Metaphysics A Guide and Anthology

by Crane, Tim; Farkas, Katalin

• ISBN13: 9780199261970
• ISBN10: 0199261970
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-03-04
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

A complete and self-contained introduction to metaphysics, this anthology provides an extensive and varied collection of fifty-four of the best classical and contemporary readings on the subject. The readings are organized into ten sections: God, idealism and realism, being, universals and particulars, necessity and contingency, causation, space and time, identity, mind and body, and freewill and determinism. It features a substantial general introduction and detailed section introductions that set the selections in context and guide readers through them. Discussion questions and detailed guides to further reading are also included.

Author Biography

Tim Crane has taught philosophy at University College London since 1990. He took his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1989. Katalin Farkas graduated in mathematics and philosophy from the Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, and she took her PhD in philosophy from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1998.

Table of Contents

God

Intorduction

Why Anything? Why This?

The five ways

Extract from Natural Theology

Extract from Proslogion

Extract from Monadology

Evil and omnipotence

Realism and Idealism Introduction

Selection from Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Selection from Three Dialogues

Selection from Critique of Pure Reason

Selection from Matter and Sense

Realism

Being Introduction

Selection from Categories

Selection from Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Primitive Thisness and Primitive Identity

On what there is

Selection from Material Beings

Can there be vague objects?

Vague Identity: Evans misunderstood

Universals and Particulars

Introduction

Selections from Republic and Parmenides

Selection from Universals: An Opinionated Introduction

Selection from New work for a theory of universals

On the Elements of Being: I

Causality and Properties

Necessity

Introduction

Selection from Naming and Necessity

Selection from On the Plurality of Worlds

Actualism and Possible Worlds

Selection from A Combinational Theory of Possibility

Causation

Introduction

Selection from Metaphysics

Selection from Enquiy Concerning Human Understanding

Causation

Causal Relations

Selections from The Faces of Causation

Time and Space Introduction

Selection from Physics

Selection from The Nature of Existence

Changes in Events and Changes in Things

Selection from Asymmetries in Time

Selection from The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence

The space-time world

The Paradoxes of Time Travel

Identity

Introduction

Identity through Time

Selection from On the Plurality of Worlds

Personal Identity

Persons, Animals, and Ourselves

Mind and Body

Introduction

Selection from Meditations on First Philosophy

Selection from New System of the Nature of Substances

Selections from Thought

Psychophysical and theoretical identifications

Selection from Thinking Causes

What is it like to be a bat?

Freedom and Determinism Introduction

Selection from Treatise of Human Nature

Freedom of the will and the concept of a person

The incompatibility of freewill and determinism

Freedom from Physics: Quantum Mechanics and Free Will

Human Freedom and the self

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