Abstract Theories are metaphysically equivalent just if there is no fact of the matter that could render one theory true and the other false. In this paper I argue that if we are judiciously to resolve disputes about whether theories are equivalent or not, we need to develop testable criteria that will give us epistemic access to the obtaining of the relation of metaphysical equivalence holding between those theories. I develop such ?diagnostic? criteria. I argue that correctly inter-translatable theories are (...) metaphysically equivalent, and what we need are ways of determining whether a putative translation is correct or not. To that end I develop a number of tools we can employ to discern whether a translation is a correct one. (shrink)

Bartolomeo Mastri’s Disputations on Metaphysics is the single most important work on metaphysics produced in the Scotist school during the Early Modern period. This contribution guides through the work by highlighting a selection of key passages that convey an impression of its historical-literary context, its subject matter, its main motifs and scientific aims, but also its limitations. Especially, we see Mastri emphasizing the theological aspect of theology, though he in the end refrains from exploring this aspect of (...) class='Hi'>metaphysics within his work on metaphysics. I suggest that this discrepancy between Mastri’s concept of metaphysics and his work on metaphysics showcases the difficulty of organizing this discipline during the phase of transition from the traditional commentary format typical of medieval scholasticism to the Early Modern scholastic Cursus philosophicus literature. (shrink)

Abstract The article is a reading, in conjunction with one-another, of Time and Being and What is metaphysics. Its scope is that of raising questions on certain Heideggerian topics that are here formulated as thesis. Namely, first that the turn in Heidegger’s thinking is not a change in his process of thinking, but rather an essential trait of what Heidegger calls the matter at hand (Sachverhalt). Secondly, that this turn of the matter at hand is in itself (...) memory in a twofold way: as metaphysics in its relation to being and time, and as questioning of this metaphysical relation. And finally, that this turn is a technical one, in the sense of technique as this latter is, in Heidegger’s thinking, the original determination of Being as Anwesenheit. (shrink)

‘Metaphysics’ is the quest to find the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence. It is about trying to find a decisive and conclusive resolution to the human condition, such that the human condition is fulfilled in some absolute way, and no longer at the mercy of meaningless suffering, or a dreadful sense of uncertainty. All other definitions and determinations of metaphysics are trivial, and irrelevant; and, given the critical importance of the quest for human fulfilment – our lives (...) are not infinite, after all – really quite bewildering. Western philosophy has never understood this, and its entire intellectual history has been characterised by a persistent debasing of any simple, straightforward and direct quest for objective metaphysical self-knowledge, preferring instead always to indulge either in pedantic squabbling over definitions, distinctions and conceptual manoeuvrings, or in flatulent ‘system building’. (shrink)

I examine why Carnap ended his "The Overcoming of Metaphysics" with admiration for Nietzsche, and contextualize his admiration for Nietzsche within their shared commitment to 'modernism.' I show that Carnap's modernism helps explain his enthusiasm for symbolic logic and his attitude towards metaphysics. However, I also argue that Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics may also apply to Carnap's own distinction between what is essential to language and how language appears.

Heidegger‘s What Is Metaphysics? - Irfan Ajvazi.

What is Derrida Saying to Us - Abstract Jacques Derrida is difficult and controversial. This article concentrates on the first part of On Grammatology (1967) as the Rosetta Stone to understanding him. It examines concepts such as the metaphysics of presence, the trace, differance, and deconstruction, aiming to interest readers further in pursuing him in more depth.

What is philosophy of science? Numerous manuals, anthologies or essays provide carefully reconstructed vantage points on the discipline that have been gained through expert and piecemeal historical analyses. In this paper, we address the question from a complementary perspective: we target the content of one major journal of the field—Philosophy of Science—and apply unsupervised text-mining methods to its complete corpus, from its start in 1934 until 2015. By running topic-modeling algorithms over the full-text corpus, we identified 126 key research (...) topics that span across 82 years. We also tracked their evolution and fluctuating significance over time in the journal articles. Our results concur with and document known and lesser-known episodes of the philosophy of science, including the rise and fall of logic and language-related topics, the relative stability of a metaphysical and ontological questioning (space and time, causation, natural kinds, realism), the significance of epistemological issues about the nature of scientific knowledge as well as the rise of a recent philosophy of biology and other trends. These analyses exemplify how computational text-mining methods can be used to provide an empirical large-scale and data-driven perspective on the history of philosophy of science that is complementary to other current historical approaches. (shrink)

