Materialism is the view according to which a zombie world is metaphysically impossible. Assuming that zombies are conceivable in the sense that we cannot rule out a priori that our world is a zombie ...world, materialists must hold that a zombie world is metaphysically impossible despite being conceivable. There are no good reasons to think that this view (type-B materialism) is false, since there are no good reasons to think that the corresponding phenomenal and physical/functional concepts cannot be distinct concepts of the same thing. Nonetheless, we cannot understand how type-B materialism can be true. We cannot understand this, because we cannot in principle explain how a zombie world could be impossible despite being conceivable.
The present study seeks to learn something about the metaphysics of substance in light of four rich but for the most part neglected centuries of philosophy, running from the thirteenth through the ...seventeenth centuries. At no period in the history of philosophy, other than perhaps our own, have metaphysical problems received the sort of sustained attention they received during the later Middle Ages, and never has a whole philosophical tradition come crashing down as quickly and completely as did scholastic philosophy in the seventeenth century. The thirty chapters work through various fundamental metaphysical issues, sometimes focusing more on scholastic thought, sometimes on the seventeenth century. The volume begins with the first challenges to the classical scholasticism of Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, runs through prominent figures like John Duns Scotus and William Ockham, and ends in the seventeenth century, with the end of the first stage of developments in post‐scholastic philosophy: on the continent, with Descartes and Gassendi, and in England, with Boyle and Locke.
DerridaWhat could be the common thread linking these three very different thinkers: Hegel, Rosenzweig, and Derrida? In my essay, I will argue that this link is provided by a certain form of political ...theology which is polemical towards Carl Schmitt’s notion of the katechon or the “restrainer of the apocalypse.” While the political theology which they propose is also based on the idea of the restraint, it takes a different form than the Schmittian postponement of the apocalyptic event. Their alternative notion is attenuation which results in the political and philosophical practice of maintaining a distance between God and the world. Neither simply restraining it, nor simply hastening, this new formula takes a third dialectical position between the katechon and the apocalyptic, which consists in “easing the lightning to the children”: the world as God’s child—weak, fragile, and exposed to the infinite power of creation and destruction—must nonetheless find a way to use the revelatory power of the eschaton for the immanent purposes.
This book covers the gamut of historical and contemporary arguments of metaphysics, engaging readers through three profound questions: what are the most general features of the world, why is there a ...world and what is the place of human beings in the world?
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