There are few topics more central to philosophical discussions than the meaning of being, and few thinkers offering a more compelling and original vision of that meaning than Edith Stein (1891-1942). Stein's magnum opus, drawing from her decades working with the early phenomenologists and intense years as a student and translator of medieval texts, lays out a grand vision, bringing together phenomenological and Scholastic insights into an integrated whole. The sheer scope of Stein's project in Finite and Eternal Being is daunting, and the text can be challenging to navigate. In this book, Sarah Borden Sharkey provides a guide to Stein's great final philosophical work and intellectual vision. The opening essays give an overview of Stein's method and argument and place Finite and Eternal Being both within its historical context and in relation to contemporary discussions. The author also provides clear, detailed summaries of each section of Stein's opus, drawing from the latest scholarship on Stein's manuscript. Edith Stein's Finite and Eternal Being: A Companion offers a unique guide, opening up Stein's grand cathedral-like vision of the meaning of being as the unfolding of meaning.

What is the connection between causation and responsibility? Is there a best way to theorize philosophically about causation? Which factors determine and influence what we judge to be the cause of something? Bringing together interdisciplinary research from experimental philosophy, traditional philosophy and psychology, this collection showcases the most recent developments and approaches to questions about causation. Chapters discuss the diverse theoretical ramifications of empirical findings in experimental philosophy of causation, providing a comprehensive survey of key issues such as the perception and learning of causal relations, omission, normative considerations, mechanism, voluntariness and legal theories of causation. With novel contributions from both experts and rising stars, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Causation demonstrates the value of empirical work and opens new domains of inquiry at the cutting edge of the field.

In this short, lucid, rich book Michael Dummett sets out his views about some of the deepest questions in philosophy. The fundamental question of metaphysics is: what does reality consist of? To answer this, Dummett holds, it is necessary to say what kinds of fact obtain, and what constitutes their holding good. Facts correspond with true propositions, or true thoughts: when we know which propositions, or thoughts, in general, are true, we shall know what facts there are in general. Dummett considers the relation between metaphysics, our conception of the constitution of reality, and semantics, the theory that explains how statements are determined as true or as false in terms of their composition out of their constituent expressions. He investigates the two concepts on which the bridge that connects semantics to metaphysics rests, meaning and truth, and the role of justification in a theory of meaning. He then examines the special semantic and metaphysical issues that arise with relation to time and tense. On this basis Dummett puts forward his controversial view of reality as indeterminate: there may be no fact of the matter about whether an object does or does not have a given property. We have to relinquish our deep-held realist understanding of language, the illusion that we know what it is for any proposition that we can frame to be true independently of our having any means of recognizing its truth, and accept that truth depends on our capacity to apprehend it. Dummett concludes with a chapter about God.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's brief Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) is one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, yet it offers little orientation for the reader. The first-time reader is left wondering what it could be about, and the scholar is left with little guidance for interpretation. In Tractatus in Context, James C. Klagge presents the vital background necessary for appreciating Wittgenstein's gnomic masterpiece. Tractatus in Context contains the early reactions to the Tractatus, including the initial reviews written in 1922-1924. And while we can't talk with Wittgenstein, we can do the next best thing-hear what he had to say about the Tractatus. Klagge thus presents what Wittgenstein thought about germane issues leading up to his writing the book, in discussions and correspondence with others about his ideas, and what he had to say about the Tractatus after it was written-in letters, lectures and conversations. It offers, you might say, Wittgenstein's own commentary on the book. Key Features: Illuminates what is at stake in the Tractatus, by providing the views of others that engaged Wittgenstein as he was writing it. Includes Wittgenstein's earlier thoughts on ideas in the book as recorded in his notebooks, letters, and conversations as well as his later, retrospective comments on those ideas. Draws on new or little-known sources, such as Wittgenstein's coded notebooks, Hermine's notes, Frege's letters, Hansel's diary, Ramsey's notes, and Skinner's dictations. Draws connections between the background context and specific passages in the Tractatus, using a proposition-by-proposition commentary.

