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Lessons to be learned about living from those who have undergone near-death experiences. Using near-death experiences as a springboard into an in-depth discussion of five key areas of awareness, this guide explains how to recognize and demystify these seemingly inexplicable events. Readers are shown how to properly extract the lessons of a near-death experience through reflection and cultivate five key concepts: gratitude, humility, beauty, innocence, and a sense of place in the world. By visu...

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...

Diese Ausgabe prasentiert die ideengeschichtlich kommentierte deutsche Erstubersetzung der "Antisozinianischen Schriften," welche Comenius 1659 bis 1662 in Amsterdam lateinisch veroffentlichte. Es handelt sich hier um zehn Einzelschriften. Der mahrische Pansoph fuhrt darin eine engagierte Kontroverse mit nicht weniger engagierten Sozinianern, den Trinitatskritikern seiner Zeit, welche als Vorlaufer der rationalistischen Aufklarung zu betrachten sind. Besagte Sozinianer sind Comenius von fruher J...

In Metaphysics 4 Aristotle discusses the nature of metaphysics, the basic laws of logic, the falsity of subjectivism and the different types of ambiguity. The full, clear commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias on this important book is here translated into English by Arthur Madigan. Alexander goes through Aristotle's text practically line by line, attending to the logical sequence of the arguments, noting places where Aristotle's words will bear more than one interpretation and marking variant r...

No man can live without ideas, for every human action, internal or external, is of necessity enacted by virtue of certain ideas. In these ideas a man believes; they guide his actions, and ultimately his whole life. Study of these ideas and principles is one of the distinctive tasks of the history of philosophy. But were we to restrict the field of interest of the history of philosophy to a mere detached academic "cataloguing" of past ideas, the history of philosophy itself would have joined long...

Most people (including moral philosophers), when faced with the fact that some of their cherished moral views lead up to the Repugnant Conclusion, feel that they have to revise their moral outlook. However, it is a moot question as to how this should be done. It is not an easy thing to say how one should avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, without having to face even more serious implications from one's basic moral outlook. Several such attempts are presented in this volume. This is the first volume...

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...

By the time of Immanuel Kant, Berkeley had been caIled, among other things, a sceptic, an atheist, a solipsist, and an idealist. In our own day, however, the suggestion has been ad vanced that Berkeley is bett er understood if interpreted as a realist and man of common sense. Regardless of whether in the end one decides to treat hirn as a subjective idealist or as a re alist, I think it has become appropriate to inquire how Berkeley's own contemporaries viewed his philosophy. Heretofore the ge...

Scholars of classical philosophy have long disputed whether Aristotle was a dialectical thinker. Most agree that Aristotle contrasts dialectical reasoning with demonstrative reasoning, where the former reasons from generally accepted opinions and the latter reasons from the true and primary. Starting with a grasp on truth, demonstration never relinquishes it. Starting with opinion, how could dialectical reasoning ever reach truth, much less the truth about first principles? Is dialectic then an...

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.