Metaphysical Arguments Research Articles

El argumento fundamental de la metafísica cartesiana: hacia una interpretación dialéctica

Este artículo ofrece razones iniciales para interpretar en forma dialéctica las “pruebas de la existencia divina” que Descartes ofrece en sus Meditaciones III y V. Empiezo indicando algunos precedentes entre los comentaristas contemporáneos, y también señalo cómo históricamente, esa manera de abordar problemas fundamentales arranca en los clásicos griegos. En segundo lugar muestro cómo un procedimiento dialéctico podría resolver un conjunto de problemas que, en principio, incluye al tradicional “círculo cartesiano”. (No obstante, reconstruir en detalle la solución dialéctica, putativamente cartesiana, queda para otra ocasión.) Por último intento mostrar que no es implausible atribuirle a Descartes una argumentación metafísica del tipo indicado; para ello esgrimo un pequeño conjunto de argumentos textuales. Mi conclusión es que este tipo de interpretaciones merecen explorarse más detenidamente.

Why Do Certain States of Affairs Call Out for Explanation? A Critique of Two Horwichian Accounts

Motivated by examples, many philosophers believe that there is a significant distinction between states of affairs that are striking and therefore call for explanation and states of affairs that are not striking. This idea underlies several influential debates in metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, normative theory, philosophy of modality, and philosophy of science but is not fully elaborated or explored. This paper aims to address this lack of clear explanation first by clarifying the epistemological issue at hand. Then it introduces an initially attractive account for strikingness that is inspired by the work of Paul Horwich (1982) and adopted by a number of philosophers. The paper identifies two logically distinct accounts that have both been attributed to Horwich and then argues that, when properly interpreted, they can withstand former criticisms. The final two sections present a new set of considerations against both Horwichian accounts that avoid the shortcomings of former critiques. It remains to be seen whether an adequate account of strikingness exists.

The Neurocognitive Bases of Human Volition

Volition refers to a capacity for endogenous action, particularly goal-directed endogenous action, shared by humans and some other animals. It has long been controversial whether a specific set of cognitive processes for volition exist in the human brain, and much scientific thinking on the topic continues to revolve around traditional metaphysical debates about free will. At its origins, scientific psychology had a strong engagement with volition. This was followed by a period of disenchantment, or even outright hostility, during the second half of the twentieth century. In this review, I aim to reinvigorate the scientific approach to volition by, first, proposing a range of different features that constitute a new, neurocognitively realistic working definition of volition. I then focus on three core features of human volition: its generativity (the capacity to trigger actions), its subjectivity (the conscious experiences associated with initiating voluntary actions), and its teleology (the goal-directed quality of some voluntary actions). I conclude that volition is a neurocognitive process of enormous societal importance and susceptible to scientific investigation.

Revamping the Metaphysics of Ethnobiological Classification

Ethnobiology has a long tradition of metaphysical debates about the “naturalness,” “objectivity,” “reality,” and “universality” of classifications. The work of Brent Berlin has been especially influential in developing a “convergence metaphysics” that explains cross-cultural similarities of knowledge systems through shared recognition of objective discontinuities in nature. Despite its influence on the development of the field, convergence metaphysics has largely fallen out of favor as contemporary ethnobiologists tend to emphasize the locality and diversity of classificatory practices. The aim of this article is twofold. First, I provide a historical account of the rise and fall of convergence metaphysics in ethnobiology. I show how convergence metaphysics emerged as an innovative theoretical program in the wake of the “cognitive revolution” and the “modern evolutionary synthesis” but failed to incorporate both theoretical insights and political concerns that gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. Second, I develop a positive proposal of how to engage with metaphysical issues in ethnobiology. By integrating traditional research on convergence of classifications with more nuanced accounts of distinctly local categories, a revamped metaphysics of ethnobiological classification can make substantial contributions to debates about ontological difference in anthropology and about the relation between applied and theoretical ethnobiology.

HOBBES AND SCIENTIFIC PRACTICE IN THE LEVIATHAN

Hobbes in the seventeenth century (1639 - 1668), we must emphasize that suggests that taste or infatuation for science bodies (physical), because as he reminds us at the end of the leviathan in 1651; you are happy to return to their initial speculations about (De Corpore) natural bodies. (Hobbes Leviatã, 2003, p. 22). Such luck with these initial observations, we used to locate a context of discussion on the topic of science in the seventeenth century in England, specifically in one of the authors as Kuhn; in late modernity, they propose a new paradigm of scientific knowledge as had been developed by the Scholastics; perhaps its medieval metaphysical knowledge. However, much it has been written about this particular issue. Excuses are many references to the subject in the person of Hobbes; as one of the first authors who knew how to take the first steps on what we now know as science in particular. I do not use science or sacred metaphysical arguments; but he wanted to investigate or propose arguments away from religion to build what was known as truth, from other fundamental axes; different to the subject of God.

Serious Actualism and Higher-Order Predication

Serious actualism is the prima facie plausible thesis that things couldn’t have been related while being nothing. The thesis plays an important role in a number of arguments in metaphysics, e.g., in Plantinga’s argument (Plantinga Philosophical Studies, 44, 1–20 1983) for the claim that propositions do not ontologically depend on the things that they are about and in Williamson’s argument (Williamson 2002) for the claim that he, Williamson, is necessarily something. Salmon (Philosophical Perspectives, 1, 49–108 1987) has put forward that which is, arguably, the most pressing challenge to serious actualists. Salmon’s objection is based on a scenario intended to elicit the judgment that merely possible entities may nonetheless be actually referred to, and so may actually have properties. It is shown that predicativism, the thesis that names are true of their bearers, provides the resources for replying to Salmon’s objection. In addition, an argument for serious actualism based on Stephanou (Philosophical Review, 116(2), 219–250 2007) is offered. Finally, it is shown that once serious actualism is conjoined with some minimal assumptions, it implies property necessitism, the thesis that necessarily all properties are necessarily something, as well as a strong comprehension principle for higher-order modal logic according to which for every condition there necessarily is the property of being a thing satisfying that condition.

Sider's Ontologese Introduction Instructions

In response to Hirsch's deflationary arguments, Sider attempts to introduce a special Ontologese quantifier to preserve the substantivity of fundamental debates in metaphysics. He claims that this strategy can be effected by two distinct means, one of which is a list of instructions for metaphysicians, which he argues suffice to give the new quantifier a meaning that carves nature at the joints. I argue that these instructions will not allow someone to start speaking Ontologese if their prior language is sufficiently deviant with respect to it, and that natural languages may be in just such a position.

Structure-preserving representations, constitution, and the relative a priori

The aim of this paper is to show that a comprehensive account of the role of representations in science should reconsider some neglected theses of the classical philosophy of science proposed in the first decades of the twentieth century. More precisely, it is argued that the representational accounts of Helmholtz and Hertz, in which the concept of structure-preservation plays an essential role, still deserve attention for contemporary debates. Following Reichenbach, structure-preserving representations provide a useful device for formulating an up-to-date version of a (relativized) Kantian a priori. An essential feature of modern scientific representations is their mathematical character. That is, representations can be conceived as (partially) structure-preserving maps or functions. This observation suggests an interesting but neglected perspective on the history and philosophy of this concept, namely, that structure-preserving representations are closely related to a priori elements of scientific knowledge. Reichenbach’s early theory of a relativized constitutive but non-apodictic a priori component of scientific knowledge provides a further elaboration of Kantian aspects of scientific representation. To cope with the dynamic aspects of the evolution of scientific knowledge, Cassirer proposed a re-interpretation of the concept of representation that conceived of a particular representation as only one phase in a continuous process determined by pragmatic considerations. Pragmatic aspects of representations are further elaborated in the classical account of C.I. Lewis and the more modern of Hasok Chang who characterized in certain relativized representational a priori assumptions as pragmatically justified metaphysical arguments.

Counterpart Theory and Its Applications

<p><em>Inspired by the many-worlds interpretation in quantum theory, </em><em>I present the concepts of “nousor” and the theory of counterpart, by which </em><em>I make a metaphysical argument that the existence of other parallel worlds could be brought to light by dreams, </em><em>and</em><em> </em><em>that </em><em>counterparts in different wor</em><em>l</em><em>ds can exchange information through the nousor containing information packets</em><em> to ensure the oneness of counterparts</em><em>. Many worlds and all lives there follow the </em><em>rules which are permanent and can not be violated</em><em>. Based on the counterpart theory, I propose a new view on the origin and meaning of </em><em>d</em><em>éjà vu, Planck’s problem</em><em>, and actual dreams, to</em><em> offer a novel way of thinking and a problem-solving paradigm. Governments should collect citizen’s dreams and use group dreams as a critical indicator to predicate catastrophes. </em></p>

