Books

Edited, with A. Seide / ontos, 2013

This volume is the result of the 15th Münster Lectures in Philosophy hosted by the University of Münster. The basic idea of the Lectures is to give advanced students of the Department the opportunity to get into discussion with important philosophers of our days. In line with what has become by now a venerable tradition, Kitcher gave a lecture to a public audience and he participated in a colloquium on the following two days. At this colloquium, eight groups of advanced students and faculty members presented papers on a wide range of topics from Kitcher’s work. Both the lecture and the papers are published in this volume. In addition, it contains Kitcher’s detailed replies to the colloquium papers.

Although Kitcher’s naturalistic and pragmatist impulses are discernible in most of his writings, he has only lately started to explicitly defend what he now calls pragmatic naturalism. His work on pragmatic naturalism contains innovative insights into questions about naturalism and pragmatism, while at the same time providing a meta-philosophical, unificatory framework for his longstanding work in various philosophical fields. Kitcher’s paper that is printed in this volume is one of the first publications in which he sets out his idea of pragmatic naturalism.

• Download the table of contents here (.pdf)