Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument makes salient the difficulties facing attempts to reconcile determinism and agency. Others go further. Derk Pereboom, for instance, contends that science provides compelling evidence that no action is free, and Galen Strawson argues that conditions for genuinely free action are flatly unsatisfiable. Against such skepticism about free will, the paper introduces considerations in support of the idea that there are probably good reasons to think that conditions for free actions—real agency—are sometimes satisfied, that ascriptions (...) of agency are sometimes true, but that truthmakers for these ascriptions could be wholly deterministic in a way that might seem to, but does not in fact, place them at odds with the possibility of genuinely free action. (shrink)

Seit Hermann Lübbes bahnbrechender Studie über die Politische Philosophie in Deutschland wird die deutsche Weltkriegsphilosophie von 1914–1918 als „FichteBewegung” charakterisiert. Zweifellos finden sich viele Belege für diese These. Im Gefolge von Rudolf Eucken, der zum „Herold des Deutschtums” und neuen Fichte stilisiert wurde, proklamierte die Kriegsphilosophie analog zu Fichtes Reden an die deutsche Nation einen Weltberuf des deutschen Geistes. Die Reden Fichtes könnten dabei ermutigen, so Eucken, „unser deutsches Wesen immer klarer und reiner herauszuarbeiten zum Segen für uns selbst, zum (...) Heil auch für das Ganze der Menschheit”. Bei dem Leipziger Professor Ernst Bergmann geriet Fichte als Begründer des Glaubens an eine deutsche Führungsrolle für die Menschheit sogar in die Rolle eines Religionsstifters, der ein ideales Deutschtum aufgegeben habe. Die polemisch gegen den französischen Universalismus entwickelte Idee Fichtes einer „ Menschheits-Gegenpartei” ließ viele Philosophen hoffen, dem eigenen Krieg einen allgemeinen Sinn geben zu können. Der Berliner Privatdozent Heinrich Scholz faßte diese Hoffnung in die knappe Formel: „Das Vaterland ist der Schlüssel zur Welt”. (shrink)

In this review I take to task the related views of E.J. Lowe, John Heil and Peter Simons according to which relations don't exist because they're dispensable qua truth-makers. I argue that this view is methodologically unstable because we also have reason to believe that relations exist because our best mathematical and scientific theories say so, i.e. quantify over them.

Introduction , Sophie Gibb 1. Mental Causation , John Heil 2. Physical Realization without Preemption , Sydney Shoemaker 3. Mental Causation in the Physical World , Peter Menzies 4. Mental Causation: Ontology and Patterns of Variation , Paul Noordhof 5. Causation is Macroscopic but not Irreducible , David Papineau 6. Substance Causation, Powers, and Human Agency , E. J. Lowe 7. Agent Causation in a Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics , Jonathan D. Jacobs and Timothy O’Connor 8. Mental Causation and Double (...) Prevention , Sophie Gibb 9. The Identity Theory as a Solution to the Exclusion Problem , David Robb 10. Continuant Causation, Fundamentality, and Freedom , Peter Simons 11. There is no Exclusion Problem , Steinvor Tholl Arnadottir and Tim Crane. (shrink)

From an Ontological Point of View is a highly original and accessible exploration of fundamental questions about what there is. John Heil discusses such issues as whether the world includes levels of reality; the nature of objects and properties; the demands of realism; what makes things true; qualities, powers, and the relation these bear to one another. He advances an account of the fundamental constituents of the world around us, and applies this account to problems that have plagued recent (...) work in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics (color, intentionality, and the nature of consciousness). (shrink)

What does reality encompass? Is it exclusively physical, or does it include mental and 'abstract' aspects? What are the elements of being, reality's raw materials? John Heil offers stimulating answers to these questions framed in terms of a comprehensive metaphysics of substances and properties inspired by Descartes, Locke, and their successors.

This book aims at reconciling the emerging conceptions of mind and their contents that have, in recent years, come to seem irreconcilable. Post-Cartesian philosophers face the challenge of comprehending minds as natural objects possessing apparently non-natural powers of thought. The difficulty is to understand how our mental capacities, no less than our biological or chemical characteristics, might ultimately be products of our fundamental physical constituents, and to do so in a way that preserves the phenomena. Externalists argue that the significance (...) of thought turns on the circumstances of thinkers; reductionists hold that mental characteristics are physical; eliminationists contend that the concept of thought belongs to an outmoded folk theory of behavior. John Heil explores these topics and points the way to a naturalistic synthesis, one that accords the mental a place in the physical world alongside the non-mental. (shrink)

How does the way things appear to us relate to the way things really are? Science tells us that the world is very different from the way we experience it. John Heil offers an explanation of why the scientific image of the world that we get from physics is our best guide to the nature of reality--to what the appearances are appearances of.

