80-275 Metaphysics

 

News: 

Paper due March 4.  No reading assignment due that day.

Class Outline

I. Historical Introduction

  1. Mystical monism
  2. Platonic dualism
  3. Aristotle's hylomorphism
  4. Descartes
  5. Leibniz
  6. Locke and Hume
  7. Kant

Midterm paper assignment DUE MARCH 4

II. Survey of Contemporary Papers (from text)

  1. Existence
  2. Universals
  3. Identity through Time
  4. Personal Identity
  5. Supervenience and Reduction
  6. Realism
Final paper assignment

Practical:

Text: Metaphysics Anthology, Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa, eds.,  Malden, Mass: Blackwell.  2000.  ISBN 0-631-2079-X.
Can be purchased from amazon.com click here.  Obtain it from the book store or Amazon right away.

Structure:

The class will be based primarily on contemporary journal articles compliled in a recent, acclaimed anthology.  However, I don't think the papers will make much sense taken entirely out of historical context, so we will begin with a few classical texts intended to provide a feel for where the subject has come from.  The preliminary, historical section of the course will take two to three weeks ( time to obtain the textbook).  There are many more papers in the anthology than we will have time to cover.  These can be used for extra research when you write your papers.  It also allows for some choice among topics.

This is a discussion class.  I'll ask leading questions and do some light lecturing to set the stage, but the success or failure of the class will be decided by your preparation for class discussion.  To this end, it is imperative that all of you read the course material twice over and think about what you are  reading.   To credit you for this hard, but private work, I will assign short reading questions along with each reading assignment to be turned in at the end of the class at which the reading is discussed.  The reading questions will not be accepted later than the end of class, since the point is to be prepared for the class discussion, rather than to listen to the discussion to find the answers to the questions. I will be quite firm about this.

Requirements:

A little advice about assignments.

Topic:

Aristotle characterized metaphysics as the study of being qua being, by which he meant the study of existence proper, before any extra qualifications are added.  Now,  we say that metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the most basic questions of existence and ultimate reality.  Epistemology is the complementary branch concerned with knowledge and justification of belief.  The two cannot really be separated.   Metaphysical arguments presuppose epistemological principles of justification (e.g., Ockham's razor = presume non-existence until forced to do otherwise).  Epistemological arguments presuppose fundamental features of reality (e.g., that there is time and that finite beings cannot see the future).   The distinction is often presented as a useful division of labor, but it may also conceal a lazy strategy for avoiding hard questions.  For example consider the thesis, due to Charles Sanders Peirce,  that "reality is the view science converges to".  Now all the hard work has to be done by students of scientific method and justification.  Next, consider the epistemological view called reliabilism,which states that a belief is justified if it is produced by a process that usually produces beliefs that correspond to reality.  This throws the question of justification back to metaphysics and the nature of reality!  The real question is how best to organize science so that it converges to the truth about reality, but somehow both the metaphysicians and the epistemologists have managed to dodge it by tossing it to one another like a hot potato.  

Religion is also concerned with ultimate questions about reality and metaphysical and religious speculation have long been intertwined.  Hindus and the early Eleatic Greek philosopher Parmenides held that the only reality is an indivisible, unchanging One, so we must be identical with that one (One = Self) and our experience of change and multiplicity is somehow an illusion (in whom?).  It seems that the source of such views is the widespread religious practice of meditation (long-term seated concentration on one's own breathing or a point on the wall), which results, after lengthy practice, in a firm intuition of unity.    Buddhists and the early Greek Philosopher Heraclitus held the opposite view that everything is in continual causal flux and that there is nothing constant that persists through the change (the doctrine of no-self).  Thus, by the very onset of written records, questions of fundamental reality were tangled with questions of human identity and of the relation between human thought and reality.  These topics remain central in contemporary metaphysical discussions.

In the Western tradition, most metaphysical discussions build upon themes from Plato and Aristotle.  Plato constructed a compromise metaphysical theory in which universal entities called Forms are "really real" (because, e.g., "triangularitiy" never changes) and phyisical objects made out of matter are "sort-of real" (because each physical example of triangularitiy is imperfect and is ultimately corrupted).   Minds are more naturally associated with Forms than with matter, so human nature is split into two parts: a perishable body and a permanent mind.  A characteristic Platonistic thesis is that reality is good, so the really real (Forms and minds) is better than the sort-of real (physical objects and the human body).  Several of the early fathers of Christianity were schooled in Platonism, so Plato's form of the Good evolved into God and our imperishable mental nature evolved into the Christian concept of the persisting soul. 

Aristotle was Plato's student.  Aristotle honored his teacher in the usual way: he adopted the opposing view that physical objects are "really real" and that universals are only "sort-of real" because the universals cannot exist on their own without the things they exist in.  This dispute may sound abstract, but it is actually fairly intuitive when one considers that Plato's pet science was geometry whereas Aristotle's was biology.  The objects of geometry are conceptual, unchanging, ideal and invisible.  The objects of biology are particular, slimy, and perishable.  In the 12th century A.D., Aristotelian texts flooded Christendom and generated a sensation because they didn't agree exactly with the Christian/Platonic synthesis constructed a millennium earlier.  This idea gave rise to a technical distinction (e.g., in the works of Thomas Aquinas) between metaphysics and religion:  metaphysics supposedly consists of everything unaided reason can discover about ultimate reality and religion augments this with holy revelation.  This idea raised, in turn, an epistemological question: how much can unaided reason discover about ultimate reality and how could it possibly do so?  The puzzle is that logic, properly understood, is vacuous (the conclusion is never stronger than the assumptions) and observation is insufficient (since multiple accounts of ultimate reality are compatible with the same experiences).  There are two epistemological stances toward this difficulty.  One is skepticism: that metaphysics has a worthy but unachievable goal.  The other is empiricism: that questions that run beyond all possible experience are literally meaningless.  For empiricists, "metaphysics" is an insult applied to questions that are so remote from practical affairs and observation that they are not even questions.

Science is also concerned with fundamental reality.  Zeno, whose celebrated paradoxes about space and time baffled the world until they were resolved by Newton, was a devoted student of Parmenides.  Newton and Leibniz debated whether space is really a substance (something that exists on its own) or a relation (of distance between existent things).   Classical physicists used to think that light waves are waves in an underlying medium (the "aether") composed of extremely small particles, for how could a wave be in nothing?  Now the situation is exactly reversed: particles are waves in nothing!  Cognitive psychologists speak of cognitive states, whereas phyisicists recognize only physical states.  Are mental states physical states?  Could there be differences in mental state that mark no difference in physical state?  Could the answer to both questions be negative?  Must there be one univocal account of reality common to all sciences? These are all metaphysical questions, since they concern the nature of ultimate reality. 

It isn't so easy to see how to "settle" metaphysical questions by usual scientific means (observation + mathematics).  For example, how could you tell whether space "really is" a self-existing thing or is merely a set of spatial relations among things that really exist?  And if you can't say what would count as a resolution of the question, do you really know what the question even means?  Empiricism, a philosophical tradition that extends all the way back to the Buddha (c. 600 B.C.) holds that metaphysical questions are therefore fruitless and perhaps even meaningless.  On the other hand, questions that once seemed metaphysical (e.g., the existence of a privileged reference frame of absolute rest) have been settled by deeper scientific thinking.  Philosophers called Realists hold that the boundary between metaphysical questions and proper scientific questions is more a matter of degree than of kind. 

If metaphyisical questions run beyond both logic and experience isn't the whole subject trivial because you can say whatever you want?  Yes, except for the embarrassing fact that it's easy to paint yourself into a corner when talking about ultimate reality.  For example, consider the very statement that the only meaningful truths are those that bear on experience.  How does that statement bear on experience?  So if it is true then it is meaningless, so it can't be true.  So how could it be a complaint against metaphysics?  Many metaphysical theses have this problematic status.  Is all truth relative to the perceiver?   What about that truth?  Each relation names a Form and Forms have instances in particulars.  What about the relation of being an instance?   Is "this statement is false" true? false? neither?   If the physical state of a system is relative to the measurement applied, then how can anything have a state if all the measurers are all part of the system?  What makes metaphysics interesting is that storytelling is easy but big storytelling is hard and may be impossible.  Doing metaphysics is sort of like trying to walk over a tar pit without getting stuck.  Everybody gets stuck.  One strategy for staying out of the tar is to keep your story just small enough to avoid trouble, even if doing so leaves some gaps.  For example, the contradictions in set theory were resolved (we hope) by eliminating the assumption that every property picks out a set.  Some properties pick out classes "too big" to be a set. 

