Metaphysical Puzzles Research Articles

Aristotle on Artifacts: A Metaphysical Puzzle

Aristotle on Artifacts: A Metaphysical Puzzle

Dancing at Lughnasa: Unexcused Absence

Though the memory play represents an increasingly familiar and substantial sub-genre of drama, its conventions — and what might be called its "ontology" — have generally avoided direct scrutiny. By asking the audience to accept the framing narrator's substantiality, but to take the other characters as aspects of that narrator's memory, the memory play poses something of a metaphysical puzzle: namely, how to account for our ability to see into the world of the narrator's memory. Do we assume some telepathic contact with the narrator, or does he possess the ability to make the objects of his memory materialize? Admittedly, similar questions were raised about how the audience at a Shakespearean drama could account for being so swiftly transported across the Mediterranean, and were famously dismissed as shortsightedly pedantic by Samuel Johnson. One of the most often noted hallmarks of modem drama, however, is the employment of metatheatrical techniques that implicitly or explicitly challenge spectators to a conscious examination of their assumptions toward what they observe behind the curtain.

The Ideal and the Historical in the Christology of Wilhelm Herrmann: The Promise and the Perils of Revisionary Christology

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Ideal and the Historical in the Christology of Wilhelm Herrmann: The Promise and the Perils of Revisionary ChristologyBrent W. SocknessBrent W. Sockness Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 72, Number 3Jul., 1992 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/488917 Views: 5Total views on this site Copyright 1992 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Advancing the Chicago School of Pragmatic Sociology: The Life and Work of Tamotsu Shibutani*

Tamotsu Shibutani is a contemporary proponent of the Chicago School of pragmatic sociology who has devoted his academic efforts to using the Chicago School of pragmatism to analyze problems of contemporary social life and to refine the theoretical tools available to the discipline of sociology. He has evaluated such topics as the Japanese relocation centers, the social construction of rumor, demoralization in Army life, the dynamics of ethnic stratification, and the resolution of ethnic tensions. Shibutani's books on social psychology and general sociology synthesize micro and macro variables, with careful attention to both agency and social control. His work is free of metaphysical puzzles and is true to the scientific method, clearly reflecting the essence of the Chicago School of pragmatic sociology.

When Are Objects Parts?

That there are deep and intractable metaphysical problems about material objects is evident from the unresolved antinomies and paradoxes involving material objects. The best known of these are about artifacts, the puzzle of the Ship of Theseus being the best known of all. Others, at least as worthy of remark, involve living organisms. If a cat's tail is cut off, for example, it seems natural to describe this episode in words that appear to imply that the cat becomes identical with a former proper part of itself-a violation of the attractive modal principle that a thing and another thing cannot become a thing and itself. Or, talking of cats, consider a cat that is composed at t of certain atoms arranged in a certain way; it is at least logically possible for those very same atoms to be arranged in exactly the same way at some later time, and then to compose a different cat; but that apparently implies that certain small material objects can compose one large material object at t, and, even though arranged in precisely the same way, compose a distinct material object later. How could that be? All, or almost all, of the antinomies and paradoxes that the philosophical study of material objects is heir to involve the notion of parthood. I believe, though I shall not argue for this thesis, that most of the great, intractable metaphysical puzzles about material objects could be seen to have quite obvious solutions by one who

The Problem of Future Contingencies

A RISTOTLE believed that any statement which asserts or 1A denies, concerning a contingent event, that it is going to occur, is neither true nor false, the world being as yet indeterminate with regard to the existence or nonexistence of such things.' Few doctrines from antiquity have engendered more controversy than this one, as indicated by the rash of polemic that has broken out over it again in the last few years.2 Medieval philosophers, following Boethius, found in it a thorny problem of reconciling liberty with divine omniscience; Lukasiewicz, more recently, revived Aristotle's arguments to provide an interpretation for his three-valued logic, while other writers still find it necessary to take account of essentially the same arguments in dealing with metaphysical problems of time. Nearly all the Scholastics discarded Aristotle's arguments as inconsistent with Christian presuppositions, while modern logicians have tended to dismiss them as paralogisms. C. A. Baylis rejected all of them, as reinterpreted by Lukasiewicz, as fallacious,3 and W. V. Quine has disdained one of the conclusions as "Aristotle's fantasy."4 Applying them to metaphysical puzzles, Gilbert Ryle treats such