Common sense and philosophical tradition agree that mind makes a difference. What we do depends not only on how our bodies are put together, but also on what we think. Explaining how mind can make a difference has proved challenging, however. Some have urged that the project faces an insurmountable dilemma: either we concede that mentalistic explanations of behavior have only a pragmatic standing or we abandon our conception of the physical domain as causally autonomous. Although each option has its (...) advocates, most theorists have sought a middle way that accommodates both the common-sense view of mind and the metaphysical conviction about the physical world. This volume presents a collection of new, specially written essays by a diverse group of philosophers, each of whom is widely known for defending a particular conception of minds and their place in nature. Contributors include Robert Audi, Lynne Rudder Baker, Tyler Burge, Donald Davidson, Fred Dretske, Ted Honderich, Jennifer Hornsby, Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ruth Garrett Millikan, H. W. Noonan, Philip Pettit, Ernest Sosa, and Robert Van Gulick. (shrink)

Appeals to dispositionality in explanations of phenomena in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, require that we first agree on what we are talking about. I sketch an account of what dispositionality might be. That account will place me at odds with most current conceptions of dispositionality. My aim is not to establish a weighty ontological thesis, however, but to move the discussion ahead in two respects. First, I want to call attention to the extent to which assumptions philosophers have (...) made about dispositionality are far from innocent. The assumptions incorporate substantive theses that, by constraining the space of acceptable answers to particular philosophical questions, have inhibited the search for answers to those questions. Second, and more positively, I hope to open up the space of possibilities by offering an alternative way of conceiving dispositionality developed by C. B. Martin. (shrink)

Common sense and philosophical tradition agree that mind makes a difference. What we do depends not only on how our bodies are put together, but also on what we think. Explaining how mind can make a difference has proved challenging, however. Some have urged that the project faces an insurmountable dilemma: either we concede that mentalistic explanations of behavior have only a pragmatic standing or we abandon our conception of the physical domain as causally autonomous. Although each option has its (...) advocates, most theorists have sought a middle way that accommodates both the common-sense view of mind and the metaphysical conviction about the physical world. This volume presents a collection of new, specially written essays by a diverse group of philosophers, each of whom is widely known for defending a particular conception of minds and their place in nature. Contributors include Robert Audi, Lynne Rudder Baker, Tyler Burge, Donald Davidson, Fred Dretske, Ted Honderich, Jennifer Hornsby, Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ruth Garrett Millikan, H. W. Noonan, Philip Pettit, Ernest Sosa, and Robert Van Gulick. (shrink)

Philosophers and non-philosophers have been attracted to the idea that the world incorporates levels of being: higher-level items – ordinary objects, artifacts, human beings – depend on, but are not in any sense reducible to, items at lower levels. I argue that the motivation for levels stems from an implicit acceptance of a Picture Theory of language according to which we can ‘read off’ features of the world from ways we describe the world. Abandonment of the Picture Theory opens the (...) way to a ‘no levels’ conception of reality, a conception that honors anti-reductionist sentiments and preserves the status of the special sciences without the ontological baggage. (shrink)

This paper consists of two parts. In Part I, an attempt to get around certain well-known criticisms of the trace theory of memory is discussed. Part II consists of an account of the so-called "logical" notion of a memory trace. Trace theories are sometimes thought to be empirical hypotheses about the functioning of memory. That this is not the case, that trace theories are in fact philosophical theories, is shown, I believe, in the arguments which follow. If this is so, (...) one may well wonder about psychologists' insistence that any empirical theory of memory must involve the postulation of traces (or trace-like entities: engrams, schemata, etc.). (shrink)

It is becoming increasingly clear that the deepest problems currently exercising philosophers of mind arise from an ill-begotten ontology, in particular, a mistaken ontology of properties. After going through some preliminaries, we identify three doctrines at the heart of this mistaken ontology: (P) For each distinct predicate, “F”, there exists one, and only one, property, F, such that, if “F” is applicable to an object a, then “F” is applicable in virtue of a’s being F. (U) Properties are universals, not (...) particulars. (D) Every property is either categorical or dispositional, but not both. We show how these doctrines influence current philosophical thinking about the mind, suggest and defend an alternative conception of properties, and indicate how this conception provides answers to two puzzles besetting contemporary philosophy of mind: the problem of mental causation and the problem of qualia. (shrink)

Consider the idea that some entities are more fundamental than others, some entities ‘ground’ other, less fundamental, entities. What is it for something to be more fundamental than another, or for something to ‘ground’ something else? This paper urges the rejection of conceptions of grounding and fundamentality according to which reality has a hierarchical structure in which higher-level entities are taken to be distinct from but metaphysically dependent on more fundamental lower-level entities. Truthmaking is offered as an apt replacement for (...) at least some of the many applications of grounding. (shrink)

In case you hadn’t noticed, metaphysics is mounting a comeback. After decades of attempts to keep the subject at arm’s length, philosophers are discovering that progress on fundamental issues in, say, philosophy of mind, requires delving into metaphysics. Questions about the nature of minds and their contents, like those concerning free action, personal identity, or the existence of God, belong to applied metaphysics. They bear a relation to metaphysics proper analogous to the relation questions about abortion, affirmative action, or pornography (...) bear to ethical theory. Just as we are ill advised to pursue topics in applied ethics independently of background considerations in theoretical ethics, so we are in no position to promote answers to questions in applied metaphysics independently of a grasp of ground-level metaphysical theory. (shrink)

The metaphysical doctrine of emergence continues to exert a powerful pull on philosophers and metaphysically inclined scientists. This paper focuses on a recent account of emergence advanced by Jessica Wilson in Metaphysical Emergence, but the discussion has the broader aim of making explicit some of the underlying themes that inspire thoughts of emergence generally. These prove to be, not merely optional, but largely lacking in merit.

