Download or read book A Meta Physical Abduction written by Susan Van De Luecht and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2006 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a mind-boggling story where aliens carried out innovative mind techniques, cloning, and genetic manipulations. Their experiments started with a young girl named Flora. Many people in the past have claimed to be abducted but Flora was one of the first to be genetically challenged and now the fight is on for humanity.There is a twist to the story but ends in happiness with renewed hope and faith for mankind...
Download or read book Metaphysical Emergence written by Jessica M. Wilson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both the special sciences and ordinary experience suggest that there are metaphysically emergent entities and features: macroscopic goings-on (including mountains, trees, humans, and sculptures, and their characteristic properties) which depend on, yet are distinct from and distinctively efficacious with respect to, lower-level physical configurations and features. These appearances give rise to two key questions. First, what is metaphysical emergence, more precisely? Second, is there any metaphysical emergence, in principle and moreover in fact? Metaphysical Emergence provides clear and systematic answers to these questions. Wilson argues that there are two, and only two, forms of metaphysical emergence of the sort seemingly at issue in the target cases: 'Weak' emergence, whereby a dependent feature has a proper subset of the powers of the feature upon which it depends, and 'Strong' emergence, whereby a dependent feature has a power not had by the feature upon which it depends. Weak emergence unifies and illuminates seemingly diverse accounts of non-reductive physicalism; Strong emergence does the same as regards seemingly diverse anti-physicalist views positing fundamental novelty at higher levels of compositional complexity. After defending the in-principle viability of each form of emergence, Wilson considers whether complex systems, ordinary objects, consciousness, and free will are actually metaphysically emergent. She argues that Weak emergence is quite common, and that there is Strong emergence in the important case of free will.
Download or read book The Gracing of Human Experience written by Donald L. Gelpi SJ and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study ponders different ways Christian thinkers understood humanity in its relationship to divine grace. It names fallacies that have in the past skewed theological understanding of that relationship. It argues that the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce avoided those same fallacies and provides a novel frame of reference for rethinking the theology of grace. The author shows how the insights of other American philosophers flesh out undeveloped aspects of Peirce's thought. He formulates a metaphysics of experience derived from his philosophical analysis. Finally, he develops an understanding of supernatural grace as the transmutation and transvaluation of human experience.
Download or read book The Gracing of Human Experience written by Donald L. Gelpi and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study ponders different ways Christian thinkers understood humanity in its relationship to divine grace. It names fallacies that have in the past skewed theological understanding of that relationship. It argues that the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce avoided those same fallacies and provides a novel frame of reference for rethinking the theology of grace. The author shows how the insights of other American philosophers flesh out undeveloped aspects of PeirceÕs thought. He formulates a metaphysics of experience derived from his philosophical analysis. Finally, he develops an understanding of supernatural grace as the transmutation and transvaluation of human experience.
Download or read book Ontology after Carnap written by Stephan Blatti and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-25 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analytic philosophy is once again in a methodological frame of mind. Nowhere is this more evident than in metaphysics, whose practitioners and historians are actively reflecting on the nature of ontological questions, the status of their answers, and the relevance of contributions both from other areas within philosophy (e.g., philosophical logic, semantics) and beyond (notably, the natural sciences). Such reflections are hardly new: the debate between Willard van Orman Quine and Rudolf Carnap about how to understand and resolve ontological questions is widely seen as a turning point in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. And indeed, this volume is occasioned by the fact that the deflationary approach to metaphysics advocated by Carnap in that debate is once again attracting considerable interest and support. Containing eleven original essays by many of today's leading voices in metametaphysics, Ontology After Carnap aims both to deepen our understanding of Carnap's contributions to metaontology and to explore how this legacy might be mined for insights into the contemporary debate. This collection will be of interest to scholars and students working in metaphysics, semantics, philosophical logic, metaphilosophy, and the history of analytic philosophy.
