This volume is devoted to problems within analytic metaphysics. It defends an ontology and theory of categories inspired by Aristotle, but revised in such a way as to be compatible with modern science. The ontology of both natural and social reality is addressed, starting out from the view that universals exist but only in the spatiotemporal world (immanent realism). In attempting to bring Aristotle's ontology up-to-date, the author relies very much on the thinking of Edmund Husserl, conceiving the cement of the universe as Husserlian relations of existential dependence and regarding intentionality as a non-reducible category in the ontology of mind. The work is thoroughly realistic in spirit, but large parts of it should nonetheless be of interest to conceptualists and nominalists, too.

This textbook introduces the reader to basic problems in the philosophy of science and ethics, mainly by means of examples from medicine. It is based on the conviction that philosophy, medical science, medical informatics, and medical ethics are overlapping disciplines. It claims that the philosophical lessons to learn from the twentieth century are not that nature is a 'social construction' and that 'anything goes' with respect to methodological and moral rules. Instead, it claims that there is scientific knowledge, but that it is never completely secure; that there are norms, but that they are situation-bound; and that, therefore, it makes good sense to search for scientific truths and try to act in a morally decent way. Using philosophical catchwords, the authors advocate 'fallibilism' and 'particularism'; a combination that might be called 'pragmatic realism'.