2013 Winner (Gold Medal), Classical Studies/Philosophy, Independent Publisher Book Awards -- 2013 Winner, Spirituality: General, International Book Awards -- 2013 Winner, Science, National Indie Excellence Awards -- 2013 Finalist, Science: General, International Book Awards -- 2013 Finalist, Best New Non-Fiction, International Book Awards -- 2013 Finalist, Best Cover Design: Non-Fiction, International Book Awards -- 2013 Finalist, Philosophy, National Indie Excellence Awards -- The Eternal Law takes the reader on a fascinating journey through some of the most profound questions related to our understanding of modern science. What does it mean to say that there is an eternal mathematical law underpinning all of physical reality? How must we expand our narrow conception of science to include not only logic but also intuition, consciousness, and the pursuit of beauty, symmetry, simplicity, and unity? Is truth objective, or is it nothing more than a whimsical projection of opinions? Why were many of the key founders of modern science inevitably drawn to ancient Greek philosophy? Spencer's extraordinary clarity helps to restore a sane vision of reality, while deepening our appreciation of what Einstein called 'the mysterious'.

Death has long been a pre-occupation of philosophers, and this is especially so today. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death collects 21 newly commissioned essays that cover current philosophical thinking of death-related topics across the entire range of the discipline. These include metaphysical topics-such as the nature of death, the possibility of an afterlife, the nature of persons, and how our thinking about time affects what we think about death-as well as axiological topics, such as whether death is bad for its victim, what makes it bad to die, what attitude it is fitting to take towards death, the possibility of posthumous harm, and the desirability of immortality. The contributors also explore the views of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato and Epicurus on topics related to the philosophy of death, and questions in normative ethics, such as what makes killing wrong when it is wrong, and whether it is wrong to kill fetuses, non-human animals, combatants in war, and convicted murderers. With chapters written by a wide range of experts in metaphysics, ethics, and conceptual analysis, and designed to give the reader a comprehensive view of recent developments in the philosophical study of death, this Handbook will appeal to a broad audience in philosophy, particularly in ethics and metaphysics.

The first critical work to attempt the mammoth undertaking of reading Badiou's Being and Event as part of a sequence has often surprising, occasionally controversial results. Looking back on its publication Badiou declared: "I had inscribed my name in the history of philosophy". Later he was brave enough to admit that this inscription needed correction. The central elements of Badiou's philosophy only make sense when Being and Event is read through the corrective prism of its sequel, Logics of Worlds, published nearly twenty years later. At the same time as presenting the only complete overview of Badiou's philosophical project, this book is also the first to draw out the central component of Badiou's ontology: indifference. Concentrating on its use across the core elements Being and Event-the void, the multiple, the set and the event-Watkin demonstrates that no account of Badiou's ontology is complete unless it accepts that Badiou's philosophy is primarily a presentation of indifferent being. Badiou and Indifferent Being provides a detailed and lively section by section reading of Badiou's foundational work. It is a seminal source text for all Badiou readers.

Our work in psychiatry always involves both sides of the mind-body divide. But despite much effort to clarify the nature of the relation between mind and body, this question is still a riddle. That is a puzzling situation, to put it mildly.

One central unresolved question in understanding the mind-brain relationship is not of an experimental type but stems from difficulties in the use of concepts. St. Augustine ( 400 CE) wrote that it is impossible for humans to understand how the mind is attached to the body. Despite the inherent paradox that humans as minds plus bodies are entirely puzzling and incomprehensible, this would appear to be an accurate statement until now, despite an extensive literature that tries to solve the difficulty, particularly as a result of the recent increase in the knowledge of brain function.

This essay, "Brain in Mind," shows that the difficulty is due to the Occidental tradition of metaphysics-ontology, which claims that reality is mindindependent; that belief eliminates the mind from reality, because the mind cannot become mind-independent. Principles from phenomenology (Jaspers) and constructivism (von Glasersfeld and others), and the awareness that all reality-structures involve the subject's pragmatic designing activity in an unstructured background, show a contradiction-free way of dealing with the question, which is also of help for other areas of knowledge.

The concept of resistance has always been central to the reception of Hegel's philosophy. The prevalent image of Hegel's system, which continues to influence the scholarship to this day, is that of an absolutist, monist metaphysics which overcomes all resistance, sublating or assimilating all differences into a single organic 'Whole'. For that reason, the reception of Hegel has always been marked by the question of how to resist Hegel: how to think that which remains outside of or other to the totalizing system of dialectics. In recent years the work of scholars such as Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Zizek, Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda has brought considerable nuance to this debate. A new reading of Hegel has emerged which challenges the idea that there is no place for difference, otherness or resistance in Hegel, both by refusing to reduce Hegel's complex philosophy to a straightforward systematic narrative and by highlighting particular moments within Hegel's philosophy which seem to counteract the traditional understanding of dialectics. This book brings together established and new voices in this field in order to show that the notion of resistance is central to this revaluation of Hegel.

This book is mainly concerned with elaborating an account of the unique theoretical essence and activities of philosophy. What manner of civilization should modern humans forge? On what developmental path should a nation embark? What lifestyle should each individual choose? These are the most fundamental issues of our time. Profoundly implicit in the choices outlined above is a deeper question: What are the criteria of choice? An examination of these criteria is a reflection on the premises constituting thought, or a critique of the premises underlying thought. Using a "critique of the premises underlying thought" as the basic idea and hermeneutic principle in philosophy will open a wider theoretical space for contemporary philosophy so as to avoid the predicament of being "pseudo-scientific" or "pseudo-artistic." It will also present contemporary philosophy with a realistic path of development for the task of reflecting on the criteria of choice. This book seeks to formulate concrete philosophical arguments for a critique of the basic beliefs, logic, modes, concepts, and philosophical ideas which constitute thought, with the aim of demonstrating the vigorous self-critique and inexhaustible theoretical space found in philosophical development. This book provides a new principle of interpretation for understanding philosophy and, in turn, uses this principle to develop a critique of the premises underlying thought, thereby furthering the contemporary development of philosophy. This book encompasses a critique of the premises underlying thought, which mainly includes the basic beliefs, logic, modes, concepts, and philosophical ideas constituting thought. Such a critique should comprise five aspects: First, the basic beliefs constituting thought propose a critique of the identity of thought and being; second, the basic logic constituting thought refers to a critique of the formal, intensional, and practical logic of thought; third, the basic modes constituting thought denote a critique of the basic modes by which humans comprehend the world, including commonsense, religion, art, and science; fourth, the basic concepts constituting thought entail a critique centering on being, the world, history, truth, value, and other basic concepts; and finally, the philosophical ideas constituting thought indicate a critique of philosophy itself. A critique aligned on these five aspects will provide a general philosophical overview of the premise critique of thought.

On the Intrinsic Value of Everything is an illuminating introduction to fundamental questions in ethics. How--and to what--we assign value, whether it is to events or experiences or objects or people, is central to ethics. Something is intrinsically valuable only if it would be valued for its own sake by all fully informed, properly functioning persons. Davison defends the controversial view that everything that exists is intrinsically valuable to some degree. If only some things are intrinsically valuable, what about other things? Where and how do we draw the cutoff point? If only living creatures are intrinsically valuable, what does this imply for how we value the environment? If everything has intrinsic value, what practical implications does this have for how we live our lives? How does this view fit with the traditional theistic idea that God is the source of goodness and truth? Both critics and proponents of the concept of intrinsic value will find something of interest in this careful investigation of the basic value structure of the world.

Pragmatists have traditionally been enemies of representationalism but friends of naturalism, when naturalism is understood to pertain to human subjects, in the sense of Hume and Nietzsche. In this volume Huw Price presents his distinctive version of this traditional combination, as delivered in his Rene Descartes Lectures at Tilburg University in 2008. Price contrasts his view with other contemporary forms of philosophical naturalism, comparing it with other pragmatist and neo-pragmatist views such as those of Robert Brandom and Simon Blackburn. Linking their different 'expressivist' programmes, Price argues for a radical global expressivism that combines key elements from both. With Paul Horwich and Michael Williams, Brandom and Blackburn respond to Price in new essays. Price replies in the closing essay, emphasising links between his views and those of Wilfrid Sellars. The volume will be of great interest to advanced students of philosophy of language and metaphysics.