Download or read book General Philosophy of Science Focal Issues written by and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2007-07-18 with total page 713 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientists use concepts and principles that are partly specific for their subject matter, but they also share part of them with colleagues working in different fields. Compare the biological notion of a 'natural kind' with the general notion of 'confirmation' of a hypothesis by certain evidence. Or compare the physical principle of the 'conservation of energy' and the general principle of 'the unity of science'. Scientists agree that all such notions and principles aren't as crystal clear as one might wish. An important task of the philosophy of the special sciences, such as philosophy of physics, of biology and of economics, to mention only a few of the many flourishing examples, is the clarification of such subject specific concepts and principles. Similarly, an important task of 'general' philosophy of science is the clarification of concepts like 'confirmation' and principles like 'the unity of science'. It is evident that clarfication of concepts and principles only makes sense if one tries to do justice, as much as possible, to the actual use of these notions by scientists, without however following this use slavishly. That is, occasionally a philosopher may have good reasons for suggesting to scientists that they should deviate from a standard use. Frequently, this amounts to a plea for differentiation in order to stop debates at cross-purposes due to the conflation of different meanings. While the special volumes of the series of Handbooks of the Philosophy of Science address topics relative to a specific discipline, this general volume deals with focal issues of a general nature. After an editorial introduction about the dominant method of clarifying concepts and principles in philosophy of science, called explication, the first five chapters deal with the following subjects. Laws, theories, and research programs as units of empirical knowledge (Theo Kuipers), various past and contemporary perspectives on explanation (Stathis Psillos), the evaluation of theories in terms of their virtues (Ilkka Niiniluto), and the role of experiments in the natural sciences, notably physics and biology (Allan Franklin), and their role in the social sciences, notably economics (Wenceslao Gonzalez). In the subsequent three chapters there is even more attention to various positions and methods that philosophers of science and scientists may favor: ontological, epistemological, and methodological positions (James Ladyman), reduction, integration, and the unity of science as aims in the sciences and the humanities (William Bechtel and Andrew Hamilton), and logical, historical and computational approaches to the philosophy of science (Atocha Aliseda and Donald Gillies).The volume concludes with the much debated question of demarcating science from nonscience (Martin Mahner) and the rich European-American history of the philosophy of science in the 20th century (Friedrich Stadler). Comprehensive coverage of the philosophy of science written by leading philosophers in this field Clear style of writing for an interdisciplinary audience No specific pre-knowledge required
Download or read book Power and Influence written by Richard Corry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world is a complex place, and this complexity is an obstacle to our attempts to explain, predict, and control it. In Power and Influence, Richard Corry investigates the assumptions that are built into the reductive method of explanation—the method whereby we study the components of a complex system in relative isolation and use the information so gained to explain or predict the behaviour of the complex whole. He investigates the metaphysical presuppositions built into the reductive method, seeking to ascertain what the world must be like in order that the method could work. Corry argues that the method assumes the existence of causal powers that manifest causal influence—a relatively unrecognised ontological category, of which forces are a paradigm example. The success of the reductive method, therefore, is an argument for the existence of such causal influences. The book goes on to show that adding causal influence to our ontology gives us the resources to solve some traditional problems in the metaphysics of causal powers, laws of nature, causation, emergence, and possibly even normative ethics. What results, then, is not just an understanding of the reductive method, but an integrated metaphysical worldview that is grounded in an ontology of power and influence.
Download or read book Wesley Hohfeld A Century Later written by Shyamkrishna Balganesh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-28 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With newly uncovered personal papers, this volume offers in-depth analysis of Wesley Hohfeld's pioneering contributions to legal theory.
