In Physical Realization, Sydney Shoemaker considers the question of how physicalism can be true: how can all facts about the world, including mental ones, be constituted by facts about the distribution in the world of physical properties? Physicalism requires that the mental properties of a person are 'realized in' the physical properties of that person, and that all instantiations of properties in macroscopic objects are realized in microphysical states of affairs. Shoemaker offers an account of both these sorts of realization, one which allows the realized properties to be causally efficacious. He also explores the implications of this account for a wide range of metaphysical issues, including the nature of persistence through time, the problem of material constitution, the possibility of emergent properties, and the nature of phenomenal consciousness.

Beneath metaphysical problems there often lies a conflict between what we want to be true and what we believe to be true. Nathan provides a general account of the resolution of this conflict as a philosophical objective, showing that there are ways of thinking it through systematically with a view to resolving or alleviating it. The author also studies in detail a set of interrelated conflicts about the freedom and the reality of the will. He shows how difficult it is to find a freedom either of decision or of action which is both an object of reflective desire and an object of rational belief. He also examines conflicts about volition as such, contending that the veridicality of volitional experience is no less easy to doubt than the veridicality of our experience of colors. In this context, arguments emerge for a voluntarist theory of the self. Nathan's important book will be essential reading for all philosophers interested in free will, volition, the self, and the methodology of metaphysics.

This book is a collection of articles authored by renowed Polish ontologists living and working in the early part of the 21st century. Harking back to the well-known Polish Lvov-Warsaw School, founded by Kazimierz Twardowski, we try to make our ontological considerations as systematically rigorous and clear as possible - i.e. to the greatest extent feasible, but also no more than the subject under consideration itself allows for. Hence, the papers presented here do not seek to steer clear of methods of inquiry typical of either the formal or the natural sciences: on the contrary, they use such methods wherever possible. At the same time, despite their adherence to rigorous methods, the Polish ontologists included here do not avoid traditional ontological issues, being inspired as they most certainly are by the great masters of Western philosophy - from Plato and Aristotle, through St. Thomas and Leibniz, to Husserl, to name arguably just the most important.

Value, Reality, and Desire is an extended argument for a robust realism about value. The robust realist affirms the following distinctive theses. There are genuine claims about value which are true or false - there are facts about value. These value-facts are mind-independent - they are not reducible to desires or other mental states, or indeed to any non-mental facts of a non-evaluative kind. And these genuine, mind-independent, irreducible value-facts are causally efficacious. Values, quite literally, affect us. These are not particularly fashionable theses, and taken as a whole they go somewhat against the grain of quite a lot of recent work in the metaphysics of value. Further, against the received view, Oddie argues that we can have knowledge of values by experiential acquaintance, that there are experiences of value which can be both veridical and appropriately responsive to the values themselves. Finally, these value-experiences are not the products of some exotic and implausible faculty of 'intuition'. Rather, they are perfectly mundane and familiar mental states - namely, desires. This view explains how values can be 'intrinsically motivating', without falling foul of the widely accepted 'queerness' objection. There are, of course, other objections to each of the realist's claims. In showing how and why these objections fail, Oddie introduces a wealth of interesting and original insights about issues of wider interest - including the nature of properties, reduction, supervenience, and causation. The result is a novel and interesting account which illuminates what would otherwise be deeply puzzling features of value and desire and the connections between them.

J.W. Dunne (1866-1949) was an accomplished English aeronautical engineer and a designer of Britian's early military aircraft. His An Experiment with Time, first published in 1927, sparked a great deal of scientific interest in--and controversy about--his new model of multidimensional time.

A series of strange, troubling precognitive dreams (including a vision of the then future catastrophic eruption of Mt. Pelee on the island of Martininque in 1902) led Dunne to re-evaluate the meaning and significance of dreams. Could dreams be a blend of memories of past and future events? What was most upsetting about his dreams was that they contradicted the accepted model of time as a series of events flowing only one way: into the future. What if time wasn't like that at all?

All of this prompted Dunne to think about time in an entirely new way. To do this, Dunne made, as he put it,"an extremely cautious" investigation in a "rather novel direction." He wanted to outline a provable way of accounting for multiple dimensions and precognition, that is, seeing events before they happen. The result was a challenging scientific theory of the "Infinite Regress," in which time, consciousness, and the universe are seen as serial, existing in four dimensions.

Astonishingly, Dunne's proposed model of time accounts for many of life's mysteries: the nature and purpose of dreams, how prophecy works, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of the all-seeing "general observer," the "Witness" behind consciousness (what is now commonly called the Higher Self).

Here in print again is the book English playwright and novelist J.B. Priestley called "one of the most fascinating, most curious, and perhaps the most important books of this age."

Phil Hutchinson engages with philosophers of emotion in both the analytic and continental traditions. He advances a framework for understanding emotion - world-taking cognitivism and argues that reductionist accounts of emotion leave us in a state of poverty regarding our understanding of the world and ourselves.

The earlier part of the commentary by 'Philoponus' on Aristotle's On the Soul is translated by William Charlton in another volume in the series. This volume includes the latter part of the commentary along with a translation of Stephanus' commentary on Aristotle 's On Interpretation. It thus enables readers to assess for themselves Charlton's view that the commentary once ascribed to Philoponus should in fact be ascribed to Stephanus. The two treatises of Aristotle here commented on are very different from each other. In On Interpretation Aristotle studies the logic of opposed pairs of statements. It is in this context that Aristotle discusses the nature of language and the implications for determinism of opposed predictions about a future occurrence, such as a sea-battle. And Stephanus, like his predecessor Ammonius, brings in other deterministic arguments not considered by Aristotle ('The Reaper' and the argument from God's foreknowledge). In On the Soul 3.9-13, Aristotle introduces a theory of action and motivation and sums up the role of perception in animal life. Despite the differences in subject matter between the two texts, Charlton is able to make a good case for Stephanus' authorship of both commentaries. He also sees Stephanus as preserving what was valuable from Ammonius' earlier commentary On Interpretation, while bringing to bear the virtue of greater concision. At the same time, Stephanus reveals his Christian affiliations, in contrast to Ammonius, his pagan predecessor.

The Meditations of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius are a readable exposition of the system of metaphysics known as stoicism. Stoics maintained that by putting aside great passions, unjust thoughts and indulgence, man could acquire virtue and live at one with nature.

Once Upon a Time of Transition is a journey through four decades in the career of a Czech dissident and diplomat reflecting on transitions from the 20th to the 21st century. A meaningful contribution to on-going public debates, and to a better understanding of our current political situation, Ambassador Martin Palous explores the uncertain territory between philosophy and politics. Directly or indirectly, his texts were inspired by three great Central European thinkers of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt, Jan Pato?ka and Eric Voegelin. At stake is the classical Socratic question concerning the "common good" that they all raised in their investigations of the human condition -- the question that Aristotle held to direct all our actions whether we adhere to some form of metaphysics or theology, or subscribe to the post-modern nihilism so fashionable these days.

Humanness supposes innate and profound reflexivity. This volume approaches the concept of reflexivity on two different yet related analytical planes. Whether implicitly or explicitly, both planes of thought bear critically on reflexivity in relation to the nature of selfhood and the very idea of the autonomous individual, ethics, and humanness, science as such and social science, ontological dualism and fundamental ambiguity. On the one plane, a collection of original and innovative ethnographically based essays is offered, each of which is devoted to ways in which reflexivity plays a fundamental role in human social life and the study of it; on the other-anthropo-philosophical and developed in the volume's Preface, Introduction, and Postscript-it is argued that reflexivity distinguishes-definitively, albeit relatively-the being and becoming of the human.

In On the Soul 3.1-8, Aristotle first discusses the functions common to all five senses, such as self-awareness, and then moves on to Imagination and Intellect. This commentary on Aristotle's text has traditionally been ascribed to Philoponus, but William Charlton argues here that it should be ascribed to a later commentator, Stephanus. (The quotation marks used around his name indicate this disputed authorship.) 'Philoponus' reports the postulation of a special faculty for self-awareness, intended to preserve the unity of the person. He disagrees with 'Simplicius', the author of another commentary on On the Soul (also available in this series), by insisting that Imagination can apprehend things as true or false, and he disagrees with Aristotle by saying that we are not always free to imagine them otherwise than as they are. On Aristotle's Active Intellect. 'Philoponus' surveys different interpretations, but ascribes to Plutarch of Athens, and rejects, the view adopted by the real Philoponus in his commentary on Aristotle's On Intellect that we have innate intellectual knowledge from a previous existence. Instead he takes the view that the Active Intellect enables us to form concepts by abstraction through serving as a model of something already separate from matter. Our commentator further disagrees with the real Philoponus by denying the Idealistic view that Platonic forms are intellects. Charlton sees 'Philoponus' as the excellent teacher and expositor that Stephanus was said to be.