A sports reporter might say that in a competition all the participants realize their potentialities or possibilities. When an athlete performs far below his usual standard, it can be said that it was possible for him to do better. But the idea of fair play requires that this use of 'possible' refers to another com petition. It is presumed that the best athlete wins and that no real possibility of doing better is left unrealized in a competition. Here we have a use of language, a language game, in which modal notions are used so as to imply that if something is possible, it is realized. This idea does not belong to the general presuppositions of current ordinary usage. It is, nevertheless, not difficult to fmd other similar examples outside of the language of sports. It may be that such a use of modal notions is sometimes calculated to express that in the context in question there are no real alternative courses of events in contradistinction to other cases in which some possible alternatives remain unrealized. Even though modal notions are currently interpreted without the presup position that each genuine possibility should be realized at some moment of the actual history, there are contemporary philosophical models of modalities which incorporate this presupposition. In his book Untersuchungen tiber den Modalkalkiil (Anton Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1952, pp. 16-36), Oscar Becker presents a statistical interpretation of modal calculi."

In this sequel to the highly acclaimed Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth , Psillos discusses recent developments in scientific realism and explores realist theses and commitments. He examines the structuralist turn in the philosophy of science and offers a framework within which inference to the best explanation can be defended.

Bertrand Russell famously quipped that he didn't believe in God for the same reason that he didn't believe in a teapot in orbit between the earth and Mars: it is a bizarre assertion for which no evidence can be provided. Is belief in God really like belief in Russell's teapot? Kenneth L. Pearce argues that God is no teapot. God is a real answer to the deepest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing? Graham Oppy argues that we should believe that there are none but natural causal entities with none but natural causal properties-and hence should believe that there are no gods. Beginning from this basic disagreement, the authors proceed to discuss and debate a wide range of philosophical questions, including questions about explanation, necessity, rationality, religious experience, mathematical objects, the foundations of ethics, and the methodology of philosophy. Each author first presents his own side, and then they interact through two rounds of objections and replies. Pedagogical features include standard form arguments, section summaries, bolded key terms and principles, a glossary, and annotated reading lists. In the volume foreword, Helen De Cruz calls the debate "both edifying and a joy," and sums up what's at stake: "Here you have two carefully formulated positive proposals for worldviews that explain all that is: classical theism, or naturalistic atheism. You can follow along with the authors and deliberate: which one do you find more plausible?" Though written with beginning students in mind, this debate will be of interest to philosophers at all levels and to anyone who values careful, rational thought about the nature of reality and our place in it.

This handbook presents the conceptions and principles central to every aspect of Hegel's systematic philosophy. In twenty-eight thematically linked chapters by leading international experts, The Palgrave Hegel Handbook provides reliable, scholarly overviews of each subject, illuminates the main issues and debates, and details concisely the considered views of each contributor. Recent scholarship challenges traditional, largely anti-Kantian, readings of Hegel, focusing instead on Hegel's appropriation of Kantian epistemology to reconcile idealism with the rejection of foundationalism, coherentism and skepticism. Focused like Kant on showing how fundamental unities underlie the profusion of apparently independent events, Hegel argued that reality is rationally structured, so that its systematic structure is manifest to our properly informed thought. Accordingly, this handbook re-assesses Hegel's philosophical aims, methods and achievements, and re-evaluates many aspects of Hegel's enduring philosophical contributions, ranging from metaphysics, epistemology, and dialectic, to moral and political philosophy and philosophy of history. Each chapter, and The Palgrave Hegel Handbook as a whole, provides an informed, authoritative understanding of each aspect of Hegel's philosophy.

This volume, edited by Dorota Probucka, criticizes the modern approach to hunting by incorporating legal, ethical, cultural, social, theological, and linguistic perspectives into the analysis. The collection of articles contains thorough argumentation against hunting and determines social change strategies for eliminating it from cultural behavior patterns. It utilizes the expertise of Polish experts from many fields to describe and criticize the practice of hunting, illustrate its inhumane nature and unimaginable cruelty, and condemn the devastation of the natural environment that comes as a direct consequence of the actions of hunters. This volume argues that, unless dictated by biological need, hunting as a practice ought to be outlawed and culturally shunned, much like slavery.

In our everyday activities we use material objects in different shapes and forms to solve various practical problems. We may use a knife to tighten a screw, turn an old washing machine drum into a fireplace, use the edge of a kitchen countertop to open a bottle, or place a hammer on the puncture patch glued to a bike's inner tube to exert pressure on the patch until the glue dries. How should we identify these objects? What functions do they have? If we want to understand the role which material objects play in our everyday activities, we need to move away from universal identifications of objects. This is because universal identifications are not sensitive to contextual differences and cannot describe how each individual user connects to their surrounding objects in an infinite variety of contexts. Problem Solving Technologies provides a user-friendly understanding of technological objects. This book develops a framework to characterise and categorize technological objects at the level of users' subjective experiences.

