Download or read book Getting Causes from Powers written by Stephen Mumford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Causation is everywhere in the world: it features in every science and technology. But how much do we understand it? Here, the authors develop a new theory of causation based on an ontology of real powers or dispositions. They provide the first detailed outline of a thoroughly dispositional approach, and explore its surprising features.
Download or read book Getting Causes from Powers written by Stephen Mumford and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sources of Power written by Gary A. Klein and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999-02-18 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anyone who watches the television news has seen images of firefighters rescuing people from burning buildings and paramedics treating bombing victims. How do these individuals make the split-second decisions that save lives? Most studies of decision making, based on artificial tasks assigned in laboratory settings, view people as biased and unskilled. Gary Klein is one of the developers of the naturalistic decision making approach, which views people as inherently skilled and experienced. It documents human strengths and capabilities that so far have been downplayed or ignored. Since 1985, Klein has conducted fieldwork to find out how people tackle challenges in difficult, nonroutine situations. Sources of Power is based on observations of humans acting under such real-life constraints as time pressure, high stakes, personal responsibility, and shifting conditions. The professionals studied include firefighters, critical care nurses, pilots, nuclear power plant operators, battle planners, and chess masters. Each chapter builds on key incidents and examples to make the description of the methodology and phenomena more vivid. In addition to providing information that can be used by professionals in management, psychology, engineering, and other fields, the book presents an overview of the research approach of naturalistic decision making and expands our knowledge of the strengths people bring to difficult tasks.
Download or read book Powers and Capacities in Philosophy written by Ruth Groff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in 2012, Powers and Capacities in Philosophy is a valuable contribution to the field of Philosophy.
Download or read book The 48 Laws of Power written by Robert Greene and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature. In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum. Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness”), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally”). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.
Download or read book Being Inclined written by Mark Sinclair and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at the work of Feĺix Ravaisson, France's most influential philosopher in the second half of the 19th century, Sinclair offers a study of Ravaisson's masterpiece 'Of Habit' (1838) in its intellectual context, and demonstrates its continued importance for contemporary thought.
Download or read book Properties Powers and Structures written by Alexander Bird and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the phrase "metaphysics of science" has been used from time to time, it has only recently begun to denote a specific research area where metaphysics meets philosophy of science—and the sciences themselves. The essays in this volume demonstrate that metaphysics of science is an innovative field of research in its own right. The principle areas covered are: The modal metaphysics of properties: What is the essential nature of natural properties? Are all properties essentially categorical? Are they all essentially dispositions, or are some categorical and others dispositional? Realism in mathematics and its relation to science: What does a naturalistic commitment of scientific realism tell us about our commitments to mathematical entities? Can this question be framed in something other than a Quinean philosophy? Dispositions and their relation to causation: Can we generate an account of causation that takes dispositionality as fundamental? And if we take dispositions as fundamental (and hence not having a categorical causal basis), what is the ontological ground of dispositions? Pandispositionalism: Could all properties be dispositional in nature? Natural kinds: Are there natural kinds, and if so what account of their nature should we give? For example, do they have essences? Here we consider how these issues may be illuminated by considering examples from reals science, in particular biochemistry and neurobiology.
Download or read book Powers written by Julia Jorati and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does a wine glass break when you drop it, whereas a steel goblet does not? The answer may seem obvious: glass, unlike steel, is fragile. This is an explanation in terms of a power or disposition: the glass breaks because it possesses a particular power, namely fragility. Seemingly simple, such intrinsic dispositions or powers have fascinated philosophers for centuries. A power's central task is explaining why a thing changes in the ways that it does, rather than in other ways: powers should explain why an acorn turns into an oak tree, not a sunflower, or why fire burns wood, and wood can catch fire. This volume examines the twists and turns of the fascinating history of a difficult philosophical concept, focusing on the metaphysical sense of "powers"--that is, the powers that are invoked in the explanation of natural changes and activities. Scholars probe the views of thinkers from antiquity to the present day: Anaxagoras, Plato, the Stoics, Abelard, Anselm, Henry of Ghent, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Shepherd, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and numerous others. In addition, the volume contains four short reflection essays that examine the concept of powers from the perspective of disciplines other than philosophy, namely history of music, West African religions, history of chemistry, and history of art. The history of philosophy brims with controversies surrounding the concept of power, and these controversies have not diminished--particularly as potentialities or powers see a revival in contemporary analytic metaphysics. Hence, telling the history of philosophical theories of powers means exploring the trajectory of a concept whose importance to the past and present of philosophy can hardly be overstated.
