This paper analyzes the role of the principle of causality in Cassirer’s account of the coordination of concepts and spatio-temporal objects. We shall see that, in contradistinction to Kantian schematism, Cassirer maintains that this coordination is not achieved by means of a third element, which albeit intellectual is nevertheless also sensible. Rather, in Cassirer’s view, the coordination will take place through a specification of the concepts that should be sought “within the domain of concepts itself.” We shall show that (...) the principle of causality is the ultimate condition upon which the possibility of the coordination of concepts and spatio-temporal objects depends. (shrink)

This paper analyzes Cassirer's account of the coordination of concepts and spatio-temporal objects. We shall see that, in contradistinction to Kantian schematism, Cassirer maintains that this coordination is not achieved by means of a third element, which albeit intellectual is nevertheless also sensible. Rather, in Cassirer's view, the coordination will take place through a specification of the concepts that should be sought “within the domain of concepts itself.”.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE SPATIO-TEMPORAL THEORY OF INDIVIDUATION MICHAEL POTTS Methodist Callege Fayetteville, North Carolina I. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW A. The Influence of Plato HE SPATIO-TEMPORAL theory of individuation has long history in the philosophical tradition. Its roots go ack to Aristotle's theory of individuation by matter,1 and ultimately back to Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato struggled with the problem of how forms are instantiated in the phenomenal world. Besides " a model (...) form (paradeigmatos eidos), intelligible and ever uniformly existent" and "the model's copy (mimeta paradeigmatos), subject to becoming and visible," Plato postulated a third thing, a " receptacle " (hupodochen), "the nurse of all becoming." 2 It is wholly indeterminate:... while it is always receiving all things, nowhere and in no wise does it assume any shape similar to any of the things that enter into it. For it is laid down by nature as a moulding-stuff for everything, being moved and marked by the entering figures, and because of them it appears different at different times. And the figures that enter and depart are copies of those that are always existent, being stamped from them...8 1 I recognize that this is a controversial claim. Since I am tracing the spatio-temporal theory of individuation from Aristotle through St. Thomas Aquinas, for the purposes of this paper I will follow St. Thomas's interpretation of Aristotle and accept the view that Aristotle took matter to be the principle of individuation. 2 Plato, Timaeus 49a. The version used is the Loeb edition by R. G. Bury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966). a Timaeus 50b-c. 59 60 MICHAEL POTTS The receptacle, then, is like formless wax upon which the forms are stamped. It is " apprehensible by a kind of bastard reasoning (logismo tini notho), barely an object of belief." 4 B. Aristotle It may seem on the surface unusual that the idea of the receptable would later be modified and used to explain individuation. Plato himself was concerned with the universal, the form. The instantiations of the forms in the phenomenal world do not even deserve to be called "this " or " that." 5 With Aristotle, however, the individual gains new importance, since for him forms have their reality only in individuals and individuals are primarily called "substance." If this is the case, then Aristotle has to explain how " humanity " can be the same while " Socrates" and " Callias" are two different individuals. Since form is universal, it cannot individuate, so the source of individuation must be matter-two individuals are different human beings, for example, because they have different lumps of matter.... and when the whole has been generated, such a form in this flesh and these bones, this is Callias or Socrates, and this is distinct from that which generated it because the matter is distinct (hulen, hetera gar), but it is the same in species since the species is indivisible.6 This view raises problems. Matter is indeterminate; it is Aristotle 's modification of Plato's receptacle. How can anything indeterminate itself determine individual substances? More needed to be done to.bring out the meaning of individuation by matter, and St. Thomas Aquinas developed a more detailed and satisfactory position. 4 Timaeus 52b. 5 Timaeus 49d-50a. 6 Aristotle, Metaphyscis 28 (1034a5-8). The Greek text used is Metaphysica, ed. by Werner Jaeger (Oxonii : E Typographaeo Clarendoniano, 1957). The English translation is by Hippocrates G. Apostle (Grinnell, Iowa: Peripatetic Press, 1979). THE SPATIO-TEMPORAL THEORY OF INDIVIDUATION 61 C. St. Thomas Aquinas Aquinas, recognizing that prime matter is indeterminate and therefore not something that can individuate, argues that the principle of individuation is " signate" or " designated" matter. "Materia signata" is defined as matter as " sub determinatis dimensionibus consideratur," " considered under determinate dimensions." 7 While the exact meaning of this is unclear, it seems to refer to matter under determinate spatial dimensions or coordinates. While the form determines what sort of thing an entity is, what determines it to be this individual is this matter with a particular set of spatial coordinates. Henry Veatch puts Aquinas's view into more modern terms: In fact, matter as determined by dimensive quantity guarantees ontologically nothing more nor less than the... (shrink)

A lot of people believe that distinct objects can occupy precisely the same place for the entire time during which they exist. Such people have to provide an answer to the 'grounding problem' – they have to explain how such things, alike in so many ways, nonetheless manage to fall under different sortals, or have different modal properties. I argue in detail that they cannot say that there is anything in virtue of which spatio-temporally coincident things have those properties. (...) However, I also argue that this may not be as bad as it looks, and that there is a way to make sense of the claim that such properties are primitive. (shrink)

It is a standard assumption in contemporary metaphysics that concrete objects come with a location in space and time. This applies not only to material objects and events, but also modes (such as the roundness of the apple, the softness of the pillow, Socrates' wisdom) and entities that have been called 'disturbances' (e.g. holes, folds, faults, and scratches). Taking the approach of descriptive metaphysics, I will show that modes and disturbances fail to have a bearer-independent spatial location. This (...) allows for a metaphysical explanation of the Chomskyan contrast between 'There is a fly believed to be in the bottle' and the unacceptable 'There is a flaw believed to be in the argument'. A subsidiary point this paper makes is that in their lack of a direct spatial location, modes need to be sharply distinguished from tropes as a category of foundationalist metaphysics that has been at the center of a pursuit of a one-category ontology since Williams (1953). (shrink)

Research on brain or cognitive/affective processes, culture, social interaction, and structural analysis are overlapping but often independent ways humans have attempted to understand the origins of their evolution, historical, and contemporary development. Each level seeks to employ its own theoretical concepts and methods for depicting human nature and categorizing objects and events in the world, and often relies on different sources of evidence to support theoretical claims. Each level makes reference to different temporal bandwidths (milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, (...) months, years, decades, and centuries) and focuses on different spatio-temporal activities and controlled and non-controlled stimulus conditions. Biological mechanisms and environmental pressures for survival simultaneously created a gradual intersection and enhancement of cognitive/affective skills, cultural practices, and changes in collaborative social interaction and communicative skills. The evolution of a given level of analysis is assumed to have been incremental and overlapping. These innovative and independent ways humans have learned to characterize their brain or cognitive/affective and social/economic/political life often depend on unexamined, representational re-descriptions or cognitive/affective and socio-cultural devices and forms of communication that facilitate the depiction of practices and beliefs we attribute to respondents or subjects and research colleagues. (shrink)

To what extent is time similar to space? in this paper it is shown that the claim, Made by richard taylor among others, That time and space are "radically alike" is unfounded. This claim can be supported only by employing the notion of temporal parts. It is shown that if objects are regarded as having temporal parts as well as spatial parts, Then serious disanalogies exist between time and space. Furthermore, If objects are said to have temporal parts, (...) Then it must also be held that time is in a very important sense "prior" to space and this that time and space are not only unlike in certain respects but indeed are radically dissimilar. Moreover, The so-Called "manifold theory of time" necessarily makes use of the notion of temporal parts and therefore should hold that time and space are quite unlike. But since an important part of the manifold theory of time is the claim that time and space are very much alike, This theory is to that extent not satisfactory. (shrink)

This article considers recent arguments against the proposition that one and the same object cannot go out of existence and then come into existence again (so that, e.g., teleportation would involve change of identity.). It argues that these arguments can be evaded by adopting a four-dimensional ontology, according to which human beings, trees, etc., have temporal as well as spatial parts.

In chapter seven ‘Self Identification’ of his challenging book The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans attempts to give an account of how it is that one is able to think about oneself self‐consciously. On Evans’ view, when one attempts to think of oneself self‐consciously that person is having what he calls an ‘I’ thought. Since these ‘I’ thoughts are a case of reference, more specifically self‐reference, Evans thinks that these thoughts can be explained by employing the same theoretical framework that (...) he uses to explain other kinds of reference. Evans thinks all thoughts are essentially structured, and this means that they must fall under his ‘generality constraint’. Since ‘I’ thoughts are also ‘thoughts’ they are essentially structured as well, and they too must be subject to the generality constraint. The radical implication of this is that Evans thinks that if ‘I’ thoughts are subject to the generality constraint, then he can show that self‐reference must be reference to a thing which we can locate on a spatio‐temporal map. In this article I hope to accomplish three things. First, I will spell out in detail the argument Evans uses to arrive at his claim that self‐reference must be reference to something located on a spatio‐temporal map. Second, I will raise an objection, which states that Evans’ conclusion that self‐reference must involve spatio‐temporal location is not a consequence of the generality constraint. Finally I will argue that Evans’ conclusion that self‐reference must involve spatio‐temporal location is in fact in tension with the generality constraint, rather than being an implication of it. (shrink)

Any philosopher sympathetic to physicaIism (or materiaIism) will allow that there is some sense in which ordinary objects---tables and chairs, etc.---are physicaI. But what sense, exactly? John Post holds a view implying that every ordinary object is identical with some or other spatio-temporal sum of fundamental entities. I begin by deploying a modal argument intended to show that ordinary objects, for example elephants, are not identical with spatio-temporal sums of such entities. Then I claim that appeal to David (...) Lewis’s counterpart theory, even if acceptable in principle, would not permit Post to make a plausible reply to this argument. Finally, I sketch an alternative account of ordinary objects, which does not require identity with spatio-temporal sums of fundamental physical entities, and argue that, despite Post’s protestations, this account is acceptably physicalist: his identity claims are not required for physicalism. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics has raised in an acute form three problems which go to the heart of man's relationship with nature through experimental science: (r) the public objectivity of science, that is, its value as a universal science for all investigators; (2) the empirical objectivity of scientific objects, that is, man's ability to construct a precise or causal spatio-temporal model of microscopic systems; and finally (3), the formal objectivity of science, that is, its value as an expression of what nature (...) is independently of its being an object of human knowledge. These are three aspects of what is generally called the "crisis of objec tivity" or the "crisis of realism" in modern physics. This crisis is. studied in the light of Werner Heisenberg's work. Heisenberg was one of the architects of quantum mechanics, and we have chosen his writings as the principal source-material for this study. Among physicists of the microscopic domain, no one except perhaps Bohr has expressed himself so abundantly and so profoundly on the philosophy of science as Heisenberg. His writings, both technical and non-technical, show an awareness of the mysterious element in scientific knowledge, far from the facile positivism of Bohr and others of his contemporaries. The mystery of human knowledge and human SUbjectivity is for him an abiding source of wonder. (shrink)

This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents. In order to elucidate the nature of agent-files, three views of the (...) relation between object- and agent-tracking are distinguished: the Independence, Deflationary and Organism-Dependence Views. The correct view is argued to be the latter, which states that perceptual and epistemic tracking of a unique human organism requires tracking both its spatio-temporal object-properties and its agent-properties. (shrink)

IF THE OBJECT OF AN INQUIRY is a constituent of the physical world, such as a physical force or a chemical substance, it is not incumbent on the inquirer to raise the prior question of the basis and nature of inquiry itself. This is as true of the bodily functions of organisms endowed with subjective capacities as it is of the physical world within which the organism finds itself. But this situation no longer holds when the object of inquiry involves (...) the nature of subjectivity itself, and not simply the elements and processes of the spatio-temporal world from which subjects have emerged. Two centuries of research in the physical sciences have led to the conclusion that the physical universe is a process of cosmological and biological evolution which stretches back for billions of years prior to the appearance on this planet of any sort of subject, nonhuman or human. The supposition that an inference of this sort can be "theory-laden" to the point of invalidating the evolutionary inference itself will not be taken seriously here. Exactly how evolution is to be understood is certainly a problem, and is in fact one of the problems with which we are here concerned. But the essential premise, the fundamentally important point, is that organisms capable of subjective experience did emerge in the course of that evolution. It follows that if we are to attempt the analysis of a concept which does not refer simply to the physical world itself but both to that world and to the manner of conceiving it, then it is necessary to begin by situating subjectivity relatively to the evolutionary process. (shrink)

Many philosophers posit abstract entities – where something is abstract if it is acausal and lacks spatio-temporal location. Theories, types, characteristics, meanings, values and responsibilities are all good candidates for abstractness. Such things raise an epistemological puzzle: if they are abstract, then how can we have any epistemic access to how they are? If they are invisible, intangible and never make anything happen, then how can we ever discover anything about them? In this article, I critically examine epistemological objections to (...) belief in abstract objects offered by Paul Benacerraf, Colin Cheyne and Hartry Field. (shrink)

Kant's philosophy must be understood nonnaturalistically and anti-psychologistically. Self-consciousness must be interpreted as preceding the distinction between different persons. Kant departs from the traditional idea that I thoughts are always mediated by a certain specific I sense or conceptualization of oneself. At the same time the so-called paradoxes of self-consciousness are resolved. The possibility of a pre-personal self-consciousness is what links the way all objects are given to finite beings to the way they are conceptualized by those beings. It (...) serves as the unifying basis for intuitions and concepts. Intuitions and concepts of objects are connected by their relation to a numerically identical self. ;The subject construed impersonally provides the frame for any possible experience and is one in the same in all possible experience. As such it can never be experienced as a distinct entity. It is the condition under which it is possible to have a point of view at all. One must be in a position to become conscious of the numerical identity of this logical subject of all representation if is to be possible to communicate indeed to compare and contrast representational contents at all. ;Self-consciousness is inherently empty and yet also necessarily in relation to contents of consciousness. This means that its numerical identity can only be sustained if all potential contents of consciousness present themselves to the self in such a way that they sustain the possibility of consciousness of the self as having a discrete empirical identity. Kant's argument in the First Analogy and the Refutation of Idealism fulfills this demand for a correlate to the numerical identity of pre-personal consciousness in the data presented to self-consciousness spatio-temporally. We must view self-construction and construction of objects existing outside of us as part of a single process which presupposes an impersonal self-consciousness. (shrink)

Habermas asserts that the ‘presupposition’ of the common objective world is thrust upon us by the pragmatics of language use. However, this is a dubious claim. A pre-linguistic relation to the world as common and objective is required for language acquisition. What’s more, Husserl’s analyses indicate that aspects of our experience of the common world are grounded in experiences of spatio-temporal horizonality and of the co-presence of others within that world-horizon. This is not to negate the importance of communicatively achieved (...) intersubjectivity, nor to diminish the rational significance of our linguistically articulated ‘world concepts’. But it is to suggest that the ‘presupposition’ of the common objective world has phenomenological, not linguistic-pragmatic, roots. (shrink)

In a number of recent papers, Davidson cultivates a new-found interest in “external world.” Starting from a naturalistic “attitude and method,” he purports to show that the skeptic's doubts are vacuous because the skeptic "does not understand his own doubts. ” His argument for this invokes a theory of cognitive content on which the traditional Cartesian picture of inference from inner to outer domains is allegedly turned on its head. On Davidson's alternative account, propositional thought is only made possible by (...) a prior understanding of "objective truth,” where this notion is itself only given content by the presupposition of communicative exchange between speakers disparately located in a common spatio-temporal setting. What allegedly emerges is a comprehensive system within which the preconditions of meaningfulness effectively double as the preconditions of knowledge, providing an account of knowledge within which the skeptic has no room to maneuver. My concern in this paper is both with the semantic aspects of this account and with the epistemological consequences that Davidson sees as following from them. The story he tells, I argue, fails to prevent an alternative form of skepticism from arising from within his own naturalistic account of the nature and acquisition of knowledge. This is because a central contention of the account he provides is not only capricious, but implicitly at odds with his long-held views on the anomalousness of the mental. (shrink)

I will introduce and motivate eliminativist super-relationism. This is the conjunction of relationism about spacetime and eliminativism about material objects. According to the view, the universe is a big collection of spatio-temporal relations and natural properties, and no substance (material or spatio-temporal) exists in it. The view is original since eliminativism about material objects, when understood as including not only ordinary objects like tables or chairs but also physical particles, is generally taken to imply substantivalism about spacetime: (...) if properties are directly instantiated by spacetime without the mediation of material objects, then, surely, spacetime has to be a substance. After introducing briefly the two debates about spacetime (§1) and material objects (§2), I will present Schaffer's super-substantivalism (§3), the conjunction of substantivalism about spacetime and eliminativism about material objects at the fundamental level. I shall then expose and discuss the assumption from which the implication from eliminativism to substantivalism is drawn, and discuss the compatibility of eliminativism with relationism: if spacetime is not a substance, and if material objects are not real, how are we to understand the instantiation of properties (§4)? And what are the relata of spatio-temporal relations (§5)? I then show that each argument in favor of super-substantivalism offered by Schaffer also holds for super-relationism (§6) and examine several metaphysical consequences of the view (§7). I conclude that both super-substantivalism and super-relationism are compatible with Schaffer's priority monism (§8). (shrink)

The term 'essentialism' in its popular usage is usually qualified in some way, as in 'biological essentialism', 'gender essentialism' and 'social essentialism'. The essentialist theses were defended on the grounds that denying them leads, under plausible assumptions, to pairs of worlds containing objects which are intrinsic and spatio‐temporal duplicates and yet which are numerically distinct. This chapter outlines some technical difficulties in getting the definitions of 'essential property' and 'individual essence' exactly right. It explains the idea of a (...) metaphysically essential property in terms of Aristotle's 'essential/accidental' contrast. A popular idea is to invoke the notion, which has its roots in Aristotle's theory of essence and accident, of a substance sortal. A different way of developing a sortal‐based account of essential kinds is suggested by David Wiggins, who argues that it is only ultimate sortals that represent essential properties, where an ultimate sortal is the most general sortal corresponding to a given principle of individuation. (shrink)

The domain of contemporary physics consists of two different classes of objects: a) of physical objects - events, particles (and their aggregates) and fields; b) spatio-temporal objects - space-time points, moments, space points and their corresponding sets: space-time, time and space. If objects of some kind (physical or spatio-temporal) are treated as individuals (= nonsets), then it is possible to define (equivalently) all remaining kinds of objects belonging to both classes which were mentioned above. This (...) way we can construct two monistic ontologies of physics: eventism founded on events, and the pointism founded on space-time points. It is also possible to construct a dualistic ontology of physics, based on events and space-time points. The paper presents these three ontologies. (shrink)

This paper explores the connection between Kant’s first antinomy and the set-theoretical paradox of the largest cardinal. The lesson to be drawn is that we should refrain from reifying the collections that generate the antinomies: the collection of all spatio-temporal objects in the case of Kant’s first antinomy, the collection of all objects whatsoever in the case of the Cantorian paradox. This conclusion is not only one that we are entitled to draw but also one that does not (...) generate new philosophical problems of its own. In this respect it is more attractive than other contemporary reactions to the paradoxes of set theory. (shrink)

One of Heidegger’s enduring concerns was to develop an original meditation on the meaning of (the presence of) the present. Integral to this attempt is his critique of the understanding of the being of beings in terms of the objectivity of the object. In this paper, I trace Heidegger’s analyses of objectivity, through which Heidegger consistently establishes objectivity as non-primordial and derivative. In order to do this, however, Heidegger had to identify a specific, narrow (spatio-temporalized) conception of objectivity (in terms (...) of Gegenstehenlassen and Vorstellen) as the hallmark of modern philosophy. I show that it is unclear whether that conception is a justified result or rather an unjustified presupposition of his approach. I then suggest what meanings of objectivity might be lost after Heidegger, by pointing to several aspects of Hegel’s notion of objectivity that are incompatible with Heidegger’s account, to wit: the lack of ‘subject-object’-terminology in his definitions of objectivity; the special language of ‘forms of’ objectivity; Hegel’s critique of representation; his notion of Gegenstand as a content with a categorical form, and, finally, that Aristotle’s notion of hypokeimenon might provide a clue as to how Hegel’s notion of object can be understood. (shrink)

This article addresses three questions concerning Kant’s views on non-rational animals: do they intuit spatio-temporal particulars, do they perceive objects, and do they have intentional states? My aim is to explore the relationship between these questions and to clarify certain pervasive ambiguities in how they have been understood. I first disambiguate various nonequivalent notions of objecthood and intentionality: I then look closely at several models of objectivity present in Kant’s work, and at recent discussions of representational and relational theories (...) of intentionality. I argue ultimately that, given the relevant disambiguations, the answers to all three questions will likely be positive. These results both support what has become known as the nonconceptualist reading of Kant, and make clearer the price the conceptualist must pay to sustain her position. (shrink)

Lucy Allais presents an original interpretation of Kant's transcendental idealism. She argues that his distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. Kant is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he does not (...) assert the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects. On Allais's account, we cannot understand Kant's idealism without a clear account of his notion of intuition and of the role of intuition in cognition: she understands Kantian intuitions as representations that give us acquaintance with the objects of thought. This enables us to make sense of Kant's central argument for his idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and to see why he takes the complete idealist position to be established there. (shrink)

One of the more superficially perplexing features of Lacan’s notion of objet petit a is the fact that he simultaneously characterizes it as both non-specularizable (i.e., incapable of being captured in spatio-temporal representations) and specular (i.e., incarnated in visible avatars). This assignment of the apparently contradictory attributes of visibility and invisibility to object a is a reflection of this object’s strange position at the intersection of transcendental and empirical dimensions. Indeed, this object, which Lacan holds up as his central psychoanalytic (...) discovery, raises important philosophical questions about the transcendental-empirical distinction, arguably short-circuiting in interesting, productive ways this dichotomy and many of its permutations. This article seeks to achieve two aims: one, to clarify how and why Lacan situates object a between the specular and the non-specular; and, two, to extract from the results of this clarification a preliminary sketch of a post-Lacanian transcendentalism that is also thoroughly materialist. (shrink)

This paper details the key steps in Kant’s transcendental proof that we perceive, not merely imagine, physical objects. These steps begin with Kant’s method (§II) and highlight the spatio-temporal character of our representational capacities (§III), Kant’s two transcendental proofs of mental content externalism (§IV), his proof that we can only make causal judgments about spatial substances (§§V, VI), the transcendental conditions of our self-ascription of experiences (§VII), Kant’s semantics of singular cognitive reference (§VIII), perceptual synthesis (§IX), Kant’s justificatory fallibilism (...) (§X), and the cognitive transcendence of global perceptual hypotheses (§XI). The proof outlined here differs markedly from ‘analytic transcendental arguments’ that focus selectively on Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’ and portions of the ‘Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding’. Understood as presented here, Kant’s epistemology is directly relevant to contemporary philosophical issues. (shrink)

Standard theories in mereotopology focus on relations of parthood and connection among spatial or spatio-temporal regions. Objects or processes which might be located in such regions are not normally directly treated in such theories. At best, they are simulated via appeal to distributions of attributes across the regions occupied or by functions from times to regions. The present paper offers a richer framework, in which it is possible to represent directly the relations between entities of various types at different (...) levels, including both objects and the regions they occupy. What results is a layered mereotopology, a theory which can handle multiple layers (analogous to the layers of a lasagna) of spatially or spatiotemporally coincident but mereologically non-overlapping entities. (shrink)

