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Author: Uwe Meixner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110326892
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 379
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Book Description
This book presents a comprehensive, non-model-theoretic theory of ontic necessity and possibility within a formal (and formalized) ontology consisting of states of affairs, properties, and individuals. Its central thesis is that all modalities are reducible to intrinsic (or "logical") possibility and necessity if reference is made to certain states of affairs, called "bases of necessity." The viability of this Bases-Theory of Modality is shown also in the case of conditionals, including counterfactual conditionals. Besides the ontological aspects of the philosophy of modality, also the epistemology of modality is treated in the book. It is shown that the Bases-Theory of Modality provides a satisfactory solution to the epistemological problem of modality. In addition to developing that theory, the book includes detailed discussions of positions in the philosophy of modality maintained by Alvin Plantinga, David Lewis, Charles Chihara, Graeme Forbes, David Armstrong, and others. Among the themes treated are: possibilism vs. actualism; the theory of essences; conceivability and possibility; the nature of possible worlds; the nature of logical, nomological, and metaphysical possibility and necessity.
Author: Uwe Meixner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110326892
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 379
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Book Description
This book presents a comprehensive, non-model-theoretic theory of ontic necessity and possibility within a formal (and formalized) ontology consisting of states of affairs, properties, and individuals. Its central thesis is that all modalities are reducible to intrinsic (or "logical") possibility and necessity if reference is made to certain states of affairs, called "bases of necessity." The viability of this Bases-Theory of Modality is shown also in the case of conditionals, including counterfactual conditionals. Besides the ontological aspects of the philosophy of modality, also the epistemology of modality is treated in the book. It is shown that the Bases-Theory of Modality provides a satisfactory solution to the epistemological problem of modality. In addition to developing that theory, the book includes detailed discussions of positions in the philosophy of modality maintained by Alvin Plantinga, David Lewis, Charles Chihara, Graeme Forbes, David Armstrong, and others. Among the themes treated are: possibilism vs. actualism; the theory of essences; conceivability and possibility; the nature of possible worlds; the nature of logical, nomological, and metaphysical possibility and necessity.
Author: Boris Kment
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191668990
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Since the ground-breaking work of Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others in the 1960s and 70s, one dominant interest of analytic philosophers has been in modal truths, which concerns the questions of what is possible and what is necessary. However, there is considerable controversy over the source and nature of necessity. In Modality and Explanatory Reasoning, Boris Kment takes a novel approach to the study of modality that places special emphasis on understanding the origin of modal notions in everyday thought. Kment argues that the concepts of necessity and possibility originate in a common type of thought experiment—counterfactual reasoning—that allows us to investigate explanatory connections. This procedure is closely related to the controlled experiments of empirical science. Necessity is defined in terms of causation and other forms of explanation such as grounding, the relation that connects metaphysically fundamental facts to non-fundamental ones. Therefore, contrary to a widespread view, explanation is more fundamental than modality. The study of modal facts is important for philosophy, not because these facts are of much metaphysical interest in their own right, but because they provide evidence about explanatory relationships. In the course of developing this position, the book offers new accounts of possible worlds, counterfactual conditionals, essential truths and their role in grounding, and a novel theory of how counterfactuals relate to causation and explanation.
Author: Mikhail Epstein
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004398341
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 379
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Book Description
In this book, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic theory of modalities (the actual, possible, and necessary), as applied to the discourse of philosophy in its post-Kantian and especially post-Derridean perspectives. He relies on his own experience of living in the USSR and the US, dominated respectively by imperative and possibilist modalities. Possibilism assumes that a thing or event acquires meaning only in the context of its multiple possibilities, inviting counterfactual and conditional modes of description. The author focuses on the creative potentials of possibilistic thinking and its heuristic value. The book demonstrates the range of modal approaches to society, culture, ethics, and language, and outlines potentiology as a new philosophical discipline interacting with ontology and epistemology.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004332960
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 428
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Book Description
The aim of this book is to present essays centered upon the subjects of Formal Ontology and Logical Philosophy. The idea of investigating philosophical problems by means of logical methods was intensively promoted in Torun by the Department of Logic of Nicolaus Copernicus University during last decade. Another aim of this book is to present to the philosophical and logical audience the activities of the Torunian Department of Logic during this decade. The papers in this volume contain the results concerning Logic and Logical Philosophy, obtained within the confines of the projects initiated by the Department of Logic and other research projects in which the Torunian Department of Logic took part.
Author: Laird Addis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110327155
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
In this collection of papers by Laird Addis, published over approximately a quarter century, the main topics are the ontology of mind and the role of mind in the explanation of behavior. Addis defends a theory of natural signs, by which there is, in every conscious state including emotional states, an intrinsically intentional entity. He also argues that explanations of behavior by dispositional mental states, while not themselves causal explanations, presuppose the possibility of such explanations. The theory of dispositions is applied also to the theories of Chomsky and Freud. In broad strokes, Addis holds that, while there is a distinct realm of mental properties, behaviors admit of purely physical explanations.
