Online research in philosophy

My purpose in this paper is to set forth a theory of agency that makes no appeal to mysterious notions of agent causation. But lest I be misunderstood at the very outset, I should perhaps clarify the point that my emphasis here is on the term “mysterious” and not on the expression “agent causation.” I shall begin with what seems to me the best possible example of agent causation: the sense in which a supremely perfect God, if one should exist, would initiate or originate his own actions. I shall not, however, simply adopt without modification the standard understanding of agent causation, assuming there to be such an understanding. I shall not make it true by definition, for example, that an agent-caused event can occur only in a context of alternative possibilities and hence can never be necessitated. Neither shall I make it true by definition that the internal states of an agent can never determine, or even causally determine in the case of human beings, a genuine instance of agent causation.1 Instead, I shall begin with the assumption that God represents the best and the clearest example of..

The author examines Scheffler’s extensional alternative to the usual notion of belief and shows that it is necessarily inadequate to serve the purpose for which it was designed. This point is established by showing that Scheffler’s proposed substitute for psychologically intensional verbs like ‘believes’ can not deliver philosophers from the classical puzzles over propositional attitudes and can not be used in all cases even to provide materially equivalent extensional substitutes for ordinary belief-statements.

In this paper I present two new arguments against the possibility of an omniscient being. My new arguments invoke considerations of cardinality and resemble several arguments originally presented by Patrick Grim. Like Grim, I give reasons to believe that there must be more objects in the universe than there are beliefs. However, my arguments will rely on certain mereological claims, namely that Classical Extensional Mereology is necessarily true of the part-whole relation. My first argument is an instance of a problem first noted by Gideon Rosen and requires an additional assumption about the mereological structure of certain beliefs. That assumption is that an omniscient being’s beliefs are mereological simples. However, this assumption is dropped when I present my second argument. Thus, I hope to show that if Classical Extensional Mereology is true of the part-whole relation, there cannot be an omniscient being.

Eric Watkins argues that according to Kant, causation is not a relation between two events, but a relation between the “causality” of a substance and an event. It is shown that his arguments are partly based on a confusion between causation and interaction. Further, Watkins claims that for Kant, causes cannot be temporally determined. If this were true, it would follow that there can be no causal chains, and that all factors that determine the time when an effect occurs do not belong to its cause. However, it is not true. In order to understand Kant, one must distinguish between causation, action, and interaction. When two substances interact, each of them does something (an event), which causes something to happen to the other one.

Subscribing to thesis of composition as identity, first proposed by Donald Baxter and David Lewis, implies accepting the extensionality principle of standard mereology. However, even though there has been a growing number of arguments for denying extensionality, an alternative understanding of composition has not been proposed. I propose the thesis of composition as causation. I argue that, unlike identity, causation has the required features to make it fit for cases when extensionality is denied, like that of material constitution. I consider some elements of a plausible theory of causation that may count as prima facie reasons against the appropriateness of composition as a species of causation and show that the thesis is defensible.

Causation is widely assumed to be a binary relation: c causes e. I will argue that causation is a quaternary, contrastive relation: c rather than C* causes e rather than E*, where C* and E* are nonempty sets of contrast events. Or at least, I will argue that treating causation as contrastive helps resolve some paradoxes.

The by now famous exclusion problem for mental causation admits only one possible solution, as far as I can see, namely: that mental and physical properties are linked by a vertical relation. In this paper, starting from what I take to be sensible premises about properties, I will be visiting some general relations between them, in order to see whether, first, it is true that some vertical relation, other than identity, makes different sorts of causation compatible and second, whether physical and mental properties can be pairs of such relation.

Eric Watkins argues that according to Kant, causation is not a relation between two events, but a relation between the “causality” of a substance and an event. It is shown that his arguments are partly based on a confusion between causation and interaction. Further, Watkins claims that for Kant, causes cannot be temporally determined. If this were true, it would follow that there can be no causal chains, and that all factors that determine the time when an effect occurs do not belong to its cause. However, it is not true. In order to understand Kant, one must distinguish between causation, action, and interaction. When two substances interact, each of them does something (an event), which causes something to happen to the other one.

One part of the true theory of actual causation is a set of conditions responsible for eliminating all of the non-causes of an effect that can be discerned at the level of counterfactual structure. I defend a proposal for this part of the theory.

“Slingshot” arguments are all the rage. And no wonder. For if they turn out to be sound, our approach to most of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language would be brutally undermined. Slingshot arguments are typically reductio arguments that aim to show that an allegedly non-extensional sentential connective— such as “necessarily ( )” or “the statement that Φ corresponds to the fact that ( )”—is, to the contrary, an extensional sentential connective. That an alleged non-extensional sentential connective would turn out to be extensional is devastating for it would lead to such radical conclusions as: (i) if sentences or proposition refer to facts, then all facts collapse into one big fact, (ii) if sentences or propositions refer to anything, then they refer to their truth value (which means there is just one thing to which all true sentences refer (e.g., the True), and just one thing that all false sentences refer (e.g., the False)), (iii) modal distinctions collapse, such that ‘necessarily p’ and ‘possibly p’ reduce to ‘p,’ etc.1 The recent resurgence of interest in slingshot arguments is primarily due to Neale (2001)—which is an expansion of Neale (1995)2—where it is argued that slingshot arguments are not only philosophically interesting in their own right, but that they put a “descriptive constraint” on certain theories of facts. Neale thinks that theories of facts are pressured by a certain reformulation of Gödel’s slingshot argument to adopt a particular semantic view of definite descriptions. More specifically, Neale thinks that theories of..