Download or read book The Determinate World written by David Jalal Hyder and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new interpretation of Hermann von Helmholtz's work on the epistemology of geometry. A detailed analysis of the philosophical arguments of Helmholtz's Erhaltung der Kraft shows that he took physical theories to be constrained by a regulative ideal. They must render nature "completely comprehensible", which implies that all physical magnitudes must be relations among empirically given phenomena. This conviction eventually forced Helmholtz to explain how geometry itself could be so construed. Hyder shows how Helmholtz answered this question by drawing on the theory of magnitudes developed in his research on the colour-space. He argues against the dominant interpretation of Helmholtz's work by suggesting that for the latter, it is less the inductive character of geometry that makes it empirical, and rather the regulative requirement that the system of natural science be empirically closed.
Download or read book Ultimates written by Robert Cummings Neville and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2015 John N. Findlay Award in Metaphysics presented by the Metaphysical Society of America Robert Cummings Neville offers a new theology of the ultimate and a new theory of religion to back it up. The first volume in a trilogy, this book and companion volumes treating existence and religion advance a systematic philosophical theology to address first-order questions found in the array of Axial Age religions. Questions generally arising in the major religious traditions are interrogated with a dialectic of philosophical approaches. This volume begins the project with a consideration of ultimacy defined philosophically and illustrated in a wide range of traditions. To the question of how or why there is something rather than nothing, Neville answers with an elaborate hypothesis about the ontological act of creation that creates all determinate things as related to but different from one another. The result is the claim that there are five ultimates: the ontological act, the form of determinate things, the components of determinate things, the existential location of determinate things relative to one another, and the value-identity of ultimate things, giving rise to five universal religious problematics of ultimacy respectively: the question of existence, the ground of obligation, the quest for wholeness, engaging others, and finding meaning. Neville analyzes what can and cannot be known about each of these ultimates. Readers will find Neville's theory of religion and philosophy a bold one, running counter to dominant trends while richly informed by a long and fruitful engagement with theology, philosophy, and religion, East and West.
Download or read book Hist West Educ Modern West V3 written by James Bowen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume Three of three, this is a reprint of James Bowen's A History of Western Education originally published by Methuen in the 1970s. Volume Three: The Modern West: Europe and the New World. The final volume covers the period of educational dissent, which became conspicuous in the early seventeenth century and reached crisis proportions in the late twentieth, when the dominant ideologies of progress and equality, generated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were questioned for the first time on a widespread, popular scale.
Download or read book A Theology Primer written by Robert Cummings Neville and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1991-10-02 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Advaita Epistemology and Metaphysics written by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on original translations of passages from the works of three major thinkers of the classical Indian school of Advaita (Sankara, Vacaspati and Sri Harsa), but addressing issues found in Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein and contemporary analytic philosophers, this book argues for a philosophical position it calls 'non-realism'. This is the view that an independent, external world must be assumed if the features of cognition are to be explained, but that it cannot be proved that there is such a world, independently of an appeal to cognition itself. This position is constructed against idealist denials of externality, realist arguments for an independent world and the sceptical denial of the coherence of cognition.
Download or read book The Tao and the Daimon written by Robert Cummings Neville and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1983-06-30 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tao and the Daimon examines a central theme in religious studies: the question of the authority and authenticity of traditional religious faith and practice (tao) in light of the challenge from the spirit of critical reason (Socrates' daimon). From a non-judgmental, historical standpoint, it develops the dialectical relation between religion and rational inquiry. Neville employs a philosophical system to set a task for reflection, making it possible to see how Eastern and Western religious traditions differ, overlap, contradict, and reinforce one another. The central chapters are detailed studies of theologically interesting elements in Christianity, Buddhism, taoism, and Neoconfucianism. How can one judge of the higher truths of another religion without having practiced it? Can the tao and the daimon, after all, be reconciled purely in the conceptual realm of speculative philosophy? Neville recognizes the very real differences between conceptualizing and practicing and the very real differences in understanding that can result. At the same time, he transcends the problem by identifying (and exemplifying in his own work) speculative philosophy as a tao in itself, "a new locus of religious significance, our own scholarly interpretation, new creations of the holy out of practiced scholarly piety toward the old."
