Download or read book Folk Metaphysics written by Charles Upton and published by Sophia Perennis et Universalis. This book was released on 2008 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among these 'few' was Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, who said: The content of folklore is metaphysical. Our failure to recognize this is primarily due to our own abysmal ignorance of metaphysics and of its technical terms. . . . The true folklorist must be not so much a psychologist as a theologian and metaphysician, if he is to 'understand his material'.
Download or read book Vice and Psychiatric Diagnosis written by John Z. Sadler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-28 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vice and Psychiatric Diagnosis begins with the simple question of why some categories of mental disorder include immoral or criminal conduct as diagnostic features, while most mental disorders in the DSM and ICD do not involve such "vice-laden" concepts. While this initial puzzle seems to concern only the limited domain of psychiatric nosology, Sadler's expansive scholarship reveals that this simple question leads inexorably to complex questions about the role of "madness and morality" in intellectual history, and to today's many conflicts and contradictions in the policy and culture of mental health, criminal justice, and related social welfare efforts. The book outlines the implications of vice concepts being incorporated into psychiatric diagnosis and clinical practice, leading to some of the vexing problems in mental health and social care. These issues include the fragmentation of care in social welfare efforts involving mentally ill people, criminal offenders, intellectually disabled individuals, and juvenile offenders. The analysis extends to cultural attitudes and policies as well: the insanity defense, managing the mentally ill criminal offender, the value of punishment in criminal justice, and derivative issues such as the ethics of forensic psychiatry, the growing problem of mass shootings, stigma, health literacy, and the difficulties in pursuing rigorous and consistent approaches to psychiatric diagnostic classification. In the pursuit of untangling these threads of vice and psychiatric diagnosis, Sadler provides a brief history of ideas about madness and morality, beginning in prehistory and extending into the late 20th century. The lessons from this history are applied in subsequent chapters, examining the "vice-mental disorder relationship" from the perspectives of philosophical/conceptual issues, the perspectives of criminal law and the criminal justice system, and the perspectives of public interest and public opinion. The concluding chapters formulate an alternative way of thinking about the vice-mental disorder relationship in clinical practice and public policy, culminating in "Forty Theses" which present the detailed conclusions and social implications for this monumental work.
Download or read book Metaphysics and Cognitive Science written by Alvin I. Goldman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume illustrates how the methodology of metaphysics can be enriched with the help of cognitive science. Few philosophers nowadays would dispute the relevance of cognitive science to the metaphysics of mind, but this volume mainly concerns the relevance of metaphysics to phenomena that are not themselves mental. The volume is thus a departure from standard analytical metaphysics. Among the issues to which results from cognitive science are brought to bear are the metaphysics of time, of morality, of meaning, of modality, of objects, and of natural kinds, as well as whether God exists. A number of chapters address the enterprise of metaphysics in general. In traditional analytical metaphysics, intuitions play a prominent role in the construction of, and assessment of theories. Cognitive science can be brought to bear on the issue of the reliability of intuitions. Some chapters point out how results from cognitive science can be deployed to debunk certain intuitions, and some point out how results can be deployed to help vindicate certain intuitions. Many metaphysicians have taken to heart the moral that physics should be taken into account in addressing certain metaphysical issues. The overarching point of the volume is that in many instances beyond the nature of the mind itself, cognitive science should also be consulted.
Download or read book The Metaphysics of Beauty written by Nick Zangwill and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In chapters ranging from "The Beautiful, the Dainty, and the Dumpy" to "Skin-deep or In the Eye of the Beholder?" Nick Zangwill investigates the nature of beauty as we conceive it, and as it is in itself. The notion of beauty is currently attracting increased interest, particularly in philosophical aesthetics and in discussions of our experiences and judgments about art. In The Metaphysics of Beauty, Zangwill argues that it is essential to beauty that it depends on the ordinary features of things. He uses this principle to defend the notion of the aesthetic, to call for a version of aesthetic formalism, and to reconsider the reality of beauty. The Metaphysics of Beauty brings beauty to the center of intellectual consciousness in a manner informed by contemporary metaphysics and engages with beauty as an enduring object of human thought and experience.
Download or read book Experimental Metaphysics written by David Rose and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-29 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphysics, almost entirely neglected by experimental philosophers, is the central focus of Experimental Metaphysics. The volume brings together a range of views aimed at addressing the question of how cognitive science might be relevant to metaphysics. With contributions from cognitive scientists and philosophers, chapters focus on theoretical and empirical issues involving the potential role of cognitive science in metaphysics. Alongside topics such as free will, objects and causation, in which relevant empirical evidence is discussed and connected to relevant metaphysical issues, more programmatic papers explore theoretical issues centered on the connection between cognitive science and metaphysics. This balanced approach exposes metaphysicians to philosophically relevant work in cognitive science, while showing cognitive scientists the ways in which their work might be important for philosophers. Presenting cutting-edge empirical and theoretical research, Experimental Metaphysics pushes forward the discussion and encourages further engagement with issues at the intersection of cognitive science and metaphysics.
