Studies In Metaphysics
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Fiction and Metaphysics
Author: Amie L. Thomasson
language: en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date: 1999
This challenging study places fiction squarely at the centre of the discussion of metaphysics. Philosophers have traditionally treated fiction as involving a set of narrow problems in logic or the philosophy of language. By contrast Amie Thomasson argues that fiction has far-reaching implications for central problems of metaphysics. The book develops an 'artifactual' theory of fiction, whereby fictional characters are abstract artifacts as ordinary as laws or symphonies or works of literature. By understanding fictional characters we come to understand how other cultural and social objects are established on the basis of the independent physical world and the mental states of human beings.
The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings
The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings addresses the problems an Anselmian perfect being faces in contexts involving unlimited options. Recent advances in the theory of vagueness, the metaphysics of multiverses and hyperspace, the theory of dynamic or sequential choice, the logic of moral and rational dilemmas, and metaethical theory provide the resources to formulate the new challenges and the Anselmian responses with an unusual degree of precision. Almeida shows that the challenges arising in the unusual contexts involving unlimited options sometimes produce metaphysical surprise.
Toward a Metaphysics of Culture
Toward a Metaphysics of Culture provides an initial, minimal, and original analysis of the concept of uniquely enlanguaged cultures of the human world and of the distinctive metaphysical features of whatever belongs to the things of that world: preeminently, persons, language, actions, artworks, products, history, practices, institutions, and norms. Emphasis is placed on the artifactual and hybrid nature of persons, naturalistic and post-Darwinian evolutionary considerations, and the bearing of the account on a range of disputed inquiries largely centered on the relationship between physical nature and human culture and between the natural and human sciences. The schema offered lays a foundation for a closer analysis of the human mind, cognition, interpretation, nomologicality, normativity, intentionality, realism, and related matters. The central thesis advances the heterodox notion, congruent with post-Darwinian studies in paleoanthropology, that the human person is a natural artifact, a functional transform of the primate members of Homo sapiens, by way of a complexly intertwined biological and encultured evolution, primarily dependent on the invention, transmission, and mastery of true language and the novel hybrid abilities that that makes possible. The emergence of persons is taken to be the obverse side of the mastery of language itself.