The Book of the World: A Philosophical Exploration of Reality - Perfect for Academic Study, Thought Provoking Discussions & Personal Enlightenment
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Product Description
In order to describe the world perfectly, one must describe it in its own terms. In this ambitious and comprehensive book, Theodore Sider argues that for a representation to be fully successful, truth is not enough; the representation must also use the right concepts - concepts that "carve at the joints" - so that its conceptual structure matches reality's structure. There is an objectively correct way to "write the book of the world".Sider's argument begins from the assertion that metaphysics is about the fundamental structure of reality. Not about what's necessarily true; not about what properties are essential; not about conceptual analysis; and not about what there is. While inquiry into necessity, essence, concepts, or ontology might help to illuminate reality's structure, the ultimate goal is insight into this structure. Part of Sider's theory of structure is an account of how structure connects to other concepts. For example, structure can be used to illuminate laws of nature, explanation, reference, induction, physical geometry, substantivity, conventionality, objectivity, and metametaphysics. Another part is an account of how structure behaves. Since structure is a way of thinking about fundamentality, Sider's account implies distinctive answers to questions about the nature of fundamentality. These answers distinguish his theory of structure - which is a generalization and extension of David Lewis's theory of natural properties - from other recent theories of fundamentality, including Kit Fine's theory of ground and reality, the theory of truthmaking, and Jonathan Schaffer's theory of ontological dependence. The book concludes by applying the theory of structure to four topics: ontology, logic, time, and modality.
Customer Reviews
This book has been floating around the world of metaphysics in .pdf form for a couple years, so it's great to finally have it, in its final form, in print.Some philosophy books present a thesis, then an argument for that thesis, and then argue for the premises of the argument. Sider's earlier book, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (Mind Association Occasional Series), is a book like this. Some books present a system, and show how the system applies to certain extant debates in philosophy. Lewis' On the Plurality of Worlds is such a book. This book is like Lewis'. In _Writing the Book of the World_, Sider lays the foundation of his system, and then he applies the system to pretty much every important debate in metaphysics and metametaphysics. The book invites us into Sider's mind, showing us the way he thinks about the world.Sider begins WtBotW by claiming that metaphysics is about structure. Not what there is or what there has to be or what there could have been, but about structure. Sider says that if we take structure as a primitive, we can understand modality, intrinsicality, naturalness, laws of nature, similarity, fundamentality, and realism in terms of structure. We will have a simpler, yet powerful, ideology. He then explains a bit about structure, and spends the rest of the book explaining how metametaphysics and metaphysics is (or should be) all about structure.This book is for anyone who is interested in how one of the best living metaphysicians thinks about the current trends in metaphysics and meta-metaphysics. It is at times very technical, and those who aren't familiar with the current metaphysics literature will feel like they've been thrown into the deep end. But there is a great reward for those who put in the time.
