Author : Trenton Merricks
Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
Page : 221 pages
File Size : 16,17 MB
Release : 2007-04-19
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 019920523X
A central question in philosophy is whether and how truth depends on the world. In isolation this question is so abstract that it is hard to address in an illuminating way. Instead, Trenton Merricks looks at how answers to this question bear on a variety of other philosophical debates. The result is a well-grounded discussion of the nature of truth that in its turn casts new light on these philosophical debates themselves.
Author : Miguel de Beistegui
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 414 pages
File Size : 43,25 MB
Release : 2004-06-16
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780253111005
"... an attempt to revive ontology (or metaphysics) -- indeed philosophy itself -- by means of a two-sided conception of being.... This is a remarkable idea which has produced a powerful book." -- Leonard Lawlor "... a major philosophical study: rich, brilliant... a tour de force, a seminal study that will be a starting-point for future research in this area." -- Robert Bernasconi In Truth and Genesis, Miguel de Beistegui considers the role and meaning of philosophy today. Calling for a new departure for philosophy, one that brings together philosophy's scattered identities, de Beistegui proposes a robust and unified philosophy that would find itself equally at home in artistic and scientific disciplines. To build this renewed philosophy, de Beistegui turns to Aristotle and the earliest foundations of thought. He traces philosophy's development through the medieval and modern periods before comparing and investigating the work of two of the 20th century's most influential thinkers, Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze. In particular, de Beistegui focuses on Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy for their handling of the concept of difference. De Beistegui concludes that Deleuze and Heidegger are irreconcilable, but it is in their disagreements that he sees a way to liberate philosophy from its current crisis.
Author : David Ingram
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 24,11 MB
Release : 2018-09-18
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0429839200
Thisness Presentism outlines and defends a novel version of presentism, the view that only present entities exist and what is present really changes, a view of time that captures a real and objective difference between what is past, present, and future, and which offers a model of reality that is dynamic and mutable, rather than static and immutable. The book advances a new defence of presentism by developing a novel ontology of thisness, combining insights about the nature of essence, the metaphysics of propositions, and the relationship between true propositions and the elements of reality that make them true, alongside insights about time itself. It shows how, by accepting an ontology of thisness, presentists can respond to a number of pressing challenges to presentism, including claims that presentism cannot account for true propositions about the past, and that it is inconsistent with the reality of temporal passage and the openness of the future. This is one of the only book-length defences of presentism. It will be of interest to students and scholars working on the debate about presentism in the philosophy of time, as well as those interested in the metaphysics of propositions and truth-making, more generally.
Author : Jamin Asay
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 311 pages
File Size : 10,77 MB
Release : 2020-04-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1108499880
Demonstrates how truthmaking can be used to make progress all across philosophy, but without its usual theoretical baggage.
Author : Amie Lynn Thomasson
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 28,17 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0199385114
Existence questions have been topics for heated debates in metaphysics, but this book argues that they can often be answered easily, by trivial inferences from uncontroversial premises. This 'easy' approach to ontology leads to realism about disputed entities, and to the view that metaphysical disputes about existence questions are misguided.
Author : D. M. Armstrong
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 25,27 MB
Release : 2004-05-27
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780521547239
This book, first published in 2004, makes a compelling case for truthmaking and its importance in philosophy.
Author : Laird Addis
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 151 pages
File Size : 41,27 MB
Release : 2013-05-02
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 3110321769
Although there is a huge literature on Nietzsche’s philosophy, this is the first study in English that focuses on his ontology. Before proceeding to that ontology, Addis argues that, contrary to many commentators, Nietzsche defends both the possibility and the desirability of objectivity in the search for knowledge, including knowledge of the basic features of reality, that is, of ontology. In separate chapters, Addis then sets out, analyzes, and evaluates the five essential components of Nietzsche’s ontology: constant change, substances and things, minds, causation, and will to power. In each case, Addis contributes an original understanding of the feature under discussion, with more detail than exists in other treatments, and defended with quotes from relevant texts of Nietzsche.
Author : Jonathan Tallant
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 45,21 MB
Release : 2017-10-16
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1351388509
How do we explain the truth of true propositions? Truthmaker theory is the branch of metaphysics that explores the relationships between what is true and what exists. It plays an important role in contemporary debates about the nature of metaphysics and metaphysical enquiry. In this book Jonathan Tallant argues, controversially, that we should reject truthmaker theory. In its place he argues for an 'explanationist' approach. Drawing on a deflationary theory of truth he shows that it allows us to explain the truth of true propositions and respond to recent arguments that purport to show otherwise. He augments this with a distinction between internally and externally quantified claims: externally quantified claims are claims that quantify over elements of our ontology that play an indispensable explanatory role; internally quantified claims do not. He deploys this union of deflationism and a distinction between kinds of quantification to pursue metaphysical inquiry, sketching the implications for a number of first-order debates, including those in the philosophy of time, modality and mathematics, and also shows how this explanationist model can be used to solve the key problems that afflicted truthmaker theory. Truth and the World is an important contribution to debates about truth and truthmaker theory as well as metametaphysics, the metaphysics of time and the metaphysics of mathematics, and is essential reading for students and scholars engaged in the study of these topics.
Author : George Englebretsen
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 12,95 MB
Release : 2013-05-02
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 3110325829
Contemporary analytic philosophy can generally be characterized by the following tendencies: commitment to first-order predicate logic as the only viable formal logic; rejection of correspondence theories of truth; a view of existence as something expressed by the existential quantifier; a metaphysics that doesn’t give the world as a whole its due. This book seeks to offer an alternative analytic theory, one that provides a unified account of what there is, how we speak about it, the underlying logic of our language, how the truth of what we say is determined, and the central role of the real world in all of this. The result is a robust account of reality. The inspiration for many of the ideas that constitute this overall theory comes from such sources as Aristotle, Leibniz, Ryle, and Sommers.
Author : Fabio Bacchini
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 190 pages
File Size : 42,74 MB
Release : 2014-10-02
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1443868272
Metaphysics and ontology feature among the traditional and fundamental concerns of philosophers. Gaining a picture of the world and the kind of objects that exist out there is for most philosophers (past and present) a preliminary aim upon which other theoretical activities depend. In fact, it seems that sound conclusions on topics relevant to ethics, aesthetics, psychology, and common and scientific knowledge can be achieved only after one has been given a picture of that sort. What is worth stressing, though, is that from time to time the tribunal of history has managed to put its finger on some flawed conclusions. To take a time-worn example, who would now accept Plato’s claim that the spatiotemporal world is just an imperfect copy of a world of abstract objects conceived of as perfect unchanging models of concrete things? The picture Plato gave us is nothing but a myth – an account which is too far away from what common sense and science could accept, too detached from the usual ways of conducting a rational discussion. Therefore, pictures of this kind appear to be supported by nothing but dogmas, i.e. uncompromising principles taken as true without any previous critical analysis. And Plato has no shortage of company. Issues of this kind revolving around metaphysics and ontology are tackled in the essays in this volume, which approach a secular debate in fresh and original ways, providing the necessary tools for clearing the field of unpalatable metaphysical and ontological items.