Hegel’s Treatment of Predication Considered in the Light of a Logic for the Actual World

AbstractOne prominent feature of analytic metaphysics in the second half of the twentieth century was the revival of metaphysical debate over modality, and in this paper I suggest that a particular position that emerged within this debate, ‘modal actualism’, bears a striking resemblance to the way that Hegel discusses modal notions in the final chapter of Book 2 of the Science of Logic, ‘Wirklichkeit’ or ‘Actuality’. Modal actualists opposed David Lewis’s counter-intuitive claims about the existence of alternate possible worlds, and aimed to reconcile the reality of alternate possibilities with the common-sense idea of the actual world as all there is. Like Hegel in the chapter ‘Actuality’, they thus argue that possible alternatives to the actual world must, somehow, exist within the actual world. Here I approach these issues via the ideas of John N. Findlay who, in the 1950s, had attempted to reintroduce Hegel into an Anglophone philosophical culture, but who also influenced the later development of modal actualism via his influence on the modal logician, Arthur Prior. Like certain actualists, Findlay distinguished between two modes of predication in order to distinguish, but relate, judgements about the actual from those about the possible. This predicative dualism is strikingly similar to the way Hegel distinguishes two types of predication in his treatment of judgement in Book 3 of the Science of Logic. Reading Hegel’s dualistic account of judgement structure against this background enables us to see how it was meant to provide a logical framework for the ‘actualist’ metaphysics he earlier sketched in the chapter, ‘Actuality’.

The resurgence of metaphysics in late analytic philosophy: A constructive critique

The purpose of the first part of this paper is to examine the major turning point events that transformed the attitude of analytic philosophers towards metaphysical discourse. We will focus on one such turning point, the modal revolution, based on the resources of possible world semantics, developed by Kripke (who devised suitable models for modal logic) and by philosophers such as Lewis and Plantinga (who offered influential metaphysical interpretations of those models). We shall see how the modal revolution, by bringing an unprecedented change in the way in which modal notions were understood by analytic philosophers, was central to the revival of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy. Yet, analytic philosophers encountered serious obstacles in their attempt to understand the ontological and epistemological foundations and implications of one of the most basic notions of the modal revolution, that of a possible world. In the second part of the paper, it will be argued that, surprisingly enough, the work of the pre-Kripkean “middle” analytic philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, especially as interpreted and reconstructed by Robert Brandom, can perhaps throw light on the semantic, epistemic and ontological dimension of possible world talk. Sellars does this mainly through 1) (what Brandom calls) the “Kant-Sellars thesis about modality”, 2) his understanding of modal discourse as non-descriptive, expressive, categorial and “metaliguistic”, and 3) his nominalism about abstract entities. Thus, it will be suggested that the implications of this Sellars-inspired position are such that make it an unexpectedly relevant and novel contribution to contemporary debates in analytic metaphysics.

On Quantitative and Qualitative Parsimony

AbstractThe distinction between quantitative and qualitative parsimony is supposed to allow David Lewis to dismiss one of the charges against his modal realism: that is, the charge of bloated ontology. The aim of this paper is to undermine Lewis's response to this objection. In order to do this, a distinction between multipliable and nonmultipliable objects is introduced. Based on this it is argued that the acceptance of Lewis's response requires one to believe in modal realism in the first place—that is, one has to believe in the view that the existence of nonactual spatiotemporal worlds does not affect the quality of the ontological commitment. Although the paper focuses on the problem of the metaphysics of possible worlds, this should be regarded merely as a case study. Accordingly, the results of this analysis should find applications in other metaphysical debates as well.

Augustine and the Crisis of the 380s in Christian Doctrinal Argumentation

Tensions within Christianity over the form that doctrinal arguments should employ reached a point of crisis in the 380s. As educated men increasingly embraced Christianity, the resources of dialectic and metaphysical argument recommended themselves, but their use ran counter to Christianity’s sense of itself as an oppositional discourse and also to its inclusion of the uneducated. The Constantinopolitan Creed and the Theodosian decrees of that decade changed the nature of doctrinal argumentation, but to understand the intellectual forces driving argumentation to the citation-dependent form that dominated in the fifth century we can learn best from the earliest writings of Augustine.

