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Title: Realistic Rationalism (Representation and Mind) by Jerrold J. Katz ISBN: 0-262-11229-9 Publisher: Bradford Book Pub. Date: 05 December, 1997 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $55.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: This is what real ontology looks like
Comment: Do abstract objects exist? If so, can we acquire knowledge of them via nonsensory means (i.e., reason or rational intuition)?
To both these questions Jerrold Katz answers "yes." And his sterling account is on all counts a welcome relief from the interminable parade of militant empiricism that seems to have taken over the streets of modern philosophy.
Even at that, I suspect Katz has conceded a bit more to empiricism than I would. He holds, for example, that we need not "causally interact" with abstract objects in order to have knowledge of them. Well, perhaps we don't, but I don't see why the claim is objectionable; the contrary claim that timeless objects don't participate in temporal causal processes is a premise that surely deserves to be questioned. (I think it's false.)
Then, too, I don't see that Katz ever questions whether we can acquire even _sensory_ knowledge apart from reason. I don't think we can -- but I wish Katz had at least raised the issue.
Be that as it may, what Katz does offer is solid -- and dense; I despair of summarizing _any_ of his arguments in a short review. The skinny of it is that he thinks mathematical objects are real, and indeed that mathematics is a sort of testing lab for philosophy.
A note on the title of my review: I read this book two or three years ago and just now returned to it after reading David Koepsell's _The Ontology of Cyberspace_ -- a book in which there's darned little actual ontology, and what there is of it isn't very good. Katz's account of mathematical objects is a good cure, and it would have been nice if some "web ontologists" had read it.
(Hey, and maybe some "Objectivists" should read it too. Ayn Rand's own impoverished account of "reason" doesn't leave reason anything to do except sort out sensory impressions into file folders, and as such is exactly the sort of "empiricism" at which Katz takes aim.)
Rating: 5
Summary: Transcription of blurbs from the dust jacket
Comment: "This book is certainly going to count as one of the most important contributions to the philosophy of mathematics of the last decades."--Paolo Mancosu, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley
"What is philosophy? The dominant view is that philosophy, where it is not the unravelling of linguistic confusions, is an inseparable part of empirical inquiry. Katz sharply challenges this. In clear and relaxed prose he advocates an earlier view: philosophy is the study of reality at the most general level through rational reflection. But he does not simply return to the position of a former age. Drawing on a mastery of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, Katz takes us one whole cycle higher up the helix of metaphilosophy, reconstructing our understanding of the relations between science and philosophy in the process."--Marcus Giaquinto, Department of Philosophy, University College, London
"Jerrold J. Katz's new book, Realistic Rationalism, constitutes a major development in philosophy of mathematics as a testing ground for fundamentally opposed philosophies. The project is to defend rationalism, in respect of both ontology and epistemology; empiricist naturalism is rejected, and the existence of numbers as particular objects is upheld against structuralist and semantic considerations. Whether or not Katz's powerfully developed position is ultimately accepted, the terms of the debate have been very significantly advanced."--Daniel Isaacson, Oxford University
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Title: Sense, Reference, and Philosophy by Jerrold J. Katz ISBN: 019515813X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
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