Download or read book Metaphysics of Goodness written by Robert Cummings Neville and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-09-27 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Metaphysics of Goodness, Robert Cummings Neville extends Alfred North Whitehead's project of cultural studies, which was based on a new metaphysics that Whitehead developed in Adventures of Ideas. Neville's focus is value or goodness in many modes. The metaphysics treated in this book derive from the Platonic and Confucian traditions, with significant modifications of Whitehead, Peirce, Dewey, Confucius, Xunzi, and Zhou Dunyi. Part one develops a theory of form based on a metaphysics of harmony. Part two elaborates a theory of art based on a metaphysics of beauty. Part three sketches a theory of personhood based on a metaphysics of obligation. Part four discusses civilization in a systematic way based on a metaphysics of flourishing. Throughout the book, Neville elaborates a theory of interpretation that is inspired by Peirce, Dewey, and Xunzi but is not limited to their ideas. While the reasoning of the book is concise, it employs methodologies from many kinds of philosophy, art criticism, ethics, and cultural studies, and sees philosophy as needing to learn from all these disciplines.
Download or read book The Metaphysics of Good and Evil written by David S. Oderberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-22 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Metaphysics of Good and Evil is the first, full-length contemporary defence, from the perspective of analytic philosophy, of the Scholastic theory of good and evil – the theory of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and most medieval and Thomistic philosophers. Goodness is analysed as obedience to nature. Evil is analysed as the privation of goodness. Goodness, surprisingly, is found in the non-living world, but in the living world it takes on a special character. The book analyses various kinds of goodness, showing how they fit into the Scholastic theory. The privation theory of evil is given its most comprehensive contemporary defence, including an account of truthmakers for truths of privation and an analysis of how causation by privation should be understood. In the end, all evil is deviance – a departure from the goodness prescribed by a thing’s essential nature. Key Features: Offers a comprehensive defence of a venerable metaphysical theory, conducted using the concepts and methods of analytic philosophy. Revives a much neglected approach to the question of good and evil in their most general nature. Shows how Aristotelian-Thomistic theory has more than historical relevance to a fundamental philosophical issue, but can be applied in a way that is both defensible and yet accessible to the modern philosopher. Provides what, for the Scholastic philosopher, is arguably the only solid metaphysical foundation for a separate treatment of the origins of morality.
Download or read book Being and Goodness written by Scott Charles MacDonald and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In exploring this tradition of philosophical reflection on the nature of goodness, the twelve essays in this book (all but two published here for the first time) present some of the best recent historical scholarship in...
Download or read book Sense and Goodness Without God written by Richard Carrier and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2005-02-23 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If God does not exist, then what does? Is there good and evil, and should we care? How do we know what’s true anyway? And can we make any sense of this universe, or our own lives? Sense and Goodness answers all these questions in lavish detail, without complex jargon. A complete worldview is presented and defended, covering every subject from knowledge to art, from metaphysics to morality, from theology to politics. Topics include free will, the nature of the universe, the meaning of life, and much more, arguing from scientific evidence that there is only a physical, natural world without gods or spirits, but that we can still live a life of love, meaning, and joy.
Download or read book Being and Goodness written by Scott MacDonald and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intuition that there is a necessary connection between being and goodness has guided a philosophical tradition that includes Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas; but surprisingly, the details of this legacy remain relatively unknown. In exploring this tradition of philosophical reflection on the nature of goodness, the twelve essays in this book (all but two published here for the first time) present some of the best recent historical scholarship in medieval philosophy and make available to nonspecialists an array of sophisticated treatments of issues that remain central to metaphysics and philosophical theology. The contributors, leading philosophers and scholars of medieval philosophy, represent a variety of points of view and take diverse methodological approaches. They address the works of figures from Augustine and Boethius to Suarez, Descartes, and Leibniz, but focus particularly on thirteenth-century thinkers, especially Aquinas.
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 1103 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 Metaphysics of Goodness written by Robert Cummings Neville and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Develops a theory of culture based on a metaphysics that elaborates on the Platonic and Confucian traditions. In Metaphysics of Goodness, Robert Cummings Neville extends Alfred North Whitehead’s project of cultural studies, which was based on a new metaphysics that Whitehead developed in Adventures of Ideas. Neville’s focus is value or goodness in many modes. The metaphysics treated in this book derive from the Platonic and Confucian traditions, with significant modifications of Whitehead, Peirce, Dewey, Confucius, Xunzi, and Zhou Dunyi. Part one develops a theory of form based on a metaphysics of harmony. Part two elaborates a theory of art based on a metaphysics of beauty. Part three sketches a theory of personhood based on a metaphysics of obligation. Part four discusses civilization in a systematic way based on a metaphysics of flourishing. Throughout the book, Neville elaborates a theory of interpretation that is inspired by Peirce, Dewey, and Xunzi but is not limited to their ideas. While the reasoning of the book is concise, it employs methodologies from many kinds of philosophy, art criticism, ethics, and cultural studies, and sees philosophy as needing to learn from all these disciplines. “Neville’s work is informed by a lifelong engagement with the most important philosophers in history, including Plato, Aristotle, Whitehead, and Dewey. Here, he offers an important argument that there is beauty not only in how people see the world, but also in the world itself.” — Kevin Schilbrack, Appalachian State University
Download or read book Metaphysics of Goodness written by Robert C. Neville and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Being is Better Than Not Being written by Christopher V. Mirus and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2022-03-18 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his contemplative works on nature, Aristotle twice appeals to the general principle that being is better than not being. Taking his cue from this claim, Christopher V. Mirus offers an extended, systematic account of how Aristotle understands being itself to be good. Mirus begins with the human, examining Aristotle’s well-known claim that the end of a human life is the good of the human substance as such—which turns out to be the good of the human capacity for thought. Human thought, however, is not concerned with human affairs alone. It is also contemplative, and contemplation is oriented toward the beauty of its objects. In each of the three branches of contemplative thought—mathematics, natural science, and theology—the intelligibility of being renders it beautiful to thought. Both in nature and in human life, moreover, the being that is beautiful through its intelligibility serves also as an end of motion and of action; hence it counts not only as beautiful (kalon), but also as good (agathon). The persistent concern of thought with the beautiful reveals what is at stake for human beings in Aristotle’s larger metaphysics of the good: in the connection between goodness and actuality that structures his natural science and metaphysics, in his explicit claim that being is better than not being, and in his concepts of order and determinacy, which help connect being with goodness. These in turn shed light on his concepts of the complete and the self-sufficient, on his teleological understanding of the four elements, and on the curious role of the honorable in his natural science and metaphysics.
