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Die Frage nach der Einheit ist ein Grundproblem der Ontologie, denn die Art und Weise, wie Einheit bestimmt wird, charakterisiert und prägt jede Ontologie. Ein spezifisch ontologischer Zugang hat dabei beträchtliche Implikationen, die weit über den Bereich der theoretischen Ontologie hinaus Folgen für die Behandlung anthropologischer, ethischer und auch theologischer Fragen haben. Das Problem der Einheit, ihrer Kriterien und ihrer Erscheinungsweisen stellt sich für die Autoren dieses philosophischen Sammelbands in mehrfacher Hinsicht. Besondere Kontroversen löst vor allem die Frage nach der temporalen Einheit aus. Gibt es Einheit durch die Zeit? Wie plausibel ist die Annahme von "endurers"? Ist die Überzeugung, dass Personen durch ihre Lebenszeit hindurch dieselben bleiben, begründbar, oder ist diese Überzeugung nur ein lebensweltliches Vorurteil, das korrigiert werden muss? Welche Rolle spielen die Begriffe der Potenzialität, der Vermögen und Dispositionen in diesem Zusammenhang? Kann die (zeitliche) Einheit von Entitäten mit Hilfe dieser Begriffe ontologisch gedeutet werden?

Whole and parts (Philosophy) --- Time --- Change --- Hours (Time) --- Geodetic astronomy --- Nautical astronomy --- Horology --- Ganzheit (Philosophy) --- Mereology --- Totality (Philosophy) --- Unity (Philosophy) --- Wholeness --- Categories (Philosophy) --- Philosophy --- Ontology --- Catastrophical, The

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In Consciousness and Persons: Unity and Identity, Michael Tye takes on the thorny issue of the unity of consciousness and answers these important questions: What exactly is the unity of consciousness? Can a single person have a divided consciousness? What is a single person? Tye argues that unity is a fundamental part of human consciousness--something so basic to everyday experience that it is easy to overlook. For example, when we hear the sound of waves crashing on a beach and at the same time see a red warning flag, there is an overall unity to our experience; the sound and the red shape are presented together in our consciousness. Similarly, when we undergo a succession of thoughts as we think something through, there is an experience of succession that unifies the thoughts into a conscious whole. But, Tye shows, consciousness is not always unified. Split-brain subjects, whose corpus callosum has been severed, are usually taken to have a divided or disunified consciousness. Their behavior in certain situations implies that they have lost the unity normal human subjects take for granted; it is sometimes even supposed that a split-brain subject is really two persons. Tye begins his account by proposing an account of the unity of experience at a single time; this account is extended over the succeeding chapters to cover bodily sensations at a single time and perceptual experience, bodily sensations, conscious thoughts, and felt moods at a single time. Tye follows these chapters with a discussion of the unity of experience through time. Turning to the split-brain phenomenon, he proposes an account of the mental life of split-brain subjects and argues that certain facts about these subjects offer support for his theory of unity. Finally, addressing the topic of the nature of persons and personal identity, Tye finds the two great historical accounts--the ego theory and the bundle theory--lacking and he makes an alternative proposal. He includes an appendix on the general representational approach to consciousness and its many varieties, because of the relevance of representationalism to the theory of unity being adanced.

Consciousness --- Whole and parts (Philosophy) --- Philosophy & Religion --- Philosophy --- Ganzheit (Philosophy) --- Mereology --- Totality (Philosophy) --- Unity (Philosophy) --- Wholeness --- Categories (Philosophy) --- Apperception --- Mind and body --- Perception --- Psychology --- Spirit --- Self --- Consciousness. --- PHILOSOPHY/General --- COGNITIVE SCIENCES/General

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How perfectible is human nature as understood in Eastern and Western philosophy, psychology, and religion? Harold Coward examines some of the very different answers to this question. He poses that in Western thought, including philosophy, psychology, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, human nature is often understood as finite, flawed, and not perfectible—in religion requiring God's grace and the afterlife to reach the goal. By contrast, Eastern thought arising in India frequently sees human nature to be perfectible and presumes that we will be reborn until we realize the goal—the various yoga psychologies, philosophies, and religions of Hinduism and Buddhism being the paths by which one may perfect oneself and realize release from rebirth. Coward uses the striking differences in the assessment of how perfectible human nature is as the comparative focus for this book.

Philosophical anthropology. --- Perfection --- Perfection. --- Anthropology, Philosophical --- Man (Philosophy) --- Civilization --- Life --- Ontology --- Humanism --- Persons --- Philosophy of mind --- Holiness --- Righteousness --- Sanctification --- Flawlessness --- Perfection (Philosophy) --- Perfectionism (Philosophy) --- Virtuosity --- Wholeness --- Mysticism --- Philosophy --- Excellence --- Imperfection --- Religious aspects. --- Perfection - Religious aspects.

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"What do blue things have in common? Or electrons? Or planets? Distinct things appear to share properties; but what are properties and what is the best philosophical account of them? A Critical Introduction to Properties introduces different ontological accounts of properties, exploring how their formulation is shaped by the explanatory demands placed upon them. This accessible introduction begins with a discussion of universals, tropes, sets and resemblance classes, the major objections to them and their responses, providing readers with a firm grasp on the competing ontological accounts of what (if anything) grounds similarity and difference. It then explores issues concerning the formulation and justification of property theories such as: how many properties are there? Should we accept a sparse ontology of properties, or an abundant one? Can we make a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties? Do properties have their causal roles necessarily? What is the relationship between properties and other metaphysical phenomena such as causality, laws and modality? These questions get to the heart of why a coherent theory of properties is so important to metaphysics, and to philosophy more generally. By concluding with the question of the ontological status of properties, the reader is introduced to some Carnapian and contemporary themes about the content and methodology of metaphysics. For students looking for an accessible resource and a more comprehensive understanding of contemporary metaphysics, A Critical Introduction to Properties is a valuable starting point."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Whole and parts (Philosophy) --- Ganzheit (Philosophy) --- Mereology --- Totality (Philosophy) --- Unity (Philosophy) --- Wholeness --- Categories (Philosophy) --- Tropes (Philosophy) --- Universals (Philosophy) --- Universals (Logic) --- Knowledge, Theory of --- Logic --- Philosophy --- Scholasticism --- Abstract particulars (Philosophy) --- Particular properties (Philosophy) --- Particulars, Abstract (Philosophy) --- Properties, Particular (Philosophy) --- Ontology

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This volume is  the first systematic and thorough attempt to investigate the relation and the possible applications of mereology to contemporary science. It gathers contributions from leading scholars in the field and covers a wide range of scientific theories and practices such as physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, computer science and engineering. Throughout the volume, a variety of foundational issues are investigated both from the formal and the empirical point of view. The first section looks at the topic as it applies to physics. The section addresses questions of persistence and composition within quantum and relativistic physics and concludes by scrutinizing the possibility to capture continuity of motion as described by our best physical theories within gunky spacetimes. The second part tackles mathematics and shows how to provide a foundation for point-free geometry of space switching to fuzzy-logic. The relation  between mereological sums and set-theoretic suprema is investigated and issues about different mereological perspectives such as classical and natural Mereology are thoroughly discussed. The third section in the volume looks at natural science. Several questions from biology, medicine and chemistry are investigated. From the perspective of biology, there is an attempt to provide axioms for inferring statements about parthood between two biological entities from statements about their spatial relation. From the perspective of chemistry, it is argued that classical mereological frameworks are not adequate to capture the practices of chemistry in that they consider neither temporal nor modal parameters. The final part introduces computer science and engineering. A new formal mereological framework in which an indeterminate relation of parthood is taken as a primitive notion is constructed and then applied to a wide variety of disciplines from robotics to knowledge engineering. A formal framework for discrete mereotopology and its applications is developed and finally, the importance of mereology for the relatively new science of domain engineering is also discussed.

Whole and parts (Philosophy) --- Philosophy and science. --- Science and philosophy --- Science --- Ganzheit (Philosophy) --- Mereology --- Totality (Philosophy) --- Unity (Philosophy) --- Wholeness --- Categories (Philosophy) --- Genetic epistemology. --- Computer science. --- Logic, Symbolic and mathematical. --- Epistemology. --- Mathematical Logic and Formal Languages. --- Mathematical Logic and Foundations. --- Algebra of logic --- Logic, Universal --- Mathematical logic --- Symbolic and mathematical logic --- Symbolic logic --- Mathematics --- Algebra, Abstract --- Metamathematics --- Set theory --- Syllogism --- Informatics --- Developmental psychology --- Knowledge, Theory of --- Mathematical logic. --- Epistemology --- Theory of knowledge --- Philosophy --- Psychology