A few days ago I encountered in Brian Leiter's blog a mention of a philosopher named Paul Studtmann. The mention was incidental, but enough to make me wonder who he was. Here is the answer. https://www.davidson.edu/people/paul-studtmann and here is a book of his, available through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Empiricism-Problem-Metaphysics-Paul-Studtmann/dp/0739142550/ Studtmann is a critic of metaphysics on what seem to be Kantian grounds. Here are some words from a review of the book pictured above. Graham Oddie of the University of Colorado says that Studtmann's argument against the tenability of metaphysics involves "a multitude of startingly original theses, such as that all so called a priori knowledge is knowledge of the results of effective procedures, and is not really a priori at all. Like Hume, Wittgenstein and Carnap before him, Studtmann aims to leave empirical science, logic and mathematics intact while cutting a broad swathe throug...
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There are at least three views of the relationship between the manifest world and the scientific world. The manifest table makes itself available to me when I sit at the chair. It is brown, firm, solid, makes a certain noise when tapped by one's fingers, and so forth. The scientific table, though, consists of some number of electrical charges whizzing about through otherwise empty space. Expand each image of the table to an image of the world. So: what is the relationship between the two worlds/tables? As I began -- there are at least three theories extant. 1. Scientific realism. The scientific world-view is the right one. The manifest view is mere appearance, a derivative from perceptual abilities that themselves are derivatives from the competition to survive. 2. Scientific pragmatism. The manifest view is the real one. We live, in a non-negotiable way, in its world. Science posits various theoretical agencies, like those tiny charged particles, because it is useful to do ...
Philosophers continue to wrestle with Freudian psychoanalysis. Case in point, Rudolf Bernet, a French thinker. In 2013, Bernet wrote a book on the subject which was widely praised, but which has only just now been translated into English under the title Force, Drive, Desire: A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, and published by the Northwestern University Press, focusing on Freud on the one hand and Lacan on the other. I'm looking today at a review of the book in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews , which tells me that one of Bernet's purposes is to create a philosophical etymology of the idea of "drive," or as Freud would have written it "trieb," from Aristotle to the point at which Freud and later Lacan picked up on it. [And since Freud's image is all to familiar, I have provided one of Lacan above.] If I can trust the reviewer -- Daniel J. Smith of the University of Memphis -- Bernet has a Heideggerian background. This means he "...
I encountered recently the phrase "the process theory of causality." I asked myself, in accord with the lingo of our time, "is that a thing?" So of course I did some googling. The answer is: Yes. It's a thing Here is a pertinent link I discovered via such googling. : https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199279739.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199279739-e-0011 The process theory of causality (PTC) holds that causal processes are more fundamental than the events they are often said to link. We say "A caused B." The act of striking the match against a hard surface caused it to light on fire. But what really exists is a single underlying process over time, where both A and B are abstracted parts of that whole. John Venn is said to have gotten the PTC underway, saying: "Substitute for the time honored 'chain of causation' so often introduced into discussions on this subject the phrase 'a rope of causation' a...
Just to practice concision. 1) In anthropology, Spinoza emphasized what we are not. We are not a "kingdom within the kingdom." We are a subject of nature, which is the only kingdom. 2) In metaphysics, Spinoza is remembered for his naturalized God, or for his deification of nature. They work out to be the same thing, which is the point. This has the odd-seeming but predictable consequence that he has been called an atheist by some commentators and a "God-intoxicated man" by others. 3. In epistemology, Spinoza believed in "geometrical order." The best way to approach truth was to start with a small number of premises that are recommended by their clarity and the difficulty of seeing how things could be otherwise, and to spin out their logical consequences. 4. In ethics, Spinoza believed that the real problem was the confusion and frustration that comes our way when we think we ARE a kingdom with the kingdom, and the solution is just to learn better...
What does a philosopher mean when he appeals to the "intuitive" nature of a premise? Does "X is intuitive" just means "X seems plausible and the non-X views I have considered seem implausible"? Four authors, led by James Ladyman, a few years back (2007) wrote a book called EVERYTHING MUST GO: METAPHYSICS NATURALIZED. They complained that most metaphysics of late, especially within the analytic philosophical tradition, has been worthless. I recently read a review of this book in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, posted there in 2010. It paraphrased the key sentiments of the authors in this passage. Look at any well-written paper in analytic philosophy and you will see arguments aplenty; if the author has not done your work for you by making a list of numbered premises, he or she has probably done enough that you could make such a list without having to exercise too much creativity. The arguments may very well be valid: you will be convinced tha...
Xenophanes, one of the pre-Socratic philosophers, observed, "Ethiopians say that their gods are snub nosed and black; Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired. "But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own -- horses like horses, cattle like cattle." What was he trying to do via these assertions? We don't know much about the context. But they are intriguing. Was he trying to suggest that the truth about the gods is unknowable? This could be akin to Kant's antinomies. Kant told us that it is possible to prove, for example, both that the universe must have had a beginning and that the universe could not have a beginning. Thus, we can only conclude that the ultimate reality is unknown to us. Perhaps Xenophanes was saying likewise, and we should simply read "the gods" as "noumena."
William James made the following points about Hegelian philosophy in an 1882 article. 1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the other false. When that happens, one must go forever, nor is there any 'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive. 2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought. 3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges because they are without chasm. 4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only partially. 5. Their partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a common world. 6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts. 7. But the same quality appears in many times and space. Generic sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by which the jolts are reduced. 8. But between different q...
