_Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction_ is for students who have already completed an introductory philosophy course and need a fresh look at the central topics in the core subject of metaphysics. It is essential reading for any student of the subject. This Fourth Edition is revised and updated and includes two new chapters on Parts and Wholes, and Metaphysical Indeterminacy or vagueness. This new edition also keeps the user-friendly format, the chapter overviews summarizing the main topics, concrete examples to clarify difficult (...) concepts, annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, endnotes, and a full bibliography. Topics addressed include: the problem of universals the nature of abstract entities the problem of individuation the nature of modality identity through time the nature of time the nature of parts and wholes the problem of metaphysical indeterminacy the Realism/anti-Realism debate. Wherever possible, Michael J. Loux and Thomas M. Crisp relate contemporary views to their classical sources in the history of philosophy. As experienced teachers of philosophy and important contributors to recent debates, Loux and Crisp are uniquely qualified to write this book. (shrink)

Internalism about epistemic justification (henceforth, ‘internalism’) says that a belief B is epistemically justified for S only if S is aware of some good-making feature of B, some feature that makes for B’s having positive epistemic status: e.g., evidence for B. Externalists with respect to epistemic justification (‘externalists’) deny this awareness requirement. Michael Bergmann has recently put this dilemma against internalism: awareness admits of a strong and a weak construal; given the strong construal, internalism is subject to debilitating regress (...) troubles; given the weak construal, internalism is unmotivated; either way, internalism is in serious trouble. I argue for two claims in this article. First, Bergmann’s dilemma argument is unmotivated: he’s given no good reason for accepting one of its crucial premises. And second, Bergmann’s dilemma argument is unsound: the crucial premise in question is false. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that developments in Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism—specifically, Thomas Crisp’s argument against a naturalistic metaphysics—have likely undermined the project of science for naturalists who are scientific realists. Scientific theorizing requires the use of abductive reasoning. A central component of abductive reasoning is the use of one’s imagination. However, Crisp’s argument provides us reason to doubt the trustworthiness of our cognitive faculties as it relates to the imaginative abilities necessary for complex abductive (...) reasoning. (shrink)

In May 2010, philosophers, family and friends gathered at the University of Notre Dame to celebrate the career and retirement of Alvin Plantinga, widely recognized as one of the world's leading figures in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Plantinga has earned particular respect within the community of Christian philosophers for the pivotal role that he played in the recent renewal and development of philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. Each of the essays in this volume engages with some (...) particular aspect of Plantinga's views on metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophy of religion. Contributors include Michael Bergman, Ernest Sosa, Trenton Merricks, Richard Otte, Peter VanInwagen, Thomas P. Flint, Eleonore Stump, Dean Zimmerman and Nicholas Wolterstorff. The volume also includes responses to each essay by Bas van Fraassen, Stephen Wykstra, David VanderLaan, Robin Collins, Raymond VanArragon, E. J. Coffman, Thomas Crisp, and Donald Smith. (shrink)

Although Thomas, Scotus, and Ockham are all broadly Aristotelian, their different Aristotelian accounts reflect underlying disagreements in these three areas. These trends may represent a shift from an earlier to a later medieval intellectual culture, but they also reflect views that continued to exist in different schools. Thomists continued to exist alongside Scotists through the end of the eighteenth century, and Ockham’s views had a more varied but continued influence through the modern period. The different views of Thomas, (...) Scotus, and Ockham are not only in themselves plausible attempts at understanding human action, but they formed the background to late medieval and early modern descriptions of human action. (shrink)

