Download or read book Necessity Essence and Individuation written by Alan Sidelle and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan Sidelle's Necessity, Essence, and Individuation is a sustained defense of empiricism—or, more generally, conventionalism—against recent attacks by realists. Sidelle focuses his attention on necessity a posteriori, a kind of necessity which contemporary realists have taken to support realism over empiricism. Turning the tables against the realists, Sidelle argues that if there are in fact truths necessary a posteriori, it is not realism, but rather empiricism which provides the best explanation for them.
Download or read book Essence and Necessity written by Daniel James Vecchio and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph is a critical and historical account of Aristotelian essentialism and modal logic. In Chapter One, ancient and contemporary interpretations and claims of inconsistency in Aristotle’s modal syllogistic are examined. A more consistent model is developed through attention to Aristotle’s comments on negation. In Chapter Two, proofs for each of the mixed apodictic syllogisms are analyzed and diagrammed. Chapter Three explores how Aristotle’s modal metaphysics fits within the context of the Posterior Analytics. Chapter Four contrasts Aristotelian modal logic to contemporary modal metaphysics and argues for ways in which a return to Aristotle may spark intriguing thought in contemporary discussions of the philosophy of science and in debate over the metaphysics of identity.
Download or read book The Nature of Necessity written by Alvin Plantinga and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1978-02-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a reissue of a book which is an exploration and defence of the notion of modality 'de re', the idea that objects have both essential and accidental properties. It is one of the first full-length studies of the modalities to emerge from the debate to which Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Ruth Marcus and others have contributed. The argument is developed by means of the notion of possible worlds, and ranges over key problems including the nature of essence, trans-world identity, negative existential propositions, and the existence of unactual objects in other possible worlds. In the final chapters Professor Plantinga applies his logical theories to the clarification of two problems in the philosophy of religion - the Problem of Evil and the Ontological Argument.
Download or read book Leibniz God and Necessity written by Michael V. Griffin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a necessitarian interpretation of Leibniz which grounds modal concepts in theology.
Download or read book Necessary Beings written by Bob Hale and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bob Hale presents a broadly Fregean approach to metaphysics, according to which ontology and modality are mutually dependent upon one another. He argues that facts about what kinds of things exist depend on facts about what is possible. Modal facts are fundamental, and have their basis in the essences of things—not in meanings or concepts.
Download or read book God and Necessity written by Brian Leftow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian Leftow offers a theist theory of necessity and possibility, and a new sort of argument for God's existence. He argues that necessities of logic and mathematics are determined by God's nature, but that it is events in God's mind - His imagination and choice - that account for necessary truths about concrete creatures.
Download or read book Aristotle s Modal Syllogistic written by Marko Malink and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristotle was the founder not only of logic but also of modal logic. In the Prior Analytics he developed a complex system of modal syllogistic which, while influential, has been disputed since antiquity—and is today widely regarded as incoherent. In this meticulously argued new study, Marko Malink presents a major reinterpretation of Aristotle’s modal syllogistic. Combining analytic rigor with keen sensitivity to historical context, he makes clear that the modal syllogistic forms a consistent, integrated system of logic, one that is closely related to other areas of Aristotle’s philosophy. Aristotle’s modal syllogistic differs significantly from modern modal logic. Malink considers the key to understanding the Aristotelian version to be the notion of predication discussed in the Topics—specifically, its theory of predicables (definition, genus, differentia, proprium, and accident) and the ten categories (substance, quantity, quality, and so on). The predicables introduce a distinction between essential and nonessential predication. In contrast, the categories distinguish between substantial and nonsubstantial predication. Malink builds on these insights in developing a semantics for Aristotle’s modal propositions, one that verifies the ancient philosopher’s claims of the validity and invalidity of modal inferences. Malink recognizes some limitations of this reconstruction, acknowledging that his proof of syllogistic consistency depends on introducing certain complexities that Aristotle could not have predicted. Nonetheless, Aristotle’s Modal Syllogistic brims with bold ideas, richly supported by close readings of the Greek texts, and offers a fresh perspective on the origins of modal logic.
Download or read book Essays on Essence and Existence written by Bob Hale and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-25 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on Existence and Essence presents a series of writings—including several previously unpublished—by Bob Hale on the topics of ontology and modality. The essays develop and consolidate a number of themes central to his work and to contemporary metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of language. They display Hale's innovative approach to some of the most fundamental issues in philosophy, in dialogue (and, in some cases, in collaboration) with other leading philosophers. The notion of a definition is examined as it applies both to words—verbal definitions-and to things—real definitions—and the relations between these are brought out in order to address problems in the metaphysics of necessity and the semantics and epistemology of modality. Hale argues for an essentialist theory of the source of necessity and our knowledge of it, and provides rigorous and inventive responses to problems such a theory might face. This theoretical framework is applied to the recently influential truthmaking approach to semantics and logic, developing an exact truthmaker account of universal quantification and modal statements. Other topics covered include the Fregean theory of ontological categories, the status of second-order logic, the metaphysics of numbers, and the nature of analytic propositions. The volume opens with a substantial introduction by Kit Fine, providing a critical examination of Hale's philosophy, and closes with a complete bibliography of Hale's writings.
