Providing a clear interpretation of Hegel's characterizations of possibility and actuality in the Science of Logic, this book departs from the standard understandings of these concepts to break new ground in Hegelian scholarship. The book draws out some of the implications of Hegel's view of immanent possibility, especially as it relates to Leibniz's thesis of modal optimism: his view that this world is the best of all possible worlds. Reading Hegel as a philosopher of possibility, against a tradition that has conceived of him primarily as a philosopher of necessity, rationality, and finitude, Nahum Brown demonstrates the historical background and philosophical traditions from which Hegel's concept of possibility emerges. Systematically outlining Hegel's conceptions of positive and negative freedom, Brown reveals the Hegelian underpinnings of our conception of reality and what it is to be in the world itself. Original and convincing, this book is crucial for philosophers approaching modality from any tradition.

Bertrand Russell famously quipped that he didn't believe in God for the same reason that he didn't believe in a teapot in orbit between the earth and Mars: it is a bizarre assertion for which no evidence can be provided. Is belief in God really like belief in Russell's teapot? Kenneth L. Pearce argues that God is no teapot. God is a real answer to the deepest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing? Graham Oppy argues that we should believe that there are none but natural causal entities with none but natural causal properties-and hence should believe that there are no gods. Beginning from this basic disagreement, the authors proceed to discuss and debate a wide range of philosophical questions, including questions about explanation, necessity, rationality, religious experience, mathematical objects, the foundations of ethics, and the methodology of philosophy. Each author first presents his own side, and then they interact through two rounds of objections and replies. Pedagogical features include standard form arguments, section summaries, bolded key terms and principles, a glossary, and annotated reading lists. In the volume foreword, Helen De Cruz calls the debate "both edifying and a joy," and sums up what's at stake: "Here you have two carefully formulated positive proposals for worldviews that explain all that is: classical theism, or naturalistic atheism. You can follow along with the authors and deliberate: which one do you find more plausible?" Though written with beginning students in mind, this debate will be of interest to philosophers at all levels and to anyone who values careful, rational thought about the nature of reality and our place in it.

Can we say that metaphysics is over? That we live, as post-phenomenology claims, after "end of metaphysics"? Through a close reading of Levinas's masterpiece Totality and Infinity, Raoul Moati shows that things are much more complicated. Totality and Infinity proposes not so much an alternative to Heidegger's ontology as a deeper elucidation of the meaning of "being" beyond Heidegger's fundamental ontology. The metaphor of the night becomes crucial in order to explore a nocturnal face of the events of being beyond their ontological reduction to the understanding of being. The deployment of being beyond its intentional or ontological reduction coincides with what Levinas calls "nocturnal events." Insofar as the light of understanding hides them, it is only through deformalizing the traditional phenomenological approach to phenomena that Levinas leads us to their exploration and their systematic and mutual implications. Following Levinas's account of these "nocturnal events," Moati elaborates the possibility of what he calls a "metaphysics of society" that cannot be integrated into the deconstructive grasp of the "metaphysics of presence." Ultimately, Levinas and the Night of Being opens the possibility of a revival of metaphysics after the "end of metaphysics".

The present volume posits the themes of freedom, action, and motivation as the central principles that drive Spinoza's Ethics from its first part to its last. It assembles essays by internationally leading scholars who provide different, sometimes opposing interpretations of these fundamental themes as they operate across the five parts of the Ethics and within its manifold domains. The diversity of issues, approaches, and perspectives within this volume, along with the chapters' common focus, open up new ways of understanding not only some of the key concepts and main objectives in the Ethics but also the threads unifying the entire work. The sequence of essays in the book broadly follows the order of the Ethics, providing up-to-date perspectives of Spinoza's views on freedom, action, and motivation in their ontological, cognitive, physical, affective, and ethical facets. This enables readers to engage with a variety of new interpretations of these key themes of the Ethics and to reconsider their consequences both for other related issues in the Ethics and for the relevance of the Ethics to contemporary trends in philosophy of action and motivation. The essays will contribute to the growing interest in Spinoza's Ethics and spark further discussion and debate within and outside the vast body of scholarship on this important work. Freedom, Action, and Motivation in Spinoza's Ethics will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Spinoza and early modern philosophy, as well as on philosophy of action and motivation.

This book begins with a survey of various readings of Locke as a materialist, as a substance dualist, and as a property dualist, and demonstrates that these inconsistent interpretations result from a general failure of modern commentators to notice the significance of Locke's 'mind-body nominalism'. By illuminating this largely overlooked aspect of Locke's philosophy, this book reveals a common mistake of previous interpretations: that of treating what Locke conceives to be 'nominal' as real. The nominal symmetry that Locke posits between mind and body is distinct from any form of metaphysical dualism, whether substance dualism or property dualism. It is a brand of naturalism, but does not insist that the material is ontologically more basic than the mental or that the former determines the latter. On this view, the material and the mental both relate solely to a certain set of functional roles, rather than to an intrinsic property that plays these roles. The term 'matter' is thus rendered vague, and materialism is conceived as a precariously grounded ontological doctrine. Elaborating on this interpretation of Locke's Essay, this book examines the insightful readings of Locke developed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers such as Richard Burthogge, William Carroll, and Joseph Priestley. This book also seeks to clarify what Locke's position would look like in a modern setting by noting some significant parallels with the ideas of leading contemporary philosophers such as Donald Davidson, David Lewis, and Colin McGinn.

What kind of experience might help to confirm and make sense of the puzzling belief in divine creation, so central to the main monotheistic religions? Anselm and Aquinas developed a philosophical understanding of 'Creation' as an asymmetrical relationship between the world and God, that is, that the world is really related to God in a relationship of total dependence but God is in no way really related to or modified by this created world. This idea of an asymmetrical relationship is the key concept unifying all aspects of this book which discusses the three main inter-related questions in a philosophical discussion about God -- the question of meaning, the question of existence, and the question of co-existence. The book explores various 'ciphers' of this asymmetrical relationship in our pre-philosophical lived experience. These are experiences such as that of the relationship between our knowledge and what we know, or our sense of obligation to our vulnerable neighbour. It argues that deciphering such experiences helps to make sense of the 'asymmetrical' relation of creation and that it in turn makes sense of them. Masterson argues further that this idea of asymmetrical relationship provides insight into the main questions of philosophy of religion and is an illuminating source of critical dialogue with contemporary Anglo/American and Phenomenological approaches in philosophy of religion.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's brief Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) is one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, yet it offers little orientation for the reader. The first-time reader is left wondering what it could be about, and the scholar is left with little guidance for interpretation. In Tractatus in Context, James C. Klagge presents the vital background necessary for appreciating Wittgenstein's gnomic masterpiece. Tractatus in Context contains the early reactions to the Tractatus, including the initial reviews written in 1922-1924. And while we can't talk with Wittgenstein, we can do the next best thing-hear what he had to say about the Tractatus. Klagge thus presents what Wittgenstein thought about germane issues leading up to his writing the book, in discussions and correspondence with others about his ideas, and what he had to say about the Tractatus after it was written-in letters, lectures and conversations. It offers, you might say, Wittgenstein's own commentary on the book. Key Features: Illuminates what is at stake in the Tractatus, by providing the views of others that engaged Wittgenstein as he was writing it. Includes Wittgenstein's earlier thoughts on ideas in the book as recorded in his notebooks, letters, and conversations as well as his later, retrospective comments on those ideas. Draws on new or little-known sources, such as Wittgenstein's coded notebooks, Hermine's notes, Frege's letters, Hansel's diary, Ramsey's notes, and Skinner's dictations. Draws connections between the background context and specific passages in the Tractatus, using a proposition-by-proposition commentary.

In this little but profound volume, Robert Kane and Carolina Sartorio debate a perennial question: Do We Have Free Will? Kane introduces and defends libertarianism about free will: free will is incompatible with determinism; we are free; we are not determined. Sartorio introduces and defends compatibilism about free will: free will is compatible with determinism; we can be free even while our actions are determined through and through. Simplifying tricky terminology and complicated concepts for readers new to the debate, the authors also cover the latest developments on a controversial topic that gets us entangled in questions about blameworthiness and responsibility, coercion and control, and much more. Each author first presents their own side, and then they interact through two rounds of objections and replies. Pedagogical features include standard form arguments, section summaries, bolded key terms and principles, a glossary, and annotated reading lists. Short, lively and accessible, the debate showcases diverse and cutting-edge work on free will. As per Saul Smilansky's foreword, Kane and Sartorio, "present the readers with two things at once: an introduction to the traditional free will problem; and a demonstration of what a great yet very much alive and relevant philosophical problem is like." Key Features: Covers major concepts, views and arguments about free will in an engaging format Accessible style and pedagogical features for students and general readers Cutting-edge contributions by preeminent scholars on free will.

