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2193.963559
This paper is about a problem which arose in mathematics but is now widely considered by mathematicians to be a matter “merely” for philosophy. I want to show what philosophy can contribute to solving the problem by returning it to mathematics, and I will do that by elucidating what it is to be a solution to a mathematical problem at all.
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290524.963663
Spacetime singularities are expected to disappear in quantum gravity. Singularity resolution prima facie supports the view that spacetime singularities are mathematical pathologies of general relativity. However, this conclusion might be premature. Spacetime singularities are more accurately understood as global properties of spacetime, rather than things. Therefore, if spacetime emerges in quantum gravity – as it is often claimed – then so may its singular structure. Although this proposal is intriguing, the attempt to uphold that spacetime singularities may be emergent fails. I provide three arguments in support of this claim, drawing upon different views on spacetime emergence.
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377668.96368
[Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Mark Wrathall replaces the
former entry
on this topic by the previous author.]
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is a central figure in the
development of twentieth-century European Philosophy. His magnum
opus, Being and Time (1927), and his many essays and
lectures, profoundly influenced subsequent movements in European
philosophy, including Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy,
Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, Simone de Beauvoir’s
feminism, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception,
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Jacques Derrida’s
deconstruction, Michel Foucault’s post-structuralism, Gilles
Deleuze’s metaphysics, the Frankfurt School, and critical
theorists like Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas,
and Georg Lukács.
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605405.963691
PEA Soup is pleased to introduce this month’s Ethics discussion, featuring Elselijn Kingma and Fiona Woollard’s paper Can You Do Harm to Your Fetus? Pregnancy, Barriers, and the Doing/Allowing Distinction, with a précis from Elizabeth Harman. …
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752122.963708
The paper studies in detail a precise formal construction of spacetime from matter suggested by the logician John Burgess. We presuppose a continuous and perdurantistic matter ontology. The result is a systematic method to translate claims about the geometry of a flat relativistic, or classical, spacetime into claims about geometrical relations between matter points. The approach is extended to electric and magnetic fields by treating them as multifields defined on matter, rather than as fields in the vacuum. A few tentative suggestions are made to adapt the method to general relativity and to quantum theories.
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845001.96372
This article argues that the “qua problem” for purely causal theories of reference grounding is an illusion. Reference can be grounded via description and fit, but purely causal reference grounding is possible too. In fact, “arguments from ignorance and error” suggest that many of our terms have had their reference grounded purely causally. If the qua problem is illusory, then there is no need to adopt a “hybrid” theory of reference grounding of the kind recently recommended by Amie Thomasson (Ontology made easy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015) and Ron Mallon (The construction of human kinds, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016). This opens the door to a “discovery model” of philosophical knowledge, a model we could then choose to accept.
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1040451.963732
This paper defends a conceptualistic version of structuralism as the most convincing way of elaborating a philosophical understanding of structuralism in line with the classical tradition. The argument begins with a revision of the tradition of “conceptual mathematics”, incarnated in key figures of the period 1850 to 1940 like Riemann, Dedekind, Hilbert or Noether, showing how it led to a structuralist methodology. Then the tension between the ‘presuppositionless’ approach of those authors, and the platonism of some recent versions of philosophical structuralism, is presented. In order to resolve this tension, we argue for the idea of ‘logical objects’ as a form of minimalist realism, again in the tradition of classical authors including Peirce and Cassirer, and we introduce the basic tenets of conceptual
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1181113.963742
[Chapter One of my undergraduate thesis on Modal Rationalism. Excuse the outdated references to “current” events — it was written in 2006. Still, I hope it may serve as a useful introduction to some key ideas in the philosophy of language. …
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1211929.963752
Could we transfer you from your biological substrate to an electronic hardware by simulating your brain on a computer? The answer to this question divides optimists and pessimists about mind uploading. Optimists believe that you can genuinely survive the transition; pessimists think that surviving mind uploading is impossible. An influential argument against uploading optimism is the multiplicity objection. In a nutshell, the objection is as follows: If uploading optimism were true, it should be possible to create not only one, but multiple digital versions of you. However, you cannot literally become many. Hence, you cannot survive even a single instance of uploading, and optimism about uploading is misguided. In this paper, I will first spell out the multiplicity objection in detail and then provide a two-pronged defence against the objection. First, uploading pessimists cannot establish that uploading optimism has the contentious implication. Second, it is in fact plausible to think that we could become multiple distinct persons. Optimists’ hope for a digital afterlife is therefore not thwarted by the prospect of multiplicity.
