Work In Metaphysics Research Articles

Metaphysics and social justice

AbstractMetaphysics is the branch of philosophy that aims to give a theoretical account of what there is and what it is like. Social justice movements seek to bring about justice in a society by changing policy, law, practice, and culture. Evidently, these activities are very different from one another. The goal of this article is to identify some positive connections between recent work in metaphysics and social justice movements. I outline three ways in which metaphysical work on social reality can make a contribution to movements seeking social justice, viz., (1) by providing basic categories and concepts useful for clarifying and defending claims made by social justice movements; (2) by offering accounts of the natures of social categories, structures, and institutions that these movements seek to change; and (3) by contributing to “unmasking” or “debunking” projects that reveal putatively natural arrangements to be social in nature and hence subject to moral critique, alteration, and possibly eradication.

The Only Extant, Complete, and Original Hebrew Commentary on the Entire Metaphysics of Aristotle: Eli Habilio and the Influence of Scotism

AbstractAt the end of the fifteenth century, the Castilian-Aragonian Eli Habilio wrote what is now the only extant, complete, and original Hebrew commentary on the entire Metaphysics of Aristotle. This commentary is short, about 15 folio pages long, and consists almost entirely of quotations from Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the early fourteenth-century translation of Qalonimos ben Qalonimos. Yet Habilio elsewhere expresses only disdain for Averroes and hopes that Jews will turn away from Averroes to read Scotus’ metaphysical works instead. The author’s claim is that Habilio’s Commentary is intended to supplement his translation of Antonius Andreas’ questions on the Metaphysics and provide a Hebrew summary of the most read Hebrew version of the Metaphysics (viz., Averroes’ Middle Commentary) that would choose its words in such a way as not to contradict Scotus and in some cases even to encourage its readers to seek out a Scotist approach.

Truth, Predication and a Family of Contingent Paradoxes

In truth theory one aims at general formal laws governing the attribution of truth to statements. Gupta’s and Belnap’s revision-theoretic approach provides various well-motivated theories of truth, in particular T* and T#, which tame the Liar and related paradoxes without a Tarskian hierarchy of languages. In property theory, one similarly aims at general formal laws governing the predication of properties. To avoid Russell’s paradox in this area a recourse to type theory is still popular, as testified by recent work in formal metaphysics by Williamson and Hale. There is a contingent Liar that has been taken to be a problem for type theory. But this is because this Liar has been presented without an explicit recourse to a truth predicate. Thus, type theory could avoid this paradox by incorporating such a predicate and accepting an appropriate theory of truth. There is however a contingent paradox of predication that more clearly undermines the viability of type theory. It is then suggested that a type-free property theory is a better option. One can pursue it, by generalizing the revision-theoretic approach to predication, as it has been done by Orilia with his system P*, based on T*. Although Gupta and Belnap do not explicitly declare a preference for T# over T*, they show that the latter has some advantages, such as the recovery of intuitively acceptable principles concerning truth and a better reconstruction of informal arguments involving this notion. A type-free system based on T# rather than T* extends these advantages to predication and thus fares better than P* in the intended applications of property theory.

Merely partial definition and the analysis of knowledge

Two families of positions dominate debates over a metaphysically reductive analysis of knowledge. Traditionalism holds that knowledge has a complete, uniquely identifying analysis, while knowledge-first epistemology contends that knowledge is primitive—admitting of no reductive analysis whatsoever. Drawing on recent work in metaphysics, I argue that these alternatives fail to exhaust the available possibilities. Knowledge may have a merely partial analysis: a real definition that distinguishes it from some, but not all other things. I demonstrate that this position is attractive; it evades concerns that its rivals face.

