"This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the idea that some facts call for explanation, an idea that underlies influential debates in metaethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of religion. Special attention is given to reliability arguments in philosophy of mathematics and metaethics, and fine-tuning arguments in philosophy of religion and cosmology. The book clarifies what it might mean to say that a fact calls for explanation, singling out an epistemic sense that is the focus of most of the book, and maps out possible views about which facts call for explanation and what kind of explanation they call for. It then develops a novel way of thinking about calling for explanation. It is argued that calling for explanation is a figurative form of speech without a fixed meaning. This in turn sheds new light on arguments premised on there being a fact that calls for explanation"--

This is the 2nd edition of volume 10 of the ten volumes of The Meaning And Explanation Of The Glorious Qur'an. The first edition of this book contained many formatting and typing errors. In this new edition, we have corrected all the errors found in the first edition. We have also re-arranged the structure of the book and added the full Arabic Text of the thirty Parts of the Qur'an. The reader is now able to read not only the meaning, the transliteration and the tafsir (explanation) of the Glorious Qur'an but also the full Arabic text as well. Our mission is to gather in one place, for the English-speaking public, all relevant information needed to make the Qur'an more understandable and easier to study. This book tries to do this by providing the following: 1. The Arabic Text for those who are able to read Arabic 2. Transliteration of the Arabic text for those who are unable to read the Arabic script. This will give them a sample of the sound of the Qur'an, which they could not otherwise comprehend from reading the English meaning. 3. The meaning of the qur'an (translated by Dr. Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din Al-Hilali, Ph.D. and Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan) 4. Background introductions by two famous Islamic scholars, Maududi and Ibn Kathir 5. Explanation (abridged Tafsir) by Ibn Kathir (translated by Safi-ur-Rahman al-Mubarakpuri) We hope that by doing this an ordinary English-speaker will be able to pick up a copy of this book and study and comprehend The Glorious Qur'an in a way that is acceptable to the understanding of the Rightly-guided Muslim Ummah (Community).

Reprint of the original, first published in 1837.

This volume distinguishes between two main traditions in the philosophy of science - the aristotelian, with its stress on explanation in terms of purpose and intentionality, and the galilean, which takes causal explanation as primary. It then traces the complex history of these competing traditions as they are manifested in such movements as positivism, idealism, Marxism and contemporary linguistic analysis. Hempels's theory of scientific explanation, the claims of cybernetics the rise of an analytic philosophy of action and the revival of hermenuetics are all discussed. The volume also deals with causal explanation, intentionality and teleological explanation, and explanation in history and the social sciences. The author concludes that explanation of human actions cannot be reduced to simple causality, and discusses the implications of this conclusion for the disciplines of history and sociology.

This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the idea that some facts call for explanation. This idea serves as a premise in influential arguments for the inexistence of moral facts, for the inexistence of mathematical facts, for the existence of a god, for the existence of multiple universes, and other topics. Despite its prevalence and importance in debates across fields of study, however, this premise is rarely questioned, and the distinction between facts that call for explanation and those that do not has thus far received little careful attention. According to what Baras calls the naïve picture, facts possess a certain property, which he calls strikingness, to different degrees. To the extent that a fact has this property, it calls for explanation. We feel compelled to figure out what this property is, and what special explanation amounts to, but this approach, Baras argues, leads to a dead end. Attending to this essential and yet strangely neglected issue, Baras argues that if calling for explanation is thought of as a fixed property of facts that justifies explanatory inferences, as many believe it to be, this leads to a futile philosophical project and confusions in reasoning. He develops the view that calling for explanation is merely a figurative form of speech without a fixed meaning. There is no unified property shared by all facts that call for explanation, and there is no unified kind of explanation that all such facts call for.

David Kellogg Lewis (1941-2001) was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He made significant contributions to almost every area of analytic philosophy including metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science, and set the agenda for various debates in these areas which carry on to this day. In several respects he remains a contemporary figure, yet enough time has now passed for historians of philosophy to begin to study his place in twentieth century thought. His philosophy was constructed and refined not just through his published writing, but also crucially through his life-long correspondence with fellow philosophers, including leading figures such as D.M. Armstrong, Saul Kripke, W.V. Quine, J.J.C. Smart, and Peter van Inwagen. His letters formed the undercurrent of his published work and became the medium through which he proposed many of his well-known theories and discussed a range of philosophical topics in depth. A selection of his vast correspondence over a 40-year period is presented here across two volumes. As metaphysics is arguably where Lewis made his greatest contribution, this forms the focus of Volume 1. Arranged under the broad areas of Causation, Modality, and Ontology, the letters offer an organic story of the origins, development, breadth, and depth of his metaphysics in its historical context, as well as a glimpse into the influence of his many interlocutors. This volume will be an indispensable resource for contemporary metaphysics and for those interested in the Lewisian perspective.