Our language and metaphors about environmental issues reflect and affect how we perceive and manage them. Discourse on invasive species is dominated by aggressive language of aliens and invasion, which contributes to the use of war-like metaphors to promote combative control. This language has been criticised for undermining scientific objectivity, misleading discourse, and restricting how invasive species are perceived and managed. Calls have been made for alternative metaphors that open up new management possibilities and reconnect with a deeper conservation ethic. (...) Here, we turn to Indigenous perspectives because they are increasingly recognised as offering important and novel voices in invasive species discourse. We examine how Australian Aboriginal elders and land managers (rangers) speak about ‘environmental weeds’ (the term used to describe invasive plants in Australia) and weed management. Based on qualitative research with five Aboriginal groups in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, our findings indicate that Aboriginal elders speak about weeds through passive, neutral language and prefer metaphors for weed management that focus on health, care and creation. We outline the influence that this language has for how rangers practice weed work and discuss its implications for the mainstream paradigm. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:T. S. Eliot, Dharma Bum:Buddhist Lessons in The Waste LandThomas Michael LeCarnerMany critics have argued that T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is a poem that attempts to deal with the physical destruction and human atrocities of the First World War, or that he had somehow expressed the disillusionment of a generation. For Eliot, such a characterization was too reductive. He replied, "Nonsense, I may have expressed for (...) them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention." He did not want to be the poet of a "lost generation" of war survivors, but rather, he wanted, like most poets, to write for all ages. To that end, Eliot sought to transcend time and space by bringing to The Waste Land scores of literary, cultural, and artistic allusions from a variety of sources including the Upanishads, Greek mythology, the Bible, Chaucer, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Leonardo Da Vinci. Ironically, within this menagerie of literary homages, Eliot has created a vast emptiness, a world of pain, suffering, desolation and despair, as if to suggest that even in the presence of all the greatest artistic and cultural achievements of mankind, we must understand that life is transitory and material things ephemeral.The idea that life is fleeting and filled with suffering is at the core of Buddhist thought and one that Eliot surely learned from his graduate studies at Harvard. Several scholars have examined the influence of Eastern philosophy, and in particular Buddhist thought, on Eliot's work, largely in the past forty years.1 My argument departs from this scholarship in two significant ways. First, I will read The Waste Land through the lens of Eliot's graduate studies, and in doing so will show how the poem functions as a didactic, artistic representation of the Buddhist doctrine of samsāra, an idea that views the world as transitory, overcome [End Page 402] with lustful desires, and forever bound to a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. From this perspective, we can see how Eliot's understanding of the original Buddhist texts, which informed much of his writing of The Waste Land, allowed him to see through the all-too-common misconceptions about Buddhism during the early part of the twentieth century. Lastly, we will see that Eliot looked at these misconceptions as a psychological projection of Europeans' discontent with their own lives in an uncertain time.Over the past three decades an increasing number of scholars have studied Eliot's graduate work. In 1985, Jeffrey Perl and Andrew Tuck published a study that examines the impact that Eliot's coursework and professors had on during his studies at Harvard.2 Perl and Tuck point out that Eliot devoted nearly one third of his graduate program to the study of Asian philosophy and philology. Eliot studied Sanskrit and Pali under C. R. Lanman, the preeminent Sanskrit specialist of the age. In his third year, Eliot took a course entitled "Schools of Religious and Philosophical Thought in Japan" with Professor Masaharu Anesaki, a course that had a profound impact on him. Eliot was exposed to several schools of Buddhism in his studies including the Kegon, Shingon, and Tendai, which are characterized as "descendants of the Madhyamika School, which was founded in the second century A.D. by Nāgārjuna, the Indian Buddhist philosopher." Nāgārjuna is widely considered the most influential Buddhist philosopher after Siddhartha Gautama himself and is the leading proponent of the Mādhyamika ("Middle Way") philosophy.The central teaching of Nāgārjuna was the doctrine of śūnyatā, or as it is often translated, "emptiness." For Mahāyāha Buddhists, all things are totally empty of any defining essence. Thus, all things are void of any fixed identity or inherent existence and remain in a constant state of impermanence, change, and flux. This is the fundamental premise of Mahāyāha Buddhism. Only through the realization of this emptiness in material things can one achieve Buddhahood. According to one standard text, "the real knowledge of Buddha nature is empty of empirical content, and it is the discovery of that emptiness or void, śūnyatā, of the true Buddha... (shrink)

