Neo-Davidsonian Metaphysics

Neo-Davidsonian Metaphysics PDF Author: Samuel C Wheeler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135086591
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Much contemporary metaphysics, moved by an apparent necessity to take reality to consist of given beings and properties, presents us with what appear to be deep problems requiring radical changes in the common sense conception of persons and the world. Contemporary meta-ethics ignores questions about logical form and formulates questions in ways that make the possibility of correct value judgments mysterious. In this book, Wheeler argues that given a Davidsonian understanding of truth, predication, and interpretation, and given a relativised version of Aristotelian essentialism compatible with Davidson’s basic thinking, many metaphysical problems are not very deep. Likewise, many philosophers' claims that common sense needs to be modified are unfounded. He argues further that a proper consideration of questions of logical form clarifies and illuminates meta-ethical questions. Although the analyses and arguments he gives are often at odds with those at which Davidson arrived, they apply the central Davidsonian insights about semantics, understanding, and interpretation.

Neo-Davidsonian Metaphysics

Neo-Davidsonian Metaphysics PDF Author: Samuel C Wheeler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135086591
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
Much contemporary metaphysics, moved by an apparent necessity to take reality to consist of given beings and properties, presents us with what appear to be deep problems requiring radical changes in the common sense conception of persons and the world. Contemporary meta-ethics ignores questions about logical form and formulates questions in ways that make the possibility of correct value judgments mysterious. In this book, Wheeler argues that given a Davidsonian understanding of truth, predication, and interpretation, and given a relativised version of Aristotelian essentialism compatible with Davidson’s basic thinking, many metaphysical problems are not very deep. Likewise, many philosophers' claims that common sense needs to be modified are unfounded. He argues further that a proper consideration of questions of logical form clarifies and illuminates meta-ethical questions. Although the analyses and arguments he gives are often at odds with those at which Davidson arrived, they apply the central Davidsonian insights about semantics, understanding, and interpretation.

Neo-Davidsonian Metaphysics

Neo-Davidsonian Metaphysics PDF Author: Samuel C Wheeler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135086664
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Much contemporary metaphysics, moved by an apparent necessity to take reality to consist of given beings and properties, presents us with what appear to be deep problems requiring radical changes in the common sense conception of persons and the world. Contemporary meta-ethics ignores questions about logical form and formulates questions in ways that make the possibility of correct value judgments mysterious. In this book, Wheeler argues that given a Davidsonian understanding of truth, predication, and interpretation, and given a relativised version of Aristotelian essentialism compatible with Davidson’s basic thinking, many metaphysical problems are not very deep. Likewise, many philosophers' claims that common sense needs to be modified are unfounded. He argues further that a proper consideration of questions of logical form clarifies and illuminates meta-ethical questions. Although the analyses and arguments he gives are often at odds with those at which Davidson arrived, they apply the central Davidsonian insights about semantics, understanding, and interpretation.

Causation, Explanation, and the Metaphysics of Aspect

Causation, Explanation, and the Metaphysics of Aspect PDF Author: Bradford Skow
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198826966
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Bradford Skow examines important philosophical questions about causation and explanation. His answers rely on a pair of connected distinctions: the distinction between acting and not acting, and that between situations in which an event happens and when something is in some state.

The Foundations of Nature

The Foundations of Nature PDF Author: Michael Dominic Taylor
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725264978
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Will the ecological crises of our time be resolved using the same form of thought that has brought them about? Are technological prowess and political power the proper tools to address them? Is there not a deeper connection between our ecological crises and our human, social, political, economic, and ethical crises? This book argues that the popular approaches to ecological, bioethical, and other human crises are not working because they fail to examine the problem in its full depth. This depth escapes us because we have abandoned true metaphysical reflection on the whole and substituted it unknowingly for a series of inadequate alternatives. Both the technocratic paradigm that views all of nature mechanistically and its antagonists—the eco-philosophies that argue for the realities of intrinsic value, relationality, and beauty—carry partial truths but are insufficient. This book presents a more radical alternative, rooted in the classical tradition yet fresh and vibrant. The metaphysics of gift, based in the giftedness of existence shared by all, offers a deeper and more satisfying vision of all things that can transform our relationship with nature and touches every aspect of human life: social, political, economic, technical, and ethical.

Fundamental Causation

Fundamental Causation PDF Author: Christopher Gregory Weaver
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315449064
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Fundamental Causation addresses issues in the metaphysics of deterministic singular causation, the metaphysics of events, property instances, facts, preventions, and omissions, as well as the debate between causal reductionists and causal anti-reductionists. The book also pays special attention to causation and causal structure in physics. Weaver argues that causation is a multigrade obtaining relation that is transitive, irreflexive, and asymmetric. When causation is singular, deterministic and such that it relates purely contingent events, the relation is also universal, intrinsic, and well-founded. He shows that proper causal relata are events understood as states of substances at ontological indices. He then proves that causation cannot be reduced to some non-causal base, and that the best account of that relation should be unashamedly primitivist about the dependence relation that underwrites its very nature. The book demonstrates a distinctive realist and anti-reductionist account of causation by detailing precisely how the account outperforms reductionist and competing anti-reductionist accounts in that it handles all of the difficult cases while overcoming all of the general objections to anti-reductionism upon which other anti-reductionist accounts falter. This book offers an original and interesting view of causation and will appeal to scholars and advanced students in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of physics.

