Earl Connee and Theodore Sider
Riddles of Existence; A guided tour of Metaphysics....
Phenomenal book, written in a way that (most) people can understand. Can be a bit heavy at times, but if you're looking for easy reading in Philosophy you're looking in the wrong genre. LOL
I always thought it was somewhat comical in University when an English teacher, or Psychology teacher, etc., would assign 60-75 pages of text to read before the next class that would usually take about 90 mins to really read and digest what you're reading.
In my Phil classes we'd get 15-25 pages to read and it'd take you all damn night to figure out what the fuck they're talking about. Never in any subject, have I ever seen a sentence last for an entire page, except for Philosophy.
Here's the table of contents for the Connee/Sider book;
Chapter 1, Personal Identity (Sider) Think back ten or twenty years
into your past. You now have little in common with that earlier you. You look
different. You think differently. And the matter now making you up is almost
completely different. So why is that person you? What makes persons stay the
same over time, despite such drastic changes?
Chapter 2, Fatalism (Conee) Fatalism claims that everything is fated to
be exactly as it is. Why believe that? Over the centuries, there have been
intriguing arguments proposed in favor of it. We investigate how well these
arguments work.
Chapter 3, Time (Sider) Time can seem like the most mundane thing
in the world, until you really start to think about it. Does time flow? If so,
what could that mean? How fast does it flow, and can one travel back in time,
against the current?
Chapter 4, God (Conee) Does God exist? Yes, some say; and they claim
to prove it. We examine the proposed proofs.
Chapter 5, Why Not Nothing? (Conee) Why is there anything at all
rather than nothing? Can we even understand this question? If so, what sort
of answer might it have?
Chapter 6, Free Will (Sider) We all believe that we are free to act as
we choose. But the business of science is to discover the underlying causes of
things. Given sciences excellent track record, its a reasonable guess that it will
one day discover the causes of human actions. But if our actions are caused by
things science can predict and control, how can we have free will?
Chapter 7, Constitution (Sider) If you hold a clay statue in your hand,
you are actually holding two physical objects, a statue and a piece of clay. For
if you squash the statue, the statue is destroyed but the piece of clay keeps on
existing. This argument seems to establish a very strange conclusion: two
different objects can share exactly the same location. Can that be correct? If
not, where did the argument go wrong?
Chapter 8, Universals (Conee) Any two red apples have many things in
common: most obviously, each is red and each is an apple. These things that
they share, redness and applehood, are universals. Universals are very strange
entities. Redness, for instance, seems to be in thousands of places at once;
wherever any red object is located, redness itself is there. Do these universals
really exist?
Chapter 9, Necessity and Possibility (Sider) Not all truths are created
equal. It is true that Michael Jordan is a great basketball player, and it is true
that all bachelors are unmarried. Although each of these is a truth, there is a
big difference between them. The First truth might have been false: Jordan
might have decided never to play basketball. But the second truth could not
have been false: bachelors are necessarily unmarried. What makes these truths
so different?
Chapter 10, What is Metaphysics? (Conee) After reading nine chapters about nine different metaphysical issues, you might expect to have a clear
idea of what exactly metaphysics is. But it is remarkably difcult to identify a
unifying feature common to every metaphysical topic. We examine some ideas
about the nature of metaphysics itself.
