The Conceptual Roots of Mathematics is a comprehensive study of the foundation of mathematics. J.R. Lucas, one of the most distinguished Oxford scholars, covers a vast amount of ground in the philosophy of mathematics, showing us that it is actually at the heart of the study of epistemology and metaphysics.

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First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Generally, categories are understood to express the most general features of reality. Yet, since categories have this special status, obtaining a correct list of them is difficult. This question is addressed by examining how Thomas Aquinas establishes the list of categories through a technique of identifying diversity in how predicates are per se related to their subjects. A sophisticated critique by Duns Scotus of this position is also examined, a rejection which is fundamentally grounded in the idea that no real distinction can be made from a logical one. It is argued Aquinas's approach can be rehabilitated in that real distinctions are possible when specifically considering per se modes of predication. This discussion between Aquinas and Scotus bears fruit in a contemporary context insofar as it bears upon, strengthens, and seeks to correct E. J. Lowe's four-category ontology view regarding the identity and relation of the categories.

Gustav Bergmann (1906-1987) was, arguably, one of the greatest ontologists of the twentieth century. In 2006 and 2007, after a period of relative neglect, international conferences devoted solely to Bergmann's work were held at the University of Iowa in the USA, Universite de Provence in France, and Universita degli Studi di Roma Tre in Italy. The fifteen papers collected in this volume were presented at the third of these conferences, in Rome, and are here divided into three sections: "Categories of a realistic ontology," "World, mind, and relations," "Metaphysics of space and time.""

The question raised in this book is why Spinoza's work which comes so close to the modern view of natural science is not prominent in the social sciences. The answer suggested is that this is due to the lingering influence of the Cartesian differentiation between the domain of science, dealing with material bodies in space and time, and the realm of thought to which the mind belongs. Spinoza's rejection of this mind/body dualism was based on his conviction that the human mind was an essential part of the 'forces' which maintain human existence. Since this view fits so well the evolutionary view of life, the book suggests that after Darwin, when this dualism became untenable, it was replaced by a nature versus culture dichotomy. The book examines whether the history of the philosophy of science supports this explanation. The author believes that answering this question is important because of the rising influence of cultural relativism which endangers the very survival of modern science and political stability.

Personal Agency consists of two parts. In Part II, a radically libertarian theory of action is defended which combines aspects of agent causalism and volitionism. This theory accords to volitions the status of basic mental actions, maintaining that these are spontaneous exercises of the will--a 'two-way' power which rational agents can freely exercise in the light of reason. Lowe contends that substances, not events, are the causal source of all change in the world--with rational, free agents like ourselves having a special place in the causal order as unmoved movers, or initiators of new causal chains. And he defends a thoroughgoing externalism regarding reasons for action, holding these to be mind-independent worldly entities rather than the beliefs and desires of agents. Part I prepares the ground for this theory by undermining the threat presented to it by physicalism. It does this by challenging the causal closure argument for physicalism in all of its forms and by showing that a dualistic philosophy of mind--one which holds that human mental states and their subjects cannot be identified with bodily states and human bodies respectively--is both metaphysically coherent and entirely consistent with known empirical facts.

"For a long time now, religion in the West has been polarized between a democratic kind of faith meant for simple believers, and divine mysteries so high that hardly anyone can claim to know much about them. The vital connecting link between them, that of metaphysical religion, is all but lost..." (From the Introduction.) There are many books that seek to answer the fundamental questions of life: Who am I? Does life have a purpose? How should I live? Dr Bolton's book brings to these universal questions an extraordinary degree of metaphysical insight. It contains in highly condensed form a veritable library of traditional wisdom, offering a systematic reconstruction of our understanding of the soul and its relation to archetypal reality. Its starting-point is the fact that increasing numbers of people seem to lack spiritual and material power over their own lives. Modern man feels like a victim. But true power, real freedom, is closer than we think. Our mistake lies in accepting a false view of the self, and neglecting the metaphysical dimension that gives access to eternity. Dr Bolton's book offers a crash-course in liberation. It can liberate us, specifically, from a common sense idea of reality which is profoundly false, and which holds us in unconscious slavery to time and appearances. The book defends the capacity of the human mind to obtain objective insight, despite the obfuscations of postmodernism, and represents a bold development of the Platonist tradition associated with St Augustine, Plotinus, and Proclus. "This book is like a diamond: a diamond placed not in a necklace, but at the business end of a drill. It is up to us to use the drill to penetrate reality. Writing the book was a great achievement. Reading it invites us to make the achievement our own." - Stratford Caldecott (G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture)

