Reddit Reddit reviews Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

We found 8 Reddit comments about Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Books
Philosophy
Philosophy Metaphysics
Politics & Social Sciences
Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Oxford University Press, USA
Check price on Amazon

8 Reddit comments about Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions):

u/Egikun · 5 pointsr/visualnovels

I haven't read Subahibi, so I'm just going to take your question as "how do I get into philosophy."

Philosophy is one of the most diverse fields that we currently have. Philosophy is more than just pondering the meaning of life, it also is about uncovering the mindsets on discoveries and how people came about the knowledge we have today. You should start more simple over diving into people's work like Nietzsche so you can get the full picture on why they say what they say.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge, metaphysics is the study of existence (not to be confused with existentialism, which is even more meta and theoretical), Aesthetics is the study of art, Ethics is the study of morality, and there are philosophies of politics, mind, body, religion, and all sorts.

I would shy away from direct writings from philosophers, as contemporary books are the literal collection of all of their knowledge presented in an easier to digest way.

u/jn48 · 3 pointsr/Metaphysics


This book is an excellent introduction to contemporary metaphysics. It gives you enough coverage of the history (i.e. the Greeks) and where metaphysics stands in contemporary literature. Highly recommend.

http://www.amazon.com/Metaphysics-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0199657122/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1452885902&sr=1-8&keywords=introduction+to+metaphysics

u/classicalecon · 3 pointsr/CapitalismVSocialism

There are a lot of really, really ignorant posts ITT. This is why you should actually read the various Austrian economists instead of listening to "internet Austrians."

For one thing, the Austrian approach doesn't reject empirical evidence. Look at all the actual Austrian economists and then see what their opinions were. Hayek is best interpreted as a member of the classical British empiricist school of thought, in the vein of Adam Smith, Hume, etc. Even for Mises, who followed Kant, the entire point of theoretical economics was to use it to interpret empirical reality.

For another thing, empirical knowledge simply isn't the only type of knowledge. This isn't even controversial in philosophy. Mises was the most explicit in attempting to ground the fundamental propositions of economics-- the so called "pure logic of choice"-- in neo-Kantian synthetic a priori statements. Kant is one of the most highly respected philosophers in history, so it would be absurd to condemn Mises simply because he took a Kantian approach to the fundamentals of economics.

And for what it's worth, a lot of Mises' views are defensible anyway. He starts with the action axiom, i.e. we engage in purposive behavior. You can agree with this proposition or disagree with it. If you agree with it, that's fine, Mises has his starting point. If you disagree with it, that disagreement itself would have to be categorized as an instance of purposive behavior-- i.e. you're disagreeing with the axiom to prove some purpose, for instance-- and so you've refuted yourself. So the notion that people engage in purposive behavior cannot be coherently denied (not that sincere seekers of truth would deny it in any event).

Mises argues several important implications follow from the action axiom, especially w.r.t. basic propositions of economics, e.g. choice, opportunity cost, uncertainty, and psychological profit / loss. But we can ignore that and focus on another purely philosophical implication to see his methodology. Hopefully this will draw light to the validity of Mises' general method without unduly focusing on purely economic propositions.

Take causality, for instance. Some philosophers-- to be sure, a minority-- would argue causality is an illusion and is merely a function of how we interpret the world. Given the action axiom, though, this cannot possibly be true: as was argued, it's incoherent to deny the fact that people act. But the ability of people to act in some sense presupposes they have some ability to interfere with, or change, the real world. Yet this logically implies they have some causal connection to it, so the a priori of action implies causality. That's a very philosophically significant argument if it works.

Lest anyone thinks this is a mere verbal trick-- or even worse, that Mises was ignorant w.r.t. philosophy-- it's worth pointing out some very respected philosophers today make similar arguments. Take Stephen Mumford, for instance. He's highly regarded as a philosopher of metaphysics and ontology, i.e. the study of being as such, to such a degree that Oxford commissioned him to write their introduction to metaphysics.

Yet, as respected as he is, Mumford gives an a priori argument for causation here that is very similar to the argument implicit in Mises' conception of human action. I think this serves to show Mises was no hack, and he was deeply on to something when he conceived of the a priori of human action as an important starting point.

I deliberately choose causation because I feel it's not as controversial on this subreddit as some of the propositions of mainstream economics. Yet it's clearly a solid philosophical argument of the same type Mises uses to justify certain economic propositions, and so it's absurd to say Mises is wrong without actually engaging his arguments. To say Mises' methodology is different from other people and is therefore wrongly simply begs the question, which is a straight up logical fallacy. If you'd like to read more and attempt to understand the Misesean view, see this paper.

u/QuasiIdiot · 3 pointsr/Destiny

There's lots of them, so I think one should start in the area they're most interested in and then branch from there.

Here' a general survey of the areas of philosophy.

The areas usually have their own articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy with extensive bibliographies (e.g. Modal Logic). Same goes for particular problems from these areas, like Truth, and some of the philosophers themselves (e.g. Bertrand Russell). There's also the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

For less technical and more structured introductions, there are plenty of textbooks, like Logic, This is Philosophy of Mind or The Fundamentals of Ethics. Books from the Very Short Introductions series are sometimes decent (e.g. Metaphysics), and they really are short.

The textbooks usually have further reading recommendations, some of which are compiled readers like The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness or The Ethical Life: Fundamental Readings in Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems. I think these are good starting points as well.

Most of the books are going to be available on libgen of course.

And then there's of course podcasts. Some of the good ones I like:

u/jez2718 · 2 pointsr/philosophy

I think S. Blackburn's Think is an excellent introduction to some of the major areas in philosophy. You might also what to look at some of the philosophical books in the "Very Short Introduction" series, for example the Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ethics, Philosophy of Science and Free Will ones, which as you can guess are good places to start.

A book I quite enjoyed as an introduction to the great philosophers was The Philosophy Book, which not only gave clear descriptions of each of the philosophers' views, but also often gave a clear flowchart summary of their arguments.

u/greatjasoni · 2 pointsr/JordanPeterson

The "Very Short Introduction" series is usually high quality stuff. They can all be read in a sitting and are written by different authors who specialize in whatever the topic is. Some authors will skip the details to make it easy to read, others will make it denser than usual to cram everything into a short package. The overview is enough to understand works referencing the topic, while also teaching you enough to know what else to read for a deeper dive.

Metaphysics

Epistemology

Postmodernism

u/philosophyaway · 1 pointr/philosophy

My suggestion would be to find introductory books to the three main 'branches' of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.

Here's one: http://www.amazon.com/Metaphysics-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0199657122

The others are probably searchable as well. My reasoning is that it would be difficult to find one book that 'dips' into each branch of philosophy for the same reasons it would be difficult to find one book that 'dips' into each branch of language. There are books out there, but it's hard to recommend them because they require a strong commitment to the work.

Instead, my suggestion is this: read a short book (under 200 pages?) of each branch of philosophy that interests you, and then let your mind be the 'book' that makes a 'dip' into each branch that you read about.

u/FreeHumanity · 1 pointr/askphilosophy

You'll have better luck with quality books than youtube videos for the most part. Although iTunes University has free Oxford course lectures. One is "Philosophy for Beginners" and includes a lecture on Metaphysics and Epistemology. That might be a good place to start.

Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction isn't bad, but definitely not detailed enough.

The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics is probably what you're looking for. A good library near you should have it.