Fictionalism is the view that a serious intellectual inquiry need not aim at truth. Since 1980, fictionalist accounts of science, mathematics, morality, and other domains of inquiry have been developed. In metaphysics fictionalism is now widely regarded as an option worthy of serious consideration. This volume represents a major benchmark in the debate: it brings together an impressive international team of contributors, whose essays (all but one of them appearing here for the first time) represent the state of the art in various areas of metaphysical controversy, relating to language, mathematics, modality, truth, belief, ontology, and morality.

Human finitude and its implications have long been one of the central themes of Western philosophy. The essays gathered together in this volume explore various facets of this not altogether pleasing fact with which we must realistically come to terms.

The interest in a better understanding of what is constitutive for being a person is a concern philosophy shares with some of the sciences. The views currently discussed in evolutionary biology and in the neurosciences are very much influenced by traditional philosophical views about the self and self-knowledge, while contemporary philosophical accounts are not considered at all. Such an account will be given by an analysis of three focal elements of the use of the first-person pronoun. These elements have something to do with the faculty of taking a first-person point of view. The conceptual structure of this point of view is explained by comparing it with a second- and third-person point of view. There is an extensive discussion of various views about self-knowledge (Davidson, Bilgrami, Burge), and a new conception of authoritative self-knowledge is established. The first-person point of view is a reflexive attitude which includes various attitudes to one's past and future. These attitudes are necessarily or contingently de se. By bringing into focus the concern for one's future intentions will be discussed as an activity-based attitude, while there are other attitudes, like hope or fear, which are shaped by the acceptance of one's future situations which are not, or not completely under one's control. This view gives rise to a criticism of Frankfurt's notion of Caring.

Is the world of appearances the real world?

Are there facts that exist independently of our minds?

Are there vague objects?

Russell on Metaphysics brings together for the first time a comprehensive selection of Russell's writing on metaphysics in one volume. Russell's major and lasting contribution to metaphysics has been hugely influential and his insights have led to the establishment of analytic philosophy as a dominant stream in philosophy. Stephen Mumford chronicles the metaphysical nature of these insights through accessible introductions to the texts, setting them in context and understanding their continued importance. Russell on Metaphysics is both a valuable introduction to Bertrand Russell as a metaphysician, and an introduction to analytic philosophy and its history.

Can we have objective knowledge of the world? Can we understand what is morally right or wrong? Yes, to some extent. This is the answer given by Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. Both rejected David Hume s skeptical account of what we can hope to understand. But they held his empirical method in high regard, inquiring into the way we perceive and emotionally experience the world, into the nature and function of human empathy and sympathy and the role of the imagination in processes of intersubjective understanding. The challenge is to overcome the natural constraints of perceptual and emotional experience and reach an agreement that is informed by the facts in the world and the nature of morality. This collection of philosophical essays addresses an audience of Smith- and Husserl scholars as well as everybody interested in theories of objective knowledge and proper morality which are informed by the way we perceive and think and communicate."

Many contemporary philosophers are interested in the scotistic notion of haecceity or thisness' because it is relevant to important problems concerning identity and individuation, reference, modality, and propositional attitudes. Haecceity is the only book-length work devoted to this topic. The author develops a novel defense of Platonism, arguing, first, that abstracta - nonqualitative haecceities - are needed to explain concreta's being diverse at a time; and second, that unexemplified haecceities are then required to accommodate the full range of cases in which there are possible worlds containing individuals not present in the actual world. In the cognitive area, an original epistemic argument is presented which implies that certain haecceities can be grasped by a person: his own, those of certain of his mental states, and those of various abstracta, but not those of external things. It is argued that in consequence there is a clear sense in which one is directly acquainted with the former entities, but not with external things.

East/West Summit on the Holy Trinity Held in Moscow. Theologians and philosophers, typically rivals, synergized in their pursuit of truth and understanding regarding this central, unifying Christian belief, demonstrating respective strengths in marvelous complementary array. The next best thing to being there are the papers that were presented and polished for this volume.