In this little but profound volume, Robert Kane and Carolina Sartorio debate a perennial question: Do We Have Free Will? Kane introduces and defends libertarianism about free will: free will is incompatible with determinism; we are free; we are not determined. Sartorio introduces and defends compatibilism about free will: free will is compatible with determinism; we can be free even while our actions are determined through and through. Simplifying tricky terminology and complicated concepts for readers new to the debate, the authors also cover the latest developments on a controversial topic that gets us entangled in questions about blameworthiness and responsibility, coercion and control, and much more. Each author first presents their 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. Short, lively and accessible, the debate showcases diverse and cutting-edge work on free will. As per Saul Smilansky's foreword, Kane and Sartorio, "present the readers with two things at once: an introduction to the traditional free will problem; and a demonstration of what a great yet very much alive and relevant philosophical problem is like." Key Features: Covers major concepts, views and arguments about free will in an engaging format Accessible style and pedagogical features for students and general readers Cutting-edge contributions by preeminent scholars on free will.

The essays in this volume are the result of a project on Values in Tort Law directed by the Westminster Institute for Ethics and Human Values. We are indebted to the Board of Westminster Col lege for its financial support. The project involved two meetings of a mixed group of lawyers and philosophers to discuss drafts of papers and general issues in tort law. Beyond the principal researchers, whose papers appear here, we are grateful to John Bargo, Dick Bronaugh, Craig Brown, Earl Cherniak, Bruce Feldthusen, Barry Hoffmaster and Steve Sharzer for their helpful discussion, and to Nancy Margolis for copy editing. All of these papers except one have appeared before in the journal Law and Philosophy (Vol. 1 No.3, December 1982 and Vol. 2 No.1, Apri11983). Chapman's paper which was previously published in The University of Western Ontario Law Review (Vol. 20 No.1, 1982) appears here with permission. Westminster Institute for Ethics and Human Values, M.D.B. Westminster College, London, Canada B.C. vii INTRODUCTION The law of torts is society's primary mechanism for resolving disputes arising from personal injury and property damage."

John Dewey was the foremost philosophical figure and public intellectual in early to mid-twentieth century America. He is still the most academically cited Anglophone philosopher of the past century, and is among the most cited Americans of any century. In this comprehensive volume spanning thirty-five chapters, leading scholars help researchers access particular aspects of Dewey's thought, navigate the enormous and rapidly developing literature, and participate in current scholarship in light of prospects in key topical areas. Beginning with a framing essay by Philip Kitcher calling for a transformation of philosophical research inspired by Dewey, contributors interpret, appraise, and critique Dewey's philosophy under the following headings: Metaphysics; Epistemology, Science, Language, and Mind; Ethics, Law, and the Starting Point; Social and Political Philosophy, Race, and Feminist Philosophy; Philosophy of Education; Aesthetics; Instrumental Logic, Philosophy of Technology, and the Unfinished Project of Modernity; Dewey in Cross-Cultural Dialogue; The American Philosophical Tradition, the Social Sciences, and Religion; and Public Philosophy and Practical Ethics.

This is an intellectual biography covering Kant's early years, from 1747 (when he published his first book) to 1770, just before he published his most influential work, The Critique of Pure Reason. Schonfeld meticulously examines almost all of Kant's early works, summarizing their content, exhibiting their shortcomings, and most important, arguing that they are all aspects of a single project that Kant progressively carried out over the course of his early years -namely, the effort to reconcile metaphysical and scientific perspectives and combine them into a coherent model of nature. He reveals the continuity in Kant's entire oevre and shows that 'the pre-critical project', despite Kant's later repudiation, pushed philosophy forward.

Do we know or even have evidence that external material objects exist? Drawing powerfully on techniques from both analytic and continental philosophy, Butchvarov offers a strikingly original approach to this perennial issue. He argues that only a direct realist view of perception--the view that in perception we are directly aware of material objects--has any hope of providing a compelling response to the skeptic.
The seemingly insuperable problem for direct realism has always been to explain hallucination, dreaming, and other situations where the object of awareness is not a really existing physical object. This has led many philosophers to adopt views in which perceptual consciousness involves a subjective state that is the direct object of awareness. Butchvarov argues persuasively that all such views are helpless in the face of the skeptic's arguments. His radical innovation is to insist that the direct object of perceptual and even dreaming and hallucinatory experience is usually a material object, but not necessarily one that actually exists. This leads to a sophisticated metaphysics in which reality is ultimately constructed by human decisions out of objects that are ontologically more basic but which cannot be said in themselves to be either real or unreal.
Butchvarov's ingenious approach to a longstanding philosophical issue, as well as the extensive range of his references to traditional and contemporary discussions of the topic, makes Skepticism about the External World a thrilling and essential book for philosophers and philosophically minded readers.

This book is a selection of results obtained within three years of research performed under SYNAT-a nation-wide scientific project aiming at creating an infrastructure for scientific content storage and sharing for academia, education and open knowledge society in Poland.

The book is intended to be the last of the series related to the SYNAT project. The previous books, titled "Intelligent Tools for Building a Scientific Information Platform" and "Intelligent Tools for Building a Scientific Information Platform: Advanced Architectures and Solutions," were published as volumes 390 and 467 in Springer's Studies in Computational Intelligence. Its contents is based on the SYNAT 2013 Workshop held in Warsaw. The papers included in this volume present an overview and insight into information retrieval, repository systems, text processing, ontology-based systems, text mining, multimedia data processing and advanced software engineering, addressing the problems of implementing intelligent tools for building a scientific information platform.

The book Ontological Proofs Today, apart from the introduction, consists of six parts. Part II comprises papers each of which pertains either to historical ontological arguments, or to some other, rather new, ontological arguments, but what makes them stand out from the other papers in this volume, is the fact that they all treat of the omniscience or the omnipotence of God. Part III includes papers which introduce new ontological arguments for the existence of God, without referring to omniscience and omnipotence as the transparent attributes of God. The issue of the type of necessity with which ontological proofs work or may work is raised in the articles of Part IV. In Part V the semantics for some ontological proofs are defined. Part VI consists of papers which, although quite different from each other in terms of content, all explore some ontological issues, and formal ontology may be considered the link between them. Part VII comprises two articles, by R. E. Maydole and G. Oppy, mutually controversial and different in their assessment of some ontological proofs.

This book presents a new, contemporary introduction to medieval philosophy as it was practiced in all its variety in Western Europe and the Near East. It assumes only a minimal familiarity with philosophy, the sort that an undergraduate introduction to philosophy might provide, and it is arranged topically around questions and themes that will appeal to a contemporary audience. In addition to some of the perennial questions posed by philosophers, such as "Can we know anything, and if so, what?", "What is the fundamental nature of reality?", and "What does human flourishing consist in?", this volume looks at what medieval thinkers had to say, for instance, about our obligations towards animals and the environment, freedom of speech, and how best to organize ourselves politically. The book examines certain aspects of the thought of several well-known medieval figures, but it also introduces students to many important, yet underappreciated figures and traditions. It includes guidance for how to read medieval texts, provokes reflection through a series of study questions at the end of each chapter, and gives pointers for where interested readers can continue their exploration of medieval philosophy and medieval thought more generally. Key Features Covers the contributions of women to medieval philosophy, providing students with a fuller understanding of who did philosophy during the Middle Ages Includes a focus on certain topics that are usually ignored, such as animal rights, love, and political philosophy, providing students with a fuller range of interests that medieval philosophers had Gives space to non-Aristotelian forms of medieval thought Includes useful features for student readers like study questions and suggestions for further reading in each chapter

The I-Thou controversy between these two thinkers is a significant but often overlooked issue in philosophy and theology. In one of the first books to truly address the subject, Haim Gordon explores the arguments of both Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber regarding the The I-Thou relationship and its significance for human existence. Gordon's work illuminates Heidegger's complex and enlightening ontology--one that describes the everyday life of the human in such a way that there is no place for the I-Thou relationship. Buber, on the other hand, argues for the significance of the I-Thou relationship within human existence, and highlights the ways in which Heidegger's philosophy fails to grasp this important point. After examining the fundamental ontology of Heidegger, set beside the ontological insights of Buber concerning this relationship, Gordon concludes that each of these important twentieth-century philosophers was guilty of ignoring the contributions made by the other to the study of ontology and being.

By exploring the complicated dynamic between Heidegger and Buber, Gordon presents the reader with valuable insights and a deeper understanding of human existence and relationships. The implications of both this controversy and its resolution are far reaching for many other philosophical disciplines, including social and political philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics.

Nietzsche's critique of the modern subject is often presented as a radical break with modern philosophy and associated with the so-called 'death of the subject' in 20th century philosophy. But Nietzsche claimed to be a 'psychologist' who was trying to open up the path for 'new versions and sophistications of the soul hypothesis.' Although there is no doubt that Nietzsche gave expression to a fundamental crisis of the modern conception of subjectivity (both from a theoretical and from a practical-existential perspective), it is open to debate whether he wanted to abandon the very idea of subjectivity or only to pose the problem of subjectivity in new terms. The volume includes 26 articles by top Nietzsche scholars. The chapters in Part I, "Tradition and Context", deal with the relationship between Nietzsche's views on subjectivity and modern philosophy, as well as with the late 19th century context in which his thought emerged; Part II, "The Crisis of the Subject", examines the impact of Nietzsche's critique of the subject on 20th century philosophy, from Freud to Heidegger to Dennett, but also in such authors as Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, or Luhmann; Part III, "Current Debates - From Embodiment and Consciousness to Agency", shows that the way in which Nietzsche engaged with such themes as the self, agency, consciousness, embodiment and self-knowledge makes his thought highly relevant for philosophy today, especially for philosophy of mind and ethics.

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.