1300 187 187
This second edition of David-Hillel Ruben's influential and highly acclaimed book on the philosophy of explanation has been revised and expanded, and the author has made substantial changes in light of the extensive reviews the first edition received. Ruben's views on the place of laws in explanation has been refined and clarified. What is perhaps the central thesis of the book, his realist view of explanation, describing the way in which explanation depends on metaphysics, has been updated and extended and engages with some of the work in this area published since the book's first edition.
| Preface and Acknowledgments | p. ix |
| Preface to the Second Edition | p. xi |
| Getting our Bearings | p. 1 |
| Some explanations | p. 3 |
| Process and product | p. 6 |
| The methodology of explaining explanation | p. 8 |
| Restricting the scope of the analysis | p. 13 |
| Scientific and ordinary explanation | p. 14 |
| Partial and full explanation | p. 17 |
| Bad explanations and no explanations | p. 19 |
| Some terminology | p. 21 |
| Theories of explanation | p. 23 |
| Dispensing with contrastives | p. 35 |
| Plato on Explanation | p. 41 |
| The Phaedo | p. 42 |
| Platonic explanantia and explananda | p. 47 |
| Problems for the physical explainers | p. 48 |
| Some terminology | p. 51 |
| Plato's Principles | p. 53 |
| Plato's (PP2) | p. 58 |
| Plato's (PP1) | p. 60 |
| The Theaetetus | p. 65 |
| Summary | p. 68 |
| Aristotle on Explanation | p. 69 |
| The doctrine of the four causes | p. 69 |
| Does Aristotle have a general account of explanation? | p. 74 |
| Incidental and per se causes | p. 78 |
| Necessitation and laws in explanation | p. 83 |
| Aristotle on scientific explanation | p. 85 |
| Aristotle's demonstrations | p. 90 |
| Summary | p. 97 |
| Mill and Hempel on Explanation | p. 98 |
| Mill's account of explanation: laws of coexistence and succession | p. 102 |
| Mill's account of explanation: the symmetry thesis | p. 110 |
| Mill on ultimate explanations | p. 111 |
| Mill on deduction and explanation | p. 115 |
| Hempel's account of scientific explanation | p. 123 |
| Hempel's methodology | p. 126 |
| Hempel on the symmetry thesis | p. 129 |
| Hempel on inductive-statistical explanation | p. 132 |
| Hempel on epistemic ambiguity | p. 135 |
| Summary | p. 137 |
| The Ontology of Explanation | p. 139 |
| Explanation and epistemology | p. 139 |
| Extensionality and the slingshot | p. 139 |
| The relata of the explanation relation | p. 143 |
| Explaining facts | p. 150 |
| The non-extensionality of facts | p. 153 |
| Facts: worldly or wordy? | p. 154 |
| The co-typical predicate extensionality of facts | p. 155 |
| The name transparency of facts | p. 159 |
| Addendum on Gideon Rosen's conception of facts | p. 162 |
| VI | p. 166 |
| The standard counterexamples: irrelevance | p. 167 |
| The standard counterexamples: symmetry | p. 175 |
| A proposed cure and its problems: the causal condition | p. 176 |
| Generalizations get their revenge | p. 189 |
| A Realist Theory of Explanatio | p. 193 |
| Are all singular explanations causal explanations? | p. 195 |
| What would make an explanation non-causal? | p. 200 |
| Identity and explanation | p. 201 |
| Are there other non-causal singular explanations? | p. 205 |
| Disposition explanations | p. 208 |
| Again: determinative, high dependency, and low dependency explanations | p. 212 |
| Postscript on Gideon Rosen | p. 214 |
| Notes | p. 217 |
| Bibliography | p. 235 |
| Reviews of the First Edition of Explaining Explanation | p. 240 |
| Name Index | p. 241 |
| Subject Index | p. 243 |
| About the Author | p. 246 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
ISBN: 9781612050676
ISBN-10: 1612050670
Audience:
Professional
Format:
Hardcover
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 240
Published: 27th June 2012
Dimensions (cm): 21.6 x 14.0
x 2.0
Weight (kg): 0.476
9am - 4pm AEST, Monday - Friday
