Dispositions are everywhere. We say that a wall is hard, that water quenches thirst and is transparent, that dogs can swim and oak trees can let their leaves fall, and that acid has the power to corrode metals. All these statements express attributions of dispositions, be they physical, physiological or psychological, yet there is much philosophical debate about how far, if at all, dispositional predicates can have complete meaning or figure in causal explanations. This collection of essays, by leading international researchers, examine the case for realism with respect to dispositions and causal powers in both metaphysics and science. Among the issues debated in this book is whether dispositions can be analyzed in terms of conditionals, whether all dispositions have a so-called categorical basis and, if they do, what is the relation between the disposition and its basis.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

What is the place of human free will in our lives if all our actions are the result of some other cause? Does our processing unconscious beliefs or desires make us less free? Is our free will necessarily restricted if we do not choose our own beliefs?
The debate between free will and its opposing doctrine, determinism, is one of the key issues in philosophy. Free Will: An historical and philosophical introduction provides a comprehensive introduction to this highly important question and examines the contributions made by sixteen of the most outstanding thinkers from the time of early Greece to the twentieth century:
*Homer *Sophocles *Platto *Aristotle *St Augustine *St Thomas Aquinas *Descaartes *Spinoza *Hume *Kant *Schopehauer *Freud *Sartre *Weil *Wittgenstein *Moore
Ilham Dilman brings together all the dimensions of the problem of free will with examples from literature, ethics and psychoanalysis. Drawing out valuable insights from both sides of the free will-determinism divide, and he provides an accessible and highly readable introduction to this perennial problem.

The word 'rationality' and its cognates, like 'reason', have multiple contexts and connotations. Rational calculation can be contrasted with rational interpretation. There is the rationality of proof and of persuasion, of tradition and of the criticism of tradition. Rationalism (and rationalists) can be reasonable or unreasonable. Reason is sometimes distinguished from revelation, superstition, convention, prejudice, emotion, and chance, but all of these also involve reasoning. In politics, three views of rationality - economic, moral, and historical - have been especially important, often defining approaches to politics and political theory such as utilitarianism and rational choice theory. These approaches privilege positive or natural law, responsibilities, or human rights, and emphasize the importance of culture and tradition, and therefore meaning and context. This book explores the understanding of rationality in politics and the relations between different approaches to rationality. Among the topics considered are the limits of rationality, the role of imagination and emotion in politics, the meaning of political realism, the nature of political judgment, and the relationship between theory and practice. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Discourse.

Examining the debate that began as modern science separated itself from natural philosophy in the 16th and 17th centuries, this text explores the two dominant approaches to causation as a metaphysical problem and as a scientific problem. As philosophy and science turned from the ideas of Aristotle that dominated western thought throughout the renaissance, one of the most pressing intellectual problems was how to replace Aristotelian science with its doctrine of the four causes. The text looks at the historical discussion as a debate that surrounds certain themes and ideas, and combines classical discussions of causation with recent thinking on the topic.

Drawing on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and novelists such as Walker Percy, Paul Auster and Graham Greene, "A Philosophical Disease" brings to the bioethical discussion larger philosophical questions about the sense and significance of human life.
Carl Elliott moves beyond the standard menu of bioethical issues to explore the relationship of illness to identity, and of mental illness to spiritual illness. He also examines the treatment of children born with ambiguous genitalia, the claims of Deaf culture, and the morality of self-sacrifice. This book focuses on a different sensibility in bioethics; how we use concepts, and how they relate to our own particular social institutions.

A Philosophical Disease extends the bondaries of bioethics discourse both in terms f philosophical argumentation and in the range of clinical material that informs the work. The book contains a series of essays, some previouslypublished, some not. A series of unifying themes run through the chapters, linking together the diverse studies into a connected whole. Elliot cobers such topics as deaf culture. hermaphrodites, personality disorders, and heart transplants. Elliot often turns to literature as a source of explication, examing work by Paul Auster, H.G.Wells, Graham Green and others.

A study of the debate that began as modern science separated itself from natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book explores the two dominant approaches to causation, as a metaphysical problem and as a scientific problem. Classical discussions of causation are also combined with recent thinking on the topic.

This title was first published in 2001. Modality and Anti-Metaphysics critically examines the most prominent approaches to modality among analytic philosophers in the twentieth century, including essentialism. Defending both the project of metaphysics and the essentialist position that metaphysical modality is conceptually and ontologically primitive, Stephen McLeod argues that the logical positivists did not succeed in banishing metaphysical modality from their own theoretical apparatus and he offers an original defence of metaphysics against their advocacy of its elimination. Seeking to assuage the sceptical worries which underlie modal anti-realism, McLeod provides an original contribution to essentialist epistemology, engaging with current debates about modality and suggesting that standard essentialist approaches to some issues in the philosophies of logic and language require revision. This book offers valuable insights to professional philosophers, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates interested in metaphysics, philosophy of logic or the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.

Series Information:
International Library of Philosophy

Truthmaking is the metaphysical exploration of the idea that what is true depends upon what exists. Truthmaker theorists argue about what the truthmaking relation involves, which truths require truthmakers, and what those truthmakers are. This Element covers the dominant views on these core issues in truthmaking. It also explores some key metaphysical topics and debates that are usefully approached by employing the tools of truthmaker theory: the debate between presentists and eternalists over the existence of entities from the past, and the debate between actualists and possibilists over merely possible states of affairs. In the final section, the Element explores how to think about truthmakers for truths involving social constructions.

