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)

Despite heroic efforts, philosophers have found it increasingly difficult to evade discussion of metaphysical topics. Take the philosophy of mind. Take, in particular, the mind-body problem in its latest guise: the problem of causal relevance. If mental properties are not reducible to physical properties, how can we reconcile the role such properties seem to have in producing bodily motions that constitute actions with the apparent fact that the very same motions are entirely explicable on the basis of purely physical properties (...) of purely physical events in the nervous system? Familiar approaches to the problem include appeals to “supervenient causation,” to “higher-level” laws governing putatively higher-level entities and events, and to “realizing” relations that make room in objects for overlapping properties. (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)

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)

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)

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)

Worries about mental causation are prominent in contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how a mental substance (thought to be immaterial) could interact with a material substance, a body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate immaterial minds, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has shifted to mental properties. How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily behavior? How could something mental qua mental cause (...) what it does? After looking at the traditional Problem of Interaction, we survey various versions of the property-based problem and look at proposed solutions to them. (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)

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)

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.

Proponents of the idea that reality is hierarchical appeal to the ‘multiple realizability’ of higher‐level properties. The ontology of multiple realizability is fuzzy, however, and in any case, we can accommodate putative examples of multiple realizability without positing higher‐level properties. Predicates taken to name such properties are better understood as being satisfied by diverse but similar properties. Ontological reduction does not imply analytical or explanatory reduction.

A broadly dispositionalist account of colour is sketched and defended in the context of a discussion of primary and secondary qualities. Secondary qualities are complex primary qualities picked out by reference to their effects on human observers. These effects, properly seen as mutual manifestations of dispositions present in light radiation and in observers, are colour experiences.

Qualities of experiences are distinguished from qualities of objects experienced. Being in a state is distinguished from experiencing a state. The identity thesis defended earlier is brought to bear on problems associated with conscious experiences; and an attempt is made to make sense of Jackson's Mary and the explanatory gap.

One popular view of dispositions turns them into ‘higher‐level’ properties with categorical ‘realizers’. The position is motivated in part by the belief that the same disposition can have different bases, and in part by a conviction that powers are contingent features of the world. I argue that the belief and conviction are misguided.

Problems arising from the idea that reality comprises levels of being are discussed. These include the problem of causal relevance and the problem of inter‐level relations.

Ontology is inescapable: even anti‐realists must be realists about something. Contemporary ontology has suffered from allegiance to an implicit Picture Theory of language according to which we can ‘read off’ features of the world from our ways of talking about it. One result is the widespread popularity of ‘levels’ of reality.

Dispositions ground the of‐ness and about‐ness of thought. What a thought is about can depend on the world, but a thought's trajectory is internally fixed. ‘Swampman’ is exhibited as a counter‐example to radically externalist accounts of intentionality and Kripke's Wittgenstein's attack on dispositions as bases for rules is defused.

Universals provide an explanation of similarity: similar objects share properties. Imperfect similarity among complex properties is explained by ‘partial identity’ of their constituents. What if simple properties could be imperfectly similar? This manifest possibility suggests that even proponents of universals require brute similarities, and a principal advantage of universals over modes evaporates.

Chapter 2 Levels of RealityMany philosophers, especially self‐described ‘non‐reductive materialists’, embrace the idea that reality is hierarchical: the world comprises levels of being. Examples of such philosophers are given, details of the conception made explicit, and difficulties mentioned.

Suppose Locke were right: ‘All things that exist are only particulars’. Properties are modes; modes, particularized ways objects are. Objects ‘share’ or possess ‘the same’ property in the way two brokers can wear the same tie to work. Objects are similar by virtue of possessing similar modes; modes are similar tout court.

The world is a world of objects. Objects are various ways; these ways are their properties. A substance–property conception of this sort differs from a conception according to which objects are bundles of properties. Might every object have proper parts that are themselves objects? Or are some objects simple? A tentative argument for simple objects is advanced.

Intrinsic properties of concrete objects endow their possessors with powers or dispositionalities. Powers are not relations or ‘relational properties’, nor are they ‘higher‐level’ properties. A power exists whether or not it is ever manifested. A power's manifestation is, in most cases, reciprocal: a mutual manifestation of reciprocal partners.