Jennifer Hornsby

A key introductory philosophy textbook, making use of an innovative, interactive technique for reading philosophical texts Reading Philosophy: Selected Texts with a Method for Beginners, Second Edition, provides a unique approach to reading philosophy, requiring students to engage with material as they read. It contains carefully selected texts, commentaries on those texts, and questions for the reader to think about as they read. It serves as starting points for both classroom discussion and independent study. The texts cover a wide range of topics drawn from diverse areas of philosophical investigation, ranging over ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and political philosophy. This edition has been updated and expanded. New chapters discuss the moral significance of friendship and love, the subjective nature of consciousness and the ways that science might explore conscious experience. And there are new texts and commentary in chapters on doubt, self and moral dilemmas. Guides readers through the experience of active, engaged philosophical reading Presents significant texts, contextualized for newcomers to philosophy Includes writings by philosophers from antiquity to the late 20th-century Contains commentary that provides the context and background necessary for discussion and argument Prompts readers to think through specific questions and to reach their own conclusions This book is an ideal resource for beginning students in philosophy, as well as for anyone wishing to engage with the subject on their own.

This flexible introductory textbook explores several key themes in philosophy, and helps the reader learn to engage with the key arguments by introducing and analysing a selection of classic readings. Fully integrated introductory text with readings for beginning students of philosophy. Each chapter focusses on a core philosophical topic, and contains an introduction to the topic, 2 classic readings and interactive commentaries on the readings. An introductory book which doesn't merely tell the reader about the subject, but requires them to engage philosophically with the text. A pedagogical resource developed in the classroom by the authors at the University of London.

This flexible introductory textbook explores several key themes in philosophy, and helps the reader learn to engage with the key arguments by introducing and analysing a selection of classic readings. * Fully integrated introductory text with readings for beginning students of philosophy. * Each chapter focusses on a core philosophical topic, and contains an introduction to the topic, 2 classic readings and interactive commentaries on the readings. * An introductory book which doesn't merely tell the reader about the subject, but requires them to engage philosophically with the text. * A pedagogical resource developed in the classroom by the authors at the University of London.

How is our conception of what there is affected by our counting ourselves as inhabitants of the natural world? How do our actions fit into a world that is altered through our agency? And how do we accommodate our understanding of one another as fellow subjects of experience--as beings with thoughts and wants and hopes and fears? These questions provide the impetus for the detailed discussions of ontology, human agency, and everyday psychological explanation presented in this book. The answers offer a distinctive view of questions about "the mind's place in nature," and they argue for a particular position in philosophy of mind: naive naturalism.This position opposes the whole drift of the last thirty or forty years' philosophy of mind in the English-speaking world. Jennifer Hornsby sets naive naturalism against dualism, but without advancing the claims of "materialism," "physicalism," or "naturalism" as these have come to be known. She shows how we can, and why we should, abandon the view that thoughts and actions, to be seen as real, must be subject to scientific explanation.