Download or read book Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth Century British Fiction written by Jason Marc Harris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.
Download or read book Aquinas on Being Goodness and God written by Christopher Hughes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Aquinas is one of the most important figures in the history of philosophy and philosophical theology. Relying on a deep understanding of Aristotle, Aquinas developed a metaphysical framework that is comprehensive, detailed, and flexible. Within that framework, he formulated a range of strikingly original and carefully explicated views in areas including natural theology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and ethics. In this book, Christopher Hughes focuses on Aquinas’s thought from an analytic philosophical perspective. After an overview of Aquinas’s life and works, Hughes discusses Aquinas’s metaphysics, including his conception of substance, matter, and form, and his account of essence and existence; and his theory of the nature of human beings, including his critique of a substance dualism that Aquinas attributes to Plato, but is usually associated with Descartes. In the final chapters, Hughes discusses Aquinas’s account of the existence and nature of God, and his treatment of the problem of evil, as well as his ideas about the relation of goodness to being, choice, and happiness. Aquinas on Being, Goodness, and God is essential reading for students and scholars of Aquinas, and anyone interested in philosophy of religion or the history of medieval philosophy.
Download or read book Scientific Metaphysics written by Don Ross and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific Metaphysics collects original essays by some of the world's leading philosophers of science on the question of whether metaphysics can and should be naturalized—that is, conducted as a part of natural science. Some people will think that the idea of naturalized metaphysics is a contradiction in terms, on the grounds that metaphysics is by definition about matters that transcend the domain of empirical inquiry. Most of the authors here disagree, and hold that if metaphysics is to hold out any prospect of identifying objective truths, it must be continuous with and inspired by science. Many go further, and argue that it should be conducted in such a way as to be of some positive use to science. But beyond this each contributor differs with one another on numerous points of detail and emphasis. The essays presented here offer various points of view on the relationship between naturalized metaphysics, more traditional forms of metaphysics, and the wider history of philosophy. The discussions are rich in examples drawn from across the sciences: physics, biology, economics, psychology and others. Several chapters explore new ideas about the complex relationships between metaphysics, physics, and mathematics. At stake, in the end, is the question of whether metaphysics should give way to science and disappear from contemporary inquiry, or continue as an activity that unifies the particular sciences into a single naturalistic worldview.
Download or read book Worldviews Science and Us written by Robrecht Vanderbeeken and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2010 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together the lectures presented at the 5th Metaphysics of Science Workshop held from June 2 to 3, 2005, in Ghent, Belgium. The aim of this volume is twofold. First, it fields a selection of ongoing discussions on a central topic in contemporary analytical metaphysics. Authors were asked to encapsulate their lecture topic into a prcis, highlighting the contesting views, accentuating the pro and contra of the main arguments, and shedding light on the origin, the evolution and the eventual offspring of a respective discussion. Second, this volume addresses the methodological question by examining what can be learned if we compare these discussions from a methodological perspective. What are the red herrings and shortcomings? Is an integrated methodology possible? Does each discussion finally await a pluralism of plausible positions or will an overall convincing account be expected? And finally, can analytical metaphysics methodologically assert and investigate their basic assumptions, if not from a common sense stance?
Download or read book Jung in the 21st Century Volume Two written by John Ryan Haule and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-10-22 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second volume explores Jung’s understanding of synchronicity and argues that it offers an important contribution to contemporary science. Whilst the scientific world has often ignored Jung’s theories as being too much like mysticism, Haule argues that what the human psyche knows beyond sensory perception is extremely valuable. Divided into two parts, areas of discussion include: shamanism and mastery border zones of exact science meditation, parapsychology and psychokinesis Jung in the 21st Century Volume Two: Synchronicity and Science will, like the first volume, be an invaluable resource for all those in the field of analytical psychology, including students of Jung, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists with an interest in the meeting of Jung and science.
Download or read book Free Will Moral Responsibility and the Desire to Be a God written by Bruce N. Waller and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-09-04 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and the Desire to be a God explores the hidden corridors of the moral responsibility system to discover why that system is so widely accepted and passionately defended. The moral responsibility system has obvious charms: it provides justification for our powerful strike-back motives, transforms selfishness into the virtuous defense of our justly deserved special benefits, draws a radical distinction between humans and the other species we exploit, and protects our nonconscious belief in a just world. Those charms notwithstanding, the resilience and endurance of the moral responsibility system indicates a hidden force that not only binds together the pieces of the system but also motivates our stubborn devotion to that system. That hidden force is a nonconscious desire to be a god: a desire that afflicts both believers and atheists, and that is almost universally denied (Nietzsche being a special exception). That desire can be found throughout the history of philosophy, from Aristotle to the present. It is also manifested in myths and a variety of religious practices and teachings. The breadth, power and harm of nonconscious “apotheosis aspiration” is the focus of this study.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics written by Ricki Bliss and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophical questions regarding the nature and methodology of philosophical inquiry have garnered much attention in recent years. Perhaps nowhere are these discussions more developed than in relation to the field of metaphysics. The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics is an outstanding reference source to this growing subject. It comprises thirty-eight chapters written by leading international contributors, and is arranged around five themes: • The history of metametaphysics • Neo-Quineanism (and its objectors) • Alternative conceptions of metaphysics • The epistemology of metaphysics • Science and metaphysics. Essential reading for students and researchers in metaphysics, philosophical methodology, and ontology, The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics will also be of interest to those in closely related subjects such as philosophy of language, logic, and philosophy of science.
