What is, and what is in itself : a systematic ontology / Robert Merrihew Adams.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Adams, Robert Merrihew, author.

Series:

Oxford scholarship online.

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ontology.

Metaphysics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xv, 223 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Other Title:

Systematic ontology

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2021]

Summary:

This work is 'a systematic ontology'. Ontology is the study of being as such, and a systematic ontology is an account of the most fundamental ways of being something or other - of what they are and of how they are related to each other. The questions it pursues are not primarily about what causes things, but about what things are or consist in - though causal questions cannot be totally avoided. The title of the book marks the most important distinction in ways of being. What is includes everything there is, but not everything there is included in what is in itself.

Contents:

1: Actuality

1.1 What Is Actualism?

1.2 The Indexical Theory of Actuality

1.3 Critique of the Indexical Theory

1.4 Actualism and Possible Worlds

2: Existence

2.1 Existence and Essence

2.2 Continuing or Ceasing to Exist

2.3 Things There Are That Never Exist

3: Intentional Objects, Existent and Nonexistent

3.1 What Are Intentional Objects?

3.2 Extreme Realism about Nonexistent Objects

3.3 Moderate Realism about Nonexistent Objects

3.4 Anti-Realism about Nonexistent Objects

4: Things and Properties

4.1 Reification

4.2 What Does Quantification Require?

4.2.1 Entity without Identity?

4.2.2 Identity without Entity?

4.3 Subjects and Properties

4.3.1 Properties

4.3.2 Properties as Universals and as Particulars

4.3.3 Ontological Subjects

4.3.4 Substance?

5: Intrinsic Reality, Relationality, and Consciousness

5.1 Real Properties

5.2 Intrinsic Reality

5.3 Consciousness: Our Surest Example of Intrinsic Reality

5.4 Intrinsic Reality and Mental Acts

5.4.1 Understanding and Judgment

5.4.2 Intending and Trying

5.5 Intrinsic Reality and Relations

5.5.1 Part-Whole Relations

5.5.2 Relations of Cause and Effect

5.5.3 Potentialities

6: Reality and the Physical

6.1 Modernism

6.2 Physical Realism

6.3 Idealism

6.4 Panpsychism

6.4.1 Panpsychism Proposed as a Solution for Two Problems

6.4.2 Physicalism and the Combination Problem

6.4.3 Panpsychism without the Combination Problem

6.4.4 Conclusion

7: The Epistemology of Being

7.1 Problems for Empiricist Epistemology

7.2 Leibniz on Distinguishing Real from Imaginary Phenomena

7.3 An Empirical Sufficient Condition for Knowledge of Bodies.

7.4 The Modal Status of the Sufficient Condition

7.4.1 Actuality and Incompleteness

7.4.2 The Nature of the Sufficiency

7.5 Practical Reason and Ontological Belief

8: Thisness

8.1 Thisness and Suchness

8.2 Issues about the Identity of Indiscernibles

8.3 Counter-examples and Intuitions

8.4 Thisness and Intrinsic Reality

8.4.1 Thisness and Things in Themselves

8.4.2 Thisness and Things That Are Not Things in Themselves

8.5 The World and I: Thisness in Empirical Epistemology

9: Identity, Time, and Self

9.1 Identity without Distance

9.2 Experience and Time

9.3 Identity, Persons, and Metaphysics

9.4 Life after Death

9.4.1 A Toy Model

9.4.2 The Body

9.4.3 The Soul

9.5 Primitive Trans-World Identity?

10: God and the Causal Unity of the World

10.1 The Problem of Intrinsically Real Causal Relations

10.2 Occasionalism

10.2.1 How Does Occasional Causation Work?

10.2.2 Deterministic and Indeterministic Occasionalism

10.3 Panentheism

10.3.1 Is God a Subject of Our Conscious Experiences?

10.3.2 Divine Omnisubjectivity

10.3.3 Persons, Human and Divine

11: God and Possibilities

11.1 Can God Know All Possibilities without Actualizing All of Them?

11.1.1 Logical Possibilities and Necessities

11.1.2 Qualitative Possibilities and Non-Possibilities

11.1.2.1 Colors

11.1.2.2 Feelings, Acts, and Intentionality

11.1.2.3 Summing Up

11.2 Omnisubjectivity and Single-Subject Models of Possible Worlds?

11.3 How Much Do Non-Actual Worlds Matter?

11.4 Causal Possibilities, Powers, Laws, and God.

Notes:

This edition also issued in print: 2021.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-19-266879-X

0-19-194643-5

0-19-266878-1

OCLC:

1290021656