Everyday Metaphysical Explanation
Everyday Metaphysical Explanation

Author: Kristie Miller

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-03-10

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 0192599259

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The philosophical notion of metaphysical explanation has been subject to an increased level of attention in the previous decade. Despite tantalising claims about how metaphysical explanations are part of everyday life, the everyday notion has not been explored. In Everyday Metaphysical Explanation, Kristie Miller and James Norton take up the task of developing an account of the everyday notion of metaphysical explanation: the notion that we all use in ordinary contexts when we ask for, and receive, explanations of a certain sort. Building on the striking results of their empirical investigation of folk judgements regarding what metaphysically explains what, together with evidence of our ordinary practices surrounding the notion, they build three unique accounts of the phenomenon.

Everyday Metaphysical Explanation
Everyday Metaphysical Explanation

Author: Kristie Miller

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-03-10

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 0198857306

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The philosophical notion of metaphysical explanation has been subject to an increased level of attention in the previous decade. Despite tantalising claims about how metaphysical explanations are part of everyday life, the everyday notion has not been explored. In Everyday Metaphysical Explanation, Kristie Miller and James Norton take up the task of developing an account of the everyday notion of metaphysical explanation: the notion that we all use in ordinary contexts when we ask for, and receive, explanations of a certain sort. Building on the striking results of their empirical investigation of folk judgements regarding what metaphysically explains what, together with evidence of our ordinary practices surrounding the notion, they build three unique accounts of the phenomenon.

The Metaphysics of Everyday Life
The Metaphysics of Everyday Life

Author: Lynne Rudder Baker

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-09-24

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780521120296

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Lynne Rudder Baker presents and defends a unique account of the material world: the Constitution View. In contrast to leading metaphysical views that take everyday things to be either non-existent or reducible to micro-objects, the Constitution View construes familiar things as irreducible parts of reality. Although they are ultimately constituted by microphysical particles, everyday objects are neither identical to, nor reducible to, the aggregates of microphysical particles that constitute them. The result is genuine ontological diversity: people, bacteria, donkeys, mountains and microscopes are fundamentally different kinds of things - all constituted by, but not identical to, aggregates of particles. Baker supports her account with discussions of non-reductive causation, vagueness, mereology, artefacts, three-dimensionalism, ontological novelty, ontological levels and emergence. The upshot is a unified ontological theory of the entire material world that irreducibly contains people, as well as non-human living things and inanimate objects.

Every Thing Must Go
Every Thing Must Go

Author: James Ladyman

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2007-07-05

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0191534757

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Every Thing Must Go argues that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it really is, and not on philosophers' a priori intuitions, common sense, or simplifications of science. In addition to showing how recent metaphysics has drifted away from connection with all other serious scholarly inquiry as a result of not heeding this restriction, they demonstrate how to build a metaphysics compatible with current fundamental physics ('ontic structural realism'), which, when combined with their metaphysics of the special sciences ('rainforest realism'), can be used to unify physics with the other sciences without reducing these sciences to physics itself. Taking science metaphysically seriously, Ladyman and Ross argue, means that metaphysicians must abandon the picture of the world as composed of self-subsistent individual objects, and the paradigm of causation as the collision of such objects. Every Thing Must Go also assesses the role of information theory and complex systems theory in attempts to explain the relationship between the special sciences and physics, treading a middle road between the grand synthesis of thermodynamics and information, and eliminativism about information. The consequences of the author's metaphysical theory for central issues in the philosophy of science are explored, including the implications for the realism vs. empiricism debate, the role of causation in scientific explanations, the nature of causation and laws, the status of abstract and virtual objects, and the objective reality of natural kinds.

Power and Influence
Power and Influence

Author: Richard Corry

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-07-31

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0192577204

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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 a complex 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 the reductive method, but an integrated metaphysical worldview that is grounded in an ontology of power and influence.

Metaphysics and the Sciences
Metaphysics and the Sciences

Author: Matteo Morganti

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-05-30

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 1009238914

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This Element presents and critically examines the relationship between metaphysics and the sciences. Section 1 provides a brief introduction. Section 2 looks at the methodological issues that arise when metaphysics and science get into contact, which is a much-debated aspect of the larger dispute concerning philosophical 'naturalism' and 'anti-naturalism'. A taxonomy of possible views is offered. Section 3 looks more specifically at milder forms of naturalism about metaphysics, which attempt in various ways to make it 'continuous' with science while preserving some degree of autonomy for it. Section 4 adds some reflections on what might be regarded as the most pressing open problem when it comes to doing scientifically oriented metaphysics (but also when practising metaphysics or science in isolation): the problem concerning theory choice and the value of non-empirical factors in determining which explanation of certain phenomena should be preferred.

The Oxford Handbook of Levinas
The Oxford Handbook of Levinas

Author: Michael L. Morgan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-04-10

Total Pages: 881

ISBN-13: 0190910682

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Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes--the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others--speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. However, his writings and thought are challenging and difficult. The Oxford Handbook of Levinas contains essays that aim to clarify and engage Levinas and his writings in a number of ways. Some focus on central themes of his work, others on the ways in which he read and was influenced by figures from Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant to Blanchot, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. And there are essays on how his thinking has been appropriated in moral and political thought, psychology, film criticism, and more, and on the relation between his thinking and religious themes and traditions. Finally, several essays deal primarily with how readers have criticized him and found him wanting. The volume exposes and explores both the depth of Levinas's philosophical work and the range of applications to which it has been put, with special attention to clarifying why his interests in the human condition, the crisis of civilization, the centrality and character of ethics and morality, and the very meaning of human experience should be of interest to the widest range of readers.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and the Method of Metaphysics
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and the Method of Metaphysics

Author: Gabriele Gava

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-05-25

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1009187325

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In two often neglected passages of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant submits that the Critique is a 'treatise' or a 'doctrine of method'. These passages are puzzling because the Critique is only cursorily concerned with identifying adequate procedures of argument for philosophy. In this book, Gabriele Gava argues that these passages point out that the Critique is the doctrine of method of metaphysics. Doctrines of method have the task of showing that a given science is indeed a science because it possesses 'architectonic unity' – which happens when it realizes the 'idea' of a science. According to Gava's novel approach, the Critique establishes that metaphysics is capable of this unity, and his reading of the Critique from this perspective not only illuminates the central role of the Transcendental Doctrine of Method within it, but also clarifies the relationship between the different parts of the work.

Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics
Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics

Author: Marcus Willaschek

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-24

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 110859607X

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In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously criticizes traditional metaphysics and its proofs of immortality, free will and God's existence. What is often overlooked is that Kant also explains why rational beings must ask metaphysical questions about 'unconditioned' objects such as souls, uncaused causes or God, and why answers to these questions will appear rationally compelling to them. In this book, Marcus Willaschek reconstructs and defends Kant's account of the rational sources of metaphysics. After carefully explaining Kant's conceptions of reason and metaphysics, he offers detailed interpretations of the relevant passages from the Critique of Pure Reason (in particular, the 'Transcendental Dialectic') in which Kant explains why reason seeks 'the unconditioned'. Willaschek offers a novel interpretation of the Transcendental Dialectic, pointing up its 'positive' side, while at the same time it uncovers a highly original account of metaphysical thinking that will be relevant to contemporary philosophical debates.

The Metaphysics of Modern Existence
The Metaphysics of Modern Existence

Author: Vine Deloria, Jr.

Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1555917666

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Vine Deloria Jr., named one of the most influential religious thinkers in the world by Time, shares a framework for a new vision of reality. Bridging science and religion to form an integrated idea of the world, while recognizing the importance of tribal wisdom, The Metaphysics of Modern Existence delivers a revolutionary view of our future and our world.