Necessary Beings

Necessary Beings PDF Author: Bob Hale
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199669570
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Bob Hale presents a broadly Fregean approach to metaphysics, according to which ontology and modality are mutually dependent upon one another. He argues that facts about what kinds of things exist depend on facts about what is possible. Modal facts are fundamental, and have their basis in the essences of things—not in meanings or concepts.

Necessary Beings

Necessary Beings PDF Author: Bob Hale
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199669570
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bob Hale presents a broadly Fregean approach to metaphysics, according to which ontology and modality are mutually dependent upon one another. He argues that facts about what kinds of things exist depend on facts about what is possible. Modal facts are fundamental, and have their basis in the essences of things—not in meanings or concepts.

Logical Modalities from Aristotle to Carnap

Logical Modalities from Aristotle to Carnap PDF Author: Adriane Rini
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107077885
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Introduces readers to the history of necessity and possibility, two modal concepts which play a key role in philosophy.

The Actual and the Possible

The Actual and the Possible PDF Author: Mark Sinclair
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198786433
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The Actual and the Possible presents new essays by leading specialists on modality and the metaphysics of modality in the history of modern philosophy from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It revisits key moments in the history of modern modal doctrines, and illuminates lesser-known moments of that history. The ultimate purpose of this historical approach is to contextualise and even to offer some alternatives to dominant positions within the contemporary philosophy of modality. Hence the volume contains not only new scholarship on the early-modern doctrines of Baruch Spinoza, G. W. F. Leibniz, Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant, but also work relating to less familiar nineteenth-century thinkers such as Alexius Meinong and Jan Lukasiewicz, together with essays on celebrated nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers such as G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger and Bertrand Russell, whose modal doctrines have not previously garnered the attention they deserve. The volume thus covers a variety of traditions, and its historical range extends to the end of the twentieth century, addressing the legacy of W. V. Quine's critique of modality within recent analytic philosophy.

Necessity and Possibility

Necessity and Possibility PDF Author: Michael Tooley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780815333821
Category : Causation
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A Philosophy of the Possible

A Philosophy of the Possible PDF 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.

Modality

Modality PDF Author: Bob Hale
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191572292
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The philosophy of modality investigates necessity and possibility, and related notions—are they objective features of mind-independent reality? If so, are they irreducible, or can modal facts be explained in other terms? This volume presents new work on modality by established leaders in the field and by up-and-coming philosophers. Between them, the papers address fundamental questions concerning realism and anti-realism about modality, the nature and basis of facts about what is possible and what is necessary, the nature of modal knowledge, modal logic and its relations to necessary existence and to counterfactual reasoning. The general introduction locates the individual contributions in the wider context of the contemporary discussion of the metaphysics and epistemology of modality.

Mere Possibilities

Mere Possibilities PDF Author: Robert Stalnaker
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691147124
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
It seems reasonable to believe that there might have existed things other than those that in fact exist, or have existed. But how should we understand such claims? Standard semantic theories exploit the Leibnizian metaphor of a set of all possible worlds: a proposition might or must be true if it is true in some or all possible worlds. The actualist, who believes that nothing exists except what actually exists, prefers to talk of possible states of the world, or of ways that a world might be. But even the actualist still faces the problem of explaining what we are talking about when we talk about the domains of other possible worlds. In Mere Possibilities, Robert Stalnaker develops a framework for clarifying this problem, and explores a number of actualist strategies for solving it. Some philosophers have hypothesized a realm of individual essences that stand as proxies for all merely possible beings. Others have argued that we are committed to the necessary existence of everything that does or might exist. In contrast, Mere Possibilities shows how we can make sense of ordinary beliefs about what might and must exist without making counterintuitive metaphysical commitments. The book also sheds new light on the nature of metaphysical theorizing by exploring the interaction of semantic and metaphysical issues, the connections between different metaphysical issues, and the nature of ontological commitment.

Kant's Modal Metaphysics

Kant's Modal Metaphysics PDF Author: Nicholas Frederick Stang
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198712626
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Nicholas F. Stang explores Kant's theory of possibility, from the precritical period of the 1750-60s to the Critical system initiated by the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. He argues that the key to understanding the relationship between these periods lies in Kant's reorientation of an ontological question towards a transcendental approach.

The Nature of Necessity

The Nature of Necessity PDF Author: Alvin Plantinga
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191037176
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This is a reissue of a book which is an exploration and defence of the notion of modality 'de re', the idea that objects have both essential and accidental properties. It is one of the first full-length studies of the modalities to emerge from the debate to which Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Ruth Marcus and others have contributed. The argument is developed by means of the notion of possible worlds, and ranges over key problems including the nature of essence, trans-world identity, negative existential propositions, and the existence of unactual objects in other possible worlds. In the final chapters Professor Plantinga applies his logical theories to the clarification of two problems in the philosophy of religion - the Problem of Evil and the Ontological Argument.

Mind and Modality

Mind and Modality PDF Author: Vesa Hirvonen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047409671
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
This volume offers a wide-ranging and profound collection of essays on philosophical psychology and conceptions of modality from antiquity to the present day, with some essays on the philosophy of religion as well.