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1211952.963769
There appears to be an epistemic gap between the personal and the impersonal. The apparent epistemic gap presents a challenge to reductionist views about personal identity according to which facts about personal identity are grounded in impersonal facts about physical and/or psychological continuity. I discuss and reject two strategies of trying to close the apparent epistemic gap, a phenomenalist and a Cartesian one. I then develop and motivate an alternative account of the epistemic gap based on the special perspecti-val character of inside imagination. The imagination-based account explains why there appears to be an epistemic gap between the personal and the impersonal and at the same time avoids a corresponding ontological gap.
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1309972.963784
In this paper, I argue that facts about an individual’s sexual identity are partially or fully grounded in facts about their sexual orientation, where an individual’s sexual identity (e.g. being queer, being straight) has to do with the social position they occupy, and their sexual orientation (e.g. being homosexual, being heterosexual) has to do with the sexual dispositions they have. The main argument for this orientation-based theory is that it gets the right results in cases in which an individual hasn’t come out yet to themselves or others. I reply to Matthew Andler’s argument against the orientation-based theory, which is that it gets the wrong results in cases having to do with (a) intergenerational gay friendship and (b) “str8 dudes,” men who have sex with men but who present themselves online as straight. I also argue that, at least in the case of being queer, Andler’s own cultural theory is consistent with sexual identity facts being partially grounded in sexual orientation facts.
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1436725.963794
“From the Archives” is a new blog series that will share some of my favorite posts, lightly revised and updated, from my 18 years of archives at philosophyetc.net. I’ll kick things off with my undergraduate honours thesis on “Modal Rationalism”, which I think remains a neat general introduction to some core issues in metaphysics, modal epistemology, and the philosophy of language. …
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1444144.963804
Since the early debates on teleosemantics, there have been people objecting that teleosemantics cannot account for evolutionarily novel contents such as “democracy” (e.g., Peacocke 1992). Most recently, this objection was brought up by Garson (2019) and in a more moderate form by Garson & Papineau (2019). The underlying criticism is that the traditional selected effects theory of functions on which teleosemantics is built is unable to ascribe new functions to the products of ontogenetic processes and thus unable to ascribe functions to new traits that appear during the lifetime of an individual organism. I will argue that this underlying thought rests on rather common misunderstandings of Millikan’s theory of proper functions, especially her notions of relational, adapted, and derived proper functions (Millikan 1984: Ch. 2). The notions of relational, adapted, and derived proper functions not only help us solve the problem of novel contents and can ascribe functions to the products of ontogenetic selection mechanisms but are indispensable parts of every selected effects theory.
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1777814.963818
We present the problem of perceptual agreement (of determinate color) and submit that it proves to be a serious and long overlooked obstacle for those insisting that colors are not objective features of objects, viz., nonobjectivist theories like C. L. Hardin’s (2003) eliminativism and Jonathan Cohen’s (2009) relationalism.
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1896089.963827
David Hume famously remarked on a curious response we have to certain
works of art that cause us to feel unhappiness or distress:
It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a
well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other
passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more
they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the
spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the
piece is at an end. (1757 [1987: 216])
This odd connection between the simultaneous pleasure and distress
caused by tragic drama is remarked upon in Aristotle’s
Poetics, the earliest philosophical attempt in the West to
construct an aesthetic theory.
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2000934.963838
In contemporary philosophy of physics, there has recently been a renewed interest in the theory of geometric objects—a programme developed originally by geometers such as Schouten, Veblen, and others in the 1920s and 30s. However, as yet, there has been little-to-no systematic investigation into the history of the geometric object concept. I discuss the early development of the geometric object concept, and show that geometers working on the programme in the 1920s and early 1930s had a more expansive conception of geometric objects than that which is found in later presentations— which, unlike the modern conception of geometric objects, included embedded submanifolds such as points, curves, and hypersurfaces. I reconstruct and critically evaluate their arguments for this more expansive geometric object concept, and also locate and assess the transition to the more restrictive modern geometric object concept.
