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Infinity Causation And Paradox
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Book Synopsis Infinity, Causation, and Paradox by : Alexander R. Pruss
Download or read book Infinity, Causation, and Paradox written by Alexander R. Pruss and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infinity is paradoxical in many ways. Some paradoxes involve deterministic supertasks, such as Thomson's Lamp, where a switch is toggled an infinite number of times over a finite period of time, or the Grim Reaper, where it seems that infinitely many reapers can produce a result without doing anything. Others involve infinite lotteries. If you get two tickets from an infinite fair lottery where tickets are numbered from 1, no matter what number you saw on the first ticket, it is almost certain that the other ticket has a bigger number on it. And others center on paradoxical results in decision theory, such as the surprising observation that if you perform a sequence of fair coin flips that goes infinitely far back into the past but only finitely into the future, you can leverage information about past coin flips to predict future ones with only finitely many mistakes. Alexander R. Pruss examines this seemingly large family of paradoxes in Infinity, Causation and Paradox. He establishes that these paradoxes and numerous others all have a common structure: their most natural embodiment involves an infinite number of items causally impinging on a single output. These paradoxes, he argues, can all be resolved by embracing 'causal finitism', the view that it is impossible for a single output to have an infinite causal history. Throughout the book, Pruss exposits such paradoxes, defends causal finitism at length, and considers connections with the philosophy of physics (where causal finitism favors but does not require discretist theories of space and time) and the philosophy of religion (with a cosmological argument for a first cause).
Book Synopsis Actuality, Possibility, and Worlds by : Alexander R. Pruss
Download or read book Actuality, Possibility, and Worlds written by Alexander R. Pruss and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-05-19 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Actuality, Possibility and Worlds is an exploration of the Aristotelian account that sees possibilities as grounded in causal powers. On his way to that account, Pruss surveys a number of historical approaches and argues that logicist approaches to possibility are implausible. The notion of possible worlds appears to be useful for many purposes, such as the analysis of counterfactuals or elucidating the nature of propositions and properties. This usefulness of possible worlds makes for a second general question: Are there any possible worlds and, if so, what are they? Are they concrete universes as David Lewis thinks, Platonic abstracta as per Robert M. Adams and Alvin Plantinga, or maybe linguistic or mathematical constructs such as Heller thinks? Or is perhaps Leibniz right in thinking that possibilia are not on par with actualities and that abstracta can only exist in a mind, so that possible worlds are ideas in the mind of God?
Download or read book One Body written by Alexander R. Pruss and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important philosophical reflection on love and sexuality from a broadly Christian perspective is aimed at philosophers, theologians, and educated Christian readers. Alexander R. Pruss focuses on foundational questions on the nature of romantic love and on controversial questions in sexual ethics on the basis of the fundamental idea that romantic love pursues union of two persons as one body. One Body begins with an account, inspired by St. Thomas Aquinas, of the general nature of love as constituted by components of goodwill, appreciation, and unitiveness. Different forms of love, such as parental, collegial, filial, friendly, fraternal, or romantic, Pruss argues, differ primarily not in terms of goodwill or appreciation but in terms of the kind of union that is sought. Pruss examines romantic love as distinguished from other kinds of love by a focus on a particular kind of union, a deep union as one body achieved through the joint biological striving of the sort involved in reproduction. Taking the account of the union that romantic love seeks as a foundation, the book considers the nature of marriage and applies its account to controversial ethical questions, such as the connection between love, sex, and commitment and the moral issues involving contraception, same-sex activity, and reproductive technology. With philosophical rigor and sophistication, Pruss provides carefully argued answers to controversial questions in Christian sexual ethics.
Book Synopsis Necessary Existence by : Alexander R. Pruss
Download or read book Necessary Existence written by Alexander R. Pruss and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Necessary Existence breaks ground on one of the deepest questions anyone ever asks: why is there anything? The classic answer is in terms of a necessary foundation. Yet, why think that is the correct answer? Pruss and Rasmussen present an original defense of the hypothesis that there is a concrete necessary being capable of providing a foundation for the existence of things. They offer six main arguments, divided into six chapters. The first argument is an up-to-date presentation and assessment of a traditional causal-based argument from contingency. The next five arguments are new "possibility-based" arguments that make use of twentieth-century advances in modal logic. The arguments present possible pathways to an intriguing and far-reaching conclusion. The final chapter answers the most challenging objections to the existence of necessary things.