It is often assumed that similar domain-specific behavioural impairments found in cases of adult brain damage and developmental disorders correspond to similar underlying causes, and can serve as convergent evidence for the modular structure of the normal adult cognitive system. We argue that this correspondence is contingent on an unsupported assumption that atypical development can produce selective deficits while the rest of the system develops normally (Residual Normality), and that this assumption tends to bias data collection in the field. Based (...) on a review of connectionist models of acquired and developmental disorders in the domains of reading and past tense, as well as on new simulations, we explore the computational viability of Residual Normality and the potential role of development in producing behavioural deficits. Simulations demonstrate that damage to a developmental model can produce very different effects depending on whether it occurs prior to or following the training process. Because developmental disorders typically involve damage prior to learning, we conclude that the developmental process is a key component of the explanation of endstate impairments in such disorders. Further simulations demonstrate that in simple connectionist learning systems, the assumption of Residual Normality is undermined by processes of compensation or alteration elsewhere in the system. We outline the precise computational conditions required for Residual Normality to hold in development, and suggest that in many cases it is an unlikely hypothesis. We conclude that in developmental disorders, inferences from behavioural deficits to underlying structure crucially depend on developmental conditions, and that the process of ontogenetic development cannot be ignored in constructing models of developmental disorders. Key Words: Acquired and developmental disorders; connectionist models; modularity; past tense; reading. (shrink)

The notion of Hegel's Dialectic has been largely critiqued and thoroughly regarded as largely a headache in the realm of metaphysics. In this work, I made the attempt to navigate and substantiate the complexity of an adapted reiteration of those fundamental Dialectical notions in conjunction with a more focused description of Idealism that attempts to substantiate itself within the bounds of our current understanding of physics and QM. This papers goal is to serve more than anything as an entry point (...) for a discussion of metaphysical prospects in the vein of Hegelian Phenomenology and ways in which we can restructure such notions into a theory compatible with current understandings of material reality such that we may be able to make meaningful progress to unraveling more of the mysteries on the composition and unfolding of our reality. (shrink)

The Reception of Derrida explores the cross-cultural reception of Derrida's work, specifically how that work in all its diversity, has come to be identified with the word deconstruction. In response to this cultural and academic phenomenon, the book examines how Derrida's own understanding of translation and inheritance illuminate the 'translation and transformation' of his own works. Positioned against the misreadings of deconstruction, the book traces the relationship between Derrida's concern with the ethico-political dimension of deconstruction and an authorial legacy. This (...) timely new study is the first book to consider the cultural reception of Derrida's works, and its accessible language and structure help to make this a benchmark amongst introductory Derrida studies. (shrink)

This paper examines an excerpt from a larger (televised) interview, wherein various married couples are asked to characterize their living situations in the aftermath of job loss and on the work of description and assessment by interview parties. It thus focuses on features of affiliation and disaffiliation and analyzes how both procedures work, particularly within an environment in which affiliated parties are engaged in attempting to figure out an "unpredictable" outcome of some (mutually experienced or experienceable) situation. In the excerpt, (...) there are instances of both affiliation and disaffiliation. Using such conversation analytic structures as topic organization, story organization, preference structures, and distinguishing between content and structural affiliations, the interview excerpt is shown to contain a series of story stages, each of which is an element of the overall work of collaborative assessment. Within this assessment, parties make use of "content affiliations," wherein they reference their lived affiliation with one another, while at the same time, structuring their talk so as to disagree and disaffiliate with one another's stance. In contrast to such classical theorists as Durkheim, Simmel, Toennies and Cooley, who viewed affiliation as resulting from internal, emotive sources, or as Durkheim put it, saw this as being a non-directly measurable condition of "primary group" relationships, this report argues for the possibility of seeing affiliation as a performed, or achieved, activity. In this latter conception, one made evident through ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, affiliation - along with its counterpart, disaffiliation, are indeed external and measurable actions. (shrink)

In the analytical colour debate there are currently two positions facing each other: color objectivism and color subjectivism. For color objectivists, colors are purely physical properties, whereas for color subjectivists they are phenomenal properties that are ontologically dependent on subjects. Although both positions have strong arguments, a stalemate and idleness in the debate has been evident for decades that requires explanation. In this essay I will show, on the basis of some considerations of Carnap's color view, what causes the stalemate (...) and idleness situation structurally and how it is 'solved' after Carnap. (shrink)

Based in a global array of case studies - Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, and Islamic education in the United States - this volume shows how the discourse concerning educational technology in the Islamic world has emphasized neoliberal and neofundamentalist themes, and argues that the design and implementation of educational technologies in schools would be better accomplished by taking a culturally grounded approach. This approach would be rooted in the context and local needs of learners, with implications and possible application (...) in the Muslim world and beyond. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 119-121 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Ethics and Political Philosophy The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought Arthur Stephen McGrade, John Kilcullen, and Matthew Kempshall, editors. Ethics and Political Philosophy. Vol. 2 of The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 664. Cloth, $85.00. Paper, $29.95. M. S. Kempshall. The Common (...) Good in Late Medieval Political Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 401. Cloth, $95.00. With the exception of the thought of Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, late medieval political and ethical philosophy has been neglected. Two recent books attempt to rectify this neglect. One is the second volume of The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts. A translator of this volume, Matthew Kempshall, has also recently written a thorough analysis of the common good as it is discussed in late thirteenth-century scholasticism. Many of the texts discussed in this second book are translated by Kempshall in the first book.The new volume of translations now makes it possible for the reader unfamiliar with Latin to have some exposure to the medieval reception of Aristotle's ethical and political thought. The selections are deliberately taken from lesser-known figures who are not often translated, such as Albert the Great, Godfrey of Fontaines, and Augustine of Ancona. The selections are carefully chosen to represent a wide variety of literary genres. For example, the selection from Albert is part of his commentary of Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, [End Page 119] whereas the selection from Godfrey is a Quodlibetal Question, and that from Augustine of Ancona is part of a treatise. Moreover, there are some selections that show developments within a particular genre. For example, a translation from Buridan's commentary on Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics contrasts nicely with that of Albert. The selection from Albert focuses mostly on pleasure, the relationship between the active and the contemplative lives, and the connection between ethics and politics. His discussion of pleasure is philosophically important in light of twentieth-century discussions about reasons for actions. Moreover, these issues are all discussed in at least one of the other selections. Interestingly, Buridan's commentary on the same Book focuses instead on human freedom. Buridan makes fine distinctions that are relevant to contemporary debates about free will. Selections from Henry of Ghent, Godfrey of Fontaines, and James of Viterbo all address the topic of the relationship between self-love and the virtuous life. These passages are relevant to the question of whether there is egoism in ancient and medieval ethical thought.The volume is a companion to The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy and suffers from one of its weaknesses, which is that the selections can seem arbitrary. For example, the passage from Albert takes up nearly one quarter of the volume. Furthermore, sometimes the representation of an author by only one genre is misleading. For example, although Giles of Rome wrote a Quodlibetal Question (Quod 2, q. 20) that is directly attacked in a translation from James of Viterbo, Giles is represented only by a passage from his treatise De regimine principum. Moreover, the moral psychology of the late thirteenth century is not well-covered, which is odd considering the importance of Bonnie Kent's work in this area.One additional problem is that there are few notes to aid the reader. Sometimes the translations can be confusing. For example, in one passage "the Commentator" should be identified, since the name can apply to at least three individuals (262-3). More seriously, readers with little background in medieval thought might confuse the medieval referents signified in the translation by the words "state" or "love" with contemporary referents. The translations themselves are clear and the different translators follow a consistent set of guidelines. Anyone who tries to translate some of these passages for herself will understand that some... (shrink)

In response to our target article, many of the commentators concentrated on our notion of Residual Normality. In our response, we focus on the questions raised by this idea. However, we also examine broader issues concerning the importance of incorporating a realistic theory of the process of development into explanations of developmental deficits.

Differences in socioeconomic status (SES) correlate both with differences in cognitive development and in brain structure. Associations between SES and brain measures such as cortical surface area and cortical thickness mediate differences in cognitive skills such as executive function and language. However, causal accounts that link SES, brain, and behavior are challenging because SES is a multidimensional construct: correlated environmental factors, such as family income and parental education, are only distal markers for proximal causal pathways. Moreover, the causal accounts themselves (...) must span multiple levels of description, employ a developmental perspective, and integrate genetic effects on individual differences. Nevertheless, causal accounts have the potential to inform policy and guide interventions to reduce gaps in developmental outcomes. In this article, we review the range of empirical data to be integrated in causal accounts of developmental effects on the brain and cognition associated with variation in SES. We take the specific example of language development and evaluate the potential of a multiscale computational model of development, based on an artificial neural network, to support the construction of causal accounts. We show how, with bridging assumptions that link properties of network structure to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures of brain structure, different sets of empirical data on SES effects can be connected. We use the model to contrast two possible causal pathways for environmental influences that are associated with SES: differences in prenatal brain development and differences in postnatal cognitive stimulation. We then use the model to explore the implications of each pathway for the potential to intervene to reduce gaps in developmental outcomes. The model points to the cumulative effects of social disadvantage on multiple pathways as the source of the poorest response to interventions. Overall, we highlight the importance of implemented models to test competing accounts of environmental influences on individual differences. (shrink)

