Rotterdanse Filofische Studies, softcover, English text, 94 pages, condition: as new.
The first essay is concerned with Quine's ideas about intensional objects and
modal logic. As is well known, Quine has always been an opponent to modal logic.
Nevertheless, in the process of reducing it ad absurdum, he implicitly made some
interesting suggestions about it himself. These insights are extracted by Castañeda
and shown to be anticipations of some of the theses of his own guise theory.
The second paper deals with the currently much-discussed concept of
supervenience. Castañeda presents a foundational study of some basic ontological
and epistemological issues involved in the supervenience thesis the thesis that
although it is not true that everything is reducible to physics, physical reality
nevertheless determines the whole of reality. Castañeda argues that the supervenience
thesis gives an impoverished view of reality: our ordinary world, the world we find
ourselves living in, is structured by us in ways which may be diametrically opposite
to the way in which physics organises reality even though the world may be
wholly physicalist at bottom. The third article contains a description of the causal mechanisms which are
involved in intentional action. Castañeda shows that his conception of human agents
as indexically volitional agents facilitates an account of the internal processes
preceding voluntary action. In this respect, the paper is a valuable addition to the
more comprehensive treatment in his Thinking and Doing.
Castañeda started from the fact that thoughts about real things in the world are of a fundamentally similar nature to thoughts about things in the imagination, it is still a thought, and from there he hypothesized an entire realm of abstract objects (he calls it "abstractist ontology") that included both the real and the imagined.[5] He referred to these objects collectively as "guises", and argued that they could be treated as sets of properties. He went on to develop the guise theory of intentionality[6] and analyse all of language and perception in terms of these guises, ultimately developing an entire metaphysics based on them
