Search results for ""author william charlton""

Metaphysics deals with truth, existence and goodness; it also considers change, time and causation, which characterise the physical world, and thought and language. We are familiar with all these things, but when we try to say what they are we become tongue-tied. William Charlton draws a line between lexicography, which lists words, and grammar, which specifies constructions for various forms of speech. Both words and constructions have meaning, but in different ways, and he argues that the topics of metaphysics are expressed primarily by constructions. He surveys the history of philosophy from classical Greece to the present day, he shows how metaphysics and grammar grew up in tandem, and he connects the difficulties philosophers have encountered, especially since the Enlightenment, with a failure to grasp the significance for metaphysics of grammar as distinct from lexicography. Metaphysics and Grammar presents metaphysics as an art, not a science. It takes the traditional topics in turn; it brings out the relation between each of them and a form of speech; and it argues that these forms of speech provide us with our only reliable access to our nature as conscious beings acting in a physical world.

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This book explains in down-to-earth language what analytical philosophy is, and presupposes no previous knowledge of the subject. Analytical philosophers aim at obtaining insight into the traditional topics of philosophy by logical, conceptual and linguistic analysis. In this book William Charlton answers relativist attacks on this ambition and argues that its methods can still provide fresh insight into the traditional problems of philosophy. Taking such central philosophical problems as meaning, time, causation and thought, the author shows why they are problems for philosophy rather than for any other discipline, and thereby illustrates and supports a new general theory of the nature and scope of philosophical enquiry. The Analytic Ambition is both an introduction to readers fresh to philosophy and a challenge to professional thinking that has become set in its ways.

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