Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Metaphysics

According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical...

Working from a realist Thomistic epistemology, Ashley asserts that we must begin our search for wisdom in the natural sciences; only then, he believes, can we ensure that our claims about immaterial and invisible things are rooted in reliable experience of the material. Any attempt to share wisdom, he insists, must derive from a context that is both interdisciplinary and intercultural.

Ashley offers an ambitious analysis and synthesis of major historical contributions to the unification of knowledge, including non-Western traditions. Beginning with the question "Metaphysics:...

The Gloria Patri has been prayed from the beginnings of Christianity. In this one-sentence prayer, time and eternity are combined in a compressed expression of doxology, praise of God. In this brief but comprehensive book, Father Ayo examines the riches in this prayer: the philological, historical, and theological origins of Christian prayer itself, and the profound spiritual implications of the Gloria Patri.

At the heart of Christian prayer and at the heart of Christian liturgy we always find worship, honor, and praise of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. In "Gloria Patri," Father Ayo...

In this challenging study in metaphilosophy, Douglas Browning makes a case for viewing ontology as a legitimate and viable philosophical pursuit. Beginning with a sustained analysis of the process of attempting to construct a system that is true of the whole of reality, he proceeds to focus upon the issues of the need for and availability of controls upon speculative construction. He concludes by arguing for the importance of one such speculative control, namely, an appeal to the structural traits of the practical stratum of our lives. In the course of his discussion Browning also develops...

Ernst Cassirer believed that all the forms of representation that human beings use--language, myth, art, religion, history, science--are symbolic, and the concept of symbolic forms was the basis of his...

In the editors' introduction to...

"We have no more beginnings," George Steiner begins in this, his most radical book to date. A far-reaching exploration of the idea of creation in Western thought, literature, religion, and history, this volume can fairly be called a magnum opus. He reflects on the different ways we have of talking about beginnings, on the "core-tiredness" that pervades our end-of-the-millennium spirit, and on the changing grammar of our discussions about the end of Western art and culture. With his well-known elegance of style and intellectual range, Steiner probes deeply into the driving forces of the...

Ortega's entry into the writing world came by way of newspaper essays that are still read by generations seeking revelations and interpretations of the world. He wrote on varied subjects: love, bullfighting, hunting, education, and Don Quixote. His incessant search for knowledge led him into political theory and practice and metaphysics as well.

This present book represents Ortega's incursions into a field of thought along which anyone curious enough to travel will find leads him into a succession of ideas that extend his vision and his understanding of himself. If generations of men...