Mtphyscs: Anthol

by Daniel Z. Korman and Ernest Sosa

Book Overview

This anthology, intended to accompany A Companion to Metaphysics (Blackwell, 1995), brings together over 60 selections which represent the best and most important works in metaphysics during this century. The selections are grouped under ten major metaphysical problems and each section is preceded by an introduction by the editors.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 063120279X
• ISBN13: 9780631202790
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Length: 688 Pages
• Weight: 2.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.7" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

Excellent for a philosopher

This book contains an excellent collection of essays on metaphysics, though it is not for the casual reader of philosophy. This book seems to be aimed primarily at philosophy professors and graduate students. Anyone without a deep and abiding interest in philosophy should not purchase this book. It is not light reading, but as a general study of metaphysics it is excellent.

Not a First Text, but Great Resource

The value and use of metaphysics in a rationally empirical centered world is a question without answer. This compendium of essays by analytic philosophers, in the main, provide a vastly diverse scope of approach, as well as divergence of opinion. Jose Bernadette's Metaphysics: A Logical Approach offers a crisper view of the subject and its applications. For pedagogical purposes, any number of essays in this text easily supplement a first course by allowing students to pick their interest. This volume suffers from a lack of bibiolographic back matter, which reduces its usefulness in research.

Wonderful Anthology in Contemporary Metaphysics

Sosa and Kim have done it again. So far as I know, this is the single best anthology of contemporary metaphysics for advanced students in the field. It's coverage is broad, the readings have been carefully selected, and it touches on the most of the central areas of research in the area. Furthermore, this anthology is packed with papers that display the virtues of good analytic philosophy: patience in explaining the nature and importance of the issues, precision in exposition and description, clarity and honesty of argument, and carefulness in analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of various positions.The subjects covered here are existence (ontological commitment), identity, modality, universals and properties, persistence through time, personal identity, causation, supervenience, and global realism vs. anti-realism. The aim of the individual sections on each of these questions isn't to provide a synoptic view of the positions in these areas. That, of course, simply couldn't be done in an anthology of this sort. The aim instead is to give the reader a sense of the positions defended in this area, to provide her with the outlines of a couple possible positions on each of the issues, and to give her the background to enter into the contemporary literature on the subjects. Still, this is not an anthology that is stuffed with introductory material by the editors themselves. Most of the sections begin with only a page or two of introductory material, and those few pages are expected to both introduce the basic issues in a few paragraphs and relate the readings included to the basic issues and to one another. However, many of the sections begin with a selection that does the work of introducing the basic issues on the subject as well as presenting a particular position on it. And, as is often the case in philosophy, many of the basic issues discussed don't need much motivation since they can be stated in a few words and since they concern questions that, on their face, are quite straightforward and simple. Some of the questions discussed here are: What is it for something to exist, and when do we have good reason to think something exists? What is it to be the same thing through time? What is it for me to be the same person through time? What is it for one thing to cause one another? Is there an objective reality? This is material that you need to know if you plan to do work in pretty much any area of philosophy. It doesn't seem that you can do much work in contemporary philosophy without encountering modal issues, supervenience theses, identity claims, general ontological issues, claims about the nature of properties, etc. All of these are extremely general, and they're of importance to meta-ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, the history of philosophy, etc. So you need to know something about this material if you're going to study just about anything in contemporary philosophy, and re