Metaphysics: The Basics is a concise and engaging introduction to the philosophical study of some of the most important and foundational aspects of the world in which we live. Concerned with ...questions about existence, time, identity, change, and other basic elements of our common-sense and scientific ways of thinking about the world, metaphysics has long fascinated people. But to the uninitiated, many of the issues and problems can appear bewilderingly complex and intractable. In this lively and lucid book, Michael Rea examines and explains the core questions in the study of metaphysics-questions such as:What is the relationship between an object and its properties, or between an object and its parts?What is time, and is time travel possible?Are human beings free?What is it for an object or person to persist over time?This second edition has been thoroughly revised and includes a new chapter on the metaphysics of gender. With suggestions for further reading and a glossary of key terms, Metaphysics: The Basics is an ideal introduction for those coming to the subject for the first time.
Metaphysics: The Basics is a concise and engaging introduction to the philosophical study of some of the most important and foundational aspects of the world in which we live. Concerned with ...questions about existence, time, identity, change, and other basic elements of our common-sense and scientific ways of thinking about the world, metaphysics has long fascinated people. But to the uninitiated, many of the issues and problems can appear bewilderingly complex and intractable. In this lively and lucid book, Michael Rea examines and explains the core questions in the study of metaphysics-questions such as:What is the relationship between an object and its properties, or between an object and its parts?What is time, and is time travel possible?Are human beings free?What is it for an object or person to persist over time?This second edition has been thoroughly revised and includes a new chapter on the metaphysics of gender. With suggestions for further reading and a glossary of key terms, Metaphysics: The Basics is an ideal introduction for those coming to the subject for the first time.
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.
Heroizm w Gułagu Raźny, Anna
Kultura Słowian,
01/2018, Volume:
XIV
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Dla podjętego tematu istotne jest znaczenie występujących w tytule pojęć. Heroizm wyraża aksjologiczny i metafizyczny wymiar poświęcenia człowieka w imię wartości fundamentalnych dla sensu i celu ...jego istnienia. To właśnie pojęcie podpowiada antropologiczno--filozoficzne kryteria interpretacji literatury stanowiącej świadectwo życia w łagrze. Gułag wnosi natomiast do tak określonej interpretacji perspektywę historyczno-ideologiczną. Prezentując postawy heroiczne w Gułagu, literatura łagrowa potwierdza określone przez Maxa Schelera znaczenie heroizmu jako postawy moralnej i zarazem egzystencjalnej. Wyrasta ona z pozycji przekraczania własnego ja w ofiarnym akcie poświęcenia w imię wybranych wysokich wartości duchowych, moralnych, kulturowych. W ofiarnym akcie ja ludzkiego (aż do ofiary własnego życia) ujawnia się metafizyczna istota wartości, dla której jest on dokonywany. Ujawnia się także perspektywa metafizycznej nadziei na inne – prawdziwe – życie, nade wszystko po śmierci. Heroizm w Gułagu stanowił nie tylko zaprzeczenie rozpaczy nicości, ale również świadectwo poświęcenia dla wartości przewyższającej system obozowy i ideologię komunizmu. Poświęcenie to oznaczało zgodę na cierpienie i śmierć w imię wybranej wartości. Literatura łagrowa podaje przykłady heroicznych postaw zajmowanych w imię religii, drugiego człowieka, wolności, rodziny, sztuki. Najbardziej reprezentatywne pod tym względem są utwory A. Sołżenicyna, W. Szałamowa, E. Giznburg, W. Bukowskiego. One też są przywoływane w niniejszej pracy.
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