Andrea Bottani Massimiliano Carrara Pierdaniele Giaretta What do we do when we do metaphysics? The aim of this introduction is to give a provisional answer to this question, and then to explain the subtitle of the volume. It is easy to observe that when we do meta physics we engage in a linguistic activity, mainly consisting of uttering declarative sentences that are not very clear to most people. That is true, but, of course, it is not very informative. What do we speak of when we do metaphysics? A traditional answer could be: we speak of what things really are, so suggesting that things can appear in a way that is different from the way they really are. So understood, meta physics is about the sense, or the senses, of "real being." A question that immediately arises is whether the sense of being is unique or is different for different types of things. Another question is whether it is possible that something could appear to be, but really not be. Modem analytic metaphysicians usually answer that the sense of being is unique, while acknowledging that there are different kinds of things, and that to say that something could appear to be but really not be is a plain contradiction, unless what is understood is that it could appear to us that there is something having such and such features, but viii Individuals, Essence, and Identity really there is no such a thing."

John McDowell's 'minimal empiricism' is one of the most influential and widely discussed doctrines in contemporary philosophy. Richard Gaskin subjects it to careful examination and criticism. The doctrine is undermined, he argues, by inadequacies in the way McDowell conceives what he styles the 'order of justification' connecting world, experience, and judgement. McDowell's conception of the roles played by causation and nature in this order is threatened with vacuity; and the requirements of self-consciousness and verbal articulacy which he places on subjects participating in the justificatory relation between experience and judgement are unwarranted, and have the implausible consequence that infants and non-human animals are excluded from the 'order of justification' and so are deprived of experience of the world. Above all, McDowell's position is vitiated by a substantial error he commits in the philosophy of language: following ancient tradition rather than Frege's radical departure from that tradition, he locates concepts at the level of sense rather than at the level of reference in the semantical hierarchy. This error generates an unwanted Kantian transcendental idealism which in effect delivers a reductio ad absurdum of McDowell's metaphysical economy. Gaskin goes on to show how to correct the mistake, and thereby presents his own version of empiricism. First we must follow Frege in his location of concepts at the level of reference, but then we must go beyond Frege and locate not only concepts but also propositions at that level; and this in turn requires us to take seriously an idea which McDowell mentions only to reject, that of objects as speaking to us 'in the world's own language'. If empiricism is to have any chance of success it must be still more minimal in its pretensions than McDowell allows: in particular, it must abandon the individualistic and intellectualistic construction which McDowell places on the 'order of justification'.

This book argues that definite descriptions ('the table', 'the King of France') refer to individuals, as Gottlob Frege claimed. This apparently simple conclusion flies in the face of philosophical orthodoxy, which incorporates Bertrand Russell's theory that definite descriptions are devices of quantification. Paul Elbourne presents the first fully-argued defence of the Fregean view. He builds an explicit fragment of English using a version of situation semantics. He uses intrinsic aspects of his system to account for the presupposition projection behaviour of definite descriptions, a range of modal properties, and the problem of incompleteness. At the same time, he draws on an unusually wide range of linguistic and philosophical literature, from early work by Frege, Peano, and Russell to the latest findings in linguistics, philosophy of language, and psycholinguistics. His penultimate chapter addresses the semantics of pronouns and offers a new and more radical version of his earlier thesis that they too are Fregean definite descriptions.

Thomas Holden presents a fascinating study of theories of matter in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These theories were plagued by a complex of interrelated problems concerning matter's divisibility, composition, and internal architecture. Is any material body infinitely divisible? Must we posit atoms or elemental minima from which bodies are ultimately composed? Are the parts of material bodies themselves material concreta? Or are they merely potentialities or possible existents? Questions such as these - and the press of subtler questions hidden in their amibiguities - deeply unsettled philosophers of the early modern period. They seemed to expose serious paradoxes in the new world view pioneered by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The new science's account of a fundamentally geometrical Creation, mathematicizable and intelligible to the human inquirer, seemed to be under threat. This was a great scandal, and the philosophers of the period accordingly made various attempts to disarm the paradoxes. All the great figures address the issue: most famously Leibniz and Kant, but also Galileo, Hobbes, Newton, Hume, and Reid, in addition to a crowd of lesser figures. Thomas Holden offers a brilliant synthesis of these discussions and presents his own overarching interpretation of the controversy, locating the underlying problem in the tension between the early moderns' account of material parts on the one hand and the programme of the geometrization of nature on the other.

The problem of universals is one of the main philosophical issues. In this book the author reconstructs the history of the problem considering a selection of medieval representative texts and authors. The source of medieval and postmedieval debate is identified in the Socratic-Platonic survey on the definition of concepts. In the Categories, Aristotle discusses important topics concerning the relations that exist between logical terms. In particular he establishes a kind of predication principle: categorial terms have a certain predication relation if (and only if) some facts expressed by ordinary sentences hold. The Categories also because of their particular disciplinary status, halfway between logic and metaphysics, leave a number of questions open. Among these questions, a particularly intriguing one is Porphyry's riddle: are there genera and species? And, if there are such things, what are they like?

