Throughout his career, Keith Hossack has made outstanding contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and the philosophy of mathematics.
This collection of previously unpublished papers begins with a focus on Hossack’s conception of the nature of knowledge, his metaphysics of facts and his account of the relations between knowledge, agents and facts. Attention moves to Hossack’s philosophy of mind and the nature of consciousness, before turning to the notion of necessity and its interaction with a priori knowledge. Hossack’s views on the nature of proof, logical truth, conditionals and generality are discussed in depth. In the final chapters, questions about the identity of mathematical objects and our knowledge of them take centre stage, together with questions about the necessity and generality of mathematical and logical truths.
Knowledge, Number and Reality represents some of the most vibrant discussions taking place in analytic philosophy today.
Table of Contents:
Notes on Contributors
Introduction, Nils Kürbis, Bahram Assadian and Jonathan Nassim
1. A Summary of My Current Views, Keith Hossack
2. Confronting Facts: On Hossack's The Metaphysics of Knowledge, Mark Sainsbury
3. Who Knows?, M. M. McCabe
4. Knowledge-first Epistemology and the Input Problem, Scott Sturgeon
5. Perceiving X = Consciousness of Perceiving X. Hossack and Brentano on the Identity Thesis, Mark Textor
6. Facts, Knowledge and Knowledge of Facts, Bernhard Weiss
7. Necessity, Conditionals and A Priority, Keith Hossack
8. A Commentary on ‘Necessity, Conditionals and A Priority’, Dorothy Edgington
9. The Mathematicians’ Use of Diagrams in Plato, Tamsin De Waal
10. Generality, Nils Kürbis
11. We Belong Together: A Plea for Modesty in Modal Plural Logic, Simon Hewitt
12. Aristotelian Aspirations, Fregean Fears: Hossack on Numbers as Magnitudes, Øystein Linnebo
13. Mathematical Structures, Universals, and Singular Terms, Bahram Assadian
14. Arithmetic in a Finite World, Peter Simons
Index
About the Author :
Nils Kürbis is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lodz, Poland.
Bahram Assadian is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Jonathan Nassim is an independent scholar. He took his PhD, on theories of possibility, at Birkbeck College, UK. He has published widely including in the journals History and Philosophy of Logic and Theoria.
Review :
Bold, original, and rigorously argued, Keith Hossack's philosophical work deserves to be appreciated much more widely than it is. This collection of essays by some of Hossack's colleagues and former students at the University of London should win for that work new readers and new admirers.
Keith Hossack’s philosophical work has been distinguished by its originality, precision and insight. This volume is a fitting tribute. A panoply of notable contributors offer important responses to his ground-breaking analyses of knowledge, numbers and facts, and Hossack himself supplies an illuminating digest of his current position.
