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A Paradigm Theory Of Existence
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Book Synopsis A Paradigm Theory of Existence by : W.F. Vallicella
Download or read book A Paradigm Theory of Existence written by W.F. Vallicella and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2002-09-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it for any contingent thing to exist? Why does any contingent thing exist? For some time now, the preferred style in addressing such questions has been deflationary when it has not been eliminativist. In its critical half, this book thoroughly analyzes and demolishes the main deflationary and eliminativist accounts of existence, including those of Brentano, Frege, Russell, and Quine, thereby restoring existence to its rightful place as one of the deep topics in philosophy, if not the deepest. In its constructive half, the book defends the thesis that the two questions admit of a unified answer, and that this answer takes the form of what the author calls a paradigm theory of existence. The central idea of the paradigm theory is that existence itself is a paradigmatically existent concrete individual. In this way the author vindicates onto-theology and puts paid to the Heideggerian conceit that Being cannot itself be a being. This work will be of interest to all serious students and teachers of philosophy, especially those interested in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion.
Book Synopsis A Paradigm Theory of Existence by : W.F. Vallicella
Download or read book A Paradigm Theory of Existence written by W.F. Vallicella and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heart of philosophy is metaphysics, and at the heart of the heart lie two questions about existence. What is it for any contingent thing to exist? Why does any contingent thing exist? Call these the nature question and the ground question, respectively. The first concerns the nature of the existence of the contingent existent; the second concerns the ground of the contingent existent. Both questions are ancient, and yet perennial in their appeal; both have presided over the burial of so many of their would-be undertakers that it is a good induction that they will continue to do so. For some time now, the preferred style in addressing such questions has been deflationary when it has not been eliminativist. Ask Willard Quine what existence is, and you will hear that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses. "! Ask Bertrand Russell what it is for an individual to exist, and he will tell you that an individual can no more exist than it can be numerous: there 2 just is no such thing as the existence of individuals. And of course Russell's eliminativist answer implies that one cannot even ask, on pain of succumbing to the fallacy of complex question, why any contingent individual exists: if no individual exists, there can be no question why any individual exists. Not to mention Russell's modal corollary: 'contingent' and 'necessary' can only be said de dicto (of propositions) and not de re (of things).
Book Synopsis A Paradigm Theory of Existence by : W. F. Vallicella
Download or read book A Paradigm Theory of Existence written by W. F. Vallicella and published by . This book was released on 2014-01-15 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Atrocity Paradigm by : Claudia Card
Download or read book The Atrocity Paradigm written by Claudia Card and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-09-12 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs? Is hatred a necessarily evil? Are some evils unforgivable? Are there evils we should tolerate? What can make evils hard to recognize? Are evils inevitable? How can we best respond to and live with evils? Claudia Card offers a secular theory of evil that responds to these questions and more. Evils, according to her theory, have two fundamental components. One component is reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm -- harm that makes a life indecent and impossible or that makes a death indecent. The other component is culpable wrongdoing. Atrocities, such as genocides, slavery, war rape, torture, and severe child abuse, are Cards paradigms because in them these key elements are writ large. Atrocities deserve more attention than secular philosophers have so far paid them. They are distinguished from ordinary wrongs not by the psychological states of evildoers but by the seriousness of the harm that is done. Evildoers need not be sadistic:they may simply be negligent or unscrupulous in pursuing their goals. Cards theory represents a compromise between classic utilitarian and stoic alternatives (including Kants theory of radical evil). Utilitarians tend to reduce evils to their harms; Stoics tend to reduce evils to the wickedness of perpetrators: Card accepts neither reduction. She also responds to Nietzsches challenges about the worth of the concept of evil, and she uses her theory to argue that evils are more important than merely unjust inequalities. She applies the theory in explorations of war rape and violence against intimates. She also takes up what Primo Levi called the gray zone, where victims become complicit in perpetrating on others evils that threaten to engulf themselves. While most past accounts of evil have focused on perpetrators, Card begins instead from the position of the victims, but then considers more generally how to respond to -- and live with -- evils, as victims, as perpetrators, and as those who have become both.
Book Synopsis The Fullness of Being by : Barry Miller
Download or read book The Fullness of Being written by Barry Miller and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to a fairly standard view, there are several reasons for denying that existence is a real property of individuals. One is that 'exists' cannot be predicated of individuals, and another is that first-level properties are parasitic on individuals for their actuality, which is something that existence could never be. A third is that existence adds nothing to individuals. Moreover, even if existence were to survive all three counter-indications, it would be merely the most vacuous of properties. The Fullness of BeingThe Fullness of Being is an account of what happens when different questions are asked, when false assumptions are eschewed, and when the possibility of a radically different paradigm for existence is actively explored rather than completely ignored. What began for Miller as an exercise in philosophical logic to determine whether 'exists' is predicable of individuals, ends in an argument with groundbreaking consequences for ontology.
