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Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's Being and Knowing, rooted in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, rests on two basic assertions: first, metaphysics is the science of being in its first and ultimate act, existence (the act by which all things manifest themselves); second, that existence is known not through observing objects, but in affirming through judgments that these objects are subjects of existence. The chapters of this book explore these Thomistic doctrines. Some explain St. Thomas Aquinas's p...

At a time when the metaphysical tradition is being called profoundly into question by proponents of pragmatism and continental philosophy, Inexhaustibility and Human Being examines a specific aspect of metaphysics: the nature of being human, acknowledging the force of these critiques and discussing their ramifications. Exploring the possibility of a systematic metaphysics that acknowledges the limits of every thought, the book offers a metaphysics of human being based on locality and inexhausti...

Subjectivity is one of the central issues of twentieth-century philosophy, literature and art. Modernism, which "discovered" the subconscious, put an end to the belief in the Cartesian Subject as the autonomous centre of knowledge and self-consciousness. Instead, the subject became something uncontrollable, unreliable, incomplete and fragmentary. The attempts to recapture the unity of the subject led to the existential quest and the flight into ideology (nazism, communism). Postmodernism, the cu...

Rene Descartes (1596-1650 ) is widely regarded as the father of modern philosophy. Breaking with the Aristotelian traditions of his day he attempted to rebuild philosophy on the foundations of reason and certainty. His Meditations on First Philosophy is amongst the most influential, controversial and widely studied texts in the history of philosophy and his arguments concerning the relationship between mind and body, knowledge and the existence of God remain widely studied and debated. In this...

In The Consequences of Determinism, originally Part Three of the single-volume hardback edition, Honderich poses the following question: if determinism is true, and free will an illusion, what are the consequences? Honderich maintains that both of the entrenched and traditional doctrines about the consequences of determinism, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism, are provably false, and formulates a new answer to the question.

Though both pundits and politicians stress the need for maintaining certain core values as the guiding principles of moral conduct, in the welter of our post-modern era there is no consensus as to what those values should be. Generally, it is up to the individual to decide what he or she ought to value. This book is designed to offer guidance to anyone with an honest interest in exploring individual values in a systematic way.Philosopher William L Reese takes the reader through an introspective...

Our reasoning evolved not for finding the truth, but for social bonding and convincing. The best logical methods humans have created provide no path to truth, unless something is assumed as true from the start. Other than that, we only have methods for attempting to measure uncertainty. This book highlights the consequences of these facts for scientific practice, and suggests how to correct the mistakes we still make. But even our best methods to measure uncertainty might require infinite resour...

Contemporary discussions in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of mind are dominated by the presupposition of naturalism. Arguing against this established convention, Jim Slagle offers a thorough defence of Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (EAAN) and in doing so, reveals how it shows that evolution and naturalism are incompatible. Charting the development of Plantinga's argument, Slagle asserts that the probability of our cognitive faculties reliably producing tr...

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VII. He is a key figure in poststructuralism and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Kant's Critical Philosophy is an outstanding example of Deleuze's work and one of the best short introductions to Kant available. The book lays emphasis on Kant's own view of philosophy. Where most discussions of Kant's work concentrate on the Critique of Pure Reason and the moral philosophy, Deleuze...

This book offers an epistemological critique of the concept of the individual and of individuality. It argues that because of our bio(techno)logical entanglements with non-human others, billions of microorganisms and our multiple (in)voluntary participations in socio(techno)logical processes, we have to conceive of ourselves no longer as individuals, but as dividuations. This dividual character which enforces simultaneous and multidirectional participations in different spheres is also apt for o...

This book is focused on a problem that has aroused the most controversy in recent epistemological debate, which is whether the truth can or cannot be the fundamental epistemic goal. Traditional epistemology has presupposed the centrality of truth without giving a deeper analysis. To epistemic value pluralists, the claim that truth is the fundamental value seems unjustified. Their central judgement is that we can be in a situation where we do not attain truth but something else that is also epist...

Philosophy and Love introduces historical and contemporary philosophical reflections on love. It brings together philosophy with cultural analysis to provide an accessible and engaging account of conventional theories of love as well as the controversial reformulations evident in same-sex desire, cross-cultural love and internet romance. Starting with Plato, but focusing especially on contemporary European philosophy, this book introduces figures such as Nietzsche, Beauvoir, Irigaray, Derrida an...

Integrated Truth and Existential Phenomenology: A Thomistic Response to Iconic Anti-Realists in Science relates an existential phenomenology to modal reasoning. By this reasoning, rooted in a consciousness of phenomena in themselves, a Thomistic realism is advanced wherein scientific inquiry yields objective truth and presupposes a causal principle. This principle, as an inferably true modality, strictly implies a first cause. And this cause as a supreme norm, causally created human nature as it...