Metaphysics, by its very nature, seems dry and abstract at first.  There is some truth to that!  But the impression of dry abstraction also involves some questionable self-centeredness.   Our own metaphysical dogmas are so thoroughly ingrained in our thinking that they remain invisible--- as water is to a fish.  To consider alternatives requires that we open up the possibility for alternative views in our brains.  It's easy to put information into mental slots that already exist, but making new slots is hard!  Many of the great mistakes in the history of science resulted from an inability to imagine how something could be possible (e.g., waves without a medium or of the appearance of rest on a moving Earth).  In fact, the arguments and ideas involved in this class will be much simpler than in, say, Calculus class.  And when you acquire some familiarity with the tensions within the various metaphysical theories, the subject will seem much more interesting.  Arriving at that point takes some time and effort, however.

As usual, we have a broad mixture of students, both in maturity and in specialization.  In practice it works better than you might expect, because the skills of the scientists and of the humanists in the class are to some extent complementary.  Let's try hard to make everybody in the class comfortable.  Remember, it is only a 200 level class, so everybody should have a chance to try out his or her own views.  One of the best ways to learn philosophy is to notice things that bother you, to try to express them as clearly as possible, and then to try the objections out in class discussion.  If the objection goes down in flames, you will have learned something fundamental about the strength of the opposing view.  Seeing the internal strength of views that we don't happen to like or to find plausible is one of the main signs of philosophical maturity and is something we should all seek in this class. 

I especially encourage Freshmen and Sophomores to make use of  office hours to follow up issues raised in the main class discussion, since it is supposed to be your class!

Reading Assignments

Historical Introduction


1. Mystical monism

Perhaps the deepest historical roots of metaphysical speculation arise from the perennial religous practice of meditative concentration, by which I mean the habitual endeavor to free the mind from all discursive thought and sensory distractions, as is still practiced today in such various religious sects as Zen (Buddhism), Sufism (Islam), Kabbalah (Judaism),  Advaita Vedanta (Hinduism).  Such mystical practices were also common in the Greco-Roman civilization.  Indeed, Pythagoras,  the father of Western Mathematics, was actually a Buddha-like figure who set up a monastic order and a series of temples in Italy within a century of the Buddha's teaching in India. 

Meditatative concentration is claimed to result, after long practice, in the certain conviction that everything is identical (not just similar).  It is as though after peeling off layer after layer of error and distraction, one finds a perfect gem that is both one's self and fundamental reality and the two are the same.  This idea is characteristic both of the Upanishads (5th-8th c. B.C.) of Hinduism and of the Eleatic school of presocratic Greek philosophy (5th c. B.C.). 

The practice of meditation is widely thought to occasion an indescribable and undeniable direct impression that everything is ultimately identical.  This impression (true or false) was a golden invitation for metaphysical speculation and subtlety, for one has to somehow explain how:
  1. we seem to be many and to change through time (in ordinary experience);
  2. we are really all identical and unchanging (as revealed in mystical experience).
One can say that ordinary experience is an illusion of change, but how can something unchanging (= us) have an illusion of change?  Thus, immediately, the Indian and Greek traditions were faced with the tangled issues of knowledge, illusion, reality, and the nature of the self.  The celebrated Hindu scholar Shankara developed the Upanishads into a sophisticated monistic metaphysics in the 9th c. A.D.  Although mystical monism died out with Plato in the Greek tradition, Shankara's monism is a widely recognized school of Hindu theology today.  

In marked contrast to the view that the self is everything, the Buddha (6th c. B.C.) promoted the doctrine of "no-self", according to which reality is a causal process with no fixed reality "beneath" it.  This view bears some similarity to that of Heraclitus (5th century B.C.), who is famous for saying that one can never step in the same river twice and who was thought to emphasize the unchanging flux of reality.  Interestingly, both thought of the soul in terms of fire, Heraclitus literally and the Buddha figuratively.  Both also explained apparent stability in terms of laws or causal connections that govern the course of change.   The Buddha was very modern in some respects: he seems to have promoted a version of empiricism that did not become popular in the West until the seventeenth century.  His view was that questions about the true nature of the self lie beyond all possible experience, so they are really pseudo-questions, so he would deny every logically possible answer to a metaphysical question and then stress the importance of achieving salvation in favor of useless speculation. 

Readings

Monistic views (reality is an unchanging unity)
Shvetashvatara Upanishad
Advaita Vedanta blurb
Parmenides of Elea

Flux views (reality is a changing multiplicity)
The Buddhist Canon:: Majjhima Nikaya 72
Heraclitus, especially fragments 10, 20, 22, 32, 40, 43, 44, 49, 52, 57, 62, 69, 83.

Reading Questions:  
  1. List two similarities and two differences between the Shvetashvatara Upanishad and Parmenides' poem.
  2. Find a passage in which the Buddha seems to contradict the Upanishadic view.
  3. Find two points of similarity between Heraclitus and the Buddha. 
  4. Do you believe that total experience (including experience gleaned in meditative concentration) would distinguish between the monistic and flux theories?  Why or why not?
Some extra reading:
Basic principles of Buddhism

2. Pythagoreanism and Platonic Dualism

Orphism and Pythagoreanism had various points in common with Buddhism and Hinduism: the view that life is painful, that it will repeat indefinitely through reincarnation, and that ascetic purification and meditation are required to obtain release from the cycle.  Unlike the Advaita position, release means separation of an individual soul from the body, not discovery that you are already the One.  Unlike Buddhism, it doesn't mean extinction.  In contrast to both, mathematics was an integral part of Pythagorean religious practice, since it focuses the mind away from the corrupting influence of the senses.  Plato systematized  Pythagoreanism into a sophisticated metaphysical theory.  According to Plato, the most real things are universal Forms like Beauty and Goodness, which exist on their own in some special non-physical domain.   Physical also exist on their own and "participate in" the forms but always fall short of resembling them perfectly  (think of a chalk triangle as a messy attempt to produce a true geometrical triangle with perfect sides and corners).  

Readings:

Pythagoreanism (click "Pythagoreanism" on the left and then click on Burnett's discussion).
Plato's Phaedo

Reading questions:
  1. What did Pythagoras conclude from the theory of harmony?
  2. How do we obtain knowledge of the Forms if they exist in a different realm that we can't see?
  3. Among our readings so far, which agrees with the "tune of the lyre" view most closely?
  4. Sketch Socrates' main argument that the soul is immortal.  
Some extra reading
Other Platonic dialogues (see especially the discussion of the demiurge in Timaeus and of learning in Meno).
Eleusinian Mysteries, Dionysian Cult, Orphism

3. Aristotle's Categories

Aristotle (384-322) was Plato's student.  Together, Plato and Aristotle cast a long shadow over Western thought.  Aristotle's favorite science was biology rather than mathematics, so Aristotle's ideas about fundamental reality were quite different.  For Aristotle, it is not universal, timeless Forms that fundamentally exist, but perishable, concrete individuals, which he called "substances".  Aristotle's innovation was to conceive of concrete individuals as combinations of particular matter and universal form.  What makes you human is your Humanity, but what makes you different from other humans is your matter.  The Categories is one of the most abstract of Aristotle's treatises.  It is pivotal, because it introduces, in a concise manner, Aristotle's ideas about substance and the other, "less real" entities like qualities and relations.  Since the Categories was standard reading in the medieval university curriclum, its terminology came to be lingua franca in the Western philosophical tradition.  Here are some further notes on Aristotle, with a lexicon covering Aristotelian vocabulary.  

Readings:

Aristotle's Categories, parts 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,10,11,14.  

Reading Questions:
  1. What is the list of possible significations of simple expressions?  The items on this list are called "Aristotle's catogories".  
  2. Contrast Aristotle's conception of ultimate reality with Plato's and with the Buddha's.
  3. List four tests for determining whether something is a substance.
  4. By "motion", Aristotle means what we mean by "change" in general.  What are the different kinds of change?
  5. What are the different senses of "have"?

4. Aristotle's  Metaphysics

What we now call metaphysics, Aristotle referred to as first philosophy, which is the study of first principles and causes.  

Readings:

Aristotle's Physics, Book II, Chapter 3 (On the four causes)
Aristotle's Metaphysics,  Book VIII (On substance, matter and form)

  1. What is are the four causes?
  2. What is potentiality of substance?  What is the actuality of substance?
  3. What is soul?
  4. What are the four causes of human generation?

5. Cartesian Dualism

Now we skip over a few details.  Here's a toy outline of what we are skipping, with lots of major gaps.  But sometimes a toy outline to remember and react against is better than the literal truth.
  1. The development of Plato's Academy into a mystical branch (Plotinus) and a skeptical branch (Academic Skepticism).  
  2. The emergence of Christianity in the Roman Empire, where mystical Platonic and Jewish ideas get mixed.  
  3. The collapse of the Roman Empire and the loss of the classical Greek texts.  
  4. The develpment of a sophisticated commentaries on Aristotle in the Islamic world.
  5. The crusades, the silk route and the recovery of some annotated texts of Aristotle.
  6. The rise of the European universities as centers of Greek text assimilation.  
  7. The emergence of a new synthesis of traditional (Platonic) Christianity with the newly assimilated Aristotelian texts.
  8. The fall of Constantinople leads to a new influx of Greek texts including those of Plato and Archimedes.
  9. The translation of Platonic and Neo-Platonic texts inspires the emergence of Renaissance Humanism in northern Italy.
  10. Platonic and pythagorean views inspire astronomers like Copernicus and Kepler.
  11. The translation of Archimedes' texts inspires engineers and mathematicians like Galileo.
  12. Descartes invents an immensely popular philosphy based on a mixture of St. Augustine, Plato, and ancient atomism.  
  13. Newton studies Descartes and invents the calculus, classical mechanics, and the classical theory of gravitation among other things.
  14. John Locke promotes empiricism as a mental analogue of Newton's method for analyzing physical phenomena.  
  15. Leibniz independently invents the calculus and urges a metaphysical return to Aristotelian ideas against the atomism of his age.
  16. David Hume revives empiricistic views of Locke and skeptical ideas from the Academy.
  17. Hume awakens Kant from his "dogmatic" (Leibnizian) slumber.
Notice how the alternataing influx of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas (marked in red) occasions major cultural developments.  Notice also how the relative importance of Plato and Aristotle shaped intellectual history.  Roughly,  early Christianity was strongly colored by Platonism (due to the fact that several influential Church Fathers like Augustine and Justin Martyr had Platonic training).  This influence remained but became invisible when the Platonic texts were lost.  When the texts of Aristole were recovered from Islam, obvious contradictions were encountered, but it was assumed that Plato and Aristotle must be saying the same thing so a compromise was hammered out which culminated in Aquinas' heavily Aristotelian Summa Theologica.  The Renaissance represented a swing back to Platonic ideas when the original Platonic texts were recovered.  Platonism also fit better with the style of science in the 17th century, which was highly mathematical and centered on astronomy and physics.  Biology, Aristotle's domain, didn't really take off until two hundred years later!  In a sense, chaos theory represents a return to paradigmatically Aristotelian problems and ideas.  

Readings:

Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Chapter 1.
Reading Questions:
  1. How do we know the mind better than the body?
  2. State Descartes' second argument for the existence of God, as succinctly as possible.  
  3. Whose views do those of Descartes resemble most closely, Aristotle or Plato?  Explain in a sentence.
  4. What are substances, attributes, and modes?   Compare to Aristotle's terminology.
  5. What are real distinctions, modal distinctions and distinctions of reason?
Bonus question:  Descartes' overall position is thought to be circular.  What is the circle?

6. Leibniz' Monadic Metaphysics

Leibniz 1646-1715 invented the calculus independently of Newton and introduced our textbook notation for derivatives and integrals.  He became embroiled in a lifelong priority dispute with Newton that resulted in a schism between English and Continental science for a generation.  He also distinguished kinetic energy from momentum.  The reading is wonderfully zany synopsis of Leibniz' metaphysical views.  Like Descartes, Leibniz would like to be God's defense attorney.  A Theodicy is a defense of God against the charge of incompetence or evil intent.  

