This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Aristotle is perhaps the most important figure in philosophy. Every serious reader of philosophy will come across the Metaphysics , yet until now there has not been an introductory book to help explain the often difficult ideas that arise in the text. This GuideBook looks at the Metaphysics thematically and takes the reader through the main arguments found in the book. The book introduces and assesses Aristotle's life and the background to the Metaphysics, the ideas and text of the Metaphysics (...) and Aristotle's philosophical legacy. (shrink)

One of the few studies to date which considers in a comprehensive way the relation between these remarkable thinkers. By concrete example and continual reference it illustrates both the pervasive influence of Pseudo-Dionysius and the profound originality of Aquinas.

Mainstream analytic metaphysics is a priori metaphysics. It is hemmed in by basic assumptions that rest on no more than a priori intuitions. Jaegwon Kim's arguments about causation are a paradigm example of sophisticated arguments with little or no justification from the world as we know it. And Peter van Inwagen's arguments about material objects are motivated by a question that, I think, has no nontrivial answer: Under what conditions do some x's compose an object y? The trivial answers are (...) "always" and "never." Any other answer, including van Inwagen's, seems to me to be arbitrary—and again based on a priori intuitions. To cite two more examples that I find egregious: The assumption that there is a metaphysically important distinction between what is mind-independent and what is not, and the assumption that there is a metaphysically important distinction, among things that are real, between what is fundamental and what is not. A priori intuitions, especially when not shared by philosophers outside a small circle of specially trained people, seem a weak reed on which to hang metaphysical systems. (shrink)

Rationalism offers an account of moral properties as a subset of the properties which serve to rationalize right actions, and these properties are fit to be the referents of our moral terms. That fitness can be exploited in constructing an externalist theory of reference determination for these terms. The resulting externalist theory draws support from standard responses to Moral Twin-Earth scenarios. The relevance of these responses to moral semantics has recently beenvigorously challenged by Dowell and by Schroeter and Schroeter. The (...) social character of meaning relations, which can explain the openness of questions about an analysis, may thereby also make Twin-Earth judgements beside the point. But the resources available to translators go beyond semantic competence and it is these resources that nonetheless make the Moral Twin-Earth responses relevant. (shrink)

I consider a somewhat obscure but important feature of Descartes’s physics that concerns the notion of the “force of rest.” Contrary to a prominent occasionalist interpretation of Descartes’s physics, I argue that Descartes himself attributes real forces to resting bodies. I also take his account of rest to conflict with the view that God conserves the world by “re-creating” it anew at each moment. I turn next to the role of rest in Malebranche. Malebranche takes Descartes to endorse his own (...) occasionalist version of physics. However, he nonetheless rejects Descartes’s account of rest by appealing to the fact that whereas God’s production of motion requires a power beyond the mere power to create, his production of rest requires only the latter power. It turns out that this argument in Malebranche is incompatible with the sort of “re-creationist” account of divine conservation that he is widely thought to have inherited from Descartes. (shrink)

This paper constitutes my first attempt publicly to comment on Nancy Cartwright’s philosophy of science. That I have not done this earlier is primarily due to the great similarities in our views on topics where our interests overlap.2 But Cartwright’s work also covers topics I have never seriously considered, such as the use of linear models in economics and the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Even the subject of probabilistic causation, to which I once contributed, is not one I now (...) feel confident in examining in any detail. I will concentrate, therefore, on her views regarding the nature of scientific theories, laws, models, and causality in general – topics at the forefront of my own current thinking. More specifically still, I will focus on the picture of classical mechanics she presents in The Dappled World (1999). (shrink)

WANG Bi 王弼 develops a metaphysic of Dao 道 in his Commentary on Laozi and “The Structure of Laozi’s Subtle Pointers.” I summarize this metaphysic as the following thesis: Dao is featureless and is the ultimate reason why the myriad things exist and are the ways they are. I develop a systematic account of this thesis: I provide an interpretation of the featurelessness of Dao and show how Dao’s featurelessness relates to its fundamental explanatory role as the ontological ground for (...) the myriad things. (shrink)

This book offers original essays by leading philosophers of religion representing these new approaches to theological problems such as incarnation.

