Appearance and Reality

Appearance and Reality

Author: Peter Kosso

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780195115147

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Appearance and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics addresses quantum mechanics and relativity and their philosophical implications, focusing on whether these theories of modern physics can help us know nature as it really is, or only as it appears to us. The author clearly explains the foundational concepts and principles of both quantum mechanics and relativity and then uses them to argue that we can know more than mere appearances, and that we can know to some extent the way things really are. He argues that modern physics gives us reason to believe that we can know some things about the objective, real world, but he also acknowledges that we cannot know everything, which results in a position he calls "realistic realism." This book is not a survey of possible philosophical interpretations of modern physics, nor does it leap from a caricature of the physics to some wildly alarming metaphysics. Instead, it is careful with the physics and true to the evidence in arriving at its own realistic conclusions. It presents the physics without mathematics, and makes extensive use of diagrams and analogies to explain important ideas. Engaging and accessible, Appearance and Reality serves as an ideal introduction for anyone interested in the intersection of philosophy and physics, including students in philosophy of physics and philosophy of science courses.


Reality and Its Appearance

Reality and Its Appearance

Author: Nicholas Rescher

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2011-11-03

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1441188908

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Reality and Its Appearance, Nicholas Rescher aims to address the conceptual and analytical question: how does the concept of reality function and how should we think with regard to the issue of reality's relations to appearances? Rescher argues that the distinction between reality and its appearance is not a substantive distinction between two types of being, but rather relates to different ways of understanding one selfsame mode of being. The book proposes that while realism is a sensible and tenable position, nevertheless there is something to be said for idealism as well. In the cognitive as in the moral life, perfection is beyond our human grasp and we have no choice but to rest content with the best that we can manage to achieve in practice. This perspective shifts the approach from a cognitive absolutism to a pragmatism that is prepared to come to terms with the limitations inherent in our situations. On this basis Rescher defends a substantive realism that itself rests on a justificatory rationale of a decidedly pragmatic orientation.


Social Appearances

Social Appearances

Author: Barbara Carnevali

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 023154698X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Philosophers have long distinguished between appearance and reality, and the opposition between a supposedly deceptive surface and a more profound truth is deeply rooted in Western culture. At a time of obsession with self-representation, when politics is enmeshed with spectacle and social and economic forces are intensely aestheticized, philosophy remains moored in traditional dichotomies: being versus appearing, interiority versus exteriority, authenticity versus alienation. Might there be more to appearance than meets the eye? In this strikingly original book, Barbara Carnevali offers a philosophical examination of the roles that appearances play in social life. While Western metaphysics and morals have predominantly disdained appearances and expelled them from their domain, Carnevali invites us to look at society, ancient to contemporary, as an aesthetic phenomenon. The ways in which we appear in public and the impressions we make in terms of images, sounds, smells, and sensations are discerned by other people’s senses and assessed according to their taste; this helps shape our ways of being and the world around us. Carnevali shows that an understanding of appearances is necessary to grasp the dynamics of interaction, recognition, and power in which we live—and to avoid being dominated by them. Anchored in philosophy and traversing sociology, art history, literature, and popular culture, Social Appearances develops new theoretical and conceptual tools for today’s most urgent critical tasks.


Found Footage Horror Films

Found Footage Horror Films

Author: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-05-08

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0786470771

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As the horror subgenre du jour, found footage horror's amateur filmmaking look has made it available to a range of budgets. Surviving by adapting to technological and cultural shifts and popular trends, found footage horror is a successful and surprisingly complex experiment in blurring the lines between quotidian reality and horror's dark and tantalizing fantasies. Found Footage Horror Films explores the subgenre's stylistic, historical and thematic development. It examines the diverse prehistory beyond Man Bites Dog (1992) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), paying attention to the safety films of the 1960s, the snuff-fictions of the 1970s, and to television reality horror hoaxes and mockumentaries during the 1980s and 1990s in particular. It underscores the importance of The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007), and considers YouTube's popular rise in sparking the subgenre's recent renaissance.


Appearance & Reality

Appearance & Reality

Author: Stephen Hogbin

Publisher: Fox Chapel Publishing

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A contemporary perspective on the problem of design and the visual arts, this book investigates the visual experience through four key disciplines: art, craft/technology, design, and science. It discusses visual fundamentals such as line, form, colour, and composition, as well as social issues such as environmental responsibility, non-Western art history, gender, locality, and cultural diversity -- all of which have an impact on current creative processes. This broad viewpoint shows how artists can create meaningful work that has cultural integrity.


Manifest Reality

Manifest Reality

Author: Lucy Allais

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2015-09-03

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 0191064246

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

At the heart of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy is an epistemological and metaphysical position he calls transcendental idealism; the aim of this book is to understand this position. Despite the centrality of transcendental idealism in Kant's thinking, in over two hundred years since the publication of the first Critique there is still no agreement on how to interpret the position, or even on whether, and in what sense, it is a metaphysical position. Lucy Allais argue that Kant's distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. He is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he does not assert the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects. A central part of Allais's reading involves paying detailed attention to Kant's notion of intuition, and its role in cognition. She understands Kantian intuitions as representations that give us acquaintance with the objects of thought. Kant's idealism can be understood as limiting empirical reality to that with which we can have acquaintance. He thinks that this empirical reality is mind-dependent in the sense that it is not experience-transcendent, rather than holding that it exists literally in our minds. Reading intuition in this way enables us to make sense of Kant's central argument for his idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and to see why he takes the complete idealist position to be established there. This shows that reading a central part of his argument in the Transcendental Deduction as epistemological is compatible with a metaphysical, idealist reading of transcendental idealism.


The Idea of the World

The Idea of the World

Author: Bernardo Kastrup

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2019-03-29

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1785357409

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A rigorous case for the primacy of mind in nature, from philosophy to neuroscience, psychology and physics. The Idea of the World offers a grounded alternative to the frenzy of unrestrained abstractions and unexamined assumptions in philosophy and science today. This book examines what can be learned about the nature of reality based on conceptual parsimony, straightforward logic and empirical evidence from fields as diverse as physics and neuroscience. It compiles an overarching case for idealism - the notion that reality is essentially mental - from ten original articles the author has previously published in leading academic journals. The case begins with an exposition of the logical fallacies and internal contradictions of the reigning physicalist ontology and its popular alternatives, such as bottom-up panpsychism. It then advances a compelling formulation of idealism that elegantly makes sense of - and reconciles - classical and quantum worlds. The main objections to idealism are systematically refuted and empirical evidence is reviewed that corroborates the formulation presented here. The book closes with an analysis of the hidden psychological motivations behind mainstream physicalism and the implications of idealism for the way we relate to the world.


What is Metaphysics?

What is Metaphysics?

Author: John Heil

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-08-20

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13: 1509546502

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

If we didn't possess certain beliefs about such things as time, appearance and reality, and how effect follows cause, we wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning, let alone read a book about metaphysics, which is the study of our experience and those ideas, or presuppositions, which allow us to make sense of it. Drawing on examples from art, science, and daily life, John Heil shows how metaphysics begins in questioning our everyday assumptions about how the world “works” and ends with speculation on the nature of the universe itself. In chapters that cover the major topics in the academic study of metaphysics, from free will and consciousness to time and objectivity, Heil explains how metaphysical questions underpin everything human beings do. This accessible book will show you how professional philosophers try to categorize and make sense of our world of perception and experience and explains why everyone should take metaphysics seriously.


I

I

Author: David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.

Publisher: Hay House, Inc

Published: 2014-03-03

Total Pages: 593

ISBN-13: 1401945007

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Experience spiritual enlightenment and personal transformation from world-renowned author, psychiatrist, clinician, spiritual teacher, and researcher of consciousness, David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. This book combines consciousness studies with transpersonal psychology, providing an accessible gateway into the deeper dimensions of self and reality. It concludes the presentation of a long-predicted major advance in critical human knowledge. It explains and describes the very substrate and essence of consciousness as it evolved from its primordial appearance as life on earth on up through evolution as the human ego, and hence, to the ego’s transcendence as the spiritual Reality of Enlightenment and the Presence of Divinity. It completes the description of the evolution of human consciousness from the level of approximately 800 to its peak experience at 1,000, which historically has been the ultimate possibility in the human domain. This is the realm of the mystic whose truth stems solely from the radical subjectivity of divine revelation. The text of the material is taken from lectures, dissertations, and dialogues with students, visitors, and spiritual aspirants from around the world who have different spiritual and religious backgrounds and varying levels of consciousness. On the referenced Scale of the Levels of consciousness, which calibrates the levels of Truth from 1 to 1,000, Power versus Force calibrates at 850, The Eye of the I at 980, and the final volume of the trilogy, I, calibrates at a conclusive 999.8. The uncommon clarity and lucidity with which the highly evolved subject matter is presented facilitates understanding. As with the reading of Power versus Force or The Eye of the I, the reader’s level of consciousness increases measurably as a consequence of exposure to this material itself, which is presented from a powerful field of exposition. Conflict is resolved within the mind of the student by means of recontextualization, which solves the dilemma. Argument and adversity are resolvable by identifying the positionalities of the ego which are the basis of human suffering. Some Chapters Include: The Process Spiritual Purification The ‘Ego’ and Society Spiritual Reality Realization The Realization of Divinity The Radical Reality of the Self The Mystic The Levels of Enlightenment The Nature of God The Obstacles Transcending the World The Emotions “Mind” Considerations Karma The Final Doorway The Transcendence The Inner Path “No Mind” The Way of the Heart The Recontextualization Spiritual Research Homo Spiritus This masterpiece is a revolutionary tool for personal transformation, blending quantum physics with spirituality, and a perfect read for anyone seeking enlightenment and a deeper understanding of the universe.