Readings:

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , The Monadology

Questions:
  1. What is a monad?  What does it mean to say they have no "windows"?
  2. What is the source of change?
  3. What are souls?
  4. What are the two principles behind all reasoning and which kind of truth does each account for?
  5. What is space?
Bonus:  Leibniz' views are amusing, but why did he hold them?  Bertrand Russell held that he read his theory backwards from Aristotelian logic, so again we have the idea that "what is reality" and "what is logic" are intertwined.  Explain (it is helpful to re-read Aristotle's discussion of relations in the Categories).  

Bonus:  What do you make of Leibniz' account of freedom?


7. Empiricism

Empiricism is the view that all ideas can be broken down into combinations of sensations, the way molecules are composed of atoms.  It follows that any idea that can't be broken down into an appropriate combination of sensations is bogus.  Empiricism is, therefore, a two-edged sword.  Insofar as metaphysics is meaningful at all, it is just a contraption built out of human experience, masquerading as something deeper.  Insofar as it cannot be so "reduced" to experience, it is meaningless drivel.  The empiricist program is to separate the wheat (science) from the meaningless chaff (religion and superstition).  The question is:  which side do metaphysical concepts like "substance" and "cause" end up on?  

John Locke (1632-1704) was an acquaintance of Isaac Newton.  He once wrote to Newton that his ambition was to do for the human sciences what Newton did for natural science.  The atomism of ideas and the division of human motives into contentment (intertia) and discomfort (force leading to increased motion) mimic Newton's achievements in science.  

David Hume (1711-1776) was a generation later.  His empiricism was more systematic and thorough than Locke's.  

Readings:

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Book II, Chapters 1, 2, 3, 7, 12, 21, 23,  27.
David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section IV.

Reading questions:
  1. What are the two sources of ideas?  
  2. What  do our ideas of particular substances amount to?  What is our general idea of substance?  What is essence?
  3. How do Locke and Hume differ concerning causal powers?
  4. Compare Leibniz and Lock on personal identity. 
Optional: compare Locke's position on substance to the Buddha's.  

8. Kant's Idealism I.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a Prussion with a background in philosophy and science.  Kant was "awakened from his dogmatic slumber" (meaning the neo-scholasticism of Leibniz) by Hume's empiricist critique of causation.  Kant saw in Hume's argument a general challenge to the very idea of metaphysics and aimed to be the first to provide a systematic response.

Readings:
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.
Preface and sections 1-11.

Reading questions:
  1. What is Kant's fundamental question?  He gives three equivalent formulations, so don't let that confuse you.
  2. What general lesson did Kant derive from Hume's Enquiry (i.e., the very passage we read last time)?
  3. How does mathematics differ from logic and how is mathematics instructively similar to metaphysics?  (A very important question).
  4. How is pure mathematics possible?

9. Kant's Idealism II.

Readings:
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.
Sections 14-21, 27-35, 40-42, 46-49.  
  1. How do subjective judgments differ from objectively valid ones?
  2. How is pure natural science possible?  A brief answer on the right track will suffice here.
  3. What are ideas and how do they differ from pure concepts of the understanding?
  4. How does Kant apply his critique of metaphysics to survival of the soul after death (the main problem of the Phaedo)?

Midterm Paper Assignment

 

length and format:
topic:  
grading criteria:

Part II:  Contemporary Papers

In the textook, each paper is assigned a number in the table of contents.  I will refer to articles by these numbers rather than by page numbers.

10. Existence

Readings:

#1, W.V. Quine "On What There Is".  
#3, B. Russell, "Existence and Description", (focus on part 2)

The (very famous) Russell article presents the theory of descriptions mentioned in Quine's article so you may read them in either order, depending on whether you prefer overviews (#1) or details (#1) first.  Wyman's views related in (#1) reflect the traditional, rationalistic metaphysics of Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz.  

Reading Questions:
  1. Internal solution to Plato's beard:  how would Quine/Russell translate "The monster in your refrigerator does not exist" and "The monster in your refrigerator is cold"?  What is the truth value of each sentence?  (Assume normal conditions in your refrigerator).
  2. Which two aspects of language do Platonists confuse?  
  3. How can we avoid saying that meanings exist?  
  4. What is existence (within a conceptual scheme)?
  5. External solution to Plato's beard: how can I say that you assert the existence of things I deny?  (Plato:  ha!  What things?)

