Download or read book David Lewis written by Daniel Nolan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Lewis's work is of fundamental importance in many areas of philosophical inquiry and there are few areas of Anglo-American philosophy where his impact has not been felt. Lewis's philosophy also has a rare unity: his views form a comprehensive philosophical system, answering a broad range of questions in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of action and many other areas. This breadth of Lewis's work, however, has meant that it is difficult to know where to start in Lewis's work and a casual reader may often miss some of the illuminating connections between apparently quite disparate pieces of Lewis's work. This book aims to make this body of work more accessible to a general philosophical readership, while also providing a unified overview of the many contributions Lewis has made to contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. The book can be divided into four parts. The first part examines Lewis's metaphysical picture - one of the areas where he has had the greatest impact and also the framework for the rest of his theories. The second section discusses Lewis's important contributions in the philosophy of mind, language and meaning. The third part explores some of Lewis's work in decision theory, metaethics and applied ethics, areas where his work in not necessarily as widely appreciated, but in which he has done a range of work that is both accessible and important. The final section focuses on Lewis's distinctive philosophical method, perhaps one of his most significant legacies, which combines naturalism with "common-sense" theorizing.

Download or read book Dispositions and Causes written by Toby Handfield and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-02-05 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the analysis of causal relations has become a topic of central importance in analytic philosophy. More recently, dispositional properties have also become objects of intense study. Both of these phenomena appear to be intimately related to counterfactual conditionals and other modal phenomena such as objective chance, but little work has been done to directly relate them. Dispositions and Causes contains ten essays by scholars working in both metaphysics and in philosophy of science, examining the relation between dispositional and causal concepts. Particular issues discussed include the possibility of reducing dispositions to causes, and vice versa; the possibility of a nominalist theory of causal powers; the attempt to reduce all metaphysical necessity to dispositional properties; the relationship between dispositions, causes, and laws of nature; the role of causal capacities in explaining the success of scientific inquiry; the grounding of dispositions and causes in objective chances; and the type of causal power required for free agency. The introductory chapter contains a detailed overview of recent work in the area, providing a helpful entry to the literature for non-specialists.

Download or read book A Companion to Metaphysics written by Jaegwon Kim and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-03-12 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fully extended and revised, A Companion to Metaphysics 2ndEdition includes a section of detailed review essays fromrenowned metaphysicians, and the addition of more than 30 newencyclopedic entries, taking the number of entries to over 300. Includes revisions to existing encyclopedic entries Features more than 30 all-new "A to Z" entries Offers a section of in-depth, essays from renownedmetaphysicians Provides the most complete and up-to-date reference guide forstudents and professionals alike

Download or read book A Basic Theory of Everything written by Atle Ottesen Søvik and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-04-04 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the basic building blocks of the world? This book presents a naturalistic theory saying that the universe and everything in it can be reduced to three fundamental entities: a field, a set of values that can be actualized at different places in the field, and an actualizer of the values. The theory is defended by using it to answer the main questions in metaphysics, such as: What is causality, existence, laws of nature, consciousness, thinking, free will, time, mathematical entities, ethical values, etc.? The theory is compared with the main alternatives and argued to solve problems better than the existing theories. Several new theories are suggested, such as how to understand mental causation, free will and the truth of ethics and mathematics.

Download or read book Dispositions written by R. Tuomela and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology consists of a collection of papers on the nature of dis positions and the role of disposition concepts in scientific theories. I have tried to make the collection as representative as possible, except that problems specifically connected with dispositions in various special sciences are relatively little discussed. Most of these articles have been previously published. The papers by Mackie, Essler and Trapp, Fetzer (in Section 11), Levi, and Tuomela appear here for the first time, and are simultaneously published in Synthese 34, No. 4, which is a special issue on dispositions. Of the previously published material it should be emphasized that the papers by Hempel and Fisk have been extensively revised specially for this anthology. The papers are grouped in four sections, partlyon the basis of their content. However, due to the complexity of the issues involved, there is considerable overlap in content between the different sections, especially between Sections land 11. I wish to thank Professors James Fetzer and Carl G. Hempel for helpful advicc in compiling this anthology.

Download or read book Dispositions written by Stephen Mumford and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mumford puts forward a new theory of dispositions, showing how central their role in metaphysics and philosophy of science is. Much of our understanding of the physical and psychological world is expressed in terms of dispositional properties--from the spin of a sub-atomic particle to the solubility of sugar. Mumford discusses what it means to say that something has a property of this kind and how dispositions can possibly be real things in the world.

