When he walked into my office it took me a while to recognise Charles Foster.Then I twigged. He was a fracking ambulance chaser. I thought the no-win no-fee lawyer was handing me an easy job for good money. All I had to do was carry out basic background checks on a few prospective clients.I found he'd left out a few things. He didn't tell me Paul Spencer was dead. He didn't tell me I was Paul's stand-in. He didn't tell me about Jessica's long legs. He didn't tell me he was going to disappear. To be fair, he didn't know that himself. Noir meets pulp meets fracking, greed and corruption in the fourth in Alan Tootill's series of Blackpool Novels, featuring PI Mike Grady.

Inhaltsverzeichnis/Table of Contents Abhandlungen/Articles M. Oreste Fiocco: An Absolute Principle of Truthmaking Daniel Alexander Milne: Everett¿s Dilemma: How Fictional Realists Can Cope with Ontic Vagueness Carlo Penco: Indexicals as Demonstratives: On the Debate between Kripke and Künne Roberto Horácio De Sá Pereira: Phenomenal Concepts as Mental Files Ángel García Rodríguez: A Wittgensteinian Conception of Animal Minds Stefan Lukits: Carnap¿s Conventionalism in Geometry Delia Belleri & Michele Palmira: Towards a Unified Notion of Disagreement Matthew Lee: Conciliationism Without Uniqueness Emanuel Viebahn: Against Context-Sensitivity Tests Christoph Kelp: How to Motivate Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology Ishtiyaque Haji: Event-Causal Libertarianism¿s Control Conundrums Essay-Wettbewerb/Essay Competition Salim Hirèche & Sandra Villata: Eating Animals and the Moral Value of Non-Human Suffering Simon Gaus: Folgt aus dem Unwert der Tierhaltung ein Verbot des Fleischkonsums? Jens Tuider: Dürfen wir Tiere essen? Buchnotizen/Critical Notes Ion Tănăsescu (ed.): Franz Brentano¿s Metaphysics and Psychology. Bucharest: Zeta Books. 2012. (Hamid Taieb) Biagio G. Tassone: From Psychology to Phenomenology: Franz Brentano¿s Psychology From An Empirical Standpoint and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan. 2012 (Mark Textor) Jens Glatzer: Schönheit. Ein Klärungsversuch. Frankfurt a.M. [u.a.]: Ontos-Verlag. 2012. (Philipp Dollwetzel) Peter Lamarque: Work and Object. Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010. (Wolfgang Huemer)

Art and Abstract Objects presents a lively philosophical exchange between the philosophy of art and the core areas of philosophy. The standard way of thinking about non-repeatable (single-instance) artworks such as paintings, drawings, and non-cast sculpture is that they are concrete (i.e., material, causally efficacious, located in space and time). Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is currently located in Paris. Richard Serra's Tilted Arc is 73 tonnes of solid steel. Johannes Vermeer's The Concert was stolen in 1990 and remains missing. Michaelangelo's David was attacked with a hammer in 1991. By contrast, the standard way of thinking about repeatable (multiple-instance) artworks such as novels, poems, plays, operas, films, symphonies is that they must be abstract (i.e., immaterial, causally inert, outside space-time): consider the current location of Melville's Moby Dick, the weight of Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium", or how one might go about stealing Puccini's La Bohème or vandalizing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9. Although novels, poems, and symphonies may appear radically unlike stock abstract objects such as numbers, sets, and propositions, most philosophers of art think that for the basic intuitions, practices, and conventions surrounding such works to be preserved, repeatable artworks must be abstracta. This volume examines how philosophical enquiry into art might itself productively inform or be productively informed by enquiry into abstracta taking place within not just metaphysics but also the philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind and language. While the contributors chiefly focus on the relationship between philosophy of art and contemporary metaphysics with respect to the overlap issue of abstracta, they provide a methodological blueprint from which scholars working both within and beyond philosophy of art can begin building responsible, mutually informative, and productive relationships between their respective fields.

Eleven original essays discuss a range of puzzling philosophical questions about fictional characters, and more generally about fictional objects. For example, they ask questions like the following: Do they really exist? What would fictional objects be like if they existed? Do they exist eternally? Are they created? Who by? When and how? Can they be destroyed? If so, how? Are they abstract or concrete? Are they actual? Are they complete objects? Are they possible objects? How many fictional objects are there? What are their identity conditions? What kinds of attitudes can we have towards them? This volume will be a landmark in the philosophical debate about fictional objects, and will influence higher-level debates within metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.

In ontology, realism and anti-realism may be taken as opposite attitudes towards entities of different kinds, so that one may turn out to be a realist with respect to certain entities, and an anti-realist with respect to others. In this book, the editors focus on this controversy concerning social entities in general and fictional entities in particular, the latter often being considered nowadays as kinds of social entities. More specifically, fictionalists (those who maintain that we only make-believe that there are entities of a certain kind) and creationists (those who believe that entities of a certain kind are the products of human activity) present themselves as the champions of the anti-realist and the realist stance, respectively, regarding the above entities. By evaluating the pros and cons of both these positions, this book intends to focus new light on a longstanding debate.

The Second Man and Win Some, Lose Some feature PI Mike Grady, with whom readers of the Blackpool novels will be familiar. In the Second Man, Grady is offered a simple job, delivering a bundle of cash in return for a gambling IOU. Seems an easy assignment, until murder queers the pitch. In the second story Grady is asked to save an attractive woman from the unwelcome advances of her boss. Grady finds nothing is as simple as it looked. The Spider introduces downmarket PI Rick Mason. An old flame asks him to help put her new partner on the straight and narrow and keep him out of jail. In Sam Cooke, PI Pete Mallone finds he is out of his depth when he witnesses a killing and ends up on the wrong side of the law. Chrome tells a story of regret, old acquaintance and an unsolved puzzle.

Computer games have become a major cultural and economic force, and a subject of extensive academic interest. Up until now, however, computer games have received relatively little attention from philosophy. Seeking to remedy this, the present collection of newly written papers by philosophers and media researchers addresses a range of philosophical questions related to three issues of crucial importance for understanding the phenomenon of computer games: the nature of gameplay and player experience, the moral evaluability of player and avatar actions, and the reality status of the gaming environment. By doing so, the book aims to establish the philosophy of computer games as an important strand of computer games research, and as a separate field of philosophical inquiry. The book is required reading for anyone with an academic or professional interest in computer games, and will also be of value to readers curious about the philosophical issues raised by contemporary digital culture.