Download or read book Essays on Essence and Existence written by Bob Hale and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on Existence and Essence presents a series of writings--including several previously unpublished--by Bob Hale on the topics of ontology and modality. The essays develop and consolidate a number of themes central to his work and to contemporary metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of language. They display Hale's innovative approach to some of the most fundamental issues in philosophy, in dialogue (and, in some cases, in collaboration) with other leading philosophers. The notion of a definition is examined as it applies both to words--verbal definitions-and to things--real definitions--and the relations between these are brought out in order to address problems in the metaphysics of necessity and the semantics and epistemology of modality. Hale argues for an essentialist theory of the source of necessity and our knowledge of it, and provides rigorous and inventive responses to problems such a theory might face. This theoretical framework is applied to the recently influential truthmaking approach to semantics and logic, developing an exact truthmaker account of universal quantification and modal statements. Other topics covered include the Fregean theory of ontological categories, the status of second-order logic, the metaphysics of numbers, and the nature of analytic propositions. The volume opens with a substantial introduction by Kit Fine, providing a critical examination of Hale's philosophy, and closes with a complete bibliography of Hale's writings.
Download or read book Necessity Cause and Blame written by Richard Sorabji and published by Bristol Classical Press. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A discussion of Aristotle's thought on determinism and culpability, Necessity, Cause, and Blame also reveals Richard Sorabji's own philosophical commitments. He makes the original argument here that Aristotle separates the notions of necessity and cause, rejecting both the idea that all events are necessarily determined as well as the idea that a non-necessitated event must also be non-caused. In support of this argument, Sorabji engages in a wide-ranging discussion of explanation, time, free will, essence, and purpose in nature. He also provides historical perspective, arguing that these problems remain intimately bound up with modern controversies. 'Original and important ... The book relates Aristotle's discussions to both the contemporary debates on determinism and causation and the ancient ones. It is especially detailed on Stoic arguments about necessity ... and on the social and legal background to Aristotle's thought.' Choice
Download or read book Chance and Necessity written by Jacques Monod and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Change and necessity is a statement of Darwinian natural selection as a process driven by chance necessity, devoid of purpose or intent.
Download or read book Proof theoretic Semantics written by Nissim Francez and published by . This book was released on 2015-10-29 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a monograph on the topic of Proof-Theoretic Semantics, a theory of meaning constituting an alternative to the more traditional Model-Theoretic Semantics. The latter regards meaning as truth-conditions (in arbitrary models), the former regards meaning as canonical derivability conditions in a meaning-conferring natural-deduction proof-system. In the first part of the book, the Proof-Theoretic Semantics for logic is presented. It surveys the way a natural-deduction system can serve as meaning-conferring, and in particular analyses various criteria such a system has to meet in order to qualify as meaning-conferring. A central criterion is harmony, a balance between introduction-rules and elimination-rules. The theory is applied to various logics, e.g., relevance logic, and various proof systems such as multi-conclusion natural-deduction and bilateralism. The presentation is inspired by recent work by the author, and also surveys recent developments. In part two, the theory is applied to fragments of natural language, both extensional and intensional, a development based on the author's recent work. For example, conservativity of determiners, once set up in a proof-theoretic framework, becomes a provable property of all (regular) determiners. It is shown that meaning need not carry the heavy ontological load characteristic of Model-Theoretic Semantics of complex natural language constructs. Nissim Francez is an emeritus professor of computer science at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. At a certain point in his career he moved from research related to concurrent and distributed programming and program verification to research in computational linguistics, mainly formal semantics of natural language. In recent years, he has worked on Proof-Theoretic Semantics, in particular for natural language.
Download or read book Nature and Necessity in Spinoza s Philosophy written by Don Garrett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spinoza's guiding commitment to the thesis that nothing exists or occurs outside of the scope of nature and its necessary laws makes him one of the great seventeenth-century exemplars of both philosophical naturalism and explanatory rationalism. Nature and Necessity in Spinoza's Philosophy brings together for the first time eighteen of Don Garrett's articles on Spinoza's philosophy, ranging over the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. Taken together, these influential articles provide a comprehensive interpretation of that philosophy, including Spinoza's theories of substance, thought and extension, causation, truth, knowledge, individuation, representation, consciousness, conatus, teleology, emotion, freedom, responsibility, virtue, contract, the state, and eternity-and the deep interrelations among them. Each article aims to resolve significant problems in the understanding of Spinoza's philosophy in such a way as to make evident both his reasons for his views and the enduring value of his ideas. At the same time, Garrett's articles elucidate the relations between his philosophy and those of predecessors and contemporaries like Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz. Lastly, the volume offers important and substantial replies to leading critics on four crucial topics: the necessary existence of God (Nature), substance monism, necessitarianism, and consciousness.