Subjectivism plays a fundamental role in many of the leading alternative schools in economics. This work explores major methodological issues in the area of radical subjectivism and includes contributions from Jorg Bibow, Peter Boettke, Maurizio Caserta, Steven Horwitz, Brian J. Loasby, Steven Parsons, Steve Sullivan and Carlo Zappia.

With thoughtful and engaging prose, noted scholar Peter van Inwagen provides a comprehensive introduction to metaphysics in this essential text. "Metaphysics" covers the gamut of historical and contemporary arguments of metaphysics, engaging readers through three profound questions: What are the most general features of the world? Why is there a world? And, what is the place of human beings in the world?
The thoroughly revised fourth edition includes an updated and rewritten chapter on temporality and significant improvements to the clarity and accessibility of the language, making it an even more valuable text for undergraduate students. "Metaphysics" remains the quintessential book in this field of study, and a fascinating book for a wide range of readers, from those new to the subject to the most sophisticated philosophers.

Real Time II extends and evolves DH Mellor's classic exploration of the philosophy of time,Real Time. This new book answers such basic metaphysical questions about time as: how do past, present and future differ, how are time and space related, what is change, is time travel possible? His Real Time dominated the philosophy of time for fifteen years. Real TIme II will do the same for the next twenty. GET /english/edu/Studying_at_SU/History_of_Literature.html HTTP/1.0

Real Time II extends and evolves DH Mellor's classic exploration of the philosophy of time, Real Time. This new book answers such basic metaphysical questions about time as: how do past, present and future differ, how are time and space related, what is change, is time travel possible? His Real Time dominated the philosophy of time for fifteen years. Real TIme II will do the same for the next twenty. GET /english/edu/Studying_at_SU/History_of_Literature.html HTTP/1.0

The Metaphysics of Night acknowledges a post-secular philosophy, one that puts philosophy into serious dialogue with religion, rather than considering religion a thing of the past. Matthew Del Nevo deals with the cultural unconscious, inseparable from religious consciousness, and draws on psychoanalysis and literature as well as philosophy. The metaphysics of the night is Del Nevo's metaphor for the deep and mysterious expanse of the soul. Philosophically, the book is critical of Enlightenment presumptions about knowledge and truth and overly spiritualizing tendencies in religion. Its critical edge cuts against materialist and historicist tendencies in the humanities and abstract intellectualism in philosophy. Arguing for strong aesthetic values, Del Nevo defends and explains soul and soulful experience, the creation of depth, the ineffable, real presence, beauty, and saving words, noting that the sources of all these are in us, but often are blocked. Each of the five parts of this book testify to what the author notes may be forgotten, but which ought not to be forgotten. It is necessary for life as socially, religiously, and educationally instituted within culture and as constitutive for culture. Del Nevo deals with sensibility as a form of wisdom and instinct that is not cognitive or knowledge/information based. He argues for a shift of emphasis in culture from intellect to intuition. This well-written work, filled with Catholic, philosophic, and artistic thought will be of interest to all philosophers, theologians, and students of culture.

If Levinas and Negarestani raised a child enchanted by the dark, then this is his debut. In this book, Rosen argues that current archaeological theoretic approaches are not up to the task of adequately theorizing exhumation in our present age of extinctions. Speculative Annihilationism attempts to "think thought's extinction," suggesting a new ontological ground for archaeology. Combining contemporary work in speculative philosophy, saprophytic dialectics, and Levinasian ethics, Rosen's "putrefied-thought" explores themes of the unthought and unthinkable, anonymity, otherness, and meaninglessness so that archaeology can be granted a new basis, a new avenue of inquiry at its intersection with extinction.

This title was first published in 2000: Beginning with a sustained argument against the new tenseless theory of time and against McTaggart's A series/B series distinction, the author of this essay goes on to provide a non-paradoxical, tensed, phenomenologically-based account of the 'going on' or 'taking place' of events in time that escapes the paradoxes endemic to 'passage' as understood via the A series/B series distinction. The author then turns his attention to the other main aim of the essay, which is to seek an understanding of time adequate to those more 'embodied' conceptions of the self that place character, and with it the 'constitutive attachments' or 'ground projects' of individual life circumstance, at the centre of the self. This involves a 'redrawing' of the self informed by a wider conception of the will than the one we have inherited via Descartes and Kant, by an account of ground projects, and by the theory of the tripartite psyche in Plato's Republic. It also involves extending the account of time developed in the second chapter in a way that draws on the notion of 'ecstatic temporality' that originates with Heidegger. The essay will be of use to philosophers and advanced students interested in the nature of the self, time, temporality, and phenomenology.

This volume presents a theory of persons: their nature, their values, and their consciousness. The author begins by proposing a new theory of personal identity over time. Next, he defends the importance of personal identity against recent sceptical attack. And finally, he explores the nature of self-consciousness by examining the pronoun "I" and the various grounds of what our "I" judgements mean. Brian Garrett places recent discussions of personal identity in a broader context, and links the question of the understanding of persons with other central issues in philosophy, notably the problem of self-consciousness and ethical questions relating to our nature as persons.

David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding are amongst the most widely-studies texts on philosophy. Hume's Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Introduction presents in a clear, concise and accessible manner the key themes of these texts. Georges Dicker clarifies Hume's views on meaning, knowledge, causality, and sense perception step by step and provides us with a sharp picture of how philosophical thinking has been influenced by Hume. Accessible to anyone coming to Hume for the first time, Hume's Epistemology and Metaphysics is an indispensible guide to Hume's philosophical thinking.