Barry Loewer - Böcker

Barry Loewer presents a novel account of the metaphysics of law of nature, chances, fundamental ontology, and the space-time arena they occupy. He calls this the Package Deal Account. This aims to answer Stephen Hawking's question "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" Loewer's account stands on the shoulders of David Lewis's Humean Best Systems Account of laws and chances, but rejects Lewis' Humean ontology of natural properties, and instead lets the criteria that physicists employ for evaluating candidate fundamental theories of everything, together with reality, determine the universe's fundamental ontology. The Package Deal Account thus advances the project of naturalizing metaphysics.Loewer discusses the history of the concept of laws of nature, current philosophical accounts of the metaphysics of laws, and arguments for and against each of these. He then shows how the Package Deal Account overcomes objections to each, and how, unlike Lewis's Humean account and its non-Humean rivals, it is able to accommodate recent developments in physics, including proposals for theories of quantum gravity that reject the fundamentality of space-time. Loewer provides in addition an account of the laws and chances that occur in non-fundamental special sciences and how they are related to those of fundamental physics.

Ernie Lepore and Barry Loewer present a series of papers in which they come to terms with three views that have loomed large in philosophy for several decades: that a theory of meaning for a language is best understood as a theory of truth for that language; that thought and language are best understood together via a theory of interpretation; and that the mental is irreducible to the physical. They aim both to offer critical assessment of the views and to develop them. They show that each of these views remains of great significance for current work in philosophy of language and mind.

Physicalism, a topic that has been central to modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics, is the philosophical view that everything in the space-time world is ultimately physical. The physicalist will claim that all facts about the mind and the mental are physical facts and deny the existence of mental events and state insofar as these are thought of as independent of physical things, events and states. This collection of essays, first published in 2001, offers a series of perspectives on this important doctrine and brings depth and breadth to the philosophical debate. A group of distinguished philosophers, comprising both physicalists and their critics, consider a wide range of issues including the historical genesis and present justification of physicalism, its metaphysical presuppositions and methodological role, its implications for mental causation, and the account it provides of consciousness.

Physicalism, a topic that has been central to modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics, is the philosophical view that everything in the space-time world is ultimately physical. The physicalist will claim that all facts about the mind and the mental are physical facts and deny the existence of mental events and state insofar as these are thought of as independent of physical things, events and states. This collection of essays, first published in 2001, offers a series of perspectives on this important doctrine and brings depth and breadth to the philosophical debate. A group of distinguished philosophers, comprising both physicalists and their critics, consider a wide range of issues including the historical genesis and present justification of physicalism, its metaphysical presuppositions and methodological role, its implications for mental causation, and the account it provides of consciousness.

Even in the eyes of many of his critics, Fodor is widely regarded as the most important philosopher of psychology of his generation. With Noam Chomsky at MIT in the 1960s he mounted a strenuous attack on the behaviourism that then dominated psychology and most philosophy of mind, and since then, he has articulated and defended in considerable richness and detail a computational theory of intentional causation that is central to the emerging cognitive sciences. This theory provides a framework both for the resolution of many traditional problems in the philosophy of mind and language, and for actual psychological research and experimentation. The present volume contains 16 contributions by philosophers and cognitive scientists who have been critical of this theory, followed by replies Fodor makes to each of them. There is alos a lengthy introduction that provides an overview of Fodor's views and their relation to this critical discussion.

Philosophers debate the ideas and implications of one of the most important contemporary works in the philosophy of science, David Albert’s Time and Chance.In the twenty-odd years since its publication, David Albert’s Time and Chance has been recognized as one of the most significant contemporary contributions to the philosophy of science. Here, philosophers and physicists explore the implications of Albert’s arguments and debate his solutions to some of the most intractable problems in theoretical physics.Albert has attempted to make sense of the tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of that world. In particular, he is concerned with problems arising from causality and the direction of time: defying common sense, almost all our basic scientific ideas suggest that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen in reverse. Focusing on Newtonian mechanics, Albert provides a systematic account of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. He also generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and suggests a deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem.The essays included in The Probability Map of the Universe develop, explore, and critique this account, while Albert himself replies. The result is an insightful discussion of the foundations of statistical mechanics and its relation to cosmology, the direction of time, and the metaphysical nature of laws and objective probability.

In A Companion to David Lewis, Barry Loewer and Jonathan Schaffer bring together top philosophers to explain, discuss, and critically extend Lewis's seminal work in original ways. Students and scholars will discover the underlying themes and complex interconnections woven through the diverse range of his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics, and aesthetics. The first and only comprehensive study of the work of David Lewis, one of the most systematic and influential philosophers of the latter half of the 20th centuryContributions shed light on the underlying themes and complex interconnections woven through Lewis's work across his enormous range of influence, including metaphysics, language, logic, epistemology, science, mind, ethics, and aestheticsOutstanding Lewis scholars and leading philosophers working in the fields Lewis influenced explain, discuss, and critically extend Lewis's work in original waysAn essential resource for students and researchers across analytic philosophy that covers the major themes of Lewis's work

I Think Therefore I Am, Existentialism, Dialectical Materialism? The Socratic Method and Deconstruction? Sure, you know what they all mean. That is, you've certainly heard of them. But do you know enough about them to join a dinner party debate or dazzle the bar with your knowledge?30-Second Philsophies takes a revolutionary approach to getting a grip on the 50 most significant schools of philosophy. The book challenges leading thinkers to quit fretting about the meaning of meaning for a while and explain the most complex philosophical ideas - using nothing more than two pages, 300 words, and a metaphorical image. Here, in one unique volume, you have the chance to pick the potted brains of our leading philosophers and understand complex concepts such as Kant's Categorical Imperative without ending up in a darkened room with an ice pack on your head.