Philosophy: metaphysics and ontology Books

Book Synopsis Does science have all the answers? Can it even deal with abstract reasoning beyond the world we experience? How can we ensure that the physical world is sufficiently ordered to be intelligible to humans? How can mathematics, a product of human minds, unlock the secrets of the physical universe? Should all such questions be considered inadmissible if science cannot settle them? Metaphysics has traditionally been understood as reasoning beyond the reach of science, sometimes even claiming realities beyond its grasp. Because of this, metaphysics is often contemptuously dismissed by scientists and philosophers who wish to remain within the bounds of what can be scientifically proven. Yet scientists at the frontiers of physics unwittingly engage in metaphysics, as they are now happy to contemplate whole universes that are, in principle, beyond human reach. Roger Trigg challenges those who deny that science needs philosophical assumptions. Trigg claims that the foundations of science themselves have to lie beyond science. It takes reasoning apart from experience to discover what is not yet known and this metaphysical reasoning to imagine realities beyond what can be accessed. “In Beyond Matter, Roger Trigg advances a powerful, persuasive, fair-minded argument that the sciences require a philosophical, metaphysical foundation. This is a brilliant book for newcomers to the philosophy of science and experts alike.” —Charles Taliaferro, professor of philosophy, St. Olaf College Trade Review“In this important book, the philosopher Roger Trigg sets out to honour the sciences by not letting them be shouldered with burdens they cannot bear, such as being the arbiter of all truth. Trigg opposes scientism, arguing that we cannot ‘arbitrarily’ dismiss ‘swathes of human reasoning and experience,’ reflected in disciplines such as literature or theology, simply on the grounds that they are not physics.” —Andrew Davison, Times’ Literary Supplement “Trigg is an eminent philosopher and now Senior Research Fellow at the Ian Ramsey Center at Oxford. If you’re concerned about the ‘science only’ approach . . . this one is a helpful corrective.” —Jim Stimp, BioLogos “This book, for newcomers to the field of philosophy of science and those already immersed in the debates, is superb.” —CHOICE “Thoughtful and well-reasoned. . . . Beyond Matter has the potential to transcend academia, thanks to its friendly tone and willingness to address atheism in a noncombative way—a rarity in works along the science-philosophy divide. In an age when belief and research seem pitted against one another, this book is a welcome window of bipartisan sanity. Ideal for researchers and thinkers, but also a good pick for interested armchair philosophers.” —Anna Call, Foreword Reviews “As always, Trigg’s writing is clear, and his argumentation is easy to comprehend. He introduces several philosophical, scientific debates without getting too entangled in details.” —Lari Launonen, ESSSAT News and ReviewsTable of Contents Preface / ix Chapter 1: Is Science the Sole Authority? / 3 Chapter 2: Science and Reality / 25 Chapter 3: World and Mind / 49 Chapter 4: Is the World Intelligible? / 73 Chapter 5: The Unity of Science / 101 Chapter 6: The Success of Science / 127 Notes / 149 Index / 159

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Book SynopsisSince at least the time of Plato, religious explanations of the metaphysical foundations of morality have typically fallen into one of two camps: natural law theory, according to which morality is fundamentally explained by facts about human nature—facts that God is responsible for—and divine command theory, which holds that moral obligations arise directly from God’s commands or some other prescriptive act of the divine will. J. Caleb Clanton and Kraig Martin offer an accessible analysis of these traditional views, reconstruct the various arguments for and against them, and offer an extended consideration of the historical emergence of the divide between these positions within the Christian tradition. Nature and Command goes on to develop and defend a theory that combines these two views—a metaethical approach that has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves.Along the way, the authors make use of underexplored theological resources drawn from the Stone-Campbell movement, a nineteenth-century restoration movement that culminated in one of the largest Protestant groups in America by the dawn of the twentieth century. Nature and Command summons the resources of this particular Christian heritage—its first principles, call for unity, and ecumenism—to solve one of the great dilemmas of moral philosophy and theology dating back to Plato’s Euthyphro. This historically aware, argumentatively rigorous, and highly readable volume will serve as a valuable resource for moral philosophy and ethics, as well as for mining the Stone-Campbell Restoration tradition for historical and theological insights.

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Book SynopsisStuff, the hoard of minor objects which have shed their commodity glamor but which we refuse to recycle, flashes up in fiction, films and photographs as alluring, unruly reminder of how people and matter are intertwined. Stuff is modern materiality out of bounds that refuses to be contained by the western semiotic system. It declines its role as the eternal sidekick of the subject, and is thus the ideal basis for a counter-narrative of materiality in flux. Can such a narrative, developed by the new materialism, reinvigorate the classical materialist account of human alienation from commodities under capital? By shifting the discussion of materiality toward the aesthetic and the everyday, the book both embraces and challenges the project of new materialism. It argues that matter has a politics, and that its new plasticity offers a continued possibility of critique. Stuff Theory's five chapters illustrate the intermittent flashes of modern 'minor' materiality in twentieth-century modernity as fashion, memory object, clutter, home décor, and waste in a wide range of texts: Benjamin's essays, Virginia Woolf's and Elfriede Jelinek's fiction, Rem Koolhaas' criticism, 1920s German photography and the cinema of Tati, Bertolucci, and Mendes. To call the commodified, ebullient materiality the book tracks stuff, is to foreground its plastic and transformative power, its fluidity and its capacity to generate events. Stuff Theory interrogates the political value of stuff's instability. It investigates the potential of stuff to revitalize the oppositional power of the object. Stuff Theory traces a genealogy of materiality: flashpoints of one kind of minor matter in a succession of cultural moments. It asserts that in culture, stuff becomes a rallying point for a new critique of capital, which always works to reassign stuff to a subaltern position. Stuff is not merely unruly: it becomes the terrain on which a new relation between people and matter might be built.Trade ReviewBoscagli’s readings of objects are genuinely exciting ... For anyone interested in consumer capitalism, mediation, the cultural transition from modernity to postmodernity, or objects in art, however, Stuff Theory is a necessary read. Boscagli’s writing throughout has verve, and the analyses are sharp, incisive, and often surprising. * U.S. Studies Online *The hinge between [modernist and new materialism] is supplied by the endlessly suggestive writing of Walter Benjamin who acts as the richest example of what can be gleaned when these two worlds are entangled ... Boscagli both follows Benjamin and pushes his work into new arenas ... Stuff Theory’s engagement with ‘new materialism’ is wide ranging. * New Foundations *New materialism meets historical materialism, to the expansion and improvement of both. With enviable nuance and sophistication, imaginative verve and critical acuity, Maurizia Boscagli explores the complex, dynamic life of the stuff of capitalism, producing an innovative and original materialism for the twenty-first century. Essential reading. -- Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, CanadaAt one point in David Fincher's 1999 cult film Fight Club, Brad Pitt's rascally Tyler Durden mocks a minor character who states vaguely that in college he studied "stuff." Maurizia Boscagli’s dazzling Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism shows how Tyler might have taken this utterance seriously: "stuff" is indeed worthy of study. Each page brimming with fresh examples drawn from literature, art, and culture, and carefully informed by intellectual precursors from Marx to the new materialists, Boscagli's theory ultimately illuminates the practice of stuff, and suggests that this practice may be due for revision. -- Christopher Schaberg, Associate Professor of English & Environment at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, and author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of FlightMatter is desire. Whether conceived as an object that can be represented and appropriated or as force whose unpredictability and vitality throws life wide open, matter never leaves us in peace. In this wonderful book Maurizia Boscagli explores how the everyday is shaped by these tantalizing movements of matter. Beyond the capitalocentricism of historical materialism and the detached hype of new materialism Stuff Theory proposes an experimental materialist practice that works with matter to remake the stuff that power and politics are made of. * Dimitris Papadopoulos, Reader in Sociology and Organisation, University of Leicester, UK, author of Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century *Boscagli offers an exhilarating genealogy of the commodity in order to open up a questions that neither presuppose the old distinction between subject and object nor revel in the sheer plasticity of things. I especially admire the case that Stuff Theory makes for dialectic as the necessary means of thinking our way through and beyond the 19th-century opposition of materialism (which now includes cyborgian hybrids) to idealism (which has always included aesthetic expression). Bocagli's "radical materialism" shows that only a critique of post-commodity things can tell us how to read them as transformations of "stuff" that expresses the people and selves to which neo-liberalism denies subjectivity. * Nancy Armstrong, Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of English, Duke University, USA *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Of Jena Glassware and Potatoes—Matter in the Moment 1. Homeopathic Benjamin: A Flexible Poetics of Matter 2. For the Unnatural Use of Clothes: Fashion as Cultural Assault 3. Paris Circa 1968: Cool Spaces, Decoration, Revolution 4. “You Must Remember this:” Memory Objects in the Age of Erasable Memory 5. Garbage in Theory: Waste Aesthetics Envoi: What Should We Do With Our Stuff? Notes Index

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