Download or read book Powers Time and Free Will written by Christopher J. Austin and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together twelve original contributions by leading scholars on the much-debated issues of what is free will and how can we exercise it in a world governed by laws of nature. Which conception of laws of nature best fits with how we conceive of free will? And which constraints does our conception of the laws of nature place on how we think of free will? The metaphysics of causation and the metaphysics of dispositions are also explored in this edited volume, in relation to whether they may or may not be game-changers in how we think about both free will and the laws of nature. The volume presents the views of a range of international experts on these issues, and aims at providing the reader with novel approaches to a core problem in philosophy. The target audience is composed by academics and scholars who are interested in an original and contemporary approach to these long-debated issues. Chapters [2] and [4] are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Download or read book Power and Influence written by Richard Corry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-25 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 Powers and Liberties written by John A. Hall and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dispositions and Powers written by Toby Friend and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-30 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As we understand them, dispositions are relatively uncontroversial 'predicatory' properties had by objects disposed in certain ways. By contrast, powers are hypothetical 'ontic' properties posited in order to explain dispositional behaviour. Chapter 1 outlines this distinction in more detail. Chapter 2 offers a summary of the issues surrounding analysis of dispositions and various strategies in contemporary literature to address them, including one of our own. Chapter 3 describes some of the important questions facing the metaphysics of powers including why they're worth positing, and how they might metaphysically explain laws of nature and modality.
Download or read book Powers Parts and Wholes written by Christopher J. Austin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-25 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a fresh exploration of the parts–whole relations within a power and among powers. While the metaphysics of powers has been extensively examined in the literature, powers have yet to be studied from the perspective of their mereology. Powers are often assumed to be atomic, and yet what they can do—and what can happen to them—is complex. But if powers are simple, how can they have complex manifestations? Can powers have parts? According to which rules of composition do powers compose into powers? Given the centrality of powers in current scientific as well as philosophical thought, recognizing and understanding the ontological differences between atomic and mereologically complex powers is important, for both philosophy and science. The first part of this book explores how powers divide; the second part, how powers compose. The final part showcases some specific study cases in the domains of quantum mechanics and psychology. Powers, Parts and Wholes will be of interest to professional philosophers and graduate students working in metaphysics, philosophy of science and logic.
Download or read book The Powers Metaphysic written by Neil E. Williams and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-12 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Systematic metaphysics is defined by its task of solving metaphysical problems through the repeated application of single, fundamental ontology. The dominant contemporary metaphysic is that of neo-Humeanism, built on a static ontology typified by its rejection of basic causal and modalfeatures. This book offers a radically distinct metaphysic, one that turns the status quo on its head. Starting with a foundational ontology of inherently causal properties known as "powers", Neil E. Williams develops a metaphysic that appeals to powers in explanations of causation, persistence,laws, and modality. Powers are properties that have their causal natures internal to them: they are responsible for the effects in the world. A unique account of powers is advanced, one that understands this internal nature in terms of blueprint of potential interaction types. After the presentationof the powers ontology, Williams offers solutions to broad metaphysical puzzles, some of which take on different forms in light of the new tools that are available. The defence of the ontology comes from the virtues of metaphysic it can be used to develop. Particular attention is paid to theproblems of causation and persistence, simultaneously solving them as is casts them in a new light. The resultant powers metaphysic is offered as a systematic alternative to neo-Humeanism.
Download or read book The Overstory A Novel written by Richard Powers and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Over One Year on the New York Times Bestseller List A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year "The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period." —Ann Patchett The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
Download or read book A Cosmological Reformulation of Anselm s Proof That God Exists written by Richard Campbell and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Richard Campbell reformulates Anselm’s proof to show that factual evidence confirmed by modern cosmology validly implies that God exists. Anselm’s proof, which was never the “ontological argument” attributed to him, emerges as engaging with current philosophical issues concerning existence and scientific explanation.
Download or read book Artificial Dispositions written by William A. Bauer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-12-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We inhabit a world not only full of natural dispositions independent of human design, but also artificial dispositions created by our technological prowess. How do these dispositions, found in automation, computation, and artificial intelligence applications, differ metaphysically from their natural counterparts? This collection investigates artificial dispositions: what they are, the roles they play in artificial systems, and how they impact our understanding of the nature of reality, the structure of minds, and the ethics of emerging technologies. It is divided into four parts covering the following interconnected themes: (i) Artificial and Natural Dispositions, (ii) Artificial Systems and Their Dispositions, (iii) Agency, Mind, and Artificial Dispositions, and (iv) Artificial Moral Dispositions. This is a groundbreaking and thought-provoking resource for any student or scholar of philosophy of science, contemporary metaphysics, applied ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of technology.
