Download or read book Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics written by D. M. Armstrong and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-29 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tries to present in brief compass a metaphysical system, matured (as is hoped) over many years. By metaphysics is understood an account of the fundamental categories of being, such notions as property, relation, causality. These notions are more abstract than the results of scientific inquiry, and are controversial among scientists as well as among philosophers. The book sprang from lectures given to graduate students, and has deliberately been kept at an informal level. It includes some explanations not required in a book for professional philosophers. The argument is developed in sixteen short chapters. It is argued that the world is a world of states of affairs, involving universals and particulars. The notion of finding suitable truthmakers for truths grows in importance as the book proceeds.
Download or read book Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics written by David Malet Armstrong and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics written by D. M. Armstrong and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-07-29 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Armstrong sets out his metaphysical system in a set of concise and lively chapters each dealing with one aspect of the world. He begins with the assumption that all that exists is the physical world of space-time. On this foundation he constructs a coherent metaphysical scheme that gives plausible answers to many of the great problems of metaphysics. He gives accounts of properties, relations, and particulars; laws of nature; modality; abstract objects such as numbers; and time and mind.
Download or read book Science and Common Experience written by Stephen Coburn Pepper and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Laws and Lawmakers written by Marc Lange and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-09 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What distinguishes laws of nature from ordinary facts? What are the "lawmakers": the facts in virtue of which the laws are laws? How can laws be necessary, yet contingent? Lange provocatively argues that laws are distinguished by their necessity, which is grounded in primitive subjunctive facts, while also providing a non-technical and accessible survey of the field.
Download or read book The Metaphysics of Perception written by Paul Coates and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-09-12 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an important study in the philosophy of the mind; drawing on the work of philosopher Wilfrid Sellars and the theory of critical realism to develop a novel argument for understanding perception and metaphysics.
Download or read book Metaphysics and Scientific Realism written by Francesco Federico Calemi and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Malet Armstrong (8 July 1926–13 May 2014) has been one of the most influential contemporary metaphysicians working in the analytic tradition and surely the greatest 20th century Australian philosopher. His main merit is to have reestablished metaphysics as a respectable branch of philosophy placing it at the centre of the philosophical debate, and giving it the status of an authoritative and competent interlocutor of both rational and empirical sciences. By means of a rigorously argumentative approach and a sharp prose, Armstrong has built a whole metaphysical system, that is, a comprehensive and unified picture of the fundamental structure of the world. The various chapters of the book address the key issues concerning Armstrong' view about the problem of universals, the nature of states of affairs, the ontological ground of possibility, nomic necessity, and dispositions, the truthmaker theory, and the theory of mind. This volume aims to celebrate Armstrong’s memory bringing new understanding, and hopefully stimulating more work, on his philosophy, with the conviction that it constitutes an invaluable heritage for contemporary research in metaphysics.
Download or read book Tales of the Mighty Dead written by Robert Brandom and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A work in the history of systematic philosophy that is itself animated by a systematic philosophic aspiration, this book by one of the most prominent American philosophers working today provides an entirely new way of looking at the development of Western philosophy from Descartes to the present. Brandom begins by setting out a historical context and outlining a methodological rationale for his enterprise. Then, in chapters on Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Frege, Heidegger, and Sellars, he pursues the most fundamental philosophical issues concerning intentionality, and therefore mindedness itself, revealing an otherwise invisible set of overlapping themes and explanatory strategies. Variously functionalist, inferentialist, holist, normative, and social pragmatist in character, the explanations of intentionality offered by these philosophers, taken together, form a distinctive tradition. The fresh perspective afforded by this tradition enriches our understanding of the philosophical topics being addressed, provides a new conceptual vantage point for viewing our philosophical ancestors, and highlights central features of the sort of rationality that consists in discerning a philosophical tradition--and it does so by elaborating a novel, concrete instance of just such an enterprise.
Download or read book Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics written by Marcus Willaschek and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detailed exploration of the Transcendental Dialectic, in which Kant uncovers the sources of metaphysics in human reason.
Download or read book The Problem of Universals in Contemporary Philosophy written by Gabriele Galluzzo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-16 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problem of universals is one of the most fascinating and enduring topics in the history of metaphysics, with roots in ancient and medieval philosophy. The contributors to this book provide a critical, up-to-date and original overview of the contemporary debate on the problem of universals.
Download or read book Thinking in the Light of Time written by Karin de Boer and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heidegger's lifelong project of exposing and deconstructing the presuppositions governing the history of metaphysics begins with the conception of temporality outlined in Being and Time, a work which Heidegger never completed. In Thinking in the Light of Time, de Boer not only traces the notion of temporality developed in Being and Time, but goes beyond the published portion of that work to offer a reconstruction of its pivotal third division based on a systematic interpretation of other works, many of which have only recently been published. Emphasizing the continuity between Heidegger's early and later thought, de Boer provides a systematic interpretation of Heidegger's work as a whole. Hegel's claim to have perfected metaphysics is central to de Boer's concern with Heidegger's attempt to deconstruct metaphysics. Heidegger's struggles to come to terms with Hegel's speculative science, especially the manner in which Hegel regards his own project as founded upon an understanding of time, is thus one of the focal points of de Boer's interpretation of Heidegger's deconstruction of metaphysics. De Boer argues that it is especially in his reading of Hegel that one sees how deeply Heidegger is committed to the attempt to do justice to the radical finitude of human life and its possible philosophical self-interpretations. Her reading of Heidegger shows how his works paved the way for the deconstructive efforts that guide Derrida's thought.
