Beginning Metaphysics An Introductory Text with Readings

by Geirsson, Heimir; Losonsky, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781557867292
• ISBN10: 1557867291
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-10-15
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This flexible textbook is both an introduction and a reader in metaphysics combining original discussion with selections from primary sources. This text shows that important social, political and moral concerns involve metaphysical questions and that important metaphysical positions have practical implications. It discusses major metaphysical topics such as God, Freedom, Mind, Causality, Value, and Universals as well as important historical and contemporary critiques of metaphysics. Each chapter is followed by selections from classic and contemporary texts, allowing for in-depth study of primary sources.

Author Biography

Heimir Geirsson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Iowa State University. He is the co-editor, with Michael Losonsky, of Readings in Language and Mind (Blackwell Publishers, 1996) and has published on philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and epistemology in Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Erkenntnis, and Journal of Philosophical Research.

Michael Losonsky is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. He is the co-editor, with Heimir Geirsson, of Readings in Language and Mind (Blackwell Publishers, 1996). He has published on contemporary metaphysics in American Philosophical Quarterly, Minds and Machines, Philosophical Review, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophy, amongst others. He has also published on metaphysics in the history of modern philosophy in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Pragmatics and Cognition, among others.

Table of Contents

What is Metaphysics?

Metaphysics and Political Philosophy

Readings: Plato, Crito. Plato, Phaedo

Selection from The Leviathan

The Second Sex, Introduction

Selection from The Problems of Philosophy

Values and Reality

Readings

The Varieties of Intrinsic Value

The Subjectivity of Values

How to be a Moral Realist

God and Evil

Readings: St Anselm of Canterbury

Selection from Proslogion

Selection from Summa Theologica

Selection from Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Summary of the Controversy Reduced to Formal Arguments

Evil and Omnipotence

Was it within God's Power to Create Any Possible World He Pleased?

Causation and Society

Readings

Selection from Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Third View of Causality

Ethics of Explanation

Mind and Morality

Readings: René Descartes, Selections from Principles of Philosophy and Passions of the Soul

Selection from Conversation Between d'Alembert and Diderot

What is it Like to be a Bat?

Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?

Could a Machine Think?

Freedom and Responsibility

Readings

Thiery d'Hollbach, Selection from The System of Nature

Appendix

C. A. Campbell, Has the Self Free Will?

C. A. Campbell

Two Concepts of Freedom

Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person

Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility

Against Metaphysics

Readings: The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language

The Four Great Errors

Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical

Glossary

Index

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