More Kinds of Being: A Further Study of Individuation, Identity, and the Logic of Sortal Terms Hardcover - 2009 - 1st Edition

In More Kinds of Being E. J. Lowe, one of the world's most distinguished contemporary metaphysicians, thoroughly reworks and expands upon the philosophical concepts first put forth in his acclaimed book Kinds of Being(1989). Taking into account significant developments in his metaphysical thinking over the past 20 years, Lowe delves deeper into the fundamental ontological categories into which all existing entities fall. While this new volume strengthens and extends many of his original arguments, Lowe's focus remains on the category of kinds or sorts and their individual instances - the latter being persisting objects, which exist at every level of the spatial scale from galaxies to atoms and include, as an especially important case, persons such as ourselves. He proceeds to show that while an object of one sort is occasionally constituted by, but not identical with, an object of another sort, persons appear not to be constituted by anything, making them special among the beings that populate the universe. Lowe also reveals why the category of kinds or sorts plays a crucial role in our understanding of scientific laws and of the dispositional properties or powers of things - a role which requires us to rethink the very foundations of modern logic in order to accommodate the logical relations between law-statements and disposition-statements.

Combining an Aristotelian spirit with startling originality, More Kinds of Being presents a thought-provoking and important new contribution to the field of contemporary analytical metaphysics.