80-275 Metaphysics
News:
Paper due March 4. No reading assignment due that day.
Class Outline
I. Historical Introduction
- Mystical
monism
- Platonic
dualism
- Aristotle's
hylomorphism
- Descartes
- Leibniz
- Locke and Hume
- Kant
II. Survey of Contemporary Papers (from text)
- Existence
- Universals
- Identity through Time
- Personal Identity
- Supervenience and Reduction
- Realism
Final paper
assignment
Practical:
- Room: GHC 5222
- Time: MW 10:30-11:50 AM
- Instructor: Kevin T. Kelly BH 135 K X8567 kk3n@andrew.cmu.edu
- Office hours: 1:00-2:00 Tues., 9:30-10:30 Thurs., or by
appointment.
- Grader Steve Fancsail sfancsal@andrew.cmu.edu.
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:
- 33% reading exercises to be turned in at the end of class.
The lowest two reading assignments will be dropped from your
average to allow illness and other unavoidable distractions.
- 33% first paper project (4 page max)
- final paper proposal (counts as one reading exercise)
- 34% final paper project (5 page max)
A little advice about assignments.
- Many students feel that their answers
must
be original, so they put a proposed philosophical theory into their
"own
words".
- Please don't do that. Use
the
words given and work with them.
- It is hard to find a paraphrase exactly
equivalent to the theory. Changing words will usually introduce
awkward differences.
- The proponent of the theory, if he is
worth his salt, probably spent a good deal of time making the theory
sound as simple as possible already.
- Understanding comes from applying the
theory, as it is originally stated, to lots of examples and checking it
for self-consistency.
- Philosophical creativity is not a
matter
of re-stating the theory in your own terms, but of criticizing it as it
is stated and proposing improvements.
- At this introductory level I mainly want you to convince me that
you know what the various theories are and that you can work with them.
Bold originality is great, but is not required for a good grade.
Succinctness, precision and accuracy are paramount.
- The papers should do one of the following things:
- Resolve a tension in some metaphysical theory.
- Compare and/or contrast two or more metaphysical theories.
- Expose a tension or difficulty in a metaphysical theory.
- Resolve a tension or difficulty in a metaphysical theory.
- Propose and defend an alternative metaphysical theory.
- The papers are very short. Basically, write a 10-15 page
paper and cut it down to the real points you can make.
- Don't waste time on boring introductory platitudes like
"Metaphysics is a very important subject". Just state your
particular point right away. Don't worry if it seems
abrupt.
- Think about explaining something to the reader. Don't think
of the paper as a statement of your own beliefs or feelings.
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:
- we seem to be many and to change through time (in ordinary
experience);
- 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:
- List two similarities and two differences between the
Shvetashvatara Upanishad and Parmenides' poem.
- Find a passage in which the Buddha seems to contradict the
Upanishadic view.
- Find two points of similarity between Heraclitus and the
Buddha.
- 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:
- What did Pythagoras conclude from the theory of harmony?
- How do we obtain knowledge of the Forms if they exist in a
different realm that we can't see?
- Among our readings so far, which agrees with the "tune of the
lyre" view most closely?
- 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:
- What is the list of possible significations of simple
expressions? The items on this list are called "Aristotle's
catogories".
- Contrast Aristotle's conception of ultimate reality with Plato's
and with the Buddha's.
- List four tests for determining whether something is a substance.
- By "motion", Aristotle means what we mean by "change" in general.
What are the different kinds of change?
- 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)
- What is are the four causes?
- What is potentiality of substance? What is the actuality of
substance?
- What is soul?
- 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.
- The development of Plato's Academy into a mystical branch
(Plotinus) and a skeptical branch (Academic Skepticism).
- The emergence of Christianity in the Roman Empire, where mystical
Platonic and Jewish ideas get mixed.
- The collapse of the Roman Empire and the loss of the classical
Greek texts.
- The develpment of a sophisticated commentaries on Aristotle in
the Islamic world.
- The
crusades, the silk route and the recovery of some annotated texts of
Aristotle.
- The rise of the European universities as centers of Greek text
assimilation.
- The emergence of a new synthesis of traditional (Platonic)
Christianity with the newly assimilated Aristotelian texts.