Two of the most fundamental distinctions in metaphysics are (1) that between reality (or things in themselves) and appearance, the R/A distinction, and (2) that between entities that are fundamental (or real, etcetera) and entities that are ontologically or existentially dependent, the F/D distinction. While these appear to be two very different distinctions, in Buddhist metaphysics they are combined, raising questions about how they are related. In this paper I argue that plausible versions of the R/A distinction are (...) essentially a special kind of F/D distinction, and conversely, that many F/D distinctions imply an R/A distinction. Nevertheless, while this does suggest that the F/D distinction is more basic than the R/A distinction, it does not favor a particular understanding of the F/D distinction. There are many kinds of existential or ontological dependence that cannot be meaningfully combined into a single notion, and reality does not force us to accept any specific kind of dependence as more fundamental. Consequently, what we consider to be ‘real’, ‘fundamental’, or ‘really existing’ is not entirely given by reality, but partially up to us. (shrink)

Recent work on rationality has been increasingly attentive to “coherence requirements”, with heated debates about both the content of such requirements and their normative status (e.g., whether there is necessarily reason to comply with them). Yet there is little to no work on the metanormative status of coherence requirements. Metaphysically: what is it for two or more mental states to be jointly incoherent, such that they are banned by a coherence requirement? In virtue of what are some putative (...) requirements genuine and others not? Epistemologically: how are we to know which of the requirements are genuine and which aren’t? This paper tries to offer an account that answers these questions. On my account, the incoherence of a set of attitudinal mental states is a matter of its being (partially) constitutive of the mental states in question that, for any agent that holds these attitudes jointly, the agent is disposed, when conditions of full transparency are met, to give up at least one of the attitudes. (shrink)

This is a metaphysical and conceptual analysis of the concepts ‘change’ and ‘continuity’. The Buddhists are in agreement with Heraclitus that all are flowing and nothing remains. However, the Buddhists have a much more elaborate theory about change and continuity, and this theory is a key element in the entire Buddhist system of related doctrines, viz., that of karma and rebirth, the possibility of Liberation and others. Simply put, the Buddhist emphasizes that change is there in every aspect of reality. (...) According to a later developed form of the Buddhist teaching, change is absolutely pervasive, and even these particles are subject to change as they are nothing more than putative objects which are conceptualized to be such and such, and without the conceptualization they are ‘nothing’ at all.. Hence it seems that continuity is not possible. But in fact according to the later theory, change is not only possible, it is accepted as part and parcel of everyday life. The fact that nothing at all remains the same does not imply that continuity is not possible, since continuity does not always have to be that of an inherently existing object. A changing object can be continued also, in roughly the same sense as we say that an event, like a drama, continues even though everything in it is changing. The thread that ties the disparate elements of the event together in this case lies within our own conceptual imputation. This does not imply that everything is subjective, since the distinction between subject and object presupposes the idea of an absolutely existing individual self, which all Buddhist schools rejects. So in this later theory, absolute change is not possible because there is, ultimately speaking nothing to change, and when there is no change there is no continuation either. This is not to deny the empirical fact of changes and continuities that are present to us; things are there and they are indeed changing. What is being denied here is the belief that that there are essences to things which endure through all the changes. Since things are empty they can change, and continuity is only possible, not because there is something that exists and endures, but because there is change. A drama that does not move cannot be continued. The foregoing discussions of the Buddhist theories have many implications for the dialog between science and religion. One point is that science still seems to subscribe to the object/subject distinction. But if change and continuity are not real in the ultimate sense, then perhaps the distinction should be reconsidered. Another point concerns how to find continuity amidst all the change. But perhaps in some important sense continuity depends on us. (shrink)

The apparent chasm between two camps in metaphysics, analytic metaphysics and scientific metaphysics, is well recognized. I argue that the relationship between them is not necessarily a rivalry; a division of labour that resembles the relationship between pure mathematics and science is possible. As a case study, I look into the metaphysical underdetermination argument for ontic structural realism, a well‐known position in scientific metaphysics, together with an argument for the position in analytic metaphysics known as (...) ontological nihilism. I argue that we can ascribe the same schema to both arguments, which indicates that analytic metaphysics can offer an abstract model that scientific metaphysics may find useful. (shrink)

Ordinary discourse is filled with discussions about ‘sexual orientation’. This discourse might suggest a common understanding of what sexual orientation is. But even a cursory search turns up vastly differing, conflicting, and sometimes ethically troubling characterizations of sexual orientation. The conceptual jumble surrounding sexual orientation suggests that the topic is overripe for philosophical exploration. This paper lays the groundwork for such an exploration. In it, I offer an account of sexual orientation – called ‘Bidimensional Dispositionalism’ – according to which (...) sexual orientation concerns what sex[es] and gender[s] of persons one is disposed to sexually engage, and makes no reference to one’s own sex and gender. (shrink)

Analyzing the position of two philosophers whose views are recognizably divergent, W. O. Quine and M. Dummett, we intend to support a striking point of agreement between them: the idea that our logical principles constitute our principles about what there is, and therefore, that logic is metaphysics.

In this paper, I answer the question of what time is. First, however, I consider why one might ask this question and what exactly it is asking. The latter consideration reveals that in order to answer the question, one must first engage in a more basic investigation of what a thing, anything at all, is. Such radical investigation requires a special methodology. After briefly characterizing this methodology, I show how it can be employed to answer the titular (...) question. This answer is significant not merely because it illuminates something of perennial interest, but because it is essential to a comprehensive and fully satisfactory metaphysics of time and, hence, to a view of the full structure in reality. (shrink)

Logical monism is the view that there is ‘One True Logic’. This is the default position, against which pluralists react. If there were not ‘One True Logic’, it is hard to see how there could be one true theory of anything. A theory is closed under a logic! But what is logical monism? In this article, I consider semantic, logical, modal, scientific, and metaphysical proposals. I argue that, on no ‘factualist’ analysis (according to which ‘there is One True Logic’ (...) expresses a factual claim, rather than an attitude like approval), does the doctrine have both metaphysical and methodological import. Metaphysically, logics abound. Methodologically, what to infer from what is not settled by the facts, even the normative ones. I conclude that the only interesting sense in which there could be One True Logic is noncognitive. The same may be true of monism about normative areas, like moral, epistemic, and prudential ones, generally. (shrink)

Temporal ontology is the part of ontology involving the rival positions of presentism, eternalism, and the growing block theory. While this much is clear, it’s surprisingly difficult to elucidate the substance of the disagreement between presentists and eternalists. Certain events happened that are not happening now; what is it to disagree about whether these events exist? In spite of widespread suspicion concerning the status and methods of analytic metaphysics, skeptics’ doubts about this debate have not generally been heeded, (...) neither by metaphysicians, nor by philosophers of physics. This paper revisits the question in the light of prominent elucidation attempts from both camps. The upshot is that skeptics were right to be puzzled. The paper then explores a possible re-interpretation of positions in temporal ontology that links it to normative views about how we should live as temporal beings. (shrink)

This is the second part of my paper "What is good forestry?" and it completes the argument on how to balance short-term economic interests with the long-term public good.

Much current debate in the metaphysics of time is between A-theorists and B-theorists. Central to this debate is the assumption that time exists and that the task of metaphysics is to catalogue time’s features. Relatively little consideration has been given to an error theory about time. Since there is very little extant work on temporal error theory the goal of this paper is simply to lay the groundwork to allow future discussion of the relative merits of such a (...) view. The paper thus develops a conceptual framework from within which to evaluate claims about the actual existence, or not, of temporality as that notion appears in folk discourses about time, and from there to examine claims about the counterfactual existence, or not, of temporality so conceived. We subsequently apply this framework to three extant positions drawn from physics and metaphysics that deny the existence of time. We show that only one of these positions is a folk temporal error theory; that is, a view that denies the existence of time as that notion is operative in our everyday thought and talk. (shrink)