Distinguished metaphysicians examine issues central to the high-profile debate between philosophers over how to classify the natural world, and discuss issues in applied ontology such as the classification of diseases.Leading metaphysicians explore fundamental questions related to the classification and structure of the natural worldAn essential commentary on issues at the heart of the contemporary debate between philosophy and scienceInterweaves discussion of overarching themes with detailed material on applied ontology

This revised and updated edition of a standard work provides a clear and authoritative survey of the Western tradition in metaphysics and epistemology from the Presocratics to the present day. Aimed at the beginning student, it presents the ideas of the major philosophers and their schools of thought in a readable and engaging way, highlighting the central points in each contributor's doctrines and offering a lucid discussion of the next-level details that both fills out the general themes and encourages the reader to pursue the arguments still further through a detailed guide to further reading. Whether John Shand is discussing the slow separation of philosophy and theology in Augustine, Aquinas and Ockham, the rise of rationalism, British empiricism, German idealism or the new approaches opened up by Russell, Sartre and Wittgenstein, he combines succinct but insightful exposition with crisp critical comment. This new edition will continue to provide students with a valuable work of initial reference.

There is little more than a decade left before the bells allover the world will be ringing in the first hour of the twenty-first century, which will surely be an era of highly advanced technology. Looking back on the century that we live in, one can realize that generations of people who have already lived in it for the better parts of their lives have begun to ask the same question that also every individual person thinks about when he is faced with the first signs of the end of his life. It is the question: "Why did everything in my life happen the way it did?" Or, "It would have been so easy to have channelled events into directions other than the way they went. " Or, "Why, in all the world, is my life coming to an end as it does, or, why must all of us face this kind of end of our century?" Whenever human beings take retrospective views of their lives and times - when they are faced with their own personal "fin du siecle" - there appears to be an increasing anxiety throughout the masses asso ciated with a somber feeling of pessimism, which may even be mixed with a slight degree of fatalism. There is quite another feeling with those persons who were born late in this century and who did not share all the events the older generation experi enced."

States of affairs raise, among others, the following questions: What kind of entity are they (if there are any)? Are they contingent, causally efficacious, spatio-temporal and perceivable entities, or are they abstract objects? What are their constituents and their identity conditions? What are the functions that states of affairs are able to fulfil in a viable theory, and which problems and prima facie counterintuitive consequences arise out of an ontological commitment to them? Are there merely possible (non-actual, non-obtaining) states of affairs? Are there molecular (i.e., negative, conjunctive, disjunctive etc.) states of affairs? Are there modal and tensed states of affairs? In this volume, these and other questions are addressed by David M. Armstrong, Marian David, Herbert Hochberg, Uwe Meixner, L. Nathan Oaklander, Peter Simons, Erwin Tegtmeier and Mark Textor.

For many years essentialism - the view that some objects have essentially or necessarily certain properties without which they could not exist or be the things they are - was considered to be beyond the pale in philosophy, a relic of discredited Aristotelianism. This is no longer so. Kripke and Putnam have made belief in essential natures once more respectable. Harre and Madden have boldly argued against Hume's theory of causation, and developed an alternative theory based on the assumption that there are genuine causal powers in nature. Dretske, Tooley, Armstrong, Swoyer and Carroll have all developed strong alternatives to Hume's theory of the laws of nature. Shoemaker has developed a thoroughly non-Humean theory of properties. The new essentialism has evolved from these beginnings and can now reasonably claim to be a metaphysic for a modern scientific understanding of the world - one that challenges the conception of the world as comprising passive entities whose interactions are to be explained by appeal to contingent laws of nature externally imposed.

In this book I investigate the necessary structure of the aether - the stuff that fills the whole universe. Some of my conclusions are. 1. There is an enormous variety of structures that the aether might, for all we know, have. 2. Probably the aether is point-free. 3. In that case, it should be distinguished from Space-time, which is either a fiction or a construct. 4. Even if the aether has points, we should reject the orthodoxy that all regions are grounded in points by summation. 5. If the aether is point-free but not continuous, its most likely structure has extended atoms that are not simples. 6. Space-time is symmetric if and only if the aether is continuous. 7. If the aether is continuous, we should reject the standard interpretation of General Relativity, in which geometry determines gravity. 8. Contemporary physics undermines an objection to discrete aether based on scale invariance, but does not offer much positive support.

This volume takes up Heidegger's idea of a phenomenological chronology in an attempt to pose the question of the possibility of a phenomenological language that would be given over to the temporality of being and the finitude of existence. The book combines a discussion of approaches to language in the philosophical tradition with readings of Husserl on temporality and the early and late texts of Heidegger's on logic, truth and the nature of language. As well as Heidegger's deconstruction of logic and metaphysics Dastur's work is also informed by Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence and Nietzschean genealogy. Appealing a much to Humboldt's philosophy of language as to Holderin's poetic thought, the book illuminates the eminently dialectical structure of speech and its essential connection with mortality.

