Samuel Gorovitz

Picked this up at a yard sale for a dollar. It appears to be a survey textbook on philosophy for undergraduates. Kind of a grab-bag: basics of formal logic and set theory, intensionality, modality, plus tips on reading philosophical works. There are exercises at the end of each chapter. I bought it because there's a chapter on the synthetic/analytic-a priori/a posteori classification system, and I've been looking for an easy explanation of this because Kant is less than clear.




[A couple days show more later...] The synthetic/analytic-a priori/a posteori chapter is very good. It covers the basics of the classification system, presents a helpful 2x2 grid diagram, discusses objections (most notably Quine's from "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", though it doesn't cite this article), and shows ways in which these ideas bear fruit. Most interesting is the suggestion that what gives certain kinds of theory-internal claims (the authors give an example of an arcane bit of Freudianism) their sealed off from the world quality is the fact that they are a priori synthetic truths. show less

7/8/22