Reality and Humean Supervenience

Reality and Humean Supervenience PDF Author: Gerhard Preyer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Reality and Humean Supervenience confronts the reader with central aspects in the philosophy of David Lewis, whose work in ontology, metaphysics, logic, probability, philosophy of mind, and language articulates a unique and systematic foundation for modern physicalism. This book includes a useful, general introduction to Lewis's philosophy and contributions by well-known American, Australian, and European philosophers whose commentaries address major topics in Lewis's theory of modality.

Reality and Humean Supervenience

Reality and Humean Supervenience PDF Author: Gerhard Preyer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reality and Humean Supervenience confronts the reader with central aspects in the philosophy of David Lewis, whose work in ontology, metaphysics, logic, probability, philosophy of mind, and language articulates a unique and systematic foundation for modern physicalism. This book includes a useful, general introduction to Lewis's philosophy and contributions by well-known American, Australian, and European philosophers whose commentaries address major topics in Lewis's theory of modality.

Reality and Humean Supervenience

Reality and Humean Supervenience PDF Author: Gerhard Preyer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0585385637
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
If asked what Humeanism could mean today, there is no other philosopher to turn to whose work covers such a wide range of topics from a unified Humean perspective as that of David Lewis. The core of Lewis's many contributions to philosophy, including his work in philosophical ontology, intensional logic and semantics, probability and decision theory, topics within philosophy of science as well as a distinguished philosophy of mind, can be understood as the development of philosophical position that is centered around his conception of Humean supervenience. If we accept the thesis that it is physical science and not philosophical reasoning that will eventually arrive at the basic constituents of all matter pertaining to our world, then Humean supervenience is the assumption that all truths about our world will supervene on the class of physical truths in the following sense: There are no truths in any compartment of our world that cannot be accounted for in terms of differences and similarities among those properties and external space-time relations that are fundamental to our world according to physical science.

Lewisian Themes

Lewisian Themes PDF Author: Frank Jackson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199274550
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
David Lewis's untimely death on 14 October 2001 deprived the philosophical community of one of the outstanding philosophers of the 20th century. As many obituaries remarked, Lewis has an undeniable place in the history of analytical philosophy. His work defines much of the current agenda in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and the philosophy of mind and language. This volume, an expanded edition of a special issue of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, covers many of the topics for which Lewis was well known, including possible worlds, counterpart theory, vagueness, knowledge, probability, essence, fiction, laws, conditionals, desire and belief, and truth. Many of the papers are by very established philosophers; others are by younger scholars including many he taught. The volume also includes Lewis's Jack Smart Lecture at the Australian National University, "How Many Lives has Schrödinger's Cat?," published here for the first time. Lewisian Themes will be an invaluable resource for anyone studying Lewis's work, and a major contribution to the many topics that he mastered.

Physicalism Deconstructed

Physicalism Deconstructed PDF Author: Kevin Morris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108472168
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Provides a philosophical and historical critique of contemporary conceptions of physicalism, especially non-reductive, levels-based approaches to physicalist metaphysics. Challenging assumptions about the mind-body problem, this accessible book will interest scholars working in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.

The Knowledge Argument

The Knowledge Argument PDF Author: Sam Coleman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107141990
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
A cutting-edge and groundbreaking set of new essays by top philosophers on key topics related to the ever-influential knowledge argument.

The Nature of Contingency

The Nature of Contingency PDF Author: Alastair Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198846215
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book defends a radical new theory of contingency as a physical phenomenon. Drawing on the many-worlds approach, it argues that quantum theories are best understood as telling us about the space of genuine possibilities, rather than as telling us solely about actuality.

Scientific Metaphysics

Scientific Metaphysics PDF Author: Don Ross
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199696497
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Original essays by leading philosophers of science explore the question of whether metaphysics can and should be naturalised - conducted as part of natural science. They engage with a range of approaches and disciplines to argue that if metaphysics is to be capable of identifying objective truths, it must be continuous with and inspired by science.

Metaphysical Emergence

Metaphysical Emergence PDF Author: Jessica M. Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192556975
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Both the special sciences and ordinary experience suggest that there are metaphysically emergent entities and features: macroscopic goings-on (including mountains, trees, humans, and sculptures, and their characteristic properties) which depend on, yet are distinct from and distinctively efficacious with respect to, lower-level physical configurations and features. These appearances give rise to two key questions. First, what is metaphysical emergence, more precisely? Second, is there any metaphysical emergence, in principle and moreover in fact? Metaphysical Emergence provides clear and systematic answers to these questions. Wilson argues that there are two, and only two, forms of metaphysical emergence of the sort seemingly at issue in the target cases: 'Weak' emergence, whereby a dependent feature has a proper subset of the powers of the feature upon which it depends, and 'Strong' emergence, whereby a dependent feature has a power not had by the feature upon which it depends. Weak emergence unifies and illuminates seemingly diverse accounts of non-reductive physicalism; Strong emergence does the same as regards seemingly diverse anti-physicalist views positing fundamental novelty at higher levels of compositional complexity. After defending the in-principle viability of each form of emergence, Wilson considers whether complex systems, ordinary objects, consciousness, and free will are actually metaphysically emergent. She argues that Weak emergence is quite common, and that there is Strong emergence in the important case of free will.

The Metaphysics Within Physics

The Metaphysics Within Physics PDF Author: Tim Maudlin
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199218218
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
What does physics tell us about metaphysics? Tim Maudlin's philosophical examination of the fundamental structure of the world as presented by physics challenges the most widely accepted philosophical accounts of laws of nature, universals, the direction of time and causation.

Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction

Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction PDF Author: Barry Stroud
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199781133
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
We all have beliefs to the effect that if a certain thing were to happen a certain other thing would happen. We also believe that some things simply must be so, with no possibility of having been otherwise. And in acting intentionally we all take certain things to be good reason to believe or do certain things. In this book Barry Stroud argues that some beliefs of each of these kinds are indispensable to our having any conception of a world at all. That means no one could consistently dismiss all beliefs of these kinds as merely ways of thinking that do not describe how things really are in the world as it is independently of us and our responses. But the unacceptability of any such negative "unmasking" view does not support a satisfyingly positive metaphysical "realism." No metaphysical satisfaction is available either way, given the conditions of our holding the beliefs whose metaphysical status we wish to understand. This does not mean we will stop asking the metaphysical question. But we need a better understanding of how it can have whatever sense it has for us. This challenging volume takes up these large, fundamental questions in clear language accessible to a wide philosophical readership.