Proyección histórica de Francisco Suárez: Xavier Zubiri

La obra epistemológica y metafísica de Francisco Suárez supuso un cambio importante en la filosofía escolástica. Por ello ha sido denominada como la Segunda Escolástica. En realidad, más que un «cambio» o «reforma» del tomismo, es una verdadera alternativa. En Suárez tienen su eco el pensamiento nominalista y la ciencia moderna. Estos puntos de referencia nos hacen entender por qué Suárez dijo lo que dijo. En alguna manera intuyó lo que su tiempo significaba. El tomismo puro asumió una interpretación «dura» del dualismo griego y esto había dado lugar a la teoría de la prevalencia del universal en el proceso cognitivo. El nominalismo y la ciencia moderna no iban en esta línea. Para ellos, la mente humana se construía a partir de la experiencia, en la línea del sensismo y del empirismo posterior. Suárez, en efecto, cambió también de perspectiva, haciéndola más conforme con su tiempo, al reconstruir el proceso del conocimiento a partir de la teoría epistemológica de la prevalencia del singular sobre el universal en el proceso cognitivo. Durante los siglos siguientes, la obra de Suárez supuso una alternativa eficaz frente al tomismo puro, sobre todo por la obra docente de los jesuitas. Por ello, el estilo filosófico de Suárez se extendió por toda Europa y marcó una línea de presencia filosófica en España. Creemos que puede hablarse de una constante filosófica española que recoge las grandes líneas de Suárez. Esta manera de pensar se ha proyectado, o ha fructificado, en el siglo XX, en autores como Amor Ruibal y Zubiri. En este artículo mostraremos la conexión entre la epistemología de Suárez y la de Zubiri.

Natural Kinds and Natural Kind Terms: Myth and Reality

The article examines the role of natural kinds in semantic theorizing, which has largely been conducted in isolation from relevant work in science, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. We argue ...

ОСНОВНЫЕ АСПЕКТЫ МЕТАФИЗИКИ ВЛАДИМИРА НАБОКОВА

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov is a distinctive representative of Russian literature in the 20th century. His works are studied by many famous artists in many countries. The conciseness and beauty of his language are unique characteristics of Nabokov’s creation. His works show great philosophical depth, high moral values, and aesthetic accomplishments. His erudition has also attracted the attention of the world. This paper mainly expounds his metaphysical ideas: Nabokov’s metaphysics is mainly expressed in his great understanding of the world and his ability to understand and his longing for something grand and incomparable. His philosophical, ethical and moral ideas have incorporated the views of various literary schools, formalism, and structuralism at home and abroad. In addition, this article analyzes the relationship between philosophy, ethics, linguistics, reality and non-reality, reality and lies through the study of many works of the author; it clearly defines the distinction between “game” and “acting”; explained a series of problems of the author’s creation techniques; summed up the themes such as “time and permanence”, “memory and memories” in Nabokov’s works. These are all reflected frequently in Nabokov’s works. It is precisely because of this that his works have also been studied as metaphysical works for the public.

Skepticism and Responsibility: Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions

ABSTRACTPaul Auster’s novels evoke with staunch sincerity what the American philosopher Stanley Cavell calls “the responsibility you bear” for your words and actions alike. I argue that Cavell’s ongoing inquiry into topics such as community and skepticism, informed by nineteenth-century Transcendentalist philosophy, can be extended to Auster’s fiction to help illuminate the ethical underpinnings of his metaphysical work. In my analysis of the author’s 2002 novel, The Book of Illusions, I show how Auster subverts the postmodern paradigm of deconstructing the humanist subject as a locus of ethical conflicts and choices. A meditation on assuming responsibility for one’s own actions and their sometimes tragic consequences, the novel rejects any claim to an unsatisfying relativism of “anything goes.” In a story obsessively occupied with guilt and penance, characters are held accountable for their mistakes and neglects. Shaped by chance events, unanticipated encounters, and deadly accidents, The Book of Illusions confirms Auster’s view of the random workings of the universe. At the same time, the novel negotiates Cavellian skepticism by advocating an ethics of love, companionship, and responsibility for the other.

Social Mereology

ABSTRACT:What kind of entity is a committee, a book group, or a band? I argue that committees and other such social groups are concrete, composite particulars, having ordinary human beings among their parts. Thus, the committee members are literally parts of the committee. This mereological view of social groups was popular several decades ago but fell out of favor following influential objections from David-Hillel Ruben. Recent years have seen a tidal wave of work in metaphysics, including the metaphysics of parts and wholes. We now have the resources to rehabilitate the mereological view of social groups. I show how this can be done and why we should bother.