David Cooper explores and defends the view that a reality independent of human perspectives is necessarily indescribable, a 'mystery'. Other views are shown to be hubristic. Humanists, for whom 'man is the measure' of reality, exaggerate our capacity to live without the sense of an independent measure. Absolutists, who proclaim our capacity to know an independent reality, exaggerate our cognitive powers. In this highly original book Cooper restores to philosophy a proper appreciation of mystery - that is what provides a measure of our beliefs and conduct.

Jewish German philosopher Ernst Cassirer was a leading proponent of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. The essays in this volume provide a window into Cassirer's discovery of the symbolic nature of human existence-that our entire emotional and intellectual life is configured and formed through the originary expressive power of word and image, that it is in and through the symbolic cultural systems of language, art, myth, religion, science, and technology that human life realizes itself and attains not only its form, its visibility, but also its reality. Thought and being are set in opposition and united in genuine correspondence by the symbolic strife between them that Cassirer calls Auseinandersetzung, which determines the ethical relationship of the self to the other.

A rival to Isaac Newton in mathematics and physics, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz believed that our world-the best of all possible worlds-must be governed by a principle of optimality. This book explores Leibniz's pursuit of optimality in five of his most important works in natural philosophy and shows how his principle of optimality bridges his scientific and philosophical studies. The first chapter explores Leibniz's work on the laws of optics and its implications for his defense of natural teleology. The second chapter examines Leibniz's work on the breaking strength of rigid beams and its implications for his thinking about the metaphysical foundations of the material world. The third chapter revisits Leibniz's famous defense of the conservation of vis viva and proposes a novel account of the origin of Leibniz's mature natural philosophy. The fourth chapter takes up Leibniz's efforts to determine the shape of freely hanging chains-the so-called problem of the catenary-and shows how that work provides an illuminating model for his thinking about the teleological structure of wills. Finally, the fifth chapter uses Leibniz's derivation of the path of quickest descent-his solution to the so-called problem of the Brachistochrone-and its historical context as a springboard for an exploration of the legacy of Leibniz's physics. The book closes with a brief discussion of the systematicity of Leibniz's thinking in philosophy and the natural sciences.

This volume presents fourteen original essays which explore the philosophy of Simon Blackburn, one of the UK's most influential contemporary philosophers. Blackburn is best known to the general public for his attempts to make philosophy accessible to those with little or no formal training, but in professional circles his reputation is based on a lifetime pursuit of his distinctive version of a projectivist and anti-realist research program. As he sees things, we must always try first to understand and explain what we are doing when we think and talk as we do. This research program reaches into nearly all of the main areas of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and moral psychology. The books and articles he has written provide us with perhaps the most comprehensive statement and defense of projectivism and anti-realism since Hume. The essays collected here document the range and influence of Blackburn's work. They reveal, among other things, the resourcefulness of his distinctive brand of philosophical pragmatism.

Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger explains how two notoriously opposed German philosophers share a rethinking of the possibility of metaphysics via notions of music and waiting. This is connected to the historical materialist project of social change by way of the radical Italian composer Luigi Nono.

Thought, to be thought at all, must be about a world independent of us. But thinking takes capacities for thought, which inevitably shape thought's objects. What would count as something being green is, somehow, fixed by what we, who have being green in mind, are prepared to recognize. So it can seem that what is true, and what is not, is not independent of us. So our thought cannot really be about an independent world. We are confronted with an apparent paradox. Much philosophy, from Locke to Kant to Frege to Wittgenstein, to Hilary Putnam and John McDowell today, is a reaction to this paradox. Charles Travis presents a set of eleven essays, each working in its own way towards dissolving this air of paradox. The key to his account of thought and world is the idea of the parochial: features of our thought which need not belong to all thought.

L. T. Hobhouse (1864-1929) was fundamental to the New Liberal movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He authored many important works in the fields of philosophy, economics and social liberalism. First published in 1896, The Theory of Knowledge considers the content and validity of knowledge, and the conditions on which our understanding of knowledge is based. It is a rich and important classic, which remains of value to students and academics with an interest in sociology, anthropology and the philosophy of logic.

