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A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals
Jonathan Bennett
404 pages
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234x156mm
978-0-19-925887-1
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Paperback
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03 April 2003
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This item is printed to order. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.
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- Complete, masterly treatment of conditionals
- Bennett is famous worldwide for his work on this subject
- Brilliantly clear and lucid approach
- Suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses
- Of interest to anyone working in the central areas of philosophy
Conditional sentences are among the most intriguing and puzzling features of language: analysis of their meaning and function has important implications for, and uses in, many areas of philosophy. Jonathan Bennett, one of the world's leading experts, distils many years' work and teaching into this Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, the fullest and most authoritative treatment of the subject. The literature on conditionals is difficult - needlessly so. Bennett's treatment is meticulously careful and luminously clear. He presents and evaluates in detail various approaches to the understanding of 'indicative' conditionals (like 'If Shakespeare didn't
write Hamlet, some aristocrat did') and 'subjunctive' conditionals (like 'If rabbits had not been deliberately introduced into New Zealand, there would be none there today'); and he offers his own view, which will be recognized as a major original contribution to the subject.
Journeying through this intellectual territory brings one into contact with the metaphysics of possible worlds, probability and belief-change, probability and logic, the pragmatics of conversation, determinism, ambiguity, vagueness, the law of excluded middle, facts versus events, and more. One might perhaps learn more philosophy from a thorough study of conditionals than from any other kind of work. Bennett's Guide is an ideal introduction for undergraduates with a philosophical grounding,
and will also be a rich source of illumination and stimulation for graduate students and professional philosophers.
Readership: Undergraduate and graduate students of philosophy; professional philosophers and course lecturers.
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Jonathan Bennett, formerly Professor of Philosophy, Syracuse University
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"Bennett's welcome guide . . . exhibits good common sense . . . presents good explanations of technical work to nontechnical readers, and most importantly, provides the only book available where we can find the whole literature on conditionals vigorously explained and analyzed." - Richard Mendelsohn, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "Jonathan Bennett sets out in this ambitious project to provide a complete and thorough guide to the subject of philosophical conditionals. I suspect that in lesser hands this text could have become something of a chore, taking on, as it does, aspects of semantics that are highly technical and difficult to work through. But in this case the results are delightful. Bennett explores the field of
conditionals without needless technicality, (indeed on occasion one wonders that others have managed to make such heavy work in a field that seems so simple when presented thus) is pellucidly clear at all times and, above all, makes the topic of conditionals interesting and relevant to the reader." - Jonathan Tallant, Philosophical Writings
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1: Introduction
2: The Material Condition: Grice
3: The Material Condition: Jackson
4: The Equation
5: The Equation Attacked
6: The Subjectivity of Indicative Conditionals
7: Indicative Conditionals Lack Truth Values
8: Uses of Indicative Conditionals
9: The Logic of Indicative Conditionals
10: Subjunctive Conditionals - First Steps
11: The Competition for 'Closest'
12: Unrolling from the Antecedent Time
13: Forks
14: Reflections on Legality
15: Truth at the Actual World
16: Subjunctive Conditionals and Probability
17: 'Even If...'
18: Backward Subjunctive Conditionals
19: Subjunctive Conditionals and Time's Arrow
20: Support Theories
21: The Need for Worlds
22: Relating the Two Kinds of Conditional
23: Unifying the Two Kinds of Conditional
References
Index of Persons
Index of Topics
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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