Download or read book Being Freedom and Method written by John A. Keller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Keller presents a set of new essays on ontology, time, freedom, God, and philosophical method. Our understanding of these subjects has been greatly advanced, since the 1970s, by the work of Peter van Inwagen. In this volume leading philosophers engage with his work, and van Inwagen himself offers selective responses.
Download or read book Contemporary Natural Philosophy and Philosophies Part 2 written by Marcin J. Schroeder and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2020-11-19 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern technology has eliminated barriers posed by geographic distances between people around the globe, making the world more interdependent. However, in spite of global collaboration within research domains, fragmentation among research fields persists and even escalates. Disintegrated knowledge has become subservient to the competition in the technological and economic race, leading in the direction chosen not by reason and intellect but rather by the preferences of politics and markets. To restore the authority of knowledge in guiding humanity, we have to reconnect its scattered isolated parts and offer an evolving and diverse but shared vision of objective reality connecting the sciences and other knowledge domains and informed by and in communication with ethical and esthetic thinking and being. This collection of articles responds to the second call from the journal Philosophies to build a new, networked world of knowledge with domain specialists from different disciplines interacting and connecting with the rest of the knowledge-producing and knowledge-consuming communities in an inclusive, extended natural-philosophic, human-centric manner. In this process of reconnection, scientific and philosophical investigations enrich each other, with sciences informing philosophies about the best current knowledge of the world, both natural and human-made, while philosophies scrutinize the ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations of sciences.
Download or read book Fields of Sense written by Markus Gabriel and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-14 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is still a widespread assumption that metaphysics and ontology deal with roughly the same questions. They are supposed to be concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and to give an account of the meaning of 'existence' or 'being' in line with the broadest possible metaphysical assumptions. Against this, Markus Gabriel proposes a radical form of ontological pluralism that divorces ontology from metaphysics, understood as the most fundamental theory of absolutely everything (the world). He argues that the concept of existence is incompatible with the existence of the world and therefore proposes his innovative no-world-view. In the context of recent debates surrounding new realism and speculative realism, Gabriel also develops the outlines of a realist epistemological pluralism. His idea here is that there are different forms of knowledge that correspond to the plurality of fields of sense that must be acknowledged in order to avoid the trap of metaphysics.
Download or read book What Truth Is written by Mark Jago and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-27 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Jago presents and defends a novel theory of what truth is, in terms of the metaphysical notion of truthmaking. This is the relation which holds between a truth and some entity in the world, in virtue of which that truth is true. By coming to an understanding of this relation, he argues, we gain better insight into the metaphysics of truth. The first part of the book discusses the property being true, and how we should understand it in terms of truthmaking. The second part focuses on truthmakers, the worldly entities which make various kinds of truths true, and how they do so. Jago argues for a metaphysics of states of affairs, which account for things having properties and standing in relations. The third part analyses the logic and metaphysics of the truthmaking relation itself, and links it to the metaphysical concept of grounding. The final part discusses consequences of the theory for language and logic. Jago shows how the theory delivers a novel and useful theory of propositions, the entities which are true or false, depending on how things are. A notable feature of this approach is that it avoids the Liar paradox and other puzzling paradoxes of truth.
Download or read book Exposing the Roots of Constructivism written by R. Scott Smith and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-10-20 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constructivism dominates over other theories of knowledge in much of western academia, especially the humanities and social sciences. In Exposing the Roots of Constructivism: Nominalism and the Ontology of Knowledge, R. Scott Smith argues that constructivism is linked to the embrace of nominalism, the theory that everything is particular and located in space and time. Indeed, nominalism is sufficient for a view to be constructivist. However, the natural sciences still enjoy great prestige from the “fact-value split.” They are often perceived as giving us knowledge of the facts of reality, and not merely our constructs. In contrast, ethics and religion, which also have been greatly influenced by nominalism, usually are perceived as giving us just our constructs and opinions. Yet, even the natural sciences have embraced nominalism, and Smith shows that this will undermine knowledge in those disciplines as well. Indeed, the author demonstrates that, at best, nominalism leaves us with only interpretations, but at worst, it undermines all knowledge whatsoever. However, there are many clear examples of knowledge we do have in the many different disciplines, and therefore those must be due to a different ontology of properties. Thus, nominalism should be rejected. In its place, the author defends a kind of Platonic realism about properties.
Download or read book On the Elements of Ontology written by D. W. Mertz and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central to Elements is an assay of the attributional union properties and relations have with their subjects, a topic historically left metaphorical. The work critiques eight Aristotelian assumptions concerning attribute dependence and ‘inherence’, per se subjects (‘substances’), attributes as agent-organizers, and unity-by-a-shared-one. Groups of these assumptions are seen to yield contradiction, vicious regress, or other problems. This analysis, joined with insights from an assay of ubiquitous structure, motivate ten theses explicating attribution and its primary ontic status. The theses detail: attributes proper as individuated instances, structure as instance-generated facts and their two forms of composition, the conditioning role and universal nature of instances’ component intensions, the primacy of attribute instances for generating all forms of composition and complex entities, and identity and indiscernibility criteria for the latter. Principal is the insight that attribution is intension-determined combinatorial agency. It is its systematizing implications that provide solutions to classic problems, e.g., Composition, Individuation, and Universals, and in net generate a comprehensive one-category structuralist ontology.
