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The ten essays in this collection were written to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the lectures which became Wilfrid Sellars's Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, one of the crowning achievements of 20th-century analytic philosophy. Both appreciative and critical of Sellars's accomplishment, they engage with his treatment of crucial issues in metaphysics and epistemology. The topics include the standing of empiricism, Sellars's complex treatment of perception, his dissatisfaction with both f...

Graham Solomon, to whom this collection is dedicated, went into hospital for antibiotic treatment of pneumonia in Oc- ber, 2001. Three days later, on Nov. 1, he died of a massive stroke, at the age of 44. Solomon was well liked by those who got the chance to know him-it was a revelation to ?nd out, when helping to sort out his a?airs after his death, how many "friends" he had whom he had actually never met, as his email included correspondence with philosophers around the world running sometimes...

This is a collective study, in nine new essays, of the close connection between theology and cosmology in Stoic philosophy. The Stoic god is best described as the single active physical principle that governs the whole cosmos. The first part of the book covers three essential topics in Stoic theology: the active and demiurgical character of god, his corporeal nature and irreducibility to matter, and fate as the network of causes through which god acts upon the cosmos. The second part turns to S...

These "Philosophical Essays" by Giulio Preti explore, with particular acuteness and originality, some of the major problems addressed by contemporary philosophy. Preti's objective was to outline a scientific philosophy capable of embodying the rigour and concern for the factual found in scientific procedure. His analysis engaged with the complex tradition of logical empiricism and he also devoted attention to pragmatism and the philosophy of praxis in early Marx. Preti succeeded in establishing...

In this small book, theoretical physicist Gerard 't Hooft (Nobel prize 1999), philosopher Emanuele Severino (Lincei Academician), and theologian Piero Coda (Pontifical Lateran University) confront one another on a topic that lies at the roots of quantum mechanics and at the origin of Western thought: Determinism and Free Will. "God does not play dice" said Einstein, a tenacious determinist. Quantum Mechanics and its clash with General Relativity have reanimated ancient dilemmas about chance and...

Amid the so-called "crisis of metaphysics"of the last several hundred years, philosophers in the 20th century re-encountered - and began a reappreciation of - the mediaeval thought of Thomas Aquinas. This crisis can be traced, at least in part, to modern Western philosophy's rejection of a specifying or "formal" cause in metaphysical analysis. Drawing from Aristotle of Stagira, Aquinas placed the formal cause on prominent display as the foundation for his metaphysics of esse. Yet nowhere did St....

Die Autorin geht davon aus, dass ein Letztprinzip nur dann begrundet werden kann, wenn es die ontologische Differenz zwischen idealer und realer Seinssphare durch ontologische Relationen zu fundieren vermag. Durch die gewahlte Methodik, die den systematischen Aspekt der Problemstellung betont, wird sich herausstellen, dass das Prinzip der Freiheit die Anforderungen an ein derart strukturiertes Letztprinzip erfullen kann."

Private Lives in the Public Sphere examines the Bildungsroman in the context of the rapid changes that affected the German literary revolution that made up for its belatedness in its rapidity and scope. The nature and quantity of reading material produced, the social status of the writer, and the reading habits of the public changed dramatically within a few decades. At the beginning of the century the new texts that appeared at the annual book fairs were primarily written in Latin and devoted t...

What are the materials of conscious perceptual experience? What is going on when we are consciously aware of a visual scene, or hear sounds, or otherwise enjoy sensory experience? In this book David Papineau exposes the flaws in contemporary answers to this central philosophical question and defends a new alternative. Contemporary theories of perceptual experience all hold that conscious experiences reach out into the world beyond the mind. According to naive realism, experiences literally inco...