This unique introduction fully engages and clearly explains pragmatism, an approach to knowledge and philosophy that rejects outmoded conceptions of objectivity while avoiding relativism and subjectivism. It follows pragmatism's focus on the process of inquiry rather than on abstract justifications meant to appease the skeptic. According to pragmatists, getting to know the world is a creative human enterprise, wherein we fashion our concepts in terms of how they affect us practically, including in future inquiry. This book fully illuminates that enterprise and the resulting radical rethinking of basic philosophical conceptions like truth, reality, and reason. Author Cornelis de Waal helps the reader recognize, understand, and assess classical and current pragmatist contributions-from Charles S. Peirce to Cornel West-evaluate existing views from a pragmatist angle, formulate pragmatist critiques, and develop a pragmatist viewpoint on a specific issue. The book discusses: Classical pragmatists, including Peirce, James, Dewey, and Addams; Contemporary figures, including Rorty, Putnam, Haack, and West; Connections with other twentieth-century approaches, including phenomenology, critical theory, and logical positivism; Peirce's pragmatic maxim and its relation to James's Will to Believe; Applications to philosophy of law, feminism, and issues of race and racism.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) stands among the greatest thinkers of the Western world. There is hardly an area of thought, at least of philosophical thought, to which he did not make significant and lasting contributions. Particularly noteworthy are his writings on the foundations and limits of human knowledge, the bidimensional nature of perceptual or "natural" objects (including human beings), the basic principles and ends of morality, the character of a just society and of a world at peace, the movement and direction of human history, the nature of beauty, the end or purpose of all creation, the proper education of young people, the true conception of religion, and on and on. Though Kant was a life-long resident of Konigsberg, Prussia - child, student, tutor, and then professor of philosophy (and other subjects) - his thought ranged over nearly all the world and even beyond. Reports reveal that he (a bachelor) was an amiable man, highly respected by his students and colleagues, and even loved by his several close friends. He was apparently a man of integrity, both in his personal relations and in his pursuit of knowledge and truth. Despite his somewhat pessimistic attitude toward the moral progress of mankind - judging from past history and contemporary events - he never wavered from a deep-seated faith in the goodness of the human heart, in man's "splendid disposition toward the good.

John Sallis has been at the cutting edge of the Continental philosophical tradition for almost half a century, and it is largely due to his contributions that we have come to understand "Continental" as designating an original philosophical, not a geographical, tradition. His work, with its uncommon scholarly rigor, has come to define the best of that tradition and to expand its horizons in creative ways through a genuine philosophical imagination. The essays gathered here are dedicated to assessing Sallis' contribution and to indicating some of the ways in which his works might shape the future of philosophy.

This book provides a clear and informed account of aesthetic and callistic concepts as they occur in the works of Plato and Aristotle. The author illustrates their ideas on art and beauty by close reference to their texts and finds a profound similarity which unites them, revealing many of their differences to be complementary aspects of an essentially similar viewpoint. He also shows how Greek notions of art and beauty are not merely primitive steps in the advance to modern ideas but have a direct relevance to modern critical controversies.

This volume provides a comprehensive, learned and lively presentation of the whole range of Plato's thought but with a particular emphasis upon how Plato developed his metaphysics with a view to supporting his deepest educational convictions. The author explores the relation of Plato's metaphysics to the epistemological, ethical and political aspects of Plato's theory of education and shows how Plato's basic positions bear directly on the most fundamental questions faced by contemporary education.

Plato's Timaeus was his only cosmological dialogue and for almost thirteen hundred years it provided the basis in the West for educated people's general view of the natural world. The author provides a translation of this important work, together with the Critias - the source of the legendary tale of Atlantis. He has taken particular care to provide an accurate rendering of Plato's words and to avoid putting his own or any other interpretation on the works.

Minimal Semantics asks what a theory of literal linguistic meaning is for--if you were to be given a working theory of meaning for a language right now, what would you be able to do with it? Emma Borg sets out to defend a formal approach to semantic theorizing from a relatively new type of opponent--advocates of what she calls "dual pragmatics." According to dual pragmatists, rich pragmatic processes play two distinct roles in linguistic comprehension: as well as operating in a post-semantic capacity to determine the implicatures of an utterance, they also operate prior to the determination of truth-conditional content for a sentence. That is to say, they have an integral role to play within what is usually thought of as the semantic realm.
Borg believes dual pragmatic accounts constitute the strongest contemporary challenge to standard formal approaches to semantics since they challenge the formal theorist to show not merely that there is some role for formal processes on route to determination of semantic content, but that such processes are sufficient for determining content. Minimal Semantics provides a detailed examination of this school of thought, introducing readers who are unfamiliar with the topic to key ideas like relevance theory and contextualism, and looking in detail at where these accounts diverge from the formal approach.
Borg's defense of formal semantics has two main parts: first, she argues that the formal approach is most naturally compatible with an important and well-grounded psychological theory, namely the Fodorian modular picture of the mind. Then she argues that the main arguments adduced by dual pragmatists against formal semantics--concerning apparent contextual intrusions into semantic content--can in fact be countered by a formal theory. The defense holds, however, only if we are sensitive to the proper conditions of success for a semantic theory. Specifically, we should reject a range of onerous constraints on semantic theorizing (e.g., that it answer epistemic or metaphysical questions, or that it explain our communicative skills) and instead adopt a quite minimal picture of semantics.

Richard Tieszen presents an analysis, development, and defense of a number of central ideas in Kurt Goedel's writings on the philosophy and foundations of mathematics and logic. Tieszen structures the argument around Goedel's three philosophical heroes - Plato, Leibniz, and Husserl - and his engagement with Kant, and supplements close readings of Goedel's texts on foundations with materials from Goedel's Nachlass and from Hao Wang's discussions with Goedel. As well as providing discussions of Goedel's views on the philosophical significance of his technical results on completeness, incompleteness, undecidability, consistency proofs, speed-up theorems, and independence proofs, Tieszen furnishes a detailed analysis of Goedel's critique of Hilbert and Carnap, and of his subsequent turn to Husserl's transcendental philosophy in 1959. On this basis, a new type of platonic rationalism that requires rational intuition, called 'constituted platonism', is developed and defended. Tieszen shows how constituted platonism addresses the problem of the objectivity of mathematics and of the knowledge of abstract mathematical objects. Finally, he considers the implications of this position for the claim that human minds ('monads') are machines, and discusses the issues of pragmatic holism and rationalism.

As the third in a musicological trilogy that seeks objective answers to physical and metaphysical questions by way of musical ratios and proportions, this book may start with the acoustical properties of vibrating strings, but it certainly does not stop there. Rather, it goes on to attack some of the thorniest issues facing quantum physics today, including why string theory, as it is presently conceived, doesn't work; what is missing in the physicists' understanding of 'missing information"; and how the real cause underlying the perceived inflation of the universe is, in fact, due to the power laws inherent in vibrating strings. The surprising answers are neither wholly mathematical nor totally philosophical, but result from the reconciling perspective of music theory, the 'real" M-theory. Moving beyond the sterile and secular world-view of the physicists, the author introduces into the equation the sacred metaphysical soul principle, now viewed as the holographic 'membrane" whose sole function is to gather and store information and thus serve as the anti-entropic force within the universe. The properties of the soul, being movement and expansion, have long been associated with the figure called the lambdoma, and with the ancient diatonic scale that naturally forms within it, known as 'The Scale of the Soul of the World and Nature." With uncanny insight, the author shows how there is not one, but three musical scales-diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic-which form of their own accord within the expanding lambdoma. These 'informing" musical scales become the obvious links to the three 'branes" of the quantum physicists, at the same time providing substantive evidence for why a 'three brain system" is absolutely essential for the completion of the soul of man-an idea that students of the Gurdjieff Work will find very familiar, and perhaps very intriguing.

First Published in 2012. The Philosophy of MetaReality: creativity, love and freedom is the third of three books elaborating Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of metaReality, which appeared in rapid succession in 2002. A big, rich book teaming with ideas, The Philosophy of MetaReality is undoubtedly the magnum opus of Bhaskar's spiritual turn. Building on a radical new analysis of the self, human agency and society, Roy Bhaskar shows how the world of alienation and crisis we currently inhabit is sustained by the ground-state qualities of intelligence, creativity, love, a capacity for right-action and a potential for human self-realisation or fulfilment. A new introduction to this edition by Mervyn Hartwig, founding editor of Journal of Critical Realism and editor of A Dictionary of Critical Realism (Routledge, 2007), describes the context, significance and impact of the philosophy of metaReality, and supplies an expert guide to its content. This book is essential reading for students and practitioners of both philosophy and the human sciences.

It is widely known that Buddhists deny the existence of the self. However, Buddhist philosophers defend interesting positions on a variety of other issues in fundamental ontology. In particular, they have important things to say about ontological reduction and the nature of the causal relation. Amidst the prolonged debate over global anti-realism, Buddhist philosophers devised an innovative approach to the radical nominalist denial of all universals and real resemblances. While some defend presentism, others propound eternalism. In How Things Are, Mark Siderits presents the arguments that Buddhist philosophers developed on these and other issues. Those with an interest in metaphysics may find new and interesting insights into what the Buddhists had to say about their ideas. This work is designed to introduce some of the more important fruits of Buddhist metaphysical inquiry to philosophers with little or no prior knowledge of that tradition. While there is plenty of scholarship on the Indian Buddhist philosophical tradition, it is primarily concerned with the historical details, often presupposes background knowledge of the major schools and figures, and makes ample use of untranslated Sanskrit technical terms. What has been missing from this area of philosophical inquiry, are studies that make the Buddhist tradition accessible to philosophers who are interested in solving metaphysical problems. This work fills that gap by focusing not on history and texts but on the metaphysical puzzles themselves, and on ways of trying to solve them.