Jonathan Lowe argues that metaphysics should be restored to a central position in philosophy, as the most fundamental form of rational inquiry, whose findings underpin those of all other disciplines. He portrays metaphysics as charting the possibilities of existence, by idetifying the categories of being and the relations of ontological dependency between entities of different categories. He proceeds to set out a unified and original metaphysical system: he defends a substance ontology, according to which the existence of the world s (...) one world in time depends upon the existence of persisting things which retain their identity over time and through processes of qualitative change. And he contends that even necessary beings, such as the abstract objects of mathematics, depend ultimately for their existence upon there being a concrete world of enduring substances. Within his system of metaphysics Lowe seeks to answer many of the deepest and most challenging questions in philosophy. (shrink)

Jonathan Lowe argues that metaphysics should be restored to a central position in philosophy, as the most fundamental form of inquiry, whose findings underpin those of all other disciplines. He portrays metaphysics as charting the possibilities of existence, by identifying the categories of being and the relations between them. He sets out his own original metaphysical system, within which he seeks to answer many of the deepest questions in philosophy. 'a very rich book... deserves to be read carefully by anyone (...) interested in any of the many subjects he discusses.' Katherine Hawley, British Journal of the Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

Kant was centrally concerned with issues in the philosophy of natural science throughout his career. The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science presents his most mature reflections on these themes in the context of both his 'critical' philosophy, presented in the Critique of Pure Reason, and the natural science of his time. This volume presents a translation by Michael Friedman which is especially clear and accurate. There are explanatory notes indicating some of the main connections between the argument of the Metaphysical (...) Foundations and the first Critique - as well as parallel connections to Newton's Principia. The volume is completed by an historical and philosophical introduction and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

What, precisely, is `salt'? It is a certainwhite, solid, crystalline, material, alsocalled sodium chloride. Does any of that solidwhite stuff exist in the sea? – Clearly not.One can make salt from sea water easily enough,but that fact does not establish thatsalt, as such, is present in brine. (Paper andink can be made into a novel – but no novelactually exists in a stack of blank paper witha vial of ink close by.) When salt dissolves inwater, what is present is no (...) longer `salt' butrather a collection of hydrated sodium cationsand chloride anions, neither of which isprecisely salt, nor is the collection. Theaqueous material in brine is also significantlydifferent from pure water. Salt may beconsidered to be present in seawater, but onlyin a more or less vague `potential' way.Actually, there is no salt in the sea. In bothancient and modern treatments of otherimportant chemical concepts, including thenotions of `element', related complication,especially polysemy (terms with multiplemeanings), also occurs.In a recent paper, Paul Needham discussed the(predicable) properties of chemical substances,phases, and solutions. He provided a valuablecharacterization of cases in which severalquantities occupy the same space. He alsoconcluded that solution properties are not`intensive', because solvent and solute do nothave parts in common. He tacitly assumed thatingredients are not altered by their inclusionin a solution. This may be the case in somespecial cases (deutero-benzene dissolved inbenzene, say) but is not true in general – andcertainly does not apply to the case of brine,which Needham used as an example – since theions that exist in the solution, and also theaqueous material there, are quite differentfrom the pure ingredients used in making thesolution. An adequate theory of wholes andparts (mereology) must take into account thatwhen individuals enter combinations ofinteresting sorts they no longer are the verysame individuals that existed prior to thecomposition. It appears that no such formaltheory now actually exists. (shrink)

This paper effectively inverts the argument of an earlier paper of mine, “The Particularisation of Attributes”, to argue that there are no necessarily particularised and unshareable attributes of the sort that contemporary metaphysics calls tropes. In that earlier paper I distinguished two kinds of attributes, namely, properties and qualities, and argued that if there were tropes they could only be particularised qualities, i.e. particularisations of, say, redness, rather than particularisations of, say, being red. While continuing to hold that there cannot (...) be particularised properties—that the very notion is oxymoronic—I now hold, further, that the supposition of qualities in addition to properties is both ontologically extravagant and conceptually outlandish. Hence there are no qualities, and thus no tropes either. (shrink)