- The fall of Constantinople leads
to a new influx of Greek texts including those of Plato and Archimedes.
- The translation of Platonic and Neo-Platonic texts inspires the
emergence of Renaissance Humanism in northern Italy.
- Platonic and pythagorean views inspire astronomers like
Copernicus and Kepler.
- The translation of Archimedes' texts inspires engineers and
mathematicians like Galileo.
- Descartes invents an immensely popular philosphy based on a
mixture of St. Augustine, Plato, and ancient atomism.
- Newton studies Descartes and invents the calculus, classical
mechanics, and the classical theory of gravitation among other things.
- John Locke promotes empiricism as a mental analogue of Newton's
method for analyzing physical phenomena.
- Leibniz independently invents the calculus and urges a
metaphysical return to Aristotelian ideas against the atomism of his
age.
- David Hume revives empiricistic views of Locke and skeptical
ideas from the Academy.
- 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:
- How do we know the mind better than the body?
- State Descartes' second argument for the existence of God, as
succinctly as possible.
- Whose views do those of Descartes resemble most closely,
Aristotle or Plato? Explain in a sentence.
- What are substances, attributes, and modes? Compare to
Aristotle's terminology.
- 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:
- What is a monad? What does it mean to say they have no
"windows"?
- What is the source of change?
- What are souls?
- What are the two principles behind all reasoning and which kind
of truth does each account for?
- 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:
- What are the two sources of ideas?
- What do our ideas of particular substances amount to?
What is our general idea of substance? What is essence?
- How do Locke and Hume differ concerning causal powers?
- 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:
- What is Kant's fundamental question? He gives three
equivalent formulations, so don't let that confuse you.
- What general lesson did Kant derive from Hume's Enquiry (i.e., the very passage we
read last time)?
- How does mathematics differ from logic and how is mathematics
instructively similar to metaphysics? (A very important question).
- 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.
- How do subjective judgments differ from objectively valid ones?
- How is pure natural science possible? A brief answer on the
right track will suffice here.
- What are ideas and how do they differ from pure concepts of the
understanding?
- 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:
- four pages max of text.
- one page max of footnotes.
- double spaced.
- Times-Roman 12 pt. font.
- bibliography unlimited.
- all references must be
credited and included in the bibliography.
- bibliographic format:
- book entry: Doe, Jane. (1995) What is There, 2nd ed., New York:
Winter Press.
- article entry: Doe, Jane (1995) "What is There", Journal of Metaphysics, 18: pp.
220-353.
- web page entry: Doe, Jane. (1995) "What is There",
www.metaphysics.com/doe/what-is-there.
topic:
- "What is there?"
- Compare the views of two or three philosophers about what really
exists.
- Remember that traditional discussions of substance are addressed
to this question.
- To make the paper interesting, look for contrasts and comparisons
between views.
- You may also discuss the difficulties faced by the views
you discuss.
grading criteria:
- main considerations: expository precision, brevity,
denonstrated mastry of the material we have looked at. Ask
yourself: have I convinced the reader that I thoroughly
understand
the positions I am discussing.
- secondary considerations: interesting contrasts or
comparisons, originality, style, extra research (e.g., secondary
literature).
- irrelevant considerations: your opinion about which
position is correct.
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:
- 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).
- Which two aspects of language do Platonists confuse?
- How can we avoid saying that meanings exist?
- What is existence (within a conceptual scheme)?
- 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.
- Read the principle on page 40 as: If F is a nuclear
property then there does not exist a collection X of nuclear poperties,
of which F is not a member, such that everything that has all the
propoerties in X also has property F.
- On page 42, the iota symbol (looks like an i) is read (iota
x)...x... = the unique x such that ...x....
- On page 42, the lambda symbol is read like this: (lambda
x).....x.... = the property of x such that ....x..... A standard
rule of the lambda calculus is lambda conversion: ((lambda
x)....x....)(a) iff ...a....
- In the Quine article, a Goedel numbering is a n effective coding
system that assings a unique natural number to each sentence in a
language.
- The Loewenheim-Skolem says that each consistent theory in a
countable language has a countable model. This is interesting,
because we hope that set theory is consistent, but set theory says that there are uncountably
many sets! That is called the "Skolem paradox", because a theory
that says there are uncountably many things can be interpreted in a
countable universe of objects. It isn't a paradox, however.
