Philosophy : Metaphysics

'This book is both a fine introduction to the me taphysics of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz and a rich, wide-ranging study of the interaction betwee n physics and metaphysics in the seventeenth centu ry.' - Kenneth P Winkler, Wellesley College more...

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Dispositions and Causes contains ten new essays by scholars working in both metaphysics and in philosophy of science, examining the relation between causal relations and dispositional properties. The introductory chapter contains a detailed overview of recent work in the area, providing a helpful entry to the literature for non-specialists. - ;In recent decades, the analysis of causal relations has become a topic of central importance in analytic philosophy. More recently, dispositional properties have also become objects of intense study. Both of these phenomena appear to be intimately related to counterfactual conditionals and other modal phenomena such as objective chance, but little work has been done to directly relate them. Dispositions and Causes contains ten essays by scholars working in both metaphysics. and in philosophy of science, examining the relation between dispositional and causal concepts. Particular issues discussed include the possibility of reducing dispositions to causes, and vice versa; the possibility of a nominalist theory of causal powers; the attempt to reduce all metaphysical necessity to dispositional properties; the relationship between dispositions, causes, and laws of nature; the role of causal capacities in explaining the success of scientific inquiry; the grounding of dispositions and causes in objective chances; and the type of causal power required for free. agency. The introductory chapter contains a detailed overview of recent work in the area, providing a helpful entry to the literature for non-specialists. - more...

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In this series of essays published over forty years Charles Kahn explicates the ancient Greek concept of Being. His linguistic aim of explaining the meaning of the verb einai is intertwined with his historical and philosophical project of understanding how the concept came to be central to Greek philosophy from Parmenides to Aristotle. - ;This volume presents a series of essays published by Charles Kahn over a period of forty years, in which he seeks to explicate the ancient Greek concept of Being. He addresses two distinct but intimately related problems, one linguistic and one historical and philosophical. The linguistic problem concerns the theory of the Greek verb einai, 'to be': how to replace the conventional but misleading distinction between copula and existential verb with a more adequatetheoretical account. The philosophical problem is in principle quite distinct: to understand how the concept of Being became the central topic in Greek philosophy from Parmenides to Aristotle. But these two problems converge on what Kahn calls the veridical use of einai. In the earlier papers he takes thatconnection between the verb and the concept of truth to be the key to the central role of Being in Greek philosophy. In the later papers he interprets the veridical in terms of a more general semantic function of the verb, which comprises the notions of existence and instantiation as well as truth. - more...

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Focuses on the consequences for ethical agency of mediating interaction by means of computers, seeking to clarify how the conditions of certain kinds of interaction in cyberspace differ from the conditions of interaction face-to-face and how these differences may come to affect the behaviour of interacting agents in terms of ethics. more...

Price: $139.00

The Facts of Causation, now available in paperback, is essential reading for students and anyone interested in reading one of the ground-breaking theories in metaphysics. more...

Price: $39.95