Intrinsic Value and the Last Last Man

AbstractEven if you were the last person on Earth, you should not cut down all the trees—or so goes the Last Man thought experiment, which has been taken to show that nature has intrinsic value. But ‘Last Man’ is caught on a dilemma. If Last Man is too far inside the anthropocentric circle, so to speak, his actions cannot be indicative of intrinsic value (a Local problem). If Last Man is cast too far outside the anthropocentric circle, though, then value terms lose their cogency (a Global problem). The experiment must satisfy conditions in a seemingly impossible ‘goldilocks’ zone. To this end I propose a new version, the Ultramodal Last Man, which appeals to Routley's work in metaphysics and non‐classical logic. With this ‘Last Last Man’, I argue that the Local/Global dilemma is resolved: impossible equations balance in ultramodal space. For defenders and critics alike, this helps to clarify the demands of intrinsic value, and renews a role for non‐standard logics in value theory.

Groups and Oppression

Oppression is a form of injustice that occurs when one social group is subordinated while another is privileged, and oppression is maintained by a variety of different mechanisms including social norms, stereotypes, and institutional rules. A key feature of oppression is that it is perpetrated by and affects social groups. In this article I show that because of the central role that groups play in theories of oppression, those theories face significant, and heretofore mostly unrecognized, metaphysical problems. I then identify resources from analytic metaphysics that can be used to address these problems. I show that, although we should not be pessimistic about the prospects for a viable theory of oppression, it will take serious metaphysical work to develop a plausible ontology of oppression, and existing theories have for the most part failed to respond to this challenge.

On The Philosophy of Poetry, ed. John Gibson

On The Philosophy of Poetry, ed. John Gibson A. J. Nickerson The Philosophy of Poetry. “Of” intimates something more than copular coexistence. This could be the systematic and propositional attempt to define what poetry is, subjecting poetry to philosophical investigation with its distinctive questions and processes of inquiry. As a literary critic, however, I heard the title The Philosophy of Poetry as an assertion of poetry’s discursive, cognitive value: it suggests there are varieties of philosophic thought, of which one might be the poetic organization of understanding. Between these inversions there are less exclusive (and less partisan) ways of imagining the relationship. The philosophy of poetry could be the attitude it assumes toward the world—its disinterested revelation of truth, or ruminating consideration of it, or resistance to its pressures. It could be the Aristotelian virtue of practical poetic commitment to propriety, discipline, and truthfulness. Or, following Heidegger, it could be poetry’s metaphysical work of measuring man’s existence in the world. One might expect (I did) this ambiguous coordination to be a strategic move to reconfigure the relation of philosophy and poetry through attention to the subtleties of their coexistence and interference. In practice, however, this volume is oriented away from the idiosyncratic particulars of poetry and toward establishing the philosophy of literature [End Page 309] as a subset of philosophy, using poetry to correct the earlier prose-heavy studies and so “attain the expansiveness and openness our friends in other areas of analytic aesthetics have already achieved.”1 The book presupposes analytic philosophy to be the basic and proper model of enquiry. Ten of the twelve essays are by members of philosophy faculties: John Gibson, Peter Lamarque, Ronald de Sousa, Jesse Prinz and Eric Mandelbaum, Sherri Irvin, Simon Blackburn, Anna Christina Soy Ribeiro, Roger Scruton, Alison Denham, and Richard Eldridge. Only Angela Leighton and Tzachi Zamir represent the literature department. They draw on a few philosophers (Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Wollheim) and repeatedly cite other contributors (Richard Eldridge’s Beyond Representation: Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination, Peter Lamarque’s The Philosophy of Literature). This in-house—or rather, in-faculty—execution of a project that is necessarily cross-disciplinary is symptomatic of a low view of what literary criticism and literature might contribute to philosophy. This finds expression in the volume’s confessed reluctance to engage with poetry. De Sousa—at once pleased and saddened by his antipathy but typical in it—describes how he once “did passionately want to be a poet” but is now “only an occasional and always a highly prejudiced reader of poetry” (p. 37). Irvin in her essay on “unreadable poems” laments having to “consort with so many unfriendly poems” (p. 92). On the occasions when poems are included, choice seems circumscribed by a limited and popular acquaintance with poetry—Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Unsurprisingly, this inattention to poetry corresponds to a clumsiness in handling texts. This is evident in the apparently hasty editing of the volume, which is riddled with misspellings, lacunae, and ugly footnoting. The literary critic will also find it evident in some crude oversimplifications about literary history (Lamarque’s discussion of “supposed commonplaces about poetry”) and poetic effect (Prinz and Mandelbaum: “Rossetti uses rhyme and repetition to create a sense of rhythm” [p. 72]). This hampers the project of an analytic critique of poetry. Prinz and Mandelbaum’s essay “Poetic Opacity: How to Paint Things with Words” is a badly spliced and uneven composition. It is also desperately limited in its appreciation of poetic effect: we are told “the form of a poem is heightened,” “enjambment heightens the reader’s attention,” “bodily imagery … heightens the readers’ attention to sensation,” and “perceptual idioms … heighten the sensual feel” (pp. 79–81; my italics). This [End Page 310] heightening argues for an intensification of attention without observing the intricately differentiated phenomena, or explaining how or why these compositional aspects have this effect on our interest and engagement, or why they direct our embodied, subjective awareness of poetic experience. Consequently, this impoverished lexicon constrains the degree of refinement possible in aesthetic evaluation and, therefore, in the analytic study of poetry. At this point the literary...

