In the present book, Pauline Phemister argues against traditional Anglo-American interpretations of Leibniz as an idealist who conceives ultimate reality as a plurality of mind-like immaterial beings and for whom physical bodies are ultimately unreal and our perceptions of them illusory.
Re-reading the texts without the prior assumption of idealism allows the more material aspects of Leibniz's metaphysics to emerge. Leibniz is found to advance a synthesis of idealism and materialism. His ontology posits indivisible, living, animal-like corporeal substances as the real metaphysical constituents of the universe; his epistemology combines sense-experience and reason; and his ethics fuses confused perceptions and insensible appetites with distinct perceptions and rational choice. In the light of his sustained commitment to the reality of bodies, Phemister re-examines his dynamics, the doctrine of pre-established harmony and his views on freedom. The image of Leibniz as a rationalist philosopher who values activity and reason over passivity and sense-experience is replaced by the one of a philosopher who recognises that, in the created world, there can only be activity if there is also passivity; minds, souls and forms if there is also matter; good if there is evil; perfection if there is imperfection.
In this book Joachim Latacz turns the spotlight of modern research on the much-debated question of whether the wealthy city of Troy described by Homer in the Iliad was a poetic fiction or a memory of historical reality. Earlier excavations at the hill of Hisarlik, in Turkey, on the Dardanelles, brought no answer, but in 1988 a new archaeological enterprise, under the direction of Manfred Korfmann, led to a radical shift in understanding. Latacz, one of Korfmann's closest collaborators, traces the course of these excavations, and the renewed investigation of the imperial Hittite archives they have inspired. As he demonstrates, it is now clear that the background against which the plot of the Iliad is acted out is the historical reality of the thirteenth century BC. The Troy story as a whole must have arisen in this period, and we can detect traces of it in Homer's great poem.
The work is the presentation of a logical theory – Logic in Reality (LIR) - and of applications of that theory in natural science and philosophy, including cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. The thesis is that the fundamental physics of the world defines a non-classical logical structure for the interactive aspects of complex phenomena. LIR can thus be construed as a meta-theory that allows an alternative formal treatment of processes and systems.
Kabbalah, Science and the Meaning of Life presents the fundamentals of the science that explores the aspects of reality hidden from scientists. When we discover those hidden parts, our knowledge of the world we live in will be complete. By uniting both the hidden and the revealed, we will prepare ourselves for accurate scientific research and the discovery of the genuine formulae. By uncovering the hidden, our view of the world will become complete, liberated from the boundaries of relative perception and we will be able to unveil the existence of every part of reality, beyond time, space and motion.
