The notions of necessity and possibility, as well as the notion of a possible world, are ubiquitous in philosophy. Nevertheless, these notions remain controversial. It also remains controversial whether metaphysics requires notions drawing distinctions which are finer than those which can be drawn in terms of necessity and possibility, such as the recently much-discussed notion...(展开全部)

Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. And pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what is the best of all possible worlds? How do we define it? This question has preoccupied philosophers and theologians for ages, but there was a time, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when scientists and mathematicians felt they could provide the a...(展开全部)

Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. And pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what "is" the best of all possible worlds? How do we define it? Is it the world that operates the most efficiently? Or the one in which most people are comfortable and content? Questions such as these have preoccupied philosophers and theologians for ages, but there...(展开全部)

Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. And pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what "is" the best of all possible worlds? How do we define it? Is it the world that operates the most efficiently? Or the one in which most people are comfortable and content? Questions such as these have preoccupied philosophers and theologians for ages, but there...(展开全部)

Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. And pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what is the best of all possible worlds? How do we define it? This question has preoccupied philosophers and theologians for ages, but there was a time, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when scientists and mathematicians felt they could provide the a...(展开全部)

彼得·F·德鲁克： 社会思想家，集作家、顾问、教授于一身。1909年11月19日生于奥地利维也纳，1937年移居美国，一生著有41部巨作。1939年出版《经济人的末日》，受到丘吉尔高度赞赏。1954年的《管理的实践》则奠定其大师级的不朽地位。之后的一系列著作构建了现代管理学的根基，因而他被尊称为“管理学教父”。但其本人则坚持以“社会生态学家”自居，通过管理的哲学思想贯彻落实“自由而有功能的社会”愿景。 2002年获美国总统布什颁发的“总统自由勋章”，这是美国公民所能获得的最高荣誉。2005年11月11曰辞世，享年95岁。

Individual objects have potentials: paper has the potential to burn; an acorn has the potential to turn into a tree. Barbara Vetter investigates the metaphysics of such potentials, and develops a dispositionalist view of metaphysical modality which takes account of contemporary developments in metaphysics, logic, and semantics.

The Logic of Metaphor uses techniques from possible worlds semantics to provide formal truth-conditions for many grammatical classes of metaphors. It gives logically precise and practically useful syntactic and semantic rules for generating and interpreting metaphors. These rules are implemented in a working computer program. This book treats the lexicon as a conceptual network...(展开全部)