Download or read book Boston Confucianism written by Robert C. Neville and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2000-09-28 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that Confucianism can be important to the contemporary, global conversation of philosophy and should not be confined to an East Asian context.
Download or read book Being is Better Than Not Being written by Christopher V. Mirus and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2022-03-18 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his contemplative works on nature, Aristotle twice appeals to the general principle that being is better than not being. Taking his cue from this claim, Christopher V. Mirus offers an extended, systematic account of how Aristotle understands being itself to be good. Mirus begins with the human, examining Aristotle’s well-known claim that the end of a human life is the good of the human substance as such—which turns out to be the good of the human capacity for thought. Human thought, however, is not concerned with human affairs alone. It is also contemplative, and contemplation is oriented toward the beauty of its objects. In each of the three branches of contemplative thought—mathematics, natural science, and theology—the intelligibility of being renders it beautiful to thought. Both in nature and in human life, moreover, the being that is beautiful through its intelligibility serves also as an end of motion and of action; hence it counts not only as beautiful (kalon), but also as good (agathon). The persistent concern of thought with the beautiful reveals what is at stake for human beings in Aristotle’s larger metaphysics of the good: in the connection between goodness and actuality that structures his natural science and metaphysics, in his explicit claim that being is better than not being, and in his concepts of order and determinacy, which help connect being with goodness. These in turn shed light on his concepts of the complete and the self-sufficient, on his teleological understanding of the four elements, and on the curious role of the honorable in his natural science and metaphysics.
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 Goodness and Justice written by Joseph Mendola and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-10 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Goodness and Justice, Joseph Mendola develops a unified moral theory that defends the hedonism of classical utilitarianism, while evading utilitarianism's familiar difficulties by adopting two modifications. His theory incorporates a developed form of consequentialism. When, as is common, someone is engaged in conflicting group acts, it requires that one perform one's role in that group act that is most beneficent. The theory also holds that overall value is distribution-sensitive, ceding maximum weight to the well-being of the worst-off sections of sentient lives. It is properly congruent with commonsense intuition and required by the true metaphysics of value, by the unconstituted natural good found in our world.
Download or read book Religion Metaphysics and the Postmodern written by Christopher Ben Simpson and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Desmond's original and creative work in metaphysics is attracting more and more attention from philosophers of religion. Putting Desmond in conversation with John D. Caputo, an important philosopher of religion from the Continental tradition, Christopher Ben Simpson casts new light on Desmond's complex, multifaceted, and nuanced thought. The comparative approach allows Simpson to get at the core of recent debates in the philosophy of religion. He develops a rich understanding of how ethics and religion are informed by metaphysics, and contrasts this approach to the decidedly anti-metaphysical stance in Continental philosophy. Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern presents a systematic analysis of Desmond's thought as it advances work on Caputo's thinking and on the philosophy of religion.
Download or read book Evil in Aristotle written by Pavlos Kontos and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides the first full study of Aristotle's notion of evil and sheds light on its content, potential, and influence.
Download or read book Philosophy written by James K. Dew, Jr. and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two experienced educators offer an up-to-date introduction to philosophy from a Christian perspective that covers the four major areas of philosophical thought: epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and ethics. Written from an analytic perspective, the book introduces key concepts and issues within the main areas of philosophical inquiry in a comprehensive yet accessible way, inviting readers on a quest for goodness, truth, and beauty that ultimately points to Jesus as the source of all.
Download or read book Commentary on the Metaphysics written by Saint Thomas Aquinas and published by Aeterna Press. This book was released on with total page 1376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When several things are ordained to one thing, one of them must rule or govern and the rest be ruled or governed, as the Philosopher, teaches in the Politics. This is evident in the union of soul and body, for the soul naturally commands and the body obeys. The same thing is true of the soul’s powers, for the concupiscible and irascible appetites are ruled in a natural order by reason. Now all the sciences and arts are ordained to one thing, namely, to man’s perfection, which is happiness. Hence one of these sciences and arts must be the mistress of all the others, and this rightly lays claim to the name wisdom; for it is the office of the wise man to direct others. Aeterna Press
