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The scientific successes of the last 400 years strongly suggest a view in which things are organized into layers, with phenomena in higher layers dependent on and determined by what occurs below. Philosophers have recently explored the idea that we can make sense of this through a relation called grounding. This book develops the rudiments of a theory of grounding and applies that theory to various questions on the nature of facts and truth. The initial theorizing examines in detail what grounding is and how it relates to relevant forms of explanation; it addresses arguments against the notion of grounding and draws points of contrast between a grounding-centered approach to relative fundame...
Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. OSM offers a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philsophy of mind and philosophy of science. Besides independent essays, volumes will often contain a critical essay on a recent book, or a symposium that allows participants to respond to one another's criticisms and questions. Anyone who wants to know what's happening in metaphysics can start here.
Derk Pereboom articulates and defends an original, forward-looking conception of moral responsibility. He argues that although we may not possess the kind of free will that is normally considered necessary for moral responsibility, this does not jeopardize our sense of ourselves as agents, or a robust sense of achievement and meaning in life.
For the first time Truth: A Contemporary Reader brings together essays that have shaped two aspects of a fundamental philosophical topic: the nature of truth and the value of truth. Featuring 22 essays, this up-to-date reader includes seminal work by leading figures in contemporary analytic philosophy. It charts the development of the central 'grand proposals' about the nature of truth, and subsequently how their influence gradually diminished in face of new theories developed in the 20th and 21st-centuries. The reader also demonstrates how truth is often taken to be valuable in various ways, in particular as the norm of correctness for belief and assertion, and the relationship between trut...
The first half of this book argues that physicalism cannot account for consciousness, and hence cannot be true. The second half explores and defends Russellian monism, a radical alternative to both physicalism and dualism. The view that emerges combines panpsychism with the view that the universe as a whole is fundamental.
Simon J. Evnine explores the view (which he calls amorphic hylomorphism) that some objects have matter from which they are distinct but that this distinctness is not due to the existence of anything like a form. He draws on Aristotle's insight that such objects must be understood in terms of an account that links what they are essentially with how they come to exist and what their functions are (the coincidence of formal, final, and efficient causes). Artifacts are the most prominent kind of objects where these three features coincide, and Evnine develops a detailed account of the existence and identity conditions of artifacts, and the origins of their functions, in terms of how they come into existence. This process is, in general terms, that they are made out of their initial matter by an agent acting with the intention to make an object of the given kind. Evnine extends the account to organisms, where evolution accomplishes what is effected by intentional making in the case of artifacts, and to actions, which are seen as artifactual events.
What are we? Are we, for example, souls, organisms, brains, or something else? This book discusses the main competing accounts of personal ontology that we are either souls, or we are composite physical objects of some sort, and includes a detailed discussion of the metaphysics of several afterlife scenarios.
While religious diversity is often considered a recent phenomenon in America, the Cape Fear region of southeastern North Carolina has been a diverse community since the area was first settled. Early on, the region and the port city of Wilmington were more urban than the rest of the state and thus provided people with opportunities seldom found in other parts of North Carolina. This area drew residents from many ethnic backgrounds, and the men and women who settled there became an integral part of the region’s culture. Set against the backdrop of national and southern religious experience, A Coat of Many Colors examines issues of religious diversity and regional identity in the Cape Fear ar...
This book invites newcomers to analytical legal philosophy to reconsider the terms in which they are accustomed to describing and defending their jurisprudential allegiances. It argues that familiar taxonomic labels such as legal positivism, natural law theory and legal interpretivism are poor guides to the actual diversity of views on the nature and normativity of law, mainly because they fail to carve up the reality of jurisprudential disagreement at its joints. These joints, the author suggests, are elusive because the semantics of law systematically misplaces them. Their true nature resides in the metaontological and metanormative features that dictate or indicate the target of a theory'...
Presentation and comparison of the main causal theories of reference for proper names, and a proposal of a new approach based on the analogy of the causal chain of reference with the block chain from blockchain technology and Paul Ricœur's narrative theory. After a brief Introduction in which the types of sentences from the concept of possible worlds are reviewed, and an overview of the theory in the Causal Theory of Reference, I present the causal theory of the reference proposed by Saul Kripke, then two hybrid causal theories developed by Gareth Evans and Michael Devitt. In the section Blockchain and the causal tree of reference I present my idea of developing a new causal theory of refer...