The Metaphysics Of Paradox

Author : Hilan Bensusan
Publisher : Speculative Realism
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2021-09-30
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1474480292

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Indexicalism by Hilan Bensusan Pdf

A radical new metaphysics where reality is not substantive but is indexical Hilan Bensusan clarifies the logic and structure of an essentially situated and indexical metaphysics that is paradoxical and can also be regarded as a chapter in the critique of metaphysics. The book articulates a metaphysical view of the other, both human and non-human (or the Great Outdoors as Meillassoux called it), that can never be totalized into a single or univocal whole. An innovative account of perception is developed, as a matter of our irreducibly situated relationship to this non-totalisable Outdoors. A coda then underscores the social-political implications of the critical position of this radical metaphysics in a post-colonial context through a meditation on the sites of Potosi and Yasuní National Park. Engaging with analytic and continental philosophy, Bensusan enlists Levinas, Whitehead, Heidegger, Kripke, Deleuze, Derrida, Benso, Harman, Garcia, Cogburn, McDowell and Haraway, in such a way that proves to be transformative for both crucial aspects of their work, as well as for contemporary approaches to thinking about what it means to be in our world and to reckon with the responsibilities that press upon us from the outside. Hilan Bensusan is Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at the University de Brasilia, Brazil.

Author : Wm. Andrew Schwartz
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2018-09-15
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781498563932

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The Metaphysics of Paradox by Wm. Andrew Schwartz Pdf

This book is an exploration into the paradoxical structure of pluralistic thinking as illuminated by both Western and Eastern insights—especially Jainism. By calling into question the most fundamental assumptions of religious pluralists, the author hopes to contribute to a paradigm shift in discourse on religious pluralism and conflicting truth claims.

Author : Howard P. Kainz
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 72 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : UOM:39015064788386

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Five Metaphysical Paradoxes by Howard P. Kainz Pdf

Author : John Wisdom
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 166 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 1965
Category : Metaphysics
ISBN : 0802219101

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Paradox and Discovery by John Wisdom Pdf

Author : Jody Azzouni
Publisher : Springer
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2017-03-16
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 3319490605

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The Rule-Following Paradox and its Implications for Metaphysics by Jody Azzouni Pdf

This monograph presents Azzouni’s new approach to the rule-following paradox. His solution leaves intact an isolated individual’s capacity to follow rules, and it simultaneously avoids replacing the truth conditions for meaning-talk with mere assertability conditions for that talk. Kripke’s influential version of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox—and Wittgenstein’s views more generally—on the contrary, make rule-following practices and assertions about those practices subject to community norms without which they lose their cogency. Azzouni summarizes and develops Kripke’s original version of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox to make salient the linchpin assumptions of the paradox. By doing so, Azzouni reveals how compelling Kripke’s earlier work on the paradox was. Objections raised over the years by Fodor, Forbes Ginsborg, Goldfarb, Tait, Wright, and many others, are all shown to fail. No straight solution (a solution that denies an assumption of the paradox) can be made to work. Azzouni illustrates this in detail by showing that a popular family of straight solutions due to Lewis and refined by Williams, “reference magnetism,” fail as well. And yet an overlooked sceptical solution is still available in logical space. Azzouni describes a series of “disposition-meaning” private languages that he shows can be successfully used by a population of speakers to communicate with one another despite their ideolectical character. The same sorts of languages enable solitary “Robinson Crusoes” to survive and flourish in their island habitats. These languages—sufficiently refined—have the same properties normal human languages have; and this is the key to solving the rule-following paradox without sacrificing the individual’s authority over her self-imposed rules or her ability to follow those rules. Azzouni concludes this unusual monograph by uncovering a striking resemblance between the rule-following paradox and Hume’s problem of induction: he shows the rule-following paradox to be a corollary of Hume’s problem that arises when the problem of induction is applied to an individual’s own abilities to follow rules. “The book is clearly and engagingly written, and the conclusions are well-argued-for. (Depressingly well-argued-for in the case of Chapter 3, as I've always been partial to Lewisian responses to Putnam's model-theoretic argument--I'm rethinking that now.) And the proposed solution to the rule-following paradox really is novel.” Joshua Brown - Gustavus Adolphus College

Author : Frederick D. Wilhelmsen
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781351477703

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The Paradoxical Structure of Existence by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen Pdf

For metaphysicians who have imbibed the sober and inebriating teachings of Thomas Aquinas, existence is an act, the act which makes all things actually to be. As the act of existence makes things to be, essence makes them to be what they are. Essence and the act of existence, in other words, are really distinct yet together they compose each of the things that are.Such an understanding involves a number of paradoxes, and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's articulation of them reveals his philosophical genius. These paradoxes include the fact that the act of existence does not exist, that it can be thought but not conceived by the mind, and that truths about God can be known while He himself remains absolutely unknown. Wilhelmsen argues the notion that the Christian faith and philosophical reason harmonize while remaining completely distinct from each other.Writing in a captivating style, Wilhelmsen begins with a discussion of the development, strengths, and limitations of the ancient Greek philosophical accounts of being. Following that, he develops such key topics as the problem of existence, St. Thomas Aquinas' understanding of being, critical analyses of Hegel's and Heidegger's doctrines of being, existence as "towards God," and a metaphysical approach to the human person. The final two chapters develop the sense in which metaphysical thinking is and is not shaped by historical and social factors.

Author : Ryan Wasserman
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780198793335

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Paradoxes of Time Travel by Ryan Wasserman Pdf

Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.

Author : Michael Huemer
Publisher : Springer
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2018-06-28
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9783319904900

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Paradox Lost by Michael Huemer Pdf

Paradox Lost covers ten of philosophy’s most fascinating paradoxes, in which seemingly compelling reasoning leads to absurd conclusions. The following paradoxes are included: The Liar Paradox, in which a sentence says of itself that it is false. Is the sentence true or false? The Sorites Paradox, in which we imagine removing grains of sand one at a time from a heap of sand. Is there a particular grain whose removal converts the heap to a non-heap? The Puzzle of the Self-Torturer, in which a series of seemingly rational choices has us accepting a life of excruciating pain, in exchange for millions of dollars. Newcomb’s Problem, in which we seemingly maximize our expected profit by taking an unknown sum of money, rather than taking the same sum plus $1000. The Surprise Quiz Paradox, in which a professor finds that it is impossible to give a surprise quiz on any particular day of the week . . . but also that if this is so, then a surprise quiz can be given on any day. The Two Envelope Paradox, in which we are asked to choose between two indistinguishable envelopes, and it is seemingly shown that each envelope is preferable to the other. The Ravens Paradox, in which observing a purple shoe provides evidence that all ravens are black. The Shooting Room Paradox, in which a deadly game kills 90% of all who play, yet each individual’s survival turns on the flip of a fair coin. Each paradox is clearly described, common mistakes are explored, and a clear, logical solution offered. Paradox Lost will appeal to professional philosophers, students of philosophy, and all who love intellectual puzzles.

Author : R.D. Ingthorsson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2016-06-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781317195825

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McTaggart's Paradox by R.D. Ingthorsson Pdf

McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time, first published in 1908, set the agenda for 20th-century philosophy of time. Yet there is very little agreement on what it actually says—nobody agrees with the conclusion, but still everybody finds something important in it. This book presents the first critical overview of the last century of debate on what is popularly called "McTaggart’s Paradox". Scholars have long assumed that McTaggart’s argument stands alone and does not rely on any contentious ontological principles. The author demonstrates that these assumptions are incorrect—McTaggart himself explicitly claimed his argument to be dependent on the ontological principles that form the basis of his idealist metaphysics. The result is that scholars have proceeded to understand the argument on the basis of their own metaphysical assumptions, duly arriving at very different interpretations. This book offers an alternative reading of McTaggart’s argument, and at the same time explains why other commentators arrive at their mutually incompatible interpretations. It will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in the philosophy of time and other areas of contemporary metaphysics.

Author : Ralph Heintzman
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 836 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2022-08-31
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781487541538

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The Human Paradox by Ralph Heintzman Pdf

What is a human being? What does it mean to be human? How can you lead your life in ways that best fulfil your own nature? In The Human Paradox, Ralph Heintzman explores these vital questions and offers an exciting new vision of the nature of the human. The Human Paradox aims to counter or correct several contemporary assumptions about the nature of the human, especially the tendency of Western culture, since the seventeenth century, to identify the human with rationality and the rational mind. Using the lens of the virtues, The Human Paradox shows how rediscovering the nature of the human can help not just to understand one’s own paradoxical nature but to act in ways that are more consistent with its full reality. Offering accessible insight from both traditional and contemporary thought, The Human Paradox shows how a fuller, richer vision of the human can help address urgent contemporary problems, including the challenges of cultural and religious diversity, human migration and human rights, the role of the market, artificial intelligence, the future of democracy, and global climate change. This fresh perspective on the Western past will guide readers into what it means to be human and open new possibilities for the future.

Author : John L. Bell
Publisher : Broadview Press
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2016-04-18
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781554813025

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Oppositions and Paradoxes by John L. Bell Pdf

Since antiquity, opposed concepts such as the One and the Many, the Finite and the Infinite, and the Absolute and the Relative, have been a driving force in philosophical, scientific, and mathematical thought. Yet they have also given rise to perplexing problems and conceptual paradoxes which continue to haunt scientists and philosophers. In Oppositions and Paradoxes, John L. Bell explains and investigates the paradoxes and puzzles that arise out of conceptual oppositions in physics and mathematics. In the process, Bell not only motivates abstract conceptual thinking about the paradoxes at issue, but he also offers a compelling introduction to central ideas in such otherwise-difficult topics as non-Euclidean geometry, relativity, and quantum physics. These paradoxes are often as fun as they are flabbergasting. Consider, for example, the famous Tristram Shandy paradox: an immortal man composing an autobiography so slowly as to require a year of writing to describe each day of his life — he would, if he had infinite time, presumably never complete the work, although no individual part of it would remain unwritten. Or think of an office mailbox labelled “mail for those with no mailbox”—if this is a person’s mailbox, how can they possibly have “no mailbox”? These and many other paradoxes straddle the boundary between physics and metaphysics, and demonstrate the hidden difficulty in many of our most basic concepts.

Author : Jody Azzouni
Publisher : Springer
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2017-03-08
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9783319490618

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The Rule-Following Paradox and its Implications for Metaphysics by Jody Azzouni Pdf

This monograph presents Azzouni’s new approach to the rule-following paradox. His solution leaves intact an isolated individual’s capacity to follow rules, and it simultaneously avoids replacing the truth conditions for meaning-talk with mere assertability conditions for that talk. Kripke’s influential version of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox—and Wittgenstein’s views more generally—on the contrary, make rule-following practices and assertions about those practices subject to community norms without which they lose their cogency. Azzouni summarizes and develops Kripke’s original version of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox to make salient the linchpin assumptions of the paradox. By doing so, Azzouni reveals how compelling Kripke’s earlier work on the paradox was. Objections raised over the years by Fodor, Forbes Ginsborg, Goldfarb, Tait, Wright, and many others, are all shown to fail. No straight solution (a solution that denies an assumption of the paradox) can be made to work. Azzouni illustrates this in detail by showing that a popular family of straight solutions due to Lewis and refined by Williams, “reference magnetism,” fail as well. And yet an overlooked sceptical solution is still available in logical space. Azzouni describes a series of “disposition-meaning” private languages that he shows can be successfully used by a population of speakers to communicate with one another despite their ideolectical character. The same sorts of languages enable solitary “Robinson Crusoes” to survive and flourish in their island habitats. These languages—sufficiently refined—have the same properties normal human languages have; and this is the key to solving the rule-following paradox without sacrificing the individual’s authority over her self-imposed rules or her ability to follow those rules. Azzouni concludes this unusual monograph by uncovering a striking resemblance between the rule-following paradox and Hume’s problem of induction: he shows the rule-following paradox to be a corollary of Hume’s problem that arises when the problem of induction is applied to an individual’s own abilities to follow rules. “The book is clearly and engagingly written, and the conclusions are well-argued-for. (Depressingly well-argued-for in the case of Chapter 3, as I've always been partial to Lewisian responses to Putnam's model-theoretic argument--I'm rethinking that now.) And the proposed solution to the rule-following paradox really is novel.” Joshua Brown - Gustavus Adolphus College

Author : Alexander R. Pruss
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2018-07-26
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780192538284

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Infinity, Causation, and Paradox by Alexander R. Pruss Pdf

Infinity is paradoxical in many ways. Some paradoxes involve deterministic supertasks, such as Thomson's Lamp, where a switch is toggled an infinite number of times over a finite period of time, or the Grim Reaper, where it seems that infinitely many reapers can produce a result without doing anything. Others involve infinite lotteries. If you get two tickets from an infinite fair lottery where tickets are numbered from 1, no matter what number you saw on the first ticket, it is almost certain that the other ticket has a bigger number on it. And others center on paradoxical results in decision theory, such as the surprising observation that if you perform a sequence of fair coin flips that goes infinitely far back into the past but only finitely into the future, you can leverage information about past coin flips to predict future ones with only finitely many mistakes. Alexander R. Pruss examines this seemingly large family of paradoxes in Infinity, Causation and Paradox. He establishes that these paradoxes and numerous others all have a common structure: their most natural embodiment involves an infinite number of items causally impinging on a single output. These paradoxes, he argues, can all be resolved by embracing 'causal finitism', the view that it is impossible for a single output to have an infinite causal history. Throughout the book, Pruss exposits such paradoxes, defends causal finitism at length, and considers connections with the philosophy of physics (where causal finitism favors but does not require discretist theories of space and time) and the philosophy of religion (with a cosmological argument for a first cause).

Author : Mary Louise Gill
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2020-12-08
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780691222219

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Aristotle on Substance by Mary Louise Gill Pdf

This book explores a fundamental tension in Aristotle's metaphysics: how can an entity such as a living organisma composite generated through the imposition of form on preexisting matterhave the conceptual unity that Aristotle demands of primary substances? Mary Louise Gill bases her treatment of the problem of unity, and of Aristotle's solution, on a fresh interpretation of the relation between matter and form. Challenging the traditional understanding of Aristotelian matter, she argues that material substances are subverted by matter and maintained by form that controls the matter to serve a positive end. The unity of material substances thus involves a dynamic relation between resistant materials and directive ends. Aristotle on Substance offers both a general account of matter, form, and substantial unity and a specific assessment of particular Aristotelian arguments. At every point, Gill engages Aristotle on his own philosophical ground through the detailed analysis of central, and often controversial, texts from the Metaphysics, Physics, On Generation and Corruption, De Anima, De Caelo, and the biological works. The result is a coherent, firmly grounded rethinking of Aristotle's central metaphysical concepts and of his struggle toward a fully consistent theory of material substances.

Author : Sergi Oms,Elia Zardini
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2019-10-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781107163997

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The Sorites Paradox by Sergi Oms,Elia Zardini Pdf

Offers a systematic introduction and discussion of all the main solutions to the sorites paradox and its areas of influence.