Roscoe, John

John Roscoe is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stavanger. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Tromsø.

A HISTORY OF THE QUEST FOR PHILOSOPHICAL CLARITY FROM DESCARTES TO WITTGENSTEIN:
“We Can Only Understand What We Ourselves Have Made”

2011 0-7734-1563-7
This work examines the philosophical positions of the canonical thinkers of the Western tradition from Descartes to Wittgenstein. It argues that philosophical discourse becomes confused whenever it has no explicit semantic basis.

Picture Theory of Language. A Philosophical Investigation into the Genesis of Meaning

2009 0-7734-4829-2
This work is intended to challenge Frege’s Begriffsschrift as the foundation of philosophical work which either uses formal methods or is inspired by them. Whilst it is emphatically not a work of Wittgensteinian scholarship, it attempts the synthesis of the antithetical ideas associated with Wittgenstein, (1) the Picture-Theory, and (2) the language-game conceived as the ultimate level of explanation.

THE THEORY OF SCIENCE: A Philosophical Investigation Into the Symbolic Reduction of Experience

2010 0-7734-3609-X
This book asserts that what makes science “science” can only be the peculiar mode of its exercise of reason. Its essential content is a careful analysis first of the Euclidean paradigm for systematic intellectual work and then of the Newtonian paradigm for the particular intellectual work of the scientist which has so often been confounded with it.