This volume offers an unusual variety of topics presented during the sixth annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy. The subjects covered include: refuting J. L. Austin's attempt to destroy philosophers' assumptions on the nature and purpose of a \u201cstatement;\u201d false premises found in \u201cSt. Anselm's Four Ontological Arguments;\u201d pain in connection with brain-state and functional-state theories; aesthetics in light of questions of fraudulence in modern art and music, and an analytical deconstruction of mystical experience.

This volume offers an unusual variety of topics presented during the fifth annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy. Essays topics include: a dispute of the standard deductivist account of scientific testability; two definitions of \u201cnonsense\u201d that are closely related and correlate to science's concern with truth and philosophy's concern with concepts; contesting the causes of voluntary actions purported in Hart and Honor\u00e9's Causation and the Law; distinguishing two kinds of metaphysical tasks-—taxonomic and evaluative; and discussions of \u201cwhat a thing is\u201d in terms of its qualities and particulars and the distinction between numerical and conceptual differences, universals and individuation.

The fifteen papers in this volume deal with the two overlapping topics of knowledge and experience from the perspective of analytic philosophical inquiry. The topics addressed are prominent in the work of such modern philosophers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, C. I. Lewis, Gilbert Ryle, A. J. Ayer, and John L. Austin. Contributors include: Hector-Neri Casta\u00f1eda, Newton Garver, Arthur N. Prior, John R. Searle, G. J. Warnock, with commentary by Paul Benacerraf, V. C. Chappell, Carl Ginet, F. A. Siegler, James F. Thomson, Zeno Vendler, and Paul Ziff.

During the years 800-1200 A.D., Arabic scholars studied many of the works of Greek philosophy, and recorded their interpretations. Significant Arabic interpretations of Aristotle's Prior Analytics, the key work of his logical Organon, however, have remained largely unavailable in the West. The recent discovery of several Arabic manuscripts in Istanbul revealed the \u201cShort Commentary on Prior Analytics\u201d by the medieval Arabic philosopher al-Farabi. Nicholas Rescher here presents the first translation of this work in English, and supplements this with an informative introduction and numerous explanatory footnotes.