Our interpretations of experience determine the limits of what we can do with the world.Jorge Luis Borges's short stories act as narrative experiments with the potential to alter the reader's experience. They provide momentary glimpses into a remixed reality that, through their vivacity, allow us to wonder at the immanent possibilities that emerge when we acknowledge the irreality of language. This function of Borges's writing follows from his understanding of fictions as imaginative verbal constructions that are effective due to their (...) aesthetic quality, the capacity to evoke emotional responses through play with narrative form. Borges does not write to produce truths. He is doubtful of the ability of any given... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Unibilitas: The Key to Bonaventure’s Understanding of Human NatureThomas M. Osborne Jr.Historians of medieval philosophy have sometimes described St. Bonaventure’s anthropology as dualist or Augustinian. The conventional story runs that the conservative Bonaventure was afraid of contemporary attempts to describe the rational soul as the substantial form of the corporeal body.1 Bonaventure’s relationship to two intellectual trends lends some support to this theory. First, Bonaventure, following Avicebron and Alexander (...) of Hales, believed in universal hylomorphism, holding that all substances, even the angels and human souls separated from the body, are comprised of matter and form.2 If the human soul apart from the body has its own matter, then in what [End Page 227] sense can the soul be the substantial form of corporeal matter? Second, followers of Bonaventure pointed to this difficulty when they held that the body has its own forma corporeitatis.3 It is not surprising that some historians have regarded Bonaventure as a strong dualist. If the soul is a substance apart from the body, then how can it be one substance with the body? Unibilitasis Bonaventure’s answer to this problem.Bonaventure himself is thoroughly aware that he might seem to regard the soul as a complete substance by itself when he describes it as a composition of form with spiritual matter. If the soul is a composition of form and matter, then it is a hoc aliquid and complete in itself. The soul united with the body could not combine into a third substance.4 I will argue that for Bonaventure unibility is this ability of the soul and body to be united as one substance.In the thirteenth century, unibility describes the ability of two different substances or dispositions to become one supposit.5 For example, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas use unibility to describe how Christ’s human nature and his divine nature can be one person. Moreover, John of Rupella, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure use unibility to describe how the soul and the body form one substance. Most historians, like E. Gilson and E. Weber, have generally described unibility as the attempt to show how one human person can have both a substance which is spiritual and a different substance which is corporeal.6 Unibility is for them a concept which precedes the Thomistic discovery of the soul as the substantial form of the body. If this interpretation [End Page 228] were correct, then it would be difficult to see how Thomas Aquinas could retain the term. In fact, unibility has a variety of uses which depend upon the context of its appearance and the thought of the one who uses it.The unibility of the soul plays a far greater role in the thought of Bonaventure than it does in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Bonaventure describes unibility as the specific difference between the angels and humans. Unlike Thomas, Bonaventure thinks that humans, like angels, have both a substantial form and spiritual matter. A human being differs from an angel in that a human’s form can also be the substantial form of a body. Since unibility lies at the heart of Bonaventure’s anthropology, it seems strange that it has not been more thoroughly examined and discussed.The four main sections of this paper roughly correspond to the different contexts in which Bonaventure uses unibility to describe a property of the human soul. The first section shows that unibility is the specific difference that distinguishes humans from angels in the genus of intellectual substances. Second, this difference between humans and angels will be elaborated to show how human souls, unlike angels, are not only movers of bodies, but also perfections of their own particular body. The third section argues that since the soul is the perfection of the body, it is also the one substantial form of the body. The fourth section touches on Bonaventure’s discussion of personhood to show that the human soul when separated from the body is not a person because it is not a fully individual substance. Since an angel is not unitable to a human body, it is unlike a human soul in that it does not need... (shrink)