Beneath metaphysical problems there often lies a conflict between what we want to be true and what we believe to be true. Nathan provides a general account of the resolution of this conflict as a philosophical objective, showing that there are ways of thinking it through systematically with a view to resolving or alleviating it. The author also studies in detail a set of interrelated conflicts about the freedom and the reality of the will. He shows how difficult it is to find a freedom either of decision or of action which is both an object of reflective desire and an object of rational belief. He also examines conflicts about volition as such, contending that the veridicality of volitional experience is no less easy to doubt than the veridicality of our experience of colors. In this context, arguments emerge for a voluntarist theory of the self. Nathan's important book will be essential reading for all philosophers interested in free will, volition, the self, and the methodology of metaphysics.

Will and World: A Study in Metaphysics

Politics & Social Sciences

Nathan, N. M. L.

Philosophy

Clarendon Press

Will And World: A Study In Metaphysics

Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press

A Map of Selves defines a concept of selfhood, radically different from the Cartesian, neo-Humean, materialist and animalist concepts which now dominate analytical philosophy of mind. A self, as this book defines it, is an enduring substance with a quality which is its constant possession, which it does not share with any other substance, and which is often remembered by it as its own. The author maintains that we are selves as so defined. He criticises the panpsychist theory that material objects are composed of selves analogous to ours, and argues, further, for the existence of at least one transcendent self, whose activity explains both our own existence and the existence of the natural world. He ends by considering whether things would be worse for us if selves as the book defines them did not exist, and we were, as some philosophers suppose we are, just brains, or sequences of mental events, or hylemorphic structures, or subjects which last no longer than the specious present. 
Nathan’s carefully argued and original book will be of interest to researchers in metaphysics and philosophical psychology, and to their students.

A Map of Selves (Routledge Studies in Metaphysics)

Routledge

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