E. J. Lowe sets out and defends his theory of what there is. His four-category ontology is a metaphysical system that recognizes two fundamental categorial distinctions which cut across each other to generate four fundamental ontological categories. The distinctions are between the particular and the universal and between the substantial and the non-substantial. The four categories thus generated are substantial particulars, non-substantial particulars, substantial universals and non-substantial universals. Non-substantial universals include properties and relations, conceived as universals. Non-substantial particulars include property-instances and relation-instances, otherwise known as non-relational and relational tropes or modes. Substantial particulars include propertied individuals, the paradigm examples of which are persisting, concrete objects. Substantial universals are otherwise known as substantial kinds and include as paradigm examples natural kinds of persisting objects. This ontology has a lengthy pedigree, many commentators attributing it to Aristotle on the basis of certain passages in his apparently early work, the Categories. At various times during the history of Western philosophy, it has been revived or rediscovered, but it has never found universal favour, perhaps on account of its apparent lack of parsimony as well as its commitment to universals. In pursuit of ontological economy, metaphysicians have generally preferred to recognize fewer than four fundamental ontological categories. However, Occam's razor stipulates only that we should not multiply entities beyond necessity; Lowe argues that the four-category ontology has an explanatory power unrivalled by more parsimonious systems, and that this counts decisively in its favour. He shows that it provides a powerful explanatory framework for a unified account of causation, dispositions, natural laws, natural necessity and many other related matters, such as the semantics of counterfactual conditionals and the character of the truthmaking relation. As such, it constitutes a thoroughgoing metaphysical foundation for natural science.

In "On the Soul" 3.1-5, Aristotle goes beyond the five senses to the general functions of sense perception, the imagination and the so-called active intellect, whose identity was still a matter of controversy in the time of Thomas Aquinas. In his commentary on Aristotle's text, Simplicius insists that the intellect in question is not something transcendental, but the human rational soul. He denies both Plotinus' view that a part of our soul has never descended from uninterrupted contemplation of the Platonic forms, and Proclus' view that our soul cannot be changed in its substance through embodiment. Continuing the debate in Carlos Steel's earlier volume in this series, Henry Blumenthal assesses the authorship of the commentary. He concludes against it being by Simplicius, but not for its being by Priscian. In a novel interpretation, he suggests that if Priscian had any hand in it at all, it might have been as editor of notes from Simplicius' lectures.

"Could there have been nothing?" is the first book-length study of metaphysical nihilism - the claim that there could have been no concrete objects. It critically analyses the debate around nihilism and related questions about the metaphysics of possible worlds, concrete objects and ontological dependence.

After a Darwinian-type account of what beliefs are and how they arose in animals acting to cope with their environments--"low beliefs," virtually all of which are true--Wallace Matson here shows how the invention of language led to imagination and thence to beliefs formed in other ways ("high beliefs"), not true though thought to be, which could be consolidated into mythologies, the first Grand Unified Theories of Everything. Science began when Thales of Miletus produced a Grand Theory based on low ("everyday") beliefs. Matson traces the course of science and philosophy through seven centuries to their sudden and violent displacement by Christianity with its Grand Theory of the old type. Against the widespread opinion that modern philosophy has slowly but completely emancipated itself from bondage to theology, he shows how remnants from the medieval 'interlude' still lurk unnoticed in the purportedly neutral notions of logical possibility, possible worlds, and laws as commands, to the detriment of the natural harmony between science and philosophy, including ethics. Accessibly written, this is a book for all who are interested in the foundations of 21st century thought and who wonder where the cracks might be.

EPILOGUE: The Rings of Reality Vol. 2 will open your mind to the wondrous human freedoms that gleam brightly in the clear light of the New View of The Cosmos', .Gone are the ancient, historic delusions of omnipotent agencies, both malevolent and benevolent, decreeing. and directing operations of the Nature of Things throughout the cosmos. This witches'' brew of mystic uncertainties is swept away by the strictures of the dynamic geometry that defines the patterns of existence of the elemental entities of the cosmos. These elemental entities are ''Units'' of spinning activity that are the ''Centers of Action'' of all Cosmic ''Things''; galactic explosions; nuclear ''events''; the swarming life in the ''skin'' of the Blue/Green Jewel of the Cosmos, Planet Earth; a summer breeze, or our meditations about such things. They are the building blocks of the cosmos. Its Analytic Metaphysics exposes, in excruciating detail, the ''Absolute Truth'' of the essense of the cosmos. It opens wondrousm new vistas of human perception, behind The Forbiden, beyond Belief. It illuminates The Way that leads to true human freedom and the Good Life of the Great American Dream.

Terence Parsons presents a lively and original study of philosophical questions about identity, such as: Is a person identical with that person's body? Puzzles of this kind have not been solved; Parsons argues, controversially, that this is because there is genuine indeterminacy of identity in the world, rather than in the language used to formulate the questions.

The current volume of the Parmenides Series "On Thinking" addresses our deepest and most personal experience of the world, the experience of "the present," from a modern perspective combining physics and philosophy. Many prominent researchers have contributed articles to the volume, in which they present models and express their opinions on and, in some cases, also their skepticism about the subject and how it may be (or may not be) addressed, as well as which aspects they consider most relevant in this context. While Einstein might have once hoped that "the present" would find its place in the theory of general relativity, in a later discussion with Carnap he expressed his disappointment that he was never able to achieve this goal. This collection of articles provides a unique overview of different modern approaches, representing not only a valuable summary for experts, but also a nearly inexhaustible source of profound and novel ideas for those who are simply interested in this question.

The heart of philosophy is metaphysics, and at the heart of the heart lie two questions about existence. What is it for any contingent thing to exist? Why does any contingent thing exist? Call these the nature question and the ground question, respectively. The first concerns the nature of the existence of the contingent existent; the second concerns the ground of the contingent existent. Both questions are ancient, and yet perennial in their appeal; both have presided over the burial of so many of their would-be undertakers that it is a good induction that they will continue to do so. For some time now, the preferred style in addressing such questions has been deflationary when it has not been eliminativist. Ask Willard Quine what existence is, and you will hear that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses. "! Ask Bertrand Russell what it is for an individual to exist, and he will tell you that an individual can no more exist than it can be numerous: there 2 just is no such thing as the existence of individuals. And of course Russell's eliminativist answer implies that one cannot even ask, on pain of succumbing to the fallacy of complex question, why any contingent individual exists: if no individual exists, there can be no question why any individual exists. Not to mention Russell's modal corollary: 'contingent' and 'necessary' can only be said de dicto (of propositions) and not de re (of things).

Four-Dimensionalism defends the thesis that the material world is composed of temporal as well as spatial parts. Along the way many topics concerning the metaphysics of time and identity over time are addressed. These include the status of past and future objects, the nature of motion and change, the existence of composite objects, and examples involving two things in the same place at the same time (such as statues and lumps of clay). An original and highly readable study of the metaphysics of time and identity.

Today, when systematic philosophy - and reason itself - are challenged both outside of and within philosophy, is it still possible to do metaphysics? This volume provides a broad perspective on contemporary approaches to the nature and the fundamental questions of metaphysics. Drawing on scholars from continental Europe, Asia, Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, and representing a variety of philosophical cultures and traditions, this volume surveys and extends work in metaphysics and its implications for broader philosophical concerns (e.g., in ethics and social philosophy, in mathematics and logic, and in epistemology). It also addresses such questions as the role of history and historicity in undertaking metaphysics, the nature of metaphysics, the priority of metaphysics over epistemology, and the challenges of empiricism and postmodernism.

Although they were not written by Kant himself, the transcripts of his lectures constitute an important source for philosophical research today. Some of the contributions presented in this volume discuss the authenticity and significance of these transcripts, for example the status of Kant's lectures on logic and anthropology, while others shed light on the historical formation of specific writings, for instance the texts on the philosophy of religion. The contributions provide new insights into Kant's philosophy, that, if looking at Kant's published writings alone, we would not be able to gain. In a number of cases, a critical analysis of Kant's lectures gives us a better understanding of his published works. Thus his lectures on metaphysics shed new light on his Critique of Pure Reason, while the lecture on natural law is a valuable source for the understanding of his published legal writings.

Crossing the boundaries between 'continental' and 'analytic' philosophical approaches, this book proposes a naturalistic revision of the mathematical ontology of Alain Badiou, establishing links with structuralist projects in the philosophy of science and mathematics.