Download or read book An Essay on Metaphysics written by Robin George Collingwood and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-05-24 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With 'The nature of metaphysical study'; 'Function of metaphysics in civilizsation'; 'Notes for an Essay on logic.'"
Download or read book Individuals written by P.F. Strawson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its publication in 1959, Individuals has become a modern philosophical classic. Bold in scope and ambition, it continues to influence debates in metaphysics, philosophy of logic and language, and epistemology. Peter Strawson's most famous work, it sets out to describe nothing less than the basic subject matter of our thought. It contains Strawson's now famous argument for descriptive metaphysics and his repudiation of revisionary metaphysics, in which reality is something beyond the world of appearances. Throughout, Individuals advances some highly influential and controversial ideas, such as 'non-solipsistic consciousness' and the concept of a person a 'primitive concept'
Download or read book Centering and Extending written by Steven G. Smith and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original metaphysical proposal building on classical and contemporary sources. In Centering and Extending, Steven G. Smith retrieves and refashions some of the best ideas of classical and early modern metaphysics to support insight into the natures of mental and material beings and their relations. Avoiding what he critiques as distortive paths of idealism, materialism, repressive monism, and overly permissive pluralism, Smith builds his framework on centering and extending as universal principles of formation. Identifying the basic consistency of being with these principles in symmetrical partnership enables a naturalist process view that, unlike Whiteheads, does not overbalance toward the subjective and teleological and, unlike Deleuze and Guattaris, does not overbalance toward the material and chaotic. This view supports useful conceptions of mind and matter, form and energy, reason and cause, and a layered world order without relying on a blind concept of supervenience or emergence. It also respects and reinforces a division of roles between metaphysical sense-making and spiritual determinations of meaningfulness. This is a highly original, speculative, and deeply learned metaphysical treatise on the basic categories of existence needed to account for human experience of the world. It contributes to the contemporary metaphysical discussion in Western philosophy by adding a new, intelligent, and interesting voice. Robert Cummings Neville, author of Ultimates: Philosophical Theology, Volume One
Download or read book Selves written by Galen Strawson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-30 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there such a thing as the self? If so, what is it? We all have experience of having or being a self, a hidden inner mental presence. Galen Strawson argues that if we look closely at what experience of a self is like, we may be able to work out what a self must be, if it exists. He concludes that selves do exist, but they are not what we think.
Download or read book Philosophy of Being written by Oliva Blanchette and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work aims to reopen the fundamental question of being. It raises the question of being after the natural sciences and phenomenology have run their course and pursues it according to a method that is properly metaphysical as well as critical.
Download or read book Idealism written by Tyron Goldschmidt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Idealism is a family of metaphysical views each of which gives priority to the mental. The best-known forms of idealism in Western philosophy are Berkeleyan idealism, which gives ontological priority to the mental (minds and ideas) over the physical (bodies), and Kantian idealism, which gives a kind of explanatory priority to the mental (the structure of the understanding) over the physical (the structure of the empirical world). Although idealism was once a dominant view in Western philosophy, it has suffered almost total neglect over the last several decades. This book rectifies this situation by bringing together seventeen essays by leading philosophers on the topic of metaphysical idealism. The various essays explain, attack, or defend a variety of idealistic theories, including not only Berkeleyan and Kantian idealisms but also those developed in traditions less familiar to analytic philosophers, including Buddhism and Hassidic Judaism. Although a number of the articles draw on historical sources, all will be of interest to philosophers working in contemporary metaphysics. This volume aims to spark a revival of serious philosophical interest in metaphysical idealism.
Download or read book Metaphysical Essays written by John Hawthorne and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2006-04-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Hawthorne is widely regarded as one of the finest philosophers working today. He is perhaps best known for his contributions to metaphysics, and this volume collects his most notable papers in this field. Hawthorne offers original treatments of fundamental topics in philosophy, including identity, ontology, vagueness, and causation. Six of the essays appear here for the first time, and there is a valuable introduction to guide the reader through the selection.
Download or read book Idea and Ontology written by Marc A. Hight and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A wide-ranging study of the 'way of ideas' and its metaphysics, culminating in a bold reinterpretation of Berkeley."
Download or read book The Metasphysics of Free Will written by John Martin Fischer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1995-10-09 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Metaphysics of Free Will provides a through statement of the major grounds for skepticism about the reality of free will and moral responsibility. The author identifies and explains the sort of control that is associated with personhood and accountability, and shows how it is consistent with causal determinism. In so doing, out view of ourselves as morally responsible agents is protected against the disturbing changes posed by science and religion.
Download or read book The Metaphysics of Everyday Life written by Lynne Rudder Baker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lynne Rudder Baker presents and defends a unique account of the material world: the Constitution View. In contrast to leading metaphysical views that take everyday things to be either non-existent or reducible to micro-objects, the Constitution View construes familiar things as irreducible parts of reality. Although they are ultimately constituted by microphysical particles, everyday objects are neither identical to, nor reducible to, the aggregates of microphysical particles that constitute them. The result is genuine ontological diversity: people, bacteria, donkeys, mountains and microscopes are fundamentally different kinds of things - all constituted by, but not identical to, aggregates of particles. Baker supports her account with discussions of non-reductive causation, vagueness, mereology, artefacts, three-dimensionalism, ontological novelty, ontological levels and emergence. The upshot is a unified ontological theory of the entire material world that irreducibly contains people, as well as non-human living things and inanimate objects.
