States of Affairs (Hardcover)

States of affairs raise, among others, the following questions: What kind of entity are they (if there are any)? Are they contingent, causally efficacious, spatio-temporal and perceivable entities, or are they abstract objects? What are their constituents and their identity conditions? What are the functions that states of affairs are able to fulfil in a viable theory, and which problems and prima facie counterintuitive consequences arise out of an ontological commitment to them? Are there merely possible (non-actual, non-obtaining) states of affairs? Are there molecular (ie: negative, conjunctive, disjunctive etc.) states of affairs? Are there modal and tensed states of affairs? In this volume, these and other questions are addressed by David M Armstrong, Marian David, Herbert Hochberg, Uwe Meixner, L Nathan Oaklander, Peter Simons, Erwin Tegtmeier and Mark Textor.