This volume comprises original articles by leading authors - from philosophy as well as sociology - in the debate around relativism in the sociology of (scientific) knowledge. Its aim has been to bring together several threads from the relevant disciplines and to cover the discussion from historical and systematic points of view. Among the contributors are Maria Baghramian, Barry Barnes, Martin Endress, Hubert Knoblauch, Richard Schantz and Harvey Siegel.

Heidegger and ethics is a contentious conjunction of terms. Martin Heidegger himself rejected the notion of ethics, while his endorsement of Nazism is widely seen as unethical. This major study examines the complex and controversial issues involved in bringing Heidegger and ethics together.
Working backwards through his work, from his 1964 claim that philosophy has been completed to his first major book, "Being and Time, " Joanna Hodge questions Heidegger's denial that his inquiries were concerned with ethics. She discovers a form of ethics in Heidegger's thinking which elucidates his important distinction between metaphysics and philosophy. Opposing many contemporary views, Hodge proposes that ethics can be retrieved and questions the relation between ethics and metaphysics that Heidegger made so pervasive.

Heidegger and ethics is a contentious conjunction of terms. Martin Heidegger himself rejected the notion of ethics, while his endorsement of Nazism is widely seen as unethical. This major new study examines the complex and controversial issues involved in bringing them together.

By working backwards through his work, from his 1964 claim that philosophy has been completed to Being and Time, his first major work, Joanna Hodge questions Heidegger's denial that his enquires were concerned with ethics. She discovers a form of ethics in Heidegger's thinking which elucidates his important distinction between metaphysics and philosophy. Against many contemporary views, she proposes therefore that ethics can be retrieved and questions the relation between ethics and metaphysics that Heidegger had made so pervasive.

This monograph deals with the interrelationship between chemistry and physics, and especially the role played by quantum chemistry as a theory in between these two disciplines. The author uses structuralist approach to explore the overlap between the two sciences, looking at their theoretical and ontological borrowings as well as their continuity. The starting point of this book is that there is at least a form of unity between chemistry and physics, where the reduction relation is conceived as a special case of this unity. However, matters are never concluded so simply within philosophy of chemistry, as significant problems exist around a number of core chemical ideas. Specifically, one cannot take the obvious success of quantum theories as outright support for a reductive relationship. Instead, in the context of a suitably adapted Nagelian framework for reduction, modern chemistry's relationship to physics is constitutive. The results provided by quantum chemistry, in partic ular, have significant consequences for chemical ontology. This book is ideal for students, scholars and academics from the field of Philosophy of Science, and particularly for those with an interest in Philosophy of Chemistry and Physics.

Reinhardt Grossmann is one of the most sophisticated, knowledgeable and original contemporary metaphysicians. Although he was a student of Bergmann, he influenced the development of Bergmann's metaphysics considerably. No philosopher other than Grossmann defends perception to that degree against the persistent skeptical arguments. He characterizes his epistemological positions as radical empiricism and radical realism. By realism Grossmann mainly means the view that the material things we perceive exist. It is thus also an ontological position and closely related to his empiricism. Grossmann's empiricism is radical insofar as he claims that entities of all categories are perceptible, even numbers and universals. Grossmann's universal realism advocates a theory of abstract categories against the current naturalism. He distinguishes between the world and the physical universe. The latter is the domain of science; the former is the subject of ontology.

John Locke's complex masterpiece, "An Essay of Human Understanding," was a sustained attack on the dogmatism of the day and the last great work of philosophical realism before the onset of idealism. One of the most influential books in the history of thought, it is the most renowned work of the great English philosopher. Originally published in two volumes, this one-volume edition of "Locke" examines the historical meaning and philosophical significance of this work through careful explanations of the context of debate to which it was a decisive contribution. The first volume of this comprehensive work focuses on Locke's "Essay" from the epistemological side, and the second turns to the concepts of Locke's ontology--substance, mode, essence, law, and identity.

Plural predication is a pervasive part of ordinary language. We can say that some people are fifty in number, are surrounding a building, come from many countries, and are classmates. These predicates can be true of some people without being true of any one of them; they are non-distributive predications. Yet the apparatus of predication and quantification in standard modern logic does not allow a place for such non-distributive predicates. Thomas McKay's book explores the enrichment of modern logic with plural predication and quantification. We can have genuinely non-distributive predication without relying on singularizing procedures from set theory and mereology. The fundamental 'among' relation can be understood in a way that does not generate any hierarchy of plurals analogous to a hierarchy of types or a hierarchy of higher-order logics. Singular quantification can be understood as a special case, with the general type being quantifiers that allow both singular and plural quantification. The 'among' relation is formally similar to a 'part of' relation, but the relations are distinct, so that mass quantification and plural quantification cannot be united in the same way that plural and singular are united. Analysis of singular and plural definite descriptions follows, with a defense of a fundamentally Russellian analysis, but coupled with some new ideas about how to be sensitive to the role of context. This facilitates an analysis of some central features of the use of pronouns, both singular and plural.

This book provides a framework that encompasses both physics and cognitive science - integrating them into a 'theory of everything' to establish a basis for both our scientific and humanistic endeavours. It explores the implications of brain laterality for understanding the emergence of mind and its relation to the physical world - arguing that the analytic vs. holistic cognitive differences of the left and right human cerebral hemispheres are key to understanding not only human self-consciousness and language, but also sociocultural phenomena ranging from the emergence of the scientific method and axes of political orientation to the direction of development of conceptions of God and the fundamental differences between polarizing philosophical traditions. In a further step, the book draws on the Darwinian principle that our cognitive apparatus is shaped by the environment in which it evolved to argue that human bilaterality mirrors the fundamental hylomorphic relation between formal organization and material components that constitutes physical nature itself. The logical division between holistic and analytic categories thereby offers a principled basis for a metaphilosophy.

Major introduction to metaphysics that integrates perennial topics such as ontology, time and free will with new ones such as critiques of metaphysics and social ontology Aimed at those coming to metaphysics for the first time: no prior knowledge of philosophy or metaphysics is required Packed with additional features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading, glossary and companion website - all of which are updated for the second edition Second edition includes more on social metaphysics and the topics of fundamentality and grounding - in response to reviewer feedback of the first edition Competing textbooks cover a narrower range of topics, are out of date, or contain too much of the author's own views: our book is the most comprehensive and up to date introduction on the market. No competitor covers social metaphysics as thoroughly as our book, or introduces students to basic logic needed for metaphysics (this is optional).

Issues of subjectivity and consciousness are dealt with in very different ways in the analytic tradition and in the idealistic-phenomenological tradition central to continental philosophy. This book brings together analytically inspired philosophers working on the continent with English-speaking philosophers to address specific issues regarding subjectivity and consciousness. The issues range from acquaintance and immediacy in perception and apperception, to the role of agency in bodily 'mine-ness', to self-determination (Selbstbestimmung) through (free) action. Thus involving philosophers of different traditions should yield a deeper vision of consciousness and subjectivity; one relating the mind not only to nature, or to first-person authority in linguistic creatures-questions which, in the analytic tradition, are sometimes treated as exhausting the topic-but also to many other aspects of mind's understanding of itself in ways which disrupt classic inner/outer boundaries.

Explanations are important to us in many contexts: in science, mathematics, philosophy, and also in everyday and juridical contexts. But what is an explanation? In the philosophical study of explanation, there is long-standing, influential tradition that links explanation intimately to causation: we often explain by providing accurate information about the causes of the phenomenon to be explained. Such causal accounts have been the received view of the nature of explanation, particularly in philosophy of science, since the 1980s. However, philosophers have recently begun to break with this causal tradition by shifting their focus to kinds of explanation that do not turn on causal information. The increasing recognition of the importance of such non-causal explanations in the sciences and elsewhere raises pressing questions for philosophers of explanation. What is the nature of non-causal explanations - and which theory best captures it? How do non-causal explanations relate to causal ones? How are non-causal explanations in the sciences related to those in mathematics and metaphysics? This volume of new essays explores answers to these and other questions at the heart of contemporary philosophy of explanation. The essays address these questions from a variety of perspectives, including general accounts of non-causal and causal explanations, as well as a wide range of detailed case studies of non-causal explanations from the sciences, mathematics, and metaphysics.

This book offers an accessible and inclusive overview of the major debates in the philosophy of action. It covers the distinct approaches taken by Donald Davidson, G.E.M. Anscombe, and numerous others to answering questions like "what are intentional actions?" and "how do reasons explain actions?" Further topics include intention, practical knowledge, weakness and strength of will, self-governance, and collective agency. With introductions, conclusions, and annotated suggested reading lists for each of the ten chapters, it is an ideal introduction for advanced undergraduates as well as any philosopher seeking a primer on these issues.

Only 10 of the 25 essays are in English, the rest being in German. They consider various aspects of theologian Tillich's (1886-1965) thought. Among the topics are epistemological incorrigibility in the theology of Tillich, his logos-ontology and Habermas' theory of communicative practice, revising h

A World for Us aims to refute physical realism and establish in its place a form of idealism. Physical realism, in the sense in which John Foster understands it, takes the physical world to be something whose existence is both logically independent of the human mind and metaphysically fundamental. Foster identifies a number of problems for this realist view, but his main objection is that it does not accord the world the requisite empirical immanence. The form of idealism that he tries to establish in its place rejects the realist view in both its aspects. It takes the world to be something whose existence is ultimately constituted by facts about human sensory experience, or by some richer complex of non-physical facts in which such experiential facts centrally feature. Foster calls this phenomenalistic idealism. He tries to establish a specific version of such phenomenalistic idealism, in which the experiential facts that centrally feature in the constitutive creation of the world are ones that concern the organization of human sensory experience. The basic idea of this version is that, in the context of certain other constitutively relevant factors, this sensory organization creates the physical world by disposing things to appear systematically world-wise at the human empirical viewpoint. Chief among these other relevant factors is the role of God as the one who is responsible for the sensory organization and ordains the system of appearance it yields. It is this that gives the idealistically created world its objectivity and allows it to qualify as a real world.