What kind of subject is philosophy? Colin McGinn takes up this perennial question, defending the view that philosophy consists of conceptual analysis, construed broadly. Conceptual analysis is understood to involve the search for de re essences, but McGinn takes up various challenges to this meta-philosophy: that some concepts are merely family resemblance concepts with no definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions ("game," "language"); that it is impossible to provide sufficient conditions for some philosophically important concepts without circularity ("knowledge," "intentional action"); that there exists an unsolved paradox of analysis; that there is no well-defined analytic-synthetic distinction; that names have no definition; and that conceptual analysis is not properly naturalistic. Ultimately, McGinn finds none of these objections convincing: analysis emerges as both possible and fruitful.
At the same time, he rejects the idea of the "linguistic turn," arguing that analysis is not directed to language as such, but at reality. Going on to distinguish several types of analysis, with an emphasis on classical decompositional analysis, he shows different philosophical traditions to be engaged in conceptual analysis when properly understood. Philosophical activity has the kind of value possessed by play, McGinn claims, which differs from the kind of value possessed by scientific activity. The book concludes with an analytic discussion of the prospects for traditional ontology and the nature of instantiation.
McGinn's study of the nature of philosophy shows us how philosophy can maintain its connection to the past while looking forward to a bright future.

Contents:
Matilal, B K, Ontological Problems in Nyaya, Buddhism and Jainism: A Comparitive Analysis, Journal of Indian Philosophy 5 [1977]
Potter, Karl H, Vedantaparibhasa as Systematic Reconstruction, SS Rama Rao Pappu ed. Perspectives on Vedanta, Essays in Honor of Professor T Raju [Leiden: E J Brill, 1988]
Chakrabarti, Kisor, The Nyaya-Vaisesika Theory of Universals, Journal of Indian Philosophy 3 [1975]
Siderits, Mark, More Things in Heaven and Earth, Journal of Indian Philosophy, 10 [1982]
Gillon, Brendon S, Negative Facts and Knowledge of Negative Facts, P. Bilimoria and J N Mohanty eds., Relativism, Suffering and Beyond [Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997]
Kapstein, Matthew, Mercological Considerations in Vasubandhu's Proof of Idealism,(Vijnaptimatratasiddhi) Idealstic Studies 18 [1988]
Matilal, B K, Causality in the Nyaya-Vaisesika School, Philosophy East and West 44 [1975]
Potter, Karl H, An Ontology of Concrete Connectors, Journal of Philosophy 58 [1961]
Garfield, Jay L, Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness: Why Did Nagarjuna Start with Causation?, Philosophy East and West 44 [1994]
Potter, Karl H, Freedom and Determinism from an Indian Perspective, Philosophy East and West 17 [1967]
Duerlinger, James, Reductionist and Nonreductionist Theories of Persons in Indian Buddhist Philosophy, Journal of Indian Philosophy 21 [1993]
Bastow, David, Self-Construction in Buddhism, Ratio 28 [1986]
Siderits, Mark, Buddhist Reductionism, Philosophy East and West 47 [1997]
Taber, John, The Mimamsa Theory of Self Recognition, Philosophy East and West 40 [1990]
Chakrabarti, Arindam, I Touch What I Saw, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 [1992]
Shukla, Pandit Badrinath, Dehatmavada or the Body as Soul: Exploration of a Possibility Within Nyaya Thought, Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 5 [1988]
Larson, Gerald James, An Eccentric Ghost in the Machine: Formal and Quantitative Aspects of the Samkhya-Yoga Dualism, Philosophy East and West 33 [1983]
Schweizer, Paul, Mind/Consciousness Dualism in Sankhya-Yoga Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 [1993]
Deutsch, Eliot, The Self in Advaita Vedanta, International Philosophical Quarterly 6 [1966]
Bhattacharyya, K C, The Concept of the Absolute and its Alternative Forms, Philosophical Studies 2 [Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, 1958]