Book Synopsis Theism and Ultimate Explanation by : Timothy O'Connor
Download or read book Theism and Ultimate Explanation written by Timothy O'Connor and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-02-20 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expansive, yet succinct, analysis of the Philosophy of Religion – from metaphysics through theology. Organized into two sections, the text first examines truths concerning what is possible and what is necessary. These chapters lay the foundation for the book’s second part – the search for a metaphysical framework that permits the possibility of an ultimate explanation that is correct and complete. A cutting-edge scholarly work which engages with the traditional metaphysician’s quest for a true ultimate explanation of the most general features of the world we inhabit Develops an original view concerning the epistemology and metaphysics of modality, or truths concerning what is possible or necessary Applies this framework to a re-examination of the cosmological argument for theism Defends a novel version of the Leibnizian cosmological argument
Book Synopsis The Principle of Sufficient Reason by : Alexander R. Pruss
Download or read book The Principle of Sufficient Reason written by Alexander R. Pruss and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-20 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) says that all contingent facts must have explanation. In this 2006 volume, which was the first on the topic in the English language in nearly half a century, Alexander Pruss examines the substantive philosophical issues raised by the Principle Reason. Discussing various forms of the PSR and selected historical episodes, from Parmenides, Leibnez, and Hume, Pruss defends the claim that every true contingent proposition must have an explanation against major objections, including Hume's imaginability argument and Peter van Inwagen's argument that the PSR entails modal fatalism. Pruss also provides a number of positive arguments for the PSR, based on considerations as different as the metaphysics of existence, counterfactuals and modality, negative explanations, and the everyday applicability of the PSR. Moreover, Pruss shows how the PSR would advance the discussion in a number of disparate fields, including meta-ethics and the philosophy of mathematics.
Book Synopsis Elements of Causal Inference by : Jonas Peters
Download or read book Elements of Causal Inference written by Jonas Peters and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-11-29 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise and self-contained introduction to causal inference, increasingly important in data science and machine learning. The mathematization of causality is a relatively recent development, and has become increasingly important in data science and machine learning. This book offers a self-contained and concise introduction to causal models and how to learn them from data. After explaining the need for causal models and discussing some of the principles underlying causal inference, the book teaches readers how to use causal models: how to compute intervention distributions, how to infer causal models from observational and interventional data, and how causal ideas could be exploited for classical machine learning problems. All of these topics are discussed first in terms of two variables and then in the more general multivariate case. The bivariate case turns out to be a particularly hard problem for causal learning because there are no conditional independences as used by classical methods for solving multivariate cases. The authors consider analyzing statistical asymmetries between cause and effect to be highly instructive, and they report on their decade of intensive research into this problem. The book is accessible to readers with a background in machine learning or statistics, and can be used in graduate courses or as a reference for researchers. The text includes code snippets that can be copied and pasted, exercises, and an appendix with a summary of the most important technical concepts.
Book Synopsis Reasonable Faith by : William Lane Craig
Download or read book Reasonable Faith written by William Lane Craig and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2008 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated edition by one of the world's leading apologists presents a systematic, positive case for Christianity that reflects the latest work in the contemporary hard sciences and humanities. Brilliant and accessible.
Book Synopsis Space, Time, and Stuff by : Frank Arntzenius
Download or read book Space, Time, and Stuff written by Frank Arntzenius and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frank Arntzenius presents a series of radical new ideas about the structure of space and time. Space, Time, and Stuff is an attempt to show that physics is geometry: that the fundamental structure of the physical world is purely geometrical structure. Along the way, he examines some non-standard views about the structure of spacetime and its inhabitants, including the idea that space and time are pointless, the idea that quantum mechanics is a completely local theory, the idea that antiparticles are just particles travelling back in time, and the idea that time has no structure whatsoever. The main thrust of the book, however, is that there are good reasons to believe that spaces other than spacetime exist, and that it is the existence of these additional spaces that allows one to reduce all of physics to geometry. Philosophy, and metaphysics in particular, plays an important role here: the assumption that the fundamental laws of physics are simple in terms of the fundamental physical properties and relations is pivotal. Without this assumption one gets nowhere. That is to say, when trying to extract the fundamental structure of the world from theories of physics one ignores philosophy at one's peril!
Download or read book Causality written by Judea Pearl and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-14 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Causality offers the first comprehensive coverage of causal analysis in many sciences, including recent advances using graphical methods. Pearl presents a unified account of the probabilistic, manipulative, counterfactual and structural approaches to causation, and devises simple mathematical tools for analyzing the relationships between causal connections, statistical associations, actions and observations. The book will open the way for including causal analysis in the standard curriculum of statistics, artificial intelligence ...
Book Synopsis Causation, Prediction, and Search by : Peter Spirtes
Download or read book Causation, Prediction, and Search written by Peter Spirtes and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is intended for anyone, regardless of discipline, who is interested in the use of statistical methods to help obtain scientific explanations or to predict the outcomes of actions, experiments or policies. Much of G. Udny Yule's work illustrates a vision of statistics whose goal is to investigate when and how causal influences may be reliably inferred, and their comparative strengths estimated, from statistical samples. Yule's enterprise has been largely replaced by Ronald Fisher's conception, in which there is a fundamental cleavage between experimental and non experimental inquiry, and statistics is largely unable to aid in causal inference without randomized experimental trials. Every now and then members of the statistical community express misgivings about this turn of events, and, in our view, rightly so. Our work represents a return to something like Yule's conception of the enterprise of theoretical statistics and its potential practical benefits. If intellectual history in the 20th century had gone otherwise, there might have been a discipline to which our work belongs. As it happens, there is not. We develop material that belongs to statistics, to computer science, and to philosophy; the combination may not be entirely satisfactory for specialists in any of these subjects. We hope it is nonetheless satisfactory for its purpose.
Book Synopsis Finite and Infinite Games by : James Carse
Download or read book Finite and Infinite Games written by James Carse and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “There are at least two kinds of games,” states James Carse as he begins this extraordinary book. “One could be called finite; the other infinite.” Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life; they are played in order to be won, which is when they end. But infinite games are more mysterious. Their object is not winning, but ensuring the continuation of play. The rules may change, the boundaries may change, even the participants may change—as long as the game is never allowed to come to an end. What are infinite games? How do they affect the ways we play our finite games? What are we doing when we play—finitely or infinitely? And how can infinite games affect the ways in which we live our lives? Carse explores these questions with stunning elegance, teasing out of his distinctions a universe of observation and insight, noting where and why and how we play, finitely and infinitely. He surveys our world—from the finite games of the playing field and playing board to the infinite games found in culture and religion—leaving all we think we know illuminated and transformed. Along the way, Carse finds new ways of understanding everything from how an actress portrays a role, to how we engage in sex, from the nature of evil, to the nature of science. Finite games, he shows, may offer wealth and status, power and glory. But infinite games offer something far more subtle and far grander. Carse has written a book rich in insight and aphorism. Already an international literary event, Finite and Infinite Games is certain to be argued about and celebrated for years to come. Reading it is the first step in learning to play the infinite game.
Book Synopsis Writing the Book of the World by : Theodore Sider
Download or read book Writing the Book of the World written by Theodore Sider and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-24 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theodore Sider presents a broad new vision of metaphysics centred on the idea of structure. To describe the world well we must use concepts that 'carve at the joints', so that conceptual structure matches reality's structure. This approach illuminates a wide range of topics, such as time, modality, ontology, and the status of metaphysics itself.
Book Synopsis The Beginning of Infinity by : David Deutsch
Download or read book The Beginning of Infinity written by David Deutsch and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Science has never had an advocate quite like David Deutsch ... A computational physicist on a par with his touchstones Alan Turing and Richard Feynman, and a philosopher in the line of his greatest hero, Karl Popper. His arguments are so clear that to read him is to experience the thrill of the highest level of discourse available on this planet and to understand it' Peter Forbes, Independent In our search for truth, how far have we advanced? This uniquely human quest for good explanations has driven amazing improvements in everything from scientific understanding and technology to politics, moral values and human welfare. But will progress end, either in catastrophe or completion - or will it continue infinitely? In this profound and seminal book, David Deutsch explores the furthest reaches of our current understanding, taking in the Infinity Hotel, supernovae and the nature of optimism, to instill in all of us a wonder at what we have achieved - and the fact that this is only the beginning of humanity's infinite possibility. 'This is Deutsch at his most ambitious, seeking to understand the implications of our scientific explanations of the world ... I enthusiastically recommend this rich, wide-ranging and elegantly written exposition of the unique insights of one of our most original intellectuals' Michael Berry, Times Higher Education Supplement 'Bold ... profound ... provocative and persuasive' Economist 'David Deutsch may well go down in history as one of the great scientists of our age' Scotsman
Download or read book Naming Infinity written by Loren Graham and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1913, Russian imperial marines stormed an Orthodox monastery at Mt. Athos, Greece, to haul off monks engaged in a dangerously heretical practice known as Name Worshipping. Exiled to remote Russian outposts, the monks and their mystical movement went underground. Ultimately, they came across Russian intellectuals who embraced Name Worshipping—and who would achieve one of the biggest mathematical breakthroughs of the twentieth century, going beyond recent French achievements. Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor take us on an exciting mathematical mystery tour as they unravel a bizarre tale of political struggles, psychological crises, sexual complexities, and ethical dilemmas. At the core of this book is the contest between French and Russian mathematicians who sought new answers to one of the oldest puzzles in math: the nature of infinity. The French school chased rationalist solutions. The Russian mathematicians, notably Dmitri Egorov and Nikolai Luzin—who founded the famous Moscow School of Mathematics—were inspired by mystical insights attained during Name Worshipping. Their religious practice appears to have opened to them visions into the infinite—and led to the founding of descriptive set theory. The men and women of the leading French and Russian mathematical schools are central characters in this absorbing tale that could not be told until now. Naming Infinity is a poignant human interest story that raises provocative questions about science and religion, intuition and creativity.
Book Synopsis Fitting Things Together by : Alex Worsnip
Download or read book Fitting Things Together written by Alex Worsnip and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some combinations of attitudes-beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on-do not fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there are requirements of 'structural rationality' that forbid us from being in these incoherent states. Yet many philosophers have recently attempted to minimize or eliminate structural rationality, arguing that it is just a 'shadow' of 'substantive rationality' - that is, correctly responding to one's reasons. In 'Fitting Things Together', Alex Worsnip pushes back against this trend, providing a sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine, autonomous, unified, and normatively significant phenomenon.
Book Synopsis On the Brink of Paradox by : Agustin Rayo
Download or read book On the Brink of Paradox written by Agustin Rayo and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to awe-inspiring ideas at the brink of paradox: infinities of different sizes, time travel, probability and measure theory, and computability theory. This book introduces the reader to awe-inspiring issues at the intersection of philosophy and mathematics. It explores ideas at the brink of paradox: infinities of different sizes, time travel, probability and measure theory, computability theory, the Grandfather Paradox, Newcomb's Problem, the Principle of Countable Additivity. The goal is to present some exceptionally beautiful ideas in enough detail to enable readers to understand the ideas themselves (rather than watered-down approximations), but without supplying so much detail that they abandon the effort. The philosophical content requires a mind attuned to subtlety; the most demanding of the mathematical ideas require familiarity with college-level mathematics or mathematical proof. The book covers Cantor's revolutionary thinking about infinity, which leads to the result that some infinities are bigger than others; time travel and free will, decision theory, probability, and the Banach-Tarski Theorem, which states that it is possible to decompose a ball into a finite number of pieces and reassemble the pieces so as to get two balls that are each the same size as the original. Its investigation of computability theory leads to a proof of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which yields the amazing result that arithmetic is so complex that no computer could be programmed to output every arithmetical truth and no falsehood. Each chapter is followed by an appendix with answers to exercises. A list of recommended reading points readers to more advanced discussions. The book is based on a popular course (and MOOC) taught by the author at MIT.
