Bøger i Synthese Library serien

This open access monograph offers a detailed study and a systematic defense of a key intuition we typically have, as human beings, with respect to the nature of time: the intuition that the future is open, whereas the past is fixed. For example, whereas it seems unsettled whether there will be a fourth world war, it is settled that there was a first world war.The book contributes, in particular, three major and original insights. First, it provides a coherent, non-metaphorical, and metaphysically illuminating elucidation of the intuition. Second, it determines which model of the temporal structure of the world is most appropriate to accommodate the intuition, and settles on a specific version of the Growing Block Theory of time (GBT). Third, it puts forward a naturalistic foundation for GBT, by exploiting recent results of our best physics (viz. General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Gravity).Three main challenges are addressed: the dismissal of temporal asymmetries as non-fundamental phenomena only (e.g., thermodynamic or causal phenomena), the epistemic objection against GBT, and the apparent tension between GBT and relativistic physics. It is argued that the asymmetry between the open future and the fixed past must be grounded in the temporal structure of the world, and that this is neither precluded by our epistemic device, nor by the latest approaches to Quantum Gravity (¿e.g., the Causal Set Theory).Aiming at reconciling time as we find it in ordinary experience and time as physics describes it, this ¿innovative book ¿will raise the interest of both academic researchers and ¿graduate students working on the philosophy of time. More generally, it ¿presents contents of interest for all metaphysicians and non-dogmatic philosophers of physics.This is an open access book.

This book explores the nature and significance of Pyrrhonism, the most prominent and influential form of skepticism in Western philosophy.

In the past century, mainstream philosophy of mathematics has claimed that the philosophy of mathematics cannot concern itself with the making of mathematics but only with finished mathematics, namely mathematics as presented in published works.

This book presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of Dewey's philosophy of science and will be of interest to scholars working in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy of science and on the relationship between Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism.

This book provides an up-to-date revision of materialism's central tenets, its main varieties, and the place of materialistic philosophy vis a vis scientific knowledge.Materialism has been the subject of extensive and rich controversies since Robert Boyle introduced the term for the first time in the 17th century. But what is materialism and what can it oi er today? The term is usually defined as the worldview according to which everything real is material. Nevertheless, there is no philosophical consensus about whether the meaning of matter can be enlarged beyond the physical. As a consequence, materialism is often defined in stark exclusive and reductionist terms: whatever exists is either physical or ontologically reducible to it. This conception, if consistent, mutilates reality, excluding the ontological significance of political, economic, sociocultural, anthropological and psychological realities. Starting from a new history of materialism, the present book focuses on the central ontological and epistemological debates aroused by today's leading materialist approaches, including some little known to an anglophone readership. The key concepts of matter, system, emergence, space and time, life, mind, and software are checked over and updated. Controversial issues such as the nature of mathematics and the place of reductionism are also discussed from different materialist approaches. As a result, materialism emerges as a powerful, indispensable scientifically-supported worldview with a surprising wealth of nuances and possibilities.

This book explores the philosophy and the foundations of quantum chemistry. It features chapters written by experts in the field. The contributions analyze quantum chemistry as a discipline, in particular, its relation with both chemistry and physics from the viewpoint of realism and reduction. Coverage includes such topics as quantum chemistry as an "e;in-between"e; discipline, molecular structure and quantum mechanics, quantum chemical models, and atoms and molecules in quantum chemistry.The interest of this book is twofold. First, the contributions aim to update and refresh the discussions regarding the foundations of quantum chemistry. Second, they seek to develop new philosophical perspectives that this discipline can suggest to philosophers of science.From its origins, quantum chemistry filled a problematic position in the disciplinary space. On the one hand, it is a branch of theoretical chemistry. On the other hand, it appeals essentially to theoretical tools coming from physics. This peculiar position triggered conceptual questions about its own identity. Inside this book, readers will find updated discussions on the foundations and the philosophy of this complex discipline.

This edited collection provides new perspectives on some metaphysical questions arising in quantum mechanics. These questions have been long-standing and are of continued interest to researchers and graduate students working in physics, philosophy of physics, and metaphysics. It features contributions from a diverse set of researchers, ranging from senior scholars to junior academics, working in varied fields, from physics to philosophy of physics and metaphysics. The contributors reflect on issues about fundamentality (is quantum theory fundamental? If so, what is its fundamental ontology?), ontological dependence (how do ordinary objects exist even if they are not fundamental?), realism (what kind of realism is compatible with quantum theory?), indeterminacy (can the world itself exhibit ontological indeterminacy?). The book contains contributions from both physicists (including Nobel Prize winner Gerard 't Hooft), science communicators and philosophers. 