Download or read book Spinoza s Dream written by David Weissman and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-04-25 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meaning (significance) and nature are this book’s principal topics. They seem an odd couple, like raisins and numbers, though they elide when meanings of a global sort—ideologies and religions, for example—promote ontologies that subordinate nature. Setting one against the other makes reality contentious. It signifies workmates and a coal face to miners, gluons to physicists, prayer and redemption to priests. Are there many realities, or many perspectives on one? The answer I prefer is the comprehensive naturalism anticipated by Aristotle and Spinoza: "natura naturans, natura naturata." Nature naturing is an array of mutually conditioning material processes in spacetime. Each structure or event—storm clouds forming, nature natured—is self-differentiating, self-stabilizing, and sometimes self-disassembling; each alters or transforms a pre-existing state of affairs. This surmise anticipated discoveries and analyses to which neither thinker had access, though physics and biology confirm their hypothesis beyond reasonable doubt. Hence the question this book considers: Is reality divided:nature vrs. lived experience? Or is experience, with all its meanings and values, the complex expression of natural processes?
Download or read book The Quantum Mechanics of Minds and Worlds written by Jeffrey A. Barrett and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1999-12-09 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeffrey Barrett presents the most comprehensive study yet of a problem that has puzzled physicists and philosophers since the 1930s. The standard theory of quantum mechanics is in one sense the most successful physical theory ever, predicting the behaviour of the basic constituents of all physical things; no other theory has ever made such accurate empirical predictions. However, if one tries to understand the theory as providing a complete and accurate framework for the description of the behaviour of all physical interactions, it becomes evident that the theory is ambiguous, or even logically inconsistent. The most notable attempt to formulate the theory so as to deal with this problem, the quantum measurement problem, was initiated by Hugh Everett III in the 1950s. Barrett gives a careful and challenging examination and evaluation of the work of Everett and those who have followed him. His informal approach, minimizing technicality, will make the book accessible and illuminating for philosophers and physicists alike. Anyone interested in the interpretation of quantum mechanics should read it.
Download or read book The Highroad Around Modernism written by Robert Cummings Neville and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1992-09-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussions of modernism and postmodernism in philosophy and the arts are usually based on a narrow reading of the Western tradition and are not conscious of the narrowness. The modern period, beginning with the European Renaissance, spawned many developments, not just the modernist one in terms of which the tradition has been read. From the standpoint of the highroad around modernism, both modernism and post-modernism look like nothing more than two late modern movements, perhaps too preoccupied with themselves and their historical place to engage a swiftly changing world containing more than the Western tradition. The Highroad Around Modernism develops and defends an explicitly non-modernist and non-postmodernist extension of modernity applicable to the problems of world-wide cultural interactions.
Download or read book Philosophies of Nature The Human Dimension written by Robert S. Cohen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophical understandings of Nature and Human Nature. Classical Greek and modern West, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, by 14 authors, including Robert Neville, Stanley Rosen, David Eckel, Livia Kohn, Tienyu Cao, Abner Shimoney, Alfred Tauber, Krzysztof Michalski, Lawrence Cahoone, Stephen Scully, Alan Olson and Alfred Ferrarin. Dedicated to the phenomenological ecology of Erazim Kohák, with 10 of his essays and a full bibliography. Overall theme: on the question of the moral sense of nature.
Download or read book Freedom s Embrace written by J. Melvin Woody and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To be free is to escape all limitations and obstacles&—or so we think at first. But if we probe further, we discover that freedom embraces its own necessities, a set of conditions without which it could not exist. Freedom's Embrace explores these necessities of freedom. J. Melvin Woody surveys competing conceptions of freedom and traces debates about the nature and reality of freedom to confusions about knowledge, humanity, and nature that are rooted in some of the most fundamental assumptions of modern Western thought. The preemption of freedom as an exclusively human privilege with all nature relegated to mechanical necessity is a fatal error that renders both humanity and nature equally unintelligible. What distinguishes human beings from other animals is not freedom but the use of symbols, which vastly extends the range of available options and enables us to envision freedom as an ideal by which customary institutions and norms may be judged and transformed. By carefully surveying its necessary conditions and limitations, Woody reconciles the salient competing conceptions of freedom and weaves them together into a richer and broader theory that resolves old controversies and opens the way toward an ethics of freedom that can meet the challenges of relativism and nihilism that arise from recognizing the historicity and malleability of culture.
