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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Metaphysics & ontology
Recent years have seen a growth of interest in the great English
idealist thinker T. H. Green (1836-82) as philosophers have begun
to overturn received opinions of his thought and to rediscover his
original and important contributions to ethics, metaphysics, and
political philosophy. This collection of essays by leading experts,
all but one published here for the first time, introduces and
critically examines his ideas both in their context and in their
relevance to contemporary debates.
Disease is everywhere. Everyone experiences disease, everyone knows
somebody who is, or has been diseased, and disease-related stories
hit the headlines on a regular basis. Many important issues in the
philosophy of disease, however, have received remarkably little
attention from philosophical thinkers. This book examines a number
of important debates in the philosophy of medicine, including 'what
is disease?', and the roles and viability of concepts of causation,
in clinical medicine and epidemiology. Where much of the existing
literature targets conceptual analyses of health and disease, this
book provides the reader with an insight into these debates, and
develops plausible alternative accounts. The author explores a
range of related subjects, discussing a host of interesting
philosophical questions within clinical medicine, pathology and
epidemiology. In the second part of the book, the author examines
the concepts of causation employed by clinicians and pathologists,
how one should classify diseases, and whether the epidemiologist's
models for inferring the causes of disease are all they're cracked
up to be.
Paul Abela presents a powerful, experience-sensitive form of realism about the relation between mind and world, based on an innovative interpretation of Kant. Abela breaks with tradition in taking seriously Kant's claim that his Transcendental Idealism yields a form of empirical realism, and giving a realist analysis of major themes of the Critique of Pure Reason. Abela's blending of Kantian scholarship with contemporary epistemology offers a new way of resolving philosophical debates about realism.
The book God, Truth, and other Enigmas is a collection of eighteen
essays that fall under four headings: (God's)
Existence/Non-Existence, Omniscience, Truth, and Metaphysical
Enigmas. The essays vary widely in topic and tone. They provide the
reader with an overview of contemporary philosophical approaches to
the subjects that are indicated in the title of the book.
This book holds classical liberalism responsible for an American
concept of beauty that centers upon women, wilderness, and
machines. For each of the three beauty components, a cultural
entrepreneur supremely sensitive to liberalism's survival agenda is
introduced. P.T. Barnum's exhibition of Jenny Lind is a masterful
combination of female elegance and female potency in the
subsistence realm. John Muir's Yosemite Valley is surely exquisite,
but only after a rigorous liberal education prepares for its
experience. And Harley Earl's 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air is a dreamy
expressionist sculpture, but with a practical 265 cubic inch V-8
underneath. Not that American beauty has been uniformly pragmatic.
The 1950s are reconsidered for having temporarily facilitated a
relaxation of the liberal survival priorities, and the creations of
painter Jackson Pollock and jazz virtuoso Ornette Coleman are
evaluated for their resistance to the pressures of pragmatism. The
author concludes with a provocative speculation regarding a future
liberal habitat where Emerson's admonition to attach stars to
wagons is rescinded.
This book describes and analyzes the levels of experience that
long-distance running produces. It looks at the kinds of
experiences caused by long-distance running, the dimensions
contained in these experiences, and their effects on the subjective
life-world and well-being of an individual. Taking a philosophical
approach, the analysis presented in this book is founded on Maurice
Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of the body and Martin Heideggers
fundamental ontology. Running is a versatile form of physical
exercise which does not reveal all of its dimensions at once. These
dimensions escape the eye and are not revealed to the runner
conceptually, but rather as sensations and emotions. Instead of
concentrating on conceptual analysis, this book explores the
emotions and experiences and examines the meaning that running has
in runners lives. Using the participative method, in which the
author is both the research subject and the researcher, the book
contributes to the philosophy of physical exercise.
In this book, Christopher Evan Franklin develops and defends a
novel version of event-causal libertarianism. This view is a
combination of libertarianism-the view that humans sometimes act
freely and that those actions are the causal upshots of
nondeterministic processes-and agency reductionism-the view that
the causal role of the agent in exercises of free will is exhausted
by the causal role of mental states and events (e.g., desires and
beliefs) involving the agent. Franklin boldly counteracts a
dominant theory that has similar aims, put forth by well-known
philosopher Robert Kane. Many philosophers contend that
event-causal libertarians have no advantage over compatibilists
when it comes to securing a distinctively valuable kind of freedom
and responsibility. To Franklin, this position is mistaken.
Assuming agency reductionism is true, event-causal libertarians
need only adopt the most plausible compatibilist theory and add
indeterminism at the proper juncture in the genesis of human
action. The result is minimal event-causal libertarianism: a model
of free will with the metaphysical simplicity of compatibilism and
the intuitive power of libertarianism. And yet a worry remains:
toward the end of the book, Franklin reconsiders his assumption of
agency reductionism, arguing that this picture faces a hitherto
unsolved problem. This problem, however, has nothing to do with
indeterminism or determinism, or even libertarianism or
compatibilism, but with how to understand the nature of the self
and its role in the genesis of action. Crucially, if this problem
proves unsolvable, then not only is event-causal libertarianism
untenable, so also is event-causal compatibilism.
This book explores the prospects of rivaling ontological and
epistemic interpretations of quantum mechanics (QM). It concludes
with a suggestion for how to interpret QM from an epistemological
point of view and with a Kantian touch. It thus refines, extends,
and combines existing approaches in a similar direction. The author
first looks at current, hotly debated ontological interpretations.
These include hidden variables-approaches, Bohmian mechanics,
collapse interpretations, and the many worlds interpretation. He
demonstrates why none of these ontological interpretations can
claim to be the clear winner amongst its rivals. Next, coverage
explores the possibility of interpreting QM in terms of knowledge
but without the assumption of hidden variables. It examines QBism
as well as Healey's pragmatist view. The author finds both
interpretations or programs appealing, but still wanting in certain
respects. As a result, he then goes on to advance a genuine
proposal as to how to interpret QM from the perspective of an
internal realism in the sense of Putnam and Kant. The book also
includes two philosophical interludes. One details the notions of
probability and realism. The other highlights the connections
between the notions of locality, causality, and reality in the
context of violations of Bell-type inequalities.
Metaphysics has often held that laws of nature, if legitimate, must
be time-independent. Yet mounting evidence from the foundations of
science suggests that this constraint may be obsolete. This book
provides arguments against this atemporality conjecture, which it
locates both in metaphysics and in the philosophy of science,
drawing on developments in a range of fields, from the foundations
of physics to the philosophy of finance. It then seeks to excavate
an alternative philosophical lineage which reconciles
time-dependent laws with determinism, converging in the thought of
Immanuel Kant.
Why broach and challenge the question of neutrality? For some
urgent reasons. The neuter is generally considered to be the
condition of objectivity. However, historically, this is asserted
by a subject which is masculine and not neuter. Claiming that truth
and the way of reaching it are and must be in the neuter amounts to
a misuse of power and a falsification of the real. Living beings
are not naturally neuter; they are sexuate somehow or other.
Subjecting them to the neuter as a condition of their objective
status transforms living beings into cultural products deprived of
their own origin and dynamism, and builds a world in which the
development and the sharing of life are impossible. In this book,
four contributors explore this basic mistake of our culture
starting from the work of Heidegger and his insistence on
maintaining that our being in the world - our Dasein - must be in
the neuter. They question the nature of the truth which is then at
stake and the political mistakes that it can cause. It is not here
a question of sexuality strictly speaking nor of sexual choice. The
concern of the two men and the two women who participate in this
volume is with the sexuate determination of all living beings. Is
not Heidegger's Dasein, as neutered and supposedly neutral, a kind
of technical device which prevents living beings from entering into
presence? If so, where might that ultimately lead?
In this rich collection of philosophical writings, Stanley Rosen
addresses a wide range of topics -from eros, poetry, and freedom to
problems like negation and the epistemological status of sense
perception. Though diverse in subject, Rosen's essays share two
unifying principles: there can be no legitimate separation of
textual hermeneutics from philosophical analysis, and philosophical
investigation must be oriented in terms of everyday language and
experience, although it cannot simply remain within these confines.
Ordinary experience provides a minimal criterion for the assessment
of extraordinary discourses, Rosen argues, and without such a
criterion we would have no basis for evaluating conflicting
discourses: philosophy would give way to poetry.
Philosophical problems are not so deeply embedded in a specific
historical context that they cannot be restated in terms as valid
for us today as they were for those who formulated them, the author
maintains. Rosen shows that the history of philosophy -- a story of
conflicting interpretations of human life and the structure of
intelligibility -- is a story that comes to life only when it is
rethought in terms of the philosophical problems of our own
personal and historical situation.
This book offers a comprehensive primer for the study of
intensionality. It explores and assesses those key theories of
intensionality which have been developed in the twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. Each of the examined theories is tested as
to whether it can account for the problems associated with (A) the
intersubstitution salva veritate of co-extensional expressions, and
(B) existential generalisation. All of these theories are
subsequently compared so as to determine which of them comes
closest to successfully solving these problems. The book examines
four kinds of intensionalist approaches: the Fregean approach
(including Church's formalisation of Frege's theory); the
possible-worlds approaches of Carnap, Montague and Cresswell; the
theory of properties relations and propositions devised by Bealer;
and the Meinongian approaches put forward by Zalta and Priest. The
book also proposes an alternative to intensionalism: sententialism.
Sententialists argue that the problems of intensionality could be
solved by appealing to linguistic items (usually sentences) rather
than intensional entities. Drawing on the works of Quine, Davidson,
Scheffler and R. M. Martin, it explores the viability and value of
sententialism as an alternative to intensionalism.
Anthropocentrism in philosophy is deeply paradoxical. Ethics
investigates the human good, epistemology investigates human
knowledge, and antirealist metaphysics holds that the world depends
on our cognitive capacities. But humans' good and knowledge,
including their language and concepts, are empirical matters,
whereas philosophers do not engage in empirical research. And
humans are inhabitants, not 'makers', of the world. Nevertheless,
all three (ethics, epistemology, and antirealist metaphysics) can
be drastically reinterpreted as making no reference to humans.
This book aims to answer two simple questions: what is it to want
and what is it to intend? Because of the breadth of contexts in
which the relevant phenomena are implicated and the wealth of views
that have attempted to account for them, providing the answers is
not quite so simple. Doing so requires an examination not only of
the relevant philosophical theories and our everyday practices, but
also of the rich empirical material that has been provided by work
in social and developmental psychology. The investigation is
carried out in two parts, dedicated to wanting and intending
respectively. Wanting is analysed as optative attitudinising, a
basic form of subjective standard-setting at the core of compound
states such as 'longings', 'desires', 'projects' and 'whims'. The
analysis is developed in the context of a discussion of
Moore-paradoxicality and deepened through the examination of rival
theories, which include functionalist and hedonistic conceptions as
well as the guise-of-the-good view and the pure entailment
approach, two views popular in moral psychology. In the second part
of the study, a disjunctive genetic theory of intending is
developed, according to which intentions are optative attitudes on
which, in one way or another, the mark of deliberation has been
conferred. It is this which explains intention's subjection to the
requirements of practical rationality. Moreover, unlike wanting,
intending turns out to be dependent on normative features of our
life form, in particular on practices of holding responsible. The
book will be of particular interest to philosophers and
psychologists working on motivation, goals, desire, intention,
deliberation, decision and practical rationality.
One of the most significant philosophical texts by W.W. Atkinson,
Mastery of Being: A Study of the Ultimate Principle of Reality and
the Practical Application Thereof breaks into three parts the
principles of reality, including atoms, the spirit, and physical
manifestation. He uses theories and popularly accepted ideology to
prove that reality is true, and uses his ideology to describe how
we can apply reality to life, and become "masters of being."
American writer WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON (1862-1932) was editor of
the popular magazine New Thought from 1901 to 1905, and editor of
the journal Advanced Thought from 1916 to 1919. He authored dozens
of New Thought books under numerous pseudonyms, including "Yogi,"
some of which are likely still unknown today.
Approaching Infinity addresses seventeen paradoxes of the infinite,
most of which have no generally accepted solutions. The book
addresses these paradoxes using a new theory of infinity, which
entails that an infinite series is uncompletable when it requires
something to possess an infinite intensive magnitude. Along the
way, the author addresses the nature of numbers, sets, geometric
points, and related matters. The book addresses the need for a
theory of infinity, and reviews both old and new theories of
infinity. It discussing the purposes of studying infinity and the
troubles with traditional approaches to the problem, and concludes
by offering a solution to some existing paradoxes.
Alain Badiou's Being and Event continues to impact philosophical
investigations into the question of Being. By exploring the central
role set theory plays in this influential work, Burhanuddin Baki
presents the first extended study of Badiou's use of mathematics in
Being and Event. Adopting a clear, straightforward approach, Baki
gathers together and explains the technical details of the relevant
high-level mathematics in Being and Event. He examines Badiou's
philosophical framework in close detail, showing exactly how it is
'conditioned' by the technical mathematics. Clarifying the relevant
details of Badiou's mathematics, Baki looks at the four core topics
Badiou employs from set theory: the formal axiomatic system of ZFC;
cardinal and ordinal numbers; Kurt Goedel's concept of
constructability; and Cohen's technique of forcing. Baki then
rebuilds Badiou's philosophical meditations in relation to their
conditioning by the mathematics, paying particular attention to
Cohen's forcing, which informs Badiou's analysis of the event.
Providing valuable insights into Badiou's philosophy of
mathematics, Badiou's Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set
Theory offers an excellent commentary and a new reading of Badiou's
most complex and important work.
Eternity is a unique kind of existence that is supposed to belong
to the most real being or beings. It is an existence that is not
shaken by the common wear and tear of time. Over the two and half
millennia history of Western philosophy we find various conceptions
of eternity, yet one sharp distinction between two notions of
eternity seems to run throughout this long history: eternity as
timeless existence, as opposed to eternity as existence in all
times. Both kinds of existence stand in sharp contrast to the
coming in and out of existence of ordinary beings, like hippos,
humans, and toothbrushes: were these eternally-timeless, for
example, a hippo could not eat, a human could not think or laugh,
and a toothbrush would be of no use. Were a hippo an
eternal-everlasting creature, it would not have to bother itself
with nutrition in order to extend its existence. Everlasting human
beings might appear similar to us, but their mental life and
patterns of behavior would most likely be very different from ours.
The distinction between eternity as timelessness and eternity as
everlastingness goes back to ancient philosophy, to the works of
Plato and Aristotle, and even to the fragments of Parmenides'
philosophical poem. In the twentieth century, it seemed to go out
of favor, though one could consider as eternalists those proponents
of realism in philosophy of mathematics, and those of timeless
propositions in philosophy of language (i.e., propositions that are
said to exist independently of the uttered sentences that convey
their thought-content). However, recent developments in
contemporary physics and its philosophy have provided an impetus to
revive notions of eternity due to the view that time and duration
might have no place in the most fundamental ontology. The
importance of eternity is not limited to strictly philosophical
discussions. It is a notion that also has an important role in
traditional Biblical interpretation. The Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew
name of God considered to be most sacred, is derived from the
Hebrew verb for being, and as a result has been traditionally
interpreted as denoting eternal existence (in either one of the two
senses of eternity). Hence, Calvin translates the Tetragrammaton as
'l'Eternel', and Mendelssohn as 'das ewige Wesen' or 'der Ewige'.
Eternity also plays a central role in contemporary South American
fiction, especially in the works of J.L. Borges. The representation
of eternity poses a major challenge to both literature and arts
(just think about the difficulty of representing eternity in music,
a thoroughly temporal art). The current volume aims at providing a
history of the philosophy of eternity surrounded by a series of
short essays, or reflections, on the role of eternity and its
representation in literature, religion, language, liturgy, science,
and music. Thus, our aim is to provide a history of philosophy as a
discipline that is in constant commerce with various other domains
of human inquisition and exploration.
Human beings live in the illusion that they are in control of their
lives. They believe they have free choice. Education is a high
priority and laws are designed to insure justice for all. Yet
satisfaction, joy and full self-expression in daily living elude
most of us.
Addiction argues that addiction should be understood not as a
disease but as a phenomenon that must be understood on many levels
at once. Employing a complex dynamic systems approach and
philosophical methodology, Shelby explains addiction as an
irreducible neurobiological, psychological, developmental,
environmental, and sociological phenomenon.
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