Philosophy / Metaphysics

This book examines the philosophical principles invoked by apologists of the Spanish empire that laid the foundations for the exploitation of the Andean region between 1520 and 1640. Orlando Bentancor ties the colonizers’ attempts to justify the abuses wrought on the environment and the indigenous population to their larger ideology concerning mining, science, and the empire’s rightful place in the global sphere. To Bentancor, their presuppositions were a major turning point for colonial expansion and paved the way to global mercantilism.

The first anthology to offer a contemporary overview of the problem of laws—an area of study that has become increasingly central to the philosophy of science. The book covers a broad range of views, and consists exclusively of articles that have proven to be influential.

This volume offers an unusual variety of topics presented during the fifth annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy. Essays topics include: a dispute of the standard deductivist account of scientific testability; two definitions of “nonsense” that are closely related and correlate to science’s concern with truth and philosophy’s concern with concepts; contesting the causes of voluntary actions purported in Hart and Honore’s Causation and the Law; distinguishing two kinds of metaphysical tasks-taxonomic and evaluative; and discussions of “what a thing is” in terms of its qualities and particulars and the distinction between numerical and conceptual differences, universals and individuation.