Christopher Peacocke

Christopher Peacocke examines the problem of knowing whether human beings can really know about the past, about what they are thinking, about what might be and whether freedom is really possible.

Being Known

Part of the international Research Library of Philosophy, which collects in book form, a range of influential essays in philosophy, drawn predominantly from English-language journals. Each volume in the library deals with a field of inquiry which has received significant attention in philosophy in the last 25 years and is edited by a philosopher noted in that field.

Understanding and Sense

Christopher Peacocke presents a new theory of subjects of consciousness, together with a theory of the nature of first person representation. He identifies three sorts of self-consciousness—perspectival, reflective, and interpersonal—and argues that they are key to explaining features of our knowledge, social relations, and emotional lives.

Subjects, Consciousness, and Self-Consciousness

The Mirror of the World

Paul Boghossian

The topics of a priori knowledge and a priori justification have long played a prominent part in epistemology and the theory of meaning. Recently there has been a surge of interest in the proper explication of these notions. These newly commissioned essays, by a distinguished, international group of philosophers, will have a substantial influence on later work in this area. They discuss the relations of the a priori to meaning, justification, definition and ontology; they consider the role of the notion in Leibniz, Kant, Frege and Wittgenstein; and they address its role in recent discussions in the philosophy of mind. Particular attention is also paid to the a priori in logic, science and mathematics. The authors exhibit a wide variety of approaches, some remaining sceptical of the notion itself, some proposing that it receive a non-factualist treatment, and others proposing novel ways of explicating and defending it. The editors' Introduction provides a helpful route into the issues.

New Essays on the A Priori

This work develops a new, general theory of what it is for a thinker to be entitled to form a given belief. The theory locates entitlement in the nexus of relations between truth content and understanding and the author formulates three principles of rationalism that articulate this conception.

The Realm of Reason

Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy Christopher Peacocke

The topics of this book lie in the intersection of three areas: the philosophy of mind, the theory of meaning and content, and the philosophy of psychology. The book grew out of a desire to treat the nature of the content of psychological states in much greater detail than was attempted in Holistic Explanation. The present work is based on material presented in classes at Oxford University in the years 1979 to 1982.

Experience, Thought, and Their Relations

Sense and Content

In Truly Understood, Christopher Peacocke argues that truth and reference have a much deeper role in the explanation of meaning and understanding than has hitherto been appreciated. Examination of specific concepts shows that a grasp of these concepts has to be characterized in terms of reference, identity, and relations to the world. Peacocke develops a positive general theory of understanding based on the idea that concepts are individuated by their fundamental reference rules, which contrasts sharply with conceptual-role, inferentialist, and pragmatist approaches to meaning. He treats thought about the material world, about places and times, and about the self within the framework of this general account, and extends the theory to explain the normative dimensions of content, which he believes are founded in the network of connections between concepts and the level of reference and truth. In the second part of the book, Peacocke explores the application of this account to some problematic mental phenomena, including the conception of many subjects of experience, concepts of conscious states, mental action, and our ability to think about the contents of our own and others' mental states.

Christopher Peacocke

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