Download or read book Paradigm Shift written by Martin Cohen and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2015-09-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do giraffes have long necks? It can't really be for reaching tasty leaves since their main food is ground level bushes, tidy though that explanation would be. And how does relativity theory cope with the fact that the observable universe defies prediction by being far too small and anything but homogeneous? By inventing a vastly larger, but invisible, universe. And what exactly should we make of the scientists who claim to be witnessing thought itself, when the changes of blood flow in the brain that they observe are a thousand times slower than the neuronal activity it is supposed to reveal? A little scepticism is in order. Yet if philosophers of science, from Thomas Kuhn to Paul Feyerabend, have argued that science is a more haphazard process, driven by political fashion and short-term economic self-interest, today almost everyone seems to assume it is a vast jigsaw of interlocking facts pieced slowly but steadily together by expert practitioners. In this witty but profound 21st-century update on the issues, Martin Cohen offers vital clues for understanding not only the way knowledge develops, but also into the dangers of accepting too readily or too uncritically the claims of experts of all kinds - even philosophical ones! The claims are invariably presented as objective fact, yet are rooted in human subjectivity.
Book Synopsis The Quest for a Universal Theory of Life by : Carol E. Cleland
Download or read book The Quest for a Universal Theory of Life written by Carol E. Cleland and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-12 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores fundamental philosophical and scientific questions about the nature of life, particularly in relation to the search for extraterrestrial life.
Book Synopsis Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life by : Albert Borgmann
Download or read book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life written by Albert Borgmann and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-14 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blending social analysis and philosophy, Albert Borgmann maintains that technology creates a controlling pattern in our lives. This pattern, discernible even in such an inconspicuous action as switching on a stereo, has global effects: it sharply divides life into labor and leisure, it sustains the industrial democracies, and it fosters the view that the earth itself is a technological device. He argues that technology has served us as well in conquering hunger and disease, but that when we turn to it for richer experiences, it leads instead to a life dominated by effortless and thoughtless consumption. Borgmann does not reject technology but calls for public conversation about the nature of the good life. He counsels us to make room in a technological age for matters of ultimate concern—things and practices that engage us in their own right.
Book Synopsis Theories of Existence by : Timothy L. S. Sprigge
Download or read book Theories of Existence written by Timothy L. S. Sprigge and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1984 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis From Alienation to Forms of Life by : Amy Allen
Download or read book From Alienation to Forms of Life written by Amy Allen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The wide-ranging work of Rahel Jaeggi, a leading voice of the new generation of critical theorists, demonstrates how core concepts and methodological approaches in the tradition of the Frankfurt School can be updated, stripped of their dubious metaphysical baggage, and made fruitful for critical theory in the twenty-first century. In this thorough introduction to Jaeggi’s work for English-speaking audiences, scholars assess and critique her efforts to revitalize critical theory. Jaeggi’s innovative work reclaims key concepts of Hegelian-Marxist social philosophy and reads them through the lens of such thinkers as Adorno, Heidegger, and Dewey, while simultaneously putting them into dialogue with contemporary analytic philosophy. Structured for classroom use, this critical introduction to Rahel Jaeggi is an insightful and generative confrontation with the most recent transformation of Frankfurt School–inspired social and philosophical critical theory. This volume features an essay by Jaeggi on moral progress and social change, essays by leading scholars engaging with her conceptual analysis of alienation and the critique of forms of life, and a Q&A between Jaeggi and volume coeditor Amy Allen. For scholars and students wishing to engage in the debate with key contemporary thinkers over the past, present, and future(s) of critical theory, this volume will be transformative.
Book Synopsis Theories of Existence by : Timothy L. S. Sprigge
Download or read book Theories of Existence written by Timothy L. S. Sprigge and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Aquinas's Way to God by : Gaven Kerr OP
Download or read book Aquinas's Way to God written by Gaven Kerr OP and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-25 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gaven Kerr provides the first book-length study of St. Thomas Aquinas's much neglected proof for the existence of God in De Ente et Essentia Chapter 4. He offers a contemporary presentation, interpretation, and defense of this proof, beginning with an account of the metaphysical principles used by Aquinas and then describing how they are employed within the proof to establish the existence of God. Along the way, Kerr engages contemporary authors who have addressed Aquinas's or similar reasoning. The proof developed in the De Ente is, on Kerr's reading, independent of many of the other proofs in Aquinas's corpus and resistant to the traditional classificatory schemes of proofs of God. By applying a historical and hermeneutical awareness of the philosophical issues presented by Aquinas's thought and evaluating such philosophical issues with analytical precision, Kerr is able to move through the proof and evaluate what Aquinas is saying, and whether what he is saying is true. By means of an analysis of one of Aquinas's earliest proofs, Kerr highlights a foundational argument that is present throughout the much more commonly studied Thomistic writings, and brings it to bear within the context of analytical philosophy, showing its relevance to the contemporary reader.
