Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!

You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.

Sign up

Natural Laws as Dispositions
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 174

Natural Laws as Dispositions

The book provides a novel account of laws of nature via dispositions. Laws of nature play a paramount role in philosophy, science and everyday life. Understanding laws of nature is philosophically interesting on its own right but also many important notions belonging to philosophy of science, like causation, prediction and explanation, are intimately related to the laws of nature. The book outlines the alleged characteristics of the laws of nature and introduces the main families of theories of laws of nature – neo-humean, ADT and dispositional theories. It then develops an account of dispositions the `triadic process picture of dispositions’ (TPD) and applies it to the debate about laws of nature. Finally, the (TPD) account of the necessity of the laws of nature is presented: laws of nature are naturally necessary and metaphysically contingent. Thus the book provides an introduction to the debates about laws of nature as well as dispositions, while at the same time developing a novel theory and thus is interesting for the beginner as well as expert in these fields.

Dispositions
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 268

Dispositions

Mumford puts forward a new theory of dispositions, showing how central their role in metaphysics and philosophy of science is. Much of our understanding of the physical and psychological world is expressed in terms of dispositional properties--from the spin of a sub-atomic particle to the solubility of sugar. Mumford discusses what it means to say that something has a property of this kind and how dispositions can possibly be real things in the world.

Situational Traits of Character
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 139

Situational Traits of Character

Philosophical tradition holds that character traits are global; if you possess a particular character trait, you will perform trait-related behavior across a broad range of situations. In Situational Traits of Character: Dispositional Foundations and Implications for Moral Psychology and Friendship, a groundbreaking study at the intersection of ethics, moral psychology, and metaphysics, Candace L. Upton offers an intriguing alternative to this philosophical tradition. By appealing to both normative considerations and the metaphysics of dispositions, Upton argues that character traits should be understood situationally. After developing and defending her situational account of character traits, Upon uses this account to adjudicate the debate over the compatibility of the demands of consequentialism with those of genuine friendship in favor of the friendly consequentialist.

Kant and the Sciences
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 305

Kant and the Sciences

Kant and the Sciences aims to reveal the deep unity of Kant's conception of science as it bears on the particular sciences of his day and on his conception of philosophy's function with respect to these sciences. It brings together for the first time twelve essays by leading Kant scholars that take into account Kant's conception of a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and anthropology.

Classical and New Paradigms of Computation and their Complexity Hierarchies
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 266

Classical and New Paradigms of Computation and their Complexity Hierarchies

The notion of complexity is an important contribution of logic to theoretical computer science and mathematics. This volume attempts to approach complexity in a holistic way, investigating mathematical properties of complexity hierarchies at the same time as discussing algorithms and computational properties. A main focus of the volume is on some of the new paradigms of computation, among them Quantum Computing and Infinitary Computation. The papers in the volume are tied together by an introductory article describing abstract properties of complexity hierarchies. This volume will be of great interest to both mathematical logicians and theoretical computer scientists, providing them with new insights into the various views of complexity and thus shedding new light on their own research.

Debating Dispositions
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 363

Debating Dispositions

Ordinary language and scientific discourse are filled with linguistic expressions for dispositional properties such as "soluble," "elastic," "reliable," and "humorous." We characterize objects in all domains - physical objects as well as human persons - with the help of dispositional expressions. Hence, the concept of a disposition has historically and systematically played a central role in different areas of philosophy ranging from metaphysics to ethics. The contributions of this volume analyze the ancient foundations of the discussion about disposition, examine the problem of disposition within the context of the foundation of modern science, and analyze this dispute up to the 20th century. Furthermore, articles explore the contemporary theories of dispositions.

Conceptual Structures: Inspiration and Application
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 465

Conceptual Structures: Inspiration and Application

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2006, held in Aalborg, Denmark in July 2006. The volume presents 24 revised full papers, together with 6 invited papers. The papers address topics such as conceptual structures; their interplay with language, semantics and pragmatics; formal methods for concept analysis and contextual logic, modeling, representation, and visualization of concepts; conceptual knowledge acquisition and more.

Intensionality
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 277

Intensionality

Since their inception, the Perspectives in Logic and Lecture Notes in Logic series have published seminal works by leading logicians. Many of the original books in the series have been unavailable for years, but they are now in print once again. This volume, the twenty-second publication in the Lecture Notes in Logic series, will launch a discussion about the concept of intensionality in philosophy, logic, linguistics and mathematics. These articles grew out of a workshop held at the University of Munich in October, 2000. Some articles address philosophical issues raised by the possible worlds approach to intensionality; others are devoted to technical aspects of modal logic. The volume highlights the particular interdisciplinary nature of intensionality with articles spanning philosophy, linguistics, mathematics and computer science.

Dispositional Pluralism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 270

Dispositional Pluralism

Jennifer McKitrick offers an opinionated guide to the philosophy of dispositions. In her view, when an object has a disposition, it is such that, if a certain type of circumstance were to occur, a certain kind of event would occur. Since it is very common for this to be the case for a variety of reasons, dispositions are very abundant and diverse. They include such varied properties as character traits like a hero's courage, characteristics of physical objects like a wine glass's fragility, and characteristics of microphysical entities like an electron's charge. Some dispositions are natural while others are non-natural. Some dispositions called "powers" are ungrounded while non-fundamental ...

The Fiery Test of Critique
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 501

The Fiery Test of Critique

Kant conceived of 'critique' as a kind of winnowing exercise, with the aim of separating the wheat of good metaphysics from the chaff of bad. He used a less familiar metaphor to make this point, namely, that of 'the fiery test of critique'-not a medieval ordeal of trial by fire, but rather a metallurgical assay, or cupellation, a procedure in which ore samples are tested for their precious-metal content. When seen in this light, critique has a positive, investigatory side: it seeks not merely to eliminate bad, 'dogmatic' metaphysics but also to uncover what of philosophical value might be contained in traditional speculative metaphysics. In this comprehensive study of the Transcendental Dial...