Beginning Metaphysics An Introductory Text

This flexible textbook is both an introduction and a reader in metaphysics combining original discussion with selections from primary sources. This text shows that important social, political and moral concerns involve metaphysical questions and that important metaphysical positions have practical implications. It discusses major metaphysical topics such as God, Freedom, Mind, Causality, Value, and Universals as well as important historical and contemporary critiques of metaphysics. Each chapter is followed by selections from classic and contemporary texts, allowing for in-depth study of primary sources.

Heimir Geirsson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Iowa State University. He is the co-editor, with Michael Losonsky, of Readings in Language and Mind (Blackwell Publishers, 1996) and has published on philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and epistemology in Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Erkenntnis, and Journal of Philosophical Research.

Michael Losonsky is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. He is the co-editor, with Heimir Geirsson, of Readings in Language and Mind (Blackwell Publishers, 1996). He has published on contemporary metaphysics in American Philosophical Quarterly, Minds and Machines, Philosophical Review, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophy, amongst others. He has also published on metaphysics in the history of modern philosophy in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Pragmatics and Cognition, among others.

What is Metaphysics?
Metaphysics and Political Philosophy
Readings: Plato, Crito. Plato, Phaedo
Selection from The Leviathan
The Second Sex, Introduction
Selection from The Problems of Philosophy
Values and Reality
Readings
The Varieties of Intrinsic Value
The Subjectivity of Values
How to be a Moral Realist
God and Evil
Readings: St Anselm of Canterbury
Selection from Proslogion
Selection from Summa Theologica
Selection from Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Summary of the Controversy Reduced to Formal Arguments
Evil and Omnipotence
Was it within God's Power to Create Any Possible World He Pleased?
Causation and Society
Readings
Selection from Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Third View of Causality
Ethics of Explanation
Mind and Morality
Readings: René Descartes, Selections from Principles of Philosophy and Passions of the Soul
Selection from Conversation Between d'Alembert and Diderot
What is it Like to be a Bat?
Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?
Could a Machine Think?
Freedom and Responsibility
Readings
Thiery d'Hollbach, Selection from The System of Nature
Appendix
C. A. Campbell, Has the Self Free Will?
C. A. Campbell
Two Concepts of Freedom
Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person
Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility
Against Metaphysics
Readings: The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language
The Four Great Errors
Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical
Glossary
Index
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

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Beginning Metaphysics An Introductory Text with Readings

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials