Reading Metaphysics: Selected Texts with Interactive Commentary - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1405123672 ISBN 13: 9781405123679

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007

Synopsis

This collection brings together key contemporary texts in metaphysics and features an interactive commentary which helps readers engage the texts critically and to use them to develop their own views.

• Each text is followed by a detailed commentary, setting it in context
• Includes questions designed to help readers think hard about what the author is saying and why, to think of objections, and to formulate his or her own views
• Aims to improve the reader's ability to engage critically with philosophical texts, and to use them as a springboard for philosophical thought and writing
• Introduces readers to the perennial problems of metaphysics and the ways that different analytic philosophers have approached them

About this title

About the Author

Helen Beebee is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Hume on Causation (2006) and co-editor, with Julian Dodd, of Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate (2005).

Julian Dodd is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology (2007) and An Identity Theory of Truth (2000), and co-editor of Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate (2005).

From the Back Cover

This collection brings together key contemporary texts in metaphysics. Designed for students and general readers, it has a distinctive pedagogical aim: to enable readers to engage critically with challenging philosophical texts, and thereby use such texts as a springboard for their own philosophical thought and writing.

Each text is followed by a detailed commentary, which puts the author’s views and arguments into context, explains key terms and argumentative moves, and – most importantly – asks a variety of questions. The questions are designed to prompt the reader to think critically about what the author is saying and why she is saying it, to think of objections, and to formulate and justify his or her own views on the topic.

The book includes texts by Kripke, Lewis, Parfit, Armstrong, Nagel, and Dennett, amongst others, and discusses the following topics: free will, personal identity, realism and nominalism, modality, persistence, and realism and anti-realism.

Each text is followed by a detailed commentary, which puts the author’s views and arguments into context, explains key terms and argumentative moves, and – most importantly – asks a variety of questions. The questions are designed to prompt the reader to think critically about what the author is saying and why she is saying it, to think of objections, and to formulate and justify his or her own views on the topic.

The book includes texts by Kripke, Lewis, Parfit, Armstrong, Nagel, and Dennett, amongst others, and discusses the following topics: free will, personal identity, realism and nominalism, modality, persistence, and realism and anti-realism.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1405123672
• ISBN 13: 9781405123679
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Beebee Helen, Dodd Julian