The Metaphysical Presuppositions of Being-in-the-World PDF Download

Author: Caitlin Smith Gilson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441195955
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Author: Richard Corry
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198840713
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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The world is a complex place, and this complexity is an obstacle to our attempts to explain, predict, and control it. In Power and Influence, Richard Corry investigates the assumptions that are built into the reductive method of explanation - the method whereby we study the components of acomplex system in relative isolation and use the information so gained to explain or predict the behaviour of the complex whole. He investigates the metaphysical presuppositions built into the reductive method, seeking to ascertain what the world must be like in order that the method could work.Corry argues that the method assumes the existence of causal powers that manifest causal influence- - a relatively unrecognised ontological category, of which forces are a paradigm example. The success of the reductive method, therefore, is an argument for the existence of such causal influences.The book goes on to show that adding causal influence to our ontology gives us the resources to solve some traditional problems in the metaphysics of causal powers, laws of nature, causation, emergence, and possibly even normative ethics. What results, then, is not just an understanding of thereductive method, but an integrated metaphysical worldview that is grounded in an ontology of power and influence.

Author: Martin Heidegger
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253214294
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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This book, the text of Martin Heidegger's lecture course of 1929/30, is crucial for an understanding of Heidegger's transition from the major work of his early years, Being and Time, to his later preoccupations with language, truth, and history. First published in German in 1983 as volume 29/30 of Heidegger's collected works, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics presents an extended treatment of the history of metaphysics and an elaboration of a philosophy of life and nature. Heidegger's concepts of organism, animal behavior, and environment are uniquely developed and defined with intensity. Of major interest is Heidegger's brilliant phenomenological description of the mood of boredome, which he describes as a "fundamental attunement" of modern times.

Author: Jürgen Habermas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745694934
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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‘There is no alternative to postmetaphysical thinking’: this statement, made by Jürgen Habermas in 1988, has lost none of its relevance. Postmetaphysical thinking is, in the first place, the historical answer to the crisis of metaphysics following Hegel, when the central metaphysical figures of thought began to totter under the pressure exerted by social developments and by developments within science. As a result, philosophy’s epistemological privilege was shaken to its core, its basic concepts were de-transcendentalized, and the primacy of theory over practice was opened to question. For good reasons, philosophy ‘lost its extraordinary status’, but as a result it also courted new problems. In Postmetaphysical Thinking II, the sequel to the 1988 volume that bears the same title (English translation, Polity 1992), Habermas addresses some of these problems. The first section of the book deals with the shift in perspective from metaphysical worldviews to the lifeworld, the unarticulated meanings and assumptions that accompany everyday thought and action in the mode of ‘background knowledge’. Habermas analyses the lifeworld as a ‘space of reasons’ – even where language is not (yet) involved, such as, for example, in gestural communication and rituals. In the second section, the uneasy relationship between religion and postmetaphysical thinking takes centre stage. Habermas picks up where he left off in 1988, when he made the far-sighted observation that ‘philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion’, and explores philosophy’s new-found interest in religion, among other topics. The final section includes essays on the role of religion in the political context of a post-secular, liberal society. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, religion and the social sciences and humanities generally.

Author: Sean Gaston
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783480025
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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In the mid-eighteenth century metaphysics was broadly understood as the study of three areas of philosophical thought: theology, psychology and cosmology. This book examines the fortunes of the third of these formidable metaphysical concepts, the world. Sean Gaston provides a clear and concise account of the concept of world from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, exploring its possibilities and limitations and engaging with current issues in politics and ecology. He focuses on the work of five principal thinkers: Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida, all of whom attempt to establish new grounds for seeing the world as a whole. Gaston presents a critique of the self-evident use of the concept of world in philosophy and asks whether one can move beyond the need for a world-like vantage point to maintain a concept of world. From Kant to the present day this concept has been a problem for philosophy and it remains to be seen if we need a new Copernican revolution when it comes to the concept of world.

