Central Works of Philosophy

CENTRAL WORKS OF PHILOSOPHY is a multi-volume set of essays on the core texts of the western philosophical tradition. From Plato's Republic to the present day, the volumes range over 2,500 years of philosophical writing covering the best, most representative, and most influential work of some of our greatest philosophers. Each essay has been specially commissioned and provides an overview of the work and clear and authoritative exposition of its central ideas. Volume 5 covers the central texts in the history of analytic philosophy from W. V. Quine's Word and Object (1960) to the present day. The texts range over political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophies of language, mind and logic, and might reasonably be said to represent the most important philosophical work of the last forty years. The volume covers works by Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett, P. F. Strawson, Charles Taylor, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, Richard Rorty, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, David Lewis and John McDowell. Students and non-specialists, who may find the technicality of some of the texts forbidding, will welcome the clarity of exposition that the individual essays provide as well as the editor's introduction, which helps position them within the overall development of philosophy in the period.