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the state of the art in the philosophy of physics. It comprisess 54 self-contained chapters written by leading philosophers of physics at both senior and junior levels, making it the most thorough and detailed volume of its type on the market - nearly every major perspective in the field is represented. The Companion's 54 chapters are organized into 12 parts. The first seven parts cover all of the major physical theories investigated by philosophers of physics today, and the last five explore key themes that unite the study of these theories. I. Newtonian Mechanics II. Special Relativity III. General Relativity IV. Non-Relativistic Quantum Theory V. Quantum Field Theory VI. Quantum Gravity VII. Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics VIII. Explanation IX. Intertheoretic Relations X. Symmetries XI. Metaphysics XII. Cosmology The difficulty level of the chapters has been carefully pitched so as to offer both accessible summaries for those new to philosophy of physics and standard reference points for active researchers on the front lines. An introductory chapter by the editors maps out the field, and each part also begins with a short summary that places the individual chapters in context. The volume will be indispensable to any serious student or scholar of philosophy of physics.

This is the first book to present an aesthetics of virtual reality media. It situates virtual reality media in terms of the philosophy of the arts, comparing them to more familiar media such as painting, film and photography. When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they have almost always done so through the lens of metaphysics, asking questions about the reality of virtual items and worlds, about the value of such things, and indeed, about how they may reshape our understanding of the "real" world. Grant Tavinor finds that approach to be fundamentally mistaken, and that to really account for virtual reality, we must focus on the medium and its uses, and not the hypothetical and speculative instances that are typically the focus of earlier works. He also argues that much of the cultural and metaphysical hype around virtual reality is undeserved. But this does not mean that virtual reality is illusory or uninteresting; on the contrary, it is significant for the altogether different reason that it overturns much of our understanding of how representational media can function and what we can use them to achieve. The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of art, philosophy of technology, metaphysics, and game studies.

Strong collection on a perennial topic in philosophy Distinctive in bringing together three approaches to personal identity: metaphysical, phenomenological and social

Essential reading for students and researchers in metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of mind, and also of interest to those in related discplines where idealist and immaterialist ontology impinge on history, science, and theology.

This collection addresses metaphysical issues at the intersection between philosophy and science. A unique feature is the way in which it is guided both by history of philosophy, by interaction between philosophy and science, and by methodological awareness. In asking how metaphysics is possible in an age of science, the contributors draw on philosophical tools provided by three great thinkers who were fully conversant with and actively engaged with the sciences of their day: Kant, Husserl, and Frege. Part I sets out frameworks for scientifically informed metaphysics in accordance with the meta-metaphysics outlined by these three self-reflective philosophers. Part II explores the domain for co-existent metaphysics and science. Constraints on ambitious critical metaphysics are laid down in close consideration of logic, meta-theory, and specific conditions for science. Part III exemplifies the role of language and science in contemporary metaphysics. Quine's pursuit of truth is analysed; Cantor's absolute infinitude is reconstrued in modal terms; and sense is made of Weyl's take on the relationship between mathematics and empirical aspects of physics. With chapters by leading scholars, Metametaphysics and the Sciences is an in-depth resource for researchers and advanced students working within metaphysics, philosophy of science, and the history of philosophy.

The late Mario Mignucci was one of the most authoritative, original, and influential scholars in the area of ancient philosophy, especially ancient logic. Collected here for the first time are sixteen of his most important essays on Ancient Logic, Language, and Metaphysics. These essays show a perceptive historian and a skillful logician philosophically engaged with issues that are still at the very heart of history and philosophy of logic, such as the nature of predication, identity, and modality. As well as essays found in disparate publications, often not easily available online, the volume includes an article on Plato and the relatives translated into English for the first time and an unpublished paper on De interpretatione 7. Mignucci thinks rigorously and writes clearly. He brings the deep knowledge of a scholar and the precision of a logician to bear on some of the trickiest topics in ancient philosophy. This collection deserves the close attention of anyone concerned with logic, language, and metaphysics, whether in ancient or contemporary philosophy.

Nietzsche, Tension, and the Tragic Disposition examines the role that tension plays in Nietzsche s recovery, in his mature thought, of the Greek tragic disposition. This is achieved by examining the ontological structure to the tragic disposition presented in his earliest work on the Greeks and then exploring its presence in points of tension that emerge in the more mature concerns with nobility. In pursuing this ontological foundation, the work builds upon the centrality of a naturalist argument derived from the influence of the pre-Platonic Greeks. It is the ontological aspect of the tragic disposition, identified in Nietzsche s earliest interpretations of Greek phusis and the inherent tensions of the chthonic present in this hylemorphic foundation, that are examined to demonstrate the importance of the notion of tension to Nietzsche s recovery of a new nobility. By bringing to light the functional importance of tension for the Greeks in the ontological, varying points of tension can be identified that demonstrate a reemergence at different aspects in Nietzsche's later work. Once these aspects are elaborated, the evolving influence of tension is shown to play a central role in the re-emergence of the noble that possesses the tragic disposition. With solid argumentation linking Nietzsche with pre=Platonic Greek tradition, Matthew Tones's book brings new insight to studies of metaphysics, ontology, naturalism, and German, continental, and Greek philosophies."

Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, Love As Human Freedom sees love as a practice that changes over time through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts-from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. Drawing on Hegel, Paul A. Kottman argues that love generates and explains expanded possibilities for freely lived lives. Through keen interpretations of the best known philosophical and literary depictions of its topic-including Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, Ovid, Flaubert, and Tolstoy-his book treats love as a fundamental way that we humans make sense of temporal change, especially the inevitability of death and the propagation of life.

Superficially, Wittgenstein and Heidegger seem worlds apart: they worked in different philosophical traditions, seemed mostly ignorant of one another's work, and Wittgenstein's terse aphorisms in plain language could not be farther stylistically from Heidegger's difficult prose. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and Heidegger's Being and Time share a number of striking parallels. In particular, this book shows that both authors manifest a similar concern with authenticity. David Egan develops this position in three stages. Part One explores the emphasis both philosophers place on the everyday, and how this emphasis brings with it a methodological focus on recovering what we already know rather than advancing novel theses. Part Two argues that the dynamic of authenticity and inauthenticity in Being and Time finds homologies in Philosophical Investigations. Here Egan particularly articulates and defends a conception of authenticity in Wittgenstein that emphasizes the responsiveness and reciprocity of play. Part Three considers how both philosophers' conceptions of authenticity apply reflexively to their own work: each is concerned not only with the question of what it means to exist authentically but also with the question of what it means to do philosophy authentically. For both authors, the problematic of authenticity is intimately linked to the question of philosophical method.

The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's 'Being and Time' contains seventeen chapters by leading scholars of Heidegger. It is a useful reference work for beginning students, but also explores the central themes of Being and Time with a depth that will be of interest to scholars. The Companion begins with a section-by-section overview of Being and Time and a chapter reviewing the genesis of this seminal work. The final chapter situates Being and Time in the context of Heidegger's later work. The remaining chapters examine the core issues of Being and Time, including the question of being, the phenomenology of space, the nature of human being (our relation to others, the importance of moods, the nature of human understanding, language), Heidegger's views on idealism and realism and his position on skepticism and truth, Heidegger's account of authenticity (with a focus on his views on freedom, being toward death, and resoluteness) and the nature of temporality and human historicality.

This book offers both a naturalistic and critical theory of signs, minds, and meaning-in-the-world. It provides a reconstructive rather than deconstructive theory of the individual, one which both analytically separates and theoretically synthesizes a range of faculties that are often confused and conflated: agency (understood as a causal capacity), subjectivity (understood as a representational capacity), selfhood (understood as a reflexive capacity), and personhood (understood as a sociopolitical capacity attendant on being an agent, subject, or self). It argues that these facilities are best understood from a semiotic stance that supersedes the usual intentional stance. And, in so doing, it offers a pragmatism-grounded approach to meaning and mediation that is general enough to account for processes that are as embodied and embedded as they are articulated and enminded. In particular, while this theory is focused on human-specific modes of meaning, it also offers a general theory of meaning, such that the agents, subjects and selves in question need not always, or even usually, map onto persons. And while this theory foregrounds agents, persons, subjects and selves, it does this by theorizing processes that often remain in the background of such (often erroneously) individuated figures: ontologies (akin to culture, but generalized across agentive collectivities), interaction (not only between people, but also between people and things, and anything outside or in-between), and infrastructure (akin to context, but generalized to include mediation at any degree of remove).

"The world viewed from the inside, the world defined and determined according to its "intelligible character"--it would be "will to power" and nothing else." Cryptic passages like this one from section 36 of Beyond Good and Evil have been the source of much intrigue, speculation, and puzzlement in the Nietzschean secondary literature. This passage in particular along with many others, have sparked a slew of questions in recent decades such as: "What is the will to power? "Is will to power a metaphysical principle?" "Is it an empirical assertion?" "Or, is will to power merely a hypothesis that Nietzsche himself rejected?" Although asked ad nausea in the literature, the multitude of answers given to the above questions never seem to satisfy. In this book, Brian Lightbody shed light on Nietzsche's most famous "esoteric" teaching by explaining what the will to power is and what it denotes. He then demonstrates how will to power may be naturalized in an attempt to show that the doctrine is epistemically and empirically defensible. Finally, he uses will to power as a philological key of sorts to unlock Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole by showing that his ontology, epistemology, and ethics are only properly understood once a coherent naturalized rendering of will to power is produced.

The fifth volume of The History of Evil covers the twentieth century from 1900 through 1950. The period saw the maturation of intellectual movements such as Pragmatism and Phenomenology, and the full emergence of several new academic disciplines; all these provided novel intellectual tools that were used to shed light on a human capacity for evil that was becoming increasingly hard to ignore. An underlying theme of this volume is the effort to reconstruct an understanding of human nature after confidence in its intrinsic goodness and moral character had been shaken by world events. The chapters in this volume cover globally relevant topics such as education, propaganda, power, oppression, and genocide, and include perspectives on evil drawn from across the world. Theological and atheistic responses to evil are also examined in the volume. This outstanding treatment of approaches to evil at a determinative period of modernity will appeal to those with interests in the intellectual history of the era, as well as to those with interests in the political, philosophical and theological movements that matured within it.

It is no exaggeration to say that of the early 20th century German philosophers who claimed to establish a new ontology, former neo-Kantian turned realist Nicolai Hartmann is the only one to have actually followed through. "Ontology: Laying the Foundations" deals with "what is insofar as it is," and its four parts tackle traditional ontological assumptions and prejudices and traditional categories such as substance, thing, individual, whole, object, and phenomenon; a novel redefinition of existence and essence in terms of the ontological factors Dasein and Sosein and their interrelations; an analysis of modes of "givenness" and the ontological embeddedness of cognition in affective transcendent acts; and a discussion of the status of ideal being, including mathematical being, phenomenological essences, logical laws, values, and the interconnections between the ideal and real spheres. Hartmann's work offers rich resources for those interested in overcoming the human-centeredness of much 20th century philosophy. Hartmann's work offers rich resources for those interested in overcoming the human-centeredness of much 20th century philosophy.

This monograph offers a comprehensive study of contingent a priori truths. Building onto a theoretical framework developed by the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke, the author also presents a new approach to these truths. The first part of the book details the many theories on contingent a priori truths. The coverage examines the cases of Kripke and David Kaplan, Donnellan and the de re requirement, Evans and weak contingency, as well as Plantinga, Salmon, Soames, and the pseudo a priori. Overall, it provides a systematic discussion and critical review of all these many positions. Next, the author develops an alternative approach. His working hypothesis is that performative verbs must play a central role in Kripke's examples, even if they do not show up at the surface structure of the corresponding sentences. This opens up an entirely new way of looking at Kripke's cases and of treating them by exploring some aspects of the theory of illocutionary acts. His discussion also examines brute facts and institutional facts, indexicals and performatives, as well as Frege's theory of definitions. Providing an authoritative exploration into contingent a priori truths, this book will be of interest to students, academics, and researchers in philosophy and logic.

This examination of Aristotle's concept of natural substance and its implications for change, process, agency, teleology, mathematical continuity, and eternal motion illustrates the conceptual power of Aristotle's metaphysics of nature along with its scientific limitations and internal tensions.

Structured to introduce the reader into all aspects of the philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950), this book aims to stimulate further interest into his thought. Once considered the most studious and systematic of all the German philosophers of the twentieth-century, this prolific author has been nearly forgotten. For many years a student and an admirer of Hartmann's work, Cicovacki argues that a closer look into Hartmann's ontologically and axiologically oriented philosophy contains a promise of a vital philosophical orientation, especially with regard to our understanding of the nature, place, and role of humanity in the larger world. "The Analysis of Wonder" - Hartmann's own definition of philosophy - is an invitation to the readers to challenge their preconceived and self-interested notions of reality in order to relearn to appreciate the always changing and conflicting world, in all of its complexity, richness, and sublimity.