Author: Anand Jayprakash Vaidya
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000840433
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
This book collects original essays on the epistemology of modality and related issues in modal metaphysics and philosophical methodology. The contributors utilize both the newer "metaphysics-first" and the more traditional "epistemology-first" approaches to these issues. The chapters on modal epistemology mostly focus on the problem of how we can gain knowledge of possibilities, which have never been actualized, or necessities which are not provable either by logico-mathematical reasoning or by linguistic competence alone. These issues are closely related to some of the central issues in philosophical methodology, notably: to what extent is the armchair methodology of philosophy a reliable guide for the formation of beliefs about what is possible and necessary. This question also relates to the nature of thought experiments that are extensively used in science and philosophy. Epistemology of Modality and Philosophical Methodology will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on the epistemology and metaphysics of modality, as well as those whose work is concerned with philosophical methodology more generally.
Author: Miroslaw Szatkowski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100055385X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
This volume collects fifteen original essays on E. J. Lowe’s work on metaphysics and ontology. The essays connect Lowe’s insights with contemporary issues in metaphysics. E. J. Lowe (1950–2014) was one of the most influential analytical philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Drawing inspiration from Aristotle's thought, E. J. Lowe treated metaphysics as an autonomous discipline concerned with the fundamental structure of reality. The chapters in this volume reflect on his path-breaking work. They deal with a wide range of metaphysical issues including four-category ontology, the causal and non-causal aspects of agency, categorial fundamentality and non-fundamentality, the existence of relations, property dualism, powers and abilities, personal identity, predication, and topological ontology. Taken together, the chapters reflect the liveliness of contemporary debates in metaphysics and the enduring impact of Lowe’s thought on them. E. J. Lowe and Ontology will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in metaphysics and philosophy of mind.
Author: Donald W. Mertz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110333236
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Structure or system is a ubiquitous and uneliminable feature of all our experience and theory, and requires an ontological analysis. The essays collected in this volume provide an account of structure founded upon the proper analysis of polyadic relations as the irreducible and defining elements of structure. It is argued that polyadic relations are ontic predicates in the insightful sense of intension-determined agent-combinators, monadic properties being the limiting and historically misleading case. This assay of ontic predicates has a number of powerful explanatory implications, including fundamentally: providing ontology with a principium individuationis, demonstrating the perennial theory that properties and relations are individuated as unit attributes or ‘instances’, giving content to the ontology of facts or states of affairs, and providing a means to precisely differentiate identity from indiscernibility. The differentiation of the unrepeatable combinatorial and repeatable intension aspects of ontic predicates makes it possible to properly diagnose and disarm the classis Bradley Regress Argument aimed against attributes and universals, an argument that trades on confusing these aspects. It is argued that these two aspects of ontic predicates form a ‘composite simple’, an explanation that sheds light on the nature and necessity of the medieval formal distinction, e.g., the distinctio formalis a parte rei of Scotus. Following from this analysis of ontic predication there is given a number of principles delineating realist instance ontology, together with a critique of both nominalistic trope theory and modern revivals of Aristotle’s instance ontology of the Categories. It is shown how the resulting theory of facts can, via ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ composition, account for all the hierarchical structuring of our experience and theory, and, importantly, how this can rest upon an atomic ontic level composed of only dependent ontic predicates. The latter is a desideratum for the proposed ‘Structural Realism’ ontology for micro-physics where at its lowest level the physical is said to be totally relational/structural. Nullified is the classic and insidious assumption that dependent entities presuppose a class of independent substrata or ‘substances’, and with this any pressure to admit ‘bare particulars’ and intensionless relations or ‘ties’. The logic inherent in realist instance ontology-termed ‘PPL’-is formalized in detail and given a consistency proof. Demonstrated is the logic’s power to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate impredicative definitions, and in this how it provides a general solution to the classic self-referential paradoxes. PPL corresponds to Gödel’s programmatic ‘Theory of Concepts’. The last essay, not previously published, provides a detailed differentiation of identity from indiscernibility, preliminary to which is given an explanation of in what sense a predicate logic presupposes an ontology of predication. The principles needed for the differentiation have the significant implication (e.g., for the foundations of mathematics) of implying an infinity of logical entities, viz., instances of the identity relation.
Author: Maria Elisabeth Reicher
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110326027
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
States of affairs raise, among others, the following questions: What kind of entity are they (if there are any)? Are they contingent, causally efficacious, spatio-temporal and perceivable entities, or are they abstract objects? What are their constituents and their identity conditions? What are the functions that states of affairs are able to fulfil in a viable theory, and which problems and prima facie counterintuitive consequences arise out of an ontological commitment to them? Are there merely possible (non-actual, non-obtaining) states of affairs? Are there molecular (i.e., negative, conjunctive, disjunctive etc.) states of affairs? Are there modal and tensed states of affairs? In this volume, these and other questions are addressed by David M. Armstrong, Marian David, Herbert Hochberg, Uwe Meixner, L. Nathan Oaklander, Peter Simons, Erwin Tegtmeier and Mark Textor.
Author: Mirosław Szatkowski
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110592037
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
The issues of the nature and existence of God, time and infinity, respectively, and how they relate to each other, are some of the most complicated problems of metaphysics.This volume presents contributions of thirteen internationally renowned scholars who deal with various aspects of these complex issues. The contributions were presented and discussed during the international conference: God, Time, Infinity held in Warsaw, September 22—24, 2015.