Our suspicion is that philosophers who tie the fate of agency to advances in cognitive science simultaneously underestimate that conception's tenacity and overestimate their ability to divine the course of empirical inquiry. For the present, however, we shall pretend that current ideas about what would be required for the scientific vindication of folk psychology are apt, and ask where this leaves the notion of agency. Our answer will be that it leaves that notion on the whole unaffected.

Historically, philosophical discussions of relations have featured chiefly as afterthoughts, loose ends to be addressed only after coming to terms with more important and pressing metaphysical issues. F. H. Bradley stands out as an exception. Understanding Bradley's views on relations and their significance today requires an appreciation of the alternatives, which in turn requires an understanding of how relations have traditionally been classified and how philosophers have struggled to capture their nature and their ontological standing. Positions on these topics range (...) from the rejection of relations altogether, to their being awarded the status as grounds for everything else, to various intermediary positions along this spectrum. Love them, hate them, or merely tolerate them, no philosopher engaged in ontologically serious metaphysics can afford to ignore relations. (shrink)

In recent work on truth and truthmaking, D. M. Armstrong has defended a version of 'truthmaker necessitarianism', the doctrine that truths necessitate truthmakers. Truthmaker necessitarianism, he contends, requires the postulation of 'totality facts', which serve as ingredients of truthmakers for general truths and negative truths, and propositions, which function as the fundamental truth bearers. I argue that neither totality facts nor propositions need figure in an account of truthmaking, and suggest that both are artifacts stemming, albeit in different ways, from (...) an ontologically shady 'linguisticizing' tendency to conflate features of descriptions and features of what is described. (shrink)

Edited by a renowned scholar in the field, this anthology provides a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to the philosophy of mind. Featuring an extensive and varied collection of fifty classical and contemporary readings, it also offers substantial section introductions--which set the extracts in context and guide readers through them--discussion questions, and guides to further reading. Ideal for undergraduate courses, the book is organized into twelve sections, providing instructors with flexibility in designing and teaching a variety of courses.

In a recent paper, Jie Gao (Synthese 194:1901–17, 2017) has argued that there are acceptance-based counterexamples to the knowledge norm for practical reasoning (KPR). KPR tells us that we may only rely on known propositions in practical reasoning, yet there are cases of practical reasoning in which we seem to permissibly rely on merely accepted propositions, which fail to constitute knowledge. In this paper, I will argue that such cases pose no threat to a more broadly conceived knowledge-based view of (...) practical reasoning. I will first motivate the view that rational acceptance depends on a knowledge-based condition being met. I will then show how KPR can be amended—yielding what I call KPR+—to include this condition. I will argue that KPR+ not only avoids Gao’s counterexample, but harbours additional explanatory power by providing an account of the normative role of acceptance in practical reasoning. Finally, I will defend KPR+ against objections by employing theoretical tools that are readily available to those sympathetic to knowledge-based views. (shrink)

Three matchsticks could be arranged on a table so as to form a triangle. Were you to place a lump of sugar into a cup of hot tea it would dissolve. You might never have been born. Such assertions express modal judgements and, as we suppose, truths about the universe. But if modal judgements can be true, what features of the universe make them true? Thanks largely to the efforts of David Lewis, philosophers nowadays find it natural to appeal to (...) alternative worlds to explicate modality. Something is possible if it occurs in at least one alternative world. A subjunctive conditional is true if, in the ‘nearest’ worlds in which its antecedent is true, its consequent is true. This paper includes a discussion of Lewis's ‘Humean’ ontology, the role alternative worlds play in Lewis's account of modality, and an Aristotelian alternative. (shrink)

The paper comprises an attempt on the part of the author to understand what hylomorphism is, both in its original Aristotelian guise, and in recent work by philosophers who defend what they call hylomorphism. Two species or strands of hylomorphism are identified and discussed. Universals, essences, and substantial and accidental forms make cameo appearances, and the implications of an Aristotelian ontology of stuffs are explored.

Brian Ellis advances a robust species of realism he calls Physical Realism. Physical Realism includes an ontology comprising three kinds of universal and three kinds of particular: a six‐category ontology. After comparing Physical Realism to a modest two‐category ontology inspired by Locke, I mention two apparent difficulties a proponent of a six‐category ontology might address.1.