Talk of metaphysical modality as “absolute” is ambiguous, as it appears to convey multiple ideas. Metaphysical possibility is supposedly completely unrestricted or unqualified; metaphysical necessity is unconditional and exceptionless. Moreover, metaphysical modality is thought to be absolute in the sense that it’s real or genuine and the most objective modality: metaphysical possibility and necessity capture ways things could and must have really been. As we disentangle these ideas, certain talk of metaphysical modality qua “absolute” turns out to be misguided. Metaphysical (...) possibility isn't completely unrestricted or most inclusive compared to the other modalities; metaphysical necessity, like all kinds of necessities, is relative to or conditional upon a specific framework of reference. Still, metaphysical modality captures how things could and must have really been most generally because it deals with reality and the nature of things or their essence. That’s the chief interest of metaphysics. Arguments against the alleged absoluteness of metaphysical modality may not thereby undermine its philosophical significance. (shrink)

Many philosophers embrace grounding, supposedly a central notion of metaphysics. Grounding is widely assumed to be irreflexive, but recently a number of authors have questioned this assumption: according to them, it is at least possible that some facts ground themselves. The primary purpose of this paper is to problematize the notion of self-grounding through the theoretical roles usually assigned to grounding. The literature typically characterizes grounding as at least playing two central theoretical roles: a structuring role and an explanatory (...) role. Once we carefully spell out what playing these roles includes, however, we find that any notion of grounding that isn’t irreflexive fails to play these roles when they are interpreted narrowly, and is redundant for playing them when they are interpreted more broadly. The upshot is that no useful notion of grounding can allow a fact to ground itself. (shrink)

This paper develops four proposals for explicating the notion of an ersatz part. It then evaluates each proposal with respect to a number of jobs for which ersatz parts are posited. We argue that each of the four notions of ersatz parthood do better with respect to some jobs, and worse with respect to others. Thus, we think, it’s horses for courses: which notion of ersatz part one chooses will be sensitive to which metaphysical project one is pursuing.

Failure to recognize the "realistic" motivations for Putnam's commitment to internal realism has led to a widely shared misunderstanding of Putnam's arguments against metaphysical realism. Realist critics of these arguments frequently offer rebuttals that fail to confront his arguments. Simply put, Putnam's arguments --the brains in a vat argument as well as the model-theoretic argument -- are "reductios" that are intended to show that "metaphysical realism itself is not sufficiently realistic". If that claim can be substantiated then Putnam can go (...) on to argue that his own view is, by comparison, more realistic than metaphysical realism. (shrink)

Contemporary biological research has suggested that some host–microbiome multispecies systems (referred to as “holobionts”) can in certain circumstances evolve as unique biological individual, thus being a unit of selection in evolution. If this is so, then it is arguably the case that some biological adaptations have evolved at the level of the multispecies system, what we call hologenomic adaptations. However, no research has yet been devoted to investigating their nature, or how these adaptations can be distinguished from adaptations at (...) the species-level (genomic adaptations). In this paper, we cover this gap by investigating the nature of hologenomic adaptations. By drawing on the case of the evolution of sanguivory diet in vampire bats, we argue that a trait constitutes a hologenomic adaptation when its evolution can only be explained if the holobiont is considered the biological individual that manifests this adaptation, while the bacterial taxa that bear the trait are only opportunistic beneficiaries of it. We then use the philosophical notions of emergence and inter-identity to explain the nature of this form of individuality and argue why it is special of holobionts. Overall, our paper illustrates how the use of philosophical concepts can illuminate scientific discussions, in the trend of what has recently been called metaphysics of biology. (shrink)

One class of central debates between normative realists appears to concern whether we should be naturalists or reductionists about the normative. However, metaethical discussion of naturalism and reduction is often inconsistent, murky, or uninformative. This can make it hard to see why commitments relative to these metaphysical categories should matter to normative realists. This paper aims to clarify the nature of these categories, and their significance in debates between normative realists. I develop and defend what I call the joint-carving (...) taxonomy, which builds on David Lewis’ notion of elite properties. I argue that this taxonomy is clear and metaphysically interesting, and answers to distinctive taxonomic interests of normative realists. I also suggest that it has important implications for the project of adjudicating debates among normative realists. (shrink)

The content of the externalist thesis about the mind depends crucially on how we define the distinction between the internal and the external. According to the usual understanding, the boundary between the internal and the external is the skull or the skin of the subject. In this paper I argue that the usual understanding is inadequate, and that only the new understanding of the external/internal distinction I suggest helps us to understand the issue of the compatibility of externalism and privileged (...) access. (shrink)

The central question of this paper is: what has Kant’s Refutation of Idealism argument proven, if anything? What is the real scandal of philosophy and universal human reason? I argue that Kant’s Refutation argument can only be considered sound if we assume that his target is what I call ‘metaphysical external-world skepticism.’ What is in question is not the ‘existence’ of outside things but their very ‘nature,’ that is, the claim that the thing outside us, which (...) appears to us as a persistent body in space, exists in itself _as a substantia noumenon_. Assuming the indirect-realist view that we only immediately know ideas and that their putative objects are known by inference, the metaphysical external-world skeptic doubts that the nature of things outside oneself is mind-independent. (shrink)

Decades of debate about scientific realism notwithstanding, we find ourselves bemused by what different philosophers appear to think it is, exactly. Does it require any sort of belief in relation to scientific theories and, if so, what sort? Is it rather typified by a certain understanding of the rationality of such beliefs? In the following dialogue we explore these questions in hopes of clarifying some convictions about what scientific realism is, and what it could or should (...) be. En route, we encounter some profoundly divergent conceptions of the nature of science and of philosophy. (shrink)

This paper initiates analytic inquiry into the metaphysics of masculinity. I argue that individual masculinities (such as ‘clone masculinity’ and ‘incel masculinity’) are distinct homeostatic property cluster kinds related to gender structures via processes of adherence, failed-adherence, selective adherence, and/or reinterpretation with respect to male-coded social norms.

Individualists about social ontology hold that social facts are “built out of” facts about individuals. In this paper, I argue that there are two distinct kinds of individualism about social ontology, two different ways individual people might be the metaphysical “builders” of the social world. The familiar kind is ontological individualism. This is the thesis that social facts supervene on, or are exhaustively grounded by, facts about individual people. What I call anchor individualism is the alternative thesis that facts (...) about individuals put in place the conditions for a social entity to exist, or the conditions for something to have a social property. Examples include conventionalist theories of the social world, such as David Hume’s theories of promises, money, and government, and collective acceptance theories, such as John Searle’s theory of institutional facts. Anchor individualism is often conflated with ontological individualism. But in fact, the two theses are in tension with one another: if one of these kinds of individualism is true, then the other is very unlikely to be. My aim in this paper is to clarify both, and argue that they should be sharply distinguished from one another. (shrink)

“What is energy?” We appreciate it well when it manifests within the limits of our perception and hence we say it is “Everything”. Understanding energy as such can be frustrating because it is like looking for something that lies beyond the limits of our perception.

‘Thing’ in the titular question should be construed as having the utmost generality. In the relevant sense, a thing just is an entity, an existent, a being. The present task is to say what a thing of any category is. This task is, I believe, the primary one of any comprehensive and systematic metaphysics. Indeed, an answer provides the means for resolving perennial disputes concerning the integrity of the structure in reality—whether some of the relations among things are (...) necessary merely given those relata themselves—and the intricacy of this structure—whether some things are more or less fundamental than others. After considering some reasons for thinking the generality of the titular question makes it unanswerable, I propound the methodology, original inquiry, required to answer it. The key to this methodology is adopting a singular perspective; confronting the world as merely the impetus to inquiry, one can attain an account of what a thing must be. Radical ontology is a systematic metaphysics—broadly Aristotelian, essentialist and nonhierarchical—that develops the consequences of this account. With it, it is possible to move past stalemate in metaphysics by revealing the grounds of a principled choice between seemingly incommensurable worldviews. (shrink)

In a friendly interdisciplinary debate, we interrogate from several vantage points the question of “personhood” in light of contemporary and near-future forms of social AI. David J. Gunkel approaches the matter from a philosophical and legal standpoint, while Jordan Wales offers reflections theological and psychological. Attending to metaphysical, moral, social, and legal understandings of personhood, we ask about the position of apparently personal artificial intelligences in our society and individual lives. Re-examining the “person” and questioning prominent construals of that category, (...) we hope to open new views upon urgent and much-discussed questions that, quite soon, may confront us in our daily lives. (shrink)

In what follows I will provide an explication of what the principle of philosophical sufficiency (PPS) refers to as conceptualized by François Laruelle, whereas, at the moment, suffice it to say that it is comparable to Marx’s extolling of the principle of praxis over that of philosophy as a critique of the philosophical “self-mirroring,” a thesis that pervades Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General (Marx, Manuscripts), German Ideology (1968), Theses on Feuerbach (1969). The self-mirroring thought (philosophy is) subsumes (...) the Real itself reducing it to a postulate, to its transcendental aspect exclusively rather than reversing the hierarchy whereby thought submits to the Real albeit radically foreclosed for philosophy’s totalizing ambition. Instead of revisiting the dialectics between thought and the real, or reviving a Kantian dilemma, in his critique of Feuerbach’s materialism and the critique of Hegel’s philosophy under the aforementioned several titles, in particular in “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General,” Marx proposes that a shift toward “objectivism” would proffer a proper foundation for a truly scientific discussion of human reality. It is probably an undisputable fact that subjectivity-centered thinking and anthropocentric ontology, epistemology, and morality have determined the civilizational legacy of modernity: it begins with Kant’s practical philosophy and metaphysics of morals, if we must choose a single philosophical threshold in the Western history of ideas. Certainly, it coincides with the birth of republicanism as the model state promulgated by the French and the American Revolution and the completion of the enlightenment project. In Karl Marx’s politico-philosophical project, subjectivity, political state, and secularism are not what a modern society should consist in but quite the opposite their transcendence by way of sublation when confronted with a materialist, objective science of the species-being of humanity. Secularism is, argues Marx in The Jewish Question, a name for a “political” state that has alienated itself from the society precisely by way of relegating everything pertaining to the individual to the so-called “civil society.”. (shrink)

One big question in biology is what life is, but another is how life divides into living things. This is the problem of biological individuality. Proposed statements of the problem have been vague and incomplete. And proposed theories of biological individuality are not detailed enough to solve the problem even if they are correct. The root of these troubles is that their authors have not recognized the metaphysical claims presupposed in their statement of the problem. Making these claims explicit (...) will enable us to see better what the problem is and what form a solution to it would need to have. (shrink)

A good metaphysical account of logical form, must make clear why logical form is logical. However, this task has proved to be very elusive. Here, I analyze different attempts to meet this challenge and defend an inferential externalism where logical form is grounded on external logical relations as our most promising option.

Since the publication of Clark and Chalmers' Extended Mind paper, the central claims of that paper, viz. the thesis that cognitive processes and cognitive or mental states extend beyond the brain and body, have been vigorously debated within philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science. Both defenders and detractors of these claims have since marshalled an impressive battery of arguments for and against “active externalism.” However, despite the amount of philosophical energy expended, this debate remains far from settled. We (...) argue that this debate can be understood as answering two metaphysical questions. Yet prominent voices within the debate have assumed that there is a tight relationship between these two questions such that one question can be answered via the other. We defend an alternative ‘wide’ view, whereby mentality is understood as constituted by wide social and cultural factors. Our wide view entails that the two metaphysical questions are separate and should be kept distinct. This suggests that active externalism as understood by prominent voices within that debate requires dissolution, rather than solution. However, if the debate were instead understood as only focusing on the second of the two questions, then there could be a possible future for this debate. (shrink)

This essay in the comparative metaphysic of nothingness begins by pondering why Leibniz thought of the converse question as the preeminent one. In Eastern philosophical thought, like the numeral 'zero' (śūnya) that Indian mathematicians first discovered, nothingness as non-being looms large and serves as the first quiver on the imponderables they seem to have encountered (e.g., 'In the beginning was neither non-being nor being: what was there, bottomless deep?' RgVeda X.129). The concept of non-being and its permutations of nothing, (...) negation, nullity, etc., receive more sophisticated treatment in the works of grammarians, ritual hermeneuticians, logicians, and their dialectical adversaries variously across Jaina and Buddhist schools. The present analysis follows the function of negation/the negative copula, nãn, and dialetheia in grammar and logic, then moves onto ontologies of non-existence and extinction and further suggestive tropes that tend to arrest rather than affirm the inexorable being-there of something. After a discussion of interests in being (existence), non-being and nothingness in contemporary metaphysics, the article examines Heidegger’s extensive treatment of nothingness in his 1929 inaugural Freiburg lecture, 'Was ist Metaphysik?', published later as 'What is Metaphysics?' The essay however distances itself from any pretensions toward a doctrine of Metaphysical Nihilism. (shrink)

The idea of an eternal and immortal life like the one we lead now seems quite appealing because (i) it will be sufficiently like our own earth-bound life and (ii) we will have the same kinds of desires we have now to want to live an eternal life. This paper will challenge the view that we have a conception of what the conscious experience of an immortal is like, regardless of whether we might want to live it. Given that (...) for us to conceive of an immortal life we must project onto it our own view of what it is like to live our own life and given that an immortal life may not be anything like the life we live, we cannot conceive of what it is like to be immortal. (shrink)

Theists claim that God can make a causal difference in the world. That is, theists believe that God is causally efficacious, has power. Discussion of divine power has centered on understanding better the metaphysics of creation and sustenance, special intervention, governance, and providing an account of omnipotence consistent with other divine attributes, such as omnibenevolence. But little discussion has centered on what, deep down ontologically, God’s power is. I show that a number of prominent accounts of power fail (...) to model what divine power could be, and then develop an account based on teleological and primitivist accounts of power. (shrink)

This paper leads us in reflections regarding the ontological status of a situation inspired by two main sources: the Zhuangzi--a multifarious compilation from Warring States China (ca. 4th c. BCE)--and José Ortega y Gasset's (1883-1955) Unas Lecciones de Metafísica (Some Lessons in Metaphysics)--the transcripts of a course on metaphysics by a Spanish philosopher of the early 20th century. Much as other ontologically subjective entities and events, situations do not preexist the intentional subject: instead, they are created alongside our (...) act of noticing. In Classical Chinese, shi , commonly rendered "propensity" and the closest the language comes to our concept of situation, denotes a dynamic process that incorporates the conscious subjective agent as well as other entities as constitutive elements. Here a situation is not reducible to the discrete phenomena and events that we can discern within a given space-time; rather, it necessitates our thinking about it to arise. These ontological reflections are important for a philosophy of action. They help us notice the role of attention in the creation of situations--as in the creation of worlds--hence the importance of understanding what the agent notices and fails to notice, what we privilege as worthy of our attention and what passes inadvertent among the world's plural affordances. The relational affordances that we actualize and reify as constituting a situation depend on what we are socialized and educated to see when looking at the world, thus situations and agents co-create one another over time. This acknowledgement is crucial to retrain our agency in order to illuminate our blind spots, overcome our uncritical certainties which generate absolutist tendencies, and move beyond fixed, reduced, and contingent corners from which to interpret the world. (shrink)

The goal of this thesis to defend the philosophical view of the new ante rem substantivism against its supposed alternatives. To achieve such goal, we will present four views about the nature of laws, two kinds of realism and two kinds of anti-realism, and evaluate them critically. The disadvantages from those theories are going to be presented for us to show that they are insufficient to provide a metaphysics that is able to explain the world's counterfactuality, universality, and regularity, (...) and that just one form of realism, the new ante rem substantivism, can. This goal is important because the concept of laws of nature is widely used in many areas of science and philosophy, and because according to the view we accept, the laws may fulfill some theoretical roles, and not others. We intent to show that the new ante rem substantivism's laws are able to fulfill the roles that scientists would hope the natural laws to fulfill. (shrink)

Contemporary scientific and philosophical literature on perception often focuses on the relationship between perception and action, emphasizing the ways in which perception can be understood as geared towards action or ‘action-oriented’. In this paper I provide a framework within which to classify approaches to action-oriented perception, and I highlight important differences between the distinct approaches. I show how talk of perception as action-oriented can be applied to the evolutionary history of perception, neural or psychological perceptual mechanisms, the semantic content or (...) phenomenal character of perceptual states, or to the metaphysical nature of perception. I argue that there are no straightforward inferences from one kind of action-oriented perception to another. Using this framework and its insights, I then explore the notion of action-oriented perceptual representation which plays a key role in some approaches to embodied cognitive science. I argue that the concept of action-oriented representation proposed by Clark and Wheeler is less straightforward than it might seem, because it seems to require both that the mechanisms of perceptual representation are action-oriented and that the content of these perceptual representations are action-oriented. Given that neither of these claims can be derived from the other, proponents of action-oriented representation owe us separate justification for each claim. I will argue that such justifications are not forthcoming in the literature, and that attempts to reconstruct them run into trouble: the sorts of arguments offered for the representational mechanisms being action-oriented seem to undermine the sorts of arguments offered for the representational content being action-oriented, and vice-versa. (shrink)

Legal positivism emerged in response to natural law, as an indictment on the latter’s metaphysical predilections. Natural law dominance created a yearning for empiricism, or even a ‘hard scientism’ in approach to understanding socially constructed phenomenon, including legal praxis. From its Benthamite origins, it has since been developed, with recent, spirited debate still undertaken among towering legal scholars. Although its validity is contested to some, it remains as an analytic point of view of the law. Yet, within its design, there (...) is quite a bit of subject matter put out of view of the positivist, even though it is observable phenomenon within the sphere of legal praxis. This creates a void in which certain problems are unsolvable by the theory of law embodied in positivism. Rather than adjust the theory, the positivists either designate the void as the province for legal decision-making based on an internal morality in hard cases; or it criticises systems that do not strictly adhere to the positivist account as crude in the case of the international legal system. What follows is an account of HLA Hart’s brand of positivism, as it has remained dominant and perhaps the easiest to understand. I then identify subject-matter put out of view of positivism, with reference to Kelsen’s account of ‘authority’. I conclude that the positivist project is incomplete given its limited account of decision-making in hard cases and the international legal system. (shrink)

I distinguish between a _metaphysical_ problem generated by the argument for theological fatalism, and a _theological_ problem posed by the argument. Some responses to the argument, including ones associated with Boethius, Aquinas and Ockham, address only the theological problem. Even if such responses succeed in showing that God's foreknowledge doesn't threaten human freedom, they fail to take the full measure of the argument for theological fatalism, since the metaphysical problem remains to be solved.

Despite the central presence of materialism in the history of philosophy, there is no universal consensus on the meaning of the word “matter” nor of the doctrine of philosophical materialism. Dictionaries of philosophy often identify this philosophy with its most reductionist and even eliminative versions, in line with Robert Boyle’s seventeenth century coinage of the term. But when we take the concept back in time to Greek philosophers and forward onto our own times, we recognize more inclusive forms of materialism (...) as well as complex interplays with non-materialist thought about the place of matter in reality, including Christian philosophy and German idealism. We define philosophical materialism in its most general way both positively (the identification of reality with matter understood as changeability and plurality) and negatively (the negation of disembodied living beings and hypostatized ideas). This inclusive approach to philosophical materialism offers a new light to illuminate a critical history of the concept of matter and materialism from Ancient Greece to the present that is also attentive to scientific developments. By following the most important connections and discontinuities among theoretical frameworks on the idea of matter, we present a general thread that offers a rich and plural, but highly cohesive, field of investigation. Finally, we propose building on rich non-reductionist materialist philosophies, such as Mario Bunge’s systemic materialism and Gustavo Bueno’s discontinuous materialism, to elaborate powerful theoretical alternatives to both physicalism and spiritualism. (shrink)

As is clear from the multiple references to knowledge in the proemium of fragment B1, Parmenides presented himself to his audiences as one who had achieved a profound insight into the nature of ‘what-is’. In support of this claim he conducted an elenchos or ‘testing’ of the ways of inquiry available for thinking, in the process revealing a set of sêmata or ‘signs’ indicating that what-is an eternal, indivisible, and unchanging plenum. In each of these respects, Parmenides was (...) speaking the language of discovery heard elsewhere in early Greek poetry. Similarly, his claim that we can neither learn nor know about what-is-not (hence must not say or think ‘it is not’) was justified by the ordinary meaning of the ancient Greek verbs for learning and knowing. Strikingly, Parmenides’ revisionary metaphysics rested in large measure on a widely shared view of what can be learned, known, and made known to others. -/- . (shrink)