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Author: Caitlin Smith Gilson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441195955
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Author: Caitlin Smith Gilson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441195955
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Author: Richard Corry
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198840713
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
The world is a complex place, and this complexity is an obstacle to our attempts to explain, predict, and control it. In Power and Influence, Richard Corry investigates the assumptions that are built into the reductive method of explanation - the method whereby we study the components of acomplex system in relative isolation and use the information so gained to explain or predict the behaviour of the complex whole. He investigates the metaphysical presuppositions built into the reductive method, seeking to ascertain what the world must be like in order that the method could work.Corry argues that the method assumes the existence of causal powers that manifest causal influence- - a relatively unrecognised ontological category, of which forces are a paradigm example. The success of the reductive method, therefore, is an argument for the existence of such causal influences.The book goes on to show that adding causal influence to our ontology gives us the resources to solve some traditional problems in the metaphysics of causal powers, laws of nature, causation, emergence, and possibly even normative ethics. What results, then, is not just an understanding of thereductive method, but an integrated metaphysical worldview that is grounded in an ontology of power and influence.
Author: Martin Heidegger
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253004403
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
" . . an important addition to the translations of Heidegger's lecture-courses . . Heidegger's voice can be heard with few of the jolting Germanicisms with which so many translations of Heidegger's texts have been burdened. . . ." —International Philosophical Quarterly "The translators of these lectures have succeeded splendidly in giving readers an intimation of the tensely insistent tone of the original German. Heidegger's concern with a linguistic preconsciousness and with our entrancement before the enigma of existence remains intensely contemporary." —Choice "There is much that is new and valuable in this book, and McNeill and Walker's faithful translation makes it very accessible." —Review of Metaphysics "Whoever thought that Heidegger . . . has no surprises left in him had better read this volume. If its rhetoric is 'hard and heavy' its thought is even harder and essentially more daring than Heideggerians ever imagined Heidegger could be." —David Farrell Krell First published in German in 1938 as volume 29/30 of Heidegger's collected works, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics includes an extended treatment of the history of metaphysics and an elaboration of a philosophy of life and nature. Heidegger's concepts of organism, animal behavior, and environment are uniquely developed and defined with intensity. This work, the text of Martin Heidegger's lecture course of 1929/30, is crucial for an understanding of Heidegger's transition from the major work of his early years, Being and Time, to his later preoccupations with language, truth, and history. First published in German in 1983 as volume 29/30 of Heidegger's collected works, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics includes an extended treatment of the history of metaphysics and an elaboration of a philosophy of life and nature. Heidegger's concepts of organism, animal behavior, and environment are uniquely developed and defined with intensity.
Author: James Ladyman
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191534757
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Every Thing Must Go argues that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it really is, and not on philosophers' a priori intuitions, common sense, or simplifications of science. In addition to showing how recent metaphysics has drifted away from connection with all other serious scholarly inquiry as a result of not heeding this restriction, they demonstrate how to build a metaphysics compatible with current fundamental physics ('ontic structural realism'), which, when combined with their metaphysics of the special sciences ('rainforest realism'), can be used to unify physics with the other sciences without reducing these sciences to physics itself. Taking science metaphysically seriously, Ladyman and Ross argue, means that metaphysicians must abandon the picture of the world as composed of self-subsistent individual objects, and the paradigm of causation as the collision of such objects. Every Thing Must Go also assesses the role of information theory and complex systems theory in attempts to explain the relationship between the special sciences and physics, treading a middle road between the grand synthesis of thermodynamics and information, and eliminativism about information. The consequences of the author's metaphysical theory for central issues in the philosophy of science are explored, including the implications for the realism vs. empiricism debate, the role of causation in scientific explanations, the nature of causation and laws, the status of abstract and virtual objects, and the objective reality of natural kinds.
Author: Jürgen Habermas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745694934
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
‘There is no alternative to postmetaphysical thinking’: this statement, made by Jürgen Habermas in 1988, has lost none of its relevance. Postmetaphysical thinking is, in the first place, the historical answer to the crisis of metaphysics following Hegel, when the central metaphysical figures of thought began to totter under the pressure exerted by social developments and by developments within science. As a result, philosophy’s epistemological privilege was shaken to its core, its basic concepts were de-transcendentalized, and the primacy of theory over practice was opened to question. For good reasons, philosophy ‘lost its extraordinary status’, but as a result it also courted new problems. In Postmetaphysical Thinking II, the sequel to the 1988 volume that bears the same title (English translation, Polity 1992), Habermas addresses some of these problems. The first section of the book deals with the shift in perspective from metaphysical worldviews to the lifeworld, the unarticulated meanings and assumptions that accompany everyday thought and action in the mode of ‘background knowledge’. Habermas analyses the lifeworld as a ‘space of reasons’ – even where language is not (yet) involved, such as, for example, in gestural communication and rituals. In the second section, the uneasy relationship between religion and postmetaphysical thinking takes centre stage. Habermas picks up where he left off in 1988, when he made the far-sighted observation that ‘philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion’, and explores philosophy’s new-found interest in religion, among other topics. The final section includes essays on the role of religion in the political context of a post-secular, liberal society. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, religion and the social sciences and humanities generally.
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.
Author: Alfred I. Tauber
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349252492
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 431
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Book Description
Science and the Quest for Reality is an interdisciplinary anthology that situates contemporary science within its complex philosophical, historical, and sociological contexts. The anthology is divided between, firstly, characterizing science as an intellectual activity and, secondly, defining its social role. The philosophical and historical vicissitudes of science's truth claims has raised profound questions concerning the role of science in society beyond its technological innovations. The deeper philosophical issues thus complement the critical inquiry concerning the broader social and ethical influence of contemporary science. In the tradition of the 'Main Trends of the Modern World' series, this volume includes both classical and contemporary works on the subject.
Author: Sean Gaston
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783480025
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
In the mid-eighteenth century metaphysics was broadly understood as the study of three areas of philosophical thought: theology, psychology and cosmology. This book examines the fortunes of the third of these formidable metaphysical concepts, the world. Sean Gaston provides a clear and concise account of the concept of world from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, exploring its possibilities and limitations and engaging with current issues in politics and ecology. He focuses on the work of five principal thinkers: Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida, all of whom attempt to establish new grounds for seeing the world as a whole. Gaston presents a critique of the self-evident use of the concept of world in philosophy and asks whether one can move beyond the need for a world-like vantage point to maintain a concept of world. From Kant to the present day this concept has been a problem for philosophy and it remains to be seen if we need a new Copernican revolution when it comes to the concept of world.
Author: Matthew Slater
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199363226
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
The question of the proper role of metaphysics in philosophy of science is both significant and contentious. The last few decades have seen considerable engagement with philosophical projects aptly described as "the metaphysics of science:" inquiries into natural laws and properties, natural kinds, causal relations, and dispositions. At the same time, many metaphysicians have begun moving in the direction of more scientifically-informed ("scientistic" or "naturalistic") metaphysics. And yet many philosophers of science retain a deep suspicion about the significance of metaphysical investigations into science. This volume of new essays explores a broadly methodological question: what role should metaphysics play in our philosophizing about science? These new essays, written by leading philosophers of science, address this question both through ground-level investigations of particular issues in the metaphysics of science and by more general methodological inquiry.
Author: Robert C. Stalnaker
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191530743
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
Ways a World Might Be collects, and adds to, Robert Stalnaker's published papers on metaphysical issues. The central theme that runs throughout the book is the role of possible worlds in articulating our various metaphysical commitments. The essays contain both reflections on the general idea of a space of possibilities and attempts to use the framework of possible worlds to formulate and clarify semantic and metaphysical questions about properties and individuals, supervenience and essentialism, reference, thought and experience. The essays also reflect on the nature of metaphysics, and on the relation between metaphysical and semantic questions - questions about what there is and questions about how we talk and think about what there is. The book begins by asking what possible worlds are, and how we are able to represent and know about them. Stalnaker argues that we can take possibilities seriously without embracing the kind of modal realism that David Lewis defended, and can take them as fundamental without purporting to offer a reductive account of modality. He then turns to questions about the nature of properties and relations and their role in carving up a space of possibilities, and to questions about the nature of individuals, and the way they are identified across time and possible worlds. The essays in the last two sections of the book are concerned with the interaction of metaphysical and semantic issues, and with the place of subjective experience in our conception of an objective world as it is in itself. Two of the fourteen essays, plus an extensive introduction that sets the papers in context and makes explicit some of the essays' common threads, are published here for the first time.
