Necessary Beings

Necessary Beings
Author: Bob Hale
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2013-09-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199669570

Bob Hale presents a broadly Fregean approach to metaphysics, according to which ontology and modality are mutually dependent upon one another. He argues that facts about what kinds of things exist depend on facts about what is possible. Modal facts are fundamental, and have their basis in the essences of things—not in meanings or concepts.

Idea and Ontology

Idea and Ontology
Author: Marc A. Hight
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2010-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0271047658

"A wide-ranging study of the 'way of ideas' and its metaphysics, culminating in a bold reinterpretation of Berkeley."

Existence

Existence
Author: Peter van Inwagen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2014-04-10
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1107047129

This is a collection of Peter van Inwagen's recent essays on ontology and meta-ontology.

A Realistic Theory of Categories

A Realistic Theory of Categories
Author: Roderick M. Chisholm
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 162
Release: 1996-08-28
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9780521556163

This book can be viewed as a summation of Roderick Chisholm's views on an enormous range of topics in metaphysics and epistemology.

Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 869
Release: 1992
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0671867806

Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.

The Activity of Being

The Activity of Being
Author: Aryeh Kosman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0674075021

Understanding “what something is” has long occupied philosophers, and no Western thinker has had more influence on the nature of being than Aristotle. Focusing on a reinterpretation of the concept of energeia as “activity,” Aryeh Kosman reexamines Aristotle’s ontology and some of our most basic assumptions about the great philosopher’s thought.

Thisness Presentism

Thisness Presentism
Author: David Ingram
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2018-09-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0429839200

Thisness Presentism outlines and defends a novel version of presentism, the view that only present entities exist and what is present really changes, a view of time that captures a real and objective difference between what is past, present, and future, and which offers a model of reality that is dynamic and mutable, rather than static and immutable. The book advances a new defence of presentism by developing a novel ontology of thisness, combining insights about the nature of essence, the metaphysics of propositions, and the relationship between true propositions and the elements of reality that make them true, alongside insights about time itself. It shows how, by accepting an ontology of thisness, presentists can respond to a number of pressing challenges to presentism, including claims that presentism cannot account for true propositions about the past, and that it is inconsistent with the reality of temporal passage and the openness of the future. This is one of the only book-length defences of presentism. It will be of interest to students and scholars working on the debate about presentism in the philosophy of time, as well as those interested in the metaphysics of propositions and truth-making, more generally.

The Red and the Real

The Red and the Real
Author: Jonathan Cohen
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2009-06-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191609609

The Red and the Real offers a new approach to longstanding philosophical puzzles about what colors are and how they fit into the natural world. Jonathan Cohen argues for a role-functionalist treatment of color - a view according to which colors are identical to certain functional roles involving perceptual effects on subjects. Cohen first argues (on broadly empirical grounds) for the more general relationalist view that colors are constituted in terms of relations between objects, perceivers, and viewing conditions. He responds to semantic, ontological, and phenomenological objections against this thesis, and argues that relationalism offers the best hope of respecting both empirical results and ordinary belief about color. He then defends the more specific role functionalist-account by contending that the latter is the most plausible form of color relationalism.

Robust Reality

Robust Reality
Author: George Englebretsen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2013-05-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3110325829

Contemporary analytic philosophy can generally be characterized by the following tendencies: commitment to first-order predicate logic as the only viable formal logic; rejection of correspondence theories of truth; a view of existence as something expressed by the existential quantifier; a metaphysics that doesn’t give the world as a whole its due. This book seeks to offer an alternative analytic theory, one that provides a unified account of what there is, how we speak about it, the underlying logic of our language, how the truth of what we say is determined, and the central role of the real world in all of this. The result is a robust account of reality. The inspiration for many of the ideas that constitute this overall theory comes from such sources as Aristotle, Leibniz, Ryle, and Sommers.

An Essay on Ontology

An Essay on Ontology
Author: Joseph Kaipayil
Publisher: Joseph Kaipayil
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2008
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9788190584401