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Aquinas’s metaphysics is unintelligible without Ibn Sina
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 Ibn Sina. The centre of Thomist metaphysics is the…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Deflationism is right: “true” is a useful device, not the name of a property
Here is the view I want to defend, as plainly as I can. Take the schema: "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Every reasonable theory of truth accepts instances of this. Deflationists say these instances are…
Started by Oskar Nyberg6 replies -
We enjoy tragic art because the grief belongs to no one in particular
Thesis: the best single explanation of why people seek out sad and terrible works is generalisation, the idea associated with Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, that the work strips the emotion of its particular owner. The paradox: grief hurts, yet we pay for tragedies and…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies -
Novels give us moral knowledge that no argument can deliver
Every year in my classroom I watch the same thing happen. Students who have heard every argument about slavery, its cruelty, its injustice, its economics, read Toni Morrison's Beloved and come out changed in a way the arguments never managed. They don't…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
The sea battle argument is a scope mistake, and Aristotle half saw it
Chapter 9 of De Interpretatione makes a fatalist of somebody in my class every year. So here is the case I make to them, and I would like it attacked by people who know more logic than my students. The argument: if…
Started by Giulia Ferrante4 replies -
Natural law is a form of ethical naturalism, and it needs no ontological naturalism
I keep meeting a confusion, in students and in some books: that "naturalism" is one view, and that a Catholic, by definition, can't be a naturalist. My thesis: natural law theory is a form of ethical naturalism, because it holds that moral…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu4 replies -
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 replies -
Robert Adams’s modified divine command theory answers the ‘God could command cruelty’ objection
The standing objection to divine command theory is that if obligation depends on God's will as such, the content of morality could in principle have been anything. Had God commanded gratuitous cruelty, cruelty would have been obligatory. William of Ockham is often…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
Traditions that disagree about the self agree about how to live, so ethics can do without metaphysics
There is one comparison that always woke my students up. Put the great traditions side by side on what a person is, and they disagree completely: an immortal soul, an eternal self identical with the absolute, no abiding self at all, a…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
Metaphysics is about what grounds what, not about what exists
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 has pushed back. Jonathan Schaffer put it bluntly…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Fuzzy logic is good engineering and a poor theory of vagueness
I've shipped fuzzy controllers. They work, they're cheap, and nobody who has used a decent one doubts that. My thesis is narrower: as an account of what vague words mean, fuzzy logic doesn't solve the problem it's usually advertised as solving. Two…
Started by Derek Hollis4 replies -
An infinite chain of reasons is not a defect: the case for infinitism deserves more than a smirk
When students first meet the regress problem they are told there are three options and one of them is obviously absurd. Foundations, coherence, or an infinite regress; and who could believe in an infinite regress? I want to argue that infinitism, defended…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies