We barely talk about them and seldom know their names. Philosophy has always overlooked them; even biology considers them as mere decoration on the tree of life. And yet plants give life to the Earth: they produce the atmosphere that surrounds us, they are the origin of the oxygen that animates us. Plants embody the most direct, elementary connection that life can establish wit...(展开全部)

The world of plants and its relation to mankind as revealed by the latest scientific discoveries. "Plenty of hard facts and astounding scientific and practical lore."-- Newsweek

A Survey of Metaphysics provides a systematic overview of modern metaphysics, covering all of the most important topics likely to be encountered on a metaphysics course. The conception of metaphysics underlying the book is the fairly traditional and widely-shared one that metaphysics deals with the deepest questions that can be raised concerning the fundamental structure of re...(展开全部)

Metaphysics is sensitive to the conceptual tools we choose to articulate metaphysical problems. Those tools are a lens through which we view metaphysical problems, and the same problems will look different when we change the lens. In this book, Theodore Sider identifies how the shift from modal to "postmodal" conceptual tools in recent years has affected the metaphysics of scie...(展开全部)

The Metamorphosis of Plants, published in 1790, was Goethe's first major attempt to describe what he called in a letter to a friend "the truth about the how of the organism." Inspired by the diversity of flora he found on a journey to Italy, Goethe sought a unity of form in diverse structures. He came to see in the leaf the germ of a plant's metamorphosis--"the true Proteus who...(展开全部)

Nicholas Harberd's narrative of the changing seasons has as its focus one tiny thale-cress plant in an East Anglian churchyard. He describes both what can be seen with the naked eye and the hidden molecular mechanisms that underlie it. He also tells the story of the last ten years of discovery in his own laboratory, as the team works to understand the genetic control of the gro...(展开全部)

The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is Kant's central contribution to moral philosophy, and has inspired controversy ever since it was first published in 1785. Kant champions the insights of 'common human understanding' against what he sees as the dangerous perversions of ethical theory. Morality is revealed to be a matter of human autonomy: Kant locates the source of t...(展开全部)

Representation is puzzling. Physical events in our heads and sounds in our mouths come to be 'about' the world around us, equipping us to think and talk about anything fromÂthe most fundamental regularities in the universe to trivial matters of gossip. InThe Metaphysics of Representation, Robert Williams tells a story about how representational properties arise out of a fundame...(展开全部)

Jerrold J. Katz offers a radical reappraisal of the "linguistic turn" in twentieth-century philosophy. He shows that the naturalism that emerged to become the dominant philosophical position was never adequately proved. Katz critiques the major arguments for contemporary naturalism and develops a new conception of the naturalistic fallacy. This conception, inspired by Moore, ex...(展开全部)

The Metaphysics of Morals is Kant's major work in applied moral philosophy in which he deals with the basic principles of rights and of virtues. It comprises two parts: the "Doctrine of Right," which deals with the rights that people have or can acquire, and the "Doctrine of Virtue," which deals with the virtues they ought to acquire. Mary Gregor's translation, revised for pub...(展开全部)