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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Ancient Western philosophy to c 500
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Powers - A History (Paperback)
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Powers - A History (Paperback)
Series: Oxford Philosophical Concepts
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Why does a wine glass break when you drop it, whereas a steel
goblet does not? The answer may seem obvious: glass, unlike steel,
is fragile. This is an explanation in terms of a power or
disposition: the glass breaks because it possesses a particular
power, namely fragility. Seemingly simple, such intrinsic
dispositions or powers have fascinated philosophers for centuries.
A power's central task is explaining why a thing changes in the
ways that it does, rather than in other ways: powers should explain
why an acorn turns into an oak tree, not a sunflower, or why fire
burns wood, and wood can catch fire. This volume examines the
twists and turns of the fascinating history of a difficult
philosophical concept, focusing on the metaphysical sense of
"powers"-that is, the powers that are invoked in the explanation of
natural changes and activities. Scholars probe the views of
thinkers from antiquity to the present day: Anaxagoras, Plato, the
Stoics, Abelard, Anselm, Henry of Ghent, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
Margaret Cavendish, Mary Shepherd, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, and numerous others. In addition, the volume
contains four short reflection essays that examine the concept of
powers from the perspective of disciplines other than philosophy,
namely history of music, West African religions, history of
chemistry, and history of art. The history of philosophy brims with
controversies surrounding the concept of power, and these
controversies have not diminished-particularly as potentialities or
powers see a revival in contemporary analytic metaphysics. Hence,
telling the history of philosophical theories of powers means
exploring the trajectory of a concept whose importance to the past
and present of philosophy can hardly be overstated.
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