Author: Caitlin Smith Gilson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501329138
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Immediacy and Meaning seeks to approach the odd uneasiness at root in all metaphysical meaning; that the human knower attempts to mediate what cannot be mediated; that there is a pre-cognitive immemorial immediacy to Being that renders its participants irreducible, incommunicable and personal. The dilemma of metaphysics rests on the relationship between the spectator and the player, both as essential responses to the immediacy of Being. Immediacy and Meaning is an attempt to pause, but without retreat, to be a spectator within the game, to gain access into this immediate Presence, for a moment only perhaps, before the signatory failure into metaphysical language returns us to the mediated. J. K. Huysman's semi-autobiographical tetralogy anchors this book as a meditation, neither purely poetic nor only philosophical; it claims a unique territory when attempting to speak what cannot be spoken. The unnerving merits of nominalism, the difficulties of an honest appraisal of efficacious prayer, the mad sanity of the muse, the relationship between the uncreated and the created, and an originary ethics of antagonism, each serves to clarify the formation of a new epistemology.

Author: Wilbur Marshall Urban
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317851986
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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First published in 2002. This is Volume XIV of seventeen in the Library of Philosophy series on Metaphysics. Written in 1929, this book is on metaphysics and value in the intelligible world, which states that there are only two kinds of philosophies: those that find the world ultimately meaningful and intelligible and those that do not. The present book claims to belong to the first of these, and as such to be apart, however modest, of the Great Tradition in philosophy.

Author: Robert C. Stalnaker
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191530743
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Ways a World Might Be collects, and adds to, Robert Stalnaker's published papers on metaphysical issues. The central theme that runs throughout the book is the role of possible worlds in articulating our various metaphysical commitments. The essays contain both reflections on the general idea of a space of possibilities and attempts to use the framework of possible worlds to formulate and clarify semantic and metaphysical questions about properties and individuals, supervenience and essentialism, reference, thought and experience. The essays also reflect on the nature of metaphysics, and on the relation between metaphysical and semantic questions - questions about what there is and questions about how we talk and think about what there is. The book begins by asking what possible worlds are, and how we are able to represent and know about them. Stalnaker argues that we can take possibilities seriously without embracing the kind of modal realism that David Lewis defended, and can take them as fundamental without purporting to offer a reductive account of modality. He then turns to questions about the nature of properties and relations and their role in carving up a space of possibilities, and to questions about the nature of individuals, and the way they are identified across time and possible worlds. The essays in the last two sections of the book are concerned with the interaction of metaphysical and semantic issues, and with the place of subjective experience in our conception of an objective world as it is in itself. Two of the fourteen essays, plus an extensive introduction that sets the papers in context and makes explicit some of the essays' common threads, are published here for the first time.

Author: Quentin Smith
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1557535981
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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In a critical dialogue with the metaphysical tradition from Plato to Hegel to contemporary schools of thought, the author convincingly argues that traditional rationalist metaphysics has failed to accomplish its goal of demonstrating the existence of a divine cause and moral purpose of the world. To replace the defective rationalist metaphysics, the author builds a new metaphysics on the idea that moods and affects make manifest the world's felt meanings; he argues that each feature of the world is a felt meaning in the sense that each feature is a source of a feeling-response, if and when it appears. The author asserts that we must synthesize our two ways of knowing - poetic evocations and exact analyses - in order to decide which mood or affect is the appropriate appreciation of any given feature of the world. Smith gives evocative and exact explications of such features as the world's temporality, appearance, and mind-independency, as these features appear in the appropriate recitations.

Author: Alfred I. Tauber
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349252492
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
Science and the Quest for Reality is an interdisciplinary anthology that situates contemporary science within its complex philosophical, historical, and sociological contexts. The anthology is divided between, firstly, characterizing science as an intellectual activity and, secondly, defining its social role. The philosophical and historical vicissitudes of science's truth claims has raised profound questions concerning the role of science in society beyond its technological innovations. The deeper philosophical issues thus complement the critical inquiry concerning the broader social and ethical influence of contemporary science. In the tradition of the 'Main Trends of the Modern World' series, this volume includes both classical and contemporary works on the subject.