When it comes to contemporary philosophical problems, metaphysical idealism-or Berkeleyan immaterialism-is not taken seriously by most philosophers, not to mention the typical Christian layperson. This state of affairs deserves some attempt at rectification, since Idealism has considerable explanatory power as a metaphysical thesis and provides numerous practical and theoretical benefits. Such thinkers as George Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards believed that Idealism is especially amenable to a Christian perspective, both because it provides a plausible way of conceptualizing the world from a theistic standpoint and because it effectively addresses skeptical challenges to the Christian faith. The contributors to this volume explore a variety of ways in which the case can be made for this claim, including potential solutions to philosophical problems related to the nature of time, the ontology of physical objects, the mind-body problem, and the nature of science.

Axiomatic Formal Ontology is a fairly comprehensive systematic treatise on general metaphysics. The axiomatic method is applied throughout the book. Its main theme is the construction of a general non-set-theoretical theory of intensional entities. Other important matters discussed are the metaphysics of modality, the nature of actual existence, mereology and the taxonomy of entities.

Kierkegaard's Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard's writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard's thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard's contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.

Our sensory relationships with the social and biological world have altered appreciably as a result of recent developments in internet and other mobile communication technologies. We now look at a screen, we touch either the screen or a keyboard in response to what we see and, somehow, an element of our sensory presence is transmitted elsewhere. It is often claimed that this change in the way we perceive the world and each other is without precedent, and is solely the result of twenty-first-century life and technologies. This book argues otherwise. The author analyses the evolving portrayals of 'haptic' sensations - that is, sensations that are at once tactile and visual - in the theories and prose of the writer-philosophers Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) and Michel Serres (1930-). In exploring haptic perception in the works of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres, the author examines haptic theories postulated by Alois Riegl, Laura U. Marks, Mark Paterson and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Noam Chomsky is among the most influential contemporary thinkers. Peter Wilkin looks in particular at the philosophical basis of his social and political thought, especially his ideal about power, knowledge and human nature. He shows how Chomsky's ideas can help to defend naturalism as in social and political thought. Chomsky's critical writings of social inquiry and his normative ideas on libertarian socialism and human emancipation are interpreted as synthesising a number of important ideas and approaches at a time when these ideas have fallen out of favour.

What does Heidegger's controversial notion of the Event mean? Can it be read as an historical prophecy connected to his political affinity with Nazism? And what has this concept to do with the possibility of a new beginning for Western philosophy after Schelling and Nietzsche? This book highlights the theoretical affinity between the results of Schelling's speculations and Heidegger's later theories. Heidegger dedicated a seminar to Schelling's Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom in 1927-28, immediately after the publication of his Sein und Zeit. He then returned to this work during the courses he taught in 1936 and again in 1941, with lectures dedicated to the Metaphysics of German Idealism. Heidegger's introduction of the Event is reminiscent of Schelling's effort to think of "being" in its organic connection to time, and is such a new form of Schelling's positive philosophy. Thanks to a concept of being intimately linked to that of time, these latter of Heidegger's theories culminate in a form of positive, historical philosophy as well as with a definition of a post-metaphysical Absolute that, in close connection with primal Nothingness, is beyond any form of onto-theology. It also reveals close connections to Nietzsche's introduction of the eternal recurrence, which rethinks being as a never-ending becoming.

A thorough analysis and discussion of the nature of time and eternity, focusing on the timelessness of God. After considering two theories of time in the light of modern science and philosophy, Padgett argues for a process notion of time. The traditional doctrine of absolute divine timelessness is incompatible with God's action in the world, if the process view of time is true. After an historical and biblical survey of the doctrine of eternity, Padgett rejects both the everlasting and the timeless theory of eternity, seeking to defent the intuition that God transcends time. He argues for a third, mediating view: God is in some sense temporal, yet is the ground of time, the Lord of time, and relatively timeless.

The third edition of Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity has been carefully updated to reflect significant developments, including a new chapter covering important recent work in the foundations of physics. * A new edition of the premier philosophical study of Bell s Theorem and its implication for the relativistic account of space and time * Discusses Roderich Tumiulka s explicit, relativistic theory that can reproduce the quantum mechanical violation of Bell s inequality. * Discusses the "Free Will Theorem" of John Conway and Simon Kochen * Introduces philosophers to the relevant physics and demonstrates how philosophical analysis can help inform physics

Since immemorial times, persons have been engaged in disputes in metaphysics. This book reacts to this fact by supporting five theses. Thesis 1 is that disputes are micro-wars that have a significant social importance; they involve conflicting parties who may resort to some kind of violence and depend on normative factors. Thesis 2 is that disputes can be approached from right-wing or left-wing stances. Thesis 3 is that the grounds for endorsing an approach to a dispute are problematic starting points that may be rationally rejected. Thesis 4 is that disputes have an incommensurable greatness. Thesis 5 is that right-wing approaches to disputes may be less appealing than the left-wing one championed by the book for those who endorse that one is to avoid expressing "subtle" violence. This is the violence expressed by those who suggest that others who disagree with one's criteria to deal with disputes fall short of logos or act as if such others did not exist.

Freedom, value, power, justice, government, legitimacy are major themes of the present inquiry. It explores the ontological structure of human beings associating with one another, the basic phenomenon of society. We human beings strive to become who we are in an ongoing power interplay with each other. Thinkers called as witnesses include Plato, Aristotle, Anaximander, Protagoras, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Schumpeter, Hayek, Schmitt, Ernst Junger, et al.

Perception is one of the most pervasive and puzzling problems in philosophy, generating a great deal of attention and controversy in philosophy of mind, psychology and metaphysics. If perceptual illusion and hallucination are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? How can perception be both internally dependent and externally directed? Perception is an outstanding introduction to this fundamental topic, covering both the perennial and recent work on the problem. Adam Pautz examines four of the most important theories of perception: the sense datum view; the internal physical state view; the representational view; and naive realism, assessing each in turn. He also discusses the relationship between perception and the physical world and the issue of whether reality is as it appears. Useful examples are included throughout the book to illustrate the puzzles of perception, including hallucinations, illusions, the laws of appearance, blindsight, and neuroscientific explanations of our experience of pain, smell and color. The book covers both traditional philosophical arguments and more recent empirical arguments deriving from research in psychophysics and neuroscience. The addition of chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading and a glossary of terms make Perception essential reading for anyone studying the topic in detail, as well as for students of philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and metaphysics.

The present volume is targeted at an interdisciplinary audience, i.e. partly at literary scholars/narratologists interested in time theory outside their field, and partly at scholars outside literary studies who in turn would like to learn more about such concepts created in narrative theory. The anthology assembles both English-speaking and German contributions to a narrative theory of time constructs which have thus far not been translated into English, but have - directly or indirectly - inspired the theoretical discourse across disciplines. The common methodological focus of the articles assembled here concerns the way in which the experience of chronological structure and ordering in (experienced or imagined) phenomena can be traced back to a logic of time "constructs". Narrative time constructs - that is: models of chronological ordering which we generate while processing narratively encoded information - constitute a particularly rich body of examples. How we experience time is directly linked to how we narrate information, and how we re-construct principles of temporal ordering in the narrated content. The logic of narrative time constructs has therefore been of interest not only to narrative theory, but also to philosophy and cognitive science, and more recently to computational approaches toward modelling human time experience.

Over the last twenty years, Jeff Malpas' research has involved his engagement with architects and other academics around the issues of place, architecture and landscape and particularly the way these practitioners have used the work of Martin Heidegger. In Rethinking Dwelling, Malpas' primary focus is to rethink of these issues in a way that is directly informed by an understanding of place and the human relation it. With essays on a range of architectural and design concerns, as well as engaging with other thinkers on topics including textuality in architecture, contemporary high-rise construction, the significance of the line, the relation between building and memory and the idea of authenticity in architecture, this book departs from the traditional phenomenological focus and provides students and scholars with a new ontological assessment of landscape and architecture. As such, it may also be used on other 'spatial' or 'topographic' disciplines including geography, sociology, anthropology, and art in which the 'spatial turn' has been so important.

This book is the first volume featuring the work of American women philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century. It provides selected papers authored by Mary Whiton Calkins, Grace Andrus de Laguna, Grace Neal Dolson, Marjorie Glicksman Grene, Marjorie Silliman Harris, Thelma Zemo Lavine, Marie Collins Swabey, Ellen Bliss Talbot, Dorothy Walsh and Margaret Floy Washburn. The book also provides the historical and philosophical background to their work. The papers focus on the nature of philosophy, knowledge, the philosophy of science, the mind-matter nexus, the nature of time, and the question of freedom and the individual. The material is suitable for scholars, researchers and advanced philosophy students interested in (history of) philosophy; theories of knowledge; philosophy of science; mind, and reality.