How Things Might Have Been: Individuals, Kinds, and Essential Properties - Image 1

£44.05

Oxford University Press How Things Might Have Been: Individuals, Kinds, and Essential Properties

Name: How Things Might Have Been: Individuals, Kinds, and Essential Properties
Brand: Oxford University Press
Price: 39.43 GBP
Availability: InStock

Metaphysics

Price History & Forecast

Last 53 days • 53 data points (No recent data available)

Historical

Generating forecast...

Price Distribution

Price distribution over 53 days • 6 price levels

Days at Price

Current Price

Price Analysis

Most common price: £44 (16 days, 30.2%)

Price range: £39 - £45

Price levels: 6 different prices over 53 days

Description

How are we to distinguish between the essential and accidental properties of things such as individual people, cats, trees, and tables? Almost everyone agrees that such individuals could have been different, in certain respects, from the way that they actually are. But what are the respects in which they could not have been different: which of their properties are essential to their being the individuals that they are? And why? Following the revival of interest among analytic philosophers in essentialism and de re modality generated by the work of Kripke and others in the 1970s, these questions have been the subject of intense, yet still unresolved, debate. In this book, Penelope Mackie challenges most of the answers that have been given to these questions. Via a critical examination of rival theories, she arrives at what she calls "minimalist essentialism" an unorthodox theory according to which ordinary individuals have relatively few interesting essential properties, and intuitions that appear to support stronger versions of essentialism are interpreted as consistent with the theory. The topics discussed include the rivalry between the interpretation of de re modality in terms of "identity across possible worlds" and its interpretation in terms of David Lewis's counterpart theory, some notorious modal puzzles generated by the theory that individuals exist with different properties in different possible worlds, the notion of an individual essence, Kripke's "necessity of origin" thesis, and the widely held view that there are sortal properties that are essential properties of the things to which they belong. The book also includes a discussion of the relation between essentialism about individuals and essentialism about natural kinds, and a critical examination of the connection between semantics and natural kind essentialism.

Product Specifications

Brand: Oxford University Press
Format: paperback
ASIN: 0199562407
Category: Books > Subjects > Politics, Philosophy & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Metaphysics
Domain: Amazon UK
Publication Date: 15 April 2009
Listed Since: 16 July 2008

Barcode

No barcode data available

Oxford University Press How Things Might Have Been: Individuals, Kinds, and Essential Properties

Price History & Forecast

Price Distribution

Price Analysis

Description

Product Specifications

Barcode

Similar Products You Might Like

Necessary Beings: An Essay on Ontology, Modality, and the Relations Between Them

Routledge A Minimalist Ontology of the Natural World Book

PLANTINGA:NATURE OF NECESSITY CLLP PAPER (Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy)

Identity and Modality (Mind Association Occasional Series)

How Change and Identity Coexist in Personal Individuality: A Phenomenological Account of Self-Shaping: 116 (Contributions to Phenomenology, 116)

Reading Metaphysics: Selected Texts with Interactive Commentary (Reading Philosophy)

Real Essentialism: 11 (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy)

Modality and Explanatory Reasoning

Springer - Existence as a Real Property: The Ontology of Meinongianism

Modality (Central Problems of Philosophy)

Thinking of Necessity: A Kantian Account of Modal Thought and Modal Metaphysics

Biological Essentialism

Existence as a Real Property: The Ontology of Meinongianism: 356 (Synthese Library, 356)

EMBODIMENT: A History (OXFORD PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS)

FOUNDATIONS OF MODALITY:FROM PROPOSITIONS TO POSSIBLE WORLDS

Handbook of Potentiality

The Sources of Necessity: Essence, Laws, and Logic

Entity and Identity: And Other Essays

The Philosophy of Free Will: Essential Readings From The Contemporary Debates

The Inhuman Condition: Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger: 175 (Phaenomenologica, 175)

Abstract Objects: For and Against: 422 (Synthese Library, 422)

Eppur si muove: Doing History and Philosophy of Science with Peter Machamer: A Collection of Essays in Honor of Peter Machamer: 81 (The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, 81)

Ordinary Objects

And Was Made Man: Mind, Metaphysics, and Incarnation