Handbook of Potentiality

This volume congregates articles of leading philosophers about potentials and potentiality in all areas of philosophy and the empirical sciences in which they play a relevant role. It is the first encompassing collection of articles on the metaphysics of potentials and potentiality.

Potentials play an important role not only in our everyday understanding of objects, persons and systems but also in the sciences. An example is the potential to become an adult human person. Moreover, the attribution of potentials involves crucial ethical problems. Bioethics makes references to the theoretical concept "potential" without being able to clarify its meaning. However, despite its relevance it has not been made subject of philosophical investigation. Mostly, potentials are regarded as a subspecies of dispositions. Whilst dispositions are a flourishing field of research, potentials as such have not come into focus. Potentials like dispositions are modal properties. But already a first glance at the metaphysics of potentials shows that concerning their ascription potentials are more problematic than dispositions since "potential" means that an entity has the potential to acquire a property in the future. Therefore, potentials involve a time structure of the entities in question that is much more complex than those of dispositions. 

This handbook brings this important concept into focus in its various aspects for the first time. It covers the history of the concept as well as contemporary systematic problems and will be of special interest for philosophers in the fields of general metaphysics, philosophy of science and ethics, especially bioethics. It will also be of interest to scientists and persons concerned with bioethical problems.

Kristina Engelhard is a post-doc Research Fellow at the DFG-funded research group „Inductive Metaphysics“, located at the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany. Her current research is on dispositions, laws of nature, methods in metaphysics, metametaphysics, classical German Philosophy and early modern philosophy. Her publications include “Das Einfache und die Materie. Untersuchungen zu Kants Antinomie der Teilung“ (De Gruyter 2005), “Categories and the ontology of powers. A semi-dualist account of pandispositionalism“ (in: A. Marmodoro (ed.), The Metaphsics of Powers. Their Grounding and their Manifestations, Routledge 2010), “Können Dispositionen das Realismus-Problem des transzendentalen Idealismus lösen?” (in: M. Egger (ed.), Philosophie nach Kant. Neue Wege zum Verständnis von Kants Transzendental- und Moralphilosophie, De Gruyter 2014).

Michael Quante is Professor for Practical Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universityof Münster, Germany. His research areas are action theory, philosophy of person, ethics and applied ethics. His most important publications are ”Hegel's Concept of Action“ (Cambridge University Press 2004), “Person“ (de Gruyter 2012); ”Personal Identity as a Principle of Biomedical Ethics“ (Springer 2016).