_Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction_ is for students who have already completed an introductory philosophy course and need a fresh look at the central topics in the core subject of metaphysics. It is essential reading for any student of the subject. This Fourth Edition is revised and updated and includes two new chapters on Parts and Wholes, and Metaphysical Indeterminacy or vagueness. This new edition also keeps the user-friendly format, the chapter overviews summarizing the main topics, concrete examples to clarify difficult (...) concepts, annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, endnotes, and a full bibliography. Topics addressed include: the problem of universals the nature of abstract entities the problem of individuation the nature of modality identity through time the nature of time the nature of parts and wholes the problem of metaphysical indeterminacy the Realism/anti-Realism debate. Wherever possible, Michael J. Loux and Thomas M. Crisp relate contemporary views to their classical sources in the history of philosophy. As experienced teachers of philosophy and important contributors to recent debates, Loux and Crisp are uniquely qualified to write this book. (shrink)

This provocative book attempts to resolve traditional problems of identity over time. It seeks to answer such questions as 'How is it that an object can survive change?' and 'How much change can an object undergo without being destroyed'? To answer these questions Professor Heller presents a theory about the nature of physical objects and about the relationship between our language and the physical world. According to his theory, the only actually existing physical entities are what the author calls 'hunks', (...) four-dimensional objects extending across time and space. This is a major contribution to ontological debate and will be essential reading for all philosophers concerned with metaphysics. (shrink)

Roman Ingarden (1893 -- 1970) was a Polish phenomenologist, ontologist and aesthetician. A student of Edmund Husserl's from the Göttingen period, Ingarden was a realist phenomenologist who spent much of his career working against what he took to be Husserl's turn to transcendental idealism. As preparatory work for narrowing down possible solutions to the realism/idealism problem, Ingarden developed ontological studies unmatched in scope and detail, distinguishing different kinds of dependence and different modes of being. He is best known, however, for (...) his work in aesthetics, particularly on the ontology of the work of art and the status of aesthetic values, and is credited with being the founder of phenomenological aesthetics. His work.. (shrink)

1. A substance is a being that is capable of action. It is either •simple, meaning that it has no parts, or •composite, meaning that it is a collection of simple substances or monads. (Monas is a Greek word meaning ‘unity’ or ‘oneness’.) Any composite thing—any body—is a multiplicity, ·a many, but simple substances are unities, ·or ones·. There must be simple substances everywhere, because without simples there would be no composites—·without ones there could not be manies·. And simple substances (...) are lives, souls, minds—·where there is a simple substance there is life·—and the world’s being full of such substances means that the whole of nature is full of life. (shrink)

I love information upon all subjects that come in my way, and especially upon those that are most important. Thus boldly declares Euphranor, one of the defenders of Christian faith in Berkley’s Alciphron (Berkeley, (1732), Dialogue 1, Section 5, Paragraph 6/10). Evidently, information has been an object of philosophical desire for some time, well before the computer revolution, Internet or the dotcompandemonium (see for example Dunn (2001) and Adams (2003)). Yet what does Euphranor love, exactly? What is information? The question (...) has received many answers in different fields. Unsurprisingly, several surveys do not even converge on a single, unified definition of information (see for example Braman 1989, Losee (1997), Machlup and Mansfield (1983), Debons and Cameron (1975), Larson and Debons (1983)). (shrink)

Norton (2003 and 2006) has recently argued that causation is merely a useful folk concept and that it fails to hold for some simple systems even in the supposed paradigm case of a causal physical theory – namely Newtonian mechanics. The purpose of this article is to argue against this devaluation of causality in physics. My main argument is that Norton’s alleged counterexample to causality (and determinism) within standard Newtonian physics fails to obey what I shall call the causal core (...) of Newtonian mechanics. In particular, I argue, Norton’s example is not in conformity with Newton’s first law. Moreover, Norton’s reformulation of this first law (in an instantaneous form) seems insufficient as a replacement for the original version since the notion of inertial frames in the resulting reformulated theory lacks a physical justification, and since an intelligible notion of time in Newtonian mechanics appears to be closely tied to Newton’s first law in its standard form. I will finally suggest how, given a plausible relationist account of time, the causal core of Newtonian mechanics may play a central role also in relativity and quantum theory. (shrink)

I deny that the world is fundamentally causal, deriving the skepticism on non-Humean grounds from our enduring failures to find a contingent, universal principle of causality that holds true of our science. I explain the prevalence and fertility of causal notions in science by arguing that a causal character for many sciences can be recovered, when they are restricted to appropriately hospitable domains. There they conform to loose and varying collections of causal notions that form folk sciences of causation. This (...) recovery of causation exploits the same generative power of reduction relations that allows us to recover gravity as a force from Einstein's general relativity and heat as a conserved fluid, the caloric, from modern thermal physics, when each theory is restricted to appropriate domains. Causes are real in science to the same degree as caloric and gravitational forces. (shrink)

This is a self-contained introduction to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is the introductory chapter of Many Worlds? Everett, quantum theory, and reality, S. Saunders, J. Barrett, A. Kent, and D. Wallace, Oxford University Press.

The paper is a contribution to formal ontology. It seeks to use topological means in order to derive ontological laws pertaining to the boundaries and interiors of wholes, to relations of contact and connectedness, to the concepts of surface, point, neighbourhood, and so on. The basis of the theory is mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, a theory which is shown to have a number of advantages, for ontological purposes, over standard treatments of topology in set-theoretic terms. One (...) central goal of the paper is to provide a rigorous formulation of Brentano's thesis to the effect that a boundary can exist as a matter of necessity only as part of a whole of higher dimension which it is the boundary of. It concludes with a brief survey of current applications of mereotopology in areas such as natural-language analysis, geographic information systems, machine vision, naive physics, and database and knowledge engineering. (shrink)

This essay considers and evaluates recent results and arguments from classical chaotic systems theory and non-relativistic quantum mechanics that pertain to the question of whether our world is deterministic or indeterministic. While the classical results are inconclusive, quantum mechanics is often assumed to establish indeterminism insofar as the measurement process involves an ineliminable stochastic element, even though the dynamics between two measurements is considered fully deterministic. While this latter claim concerning the Schrödinger evolution must be qualified, the former fully depends (...) on a resolution of the measurement problem. Two alleged proofs that nature is indeterministic, relying, in turn, on Gleason's theorem and Conway and Kochen's recent 'free will theorem', are shown to be wanting qua proofs of indeterminism. We are thus left with the conclusion that the determinism question remains open. (shrink)

Alan Turing’s pioneering work on computability, and his ideas on morphological computing support Andrew Hodges’ view of Turing as a natural philosopher. Turing’s natural philosophy differs importantly from Galileo’s view that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics (The Assayer, 1623). Computing is more than a language used to describe nature as computation produces real time physical behaviors. This article presents the framework of Natural info-computationalism as a contemporary natural philosophy that builds on the legacy of (...) Turing’s computationalism. The use of info-computational conceptualizations, models and tools makes possible for the first time in history modeling of complex self-organizing adaptive systems, including basic characteristics and functions of living systems, intelligence, and cognition. (shrink)

I deny that the world is fundamentally causal, deriving the skepticism on non-Humean grounds from our enduring failures to find a contingent, universal principle of causality that holds true of our science. I explain the prevalence and fertility of causal notions in science by arguing that a causal character for many sciences can be recovered, when they are restricted to appropriately hospitable domains. There they conform to a loose collection of causal notions that form a folk science of causation. This (...) recovery of causation exploits the same generative power of reduction relations that allows us to recover gravity as a force from Einstein's general relativity and heat as a conserved fluid, the caloric, from modern thermal physics, when each theory is restricted to appropriate domains. Causes are real in science to the same degree as caloric and gravitational forces. (shrink)

The modeling of the human mind based on quantum effects has been gaining considerable interest due to the intriguing possibility of applying non-local interactions in the studies of consciousness. Inasmuch as the majority of the pertinent studies are restricted to the exclusive analysis of mental phenomena, the quantum model of mind proposed by Roger Penrose constitutes a part of a much larger scheme of the ultimate unification of physics. Penrose's efforts to find the 'missing science of consciousness' presuppose the non-algorithmic (...) character of human thinking inferred from Gödel's incompleteness theorem. This is supposed to combine with the anticipated non-algorithmic character of the future quantum gravity theory involving the objective reduction of a quantum mechanical state vector. By surveying contemporary achievements of cognitive sciences as well as the development of Penrose's conjectures, presented in his recent work The Road to Reality, we wish to show that his non-algorithmic quantum model of human mind is contingent upon the fundamental philosophical assumption of the mathematicity of the Universe. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to the reconstruction of the implicit logic of Plato’s Par-menides. The reconstructed logic, F, makes it possible to form a new semi-intuitionistic system of logic of predicates, FN. The axioms of Peano Arithmetic (PA) and an axiom of infinity follow from FN. Therefore, FN can be seen as a new attempt at the realization of Frege’s logicist program. Some very strong systems can be seen as other variants of FN, e.g. Leśniewski’s ontology. The hypothesis from Parmenides (...) II contains proof of the existence of the two highest principles, i.e. the One and the Dyad, their mutual relationship, their relations to other things, and the reasoning regarding the mutual relationship follows some exact formal rules. Six types of Plato’s negation of a predicate are defined. The system is a first-order logic with non-classical negation of a predicate (local negation) that is non-definable by classical sentential negation. Therefore, the implicit logic of Plato’s Parmenides differs from classical syllogistics (formed in the Łukasiewicz’s style) as well as from the classical predicate calculus. (shrink)

© 2015, American College of Rheumatology. Objective More than 1 in 4 Medicare beneficiaries with rheumatoid arthritis use high-cost biologic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs, and spending for these drugs has risen sharply for Medicare Part D. Our aim was to conduct the first systematic, national investigation of how Part D plans cover biologic DMARDs and to determine patients' financial burden under current cost-sharing structures. Methods We performed a cross-sectional analysis of Part D plan formularies in 50 states and Washington, DC using (...) the January 2013 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Prescription Drug Plan Formulary and Pharmacy Network Files. We calculated the percentage of plans covering each DMARD as well as the percentage requiring prior authorization and/or coinsurance. We also compared biologic drug coverage in Medicare Advantage prescription drug plans to that in Medicare Part D stand-alone plans. Results All plans covered at least 1 biologic DMARD, but the vast majority required prior authorizations. Nearly all plans required patients to pay a coinsurance percentage rather than a fixed dollar copayment. This translated into mean out-of-pocket costs of $2,712-$2,774 before reaching the catastrophic phase of coverage, during which beneficiaries pay 5% of drug costs. Medicare Advantage prescription drug plans covered more individual biologic DMARDs than did Medicare Part D stand-alone plans, but Medicare Advantage prescription drug plans required higher average coinsurance. In contrast, 6 of 9 nonbiologic DMARDs were covered by nearly all plans without prior authorizations at fixed copayments averaging $5-$10/month. Conclusion Nationally, nearly all Part D plans cover at least 1 biologic DMARD, but the vast majority require cost sharing sufficiently high to risk significant financial burden to patients. (shrink)

Reviewed Works:John R. Steel, A. S. Kechris, D. A. Martin, Y. N. Moschovakis, Scales on $\Sigma^1_1$ Sets.Yiannis N. Moschovakis, Scales on Coinductive Sets.Donald A. Martin, John R. Steel, The Extent of Scales in $L$.John R. Steel, Scales in $L$.