11. Readings:

#4  T. Parsons "Referring to Nonexistent Objects".
#5 W. V. Quine "Ontological Relativity".

Notes:  there are some technicalities in the articles.  The following notes should help. Reading Questions:
  1. What would Russell/Quine say the truth value of sentence (5) in Parson's article is?  What would Parsons say the truth value of sentence (5) is?  
  2. In the principle on page 40, does "everything" range over existent things or all things?  Give an example to motivate your answer.
  3. What are the two possible explanations why we reject questions in which the subject fails to refer?
  4. How does Dewey's naturalism differ from mentalistic semantics?  
  5. What point does the famous "gavagai" example illustrate?
  6. What question does Quine prefer to the (meaningless) question "what are the objects of a theory, absolutely speaking?"  

Universals

12. Readings:

#16. D. M. Armstrong, "Universals as Attributes"

Reading Questions:

  1. What is the instantiation principle and how does it relate to Platonism?
  2. Characterize:
    1. universalia ante res
    2. universalia in rebus
    3. universality post res
  3. What are states of affairs?
  4. What is the antinomy of bare particulars and what is the solution?
  5. How can universals be at multiple locations and times?


13. Readings

#18 W. V. Quine "Natural Kinds"

Reading Questions:
  1. What is "grue" and what is Goodman's problem?
  2. What is projectability?   What is lawlikeness?
  3. How are sets different from kinds?
  4. How does Carnap define kinds from relative similarity?
  5. What is entrenchment and how is it related to scientific kinds?
  6. How are dispositions and causes related to kinds?


14. Readings:

Sydney Shoemaker, "Causality and Properties".  Shoemaker has a much "thicker" account of natural kinds than Quine's which seems to explain why "grue" is not a natural kind.  
  1. How are dispositional and non-dispositional predicates related to properties and powers?
  2. What is the identity condition for properties?
  3. Why does Shoemaker think the causal powers of properties cannot change?
  4. Use the theory to show that "grue" and "slept-in by George Washington" are not genuine properties.
  5. When do conditional powers belong to the same property?
  6. What is Boyd's counterexample?  (Ouch!)

IdentityThrough Time

15. Readings:

#21, Roderick M. Chisholm, "Identity Through Time".

  1. The principle of transitivity of identity says:  If A = B and B= C then A = C.  How, exactly,  is this principle violated in the case a river with multiple tributaries?  In the case of Theseus' boat?  
  2. How might the Buddha's views about the self give rise to such a problem?  
  3. How does Chisholm define Butler's "loose" sense of identity?
  4. What is the "popular" sense of "there are two tables"?
Here's an amusing aside for today.  It comes from a best-selling  biography of Meriweather Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark expedition.   Keep in mind that Lewis and Clark may have been the first non-native Americans ever to map the upper Missouri.

On the morning of June 3, the party crossed the Missouri and set up a camp on the point formed by the junction of the two large rivers.  "An interesting question was now to be determined," Lewis wrote in his journal: "Which of these rivers was the Missouri?"

* * *

The right-hand or north fork came in on an almost straight west-east line, meaning that going up that rivier was heading directly toward the mountains.  The left-hand or south fork came in from the southwest.  The right fork was 200 yards wide, the left fork 372.  The right fork was deeper, but the left fork's current was swifter.  Lewis described the north fork as running "in the same boiling and roling [sic] manner which has uniformly characterized the Missouri throughout its whole course so far; it's [sic] waters are of a whitish brown colour very thick and terbid [sic], also characteristic of the Missouri.  The water of the south fork "is perfectly transparent" and ran "with a smoth [sic] unriffled surface."

As Lewis summed it up, "the air & character of this river [the north fork] is so precisely that of the missouri below that the party with very few exceptions have already pronounced the N. fork to be the Missouri; myself and Capt. C[lark] not quite so precipitate  have not yet decided but if we were to give our opinions I believe we should be in the minority".

Stephen E. Ambrose (1996) Undaunted Courage,  New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. 230-231.



16. Readings:

#25, Mark Heller, "Temporal Parts of Four-Dimensional Objects".

This is a fun article that illustrates metaphysics at its best--- biting the bullet in the face of an explicit argument that results in a contradiction.  

