Philosophical Analysis

This volume announces a new era in the philosophy of God. Many of its contributions work to create stronger links between the philosophy of God, on the one hand, and mathematics or metamathematics, on the other hand. It is about not only the possibilities of applying mathematics or metamathematics to questions about God, but also the reverse question: Does the philosophy of God have anything to offer mathematics or metamathematics? The remaining contributions tackle stereotypes in the philosophy of religion.

The volume includes 35 contributions. It is divided into nine parts: 1. Who Created the Concept of God; 2. Omniscience, Omnipotence, Timelessness and Spacelessness of God; 3. God and Perfect Goodness, Perfect Beauty, Perfect Freedom; 4. God, Fundamentality and Creation of All Else; 5. Simplicity and Ineffability of God; 6. God, Necessity and Abstract Objects; 7. God, Infinity, and Pascal’s Wager; 8. God and (Meta-)Mathematics; and 9. God and Mind.

For fifty years the philosophy of language has been experiencing a stalemating conflict between the old descriptive and internalist orthodoxy (advocated by philosophers such as Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Strawson, and Searle) and the new causal-referential and externalist orthodoxy (mainly endorsed by Kripke, Putnam, and Kaplan). Although the latter is dominant among specialists, the former retains a discomforting intuitive plausibility. The ultimate goal of this book is to overcome the stalemate by means of a non-naïve return to the old descriptivist-internalist orthodoxy. Concerning proper names, this means introducing second-order description-rules capable of systemizing descriptions of the proper name’s cluster to provide us with the right changeable conditions of satisfaction for its application. Such rules can explain how a proper name can become a rigid designator while remaining descriptive, disarming Kripke's and Donnellan’s main objections. In the last chapter, this new perspective is extended to indexicals in a discussion of David Kaplan’s and John Perry’s views, and of general terms, in a discussion of Hilary Putnam’s externalism.

Meanings are located neither "inside" or "outside" the mind. Consciousness, the outside world, and language form a unity. In his investigation into externalist and internalist positions (e.g., Locke, Putnam, Kripke), Munz uses selected thought experiments to show that phenomenal and physicalist approaches by no means exclude each other; rather, when determining the meaning of linguistic signs, they can by all means complement each other.

This book develops and applies a novel kind of explanation: Empty-Base Explanation. While ordinary explanations have a tripartite structure involving an explanandum, a base of reasons why the explanandum obtains, and a link that connects the reasons to the explanandum, this book argues that there are explanations whose corresponding set of reasons is empty. This novel idea is located in the theoretical background of several fundamental philosophical issues. For example, it provides a convincing kind of ultimate or final explanation that completely and conclusively explains a phenomenon without involving other phenomena for which further explanations could be demanded.

The possibility and fruitfulness of empty-base explanation is defended by general considerations from the theory of explanation, as well as concrete applications to

• the practice of explanation by status,
• the explanation of logical theorems, causal connections, and laws of nature,
• self-explanation,
• the use of IBE in metaphysics,
• the notion of zero-ground (which it provides with a solid theoretical footing), and
• ultimate explanation and its application to philosophical cosmology, the debate about the PSR, and the question of why there is anything at all.

For this book, Yannic Kappes has received the 2022 De Gruyter Prize for Ontology and Metaphysics from the German Society for Analytic Philosophy (GAP).

In this book, the author develops a new approach of metaphors by systematically distinguishing the level of linguistic properties from the level of psychological processes associated with metaphorical interpretations. Besides avoiding problems of other available theories of metaphor his account also enables to gain valuable insights about other tropes such as irony or metonymy as well as about the relation between semantics and pragmatics.

Weingartner shows that an essential part of natural or philosophical theology and even a part of theology can be treated axiomatically. God’s essence, omniscience, omnipotence, creating activity, and all-goodness are described by axioms and by theorems proved from them.

Almost everyone can run. Only very few can run a marathon. But what is it for agents to be able to do things? This question, while central to many debates in philosophy, is still awaiting a comprehensive answer. The book provides just that. Drawing on some valuable insights from previous works of abilities and making use of possible world semantics, Jaster develops the "success view", a view on which abilities are a matter of successful behavior. Along the way, she explores the gradable nature of abilities, the contextsensitivity of ability statements, the difference between general and specific abilities, the relationship between abilities and dispositions, and the ability to act otherwise. The book is mandatory reading for anyone working on abilities, and provides valuable insights for anyone dealing with agents' abilities in other fields of philosophy.

For this book, Romy Jaster has received both the Wolfgang Stegmüller Prize and the De Gruyter Prize for Analytical Philosophy of Mind or Metaphysics/Ontology.

This book is a collection of articles authored by renowed Polish ontologists living and working in the early part of the 21st century. Harking back to the well-known Polish Lvov-Warsaw School, founded by Kazimierz Twardowski, we try to make our ontological considerations as systematically rigorous and clear as possible – i.e. to the greatest extent feasible, but also no more than the subject under consideration itself allows for. Hence, the papers presented here do not seek to steer clear of methods of inquiry typical of either the formal or the natural sciences: on the contrary, they use such methods wherever possible. At the same time, despite their adherence to rigorous methods, the Polish ontologists included here do not avoid traditional ontological issues, being inspired as they most certainly are by the great masters of Western philosophy – from Plato and Aristotle, through St. Thomas and Leibniz, to Husserl, to name arguably just the most important.

The old philosophical discipline of metaphysics – after having been pronounced dead by many – has enjoyed a significant revival within the last thirty years, due to the application of the methods of analytic philosophy. One of the major contributors to this revival is the outstanding American metaphysician Peter van Inwagen. This volume brings together twenty-two scholars, who, in commemoration of Prof. van Inwagen's 75th birthday, ponder the future prospects of metaphysics in all the richness to which it has now returned. It is only natural that logical and epistemological reflections on the significance of metaphysics – sometimes called “meta-metaphysics” – play a considerable role in most of these papers. The volume is further enriched by an interview with Peter van Inwagen himself.

In this study, Sebastian Krebs elaborates a metaphysical deflationism in response to the question of the ontological status of possibility and necessity. In doing so, he not only offers the first German-language introduction to Kripke’s metaphysics; he also clarifies the much misunderstood yet crucial concept of possible worlds in formal modal logic.

The book provides philosophical interpretations of pragmatic issues. It concentrates on well-established concepts such as presupposition, entailment, implicature, speech acts, subsentential speech acts, different cases of meaning as use, expressive meanings and expressive commitments, as well as the relation between knowledge and belief. The discussion goes beyond linguistic investigations and offers a wide philosophical perspective.

Many systems of logic diagrams have been offered both historically and more recently. Each of them has clear limitations. An original alternative system is offered here. It is simpler, more natural, and more expressively and inferentially powerful. It can be used to analyze not only syllogisms but arguments involving relational terms and unanalyzed statement terms.