Kant’s critical project has been understood as a description of the functioning of knowledge. Such an understanding of the first Critique seems however limited, especially if we consider Kant’s frequent use of political analogies. These analogies suggest another reading in which Kant’s critical project emerges as an attempt to overcome a state of nature in reason through the institution of a legal state in and by reason itself. Seen in this perspective, Kant’s critical metaphysics can be considered revolutionary, because it (...) assumes the issues of the two revolutions of modernity, the political and the scientific one: from the former, Kant adopts the conviction that a conflict can be settled only through the separation and reciprocal limitation of powers, as theorized by Locke and Montesquieu - and thus neither by force nor by the establishment of an absolute power; from the latter, he acquires a model of proof, which is based, not on description, but on the elaboration of an explicative hypothesis. The Critique of Pure Reason, then, is not a mere treatise of epistemology or of descriptive metaphysics, but the attempt of setting up a policy of reason at the service of peace and civil communal life. (shrink)

One of the most peculiar features of Spinoza’s philosophy is his radical interpretation of the notion of freedom. Even though it plays a significant role in his metaethics and political philosophy, freedom is, for Spinoza, a deeply metaphysical notion, rooted in the most fundamental features of his ontology. In this paper, I analyze the internal structure that identifies a being as “free” within Spinoza’s metaphysics. I argue that this structure leads to an internal paradox, entailing that the very component that (...) allows a being its freedom – its essence or nature – is itself externally determined. I further proceed to resolve this issue indicating how Spinoza’s metaphysics of freedom can accommodate this paradox. I conclude by presenting possible solutions for both Natura naturans and Natura naturata, attempting to integrate the notion of metaphysical freedom with more familiar images of ethical and epistemological freedom. (shrink)

Throughout its long history metaphysics has been variously conceived. At its most sublime, it has been taken to be the study of the super‐sensible, in particular of the existence of a god, the nature of the soul, and the possibility of an afterlife. When the young Ludwig Wittgenstein entered the lists, it was entirely reasonable to conceive of metaphysics in this manner. Its subject matter was held to be the language‐independent and thought‐independent de re necessities of the world. The Tractatus (...) is dominated by three problems: first, the nature of logic and logical necessity; secondly, the essence of the proposition and hence the characterization of the general propositional form; and thirdly, the intentionality of the proposition. Logical propositions are combinations of elementary propositions by means of truth‐functional logical connectives. The metaphysics adumbrated in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein thought, was required for the possibility of representation and for the possibility of logic. (shrink)

Over the last century, as Figure 1 graphically illustrates, scientific investigations have given us a detailed account of many natural phenomena, from molecules to manic depression, through so-called.

This chapter presents an opinionated account of how to understand the contributions of experience, especially with respect to the role of cognitive science, in developing and assessing metaphysical theories of reality. I develop a methodological basis for the idea that, independently of work in experimental philosophy focused on explications of concepts, contemporary metaphysical theories with a role for experiential evidence can be fruitfully connected to empirical work in psychology, especially cognitive science. My argument is not that cognitive science should replace (...) the metaphysician’s use of a priori theorizing and ordinary experience as a guide to metaphysical reality. Rather, we should enrich our perspective on a priori theorizing and ordinary experience as a guide to metaphysical reality by drawing on any relevant work in cognitive science. (shrink)

According to one prominent view, current metaphysics is hopelessly disconnected from the implications of modern science and as a result should be abandoned forthwith (Ladyman and Ross 2007). Others have taken a more conciliatory stance, suggesting that the metaphysicians’ toolbox may yet yield devices that could prove useful to the philosopher of science (French and McKenzie 2012). In this book, Sider aims to contribute to the metaphysics of science by setting out an array of such tools and indicating which are (...) up to the job. More particularly, he wants to demonstrate the usefulness of certain ‘postmodal’ concepts, such as fundamentality, which is a promising tack, given that (Callender 2011), for example, has argued that it was the modal turn initiated by the likes of Kripke that is ultimately responsible for the disconnect. To illustrate his overall claim that the tools we deploy may help frame the issues that we take to be central to the metaphysics of science, Sider chooses to analyse various forms of structuralism, the view that we should take structure to be primary and the relevant entities to be secondary : nomic essentialism, which takes properties to be ‘bound up’ with laws (ibid., p. 23); structural realism, which holds, in its epistemic form, that all that we know about the world is its structure and, in the ontic alternative, that the world is, in some sense, structure; and comparativism about quantities, whereby quantities are ascribed to objects comparatively or relationally (ibid., p. 122). His conclusions are that no postmodal sense can be made of the first two, and so much the worse for them, whereas comparativism about quantities can unproblematically be stated in such terms (ibid., p. 119), and indeed, when it comes to ‘fundamentality’, at least, may well be this concept’s ‘Waterloo’ (ibid., p. 166). The worry some philosophers of science will have is that Sider’s arguments are driven more by his metaphysics than the relevant science and the issues that he identifies don’t quite map onto those they take to be central. (shrink)