Download or read book Axiogenesis written by Nicholas Rescher and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2010-08-20 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicholas Rescher's book Axiogenesis: An Essay in Metaphysical Optimalism is a detailed exposition of axiogenerts: the philosophical theory seeking to explain the world's facts on the basis of evaluative considerations. In classical antiquity, this theory was espoused by Plato (in the Timaeus) and neo-Platonic tradition; in early modern times, it was revived by Leibniz and continued to find favor in the development of rational mechanics from Maupertuis to William Hamilton. However, since then the principles behind axiogenesis and similar theories have fallen out of fashion. This book is therefore unique in that it argues in detail that this metaphysical approach still has traction and endeavors to formulate the theory in a manner that makes it available as a live option for contemporary thinkers. Advanced students of philosophy and professionals in this field, as well as anyone interested in the issue of speculative metaphysics, will find Rescher's contemporary refashioning of axiogenesis a distinctly compelling read.
Download or read book in the realm of mind written by Frederick J. E. Woodbridge and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1926 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality written by Alvin Plantinga and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-27 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps no one has done more in the last 30 years to advance thinking in the metaphysics of modality than has Alvin Plantinga. Collected here are some of his most important essays on this influential subject. Dating back from the late 1960's to the present, they chronicle the development of Plantinga's thoughts about some of the most fundamental issues in metaphysics: what is the nature of abstract objects like possible worlds, properties, propositions, and such phenomena? Are there possible but non-actual objects? Can objects that do not exist exemplify properties? Plantinga gives thorough and penetrating answers to all of these questions and many others. This volume contains some of the best work in metaphysics from the past 30 years, and will remain a source of critical contention and keen interest among philosophers of metaphysics and philosophical logic for years to come.
Download or read book Non Being written by Sara Bernstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonexistence is ubiquitous, yet mysterious. This volume explores some of the most puzzling questions about non-being and nonexistence, and offers answers from diverse philosophical perspectives. The contributors draw on analytic, continental, Buddhist, and Jewish philosophical traditions, and the topics range from metaphysics to ethics, from philosophy of science to philosophy of language, and beyond.
Download or read book Primary Ousia written by Michael Loux and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael J. Loux here presents a fresh reading of two of the most important books of the Metaphysics, Books Z and H, in which Aristotle presents his mature theory of primary substances (ousiai). Focusing on the interplay of Aristotle's early and late views, Loux maintans that the later concept of ousia should be understood in terms of a theory of predication that carries interesting implications for contemporary metaphysics. Loux argues that in his first attempt in identifying ousiai in the Categories, Aristotle encountered a set of ontological problems which he wrestled with again in Metaphysics Z and H. In the Categories, where the primary realities are basic subjects of predication construed in essentialist terms as things falling under natural kinds, familiar particulars are the primary ousiai. In subsequent works, Aristotle holds that since familiar particulars come into being and pass away, they must be composites of matter and form; and in Metaphysics Z and H, he explores the implications of this insight for the search for ousia. Maintaining that the substantial forms of familiar particulars are the primary ousiai, the later Aristotle interprets forms as predicable universals rather than as particulars, each uniquely possessed by a single object.
Download or read book Semantics Tense and Time written by Peter Ludlow and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999-09-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to Peter Ludlow, there is a very close relation between the structure of natural language and that of reality, and one can gain insights into long-standing metaphysical questions by studying the semantics of natural language. In this book Ludlow uses the metaphysics of time as a case study and focuses on the dispute between A-theorists and B-theorists about the nature of time. According to B-theorists, there is no genuine change, but a permanent sequence of events ordered by an earlier-than/later-than relation. According to the version of the A-theory adopted by Ludlow (a position sometimes called "presentism"), there are no past or future events or times; what makes something past or future is how the world stands right now. Ludlow argues that each metaphysical picture is tied to a particular semantical theory of tense and that the dispute can be adjudicated on semantical grounds. A presentism-compatible semantics, he claims, is superior to a B-theory semantics in a number of respects, including its abilities to handle the indexical nature of temporal discourse and to account for facts about language acquisition. Along the way, Ludlow develops a conception of "E-type" temporal anaphora that can account for both temporal anaphora and complex tenses without reference to past and future events. His view has philosophical consequences for theories of logic, self-knowledge, and memory. As for linguistic consequences, Ludlow suggests that the very idea of grammatical tense may have to be dispensed with and replaced with some combination of aspect, modality, and evidentiality.
Download or read book An Essay on Metaphysics written by R. G. Collingwood and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2016-12-28 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This early work by Robin G. Collingwood was originally published in 1940 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'An Essay on Metaphysics' is an academic inquiry in the field of philosophy. Robin George Collingwood was born on 22nd February 1889, in Cartmel, England. He was the son of author, artist, and academic, W. G. Collingwood. He was greatly influenced by the Italian Idealists Croce, Gentile, and Guido de Ruggiero. Another important influence was his father, a professor of fine art and a student of Ruskin. He published many works of philosophy, such as Speculum Mentis (1924), An Essay on Philosophic Method (1933), and An Essay on Metaphysics (1940).