To say that a set is enumerable is to say that there exists a
one-to-one mapping of the set to the natural numbers. Set theory
entails the statement that there are non-enumerable sets. In the
countable model of set theory, however, there is no object that
corresponds to such an enumeration function even though the domain of
the model is countable. In other words, the interpretation of
"enumeration function" trades off against the interpretation of "set"
to
yield uncountable sets in a countable domain.
Reading Questions:
- 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?
- In the principle on page 40, does "everything" range over
existent things or all things? Give an example to motivate your
answer.
- What are the two possible explanations why we reject questions in
which the subject fails to refer?
- How does Dewey's naturalism differ from mentalistic semantics?
- What point does the famous "gavagai" example illustrate?
- 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:
- What is the instantiation principle and how does it relate to
Platonism?
- Characterize:
- universalia ante res
- universalia in rebus
- universality post res
- What are states of affairs?
- What is the antinomy of bare particulars and what is the solution?
- How can universals be at multiple locations and times?
13. Readings
#18 W. V. Quine "Natural Kinds"
Reading Questions:
- What is "grue" and what is Goodman's problem?
- What is projectability? What is lawlikeness?
- How are sets different from kinds?
- How does Carnap define kinds from relative similarity?
- What is entrenchment and how is it related to scientific kinds?
- 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.
- How are dispositional and non-dispositional predicates related to
properties and powers?
- What is the identity condition for properties?
- Why does Shoemaker think the causal powers of properties cannot
change?
- Use the theory to show that "grue" and "slept-in by George
Washington" are not genuine properties.
- When do conditional powers belong to the same property?
- What is Boyd's counterexample? (Ouch!)
IdentityThrough Time
15. Readings:
#21, Roderick M. Chisholm, "Identity Through Time".
- 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?
- How might the Buddha's views about the self give rise to such a
problem?
- How does Chisholm define Butler's "loose" sense of identity?
- 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:
- Present Inwagen's argument. It's cute--- try it out at your
next party.
- What is Heller's response to Thomson's "Craziness" objection?
- What is Heller's solution to Inwagen's argument?
- 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".
- How does Chisholm refute the possibility that you could be
transferred from one substance to another?
- What do you think the weakest link in his argument is?
- 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!
- What does Chisholm say about the amoeba example?. What do
you think?
18. Readings:
#28. Bernard Williams, "The Self and the Future"
- Describe the body-exchange example.
- Describe the personality-change example. How are the two
related?
- Why is it uncompelling to say that there are "borderline cases"?
- What is the point about first and third person perspectives?
19. Readings:
#29 Derek Parfit, "Personal Identity".
- What two theses does Parfit object to?
- What are two ways in which the two halves of the split person can
be the same person?
- What is q-memory and what is its relevance to the personal
identity issue?
- Distinguish "psychological continuity" from "psychological
connectedness".
- 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.
- What is "disastrous" and what is Putnam's recommended solution?
- 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?
- Why is intentioanality a problem for realism?
- Mackie and Lewis come up for a beating (why?). What's
Putnam's response?
- 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:
- five pages max of text.
- one page max of footnotes.
- double spaced.
- Times-Roman 12 pt. font.
- bibliography unlimited.
- all references must be
credited and included in the bibliography.
- bibliographic format:
- book entry: Doe, Jane. (1995) What is There, 2nd ed., New York:
Winter Press.
- article entry: Doe, Jane (1995) "What is There", Journal of Metaphysics, 18: pp.
220-353.
- web page entry: Doe, Jane. (1995) "What is There",
www.metaphysics.com/doe/what-is-there.
topic:
- any topic covered in the textbook, including those we haven't
looked at.
- compare the views of two or three philosophers on the issue you
choose.
- nice but not necessary to relate modern topic to ancient views
discovered in first half of class.
- detailed presentation and critique of arguments is expected.
grading criteria: similar to midterm
- main considerations: expository precision, brevity,
denonstrated mastry of the material we have looked at. Ask
yourself: have I convinced the reader that I thoroughly
understand
the positions I am discussing.
- secondary considerations: interesting contrasts or
comparisons, originality, style, extra research (e.g., secondary
literature).
- more originality is expected than on the midterm.