Download or read book Dispositions and Causal Powers written by Bruno Gnassounou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dispositions are everywhere. We say that a wall is hard, that water quenches thirst and is transparent, that dogs can swim and oak trees can let their leaves fall, and that acid has the power to corrode metals. All these statements express attributions of dispositions, be they physical, physiological or psychological, yet there is much philosophical debate about how far, if at all, dispositional predicates can have complete meaning or figure in causal explanations. This collection of essays, by leading international researchers, examine the case for realism with respect to dispositions and causal powers in both metaphysics and science. Among the issues debated in this book is whether dispositions can be analyzed in terms of conditionals, whether all dispositions have a so-called categorical basis and, if they do, what is the relation between the disposition and its basis.

Download or read book The Matter of Chance written by D. H. Mellor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-02 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Statistical techniques and theories have become widely applied in the physical, biological and social sciences. This book deals not so much with statistical methods as with the central concept of chance, or statistical probability, which statistical theories apply to nature.

Download or read book Dispositions written by D.M. Armstrong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-03-11 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. Dispositions: A Debate is an extended dialogue between three distinguished philosophers - D.M. Armstrong, C.B. Martin and U.T. Place - on the many problems associated with dispositions, which reveals their own distinctive accounts of the nature of dispositions. These are then linked to other issues such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation.

Download or read book Ceterus Paribus Laws written by John Earman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2002 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural and social sciences seem very often, though usually only implicitly, to hedge their laws by ceteris paribus clauses - a practice which is philosophically very hard to understand because such clauses seem to render the laws trivial and unfalsifiable. After early worries the issue is vigorously discussed in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind since ca. 15 years. This volume collects the most prominent philosophers of science in the field and presents a lively, controversial, but well-integrated, highly original and up-to-date discussion of the issue. It will be the reference book in the coming years concerning ceteris paribus laws.

Download or read book Natural Laws as Dispositions written by Florian Fischer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-09-10 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book provides a novel account of laws of nature via dispositions. Laws of nature play a paramount role in philosophy, science and everyday life. Understanding laws of nature is philosophically interesting on its own right but also many important notions belonging to philosophy of science, like causation, prediction and explanation, are intimately related to the laws of nature. The book outlines the alleged characteristics of the laws of nature and introduces the main families of theories of laws of nature – neo-humean, ADT and dispositional theories. It then develops an account of dispositions the `triadic process picture of dispositions’ (TPD) and applies it to the debate about laws of nature. Finally, the (TPD) account of the necessity of the laws of nature is presented: laws of nature are naturally necessary and metaphysically contingent. Thus the book provides an introduction to the debates about laws of nature as well as dispositions, while at the same time developing a novel theory and thus is interesting for the beginner as well as expert in these fields.

Download or read book Natural Law and the Nature of Law written by Jonathan Crowe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a systematic, contemporary defence of the natural law outlook in ethics, politics and jurisprudence.

Download or read book Laws in Nature written by Stephen Mumford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book outlines a major new theory of natural laws and addresses questions currently being debated by metaphysicians.

Download or read book Probability written by D. H. Mellor and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work presents the basic concepts of probability to philosophy students who are new to this area of the subject.

Download or read book A Companion to David Lewis written by Barry Loewer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-02-10 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Companion to David Lewis, Barry Loewer and Jonathan Schaffer bring together top philosophers to explain, discuss, and critically extend Lewis's seminal work in original ways. Students and scholars will discover the underlying themes and complex interconnections woven through the diverse range of his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics, and aesthetics. The first and only comprehensive study of the work of David Lewis, one of the most systematic and influential philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century Contributions shed light on the underlying themes and complex interconnections woven through Lewis's work across his enormous range of influence, including metaphysics, language, logic, epistemology, science, mind, ethics, and aesthetics Outstanding Lewis scholars and leading philosophers working in the fields Lewis influenced explain, discuss, and critically extend Lewis's work in original ways An essential resource for students and researchers across analytic philosophy that covers the major themes of Lewis's work

Download or read book Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology Prefatory note Text Le Z Addenda indexes I Greek terms II Latin terms III German terms IV French terms V Italian terms written by James Mark Baldwin and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 938 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology written by James Mark Baldwin and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 948 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: