Hasil untuk "Metaphysics"

M. Farber, A. Ayer

T. G.

M. Heidegger

R. Poggioli

Immanuel Kant

Zachery Moffatt

This article explores Augustine of Hippo’s conception of miracles. It places a particular emphasis on the metaphysics of the natural order in Augustine’s works The Trinity and The Literal Meaning of Genesis to dispute subjectivist and interventionist readings of Augustinian miracles. Rather, this article argues that Augustine offers a metaphysically robust conception of miracles that upholds an intimate connection between God and nature while respecting the intrinsic wonder of miracles. In light of this, this article considers how a deep and wide engagement with Augustine’s thought may help provide alternative approaches to the prevailing philosophical and theological orthodoxies regarding miracles.  

Daniel Dal Monte

I consider the principle of sufficient reason (henceforth, PSR) as it functions in both Leibniz and Kant. The issue separating these thinkers is a modal status of absolute contingency, which is exempt from PSR insofar as it is neither logically necessary, nor does it necessarily follow from the given causal series. Leibniz’s ambitious metaphysics applies PSR even to God’s choices, which, since they must rest on a reason that makes sense of them, necessarily tend to the creation of the best of all possible worlds. Through PSR, the exercise of human freedom represents the unfolding of a concept God already has chosen, with an eye to the best possible world aligned with the universal intelligibility enjoined by PSR. PSR, in Kant’s critical period, is not a principle of being, but one of mere experience, since any extension of thought beyond possible experience can yield no knowledge. Human agency, for Kant, has an intelligible aspect that is beyond possible experience. Since PSR is only a principle of experience for Kant, the agent in its intelligible aspect is not subject to it. Human free will introduces a special modal category of absolute contingency. Kant provides impetus for a humanism that makes the absolute freedom of the human will a competitor with the sovereignty of God, and also liberates the human will from contemporary ideologies that would subordinate it to natural determinism or group dynamics.

Fatima BAHI & Youcef ATTIA

Abstract : This study aims at understanding the concept of metalanguage: its origins, definition, its perception by the Arb receiver, its translation and its interpretation. The human being is unique living being in terms of using the language to express his thoughts linguistically without even knowing that he is applying the grammar of the language. In connection to this, the philosophical thought, ancient and new, paid a significant attention to language. Therefore, trends in schools of linguistics and publications have varied introducing definitions of language and linguistics particularly at the age of globalization during which knowledge has become open access due to the services technology affords for the scientific study of language. Accordingly, research has overstepped the narrow boundaries to search deeper in metalanguage. As a result, studies in linguistics have contributed to establishing a theory of the concept of metalanguage leading to the emergence of many definitions of the term specifically after the work of Ferdinand De Saussure who was interested in language and the science of language. Immediately then a philosophical question that goes beyond the simple study and naive definitions to a deeper philosophy represented by meta-philosophy crops up. Iin other words, it questions what is meta-philosophy, its most important cognitive dimensions, the specificity of this prefix (meta), which has influenced all research and all modern studies, transforming it from the path of research into the subject to research into metaphysics, and finally how it was received by Arab studies translated, theorized, transmitted, and applied this prefix ? Keywords: meta, meta-language, beyond, tongue, linguistics.

M. Wartofsky

Zanchet Maria Eugênia

The idea that we must free ourselves from the mastery of our emotions in order to act morally has been challenged over the past decades as Kant scholars have turned to the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Judgment to regain the centrality of emotions in this tradition. I want to expand the claim about the positive role of emotions in Kant’s moral theory by arguing that certain emotional states should be understood as having an even more fundamental role, namely, as an empirical condition for morality. Therefore, I will show that the structure Kant provides to explain the human mind conceives of our moral experience as relying on what he calls lower faculty of feeling. After sketching Kant’s approach to cognition, I will show how some feelings are indissociable from the human moral experience – and notably, from the ability to act in accordance with our predispositions. I will discuss textual evidence for this view and explain that, although Kant himself failed to devise an explicit taxonomy of emotions, there is a sense in which pathological feelings are to be regarded as a condition for morality.

J. Dupré

Amie L. Thomasson

How ought we to do work in conceptual ethics? Some have thought that conceptual choice should itself be guided by (heavyweight) metaphysics—for we should be sure that our concepts pick out things that exist or should aim to choose concepts that really ‘carve the world at its joints’. An alternative is to take a pragmatic approach to conceptual ethics. But pragmatic approaches are often criticized as unable to account for intuitions that some conceptual choices are objectively better than others, and intuitions that the world is structured. As a result, the fear is that a pragmatic approach leaves conceptual choices arbitrary and insusceptible to critique. This chapter confronts such worries and develops a pragmatic method for conceptual ethics that clearly avoids these problems. As a result, we need not rely on heavyweight metaphysics and become entangled in its epistemological mysteries to do conceptual ethics.

Mark Wilson

The grander metaphysical schemes popular in Hertz’s era often suppressed conceptual innovation in manifestly unhelpful ways. In counterreaction, Hertz and his colleagues stressed the raw pragmatic advantages of “good theory” considered as a functional whole and rejected the armchair meditations upon individual words characteristic of the metaphysical imperatives they spurned. Rudolf Carnap’s later rejection of all forms of “metaphysics” attempts to broaden these methodological tenets to a wider canvas. In doing so, the notion of an integrated, axiomatizable “theory” became the shaping tenet within our most conception of how the enterprise of “rigorous conceptual analysis” should be prosecuted. Although Carnap hoped to suppress all forms of metaphysics, large and small, through these means, in more recent times, closely allied veins of “theory T thinking” have instead encouraged a revival of grand metaphysical speculation that embodies many of the suppressive doctrines that Hertz’s generation rightly resisted (I have in mind the school of “analytic metaphysics” founded by David Lewis). The proper corrective to these inflated ambitions lies in directly examining the proper sources of descriptive effectiveness in the liberal manner of a multiscalar architecture.

J. Heil

Preface to the second edition Preface to the first edition 1. Introduction 1.1 Experience and reality 1.2 The unavoidability of the philosophy of mind 1.3 Science and metaphysics 1.4 Metaphysics and cognitive science 1.5 A look ahead Suggested reading 2. Cartesian Dualism 2.1 Science and philosophy 2.2 Descartes's Dualism 2.3 Substances, attributes, and modes 2.4 The metaphysics of Cartesian Dualism 2.5 Mind-body interaction Suggested reading 3. Decartes's legacy 3.1 Dualism without interaction 3.2 Parallelism 3.3 Occasionalism 3.4 Causation and occasionalism 3.5 Idealism 3.6 Mind and meaning 3.7 Epiphenomealism Suggested reading 4. Non-Cartesian Dualism 4.1 Three facets of Cartesian Dualism 4.2 Individuating substances 4.3 Metaphysical interlude 4.4 Substance dualism 4.5 Self-body interaction 4.6 Taking stock Suggested reading 5. Behaviourism 5.1 Moving away from Dualism 5.2 Historical and philosophical background 5.3 Privacy and its consequences 5.4 The beetle in the box 5.5 Philosophical behaviourism 5.6 Dispositions 5.7 Behavioural analysis 5.8 Sensation 5.9 The legacy of philosophical behaviourism 5.10 Intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics 5.11 Psychological behaviourism 5.12 The demise of behaviourism Suggested reading 6. The identity theory 6.1 Correlation to identification 6.2 Parsimony 6.3 Self-conscious thought 6.4 Locating mental qualities 6.5 Substance, properties, states, and events 6.6 Predicates and properties 6.7 Strict identity 6.8 Leibniz's law 6.9 The $64 question 6.10 Qualities of experiences and qualities experienced 6.11 Epistemological loose ends 6.12 Taking stock Suggested reading 7. Functionalism 7.1 The emergence of functionalism 7.2 The functionalist picture 7.3 Abstraction as partial consideration 7.4 Minds as computing machines 7.5 Functional explanation 7.6 Functionalist ontology 7.7 Functionalism and materialism 7.8 Functional properties 7.9 Mental properties as functional properties 7.10 Functionalism and behaviourism 7.11 Characterizing functional states 7.12 Total functional systems Suggested reading 8. The representational theory of mind 8.1 Mental representation 8.2 Semantic engines 8.3 The mind as a semantic engine 8.4 The Chinese room 8.5 From syntax to semantics 8.6 Levels of description 8.7 Levels of description and the special sciences 8.8 From taxonomy to ontology 8.9 Layers of reality Suggested reading 9. Qualia 9.1 Qualities of conscious experience 9.2 Zombies 9.3 Biting the bullet 9.4 Living without Qualia 9.5 The mystery of consciousness Suggested reading 10. Radical interpretation 10.1 Minds as constructs 10.2 Davidson and the propositional attitudes 10.3 Semantic opacity 10.4 Radical interpretation: Background issues 10.5 T-theories 10.6 From T-theories to I-theories 10. 7 Decision theory 10.8 Charity 10.9 Indeterminacy 10.10 The omniscient interpreter 10.11 Interpretation and measurement 10.12 Structures and content 10.13 Mental causation and the propositional attitudes 10.14 An apparent regress Suggested reading 11. The intentonal stance 11.1 From Davidson to Dennett 11.2 Taking a stance 11.3 From intentional stance to design stance 11.4 From design stance to physical stance 11.5 The emerging picture 11.6 Thought and language 11.7 Kinds of mind 11.8 Consciousness 11.9 Searle's objection Suggested reading 12. Eliminativism 12.1 From instrumentalism to eliminativism 12.2 Theories and theory reduction 12.3 Stitch's argument 12.4 Is eliminativism self-refuting? Suggested reading 13. Property Dualism 13.1 From substances to properties 13.2 Appearance and reality 13.3 Mental causation 13.4 Mental-material supervienience 13.5 Causal relevance 13.6 The causal relevance of mental properties 13.7 The upshot 13.8 Conclusion Suggested reading 14. Mind and metaphysics 14.1 The status of philosophies of mind 14.2 Metaphysical p

D. Villa

This text aims to defend Arendt against her devotees. The author argues that Arendt's sweeping reconceptualization of the nature and value of political action has been covered over and domesticated by admirers who had hoped to enlist her in their less radical philosophical/political projects. Against the prevailing "Aristotelian" interpretation of her work, Villa explores Arendt's modernity, and indeed her postmodernity, through the Heideggerian and Nietzschean theme of a break with tradition at the closure of metaphysics. The author makes a case for Arendt as the postmodern or post-metaphysical political theorist, the first political theorist to think through the nature of political action after Nietzsche'a exposition of the death of God. After giving an account of Arendt's theory of action and Heidegger's influence on it, the book shows how Arendt did justice to the Heideggerian and Nietzschean criticism of the metaphysical tradition while avoiding the political conclusions they drew from their critiques.

Van Fraassen, C. Bastiaan

Fernando Pérez Borbujo

The thought of Gianni Vattimo, father of the pensiero débole, is consciously si-tuated within the framework of a history of metaphysics, which has in Nietzsche and Heidegger, two of the most outstanding representatives of one of its turns or high points. The pensiero débole, redefined in his latest writings as hermeneutical communism, corresponds to a new milestone in this history of metaphysics that is nothing other than the history of Western onto-theo-logy, where the concepts of Being and God, configure the entire space of that fundamental science or philosophy, metaphysics, founded by Aristotle, reconfigured by Thomas Aquinas, criticized by Nietzsche and redefined by Heidegger.

H. Cappelen, E. Lepore

J. Schaffer

Abstract I argue that, just like causal explanation requires laws of nature, so metaphysical explanation requires laws of metaphysics. I offer a minimal rendition of the argument for laws of metaphysics, assuming nothing about grounding or essences, and little about explanation. And I offer a positive and minimal functional conception of the laws of metaphysics, coupled with an argument that some laws of metaphysics are fundamental.

Jason Nehez

As the saying goes, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, yet very few assume imitation to be equivalence. An original masterpiece may be worth millions while a copy, no matter how exact the resemblance, would yield just a fraction of the price. I propose that there is more to thought than a machine will ever be capable of. The imitation game, while reproducing an imitation that is something like human thinking and interaction, will never achieve that same unique mode of thinking we experience as human species. This presentation aims to outline some of the hidden assumptions in the Turing Test for the computational theory of mind, explain some of the most popular arguments against the computational model of thought today, provide some original thought experiments, and finally discuss briefly the unique aspects of human thought that may never be able to be replicated in a machine.