This text by a well-known author provides an approachable introduction to the six great arguments for the existence of God. Requiring no specialist knowledge of philosophy, an important feature of The Question of God is the inclusion of a wealth of primary sources drawn from both classic and contemporary texts. With its combination of critical analysis and extensive extracts, this book will be particularly attractive to students and teachers of philosophy, religious studies and theology, at school or university level, who are looking for a text that offers a detailed and authoritative account of these famous arguments - The Ontological Argument (Sources: Anselm, Haight, Descartes, Kant, Findlay, Malcolm, Hick), The Cosmological Argument (Sources: Aquinas, Taylor, Hume, Kant), The Argument from Design (Sources: Paley, Hume, Darwin, Dawkins, Ward), The Argument from Miracles (Sources: Hume, Hambourger, Coleman, Flew, Swinburne, Diamond), The Moral Argument (Sources: Plato, Lewis, Kant, Rachels, Martin, Nielsen), and The Pragmatic Argument (Sources: Pascal, Gracely, Stich, Penelhum, James, Moore).

Does the real world, defined as a world of objects that exist independent of human interests, concerns, and cognitive activities, really exist? Jan Westerhoff argues that we have good reason to believe it does not. His discussion considers four main facets of the idea of the real world, ranging from the existence of a separate external and internal world (comprising various mental states congregated around a self), to the existence of an ontological foundation that grounds the existence of all the entities in the world, and the existence of an ultimately true theory that provides a final account of all there is. As Westerhoff discusses the reasons for rejecting the postulation of an external world behind our representations, he asserts that the internal world is not as epistemically transparent as is usually assumed, and that there are good reasons for adopting an anti-foundational account of ontological dependence. Drawing on conclusions from the ancient Indian philosophical system of Madhyamaka Buddhism, Westerhoff defends his stance in a purely Western philosophical framework, and affirms that ontology, and philosophy more generally, need not be conceived as providing an ultimately true theory of the world.

The present book brings together several case studies, dealing with relevant facets of the work of some of philosophy's all-time greats. The subject-matter topic being addressed differs significantly, but in each case there is an attempt to apply mathematical methods and perspectives to the solution of a key philosophical issue in a way that throws instructive light upon it. On this basis it emerges that the question "Are mathematical methods useful in philosophy?" finds a suggestive response in the fact that over two millennia key figures in the history of the subject have indeed thought so. And they have substantiated this view not so much by abstract argumentation on the basis of general principles, but by making this point through actual practice.

"Routledge Philosophy Guidebooks" introduce students to the classic works of philosophy. Each guidebook considers a major philosopher and a key area of their philosophy by focusing upon an important text - situating the philosopher and work in a historical context, considering the text in question and assessing the philosopher's contribution to contemporary thought.;Leibniz is a major figure in western philosophy and, with Descartes and Spinoza, one of the most influential philosophers of the Rationalist School. The "Monadology" is his most famous work and one of the most important works of modern philosophy. This text introduces and assesses: Leibniz's life and the background to the "Monadology"; the ideas and text of the "Monadology"; and Leibniz's continuing importance to philosophy.

The texts of the book are concerned with G. Bergmann's open and new problems and their active role on issues in contemporary metaphysics, like the ontology of ties, connexions and relations, problems of exemplification, substrates and tropes theories, particulars, persistence and the metaphysics of space, time and existence. Papers deal with these themes by themselves, or discuss them in an associated way: some of them aim to clarify the complicated conceptual Relations Bergmann have enlarged with major themes of philosophers like Aristotle, Brentano, Meinong and Sellars. The purpose of the book is to provide some light on his central interests, but also in regard of the evolution of the actual scope of his thought.

Things are particulars and their qualities are universals, but do universals have an existence distinct from the particular things describable by those terms? And what must be their nature if they do? This book provides a careful and assured survey of the central issues of debate surrounding universals, in particular those issues that have been a crucial part of the emergence of contemporary analytic ontology. The book begins with a taxonomy of extreme nominalist, moderate nominalist, and realist positions on properties, and outlines the way each handles the phenomena of predication, resemblance, and abstract reference. The debate about properties and philosophical naturalism is also examined. Different forms of extreme nominalism, moderate nominalism, and minimalist realism are critiqued. Later chapters defend a traditional realist view of universals and examine the objections to realism from various infinite regresses, the difficulties in stating identity conditions for properties, and problems with realist accounts of knowledge of abstract objects. In addition, the debate between Platonists and Aristotelians is examined alongside a discussion of the relationship between properties and an adequate theory of existence. The book's final chapter explores the problem of individuating particulars. The book makes accessible a difficult topic without blunting the sophistication of argument required by a more advanced readership.

Series Information:
Studies in Philosophy