Download or read book Explorations in Metaphysics written by W. Norris Clarke S.J. and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 1992-01-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays is a compilation of the thought and work of W. Norris Clarke, S.J., a philosopher inspired by the Thomistic tradition, who in 45 years of teaching and writing has delved into many of the central problems of perennial philosophy and made a significant contribution to the ongoing history of American Thomism. The essays presented here reflect an internal unity-each essay deliberately building on the positions put forth in the preceding ones-as they progress systematically through the themes of metaphysics and philosophy of God. Clarke begins with an overall survey of what in Aquinas's metaphysics is most relevant for today, and then suggests the most fruitful starting point for a contemporary presentation of such a metaphysics. The next five essays discuss key positions in metaphysics and are followed by two essays on the philosophy of God. The final essay illuminates key themes in Clarke's most recent work on the human person. Clarke's examination of topics in all these areas is especially concerned with the notions of action and participation in existence as being central to the metaphysical study of reality. This then leads to a close study of the often misunderstood Thomistic doctrine of analogy and how it functions in the construction of a viable philosophy of God. The overall spirit that permeates the volume is Clarke's firm conviction that the philosophical thought of St. Thomas Aquinas is an inexhaustibly rich and profound resource, and his purpose is to share this conviction with contemporary philosophers. In so doing Clarke both reflects and triggers significant new directions in contemporary Thomistic thought.
Download or read book Work and Object written by Peter Lamarque and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-06-03 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Work and Object is a study of fundamental questions in the metaphysics of art, notably how works relate to the materials that constitute them. Issues about the creation of works, what is essential and inessential to their identity, their distinct kinds of properties, including aesthetic properties, their amenability to interpretation, their style, the conditions under which they can go out of existence, and their relation to perceptually indistinguishable doubles (e.g. forgeries and parodies), are raised and debated. A core theme is that works like paintings, music, literature, sculpture, architecture, films, photographs, multi-media installations, and many more besides, have fundamental features in common, as cultural artefacts, in spite of enormous surface differences. It is their nature as distinct kinds of things, grounded in distinct ontological categories, that is the subject of this enquiry. Although much of the discussion is abstract, based in analytical metaphysics, there are numerous specific applications, including a study of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel La Nausée and recent conceptual art. Some surprising conclusions are derived, about the identity conditions of works and about the difference, often, between what a work seems to be and what it really is.
Download or read book Explorations in Metaphysics written by W Norris Clarke and published by University of Notre Dame Press. This book was released on 1995-01-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ontology Revisited written by Ruth Groff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Groff's argument runs counter to the familiar anti-metaphysical habit. Social and political philosophy, she maintains, is not as metaphysically neutral as it may seem. Even the most deontological of theories connects up with an attendant set of philosophical commitments regarding what kinds of things exist, as a fundamental ontological matter, and what they are like. These are topics of interest not just to social and political philosophers, but to social scientists and to philosophers of social science as well. "Ruth Groff has broken new ground in demonstrating the connection between social and political thought and the ontology of causal powers. Her account of the structure of Humean thinking about agency is excellent. Especially significant is the role that she assigns to Kantianism in the analysis that she develops. She moves effortlessly between contemporary metaphysics, political theory, critical social theory, and the history of modern philosophy, offering trenchant insights along the way into the work of thinkers ranging from Hume himself to Mill, Adorno, and Martha Nussbaum, and into debates over agent causation and emergence. There is even a discussion, in the final chapter, of Spinoza. This is big-picture philosophy at its best: rigorous and exacting at the level of detail; original, compelling and systematic in the whole." - Stephen Mumford, Professor of Metaphysics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham
Download or read book Feminist Metaphysics written by Charlotte Witt and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume is an exciting new collection of original essays by outstanding feminist theorists including Sally Haslanger, Marilyn Frye and Linda Alcoff. Feminist Metaphysics is the first collection of articles addressing metaphysical issues from a feminist perspective. The essays cover central feminist topics including: the ontology of sex and gender, persons, identity and subjectivity, and the relations among experience, ideology and reality. Many of the papers combine cutting-edge feminist theory with contemporary metaphysics and the philosophy of language. The volume is also distinctive in including articles representing both analytic and continental perspectives on metaphysics. The essays are philosophically sophisticated and are primarily intended for a professional audience of philosophers and feminist theorists.
Download or read book Mental Fictionalism written by Tamás Demeter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-29 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are mental states? When we talk about people’s beliefs or desires, are we talking about what is happening inside their heads? If so, might cognitive science show that we are wrong? Might it turn out that mental states do not exist? Mental fictionalism offers a new approach to these longstanding questions about the mind. Its core idea is that mental states are useful fictions. When we talk about mental states, we are not formulating hypotheses about people’s inner machinery. Instead, we simply talk "as if" people had certain inner states, such as beliefs or desires, in order to make sense of their behaviour. This is the first book dedicated to exploring mental fictionalism. Featuring contributions from established authors as well as up-and-coming scholars in this burgeoning field, the book reveals the exciting potential of a fictionalist approach to the mind, as well as the challenges it faces. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on foundational debates in the philosophy of mind, such as the nature of mental states and folk psychology, as well as hot topics in the field, such as embodied cognition and mental representation. Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations is essential reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and professionals alike.