Images

Images Pascal Schwaighofer Royal Batik It might be risky and somehow shallow to start by saying that the featured artworks "deal" with traces. After all, which artwork does not? Opening a discussion on artifacts by comparing them with traces might lock you up in a mental maze. To put it simply, should we consider traces to be anonymous and mute marks or meaningful signs demanding to be deciphered? Artifacts, indeed, might force you to decide for the latter, but then we might ask: do they really "demand" such a thing? And to complicate it a little bit, one might continue and wonder: do these signs refer to something beyond or "just" to themselves? The main reason I am cautious is my supposition that in this case some of the questions related to traces have become tightly "wrapped" into a form and, instead of unfolding them, it might be more rewarding to contemplate their folded shape. I am saying this not for the sake of mystification or some hermetic détournement, but because sometimes fossilized "wrinkles" get easily spoiled, and the better way to appreciate their untranslatable sinuosity is to keep them "unaltered." To avoid that, therefore, I will refrain from quoting, and try to contain, let's say, theoretical speculations. To start with, Sketches for a Flag (Royal Batik) is one of several outcomes of a longterm project with the overarching title Royal Batik. As the name suggests, it has as its starting point the wax-resist—mainly beeswax—dyeing process called batik. The etymology of the ancient craft reflects its Javanese and Proto-Austronesian roots referring to "writing" or "tattooing," whereas the contemporary word is the result of British and Dutch colonial butchering of the original term. The second work is called La mala mimesis; plaster casts of framed honeycombs. While plaster molding is renowned as the pivotal process that facilitated for centuries—and still does—copying and reproducing forms ad libitum, forcing bees to nest into frames is a practice that allows modern apiculture to exploit these laborious tiny workers also, almost—recent bees' colony collapses rectify—ad libitum. It goes without saying that in both artworks technique and history or, in other words, material culture and politics, meet and mingle; making a thorough "unpacking" difficult. I will attempt, nevertheless, to delve first into the craft, or perhaps the technical aspects. For many centuries plaster models were considered in the Western tradition only for planning, sketches, or transitory processes. Particularly for sculpture, plaster was considered handy either for scale models in the planning phase or as molds for metal casting. Gessoes sculpture allowed the Maestro—usually assisted by a number of anonymous apprentices—to better control the carving process by transposing with pantographs the statue's features and proportions from model to stone. At the end of the nineteenth century, plaster was no longer deemed a poor and transitory material and was elevated to the realm of creativity. Before that shift, however, plaster casting had already been popular among physicians, ethnologists, botanists, and zoologists. Casts of fruits and vegetables, [End Page 122] animals, and body parts—particularly those deformed by pathologies or not complying with "Western" traits—were common pieces of bourgeois and Eurocentric curiosity. The early birds, that is, the artists who introduced the casting of body parts in the sculpting process were at first labeled by their contemporaries as cheaters. Among the detractors, one might find big names such as Charles Baudelaire and Auguste Rodin. If we consider their historical context, it is no surprise that the liberal arts felt the threatening pressure of impressive new technologies. Plaster casting was in fact associated with photography: the latter a menace for painters, the former for sculptors. Having said that, the strong resistance cannot be reduced only to a reaction against technical reproduction and loss of authority. To cut short a long analysis, up to the end of nineteenth century, artistic disputes took place in the borderlines of metaphysical debates between "realists" and "animists." As surprising as it might sound, there is something photographic about batik. By this I mean that phenomenologically speaking it is reminiscent of the photosensitive chemical process. Fabric soaked in wax becomes...

Separation and its language in Plato

In this paper I present an original interpretation of the concept of separation in Plato. First, I argue that despite the fact that the ancient Greek word for “separation” almost never appears in the metaphysical discussions of Plato’s dialogues, the key role of the concept of separation in Plato’s metaphysics can be attested by the importance the platonic tradition gives to it. Therefore, understanding separation in Plato seems to be a problem we must face, but we do not have a clear strategy to solve it. My strategy will be to tackle this problem by looking at a specific passage ( Phd. 74 b7-c5) in which Plato distinguishes the ontological status of Forms and sensible things. Through the analysis of this passage and its relations to another metaphysical argument in Plato ( Smp . 211a2-5), I hope to show that Plato’s careful choice of words and syntactical structure of sentences aims to distinguish two ontologically different types of entities: the unrelational, separate Forms, and the relational sensible things. Keywords: Plato, separation, ontology.

