This book is designed to explain the technical ideas that are taken for granted in much contemporary philosophical writing. Notions like "denumerability," "modal scope distinction," "Bayesian conditionalization," and "logical completeness" are usually only elucidated deep within difficult specialist texts. By offering simple explanations that by-pass much irrelevant and boring detail, Philosophical Devices is able to cover a wealth of material that is normally only available to specialists. The book contains four sections, each of three chapters. The first section is about sets and numbers, starting with the membership relation and ending with the generalized continuum hypothesis. The second is about analyticity, a prioricity, and necessity. The third is about probability, outlining the difference between objective and subjective probability and exploring aspects of conditionalization and correlation. The fourth deals with metalogic, focusing on the contrast between syntax and semantics, and finishing with a sketch of Godel's theorem. Philosophical Devices will be useful for university students who have got past the foothills of philosophy and are starting to read more widely, but it does not assume any prior expertise. All the issues discussed are intrinsically interesting, and often downright fascinating. It can be read with pleasure and profit by anybody who is curious about the technical infrastructure of contemporary philosophy.
Author
David Papineau ( born 1947) is a British academic philosopher, born in Como, Italy.[1] He works as Professor of Philosophy of Science at King's College London and the City University of New York Graduate Center having previously taught for several years at Cambridge University where he was a fellow of Robinson College. Papineau was born in Italy and grew up in Trinidad, England and South Africa.[citation needed] He received a BSc in mathematics from the University of Natal and a BA and PhD in philosophy from the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Ian Hacking. He has worked in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, mind, and mathematics. His overall stance is naturalist and realist. He is one of the originators of the teleosemantic theory of mental representation, a solution to the problem of intentionality which derives the intentional content of our beliefs from their biological purpose. He is also a defender of the a posteriori physicalist solution to the mind-body problem Papineau was elected President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science for 1993–5, of the Mind Association for 2009–10 and of the Aristotelian Society for 2013-4 His latest book Knowing the Score (2017) is written for a general readership, and looks at a number of ways in which sporting issues cast light on long-standing philosophical problems. Papineau lives in London with his wife, Rose Wild
