The mystery of matter

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Sheldon M. Cohen

This book examines Aristotle's metaphysics and his account of nature, stressing the ways in which his desire to explain observed natural processes shaped his philosophical thought. It departs radically from a tradition of interpretation in which Aristotle is understood to have approached problems with a set of abstract principles in hand - principles derived from critical reflection on the views of his predecessors. A central example in the book interprets Aristotle's essentialism as deriving from an examination of the kinds of unity that various sorts of things have, and from his account of elemental motion, alteration, transformation, and the growth of organisms. An important conclusion of this argument is that a substance may, under certain circumstances, lack some of its essential attributes. The book goes on to develop a notion of incomplete substance and explores the connection between Aristotle's concept of nature and its role in scientific explanation. In this way Cohen breaks down the sharp division that many interpreters have chosen to see between Aristotle's natural science and his philosophy. This is a major reevaluation of Aristotle's metaphysics that will interest philosophers, classicists, and historians of classical science.

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John Heil

"Is the world hierarchically arranged, incorporating 'levels' of reality? What is the nature of objects and properties? What does 'realism' about ordinary objects or states of mind demand? When an assertion is true, what makes it true? Are natural properties best regarded as qualities or powers or some combination of these? What are colours? What explains the 'projective' character of intentionality? What is the nature of consciousness, and what relation do conscious experiences bear to material states and processes?" "From an Ontological Point of View endeavours to provide answers to such questions through an examination of ground-floor issues in ontology. The result is an account of the fundamental constituents of the world around us and an application of this account to problems dominating recent work in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics." "The book, written in an accessible, non-technical style, is intended for non-specialists as well as seasoned metaphysicians."--BOOK JACKET.

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Peter Poellner

This book offers a new and comprehensive interpretation and a detailed critical assessment of Nietzsche's later ideas on epistemology and metaphysics, drawing extensively not only on his published works but also his voluminous notebooks, largely unpublished in English. The author examines Nietzsche's various distinct lines of thought on the traditionally central areas of philosophy and shows in what specific sense Nietzsche, as he himself claimed, might be said to have moved beyond these questions. Throughout the book, considerable attention is paid both to the historical context of his writings and to subsequent developments in philosophy - English-language as well as Continental European. Among the themes discussed are Nietzsche's relation to scepticism and to evolutionary epistemology; his analysis of 'objective reality' and the associated 'perspectivism'; his criticism of the metaphysician's 'will to truth' and the related analysis of the intellectual paradigm he called the 'ascetic ideal'; his notion of unconscious mental states; and the concept of the will to power and its relation to metaphysics. Dr Poellner, while recognizing the originality of Nietzsche's influential new philosophical paradigm, shows that his thought has closer affinities to the philosophical tradition than is often supposed.

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James Giles

Phenomenalism is a philosophical theory of perception involving the idea that statements about material objects can be explained in terms of statements about actual and possible sense experiences. In this study James Giles explores the development of phenomenalism through the works of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and others. He shows how problems occur for phenomenalists precisely at the point where they abandon their empiricism. Holding to empiricism, Giles then presents his own version of phenomenalism as a metaphysical thesis in which the material objects are constructed out of sense experience. He then argues that the major critiques of phenomenalism, including Wittgenstein’s private language argument and Sellars’ famous attack on the ‘myth of the given’, all fail to dislodge the basic phenomenalist insights.