Material Beings

Material Beings PDF Author: Peter Van Inwagen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501713035
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
According to Peter van Inwagen, visible inanimate objects do not, strictly speaking, exist. In defending this controversial thesis, he offers fresh insights on such topics as personal identity, commonsense belief, existence over time, the phenomenon of vagueness, and the relation between metaphysics and ordinary language.

Material Beings

Material Beings PDF Author: Peter Van Inwagen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501713035
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
According to Peter van Inwagen, visible inanimate objects do not, strictly speaking, exist. In defending this controversial thesis, he offers fresh insights on such topics as personal identity, commonsense belief, existence over time, the phenomenon of vagueness, and the relation between metaphysics and ordinary language.

Material Beings

Material Beings PDF Author: Peter Van Inwagen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501713027
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
According to Peter van Inwagen, visible inanimate objects do not, strictly speaking, exist. In defending this controversial thesis, he offers fresh insights on such topics as personal identity, commonsense belief, existence over time, the phenomenon of vagueness, and the relation between metaphysics and ordinary language.

Material Beings

Material Beings PDF Author: Peter van Inwagen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801483069
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
In this bold and original book, the author develops a provocative theory about the metaphysics of material objects. According to this view, visible inanimate objects such as ships or mountains or stars do not, strictly speaking, exist.

Material Beings

Material Beings PDF Author: Peter van Inwagen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801483066
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
In this bold and original book, the author develops a provocative theory about the metaphysics of material objects. According to this view, visible inanimate objects such as ships or mountains or stars do not, strictly speaking, exist.

The Material Life of Human Beings

The Material Life of Human Beings PDF Author: Michael Brian Schiffer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134637241
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
In this ground-breaking work, the distinguished anthropological theorist, Michael Brian Schiffer, presents a profound challenge to the social sciences. Through a broad range of examples, he demonstrates how theories of behaviour and communication have too often ignored the fundamental importance of objects in human life. In The Material Life of Human Beings, the author builds upon the premise that the most important feature of human life is not language but the relationships which take place between people and objects. The author shows that artifacts are involved in all modes of human communication - be they visual, auditory or tactile. By creatively folding elements of postmodernist thought into a scientific framework, he creates new concepts and models for understanding and analysing communication and behavior. Challenging established theories within the social sciences, Michael Brian Schiffer offers a reassessment of the centrality of materiality to everyday life.

The Body Divided

The Body Divided PDF Author: Dr Sarah Ferber
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409482847
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Bodies and body parts of the dead have long been considered valuable material for use in medical science. Over time and in different places, they have been dissected, autopsied, investigated, harvested for research and therapeutic purposes, collected to turn into museum and other specimens, and then displayed, disposed of, and exchanged. This book examines the history of such activities, from the early nineteenth century through to the present, as they took place in hospitals, universities, workhouses, asylums and museums in England, Australia and elsewhere. Through a series of case studies, the volume reveals the changing scientific, economic and emotional value of corpses and their contested place in medical science.

Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings

Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings PDF Author: James W. Watts
Publisher: Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts
ISBN: 9781781798843
Category : Books and reading
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
In this volume an international team of scholars address the theme of books as sacred beings from an impressively diverse range of primary material and perspectives. Yet, as a group, they meld to engage and advance previous research to solidify the conclusion that human cultures, especially religious groups, often ritualize bodies as sacred books and books as divine beings. The studies collected here not only increase the range of examples of this phenomenon. They also show the wide variety of ways in which the identity of books, bodies and beings gets both ritualized and theorized. The articles are bracketed by an introduction to the collection, and then by a concluding essay that extrapolates the theme of books as sacred beings on a more general level.

Objects and Persons

Objects and Persons PDF Author: Trenton Merricks
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 019926631X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This work presents a theory about what kind of things exist. Trenton Merricks defends the following criterion for existence of a physical object: that it has a causal role over and above that of its parts.

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings PDF Author: Caspar Henderson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022604470X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
From medieval bestiaries to Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, we’ve long been enchanted by extraordinary animals, be they terrifying three-headed dogs or asps impervious to a snake charmer’s song. But bestiaries are more than just zany zoology—they are artful attempts to convey broader beliefs about human beings and the natural order. Today, we no longer fear sea monsters or banshees. But from the infamous honey badger to the giant squid, animals continue to captivate us with the things they can do and the things they cannot, what we know about them and what we don’t. With The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, Caspar Henderson offers readers a fascinating, beautifully produced modern-day menagerie. But whereas medieval bestiaries were often based on folklore and myth, the creatures that abound in Henderson’s book—from the axolotl to the zebrafish—are, with one exception, very much with us, albeit sometimes in depleted numbers. The Book of Barely Imagined Beings transports readers to a world of real creatures that seem as if they should be made up—that are somehow more astonishing than anything we might have imagined. The yeti crab, for example, uses its furry claws to farm the bacteria on which it feeds. The waterbear, meanwhile, is among nature’s “extreme survivors,” able to withstand a week unprotected in outer space. These and other strange and surprising species invite readers to reflect on what we value—or fail to value—and what we might change. A powerful combination of wit, cutting-edge natural history, and philosophical meditation, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is an infectious and inspiring celebration of the sheer ingenuity and variety of life in a time of crisis and change.

Philosophical Devices

Philosophical Devices PDF Author: David Papineau
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191656259
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This book is designed to explain the technical ideas that are taken for granted in much contemporary philosophical writing. Notions like 'denumerability', 'modal scope distinction', 'Bayesian conditionalization', and 'logical completeness' are usually only elucidated deep within difficult specialist texts. By offering simple explanations that by-pass much irrelevant and boring detail, Philosophical Devices is able to cover a wealth of material that is normally only available to specialists. The book contains four sections, each of three chapters. The first section is about sets and numbers, starting with the membership relation and ending with the generalized continuum hypothesis. The second is about analyticity, a prioricity, and necessity. The third is about probability, outlining the difference between objective and subjective probability and exploring aspects of conditionalization and correlation. The fourth deals with metalogic, focusing on the contrast between syntax and semantics, and finishing with a sketch of Gödel's theorem. Philosophical Devices will be useful for university students who have got past the foothills of philosophy and are starting to read more widely, but it does not assume any prior expertise. All the issues discussed are intrinsically interesting, and often downright fascinating. It can be read with pleasure and profit by anybody who is curious about the technical infrastructure of contemporary philosophy.