There are surely respects in which the notion of “space-time” as a unitary block, the view of time as just one of its dimensions, has served a useful role in the further development of science and technology. Insofar as it does, we might accept it pragmatically as true. But (secondly) broad propositions are often ambiguous, even when not obviously so, and in the case of any ambiguity it is always open to us to say that the statement or the idea is true in one respect, false in another. What might tempt us even at an early blush to suspect that there are respects in which this idea is false? There are the various ambiguities and paradoxes that come with the idea. Consider the bicycle in the doorway as an example. A bicycle stands in an open doorway such that the front of the bike is inside the house, the back of the door is outside. A philosopher asks us, “Well, is the bike in the house or not?” We might well reply, “some parts are, some parts are not.” Simp...
What follows may appear to have been plagiarized from the wikipedia article on The Problem of Universals. It isn't though: I was the original author of much of that article, and the material that follows still survives there in roughly the form I originally gave it years ago. So I feel free to steal it back from myself. --------------- William James learned pragmatism, the way of understanding an idea by its practical effects, from his friend Peirce, but he gave it new significance. (Which was not to Peirce's taste - he came to complain that James had "kidnapped" the term and eventually to call himself a "pragmaticist" instead.) Although James certainly agreed with Peirce and against Berkeley that general ideas exist as a psychological fact, he was a nominalist in his ontology: From every point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from Plato and Aristotle, philosophers should...
One traditional approach to the mind-body problem in philosophy is this: look for some neutral stuff. The interaction of an immaterial consciousness with a material body/brain would seem less mysterious were there some neutral stuff out of which both consciousness and physicality were themselves created. The term "neutral" here means simply that the theorist at issue isn't trying to dissolve one half of the dichotomy into the other. There are three broad types of neutralism, one of which is simply called "neutral monism." The other two that one can put into this category have different names and slightly different approaches: panpsychism, and double-aspect theory. I will say a brief word now about how each of them relates to the philosopher who inspired the existence of this blog: William James. Tomorrow, I'll try to say something about how they are different. Neutral Monism William James is a and perhaps even the key figure in the development ...
One of the Big 30 of philosophy in the list I presented yesterday, perhaps the least well known of them to non-philosophers, is D.K. Lewis. More fully, that is David Kellogg Lewis (1941-2001). He is hanging on at the end of the list, #30, but he is there, in the elite company, nonetheless. He got there, interestingly, because of a late surge in what one may call pro-metaphysics votes in the polling. The earlier votes had had more of a positivist slant to them. This late pro-metaphysics surge not only got Lewis onto the list it put Aristotle at the top and moved Hegel up (past Nietzsche) to #17. So let's talk a little about Lewis's defining idea. He is considered the outstanding exponent of extreme modal realism. Let's break that down: (1) modal logic is the branch of logic that addresses issues of possibility and necessity; (2) modal realism is the view that what are called "possible worlds" are real facts; Lewis' extreme modal realism is the view that...
I mentioned Samuel Alexander last week in the course of discussing the semantics of emergence. At one time, I considered Alexander to be an important and impressive philosopher. I'm afraid I've outgrown his appeal, but he is certainly worth a blog entry of his own. He is the author of Space, Time, and Deity (1920). If you are interested in the social history of academe, you might also want to know that he was the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college. The book named above is one of the early expressions of metaphysicians' efforts to incorporate Einsteinian physics into their own speculations. Space and Time are named separately in the title, but the book is suffused with the idea that they are one, and that this one thing, spacetime, is not merely (as many philosophers have thought and still think) a matter of relationships among objects or events, it is a directly intuited substance. What is more, spacetime is THE substance for Alexander. Over t...
In contemporary metaphysical discussions the word "emergence" and its variants play a big part. It often appears in the context of the mind-body problem. The mind (or intentionality, or consciousness, or whatever you may call the intangible subjective aspect of our reality) is said to have "emerged" at a certain moment in evolution, and to recapitulate this by "emerging" again at a certain moment in embryology. I think there is an element of word magic involved. We lessen the mystery of something by having a good word for it. IIRC, Samuel Alexander built an impressive metaphysical structure around this word magic. Matter, he said, emerged from space, then life from matter, then mind from life, like a growing ziggurat. I bring this up because I came across an intriguing discussion of the ambiguity of the word in my recent web surfing. Here is a link. It turns out that was written a year ago but, hey, that's an eyeblink for the chronology of ...
As I was saying last weekend, Valdi Ingthorsson, (portrayed here) of Sweden's Lund University, has written a book on the philosophy of time. Much of it is devoted to a reconsideration of McTaggart's argument to the effect that time is not real. To summarize ruthlessly, Ingthorsson says that if McTaggart's argument is taken as a stand-alone, it fails, because it begs the question. McTaggart is arguing that IF reality is a single block, THEN it can't be divided in any meaningful way into that which has happened already and that which hasn't. But that is just to say that if it is indivisible, then it is indivisible: which isn't informative. If one is willing to contend with McTaggart's idealistic metaphysics as a whole, OTOH, then his argument serves a useful purpose. It draws out some of the implications of some parts of that whole. Ingthorsson also contends that the philosophical literature about McTaggart's paradox has been sharply split betwe...