Kant insists that the use of concepts must be subject to empirical conditions if they are to have objective validity. This article analyses Kants distinction between empirical and transcendental truths. Since transcendental concepts are pure concepts without spatio-temporal content, their objective validity is of the same second-order kind as that of unschematized categories. This characteristic of transcendental concepts implies that the cognitive powers picked out by them are not particular psychological mechanisms, but rather abstract functional structures. Transcendental concepts owe their (...) objective validity to the realizability of the functional structures by empirical cognizers like humans. This relation in turn helps to explain the nature of transcendental truths. (shrink)

In this paper I present a new solution to the so-called ‘neglected alternative’ objection against Kant’s argument for transcendental idealism. According to this objection, Kant does not give sufficient justification for his claim that not only are space and time forms of our intuition but they also fail to be things in themselves or properties thereof. I first discuss a proposal by Willaschek and Allais, who try to defend Kant against this charge by building on his account of a priori (...) intuition, and argue that it is insufficient to meet the objection in its full force. I then present my own solution to the problem. It is based on a reconstruction of Kant’s account of properties of appearances, and tries to show that this account implies that spatio-temporal properties could in principle not pertain both to appearances and to things in themselves. (shrink)

Infants apparently start to understand their experience via the linked concepts of numerical identity and spatio-temporally continuous objects during the forth month of life. As described by Piaget and Klein, this development requires them to synthesise their experience in a new ways: in particular they must start to acknowledge that the main target of their anger at frustration and the main target of their gratitude and love are the same person, who is unique and irreplaceable. This seems to have (...) an immediate consequence in the onset of separation distress and stranger anxiety, and apparently has far-reaching psychological consequences later. (shrink)

By taking into account some texts published between the first and the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that have been neglected by most of those who have dealt with the deduction of the categories, I argue that the core of the deduction is to be identified as the ‘almost single inference from the precisely determined definition of a judgment in general’, which Kant adumbrates in the Metaphysical Foundations in order to ‘make up for the deficiency’ of the (...) A-deduction. Whereas the first step of the B-deduction is an attempt to show that the manifold of an intuition belongs to the ‘necessary unity of self-consciousness’ by means of the synthesis of the understanding, the second step has the task of showing that the very same synthesis is responsible for the spatio-temporal unity of the manifold. Thus, Kant's ‘answer to Hume’ is that no spatio-temporal objects of experience at all are merely ‘given’, independently of the conceptual activities of the understanding. Against the established view I substantiate the claim that with this ‘almost single inference’ of the second proof step the distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience consequently vanished from Kant's thinking. (shrink)

Benjamin Callard has recently suggested that causation between Platonic objects—standardly understood as atemporal and non-spatial—and spatio-temporal objects is not ‘a priori’ unintelligible. He considers the reasons some have given for its purported unintelligibility: apparent impossibility of energy transference, absence of physical contact, etc. He suggests that these considerations fail to rule out a priori Platonic-object causation. However, he has overlooked one important issue. Platonic objects must causally affect different objects differently, and different Platonic objects must (...) causally affect the same objects differently. How are Platonic objects—ones outside space and time—supposed to do that? CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In this paper I argue that if the Identity of Indiscernibles is not necessarily true, then Haecceitism ensues—where Haecceitism is the view that there are maximal possibilities that include all the same qualitative possibilities, and yet differ with respect to the non-qualitative possibilities they include. This goes against the common intuition that Anti-Haecceitism is compatible with the Identity of Indiscernibles being only contingently true. My argument is interesting in many respects. First, it shows that in any modal framework there is (...) a connection between the number of worldbound ordinary spatio-temporal objects, and the number of overall possibilities. Second, it has repercussions for the tenability of some philosophical positions, like Generalism, which is usually interpreted as entailing Anti-Haecceitism while at the same time being compatible with the claim that the Identity of Indiscernibles is not necessarily true. If I am correct, Generalism and similar philosophical accounts turn out to be inconsistent. Finally, it provides a strong argument for Haecceitism, given that the majority of authors today find counterexamples to the Identity of Indiscernibles extremely convincing, and many philosophical positions have been and continue being criticised on the basis of their commitment to the Identity of Indiscernibles. The paper is structured as follows: I introduce Haecceitism and the Identity of Indiscernibles in Sects. 1 and 2 respectively. Drawing on a result from the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, which I survey in Sect. 3, I give my main argument in Sect. 4. Finally, I discuss some implications in Sect. 5. (shrink)

The problem of philosophical skepticism relates to the difficulty involved in underwriting the claim that we know anything of spatio-temporal reality. It is often claimed, in fact, that proper philosophical scrutiny reveals quite the opposite from what common sense suggests. Knowledge of external reality is thought to be even quite obviously denied to us as a result of the alleged fact that we all fail to know that certain skeptical scenarios do not obtain. A skeptical scenario is one in which (...) we have neurological occurrences just like any normal situation in which we actually perceive spatio-temporal objects, but where we are deceived in some sense as a result of the manipulation of our brains from some outside source. In this work I attempt to address the problem of philosophical skepticism by claiming that most of us are able to come to know plenty about external reality, since we can come to realize that a certain philosophical theory of perception is correct. The theory I have in mind is what I call a non-cognitive theory of perception. According to this view, perceptual experience is defined by continuous, sensitive behavioral interaction with spatio-temporal objects of the appropriate size, shape, hardness, speed, etc. Knowing that this theory of perception is correct is equivalent to knowing that we know plenty about external reality. This is ultimately because by knowing that a non-cognitive theory of perception is true, we know that any skeptical scenario must fail to obtain. The structure of the work proceeds by first discussing the significance of the problem of philosophical skepticism in some detail. Chapter 1 lays out how the problem does indeed forcefully arise if it is conceded that we fail to know that the skeptical scenarios fail to obtain. Chapter 2 develops the sort of view of our epistemological situation that falls out of accepting without qualification that the problem exists. Chapter 3 examines and criticizes certain popular responses to the skeptical problem. The main goal of these first three preliminary chapters is to indicate that once it is admitted that we fail to know that the skeptical scenarios fail to obtain, the problem of philosophical skepticism forcefully presents itself. Chapter 4, however, attacks the idea that we fail to know that the skeptical scenarios fail to obtain. In this chapter I argue that this idea is wedded to the position that a certain theory of perception is correct. The theory in question is what I call a conjunctive theory of veridical experience. According to this view, normal experience of spatio-temporal objects occurs when a subject has a certain perceptual experience, and that experience also happens to match up with and/or be satisfied by what is really the case. Only when a theory of this sort is assumed, I argue, is the claim that we fail to know that the skeptical scenarios fail to obtain found to be obvious. In chapter 5 I argue that, in fact, a non-cognitive theory, rather than a conjunctive theory, is the correct view to maintain. In the final chapter 6 I develop the epistemological position that falls out of accepting a non-cognitive theory. (shrink)

1. Almost from the beginning of its history, it has tried to provide intelligible, systematic accounts of the world of actualities--the spatio-temporal objects which ground our daily experiences. Because of the great success of science in formulating cosmic schemes which are sustained by many widespread observations, multiple, daring predictions, and a host of desirable practical productions, many thinkers have been tempted to turn the entire task over to the sciences. Others have supposed that the philosopher has nothing more to (...) do than to occupy himself with historical studies, logical investigations, and perhaps some asides on ethics, aesthetics, and politics. (shrink)

The domain of contemporary physics consists of two different classes of objects: a) physical objects — point events (shortly — events), elementary particles (and their aggregates), and fields; b) spatio-temporal objects — space-time points (shortly — points), moments, space points, and their corresponding sets: space-time, time and physical space. If objects of some kind (physical or spatio-temporal) are treated as individuals, i.e. nonsets, then it is possible to define the remaining kinds of objects from both (...) above-mentioned classes. In this way one can construct two alternative monistic ontologies of physics: eventism founded on events, and pointism founded on points. It is also possible to establish a dualistic ontology of physics, based both on events and points treated as individuals. In this paper these three ontologies are presented with particular emphasis on some extreme versions of monistic ontologies. I shall compare them considering both their respective advantages and difficulties and trying to justify my own choice of eventistic ontology. (shrink)

Modal logics, originally conceived in philosophy, have recently found many applications in computer science, artificial intelligence, the foundations of mathematics, linguistics and other disciplines. Celebrated for their good computational behaviour, modal logics are used as effective formalisms for talking about time, space, knowledge, beliefs, actions, obligations, provability, etc. However, the nice computational properties can drastically change if we combine some of these formalisms into a many-dimensional system, say, to reason about knowledge bases developing in time or moving objects. To (...) study the computational behaviour of many-dimensional modal logics is the main aim of this book. On the one hand, it is concerned with providing a solid mathematical foundation for this discipline, while on the other hand, it shows that many seemingly different applied many-dimensional systems (e.g., multi-agent systems, description logics with epistemic, temporal and dynamic operators, spatio-temporal logics, etc.) fit in perfectly with this theoretical framework, and so their computational behaviour can be analyzed using the developed machinery. We start with concrete examples of applied one- and many-dimensional modal logics such as temporal, epistemic, dynamic, description, spatial logics, and various combinations of these. Then we develop a mathematical theory for handling a spectrum of 'abstract' combinations of modal logics - fusions and products of modal logics, fragments of first-order modal and temporal logics - focusing on three major problems: decidability, axiomatizability, and computational complexity. Besides the standard methods of modal logic, the technical toolkit includes the method of quasimodels, mosaics, tilings, reductions to monadic second-order logic, algebraic logic techniques. Finally, we apply the developed machinery and obtained results to three case studies from the field of knowledge representation and reasoning: temporal epistemic logics for reasoning about multi-agent systems, modalized description logics for dynamic ontologies, and spatio-temporal logics. The genre of the book can be defined as a research monograph. It brings the reader to the front line of current research in the field by showing both recent achievements and directions of future investigations (in particular, multiple open problems). On the other hand, well-known results from modal and first-order logic are formulated without proofs and supplied with references to accessible sources. The intended audience of this book is logicians as well as those researchers who use logic in computer science and artificial intelligence. More specific application areas are, e.g., knowledge representation and reasoning, in particular, terminological, temporal and spatial reasoning, or reasoning about agents. And we also believe that researchers from certain other disciplines, say, temporal and spatial databases or geographical information systems, will benefit from this book as well. Key Features: Integrated approach to modern modal and temporal logics and their applications in artificial intelligence and computer science Written by internationally leading researchers in the field of pure and applied logic Combines mathematical theory of modal logic and applications in artificial intelligence and computer science Numerous open problems for further research Well illustrated with pictures and tables. (shrink)

As Josef Pieper writes in his study “On Hope,” the virtue of hope is the virtue that completes the human being in its intermediary, temporal state (the “status viatoris,” or condition of being “on the way”). To be human is always to be “on the way” toward a fulfillment and completion not yet available to it (the “status comprehensoris”). Those who are hopeful direct themselves toward this end as to their fulfillment despite recognizing that it, in some sense, exceeds their (...) grasp, whereas those who are not hopeful either reject the possibility of such a fulfillment (despair) or prematurely suppose themselves to have attained it (presumption). While Pieper’s account of hope is largely based on the theologically-inflected account found in Thomas Aquinas, Pieper draws his conception of the nature of philosophy and philosophical reasoning ultimately from Plato. Philosophy, for Plato, on Pieper’s view, is essentially structured by the “not yet” condition that Pieper calls the status viatoris, as we see mythically depicted in Diotima’s account of Eros as being an intermediary daimon who, partaking of his parents’ opposed natures, is fundamentally characterized by poverty and lack (the “not”) on the one hand and by resourcefulness (the “yet”) on the other. The human soul, erotic at its very core, is structured by this twofold relation to the object of its greatest longing, Beauty Itself, which it doesn’t yet possess but for which it strives with all of its being. In this essay, I show that Plato has a “hopeful” sense of reason on account of the erotic condition (the status viatoris) that essentially characterizes the human soul’s spatio-temporal life during its incarnate, earthly state. If reason is, for Plato, to be true to itself, it must strive for the whole of wisdom even as it lacks that wisdom. Because reason is directed toward a fulfillment it can’t quite fathom, it must relate to that fulfillment essentially in the mode of hope. When, by contrast, reason becomes presumptuous, thinking that it already has a clear and secure cognition of the truth for which it seeks, it becomes dogmatic and runs the risk of falling into the misology diagnosed in the Phaedo when it inevitably comes up against some crack in its understanding. Likewise, when reason succumbs to despair—as we see, for example, in Meno’s eristic argument about the impossibility of learning—it becomes excessively skeptical and inert. Only when reason avoids the twin errors of presumption and despair can it continue in its pursuit of the whole of wisdom while remaining mindful of its limitations. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to an examination of issues concerning the persistence and linguistic re-expression of indexical singular belief. I discuss two approaches to the topic: the directly referential approach, which I take as best represented in Kaplan's views, and the neo-Fregean approach, which I take as best represented in Gareth Evans's views. The upshot of my discussion is twofold. On the one hand, I argue that both Kaplan's account and Evans's account are on the whole defective. On the other, (...) I claim that a broadly Fregean account is still to be preferred, since by positing semantically efficacious modes of presentation it is clearly better equipped to deal with the phenomena in the area. In particular, I argue that the notion of a memory-based mode of presentation of an object (a spatio-temporal particular, a region in space, a period of time, etc.), as introduced by Christopher Peacocke, turns out to be indispensable to account for the persistence and re-expression of intentional mental states over time. (shrink)

Bodily and mental self-ascriptions are forms of first-person thought where a subject attributes physical properties and psychological states to herself. The body-ownership view argues that a necessary and sufficient condition on such self-ascriptions is the existence of causal links between a spatio-temporal body and the self-ascribed properties or states. However, since P.F. Strawson’s influential attack, this view has been dismissed as a bad philosophical idea. The goal of this brief piece is to outline the body-ownership view and neutralise two classic (...) lines of objection against it: on the one hand, that the stance is incoherent; and, on the other, that it has counterintuitive implications. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 454-456 [Access article in PDF] Michael Potter. Reason's Nearest Kin: Philosophies of Arithmetic from Kant to Carnap.New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 305. Cloth, $45.00. This book tells the story of a remarkable series of answers to two related questions:(1) How can arithmetic be necessary and knowable a priori? [End Page 454](2) What accounts for the applicability of (...) arithmetic to matters of empirical fact?These are philosophical questions, part of a "wider puzzle of explaining the link between experience, language, thought, and the world" (18). But answers to them are heavily constrained by technical results in logic and mathematics, and most of Potter's protagonists are either mathematicians (Frege, Dedekind, Ramsey, Hilbert, Gödel) or mathematically trained philosophers (Kant, Russell, Carnap). (Only Wittgenstein fits neither category.) Potter, whose doctorate was in pure mathematics, is an able guide.It is not hard to think of answers to these questions taken singly; what is hard is answering both at the same time. Formalists can easily explain why arithmetic does not depend for its justification on empirical fact—it is just a game with symbols, not responsible to anything beyond its own rules—but they then have trouble explaining why the world of empirical fact is constrained by this game. Empiricists can explain the applicability of arithmetic in just the same way they explain the applicability of physics, but they then must then explain away the apparent a prioricity and necessity of arithmetic. Kant was the first to propose a plausible answer to both questions: arithmetic is both necessary and empirically applicable because it is grounded in the spatio-temporal form of any possible experience.What unites Frege, Dedekind, Russell, Ramsey, Hilbert, and Carnap is that they reject Kant's answer while continuing to seek an answer to his question: how can arithmetic's necessity be reconciled with its applicability? Potter helpfully classifies their projects by the surrogates they substitute for Kant's appeal to the form of spatio-temporal intuition: Frege and Dedekind appeal to thought, Russell to necessary features of the world, Wittgenstein, Ramsey, and Carnap to language, and Hilbert to the necessary structure of our experience of finitary combinations of objects. (Revealingly, the logicists are not grouped together in Potter's taxonomy.) A chapter (or two) is devoted to each of these thinkers, plus Kant and Gödel.This breadth of coverage does not come at the price of superficiality: Potter's chapters are (by and large) accurate, penetrating, and full of interesting insights. I cannot think of another book that offers such clear explanations of the many mathematical concepts and distinctions one must grasp in order to follow debates in the philosophy of arithmetic. The Russell chapters are enhanced by numerous quotations from archival material. The exposition of Hilbert's programme and the implications for it of Gödel's theorems is the best I have seen. The discussions of Wittgenstein's views on arithmetic and of Carnap's syntactical approach also shine. The chapters on Kant and Frege are somewhat weaker; the discussion of Kant, in particular, would have benefited from some engagement with Michael Friedman's views.But the real contribution of Potter's book is its integration of these nine thinkers into a single coherent story. No one will be surprised that Russell's motivations can only be understood in light of Frege's failures, or that many features of Wittgenstein's cryptic work become clearer when seen in light of the specific problems with Russell's system. But there are also some less obvious payoffs: for example, Hilbert's programme is usefully compared with Russell's regressive method (227-8), and Carnap and Russell are shown to face a common dilemma (269, 286).If there is a central theme to Potter's story, it is "how often we have had to reject an [End Page 455] account not for philosophical reasons but for technical ones" (278). Frege's program founders on Russell's paradox, Russell's... (shrink)

Edwin Hartman explores Aristotle's metaphysical assumptions as they illuminate his thought and some issues of current philosophical significance. The author's analysis of the theory of the soul treats such topics of lively debate as ontological primacy, spatio-temporal continuity, personal identity, and the relation between mind and body. Aristotle presents a world populated primarily by individual material objects rather than by their parts or by universals. The author notes that defense of this view requires Aristotle to create the notion of (...) form or essence. A material object, the Philosopher holds, is identical with its particular essence, and is not a combination of form and matter. Most important, a person is a substance and his essence is his soul. Personal identify is therefore bodily identity, and survival consists in bodily continuity. The relation between a state of perceiving and a state of the body is a special case of the weak identity between form and matter. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Statistical regularities of the environment are important for learning, memory, intelligence, inductive inference, and in fact, for any area of cognitive science where an information-processing brain promotes survival by exploiting them. This has been recognised by many of those interested in cognitive function, starting with Helmholtz, Mach, and Pearson, and continuing through Craik, Tolman, Attneave, and Brunswik. In the current era, many of us have begun to show how neural mechanisms exploit the regular statistical properties of natural images. Shepard proposed (...) that the apparent trajectory of an object when seen successively at two positions results from internalising the rules of kinematic geometry, and although kinematic geometry is not statistical in nature, this is clearly a related idea. Here it is argued that Shepard's term, “internalisation,” is insufficient because it is also necessary to derive an advantage from the process. Having mechanisms selectively sensitive to the spatio-temporal patterns of excitation commonly experienced when viewing moving objects would facilitate the detection, interpolation, and extrapolation of such motions, and might explain the twisting motions that are experienced. Although Shepard's explanation in terms of Chasles' rule seems doubtful, his theory and experiments illustrate that local twisting motions are needed for the analysis of moving objects and provoke thoughts about how they might be detected. Key Words: Chasles' rule; evolution; geometry; perception; redundancy; statistics; twisting. (shrink)

Le but de l'article est de cerner le sens précis du concept de constitution, central dans la pensée de Husserl, et ce afin de comprendre la portée ontologique de son idéalisme transcendantal: en quel sens s'agit-il d'un idéalisme? Le sujet constituant produit-il le sens et l'être des objets? On s'interroge d'abord sur le champ d'objets qui sert à Husserl de fil conducteur pour l'élaboration de ce concept: est-ce celui des objets immanents, des choses spatio-temporelles, ou des idéalités? Ayant montré que (...) la constitution de la res extensa possède une fonction paradigmatique, on met en question la possibilité de transposer ses traits essentiels à celle des idéalités formelles ou mathématiques: celles-ci ont-elles une subsistance et un caractère d'Idée kantienne analogues à ceux de la res extensa? Comment concilier leur validité omnitemporelle, qui accrédite une thèse réaliste, et le fait qu'elles apparaissent à un moment précis de l'histoire, qui semble justifier la thèse idéaliste? The aim of this article is to tackle and define the concept of constitution, which is central in Husserl's thought, in order to understand the ontological significance of its transcendental idealism: what kind of idealism is it? Does the constituting subject produce the sense and the being of objects? The first question will be to know what field of objects Husserl uses as paradigm in the construction of this concept: is it the field od immanent temporal objects, of spatiotemporal things or of idealities? Having proved that the constitution of the res extensa has a paradigmatic fonction, is it possible to transfer its main characteristics to the constitution of formal or mathematical idealities? Do the latter have the same subsistence and the same statut of Kantian ideas as the res extensa? How is possible to reconcile their omnitemporal validity with the fact that they appear at a particular time in history? (shrink)

The literature of science speaks of many things in the heavens and on earth that neither the man in the street nor the scientist in his laboratory, can directly see with his eyes or touch with his fingers. Scientific hypotheses refer to atoms and genes, cosmic rays and electrostatic charges. No one can deny the importance of these hypothetical constructions; without them we could neither understand nor manage the world which we directly experience. They simplify the system of laws that (...) relate observable variables to one another. They suggest further research and enable us to predict what will be found if certain operations are carried out. The sporadic and disjointed collection of observed objects and events, and the occurrence of the unusual ones which we call illusions, are explained by correlating them with a hypothetical physical or physiological state of affairs that has order and spatio-temporal continuity. (shrink)

Samuel Todes’s book, Body and World, makes an important contribution to the current debate among analytic philosophers concerning non–conceptual intentional content and its relation to thought. Todes’s relevant theses are: (1) Our unified, active body, in moving to meet our needs, generates a unified, spatio–temporal field. (2) In that field we use our perceptual skills to make the determinable perceptual objects that show up relatively determinate. (3) Once we have made the objects of practical perception determinate, we can (...) make ‘practical perceptual judgements’ about them. Such ‘judgements’ have conditions of satisfaction, but they are non–conceptual in that they are a way of coping with an actual object in this situation, from this point of view, in this light, in this orientation, and so forth. (4) By withholding our activity, however, we can transform our practical perception into a detached, spectatorial perception of qualities that are experienced as independent of the object they qualify. (5) Thanks to our conceptual imagination, we can then treat these qualities as reidentifiable properties of reidentifiable objects that can be entertained by thought. (shrink)

This paper briefly review a current trend in neuroscience aiming to combine neurophysiological and physical concepts in order to understand the emergence of spatio-temporal patterns within brain activity by which brain constructs knowledge from multiple streams of information. The authors further suggest that the meanings, which subjectively are experienced as thoughts or perceptions can best be described objectively as created and carried by large fields of neural activity within the operational architectonics of brain functioning.

Two approaches to cognitive dynamics are examined: the direct reference view, taken as represented in David Kaplan's positions, and the neo-Fregean view, taken as represented in Gareth Evans's positions. The upshot of the discussion is twofold. On the one hand, it is argued that both Kaplan's account and Evans's account are on the whole defective. On the other, it is claimed that a broadly Fregean theory is still to be preferred since by positing semantically efficacious modes of presentation it is (...) clearly better equipped to deal adequately with some important phenomena in the area. In particular, it is claimed that the notion of a memory-based demonstrative mode of presentation of an object (a spatio-temporal particular, a region in space, a period of time, etc.) turns out to be indispensable for the purpose of accounting for the persistence of an important range of mental states with propositional content over time. (shrink)