Download or read book The Path of a Reluctant Metaphysician written by Michael Mayer and published by Michael Mayer. This book was released on 2012 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are you a Reluctant Metaphysician? A career change, an upsetting external event, a serious illness, a painful breakup, or an unravelling culture can all be invitations to enter a deeper world behind the world. You may not have chosen to go there, but you evolve thereby. This book weaves together stories and reflections to introduce teachings and practices from ancient wisdom traditions that illuminate our unique life path.The Path of a Reluctant Metaphysician speaks to the importance of a holistic spiritual philosophy in our current times of the "great unraveling" of our political, economic, cultural, and ecological world. Here you will find an approach to finding your life stance in such troubled times. The metaphysical path is an "all vector approach" that incorporates both "spiritual" and "soulful" pathways, traditions of postural initiation such as Tai Chi, mythology, depth psychology, bodymind healing methods, a non-deterministic approach to astrology, and a multi-dimensional approach to the political sphereDr. Mayer transmits stories, teachings, and practices from his multifaceted career that are so captivating, they may lead you to reluctantly take time out of your busy everyday life. Be forewarned if you read this book you too may become a Reluctant Metaphysician! Kirkus Reviews says: "A meaningful contribution to the spiritual self-help library...A psychologist blends spiritual paths from the East, West, and beyond for an innovative approach to healing...an expansive tale told with humility and insight." Larry Dossey, MD says, Dr. Mayer's revelations in various metaphysical domains are a guide for anyone who desires a richer and more fulfilling experience of life. If you think life must contain more juice than you have known so far, this book is for you.
Download or read book Toward a Metaphysics of Culture written by Joseph Margolis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-02 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toward a Metaphysics of Culture provides an initial, minimal, and original analysis of the concept of uniquely enlanguaged cultures of the human world and of the distinctive metaphysical features of whatever belongs to the things of that world: preeminently, persons, language, actions, artworks, products, history, practices, institutions, and norms. Emphasis is placed on the artifactual and hybrid nature of persons, naturalistic and post-Darwinian evolutionary considerations, and the bearing of the account on a range of disputed inquiries largely centered on the relationship between physical nature and human culture and between the natural and human sciences. The schema offered lays a foundation for a closer analysis of the human mind, cognition, interpretation, nomologicality, normativity, intentionality, realism, and related matters. The central thesis advances the heterodox notion, congruent with post-Darwinian studies in paleoanthropology, that the human person is a natural artifact, a functional transform of the primate members of Homo sapiens, by way of a complexly intertwined biological and encultured evolution, primarily dependent on the invention, transmission, and mastery of true language and the novel hybrid abilities that that makes possible. The emergence of persons is taken to be the obverse side of the mastery of language itself.
Download or read book Optimality Justifications written by Gerhard Schurz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-08 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The leading idea of epistemology in the Enlightenment tradition was foundation-theoretic: to reach knowledge, we must not legitimize our beliefs by external authorities, but instead justify them by rational arguments. Recently, the foundation-theoretic ideal of justification has come under attack, the chief criticism being that universal standards of justification are illusory because the problem of a regress of justification is unsolvable. Alternatives to foundation theory (coherentism, externalism, or dogmatism) have been developed that give up central claims of Enlightenment epistemology such as empirical support, cognitive accessibility, or rational justifiability. Optimality Justifications develops a new account of foundation-theoretic epistemology based on the method of optimality justifications. Optimality justifications offer a solution to the regress problem. Rather than striving for a priori demonstrations of reliability, which are impossible, they show that certain epistemic methods are optimal with regard to all accessible alternatives, which is more modestly but provably possible. In particular, optimality justifications can achieve a non-circular justification of deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning. This volume pursues two goals: a general renewal of foundation-theoretic epistemology based on the account of optimality justifications, and the advancement of methods of optimality justification in important domains of epistemology and the philosophy of science, logic, and cognition. Connected with these goals is the aspiration to develop new ideas for mainstream epistemology, as well as for formal epistemology, philosophy of science, and cognitive science, which are intended to attract researchers, students, and all other readers interested in these fields.