The definitive study of the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas, the greatest medieval philosopher, written by one of the world's most eminent scholars of medieval thought.

Resumen En el presente artículo se explora la pertenencia de los libros M y N al programa general de la Metafísica de Aristóteles. Los libros XIII y XIV han quedado en el trasfondo de la Metafísica, como una suerte de agregado editorial, del cual se puede prescindir para la comprensión de la propuesta aristotélica. En el presente artículo, sin embargo, se asume un punto de partida diferente, que consiste en integrar estos libros al núcleo de la propuesta de la Metafísica, (...) enten diendo que ellos son claves para completar el panorama de la teoría general de la sustancia, o ousiología, que guía todos los libros metafísicos. De este modo, la discusión de M y N sobre números y principios viene a concluir la cuestión de la sustancia como causa y principio, anunciada desde el inicio de la Metafísica y desarrollada en sus libros centrales.This article explores the belonging of books M and N to the generalprogram of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Books XIII and XIV have remained in the background of Metaphysics, as a kind of editorial aggregate, which can be dispensed with for the understanding of the Aristotelian proposal. In this article, however, a different startingpoint is assumed, which consists in integrating these books into the core of the proposal of Metaphysics, understanding that they are key to completing the panorama of the general theory of substance, or ousiology, which guides all metaphysical books. Thus, the discussion of numbers and principles within M and N concludes the question of substance as cause and principle, announced from the beginning of Metaphysics and developed in its central books. (shrink)

Because metaphysics aims for absolute generality, its primary job is to tell us what are the fundamental particulars, of which one may say that is ultimately all there is, and yet be assured of an unabridged version of reality. It should be clear that such a search for the fundamental particulars is totally different from the enterprise of determining which particulars are basic from the point of view of particular-identification, which though it has recently been labeled "metaphysics," albeit "descriptive metaphysics," (...) might less confusingly be called "descriptive epistemology.". (shrink)

the famous passage at the end of the sixth book of the Republic, in which Socrates compares our cognitive states to different sections of a single line, is often read as a "map" of Plato's epistemology. Symbolizing the different levels of cognition, the divided line may be taken to present a forceful image of the various stages that the soul must traverse in its quest for true knowledge. Its reputation as a snapshot of the epistemology of Plato's mature dialogues makes (...) the divided line, despite, or perhaps because of, persisting disagreements over its interpretation, one of the most vexed passages of the Platonic corpus.In the ancient readings of the divided line, many of the modern exegetical debates... (shrink)

The late Mario Mignucci was one of the most authoritative, original, and influential scholars in the area of ancient philosophy, especially ancient logic. Collected here for the first time are sixteen of his most important essays on ancient logic, language, and metaphysics. These essays show a perceptive historian and a skillful logician philosophically engaged with issues that are still at the very heart of history and philosophy of logic, such as the nature of predication, identity, and modality. As well as (...) essays found in disparate publications, often not easily available online, the volume includes an article on Plato and the relatives translated into English for the first time and an unpublished paper on De interpretatione7. Mignucci thinks rigorously and writes clearly. He brings the deep knowledge of a scholar and the precision of a logician to bear on some of the trickiest topics in ancient philosophy. This collection deserves the close attention of anyone concerned with logic, language, and metaphysics, whether in ancient or contemporary philosophy. t philosophy. This collection deserves the close attention of anyone concerned with logic, language, and metaphysics, whether in ancient or contemporary philosophy. (shrink)