Necessary Beings PDF Download

Author: Bob Hale
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199669570
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Bob Hale presents a broadly Fregean approach to metaphysics, according to which ontology and modality are mutually dependent upon one another. He argues that facts about what kinds of things exist depend on facts about what is possible. Modal facts are fundamental, and have their basis in the essences of things—not in meanings or concepts.

Author: Peter van Inwagen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521795487
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book gathers together thirteen of Peter van Inwagen's essays on metaphysics, several of which have acquired the status of modern classics in their field. They range widely across such topics as Quine's philosophy of quantification, the ontology of fiction, the part-whole relation, the theory of 'temporal parts', and human knowledge of modal truths. In addition, van Inwagen considers the question as to whether the psychological continuity theory of personal identity is compatible with materialism, and defends the thesis that possible states of affairs are abstract objects, in opposition to David Lewis's 'extreme modal realism'. A specially-written introduction completes the collection, which will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in metaphysics.

Author: Paolo Valore
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110459035
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Scientific literature on particular themes in ontology is extremely abundant, but it is often very hard for freshmen or sophomores to find a red thread between the various proposals. This text is an opinionated introduction, a preliminary text to research in ontology from the so called standard approach to ontological commitment, that is from the particular point of view that connects ontological questions to quantificational questions. It offers a survey of this viewpoint in ontology together with their possible applications through a broad array of examples and open problems and, at the same time, essential references to the classics of philosophy, so as to allow non-specialists to understand the terms and analysis procedures characterizing the discipline. Its result is a wide-ranging overview of the issued tackled by ontology, with a particular focus on the most relevant problems of contemporary debate (categorial taxonomies, nonexistent objects, case studies of ontological debates in specific fields of knowledge).

Author: Jan Dejnožka
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429861710
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
First published in 1999, this volume re-examines Bertrand Russell’s views on modal logic and logical relevance, arguing that Russell does in fact accommodate modality and modal logic. The author, Jan Dejnožka, draws together Russell’s comments and perspectives from throughout his canon in order to demonstrate a coherent view on logical modality and logical relevance. To achieve this, Dejnožka explores questions including whether Russell has a possible worlds logic, Rescher’s case against Russell, Russell’s three levels of modality and the motives and origins of Russell’s theory of modality.

Author: Mark Sinclair
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198786433
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The Actual and the Possible presents new essays by leading specialists on modality and the metaphysics of modality in the history of modern philosophy from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It revisits key moments in the history of modern modal doctrines, and illuminates lesser-known moments of that history. The ultimate purpose of this historical approach is to contextualise and even to offer some alternatives to dominant positions within the contemporary philosophy of modality. Hence the volume contains not only new scholarship on the early-modern doctrines of Baruch Spinoza, G. W. F. Leibniz, Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant, but also work relating to less familiar nineteenth-century thinkers such as Alexius Meinong and Jan Lukasiewicz, together with essays on celebrated nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers such as G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger and Bertrand Russell, whose modal doctrines have not previously garnered the attention they deserve. The volume thus covers a variety of traditions, and its historical range extends to the end of the twentieth century, addressing the legacy of W. V. Quine's critique of modality within recent analytic philosophy.

Author: Otávio Bueno
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317585275
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
Modality - the question of what is possible and what is necessary - is a fundamental area of philosophy and philosophical research. The Routledge Handbook of Modality is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising thirty-five chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into seven clear parts: worlds and modality essentialism, ontological dependence, and modality modal anti-realism epistemology of modality modality in science modality in logic and mathematics modality in the history of philosophy. Within these sections the central issues, debates and problems are examined, including possible worlds, essentialism, counterfactuals, ontological dependence, modal fictionalism, deflationism, the integration challenge, conceivability, a priori knowledge, laws of nature, natural kinds, and logical necessity. The Routledge Handbook of Modality is essential reading for students and researchers in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. It will also be very useful for those in related fields in philosophy such as philosophy of mathematics, logic and philosophy of science.

Author: Brian Leftow
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199263353
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description
Brian Leftow offers a theist theory of necessity and possibility, and a new sort of argument for God's existence. He argues that necessities of logic and mathematics are determined by God's nature, but that it is events in God's mind - His imagination and choice - that account for necessary truths about concrete creatures.

Author: Phillip Bricker
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199676569
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
Drawing together his work from four decades, Phillip Bricker provides a comprehensive account of modal reality - the realm of possible worlds - from a Humean perspective, with excursions into neighboring topics in metaphysics. Many of the chapters in this volume focus on aspects of David Lewis's metaphysics and his defence of modal realism, sometimes further developing and defending Lewis's views, sometimes deviating from them in substantial ways. The volume is presented in four parts: part one sketches an account of reality as a whole, both the mathematical and the modal, defending a form of plenitudinous realism; part two presents and defends a realist theory of concrete possible worlds with an absolute ontological distinction between the actual and the merely possible; part three presents and defends a Humean account of modal plenitude, formulating and endorsing principles that guarantee a plenitude of recombination, of possible structures, and of alien contents; and part four applies the Humean account to truthmaking, mereology, spacetime, and quantities. An uncompromising Humean, Bricker shows that holding fast to Humean strictures leads to views that differ in radical ways from those prevalent among contemporary metaphysicians.

Author: Paul Hanmer
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1648897088
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
This book concerns the philosophical analysis of modal sentences. David Lewis’ Modal Translation Scheme "translates" sentences of quantified modal logic into sentences of predicate logic supplemented by counterpart theory. A number of theoretical advantages are thereby secured. One component of the translation scheme makes reference to non-actual but possible worlds i.e. the primitive predicate “at a world(s), w”. The author addresses the problem of advanced modal sentences which threaten this predicate and so the ability of genuine realism to secure the aforementioned theoretical benefits. The problem of advanced modal sentences is a relatively new field of philosophical research. This ground-breaking book will primarily be of interest to researchers in modality, particularly those working in this field.

Author: Stefano Bella
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781402032592
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
In his well-known Discourse on Metaphysics, Leibniz puts individual substance at the basis of metaphysical building. In so doing, he connects himself to a venerable tradition. His theory of individual concept, however, breaks with another idea of the same tradition, that no account of the individual as such can be given. Contrary to what has been commonly accepted, Leibniz’s intuitions are not the mere result of the transcription of subject-predicate logic, nor of the uncritical persistence of some old metaphysical assumptions. They grow, instead, from an unprejudiced inquiry about our basic ontological framework, where logic of truth, linguistic analysis, and phenomenological experience of the mind’s life are tightly interwoven. Leibniz’s struggle for a concept capable of grasping concrete individuals as such is pursued in an age of great paradigm changes – from the Scholastic background to Hobbes’s nominalism to the Cartesian ‘way of ideas’ or Spinoza’s substance metaphysics – when the relationships among words, ideas and things are intensively discussed and wholly reshaped. This is the context where the genesis and significance of Leibniz’s theory of ‘complete being’ and its concept are reconstrued. The result is a fresh look at some of the most perplexing issues in Leibniz scholarship, like his ideas about individual identity and the thesis that all its properties are essential to an individual. The questions Leibniz faces, and to which his theory of individual substance aims to answer, are yet, to a large extent, those of contemporary metaphysics: how to trace a categorial framework? How to distinguish concrete and abstract items? What is the metaphysical basis of linguistic predication? How is trans-temporal sameness assured? How to make sense of essential attributions? In this ontological framework Leibniz’s further questions about the destiny of human individuals and their history are spelt out. Maybe his answers also have something to tell us. This book is aimed at all who are interested in Leibniz’s philosophy, history of early modern philosophy and metaphysical issues in their historical development.