I have a warning, though.  The whole point of Einstein's special theory of relativity, which introduced "space-time" to philosophers, is that there is no such thing as an objective "time slice".  Different observers in different intertial reference frames (i.e., space-ships with the engines shut off in otherwise empty space) will see different time slices of the same thing.  So, strange to say, for you, my space-ship is a different "slice" than it is for me.  He will see a different pill bottle in my medicine cabinet at t than I see.   Something to think about: does this matter to Heller's thesis or does it strengthen his position?

Reading Questions:
  1. Present Inwagen's argument.  It's cute--- try it out at your next party.
  2. What is Heller's response to Thomson's "Craziness" objection?
  3. What is Heller's solution to Inwagen's argument?
  4. How does Heller respond to Chisholm's argument from the unity of consciousness?

Personal Identity

17. Readings:

#26.  Roderick M. Chisholm, "The Persistence of Persons".
  1. How does Chisholm refute the possibility that you could be transferred from one substance to another?
  2. What do you think the weakest link in his argument is?
  3. Describe the Peirce example and Chisholm's opinion concerning it.  Guess what: anesthesiologists really do use amnestic drugs (e.g., Valium) to make you forget your operation.  That's really spooky!
  4. What does Chisholm say about the amoeba example?.  What do you think?
18. Readings:

#28. Bernard Williams, "The Self and the Future"
  1. Describe the body-exchange example.
  2. Describe the personality-change example.  How are the two related?
  3. Why is it uncompelling to say that there are "borderline cases"?
  4. What is the point about first and third person perspectives?
19. Readings:
#29 Derek Parfit,  "Personal Identity".
  1. What two theses does Parfit object to?
  2. What are two ways in which the two halves of the split person can be the same person?
  3. What is q-memory and what is its relevance to the personal identity issue?
  4. Distinguish "psychological continuity" from "psychological connectedness".  
  5. Compare Parfit's ethical morals to those of the Buddha.

Supervenience and Reduction

Is the mind just the brain or is mind independent of physics?  Are there two kinds of things or just one?    Leibniz, Locke, and Kant all weighed in.  But what is it to be independent of physics, anyway? 

20.  Readings  Jerry Fodor, "Special Sciences"

What is reductionism?
Distinguish token physicalism from reductionism.
What is Fodor's liberal view?
What would Fodor say about Leibniz' mill in the Monadology?
Why are there special sciences?








Realism

Here's a metaphysical question.  There's blabbering and then there's reality.  What's real and what's just blabbering?  How do we tell?  Does the question make sense?  Is anything real or is there just our web of blabber?  Realism is, as it were, the ultimate metaphysical debate and is an appropriate topic for the end of the semester.  Anyone familiar with the "culture wars" between science and the humanities will recognize realism as the underlying issue along which the battle lines are drawn.  Humanties emphasize the blabber and scientists emphasize the reality (so the story goes).  

Readings:

 #44 Hilary Putnam, "Pragmatic Realism".  This article is a tour-de-force of many of the passages we have read this term.  Most readers wonder how Putnam could possible call himself a "realist".  Judge for yourself.  I have a paper in which I derive a kind of Goedel's theorem for Putnam's "internal realist" semantics.  I also got to drink single malt scotches with the great man in front of the roaring fireplace in the Links hotel at St. Andrews.   Philosophy doesn't get much better than that.  I like Putnam's early work better than his later work.  He is, you will recall, the inventor of the extremely influential "functionalist" theory of mind according to which mind is to brain as software is to hardware.  
  1. What is "disastrous" and what is Putnam's recommended solution?
  2. Which article in our text promoted the idea Putnam criticizes on page 594 and what is Putnam's objection?  Bonus:  how did the author of that article already respond to Putnam's objection?
  3. Why is intentioanality a problem for realism?
  4. Mackie and Lewis come up for a beating (why?).  What's Putnam's response?
  5. What is wrong with the notion of existence independent of a conceptual scheme?

Final paper due in class!  Class will consist of a final paper mini-conference!  No reading assignment.  


Final Paper Assignment

due:  last day of class.  1/2 letter grade per day late penalty.  
length and format:
topic:  
grading criteria:  similar to  midterm