Reality is a rather large place. It contains protons, economies, headaches, sentences, smiles, asteroids, crimes, and numbers, and very many other things. Much of the content of our reality appears to depend on other of its content. Economies, for example, appear to depend upon people and the way they behave, amongst other things. Some of the content of our reality also appears to be, in some significant sense, more important than other of its content. Whilst none of us would wish to deny the very important role that economies play in our lives, most of us would agree that without matter arranged certain ways in space, for example, there could be no economies in the first place. Very many contemporary philosophers are concerned with how exactly we are to fill in the details of this view. What they are inclined to agree on is that reality has an over-arching hierarchical structure ordered by relations of metaphysical dependence, where chains of entities ordered by those dependence relations terminate in something fundamental. It is also commonly taken for granted that what those dependence chains terminate in is merely contingently existent - those things could have failed to exist - and consistent - they have no contradictory properties. This volume brings together fifteen essays from leading and emerging scholars that address these core, yet often under-explored, commitments.

The mid-1980s saw the discovery of logical tools that make it possible to model changes in belief and knowledge in entirely new ways. These logical tools turned out to be applicable to both human beliefs and to the contents of databases. Philosophers, logicians, and computer scientists have contributed to making this interdisciplinary field one of the most exciting in the cognitive scientists - and one that is expanding rapidly. This, the first textbook in the new area, contains both discursive chapters with a minimum of formalism and formal chapters in which proofs and proof methods are presented. Using different selections from the formal sections, according to the author's detailed advice, allows the book to be used at all levels of university education. A supplementary volume contains solutions to the 210 exercises. The volume's unique, comprehensive coverage means that it can also be used by specialists in the field of belief dynamics and related areas, such as non-monotonic reasoning and knowledge representation.

Like Kant, the German Idealists, and many neo-Kantian philosophers before him, Nietzsche was persistently concerned with metaphysical questions about the nature of objects. His texts often address questions concerning the existence and non-existence of objects, the relation of objects to human minds, and how different views of objects impact commitments in many areas of philosophy-not just metaphysics, but also language, epistemology, science, logic and mathematics, and even ethics. In this book, Remhof presents a systematic and comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche's material object metaphysics. He argues that Nietzsche embraces the controversial constructivist view that all concrete objects are socially constructed. Reading Nietzsche as a constructivist, Remhof contends, provides fresh insight into Nietzsche's views on truth, science, naturalism, and nihilism. The book also investigates how Nietzsche's view of objects compares with views offered by influential American pragmatists and explores the implications of Nietzsche's constructivism for debates in contemporary material object metaphysics. Nietzsche's Constructivism is a highly original and timely contribution to the steadily growing literature on Nietzsche's thought.

In Admirable Evasions, Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures. Dalrymple reveals how the fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is necessary to the formation of human character. Instead, they promote self-obsession without self-examination, and the gross overuse of medicines that affect the mind. Admirable Evasions also considers metaphysical objections to the assumptions of psychology, and suggests that literature is a far more illuminating window into the human condition than psychology could ever hope to be.

Are there nonexistent objects? Can we make sense of objects having properties without thinking that there are nonexistent objects? Is existence a predicate? Can we make sense of necessarily existing objects depending on God? Tackling these central questions, Matthew Davidson explores the metaphysics of existence and nonexistence. He presents an extended argument for independence actualism, a previously undefended view that objects can have properties in worlds and at times at which they do not exist. Among other unique points of discussion, Davidson considers the nature of actualism, arguments for and against serious actualism, the semantics of "exists" as a predicate, the merits of different sorts of Meinongian theories, and different views on which God might ground the existence of necessarily existing abstracta. The book offers a Lewisian-style argument for adopting independence actualism in that the view may be used to solve many problems in metaphysics, philosophy of language and philosophy of religion.

This book explores the relevance of naturalism and theories of nature to Classical German Philosophy. It presents new readings on Kant, Jacobi, Goethe, the Romantic tradition, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Marx, which highlight the relevance of Classical German Philosophy's considerations of nature and naturalism for contemporary concerns.

This book is dedicated to Edith Stein (1891-1942), who is known widely for her contributions to metaphysics. Though she never produced a dedicated work on questions of ethics, her corpus is replete with pertinent reflections. This book is the first major scholarly volume dedicated to exploring Stein's ethical thought, not only for its wide-ranging content, from her earlier to later works, but also for its applications to such fields as psychology, theology, education, politics, law, and culture. Leading international scholars come together to provide a systematic account of Stein's ethics, highlighting its relation to Stein's highly developed and complex metaphysics. Questions about the good, evil, the rights and ethical comportment of the person, the state, and feminism are addressed. The book appeals to scholars interested in the history of philosophical and ethical thought