Overview
- Offers a completely novel view about persistence and composition
- Explores issues of theoretical diversity and provides a way of determining when disagreement is merely semantic, and when it is substantial
- Explores metaphysical issues from a new methodological perspective by first answering questions about theoretical diversity, and then exploring traditional first-order metaphysical issues
Part of the book series: Philosophical Studies Series (PSSP, volume 106)
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About this book
Our world is full of composite objects that persist through time: dogs, persons, chairs and rocks. But in virtue of what do a bunch of little objects get to compose some bigger object, and how does that bigger object persist through time? This book aims to answer these questions, but it does so by looking at accounts of composition and persistence through a new methodological lens. It asks the question: what does it take for two theories to be genuinely different, and how can we know whether what seems like metaphysical disagreement is really just semantic disagreement?
By offering a framework within which to explore issues of theoretical diversity, this book provides a novel way of thinking about the inter-relationship between composition and persistence. Ultimately, it argues for a new way of thinking about these issues, a way that does not preserve the standard theoretical dichotomies between four-dimensionalist theories on the one hand, and three-dimensionalist theories on the other.
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Authors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Issues in Theoretical Diversity
Book Subtitle: Persistence, Composition, and Time
Authors: Kristie Lyn Miller
Series Title: Philosophical Studies Series
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-5256-1
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4020-5255-2Published: 02 January 2007
Softcover ISBN: 978-90-481-7324-2Published: 22 November 2010
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4020-5256-9Published: 01 May 2007
Series ISSN: 0921-8599
Series E-ISSN: 2542-8349
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 258
Topics: Metaphysics, Ontology, Philosophy of Science