Hermann Lotze was a german philosopher and logician who lived and worked in the latter part of the nineteenth century. He contributed a great deal to the philosophy of science and was well-versed not only in philosophy but also in medicine and biology. His book is the text of several of his lectures where he explained the ideas he had about the rules governing the universe.
Based on original translations of passages from the works of three major thinkers of the classical Indian school of Advaita (Sankara, Vacaspati and Sri Harsa), but addressing issues found in Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein and contemporary analytic philosophers, this book argues for a philosophical position it calls 'non-realism'. This is the view that an independent, external world must be assumed if the features of cognition are to be explained, but that it cannot be proved that there is such a world, independently of an appeal to cognition itself. This position is constructed against idealist denials of externality, realist arguments for an independent world and the sceptical denial of the coherence of cognition.
Presents the full text of "Metaphysics," by Aristotle, presented by the Perseus Project of the Department of Classics at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Includes author information and help for texts and text tools. Offers Greek text with morphological links. Links to the home page of the Perseus Project.
Adler's 53rd book explores philosophy--its relation to and difference from other disciplines, such as history, mathematics, empirical science, and even poetry--and acts as an extension of the author's classic works on the conditions that that make philosophy workable.
By offering the first systematic analysis of the nature of the discipline, Metaphysics and Its Task answers why metaphysics always recovers from the attacks it has been subjected to throughout its history. This is done by examining its object, method, aim, and the kind of propositions of which it is composed. In addition to presenting a new conception of metaphysics and an explanation of the resilience of the discipline, the book offers a novel understanding of the nature and ontological status of categories, an analysis of the nature of reductionism and its role in philosophy, and a discussion and criticism of the main views concerning the nature of metaphysics developed in the history of philosophy. In this nonsectarian book Gracia uses sources ranging from Plato and Aquinas, to Collingwood and Strawson. Written in nontechnical language, it is accompanied by detailed bibliographical references.
This book is about our ordinary concept of matter in the form of enduring continuants and the processes in which they are involved in the macroscopic realm. It emphasises what science rather than philosophical intuition tells us about the world, and chemistry rather than the physics that is more usually encountered in philosophical discussions. The central chapters dealing with the nature of matter pursue key steps in the historical development of scientific conceptions of chemical substance. Like many contemporary discussions of material objects, it relies heavily on mereology. The classical principles are applied to the mereological structure of regions of space, intervals of time, processes and quantities of matter. Quantities of matter, which don’t gain or lose parts over time, are distinguished from individuals, which are typically constituted of different quantities of matter at different times. The proper treatment of the temporal aspect of the features of material objects is a central issue in this book, which is addressed by investigating the conditions governing the application of predicates relating time and other entities. Of particular interest here are relations between quantities of matter and times expressing substance kind, phase and mixture. Modal aspects of these features are taken up in the final chapter.