Anselm’s Other Argument by A. D. Smith (review)

Reviewed by: Anselm’s Other Argument by A. D. Smith Sandra L. Visser A. D. Smith. Anselm’s Other Argument. Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 244. Cloth, $49.95. Reading Smith’s Anselm’s Other Argument can be puzzling if one neglects to first read the introduction in which Smith explains that this book arose from work he was doing on a different book on Spinoza. Understanding that helps one understand why it might be that most of the chapters begin where contemporary scholars might rarely choose to begin, with Norman Malcolm and Charles Hartshorne, and why it takes a long, but inadequate and incomplete (at least for those who are conversant with the current literature), detour into considerations of omnipotence, while it examines the relevant passages of Anselm’s Proslogion arguments, before ending with the defense of a different argument that Anselm makes explicit in his Reply to Gaunilo. Despite this at times unhelpful approach to Anselm’s work, at each step of the way, Smith’s scholarship is careful, fair, and very good. Most of the discussions are highly illuminating and typically convincing. The criticisms of Malcolm, Hartshorne, and Katherin Rogers, the one contemporary Anselm scholar Smith treats at length, are nuanced and persuasive. Yet the route that Smith takes in his research, and that appears duplicated in his book, is probably not the one others would find most profitable when considering Anselm’s arguments for the existence of something greater than which cannot be conceived. One of the two central arguments of Smith’s work is that there is no modal ontological argument in Anselm’s Proslogion. Smith closely analyzes the most commonly referenced arguments offered as candidates, namely, those found in Proslogion 3 and Anselm’s Reply to Gaunilo. In each case, Smith argues that the arguments are not properly understood as modal ontological arguments. Smith’s arguments in this section of the book rest on three key premises, which he defends throughout the course of the book. My presentation does not do the subtlety of his arguments justice, but I believe these are fair statements of them. First, conceivability is not possibility. It is important for Anselm that inconceivability entails impossibility; however, one cannot conceive anything that contradicts reason. Second, because conceivability is not possibility, Anselm’s arguments require substantive metaphysical claims. The most important of these metaphysical claims is that “a thing that does not exist is able not to exist is true . . . because and only because there is something that actually exists that has a power over the thing’s existence” (112). It is because nothing has power over something than which nothing greater can be conceived that it is not conceivable for that thing not to exist. Third, modal ontological arguments do not require such substantive metaphysical claims in order for their inferences to go through. Smith concludes that Anselm’s arguments are not modal arguments at all. Smith convincingly argues that Anselm’s arguments cannot be easily translated into an argument that relies on a system of modal logic without loss of information. The care that Smith takes on this point requires some rather technical discussions of contemporary modal systems including S5 and B. The sometimes dense discussion helps the reader appreciate in what ways Anselm’s modal concepts do not map onto our own. But Smith’s argument [End Page 781] might also lead the reader to believe that there is a bigger gap between Anselm’s arguments and ours. That is misleading. There is some very heavy metaphysical work going on in the premise necessary for a contemporary modal argument that it is possible that God exists. In fact, in order to defend that premise, many of Anselm’s arguments and premises from his own arguments might be philosophically helpful. What of Anselm’s other argument and the second central piece of Smith’s work? The argument Smith examines is an interesting one Anselm offers in the Replies. Anselm uses the argument to clarify or further unpack why it is that Anselm believes that something than which a greater cannot be conceived exists. It is an argument that starts from the claim that such a being...