Book Synopsis Paradigms for a Metaphorology by : Hans Blumenberg
Download or read book Paradigms for a Metaphorology written by Hans Blumenberg and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What role do metaphors play in philosophical language? Are they impediments to clear thinking and clear expression, rhetorical flourishes that may well help to make philosophy more accessible to a lay audience, but that ought ideally to be eradicated in the interests of terminological exactness? Or can the images used by philosophers tell us more about the hopes and cares, attitudes and indifferences that regulate an epoch than their carefully elaborated systems of thought? In Paradigms for a Metaphorology, originally published in 1960 and here made available for the first time in English translation, Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) approaches these questions by examining the relationship between metaphors and concepts. Blumenberg argues for the existence of "absolute metaphors" that cannot be translated back into conceptual language. "Absolute metaphors" answer the supposedly naïve, theoretically unanswerable questions whose relevance lies quite simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside, since we do not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our existence. They leap into a void that concepts are unable to fill. An afterword by the translator, Robert Savage, positions the book in the intellectual context of its time and explains its continuing importance for work in the history of ideas.
Download or read book What is Reality? written by Ervin Laszlo and published by SelectBooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ervin Laszlo's tour de force, What is Reality?, is the product of a half-century of deep contemplation and cutting-edge scholarship. Addressing many of the paradoxes that have confounded modern science over the years, it offers nothing less than a new paradigm of reality, one in which the cosmos is a seamless whole, informed by a single, coherent consciousness manifest in us all. Bringing together science, philosophy, and metaphysics, Laszlo takes aim at accepted wisdom, such as the dichotomies of mind and body, spirit and matter, being and nonbeing, to show how we are all part of an infinite cycle of existence unfolding in spacetime and beyond. Augmented by insightful commentary from a dozen scholars and thinkers, along with a foreword by Deepak Chopra and an introduction by Stanislav Grof, What is Reality? offers a fresh and liberating understanding of the meaning and purpose of existence.
Book Synopsis Shipwreck With Spectator by : Hans Blumenberg
Download or read book Shipwreck With Spectator written by Hans Blumenberg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This elegant essay exemplifies Blumenberg's ideas about the ability of the historical study of metaphor to illuminate essential aspects of being human. Originally published in the same year as his monumental Work on Myth, Shipwreck with Spectator traces the evolution of the complex of metaphors related to the sea, to shipwreck, and to the role of the spectator in human culture from ancient Greece to modern times. The sea is one of humanity's oldest metaphors for life, and a sea journey, Blumenberg observes, has often stood for our journey through life. We all know the role that shipwrecks can play in this journey, and at some level we have all played witness to others' wrecks, standing in safety and knowing that there is nothing we can do to help, yet fixed comfortably or uncomfortably in our ambiguous role as spectator. Through Blumenberg's seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of letters, from ancient texts through nineteenth-century reminiscences and modern speeches, we see layer upon layer revealed in the meanings humans have given to these metaphors; and in this way we begin to understand what metaphors can do that more straightforward modes of expression cannot. This edition of Shipwreck with Spectator also includes "Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality", an essay that recounts the evolution of Blumenberg's ideas about metaphorology in the years following his early manifesto "Paradigms for a Metaphorology".
Book Synopsis The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by : Thomas S. Kuhn
Download or read book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions written by Thomas S. Kuhn and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Reflexive Universe by : Arthur M. Young
Download or read book The Reflexive Universe written by Arthur M. Young and published by . This book was released on 1999-07-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, together with an emerging science of consciousness, have created the need for a new cosmology, or model of the universe. The theory of process contained in THE REFLEXIVE UNIVERSE places consciousness within the context of contemporary science. One of the central themes of this extraordinary work is that each successive organization of matter, from fundamental particles in physics to living organisms, expresses a particular stage in the evolution of mind. Starting with the photon, the basic unit of light, and moving through atomic physics, molecular chemistry, the morphology of plants and animals and finally to levels of human evolution, Young develops his theory in vivid step-by-step detail. Consciousness, in his point of view, is not isolated from the material universe. It exists in a continuum, one in which physical and nonphysical realms can be linked and the teachings of mythology and religion can be integrated. To order: FAX: 415-883-9280; e-mail: [email protected]; or write: Anodos Foundation, c/o Publishers Services, P.O. Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948. Visa and MasterCard only. Trade STOP orders 40% plus postage.
