Mihretu P. Guta - Böcker

This volume explores how E.J. Lowe’s metaphysics relates to various issues in philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion.Lowe’s views on ontological issues have direct implications for issues in philosophical theology as well as philosophy of religion. Lowe’s work is systematic in nature, and he built an extremely sophisticated ontological system in The Four-Category Ontology. The chapters in this volume are concerned with the centrality of having a proper ontology for our understanding of the core issues in philosophical theology. This means that we need to engage in ground-level debates about the ontology of theological issues. The chapters explore topics such as the existence of God, divine causality, divine presence, divine action, divine temporality dualism, and Christology.E.J. Lowe’s Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology will appeal to scholars and graduate students working in philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and philosophical theology.

This book aims to show the centrality of a proper ontology of properties in thinking about consciousness. Philosophers have long grappled with what is now known as the hard problem of consciousness, i.e., how can subjective or qualitative features of our experience—such as how a strawberry tastes—arise from brain states? More recently, philosophers have incorporated what seems like promising empirical research from neuroscience and cognitive psychology in an attempt to bridge the gap between measurable mental states on the one hand, and phenomenal qualities on the other. In Consciousness and the Ontology of Properties, many of the leading philosophers working on this issue, as well as a few emerging scholars, have written 14 new essays on this problem. The essays address topics as diverse as substance dualism, mental causation, the metaphysics of artificial intelligence, the logic of conceivability, constitution, extended minds, the emergence of consciousness, and neuroscience and the unity and neural correlates of consciousness, but are nonetheless unified in a collective objective: the need for a proper ontology of properties to understand the hard problem of consciousness, both on non-empirical and empirical grounds.