The Determinate World

The Determinate World
Author: David Jalal Hyder
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2009
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3110183919

This book offers a new interpretation of Hermann von Helmholtz's work on the epistemology of geometry. A detailed analysis of the philosophical arguments of Helmholtz's Erhaltung der Kraft shows that he took physical theories to be constrained by a regulative ideal. They must render nature "completely comprehensible", which implies that all physical magnitudes must be relations among empirically given phenomena. This conviction eventually forced Helmholtz to explain how geometry itself could be so construed. Hyder shows how Helmholtz answered this question by drawing on the theory of magnitudes developed in his research on the colour-space. He argues against the dominant interpretation of Helmholtz's work by suggesting that for the latter, it is less the inductive character of geometry that makes it empirical, and rather the regulative requirement that the system of natural science be empirically closed.

Ultimates

Ultimates
Author: Robert Cummings Neville
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2013-09-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438448856

Finalist for the 2015 John N. Findlay Award in Metaphysics presented by the Metaphysical Society of America Robert Cummings Neville offers a new theology of the ultimate and a new theory of religion to back it up. The first volume in a trilogy, this book and companion volumes treating existence and religion advance a systematic philosophical theology to address first-order questions found in the array of Axial Age religions. Questions generally arising in the major religious traditions are interrogated with a dialectic of philosophical approaches. This volume begins the project with a consideration of ultimacy defined philosophically and illustrated in a wide range of traditions. To the question of how or why there is something rather than nothing, Neville answers with an elaborate hypothesis about the ontological act of creation that creates all determinate things as related to but different from one another. The result is the claim that there are five ultimates: the ontological act, the form of determinate things, the components of determinate things, the existential location of determinate things relative to one another, and the value-identity of ultimate things, giving rise to five universal religious problematics of ultimacy respectively: the question of existence, the ground of obligation, the quest for wholeness, engaging others, and finding meaning. Neville analyzes what can and cannot be known about each of these ultimates. Readers will find Neville's theory of religion and philosophy a bold one, running counter to dominant trends while richly informed by a long and fruitful engagement with theology, philosophy, and religion, East and West.

Hist West Educ:Modern West V3

Hist West Educ:Modern West V3
Author: James Bowen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 674
Release: 2013-10-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1136501177

Volume Three of three, this is a reprint of James Bowen's A History of Western Education originally published by Methuen in the 1970s. Volume Three: The Modern West: Europe and the New World. The final volume covers the period of educational dissent, which became conspicuous in the early seventeenth century and reached crisis proportions in the late twentieth, when the dominant ideologies of progress and equality, generated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were questioned for the first time on a widespread, popular scale.

A Theology Primer

A Theology Primer
Author: Robert Cummings Neville
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1991-10-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781438414607

Advaita Epistemology and Metaphysics

Advaita Epistemology and Metaphysics
Author: Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1136868976

Based on original translations of passages from the works of three major thinkers of the classical Indian school of Advaita (Sankara, Vacaspati and Sri Harsa), but addressing issues found in Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein and contemporary analytic philosophers, this book argues for a philosophical position it calls 'non-realism'. This is the view that an independent, external world must be assumed if the features of cognition are to be explained, but that it cannot be proved that there is such a world, independently of an appeal to cognition itself. This position is constructed against idealist denials of externality, realist arguments for an independent world and the sceptical denial of the coherence of cognition.

The Tao and the Daimon

The Tao and the Daimon
Author: Robert Cummings Neville
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 1983-06-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1438414595

The Tao and the Daimon examines a central theme in religious studies: the question of the authority and authenticity of traditional religious faith and practice (tao) in light of the challenge from the spirit of critical reason (Socrates' daimon). From a non-judgmental, historical standpoint, it develops the dialectical relation between religion and rational inquiry. Neville employs a philosophical system to set a task for reflection, making it possible to see how Eastern and Western religious traditions differ, overlap, contradict, and reinforce one another. The central chapters are detailed studies of theologically interesting elements in Christianity, Buddhism, taoism, and Neoconfucianism. How can one judge of the higher truths of another religion without having practiced it? Can the tao and the daimon, after all, be reconciled purely in the conceptual realm of speculative philosophy? Neville recognizes the very real differences between conceptualizing and practicing and the very real differences in understanding that can result. At the same time, he transcends the problem by identifying (and exemplifying in his own work) speculative philosophy as a tao in itself, "a new locus of religious significance, our own scholarly interpretation, new creations of the holy out of practiced scholarly piety toward the old."

Spinoza’s Dream

Spinoza’s Dream
Author: David Weissman
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2016-04-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3110479257

Meaning (significance) and nature are this book’s principal topics. They seem an odd couple, like raisins and numbers, though they elide when meanings of a global sort—ideologies and religions, for example—promote ontologies that subordinate nature. Setting one against the other makes reality contentious. It signifies workmates and a coal face to miners, gluons to physicists, prayer and redemption to priests. Are there many realities, or many perspectives on one? The answer I prefer is the comprehensive naturalism anticipated by Aristotle and Spinoza: "natura naturans, natura naturata." Nature naturing is an array of mutually conditioning material processes in spacetime. Each structure or event—storm clouds forming, nature natured—is self-differentiating, self-stabilizing, and sometimes self-disassembling; each alters or transforms a pre-existing state of affairs. This surmise anticipated discoveries and analyses to which neither thinker had access, though physics and biology confirm their hypothesis beyond reasonable doubt. Hence the question this book considers: Is reality divided:nature vrs. lived experience? Or is experience, with all its meanings and values, the complex expression of natural processes?

The Quantum Mechanics of Minds and Worlds

The Quantum Mechanics of Minds and Worlds
Author: Jeffrey A. Barrett
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 286
Release: 1999-12-09
Genre:
ISBN: 0191583251

Jeffrey Barrett presents the most comprehensive study yet of a problem that has puzzled physicists and philosophers since the 1930s. The standard theory of quantum mechanics is in one sense the most successful physical theory ever, predicting the behaviour of the basic constituents of all physical things; no other theory has ever made such accurate empirical predictions. However, if one tries to understand the theory as providing a complete and accurate framework for the description of the behaviour of all physical interactions, it becomes evident that the theory is ambiguous, or even logically inconsistent. The most notable attempt to formulate the theory so as to deal with this problem, the quantum measurement problem, was initiated by Hugh Everett III in the 1950s. Barrett gives a careful and challenging examination and evaluation of the work of Everett and those who have followed him. His informal approach, minimizing technicality, will make the book accessible and illuminating for philosophers and physicists alike. Anyone interested in the interpretation of quantum mechanics should read it.

The Highroad Around Modernism

The Highroad Around Modernism
Author: Robert Cummings Neville
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1992-09-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438414536

Discussions of modernism and postmodernism in philosophy and the arts are usually based on a narrow reading of the Western tradition and are not conscious of the narrowness. The modern period, beginning with the European Renaissance, spawned many developments, not just the modernist one in terms of which the tradition has been read. From the standpoint of the highroad around modernism, both modernism and post-modernism look like nothing more than two late modern movements, perhaps too preoccupied with themselves and their historical place to engage a swiftly changing world containing more than the Western tradition. The Highroad Around Modernism develops and defends an explicitly non-modernist and non-postmodernist extension of modernity applicable to the problems of world-wide cultural interactions.

Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension

Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension
Author: Robert S. Cohen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2013-04-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9401726140

Philosophical understandings of Nature and Human Nature. Classical Greek and modern West, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, by 14 authors, including Robert Neville, Stanley Rosen, David Eckel, Livia Kohn, Tienyu Cao, Abner Shimoney, Alfred Tauber, Krzysztof Michalski, Lawrence Cahoone, Stephen Scully, Alan Olson and Alfred Ferrarin. Dedicated to the phenomenological ecology of Erazim Kohák, with 10 of his essays and a full bibliography. Overall theme: on the question of the moral sense of nature.