Download or read book Artefact Kinds written by Maarten Franssen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-10-04 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned with two intimately related topics of metaphysics: the identity of entities and the foundations of classification. What it adds to previous discussions of these topics is that it addresses them with respect to human-made entities, that is, artefacts. As the chapters in the book show, questions of identity and classification require other treatments and lead to other answers for artefacts than for natural entities. These answers are of interest to philosophers not only for their clarification of artefacts as a category of things but also for the new light they may shed on these issue with respect to to natural entities. This volume is structured in three parts. The contributions in Part I address basic ontological and metaphysical questions in relation to artefact kinds: How should we conceive of artefact kinds? Are they real kinds? How are identity conditions for artefacts and artefact kinds related? The contributions in Part II address meta-ontological questions: What, exactly, should an ontological account of artefact kinds provide us with? What scope can it aim for? Which ways of approaching the ontology of artefact kinds are there, how promising are they, and how should we assess this? In Part III, the essays offer engineering practice rather than theoretical philosophy as a point of reference. The issues addressed here include: How do engineers classify technical artefacts and on what grounds? What makes specific classes of technical artefacts candidates for ontologically real kinds, and by which criteria?
Download or read book The Speculative Turn written by Levi Bryant and published by re.press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continental philosophy has entered a new period of ferment. The long deconstructionist era was followed with a period dominated by Deleuze, which has in turn evolved into a new situation still difficult to define. However, one common thread running through the new brand of continental positions is a renewed attention to materialist and realist options in philosophy. Among the current giants of this generation, this new focus takes numerous different and opposed forms. It might be hard to find many shared positions in the writings of Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Zizek, but what is missing from their positions is an obsession with the critique of written texts. All of them elaborate a positive ontology, despite the incompatibility of their results. Meanwhile, the new generation of continental thinkers is pushing these trends still further, as seen in currents ranging from transcendental materialism to the London-based speculative realism movement to new revivals of Derrida. As indicated by the title The Speculative Turn, the new currents of continental philosophy depart from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself. This anthology assembles authors, of several generations and numerous nationalities, who will be at the center of debate in continental philosophy for decades to come.
Download or read book Free Will and Consciousness written by Gregg D. Caruso and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-02-23 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, with advances in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences, the idea that patterns of human behavior may ultimately be due to factors beyond our conscious control has increasingly gained traction and renewed interest in the age-old problem of free will. In this book, Gregg D. Caruso examines both the traditional philosophical problems long associated with the question of free will, such as the relationship between determinism and free will, as well as recent experimental and theoretical work directly related to consciousness and human agency. He argues that our best scientific theories indeed have the consequence that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform and that because of this we do not possess the kind of free will required for genuine or ultimate responsibility. It is further argued that the strong and pervasive belief in free will, which the author considers an illusion, can be accounted for through a careful analysis of our phenomenology and a proper theoretical understanding of consciousness. Indeed, the primary goal of this book is to argue that our subjective feeling of freedom, as reflected in the first-person phenomenology of agentive experience, is an illusion created by certain aspects of our consciousness.
Download or read book Naturalization of the Soul written by John Barresi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naturalization of the Soul charts the development of the concepts of soul and self in Western thought, from Plato to the present. It fills an important gap in intellectual history by being the first book to emphasize the enormous intellectual transformation in the eighteenth century, when the religious 'soul' was replaced first by a philosophical 'self' and then by a scientific 'mind'. The authors show that many supposedly contemporary theories of the self were actually discussed in the eighteenth century, and recognize the status of William Hazlitt as one of the most important Personal Identity theorists of the British Enlightenment, for his direct relevance to contemporary thinking. Now available in paperback, Naturaliazation of the Soul is essential reading for anyone interested in the issues at the core of the Western philosophical tradition.
Download or read book Goldman and His Critics written by Brian P. McLaughlin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goldman and His Critics presents a series of original essays contributed by influential philosophers who critically examine Alvin Goldman’s work, followed by Goldman’s responses to each essay. Critiques Alvin Goldman’s groundbreaking theories, writings, and ideas on a range of philosophical topics Features contributions from some of the most important and influential contemporary philosophers Covers Goldman’s views on epistemology—both individual and social—in addition to cognitive science and metaphysics Pays special attention to Goldman’s writings on philosophy of mind, including the evolution of his thoughts on Simulation-Theory (ST)