Download or read book Modal Matters written by Phillip Bricker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-16 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together his work from four decades, Phillip Bricker provides a comprehensive account of modal reality - the realm of possible worlds - from a Humean perspective, with excursions into neighboring topics in metaphysics. Many of the chapters in this volume focus on aspects of David Lewis's metaphysics and his defence of modal realism, sometimes further developing and defending Lewis's views, sometimes deviating from them in substantial ways. The volume is presented in four parts: part one sketches an account of reality as a whole, both the mathematical and the modal, defending a form of plenitudinous realism; part two presents and defends a realist theory of concrete possible worlds with an absolute ontological distinction between the actual and the merely possible; part three presents and defends a Humean account of modal plenitude, formulating and endorsing principles that guarantee a plenitude of recombination, of possible structures, and of alien contents; and part four applies the Humean account to truthmaking, mereology, spacetime, and quantities. An uncompromising Humean, Bricker shows that holding fast to Humean strictures leads to views that differ in radical ways from those prevalent among contemporary metaphysicians.
Download or read book Quality and the Birth of Quantity in Hegel s Science of Logic written by Stephen Houlgate and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hegel on Being provides an authoritative treatment of Hegel's entire logic of being. Stephen Houlgate presents the Science of Logic as an important and neglected text within Hegel's oeuvre that should hold a more significant place in the history of philosophy. In the Science of Logic, Hegel set forth a distinctive conception of the most fundamental forms of being through ideas on quality, quantity and measure. Exploring the full trajectory of Hegel's logic of being from quality to measure, this two-volume work by a preeminent Hegel scholar situates Hegel's text in relation to the work of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Frege. Volume I: Quality and the Birth of Quantity in Hegel's 'Science of Logic' covers all material on the purpose and method of Hegel's dialectical logic and charts the crucial transition from the concept of quality to that of quantity, as well as providing an original account of Hegel's critique of Kant's antinomies across two chapters.
Download or read book The Vindication of Nothingness written by Marco Simionato and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-11-17 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The philosophical question of nothingness has often been controversial. The main core of the question is the use of ‘nothing’ or ‘nothingness’ as a noun phrase rather than a quantifier phrase. This work deals with the question of nothingness and metaphysical nihilism in analytic philosophy. After evaluating an account of nothingness based on the notion of an empty possible world, the present work proposes two original arguments for metaphysical nihilism. With a preface by Graham Priest. “Simionato’s book delivers a welcome deepening of our understanding of nothing.” Graham Priest
Download or read book Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 8 written by Karen Bennett and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. OSM offers a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. Besides independent essays, volumes will often contain a critical essay on a recent book, or a symposium that allows participants to respond to one another's criticisms and questions. Anyone who wants to know what's happening in metaphysics can start here.
Download or read book The World s Greatest Literature written by and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Defining Religion written by Robert Cummings Neville and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a new orientation to philosophy of religion and a new theory of how religion ought to be defined. In this collection of essays, written over the past decade, Robert Cummings Neville addresses contemporary debates about the concept of religion and the importance of the comparative method in theology, while advancing and defending his own original definition of religion. Nevilles hypothesis is that religion is a cognitive, existential, and practical engagement of ultimate realitiesfive ultimate conditions of existence that need to be engaged by human beings. The essays, which range from formal articles to invited lectures, develop this hypothesis and explore its ramifications in religious experience, philosophical theology, religious studies, and the works of important thinkers in philosophy of religion. Defining Religion is an excellent introduction to Nevilles work, especially to the systematic philosophical theology presented in his magisterial three-volume set Philosophical Theology.
