A World of States of Affairs

A World of States of Affairs
Author: D. M. Armstrong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1997-03-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780521589482

Offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective.

Metaphysics of States of Affairs

Metaphysics of States of Affairs
Author: Bo R. Meinertsen
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2019-04-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9811330689

This book addresses the metaphysics of Armstrongian states of affairs, i.e. instantiations of naturalist universals by particulars. The author argues that states of affairs are the best candidate for truthmakers and, in the spirit of logical atomism, that we need no molecular truthmakers for positive truths. In the book's context, this has the pleasing result that there are no molecular states of affairs. Following this account of truthmaking, the author first shows that the particulars in (first-order) states of affairs are bare particulars. He then argues that the properties in states of affairs are simple, non-relational and concrete universals. Next, he argues that (material) relations in states of affairs are external relations. Lastly, he argues that a state of affairs is unified by a distinctive formal relation without giving rise to Bradley’s regress. Written in a relatively non-technical style, the book offers a valuable resource for philosophers working on analytic metaphysics and ontology, as well as their graduate students.

Contingent Kinship

Contingent Kinship
Author: Kathryn A. Mariner
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2019-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520299558

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.

The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion

The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion
Author: William E. Mann
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0470756543

The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion features fourteen new essays written by some of the most prominent philosophers working in the field. Contributors include Linda Zabzeski, Hugh McCann, Brian Leftow, Gareth B. Matthews, William L. Rowe, Elliott Sober, Derk Pereboom, Alfred J. Freddoso, William P. Alston, William J. Wainwright, Peter van Inwagen, Philip Kitcher and Philip Quinn. Features fourteen newly commissioned essays. Provides a comprehensive treatment of the major problems in the philosophy of religion. Surveys the field and presents distinctive arguments.

Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases XIII

Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases XIII
Author: Hannu Kangassalo
Publisher: IOS Press
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2002
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9781586032340

This is a collection of papers presented in the 11th European Japanese Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases held in Maribor, Slovenia. This annually organized conference brings together the leading researchers from Europe and Japan to introduce the latest results of their research.