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Audiobooks by JOHN-MICHAEL KUCZYNSKI
Browse audiobooks by JOHN-MICHAEL KUCZYNSKI, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
These essays concern the different kinds of causation and their respective explanatory functions. Each of the following topics is discussed, in a clear and precise manner:
*The relationship between causation and prediction
*The relationship between causation and explanation
*The relationship between prediction and explanation
*The nature of counterfactual truth
*The relationship between counterfactual conditionals and the corresponding past-tense indicatives
*The relationship between counterfactual conditionals and the corresponding future-tense indicatives
*Program causality and its explanatory virtues
*The different kinds of causes involved in the development of mental illness.
*Singular causation
*The nature of causal laws
These topics are analyzed clearly, incisively and originally, by the world authority on the topic of causation. This book is a fascinating adventure, to be cherished and listened to over and over.
In this fictitious dialogue, it is shown that there are three kinds of freedom, each of which, though non-trivially different from the other two, is identical with the subject's being appropriately constitutive of a causally cohesive structure of some kind or other. Analogues of this point are proven to hold not just of personal freedom, but also of personal identity, and not just of personal identity, but also of objectual identity.
Determinism is the doctrine that the world's condition at any given time is a consequence of its condition at some prior time. The world is predictable only to the extent that it is deterministic, but even a strictly deterministic world cannot possibly be entirely predictable. The reasons for this are stated in this fast-paced, tightly argued monograph, as are the reasons why, contrary to what is generally assumed, it can in fact be established with reasonable certainty that the world is at least approximately deterministic. The difference between indeterminism and randomness is also discussed, and some important but oft-overlooked consequences of this distinction are identified.
It is said what aggregative properties are and also what emergent properties are, and examples are given each of kind of property. It is also explained why, even though all emergent properties are aggregative properties, not all aggregative properties are emergent properties. It is further made clear that, strictly speaking, emergence is a property of one's knowledge of a given kind of aggregate, and not of such aggregates themselves, this being why a property that is emergent at one time will, when additional information becomes available, cease to be emergent. And it is explained why, for this very reason, the right answer to the question 'why does X exist?' is never 'because X is an emergent property.'
A transcendental argument for a given proposition P is one to the effect that, unless P were true, it could not even be asked whether P were true. In this audio, it is shown by means of transcendental arguments that some events compel the occurrence of other events and also that the mind is a cohesive structure in which thoughts inhere, as opposed to a mere 'bundle' or 'cloud' of thoughts.
Someone afflicted by mental illness is neurotic if he sees his symptoms as symptoms and psychotic if does not. A neurosis is therefore an 'ego-dystonic' mental illness, meaning that the viewpoint embodied in one's symptoms is not the viewpoint of the ego of the afflicted party. And a psychosis is therefore an 'ego-syntonic' illness, meaning that the viewpoint embodied in the symptoms coincides with that of the afflicted party's ego. Whereas ego-syntonic illnesses are unqualifiedly debilitating, ego-dystonic are sometimes adaptive and, within limits, may enhance the subject's ability to deploy his abilities. In this lecture, it is explained why this is so.