Download or read book Nature and Necessity in Spinoza s Philosophy written by Don Garrett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spinoza's guiding commitment to the thesis that nothing exists or occurs outside of the scope of nature and its necessary laws makes him one of the great seventeenth-century exemplars of both philosophical naturalism and explanatory rationalism. Nature and Necessity in Spinoza's Philosophy brings together for the first time eighteen of Don Garrett's articles on Spinoza's philosophy, ranging over the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. Taken together, these influential articles provide a comprehensive interpretation of that philosophy, including Spinoza's theories of substance, thought and extension, causation, truth, knowledge, individuation, representation, consciousness, conatus, teleology, emotion, freedom, responsibility, virtue, contract, the state, and eternity-and the deep interrelations among them. Each article aims to resolve significant problems in the understanding of Spinoza's philosophy in such a way as to make evident both his reasons for his views and the enduring value of his ideas. At the same time, Garrett's articles elucidate the relations between his philosophy and those of predecessors and contemporaries like Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz. Lastly, the volume offers important and substantial replies to leading critics on four crucial topics: the necessary existence of God (Nature), substance monism, necessitarianism, and consciousness.
Download or read book A Companion to the Philosophy of Language written by Bob Hale and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 1176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Providing up-to-date, in-depth coverage of the central question, and written and edited by some of the foremost practitioners in the field, this timely new edition will no doubt be a go-to reference for anyone with a serious interest in the philosophy of language.” Kathrin Glüer-Pagin, Stockholm University Now published in two volumes, the second edition of the best-selling Companion to the Philosophy of Language provides a complete survey of contemporary philosophy of language. The Companion has been greatly extended and now includes a monumental 17 new essays – with topics chosen by the editors, who curated suggestions from current contributors – and almost all of the 25 original chapters have been updated to take account of recent developments in the field. In addition to providing a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts, and debates, each essay introduces new and original contributions to ongoing debates, as well as addressing a number of new areas of interest, including two-dimensional semantics, modality and epistemic modals, and semantic relationism. The extended “state-of-the-art” chapter format allows the authors, all of whom are internationally eminent scholars in the field, to incorporate original research to a far greater degree than competitor volumes. Unrivaled in scope, this volume represents the best contemporary critical thinking relating to the philosophy of language.
Download or read book The Nature of Necessity written by Alvin Plantinga and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1974 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a reissue of a book which is an exploration and defence of the notion of modality 'de re', the idea that objects have both essential and accidental properties. It is one of the first full-length studies of the modalities to emerge from the debate to which Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Ruth Marcus and others have contributed. The argument is developed by means of the notion of possible worlds, and ranges over key problems including the nature of essence, trans-world identity, negative existential propositions, and the existence of unactual objects in other possible worlds. In the final chapters Professor Plantinga applies his logical theories to the clarification of two problems in the philosophy of religion - the Problem of Evil and the Ontological Argument.
Download or read book Necessity Lost written by Sanford Shieh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A long tradition, going back to Aristotle, conceives of logic in terms of necessity and possibility: a deductive argument is correct if it is not possible for the conclusion to be false when the premises are true. A relatively unknown feature of the analytic tradition in philosophy is that, at its very inception, this venerable conception of the relation between logic and necessity and possibility - the concepts of modality - was put into question. The founders of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, held that these concepts are empty: there are no genuine distinctions among the necessary, the possible, and the actual. In this book, the first of two volumes, Sanford Shieh investigates the grounds of this position and its consequences for Frege's and Russell's conceptions of logic. The grounds lie in doctrines on truth, thought, and knowledge, as well as on the relation between mind and reality, that are central to the philosophies of Frege and Russell, and are of enduring philosophical interest. The upshot of this opposition to modality is that logic is fundamental, and, to be coherent, modal concepts would have to be reconstructed in logical terms. This rejection of modality in early analytic philosophy remains of contemporary significance, though the coherence of modal concepts is rarely questioned nowadays because it is generally assumed that suspicion of modality derives from logical positivism, which has not survived philosophical scrutiny. The anti-modal arguments of Frege and Russell, however, have nothing to do with positivism and remain a challenge to the contemporary acceptance of modal notions.
