Defeasibility in Philosophy: Knowledge, Agency, Responsibility, and the Law (Grazer Philosophische Studien: International Journal for Analytic Philosophy, Vol.87)

Claudia Blöser; Mikael Janvid; Hannes Ole Matthiessen; Marcus Willaschek

ISBN 10: 904203761X / ISBN 13: 9789042037618

Published by Rodopi / Brill, 2013

About this Item

Paperback, vi + 257 pages, NOT ex-library. Contents are clean and bright throughout, with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Minor handling wear only. -- Originating from a 2010 conference at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, this volume brings together twelve essays exploring the concept of defeasibility across several branches of philosophy. Defeasibility, in its most general form, describes a reasoning structure in which a conclusion holds given certain conditions, unless some defeating condition intervenes. The concept entered philosophical discourse through H.L.A. Hart, who borrowed it from property law and applied it to questions of moral responsibility and voluntary action. The essays here extend that inquiry into epistemology, action theory, ethics, and legal philosophy. Six contributions address epistemological questions, examining how defeasibility bears on knowledge and justification. Four focus on moral responsibility, including a sustained exchange between Claudia Blöser and R. Jay Wallace on the "default and challenge" structure of responsibility ascriptions and whether responsibility has a discoverable deep nature or remains irreducibly open-ended. Further essays treat agency and law, with Frederick Schauer's contribution exploring the relationship between defeasibility and the "open texture" of legal language. A concise editorial introduction sets out the basic structure of defeasible reasoning and surveys different approaches. The volume closes with an extensive thematic bibliography covering defeasible reasoning across many areas of philosophy in English and other European languages. The collection is notable for placing epistemological, ethical, and legal perspectives side by side, making visible the structural similarities and instructive differences in how defeasibility operates across these fields.

Seller Inventory # 013266

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Defeasibility in Philosophy: Knowledge, Agency, Responsibility, and the Law (Grazer Philosophische Studien: International Journal for Analytic Philosophy, Vol.87)
• Publisher: Rodopi / Brill
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 904203761X
• ISBN 13: 9789042037618
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Defeasibility, most generally speaking, means that given some set of conditions A, something else B will hold, unless or until defeating conditions C apply. While the term was introduced into philosophy by legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart in 1949, today, the concept of defeasibility is employed in many different areas of philosophy. This volume for the first time brings together contributions on defeasibility from epistemology (Mikael Janvid, Klemens Kappel, Hannes Ole Matthiessen, Marcus Willaschek, Michael Williams), legal philosophy (Frederick Schauer) and ethics and the philosophy of action (Claudia Blöser, R. Jay Wallace, Michael Quante and Katarzyna Paprzycka). The volume ends with an extensive bibliography (by Michael de Araujo Kurth).