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A feminist introduction to emerging philosophical understandings of gaslighting.Originating in a 1938 play, the term gaslighting has become part of our everyday vocabulary. But do we truly know what it means? This collection of new and foundational essays explores concepts and experiences of gaslighting from philosophical perspectives. Contributors build on longstanding feminist analyses of the relations among knowledge, affect, and power to consider how gaslighting can work at not only individual but also structural levels to undermine its targets. In examining racial, epistemological, medical, affective, political, and other forms of gaslighting, the book helps illuminate contemporary power relations and provides urgently needed tools for further research in and beyond the field of philosophy.

Philosophical commentaries on the difficult task of forming a deep, respectful relationship with the land.

Do concepts exist independently of the mind? Where does objective reality diverge from subjective experience? John Burbidge calls upon the work of some of the foremost thinkers in philosophy to address these questions, developing a nuanced account of the relationship between the mind and the external world.In Ideas, Concepts, and Reality John Burbidge adopts, as a starting point, Gottlob Frege's distinction between \"ideas,\" which are subjective recollections of past sensations, and \"concepts,\" which are shared by many and make communication possible. Engaging with Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and many others, the book argues that concepts are not eternal and unchanging, as Frege suggested, but open to revision. We can move from ideas to thoughts, Burbidge suggests, that can be refined to the point where they acquire independent and objective status as concepts. At the same time, they are radically connected to other concepts which either complement or are differentiated from them.Ideas, Concepts, and Reality offers a fresh perspective on the ways in which rigorous thought differs from other operations of the mind. Daringly inventive and accessibly written, the book will appeal to philosophers at all levels of interest.

Engel argues that, although the minimalist conception of truth is basically right, it does not follow that truth can be eliminated from our philosophical thinking, as is claimed by some radical deflationists. In particular, he shows that some deflationist views have a definitively relativist and \"postmodernist\" ring and should be rejected. Even if a metaphysically substantive theory of truth has little chance to succeed, he argues, truth plays a central role as a norm or guiding value of our rational inquiries and practices in the philosophy of knowledge and in ethics.

Gascoigne explores the challenge to epistemology itself and considers two contemporary responses: the turn against foundationalist epistemology in favour of more naturalistic conceptions of inquiry, and the resistance to this response by non-naturalistically inclined philosophers. This contextualization of the sceptical debate gives students a better appreciation of the methodological importance of sceptical reasoning, an analytic understanding of the structure of sceptical arguments (including an assessment of whether the theoretical burden lies with the sceptic or anti-sceptic), and an awareness of the significance of scepticism for other areas of philosophical inquiry.

Immunity to error through misidentification is recognised as an important feature of certain kinds of first-person judgments, as well as arguably being a feature of other indexical or demonstrative judgments. In this collection of newly commissioned essays, the contributors present a variety of approaches to it, engaging with historical and empirical aspects of the subject as well as contemporary philosophical work. It is the first collection of essays devoted exclusively to the topic and will be essential reading for anyone interested in philosophical work on the self, first-person thought or indexical thought more generally.

Woodward's long awaited book is an attempt to construct a comprehensive account of causation explanation that applies to a wide variety of causal and explanatory claims in different areas of science and everyday life. The book engages some of the relevant literature from other disciplines, as Woodward weaves together examples, counterexamples, criticisms, defenses, objections, and replies into a convincing defense of the core of his theory, which is that we can analyze causation by appeal to the notion of manipulation.

There exist such things as the things we mean and believe, and they are what the book calls pleonastic propositions. The book is about what these propositions are in themselves, and about their place in nature, language, and thought. Chapters 1 and 2 advance the theory of pleonastic propositions, and of pleonastic entities generally. The remaining six chapters bring that theory to bear on issues in the theory of content: the existence and nature of meanings; knowledge of meaning; the relation between content-involving facts and underlying physical facts; vagueness and indeterminacy; conditionals; normative discourse; and the role of pleonastic propositions in explanation, prediction, and knowledge acquisition.

Shakespeare as a Way of Life shows how reading Shakespeare helps us to live with epistemological weakness and even to practice this weakness, to make it a way of life. In a series of close readings, Kuzner shows how Hamlet, Lucrece, Othello, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Timon of Athens, impel us to grapple with basic uncertainties: how we can be free, whether the world is abundant, whether we have met the demands of love and social life. To Kuzner, Shakespeare's skepticism doesn't have the enabling potential of Keats's heroic \"negativity capability,\" but neither is that skepticism the corrosive disease that necessarily issues in tragedy. While sensitive to both possibilities, Kuzner offers a way to keep negative capability negative while making skepticism livable. Rather than light the way to empowered, liberal subjectivity, Shakespeare's works demand lasting disorientation, demand that we practice the impractical so as to reshape the frames by which we view and negotiate the world. The act of reading Shakespeare cannot yield the practical value that cognitive scientists and literary critics attribute to it. His work neither clarifies our sense of ourselves, of others, or of the world; nor heartens us about the human capacity for insight and invention; nor sharpens our ability to appreciate and adjudicate complex problems of ethics and politics. Shakespeare's plays, rather, yield cognitive discomforts, and it is just these discomforts that make them worthwhile.

The concepts of meaning and mental content resist naturalistic analysis and this, Kripke’s Wittgenstein suggests, is because these concepts are normative. The book draws, motivates, and sketches an analysis of these concepts in terms of oughts, which in turn are explained through expressivism. Devices from metaethics thus inform philosophy of language. The oughts are primitive and subjective. Central devices for the project are drawn from Horwich but are taken normative; these include treating meaning through deflation and synonymy. Horwich’s naturalistic treatment yields Quine-like indeterminacy of meaning that a normative theory might render determinate. Conceptual truth for thoughts and analyticity for sentences voicing thoughts are explained as specially invariant normative features, and the treatment is internalistic, invoking the credence one should have given total evidence. Talk of analyticity is initially provisional, with a gloss developed in terms of the ensuing metatheory of meaning. Concepts of truth and reference with context dependence are treated so as to capture direct reference theory’s virtues without its vices. Tests for this metatheory are then devised in terms of the metatheory itself. Expressivism has two prongs: an oblique substantive theory of meanings of normative terms, and a normative rendering of what this substantive theory is claiming. Strongest forms of expressivism and nonnaturalism converge in their theses, but not in their explanations. Nonnaturalists’ explanations mystify, whereas expressivists explain normative thinking as what natural beings like us, conversing products of natural selection, would legitimately practice.