Philosophy : Metaphysics

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...

Price: $90.00

Doing and Being confronts the problem of how to understand two central concepts of Aristotle's philosophy: energeia and dunamis. While these terms seem ambiguous between actuality/potentiality and activity/capacity, Aristotle did not intend them to be so. Through a careful and detailed reading of Metaphysics Theta, Beere argues that we can solve the problem by rejecting both "actuality" and "activity" as translations of energeia, and byworking out an analogical conception of energeia. This approach enables Beere to discern a hitherto unnoticed connection between Plato's Sophist and Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta, and to give satisfying interpretations of the major claims that Aristotle makes in Metaphysics Theta, the claim that energeia is prior in being to capacity (Theta 8)and the claim that any eternal principle must be perfectly good (Theta 9). more...

Price: $92.13

Time is a mystery that has perplexed humankind since time immemorial. Resolving this mystery is of significance not only to philosophers and physicists but is also a very practical concern. Our perception of time shapes our values and way of life; it also mediates the interaction between science and religion both of which rest fundamentally on assumptions about the nature of time. C K Raju begins with a critical exposition of various time-beliefs, ranging from the earliest times through Augustine, Newton and Einstein to Stephen Hawking and current notions of chaos and time travel. He traces the role of organised religion in subverting time beliefs for its political ends. The book points out how this resulted in a facile dichotomy between ‘linear’ and ‘cyclic’ time, thereby inaugurating a confusion which, according to the author, has handicapped Western thought ever since, eventually influencing the content of science itself. Thus, this book daringly asserts that physical theory, traditionally regarded as amoral and objective, has depended on cultural beliefs about time. The author points out that time beliefs are again being manipulated today as the credibility of science is being exploited to promote a picture of time and, hence, a pattern of human behaviour which is convenient to the agenda of globalisation of culture. The linkages between modern theology and this ‘brave new physics’ are traced against the wider context of the so-called ‘clash of civilisations’, and the attempts to remake the world order. The conclusions point to the need to de-theologise time. The author challenges Einstein’s understanding of relativity theory and suggests that a ‘tilt in the arrow of time’, or a small tendency towards cyclicity, will help repair the prevalent confusion about time. A ‘tilt’ also enables a physics that permits both memory and creativity, so that purpose and spontaneous growth of order are returned to more...

Price: $96.95

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...

Price: $55.00

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