Thought and World

James Ross

Description

James F. Ross is a creative and independent thinker in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of mind. In this concise metaphysical essay, he argues clearly and analytically that meaning, truth, impossibility, natural necessity, and our intelligent perception of nature fit together into a distinctly realist account of thought and world. Ross articulates a moderate realism about repeatable natural structures and our abstractive ability to discern them that poses a challenge to many of the common assumptions and claims of contemporary analytic philosophy. He develops a broadly Aristotelian metaphysics that recognizes the "hidden necessities" of things, which are disclosed through the sciences, which ground his account of real impossibility as a kind of vacuity, and which require the immateriality of the human ability to understand. Those ideas are supported by a novel account of false judgment. Ross aims to offer an analytically and historically respectable alternative to the prevailing positions of many British-American philosophers.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Métaphysique
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Logic
• Metaphysics
• Epistemology

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268091682
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

James Ross

THOUGHT AND The Hidden Necessities WORLD

              

THOUGHT The Hidden Necessities AND WORLD

JA M E S R O S S

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright ©by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ross, James F.,– Thought and world : the hidden necessities / James Ross. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. -: ----(cloth : alk. paper) -: ---(cloth : alk. paper) -: ----(pbk. : alk. paper) -: ---(pbk. : alk. paper) . Necessity (Philosophy)I. Title.. Philosophy of nature. .  — dc 

This book is printed on recycled paper.

f o r k at h l e e n

Preface

Contents

Introduction: Structural Realism

        Necessities: Earned Truth and Made Truth

        Real Impossibility

        What Might Have Been

        Truth

        Perception and Abstraction

ix















viii

Contents

        Emergent Consciousness and Irreducible Understanding

        Real Natures: Software Everywhere

        Going Wrong with the Master of Falsity

Notes

Works Cited

Index













Preface

T his book initiates and invites some new analytic thinking about meaning, truth, impossibility, natural necessity, and our intelli- gent perception of nature. The outcome is an account of thought and world that is discernibly classical in its antecedents and distinctly real- ist about the intelligible structures in nature and about our abstractive ability to discern them; it is realist as well as about common objects, so- cial constructs, and midrange science. The topics also include percep- tion and media for thought, knowledge of spatially and historically re- mote realities, the false, the naturally impossible, real kinds, and what might have been. They all knit together in their explanations. The method is to support the new considerations with articulated reasons that pivot on examples and to develop their strategic inter- connections without certain constraints that trace to the seventeenth century. I begin from observations about the hidden necessities that over- flow the words we use and the science of one’s time, explaining how they require revisions of metaphysics to accommodate them. Next I examine how to understand natural impossibility and natural necessity without resorting to “possible worlds” ontologies. Then I explore how contrary- to-fact suppositions are, unless grounded in the real natures of existing things or in formal and conventional structures, deprived of earned

ix