Download or read book Metaphysical Emergence written by Jessica M. Wilson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both the special sciences and ordinary experience present us with a world of macro-entities - trees, birds, lakes, mountains, humans, houses, and sculptures, to name a few - which materially depend on lower-level configurations, but which are also distinct from and distinctively efficacious ascompared to those configurations. This give rise to two key questions. First, what is metaphysical emergence, more precisely? Second, is there actually any metaphysical emergence? Metaphysical Emergence provides clear, compelling, and systematic answers to these questions. Wilson argues that thereare two and only two forms of metaphysical emergence that make sense of the target cases: 'Weak' emergence, whereby a macro-entity or feature has a proper subset of the powers of its base-level configuration, and 'Strong' emergence, whereby a macro-entity or feature has a new power as compared toits base-level configuration. Given that the lower-level configurations are physical, Weak emergence unifies and accommodates diverse accounts of realization associated with varieties of non-reductive physicalism, whereas Strong emergence unifies and accommodates anti-physicalist views according towhich there may be fundamentally novel features, forces, interactions, or laws at higher levels of compositional complexity. After defending each form of emergence from various objections, Wilson considers whether complex systems, ordinary objects, consciousness, and free will are actually eitherWeakly or Strongly metaphysically emergent. She argues that Weak emergence is quite common, and that Strong emergence, while in most cases at best a live empirical possibility, is instantiated for the important case of free will.
Download or read book The Vocabulary of Philosophy mental moral and metaphysical with quotations and references written by William FLEMING (D.D.) and published by . This book was released on 1858 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book God versus Language Contrasting Metaphysical Methods of Wittgenstein s Tractatus and Langan s CTMU written by Jonathan Mize and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2020-01-03 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) was first published no less than two decades ago. Unfortunately, however, this work has received little attention from contemporary academia. Mr. Langan is often lambasted for his ostensible prolixity, obscurantism, and his writings' supposed "lack of rigor". However, if one holds steadfastly to one's own curiosity and powers of intellectual discernment, one will unearth a theory that will indeed shake this very world as we know it. In this book, I endeavor, through a cross-analysis with Langan's work with that of Ludwig Wittgenstein, to illustrate the CTMU in all of its metaphysical and spiritual grandeur, leading the reader to form his own conclusions about the theory.
Download or read book The Disappearance of the Soul and the Turn against Metaphysics written by Mark Textor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twentieth century English-language philosophy came to be science- and logic-oriented, and was suspicious of metaphysics. The Disappearance of the Soul and the Turn against Metaphysics traces our present philosophical outlook back to debates in Austro-German philosophy about the relation between empirical science and metaphysics: does empirical psychology depend on the metaphysics of the soul, the mental substance? The negative answer - that there is 'a psychology without a soul' - shaped Austrian philosophy and provided a model for ontologies that dispense with substances. Mark Textor tells the story of how and why (Austrian) philosophy turned against metaphysics . He introduces the key thinkers of the time, including the 'fathers of Austrian philosophy' Franz Brentano and Ernst Mach, whose Intentionalism (Brentano) and Neutral Monism (Mach) became distinctive and influential positions in the philosophy of mind. Textor goes on to use the 'psychology without a soul' view as a vantage point from which to reconstruct and assess the immediate pre-history and formation of analytic philosophy (Ward, Stout, Moore, Russell). While Austrian philosophers retired the soul, early analytic philosophers were happy to introduce a successor, the subject, and conceive of the mental as constituted by subject-object relations. The final part of the book returns to the theme of anti-metaphysics from a different perspective. In this part the early Moritz Schlick, who would soon become the leading figure of the Vienna Circle, takes centre stage. The final part of the book reconstructs Schlick's arguments for the conclusion that metaphysics lies beyond the limits of knowledge that are rooted in the philosophy of mind discussed in previous parts.
Download or read book The Dak Dak Series the Crystal Cave written by Susan Van De Luecht and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2006-02-01 with total page 67 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first of The Dak-Dak Series The Crystal Cave. A young boy out in the forest discovers a mysterious black box. When he attempts to open it, weird things start to happen. Unbeknown to him an alien watches his every move until... Click on the tab to purchase the book now to find out.
Download or read book The Essential Peirce Volume 2 written by Charles Sanders Peirce and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A convenient two-volume reader's edition makes accessible to students and scholars the most important philosophical papers of the brilliant American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce."--Back cover.