Philosophy of Time and Perceptual Experience

Philosophy of Time and Perceptual Experience PDF Author: Sean Enda Power
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351249479
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This book explores the important yet neglected relationship between the philosophy of time and the temporal structure of perceptual experience. It examines how time structures perceptual experience and, through that structuring, the ways in which time makes perceptual experience trustworthy or erroneous. Sean Power argues that our understanding of time can determine our understanding of perceptual experience in relation to perceptual structure and perceptual error. He examines the general conditions under which an experience may be sorted into different kinds of error such as illusions, hallucinations, and anosognosia. Power also argues that some theories of time are better than others at giving an account of the structure and errors of perceptual experience. He makes the case that tenseless theory and eternalism more closely correspond to experience than tense theory and presentism. Finally, the book includes a discussion of the perceptual experience of space and how tenseless theory and eternalism can better support the problematic theory of naïve realism. Philosophy of Time and Perceptual Experience originally illustrates how the metaphysics of time can be usefully applied to thinking about experience in general. It will appeal to those interested in the philosophy of time and debates about the trustworthiness of experience.

Eliminativism, Objects, and Persons

Eliminativism, Objects, and Persons PDF Author: Jiri Benovsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429816618
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In Eliminativism, Objects, and Persons, Jiri Benovsky defends the view that he doesn't exist. In this book, he also defends the view that this book itself doesn't exist. But this did not prevent him to write the book, and although in Benovsky's view you don't exist either, this does not prevent you to read it. Benovsky defends a brand of non-exceptionalist eliminativism. Some eliminativists, typically focusing on ordinary material objects such as chairs and hammers, make exceptions, for instance for blue whales (that is, living beings) or for persons (that is, conscious organisms). Benovsky takes one by one all types of allegedly existing objects like chairs, whales, and persons and shows that from the metaphysical point of view they are more trouble than they are worth—we are much better off without them. He thus defends an eliminativist view about ordinary objects as well as the 'no-Self' view, where he explores connections between metaphysics, phenomenology, and Buddhist thought. He then also considers the case of aesthetic objects, focusing on musical works and photographs, and shows that the claim of their non-existence solves the many problems that arise when one tries to find an appropriate ontological category for them, and that such an eliminativist view is more natural than what we might have thought. The arguments provided here are always topic-specific: each type of entity is given its own type of treatment, thus proving a varied and solid foundation for a generalized, non-exceptionalist, full-blown eliminativist worldview.

Negative Actions

Negative Actions PDF Author: Jonathan D. Payton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108839797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
"Negative actions (intentional omissions, refrainments, etc.) seem to be genuine actions. The standard metaphysical theories of action are event-based: they treat actions as events of a special kind. But it seems that many (and perhaps all) negative actions are, not events, but absences thereof. In this book, I provide a comprehensive treatment of this problem and its solution. I trace the appearance that negative actions are mere absences to the widely-assumed view that negative action sentences (sentences which describe an agent as omitting, refraining, etc.) are negative existentials, reporting the non-occurrence of an event of a certain kind. I argue, on the contrary, that such sentences report the occurrence of an event, not the absence of one. Moreover, I show how these events can be identified with ordinary, positive events of the sort we should already have in our ontology. In developing these views, I provide a comprehensive picture of the metaphysics of negative actions, the nature of our thought and talk about them, and their place in a theory of action and agency"--

Nominalism about Properties

Nominalism about Properties PDF Author: Ghislain Guigon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317532252
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Nominalism, which has its origins in the Middle Ages and continues into the Twenty-First Century, is the doctrine that there are no universals. This book is unique in bringing together essays on the history of nominalism and essays that present a systematic discussion of nominalism. It introduces the reader to the distinction between particulars and universals, to the difficulties posed by this distinction, and to the main motivations for the rejection of universals. It also describes the main varieties of nominalism about properties and provides tools to understand how they developed in the history of Western Philosophy. All essays are new and are written by experts on the topic, and they advance the discussion about nominalism to a new level.

Deontic Modality

Deontic Modality PDF Author: Nate Charlow
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019871792X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
This volume presents new work on the much-discussed topic of deontic modality: the meaning and function of language relating to what is allowed, required, or obligatory, in view of moral or legal demands. A team of leading experts in philosophy of language, meta-ethics, and linguistics tackle key issues at the heart of the debate.