E. J. Lowe and Ontology

Edited by Mirosław Szatkowski  ⁞  Routledge, 2021,  in progress

Book Description

This volume collects fifteen original essays on E. J. Lowe’s work on metaphysics and ontology. The essays connect Lowe’s insights with contemporary issues in metaphysics.
E. J. Lowe (1950-2014) was one of the most influential analytical philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Drawing inspiration from Aristotle’s thought, E. J. Lowe treated metaphysics as an autonomous discipline concerned with the fundamental structure of reality. The chapters in this volume reflect on his path-breaking work. They deal with a wide range of metaphysical issues including four-category ontology, the causal and non-causal aspects of agency, categorial fundamentality and non-fundamentality, the existence of relations, property dualism, powers and abilities, personal identity, predication, and topological ontology. Taken together, the chapter reflects the liveliness of contemporary debates in metaphysics and the enduring impact of Lowe’s thought on them.
E. J. Lowe and Ontology will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in metaphysics and philosophy of mind.
Table of Contents

Figures and Tables

Acknowledgements

Authors of Contributed Papers

Jonathan and Peter  ⁞  Elisabeth M. Bolduc

1.  E. J. Lowe and Ontology. Introductory Note  ⁞  Mirosław Szatkowski

Part I  Metaphysics in the Manner of  E. J. Lowe

2.  Lowe’s Progress  ⁞  John Heil

3.  The Possibility of Metaphysics  ⁞  Christian Kanzian

4.  The Plausibility of Lowe’s Metaphilosophy  ⁞  Chris Daly

Part II  The Four-Category Ontology

5.  Jonathan Lowe’s Theory of Predication  ⁞  Peter van Inwagen

6.  Lowe’s Eliminativism about Relations and the Analysis of Relational Inherence  ⁞  Markku Keinänen

7.  The Fundamentality and Non-Fundamentality of Ontological Categories  ⁞  Jani Hakkarainen

8.  The Four-Category Ontology modulo Topological Ontology  ⁞  Janusz Kaczmarek

9. Kinds and Explanations: From the Four-Category Ontology to Formal Causation  ⁞  Petter Sandstad and Ludger Jansen

Part III  Persons, Minds, and Agency

10.  Persons and other Physical Objects  ⁞  Peter Simons

11. Persons, Minds, Souls and Selves: The Difference between the Mental and the Psychological  ⁞  Kevin Mulligan

12.  Lowe’s Non-Cartesian Dualism  ⁞  Eric T. Olson

13.  Lowe’s Dualist Construal of Mental Causation  ⁞  Max Kistler

14.  Causal and Non-Causal Aspects of Agency in Lowe’s Ontology of Action  ⁞  Michał Głowala

Part IV Powers and Persistence

15.  Powers Are Not Enough  ⁞  Uwe Meixner

16.  A Causal Theory of Constitution and Persistence  ⁞  Rognvaldur D. Ingthorsson

Person Index

Subject Index

About Editor

Mirosław Szatkowski is Privatdocent in Philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. He is also the Vice-President of the International Society for Formal Ontology.