Building a foundational understanding of the digital, Logic of the Digital reveals a unique digital ontology. Beginning from formal and technical characteristics, especially the binary code at the core of all digital technologies, Aden Evens traces the pathways along which the digital domain of abstract logic encounters the material, human world. How does a code using only 0s and 1s give rise to the vast range of applications and information that constitutes a great and growing portion of our world? Evens' analysis shows how any encounter between the actual and the digital must cross an ontological divide, a gap between the productive materiality of the human world and the reductive abstraction of the binary code. Logic of the Digital examines the distortions of this ontological crossing, considering the formal abstraction that persists in exemplary digital technologies and techniques such as the mouse, the Web, the graphical user interface, and the development of software. One crucial motive for this research lies in the paradoxical issue of creativity in relation to digital technologies: the ontology of abstraction leaves little room for the unpredictable or accidental that is essential to creativity, but digital technologies are nevertheless patently creative. Evens inquires into the mechanisms by which the ostensibly sterile binary code can lend itself to such fecund cultural production. Through clarification of the digital's ontological foundation, Evens points to a significant threat to creativity lurking in the nature of the digital and so generates a basis for an ethics of digital practice. Examining the bits that give the digital its ontology, exploring the potentials and limitations of programming, and using gaming as an ideal test of digital possibility, Logic of the Digital guides future practices and shapes academic research in the digital.

35 MINUTES and COUNTING, a true story of Micky Oldham, a woman who crossed over to the other side and came back to share the lessons of her experience.

After the final barrage of bullets from a crazed gunman, Micky lay on the floor for 35 minutes, waiting for medical assistance. During this time, she felt her psyche slip between reality and an unknown dimension. She came back with a message: life can bring a raincloud, but a rainbow waits w the promise of hope, as the sun begins to emerge from the darkness of the clouds.

"For anyone who has ever questioned, "what is life and death?" 35 MINUTES and COUNTING is a quick and breathtaking read."--JoAn Worden, CMSW, LMHP, and author.

This book offers a detailed defense of a metaphysics of Platonic universals and a conception of particular objects that is coherent with said metaphysics. The work discusses all the main alternatives in metaphysics of properties and tries to show why universals are the entities that best satisfy the theoretical roles required for a property. The work also explains the advantages of Platonic over Aristotelian universals in the metaphysics of modality and natural laws. Moreover, it is argued that only Platonic universals are coherent with the grounding profile required for universals. The traditional objections against Platonism are discussed and answered. The third part of the book, finally, offers a conception of particular objects as nuclear bundles of tropes that is coherent with the Platonic ontology of universals. This book is of interest to anyone that wants to understand the current -and intricate- debate in metaphysics of properties and its incidence in many other areas in philosophy.

This book provides a comprehensive account of Kant's development from the 1755/56 metaphysics to the cosmological antinomy of 1781. With the Theory of the Heavens (1755) and the Physical Monadology (1756), the young Kant had presented an ambitious approach to physical cosmology based on an atomistic theory of matter, which contributed to the foundations of an all-encompassing system of metaphysics. Why did he abandon this system in favor of his critical view that cosmology runs into an antinomy, according to the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR)? This book answers this question by focusing on Kant's methodology and the internal problems of his 1755/56 theory of nature. A decisive role for Kant's critical turn plays the argument from incongruent counterparts (1768), which drew much attention among philosophers of science, though not sufficiently in Kant research. Furthermore, the book analyses the genesis of the cosmological antinomy in the 1770s, the logical structure of the antinomy in the CPR, its relation to transcendental idealism, as explained in the "experiment of pure reason" (1787), and its role for the teleology of human reason. The book is addressed to Kant scholars, philosophers of science, and students of Kant's philosophy.

This book examines the true core of philosophy and metaphysics, taking account of quantum and relativity theory as it applies to physical Reality, and develops a line of reasoning that ultimately leads us to Reality as it is currently understood at the most fundamental level - the Standard Model of Elementary Particles. This book develops new formalisms for Logic that are of interest in themselves and also provide a Platonic bridge to Reality. The bridge to Reality will be explored in detail in a subsequent book, Relativistic Quantum Metaphysics: A First Principles Basis for the Standard Model of Elementary Particles. We anticipate that the current "fundamental" level of physical Reality may be based on a still lower level and/or may have additional aspects remaining to be found. However the effects of certain core features such as quantum theory and relativity theory will persist even if a lower level of Reality is found, and these core features suggest the form of a new Metaphysics of physical Reality. We have coined the phrase "Operator Metaphysics" for this new metaphysics of physical Reality. The book starts by describing aspects of Philosophy and Metaphysics relevant to the study of current physical Reality. Part of this development are new Logics, Operator Logic and Quantum Operator Logic, developed in earlier books by this author (and revised and expanded in this book). Using them we are led to develop a connection to the beginnings of The Standard Model of Elementary Particles. While mathematics is essential in the latter stages of the book we have tried to present it with sufficient text discussion to make what it is doing understandable to the non-mathematical reader. Generally we will avoid using the jargon of Philosophy, Logic and Physics as much as possible.