Download or read book The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings written by and published by Routledge. This book was released on with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Iranian Metaphysicals written by Alireza Doostdar and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do the occult sciences, séances with the souls of the dead, and appeals to saintly powers have to do with rationality? Since the late nineteenth century, modernizing intellectuals, religious leaders, and statesmen in Iran have attempted to curtail many such practices as "superstitious," instead encouraging the development of rational religious sensibilities and dispositions. However, far from diminishing the diverse methods through which Iranians engage with the immaterial realm, these rationalizing processes have multiplied the possibilities for metaphysical experimentation. The Iranian Metaphysicals examines these experiments and their transformations over the past century. Drawing on years of ethnographic and archival research, Alireza Doostdar shows that metaphysical experimentation lies at the center of some of the most influential intellectual and religious movements in modern Iran. These forms of exploration have not only produced a plurality of rational orientations toward metaphysical phenomena but have also fundamentally shaped what is understood as orthodox Shi‘i Islam, including the forms of Islamic rationality at the heart of projects for building and sustaining an Islamic Republic. Delving into frequently neglected aspects of Iranian spirituality, politics, and intellectual inquiry, The Iranian Metaphysicals challenges widely held assumptions about Islam, rationality, and the relationship between science and religion.
Download or read book Constructions of Reason written by Onora O'Neill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the alleged incoherences to attempts to assimilate Kant's ethical writings to modern conceptions of rationality, actions and rights.
Download or read book Rawlsian Explorations in Religion and Applied Philosophy written by Daniel A. Dombrowski and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To probe the underlying premises of a liberal political order, John Rawls felt obliged to use a philosophical method that abstracted from many of the details of ordinary life. But this very abstraction became a point of criticism, as it left unclear the implications of his theory for public policies and life in the real political world. Rawlsian Explorations in Religion and Applied Philosophy attempts to ferret out those implications, filling the gap between Rawls’s own empyrean heights and the really practical public policy proposals made by government planners, lobbyists, and legislators. Among the topics examined are natural rights, the morality of war, the treatment of mentally deficient humans and nonhuman sentient creatures, the controversies over legacy and affirmative action in college admissions, and the place of religious belief in a democratic society. The final chapter explores how Rawls’s own religious beliefs, as revealed in two works posthumously published in 2009, played into his formulation of his theory of justice.
Download or read book Aristotle s Metaphysics Lambda written by Michael Frede and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished group of scholars of ancient philosophy here presents a systematic study of the twelfth book of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Lambda, which can be regarded as a self-standing treatise on substance, has been attracting particular attention in recent years, and was chosen as the focusof the fourteenth Symposium Aristotelicum, from which this volume derives. At the Symposium, each of Lambda's ten chapters was taken in turn as the subject of a session at which a specially written paper was read to and discussed by the assembled symposiasts. (The ninth chapter commanded twosessions by dint of its particular difficulty.) The papers have been revised in the light of discussion, and are now offered to a wider audience as a discursive commentary on points of particular philosophical interest covering all of Lambda. Michael Frede's extensive Introduction aims to give abroader view of Lambda as a whole and the problems it raises, and thus to provide the context for the discussion of each of the chapters. This volume will be a resource of great value and interest for anyone working on ancient metaphysics and theology.
Download or read book Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy written by M. F. Burnyeat and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-14 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first of two volumes collecting the published work of one of the greatest living ancient philosophers, M.F. Burnyeat.
Download or read book Women Knowledge and Reality written by Ann Garry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-17 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second edition of Women, Knowledge, and Reality continues to exhibit the ways in which feminist philosophers enrich and challenge philosophy. Essays by twenty-five feminist philosophers, seventeen of them new to the second edition, address fundamental issues in philosophical and feminist methods, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, language, religion and mind/body. This second edition expands the perspectives of women of color, of postmodernism and French feminism, and focuses on the most recent controversies in feminist theory and philosophy. The chapters are organized by traditional fields of philosophy, and include introductions which contrast the ideas of feminist thinkers with traditional philosophers. The collected essays illustrate both the depth and breadth of feminist critiques and the range of contemporary feminist theoretical perspectives.
Download or read book The Metaphysics of Gender written by Charlotte Witt and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-10-21 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author develops the claim that gender is uniessential to social individuals. The used terms to express gender essentialism are explained, clarified and defended in the first part of the book. In the second part the author constructs an argument for the claim that gender is uniessential to social individuals.
Download or read book Aristotelian Explorations written by G. E. R. Lloyd and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges several widespread views concerning Aristotle's methods and practices of scientific and philosophical research. Taking central topics in psychology, zoology, astronomy and politics, Professor Lloyd explores generally unrecognized tensions between Aristotle's deeply held a priori convictions and his remarkable empirical honesty in the face of complexities in the data or perceived difficult or exceptional cases. The picture that emerges of Aristotle's actual engagement in scientific research and of his own reflections on that research is substantially more complex than is usually allowed.
Download or read book Explorations in Whitehead s Philosophy written by Lewis S. Ford and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All the authors of the sixteen essays gathered in this volume are concerned, in their different ways, to clarify, criticize, and develop key ideas and insights of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), one of the towering figures of twentieth-century speculative thought, whose "process philosophy" has, in recent decades, aroused intense intellectual interest both in this country and abroad. The present volume is intended to complement, but not to duplicate, an earlier selection of important Whitehead studies, Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, ed. G. L. Kline (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963).
Download or read book Spinoza on Nature written by James Collins and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collins' method is to make an internal textual study of Spinoza's doctrine on nature with emphasis on his general model of nature that underlies and governs his arguments on particular issues. Separate chapters are devoted to each of his early writings. Two chapters discuss the Ethics. Collins concludes with a unifying view of Spinoza's perspective on nature that has a bearing upon many contemporary philosophical issues.