This book seeks to provide new perspectives, to broaden the field of philosophy of science, or to renew themes that have had a great impact on the profession. Thus, after an initial chapter to situate the current trends in philosophy of science and the prospective of the near future, it offers contributions in five thematic blocks: I) Philosophy of Medicine and Climate Change; II) Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence and the Internet; III) New Analyses of Probability and the Use of Mathematics in Practice; IV) Scientific Progress Revisited; and V) Scientific Realism and the Instrumentalist Alternative.Within this framework, the volume addresses such relevant issues as the methodological validity of medical evidence or decision making in situations of uncertainty; recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and the future of the Internet; current forms of empirically based methodological pluralism and new ways of understanding mathematics with scientific practice; and the revision of the approaches to scientific progress based on the experiences accumulated in recent decades.

This book provides an account of what is to know what things are, focusing on kinds, both natural (such as water) and social (such as marriage). It brings tools from an area that has received much attention in recent years, the epistemology of inquiry. The knowledge of what things are is to be understood as resulting from successful inquiries directed at questions of the form 'What is x?', where x stands for a given kind of thing. The book also addresses knowledge-wh in general (which includes knowledge-who and knowledge-where), as well as the phenomenon of ignorance regarding what things are and our obligations in respect to knowing what things are. It also brings to light new avenues of research for those interested in the relation between the knowledge of what things are and concept possession and amelioration.'Knowing What Things Are' should be of interest to researchers in Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Social Philosophy and Linguistics.

This monograph is a defence of the Fregean take on logic. The author argues that Frege¿s projects, in logic and philosophy of language, are essentially connected and that the formalist shift produced by the work of Peano, Boole and Schroeder and continued by Hilbert and Tarski is completely alien to Frege's approach in the Begriffsschrift. A central thesis of the book is that judgeable contents, i.e. propositions, are the primary bearers of logical properties, which makes logic embedded in our conceptual system. This approach allows coherent and correct definitions of logical constants, logical consequence, and truth and connects their use to the practices of rational agents in science and everyday life.

This book offers a comprehensive interpretation of Sextus Empiricus based on his own view of what he calls the distinctive character of skepticism. It focuses on basic topics highlighted by this ancient philosopher concerning Pyrrhonism, a kind of skepticism named for Pyrrho: its concept, its principles, its reason, its criteria, its goals. In the first part, the author traces distinct phases in the life and philosophical development of a talented person, from the pre-philosophical phase where philosophy was perceived as the solution to life's disturbing anomalies, through his initial philosophical investigation in order to find truth where the basic experience is that of a huge disagreement between philosophers, to the final phase where he finally recognises that his experience is similar to that of the skeptical school and adheres to skepticism. The second part is devoted to explain the nature of his skepticism. It presents an original interpretation, for it claims that the central role in Sextus¿ Neo-Pyrrhonism is played by a skeptical logos, a rationale or way of reasoning. This is what unifies and articulates the skeptical orientation. The skeptic goes on investigating truth, but in a new condition, for he is now tranquil, and he has a skeptical method of his own. He has also acquired a special ability in order to balance both sides of an opposition, which involves a number of different skills. Finally, the author examines the skeptical life generated by this philosophical experience where he lives a life without opinions and dogmas; it is an engaged life, deeply concerned with our everyday actions and values. Readers will gain a deeper insight into the philosophy of Pyrrhonism as presented by Sextus Empiricus, as well as understand the meaning of anomalía, zétesis, epokhé, ataraxía, and other important ideas of this philosophy.

This book focuses on the problem of responsibility voids: these are cases where responsibility for a morally undesirable outcome cannot be attributed to any of the involved agents. Responsibility voids are thought to occur in collective decision-making and in the context of artificial intelligent systems. In these cases, philosophers worry that there is a shortfall of moral responsibility. In particular, such voids are often assumed to justify a notion of collective responsibility that cannot be reduced to individual responsibility. One of the aims of the book is to study how collective responsibility and joint action relate to individual responsibility and individual actions. The book offers a unifying framework for modelling moral responsibility by drawing from modal logic and game theory.The book investigates the possibility and scope of the problem of responsibility voids. One of its characteristics is its pluralistic perspective on moral responsibility: in contrast to giving a unique and all-encompassing definition of it, the book makes progress by spelling out and modelling several conceptions of moral responsibility. One of the appealing features of the book is that a relatively small range of models is used to investigate a variety of conceptions of moral responsibility. The unifying framework can thus be used to characterize the conditions under which responsibility voids are ruled out.

This book offers an alternative to current philosophy of mathematics: heuristic philosophy of mathematics. In accordance with the heuristic approach, the philosophy of mathematics must concern itself with the making of mathematics and in particular with mathematical discovery. In the past century, mainstream philosophy of mathematics has claimed that the philosophy of mathematics cannot concern itself with the making of mathematics but only with finished mathematics, namely mathematics as presented in published works. On this basis, mainstream philosophy of mathematics has maintained that mathematics is theorem proving by the axiomatic method. This view has turned out to be untenable because of Gödel¿s incompleteness theorems, which have shown that the view that mathematics is theorem proving by the axiomatic method does not account for a large number of basic features of mathematics. By using the heuristic approach, this book argues that mathematics is not theorem provingby the axiomatic method, but is rather problem solving by the analytic method. The author argues that this view can account for the main items of the mathematical process, those being: mathematical objects, demonstrations, definitions, diagrams, notations, explanations, applicability, beauty, and the role of mathematical knowledge.

This monograph reevaluates a school of thought concerned with truth and inquiry. It examines the critique which asserts that it's not possible to live this Early Greek philosophy in practice. The investigation also details new discoveries on the reception of Skepticism by Empiricist Doctors, Early Greek Fathers, Medieval Arabic Thinkers, and Renaissance Thinkers.The author takes a careful look at the apraxia argument and how critics used it. He shows how anti-skeptical arguments rose in different stages of the development of the Skepticism. Coverage also details how the skeptics replied and gave more pragmatic coherence to their philosophy, starting with the proto-skeptics and continuing with the works of Sextus Empiricus. Readers will learn how skepticism endured despite the criticisms, becoming a coherent response to dogmatic philosophies such as Stoicism.The investigation also analyzes the two common approaches that philosophers have used to interpret Sextan philosophy. It considers their benefits as well as defects. In the process, the author presents an original way of interpreting Sextan thought, which the author calls the ¿suburban interpretation¿. He then applies this "middle way" to two works: Against the Grammarians and Against the Rhetoricians. Overall, the book provides readers with an insightful look at how this school of thought survived and spread throughout the ages.

This book provides an original perspective on the debate about anti-representationalism and the nature of philosophy. This debate has come to prominence in recent years through the work of people like Richard Rorty, Paul Horwich, Huw Price and Amie Thomasson. It is the first book to explicitly consider this well-known pragmatist kind of anti-representationalism in relation to anti-representationalist views in other areas of philosophy, in particular the philosophy of perception and cognitive science. Taking as its point of departure the neo-pragmatism of Rorty and Price, it critiques the way these (and other) thinkers develop, on this basis, a positive view of philosophy and its remit. By examining the debate about representationalism versus anti-representationalism in perception and cognitive science it provides a different way of understanding the significance of neo-pragmatism, as well as providing an independently interesting perspective on these other debates. A central idea in this perspective involves distinguishing between a world-for-us and a world-in-itself, though in a different way from Kant and many other philosophers. The book extends these reflections to examine questions about realism and the limits of metaphysics for anti-representationalist pragmatism, arguing the view can uphold a common sense kind of realism, as well as the value of distinctively philosophical enquiry in metaphysics.

This book deals with the evolution of mathematical thought during the 20th century. Representing a unique point of view combining mathematics, philosophy and history on this issue, it presents an original analysis of key authors, for example Bourbaki, Grothendieck and Husserl. As a product of 19th and early 20th century science, a canon of knowledge or a scientific ideology, mathematical structuralism had to give way. The succession is difficult, still in progress, and uncertain. To understand contemporary mathematics, its progressive liberation from the slogans of "modern mathematics" and the paths that remain open today, it is first necessary to deconstruct the history of this long dominant current. Another conception of mathematical thought emerged in the work of mathematicians such as Hilbert or Weyl, which went beyond the narrow epistemological paths of science in the making. In this tradition, mathematical thought was accompanied by a philosophical requirement. Modernity teaches us to revive it.The book is intended for a varied public: mathematicians concerned with understanding their discipline, philosophers of science, and the erudite public curious about the progress of mathematics.