THE DISPOSITIONALIST DEITY: HOW GOD CREATES LAWS AND WHY THEISTS SHOULD CARE

AbstractHow does God govern the world? For many theists “laws of nature” play a vital role. But what are these laws, metaphysically speaking? I shall argue that laws of nature are not external to the objects they govern, but instead should be thought of as reducible to internal features of properties. Recent work in metaphysics and philosophy of science has revived a dispositionalist conception of nature, according to which nature is not passive, but active and dynamic. Disposition theorists see particulars as being internally powerful rather than being governed by external laws of nature, making external laws in effect ontologically otiose. I will argue that theists should prefer a dispositionalist ontology, since it leads them toward the theory of concurrentism in divine conservation, rather than occasionalism, and revives the distinction between internal and external teleology. God on this view does not govern the world through external laws of nature, but rather through internal aspects of powerful properties.

Phenomenology and Metaphysics

Moore claims, refreshingly, that Heidegger’s Being and Time is a metaphysical work. Moore also claims, strikingly, that Heidegger, indeed phenomenology more generally, would be better off dropping its metaphysical pretensions. Moore objects that phenomenology can have genuine metaphysical import only by incurring commitment to an untenable idealism. I defend Heidegger against this objection. Heideggerian phenomenology is metaphysical—it raises the question of, and makes commitments about, what it is for things to be—without any untenable idealism.

Two Ways to Particularize a Property

ABSTRACT:Trope theory is an increasingly prominent contender in contemporary debates about the existence and nature of properties. But it suffers from ambiguity concerning the nature of a trope. Disambiguation reveals two fundamentally different concepts of a trope: modifier tropes and module tropes. These types of tropes are unequally suited for metaphysical work. Modifier tropes have advantages concerning powers, relations, and fundamental determinables, whereas module tropes have advantages concerning perception, causation, character-grounding, and the ontology of substance. Thus, the choice between modifier tropes and module tropes is significant and divides the advantages of trope theorysimpliciter. In addition, each resulting trope theory is unstable: modifier trope theory threatens to collapse into realism, and module trope theory threatens to collapse into austere nominalism. This invites reflection on the stability of trope theory in general.

Real Presence in the Eucharist and time-travel

AbstractThis article aims to bring some work in contemporary analytic metaphysics to discussions of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I will show that some unusual claims of the Real Presence doctrine exactly parallel what would be happening in the world if objects were to time-travel in certain ways. Such time-travel would make ordinary objects multiply located, and in the relevantly analogous respects. If it is conceptually coherent that objects behave in this way, we have a model for the behaviour of the Eucharist which shows the doctrine to be coherent, at least with respect to the issues discussed.

La «causalidad del uno» en Dominicus Gundissalinus / The Causality of the One in Dominicus Gundissalinus

This article deals with the arguments which the metaphysical work of Dominicus Gundissalinus uses in order to explain the kind of unity found in the many, as well as the status of multiplicity, which proceeds from a being who is both one and unique. From the notion of a creating cause the article will show the possibility of the existence of the many, having as background the thesis which appears in the texts of Gundissalinus: omne creatum a creante esse diversum.

Veil of Light

This article attempts to provide some explanation for the variety of sun - 'stars', shamsa in shabaka geometric designs by looking at some of the Koranic references and metaphysical works concerning Light and light, Sun and sun, Reality and phenomena. These designs became increasingly employed from the XI th c. onwards over a wide variety of surfaces and media, and can be understood as representing the Lights-Suns of the Veil of Light(s) that separates the 'Face' of the Almighty from all else. The exposure to the Word in the Mushaf with the ayet being separated by a depiction of a shamsa, a little sun, with the Real Sun being the Light of the Absolute, the combination of the Word and the Light, rooted these sun-sunburst centred designs within Islam.

Rodzina jako fundament kształtowania człowieka. Szkic do Metafizyki macierzyństwa Wilhelma Schappa

Wilhelm Schapp, the German philosopher (a student of Edmund Husserl), wrote his treatise “Zur Metaphysik des Muttertums” in 1937, but the book was not published until 1965, fourteen days before the author’s death. Its theme is motherhood and family. This article attempts to interpret Wilhelm Schapp`s text; the subject of the analysis is, firstly, the meaning of the title phrase “Metaphysik des Muttertums” (“metaphysics of motherhood”), and secondly, the role of the family in the educational process. In his metaphysical work Wilhelm Schapp appears as a philosopher, strongly connected with the Christian tradition; according to him the main term of this tradition is not reason, but love, the deepest manifestation of which is motherhood.