Substitution in a sense

The Reference Principle (RP) states that co-referring expressions are everywhere intersubstitutable salva congruitate. On first glance, (RP) looks like a truism, but a truism with some bite: (RP) transforms difficult philosophical questions about co-reference into easy grammatical questions about substitutability. This has led a number of philosophers to think that we can use (RP) to make short work of certain longstanding metaphysical debates. For example, it has been suggested that all we need to do to show that the predicate ‘( ) is a horse’ does not refer to a property is point out that ‘( ) is a horse’ and ‘the property of being a horse’ are not everywhere intersubstitutable salva congruitate. However, when we understand ‘substitution’ in the simplest and most straightforward way, (RP) is no truism; in fact, natural languages are full of counterexamples to the principle. In this paper, I introduce a new notion of substitution, and then develop and argue for a version of (RP) that is immune to these counterexamples. Along the way I touch on the following topics: the relation between argument forms and their natural language instances; the reification of sense; the difference between terms and predicates; and the relation between reference and disquotation. I end by arguing that my new version of (RP) cannot be used to settle metaphysical debates quite as easily as some philosophers would like.

Findlay’s Hegel: Idealism as Modal Actualism

ABSTRACTHere, I suggest a hitherto relatively unexplored way beyond the opposed Aristotelian realist and Kantian idealist approaches that divide recent interpretations of the categories or “thought determinations” of Hegel’s Logic, by locating his idealism within the terrain of recent debates in modal metaphysics. In particular, I return to the outlook of the first philosopher to attempt to bring Hegel into the analytic conversation, John Niemeyer Findlay, and consider Hegel’s idealism as instantiating the metaphysical position that, following the work of Findlay’s former student, Arthur Prior, has come to be called “modal actualism”.

Semantic deflationism deflated

Deflationism is the view that certain metaphysical debates are defective, leaving it open whether the defect is best explained in semantic, conceptual, or epistemic terms. Local semantic deflationism is the thesis that familiar metaphysical debates, which appear to be about the existence and identity of material objects, are merely verbal. It’s a form of local deflationism because it restricts itself to one particular area of metaphysics. It’s a form of semantic deflationism because the defect it purports to identify in these debates is explained in terms of the broadly semantic notion of a merely verbal disputation. Three questions about this thesis are asked and answered here. Does a commitment to the principle of interpretive charity support it? No. Does it avoid the problems that plagued Carnap? No. Does it support a linguistic turn with respect to questions about the nature of material things? No. The central take-home message is that local semantic deflationism is unstable: advocates of the view must (on pain of inconsistency) admit that debates about material coincidence and identity are substantive.

Making Sense of Interlevel Causation in Mechanisms from a Metaphysical Perspective

According to the new mechanistic approach, an acting entity is at a lower mechanistic level than another acting entity if and only if the former is a component in the mechanism for the latter. Craver and Bechtel (Biol Philos 22(4):547–563, 2007. doi: 10.1007/s10539-006-9028-8 ) argue that a consequence of this view is that there cannot be causal interactions between acting entities at different mechanistic levels. Their main reason seems to be what I will call the Metaphysical Argument: things at different levels of a mechanism are related as part and whole; wholes and their parts cannot be related as cause and effect; hence, interlevel causation in mechanisms is impossible. I will analyze this argument in more detail and show under which conditions it is valid. This analysis will reveal that interlevel causation in mechanisms is indeed possible, if we take seriously the idea that the relata of the mechanistic level relation are acting entities and accept a slightly modified notion of a mechanistic level that is highly plausible in the light of the first clarification.

Moorean Arguments and Moral Revisionism

G. E. Moore famously argued against skepticism and idealism by appealing to their inconsistency with alleged certainties, like the existence of his own hands. Recently, some philosophers have offered analogous arguments against revisionary views about ethics such as metaethical error theory. These arguments appeal to the inconsistency of error theory with seemingly obvious moral claims like “it is wrong to torture an innocent child just for fun.” It might seem that such ‘Moorean’ arguments in ethics will stand or fall with Moore’s own arguments in metaphysics and epistemology, in virtue of their shared structure. I argue that this is not so. I suggest that the epistemic force of the canonical Moorean arguments can best be understood to rest on asymmetries in indirect evidence. I then argue that this explanation suggests that Moorean arguments are less promising in ethics than they are against Moore’s own targets. I conclude by examining the competing attempt to vindicate Moorean arguments by appealing to Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium.