New Essays in Metaphysics

Edited by Robert Cummings Neville

Subjects: Metaphysics
Series: SUNY series in Systematic Philosophy
Paperback : 9780887064715, 321 pages, November 1986
Hardcover : 9780887063572, 321 pages, November 1986

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Table of contents

Editor's Introduction

Logos, Mythos, Chaos: Metaphysics as the Quest for Diversity
David L. Hall

The Primacy of the Mesocosm
George Allan

Copernican Metaphysics
Nicholas Capaldi

Perceived Worlds Are Interpreted Worlds
Patrick A. Heelan

Toward Experiential Metaphysics: Radical Temporalism
Charles M. Sherover

Possibilities and Constraints
Jay Schulkin

Moral Order and the Constraints of Agency: Toward a New Metaphysics of Morals
George R. Lucas

The Civilizing of Enterprise
William M. Sullivan

The First Metaphysics: Revisioning Plato
Antonio T. de Nicolas

Creativity in a Future Key
Lewis S. Ford

God the Savior
Elizabeth M. Kraus

Metaphor, Analogy, and the Nature of Truth
Carl G. Vaught

Relations, Indeterminacy, and Intelligibility
Brian John Martine

Sketch of a System
Robert C. Neville

The Spiral of Reflection
David Weissman

Description

This volume displays fifteen of the many lively options in the field of metaphysics. The authors, having finished their formal education in the 1960s or later, belong to the generation of philosophers whose rebellion was against those who thought they saw metaphysics in the grand sense to be passe or impossible. The authors also share a commitment to the importance of metaphysics for the social and cultural life of our time. Despite the diversity of argued opinions on the fundamental array of metaphysical topics, these essays display the zest of a reborn enterprise, at once appropriating a rich and honorable past and moving into new areas only recently thought illegitimate for philosophy.

Robert C. Neville is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Reviews

". ..a straightforward and unpretentious sampler of what metaphysical positions one might hold now that the anti-metaphysical stances of a generation ago have been surpassed. "--Donald Phillip Verene, Emory University

"Metaphysics has been unduly neglected in our 'age of analysis. ' The appearance of this new generation of philosophers in a single volume ought to convince all readers that speculative metaphysics is alive and well in America. " --Andrew J. Reck, Tulane University

" 'Metaphysics' is the name of a very important branch, really the central branch, of philosophy--important in itself and important for science and theology, in different ways. This book is useful as a sampling of recent philosophizing of a daring sort. It forces one to face the lack of consensus that seems inevitable, given freedom of discussion in primary philosophy. "--Charles Hartshorne, University of Texas at Austin