Metaphysical Perspectives

Description

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: On the Mission of Philosophy -- One Ultimate Questions -- Two World Views -- Three Terminological Contextuality -- Four On Contingency and Necessity -- Five Randomness and Reason -- Six Issues of Self-Reference and Paradox -- Seven Explanation and the Principle of Sufficient Reason -- Eight Intelligent Design Revisited in the Light of Evolutionary Neoplatonism -- Nine What If Things Were Different? -- Ten On the Improvability of the World -- Eleven Consciousness -- Twelve Control -- Thirteen Free Will in the Light of Process Theory -- Fourteen Personhood -- Fifteen The Metaphysics of Moral Obligation -- Sixteen Empathy, Shared Experience, and Other Minds -- Seventeen Philosophy as an Inexact Science -- Eighteen Philosophy's Involvement with Transcendental Issues -- Nineteen Religious Variation and the Rationale of Belief -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index of Names.;Nicholas Rescher offers a grand vision of how to conceptualize, and in some cases answer, some of the most fundamental issues in metaphysics and value theory.