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Levels of Explanation
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The different sciences furnish us with a wide variety of explanations: some work at macroscopic scales, some work at microscopic scales, and some operate across different levels. How do these different explanatory levels relate to one another, and what is an explanatory level in the first place? Over the last 50 years, more and more philosophers--both reductionists and anti-reductionists--no longer subscribe to the idea that the best explanation resides at the fundamen...
About Haecceity
This book offers an in-depth and updated examination of the nature of haecceity—that primitive entity which explains why something is distinct from other things. The book begins by exploring different conceptions of haecceity throughout history. The discussion of various figures across history is important for getting clear on the nature of haecceity and its role in individuation. The next part of the book examines different views about the nature of haecceity. The author defends a view on which haecceities have objects that instantiate them as constituents. Following that, the book considers arguments for and against the existence of haecceities, the epistemology of haecceity, and the distinction between qualitative and non-qualitative properties. About Haecceity will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of language, epistemology, logic, and history of philosophy.
A Minimal Metaphysics for Scientific Practice
Provides a minimal metaphysics for scientific practice, yielding new accounts of lawhood, causation and reduction.
Philosophy of Cognitive Neuroscience
How do cognitive neuroscientists explain phenomena like memory or language processing? This book examines the different kinds of experiments and manipulative research strategies involved in understanding and eventually explaining such phenomena. Against this background, it evaluates contemporary accounts of scientific explanation, specifically the mechanistic and interventionist accounts, and finds them to be crucially incomplete. Besides, mechanisms and interventions cannot actually be combined in the way usually done in the literature. This book offers solutions to both these problems based on insights from experimental practice. It defends a new reading of the interventionist account, hig...
The Ethics of Conceptualization
Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? The Ethics of Conceptualization develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally...
The Metaphysics of Bohmian Mechanics
The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive guide to the metaphysics of Bohmian mechanics. Bohmian mechanics is a quantum theory that describes the motion of particles following trajectories that are determined by the quantum wave-function. The key question that the theory has to face relates to the ontological interpretation of the quantum wave-function. The main debate has mostly centered around two opposing views, wave-function realism on the one hand, and the nomological view on the other hand. The supporters of the former believe that the wave-function is a physical field living in a high-dimensional space; the supporters of the latter regard the wave-function as just an entity that appears in the laws of nature and lacks physical status. This monograph discusses both views open-mindedly, illuminating their tacit problems and providing new insight into how they can be overcome. Moreover, it discusses the structuralist view, which is often neglected and which can be regarded as a reconciliation of the two main opposing camps.
The Non-Fundamentality of Spacetime
This book argues that our current best theories of fundamental physics are best interpreted as positing spacetime as non-fundamental. It is written in accessible language and largely avoids mathematical technicalities by instead focusing on the key metaphysical and foundational lessons for the fundamentality of spacetime. According to orthodoxy, spacetime and spatiotemporal properties are regarded as fundamental structures of our world. Spacetime fundamentalism, however, faces challenges from speculative theories of quantum gravity – roughly speaking, the project of applying the lessons of quantum mechanics to gravitation and spacetime. This book demonstrates that the non-fundamentality of...
Mental Causation
Presents a comprehensive account of how the mind causes things to happen in the physical world. This book is also available as Open Access.
Voicing Identities
We are often asked to describe ourselves. In response, one might propose a few adjectives, or possibly even a brief account of how they became the person they are today. How we develop such self-understanding is a complicated matter involving various cognitive and social processes. Fanti Rovetta contributes to the comprehension of these processes by exploring the role of inner speech, or verbal thought, in self-understanding. Drawing from sociolinguistics, he proposes and applies a novel theoretical framework, a situated approach to inner speech, which emphasizes individual variation, and suggests that each person has a style of inner speaking. Such style of inner speaking constrains the linguistic hermeneutic resources a person can access in thinking about themselves and in making sense of their experiences. Additionally, he investigates the role of inner speech in narrative thinking and in verbal rumination, which are two key mental phenomena related to self-understanding. Throughout the book, the approach adopted is multidisciplinary, integrating philosophical discussion with recent developments in cognitive science, psychology, and linguistics.
The Routledge Handbook of Properties
Philosophical questions regarding both the existence and nature of properties are ubiquitous in ordinary life, the sciences, and philosophical theorising. In philosophy, it is one of the oldest topics discussed in various intellectual traditions – East and West – reaching back to Plato and Aristotle. Today, in the analytic tradition, properties continue to be a core area of study and research. The Routledge Handbook of Properties is an outstanding reference source to this perennial topic and is the first major volume of its kind. It contains forty specially commissioned chapters written by an international team of expert contributors, and is divided into nine clear parts: Methodology and...
