Category
Metaphysics
What exists, and what is it to be? Time, causes, freedom and necessity.
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The grounding revival brought metaphysics back without bringing back a method
For much of the twentieth century, substantive metaphysics was out of fashion. Carnap argued that many ontological questions were either trivial within a framework or merely practical choices about which framework to use. Quine brought ontology back, but in a tightly regimented…
Started by Oskar Nyberg0 replies57 views -
Al-Ghazali was right: causal necessity cannot be demonstrated
In the Seventeenth Discussion of The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali argues that the connection between what is customarily believed to be a cause and its effect is not necessary. When cotton touches fire and burns, observation shows only that the burning…
Started by Layla Haddad8 replies332 views -
Compatibilism answers a question nobody was asking
I drive a bus across Ankara and listen to philosophy lectures between stops. I have now heard about four lectures defending compatibilism, and every time I feel the same thing: it changes the subject. Hume says liberty is just a power of…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu6 replies236 views -
Anscombe was right: we see causing all the time
I make cedar doors and ceilings in Tetouan. When I push a chisel through cedar I do not see a chisel, then a cut, and infer a connection. I see the chisel cutting. When my apprentice drops a plank and it cracks,…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies234 views -
Possibility lives in the powers of real things, not in other worlds
I make cedar doors and ceilings. When I look at a plank I see what it can become: a panel, a frame, a box. That "can" is not in some other world. It is in the cedar: its grain, its weight, the…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies204 views -
The statue-and-clay puzzle is a verbal dispute, and metaphysicians should admit it
I coach high school debate. Half my job is stopping kids from winning arguments by quietly changing what a word means. So I'm primed to spot verbal disputes, and I think I've spotted a big one. The puzzle: a sculptor shapes a…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies182 views -
Splitting causation from explanation was a modern mistake, not an Aristotelian one
I study kelp forests on the Chilean coast. I came to philosophy through Maturana and Varela, the Chilean biologists who described living things as self-producing systems in the early 1970s, and I keep running into the same problem. To explain why a…
Started by Ignacio Fuenzalida6 replies212 views -
Perdurantism fits modern physics better than endurantism does
I trained in physics in Lagos and now tutor it, and I've been reading Theodore Sider's case for four-dimensionalism. I'm persuaded, and I want to put the argument from physics as strongly as I can. Relativity treats spacetime as a single four-dimensional…
Started by Emeka Nwosu5 replies149 views -
Calling Wang Fuzhi a materialist hides more than it reveals
Some older textbooks my students find online still call Wang Fuzhi (Chuanshan) a "materialist". The label comes mostly from twentieth-century scholarship that wanted ancestors for a materialist philosophy, and it has a respectable basis: Wang made qi the sole reality and treated…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies182 views -
The incredulous stare is a perfectly respectable argument against modal realism
I have been reading the threads on Lewis and his infinitely many concrete worlds. I am told the standard response, the "incredulous stare", is not an argument, and that Lewis himself said so. I want to defend the stare. In medicine we…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies180 views -
The al-Ghazali–Hume parallel is shallower than the textbooks suggest
I teach comparative philosophy, and the sentence I most often have to correct in student essays is "al-Ghazālī anticipated Hume". I'd like to argue that the parallel, though real, is shallower than it is usually made to look. The shared step is…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho5 replies254 views -
The deepest split in metaphysics is substance versus process, not matter versus mind
I'm a physicist in Copenhagen, and I want to defend a claim I came across in a comparative table of answers to "what is real?" across traditions. Most introductions organise metaphysics around matter versus mind: materialism, idealism, dualism. That division is real,…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies236 views -
Rāmānuja’s question ‘whose ignorance?’ is the objection Advaita never answered
I teach Mīmāṃsā, which makes me a realist about the world of ritual, persons and things, and therefore no natural friend of either kind of Vedāntin. On one point, though, I side firmly with Rāmānuja against Śaṅkara. Advaita holds that brahman alone…
Started by Govinda Prasad Mishra6 replies236 views -
Leibniz had the better of the argument with Clarke
I model oil reservoirs for a living, so space and what fills it is a professional concern. I've been reading the Leibniz–Clarke correspondence of 1715–16, in which Samuel Clarke defended Newton's absolute space and Leibniz argued that space is only the order…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani5 replies244 views -
Kim was right: non-reductive physicalism cannot give the mind any causal work
I'm a cognitive scientist and a materialist, and I want to defend a thesis many materialists find uncomfortable. Non-reductive physicalism says two things: everything is physical, and mental properties (believing, wanting, feeling pain) are not identical to physical properties. It's the most…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies205 views -
Kasb is a real distinction, not a verbal escape: the Ash’ari answer deserves a hearing
Within Islamic theology the free will question produced two sharply opposed answers, and I think one of them gets a worse press than it deserves. The Mu'tazila said that human beings genuinely create their own acts. God is just; he would not…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani5 replies206 views -
S5 is the right logic for metaphysical necessity
I work on modal and many-valued logics in Kraków, so I'll state a view I hold and want tested. S5 says: whatever is possible is necessarily possible, and whatever is necessary is necessarily necessary. In Kripke's terms, every world is accessible from…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik6 replies190 views -
Aquinas’s metaphysics is unintelligible without Ibn Sina
I teach metaphysics at a seminary in Enugu, and my students arrive believing that Aquinas is a Catholic synthesis of Aristotle and the Bible. That leaves out the man in the middle. My thesis is strong: Aquinas's metaphysics cannot be understood without…
Started by Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies127 views -
Unrestricted composition is the only principled answer to when parts make a whole
Thesis: any things whatever compose something. Here is why I think universalism is the only principled position. Restriction generates vagueness. If only some collections compose, there will be a sequence of cases, removing one particle at a time, in which composition goes…
Started by Derek Hollis6 replies294 views -
Metaphysics is about what grounds what, not about what exists
I teach metaphysics at a seminary in Enugu. For most of the last century analytic metaphysics followed Quine: the job of ontology is to say what exists, and existence is settled by what our best theories quantify over. Recently a neo-Aristotelian movement…
Started by Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies157 views