Metaphysics category: 2011 books

Descartes is often regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, and is credited with placing at centre stage the question of what we know and how we know it. Descartes: Belief, Scepticism and Virtue seeks to reinsert his work and thought in its contemporary ethical and theological context. Richard...

The core contention of The Legitimacy of Miracle is that a priori philosophical dismissals of the possibility or probability of justified belief in miracles fail. Whether or not it is rational to believe that events best understood as miracles actually occur is not to be decided on the basis of armchair...

Kierkegaard’s Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard’s writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development...

To be confronted with a text can lead us to open our own living world, to its expansion and saturation with something new or even with something else, something unpredictable. What then makes a human a human? Can philosophical hermeneutics say anything about that? It can! «Language is the real centre...

The paradox within the title of this book refers to its principal theme, that of elucidating our innate capacity to transform/convert from an inauthentic everyday mode of being to an authentic one. This study provides an analysis of affect as a means of highlighting a number of key points of contact...

Absolute Truth involves a metaphysical logic that synthesises. Real logic is the logic of creation, i.e. the creative cause – an Idea that does actual work.Creation is effected through dichotomies; all Truths are dichotomies. Dichotomies are the only plausible mechanism for creation. They...

As humanity becomes increasingly interconnected through globalization, the question of whether community is possible within culturally diverse societies has returned as a principal concern for contemporary thought. Lorenzo Simpson charges that the current discussion is stuck at an impasse-between...

A work of philosophy that presents a series of arguments that are intended to demonstrate the untenable nature of materialistic and reductionist philosophies. Following these refutations is a stern admonition of the so-called "freethought" movement of atheist and secular organizations for...

Is there one world? There are a few claims to such a world, including the physical universe of science, God and religion, several philosophical systems and beliefs others have of the world around them. Certainly none of these can be the ultimate unified totality, although there is much truth in each. The answer is in the fusion of absolute and relative totalities that make actual totality.

Kathrin Koslicki offers an analysis of ordinary materials objects, those material objects to which we take ourselves to be committed in ordinary, scientifically informed discourse. She focuses particularly on the question of how the parts of such objects are related to the wholes which they compose....

The Diamond Sutra is revered throughout Asia as one of the Buddha's most profound expressions of the nature of reality. A gem among the vast Perfection of Wisdom literature, the Diamond Sutra elicits an experience of eternal truth through its use of a seemingly paradoxical style, as the reader goes...

In this work I have endeavoured to see Berkeley in his contemporary setting. On the principle that philosophy is ultimately about men, not about abstract problems, I have tried to see Berkeley the philosopher as an expression of Berkeley the man. When this is done, what is perennial in the philosophy...

We are all spirit-mind-body complexes. We all possess an inner spirit, a divine energy which runs our lives and keeps us alive, from birth to death. We think, learn and act through our minds and our words and actions, which are carried out by our body, determine the quality of our lives here on earth....

This study is a revised version ofa book, published in February 1990 under the same title, as my Ph.D. thesis at the University of Stockholm. Revision of an earlier work poses specific problems, some of which deserve mentioning. After the appearance of the first version of this book new literature...