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2000955.96385
The concept of "information" is one of the key words that describe modern society. It is used in a variety of settings, from daily life to academic research, and it is now difficult to understand modern society without it. On the other hand, the independent use of the concept in various situations has led to the polysemous nature of the concept, and even when the same term is used, it has different meanings in different areas of usage. The fragility of these conceptual foundations is one of the central concerns in the philosophy of information. Thus, the "analysis and organization of information concepts" emerges as an important task in the philosophy of information (cf. Adriaans and van Benthem eds. 2008; Floridi 2011). The importance of this task is not limited to simply analyzing and organizing concepts, but also includes resolving the differences that arise between different domains (concerning information concepts).
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2014451.963863
It is uncontroversial that definite plurals in natural language stand for pluralities and permit predicates that are inherently distributive as in (1a) as well as predicates that can apply both collectively or distributively, as in (1b): (1) a. The stones are grey. b. The stones are heavy.
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2102484.963874
How the semantic significance of numerical discourse gets determined is a metasemantic issue par excellence. At the sub-sentential level, the issue is riddled with difficulties due to the contested metaphysical status of the subject matter of numerical discourse, i.e. numbers and numerical properties and relations. I propose to set those difficulties aside and focus instead on the sentential level, specifically, on obvious affinities between whole numerical and non-numerical sentences and how their significance is determined. From such a perspective, Frege’s 1884 construction of number, while famously mathematically untenable, fares better than other approaches in the philosophy of mathematics. Despite the work’s foundational untenability, it is metasemantically superior to extant alternatives.
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2462647.963884
Symmetry fundamentalism claims that symmetries should be taken metaphysically seriously as part of the fundamental ontology. The main aim of this paper is to bring some novel objections against this view. I make two points. The first places symmetry fundamentalism within a broader network of philosophical commitments. I claim that symmetry fundamentalism entails idealization realism which, in turn, entails the reification of further theoretical structures. This might lead to an overloaded ontology as well as open the way to criticisms from metaphysical frameworks that reject such reifications. The second point contrasts symmetry fundamentalism with the now common view that regards symmetries as stipulations guiding empirical research and theory construction. I claim that both views clash each other and cannot be held together. I finish the paper with a more positive prospect that will be developed in future work—symmetry deflationism.
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2462670.963893
In this paper, I critically assess two recent proposals for an interpretation-independent understanding of non-relativistic quantum mechanics: the overlap strategy (Fraser & Vickers, 2022) and the textbook account (Egg, 2021). My argument has three steps. I first argue that they presume a Quinean-Carnapian meta-ontological framework that yields flat, structureless ontologies. Second, such ontologies are unable to solve the problems that quantum ontologists want to solve. Finally, only structured ontologies are capable of solving the problems that quantum ontologists want to solve. But they require some dose of speculation. In the end, I defend the conservative way to do quantum ontology, which is (and must be) speculative and non-neutral.
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3247103.963904
Artifacts remain nebulous entities, notwithstanding their relevance to various domains such as engineering, art and archeology. In this paper we investigate the interconnection between artifacts and realizable entities, as illustrated by dispositions, functions, and roles within the framework of the upper ontology Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). More concretely, we propose the notions of canonical artifact (something that is intentionally produced for some purpose) and usefact (something that is intended to be used for some non-original purpose) which can correspond to various usages of the term “artifact”. We also characterized them in terms of intentional realizable entities and novel realizable entities: material canonical artifacts and material usefacts can be analyzed in terms of novel intentional realizable entities and a special kind of non-novel intentional realizable entities, respectively.
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4019411.96392
In this article I examine several related views expressed by Robin Hendry concerning molecular structure, emergence and chemical bonding. There is a long- standing problem in the philosophy of chemistry arising from the fact that molecular structure cannot be strictly derived from quantum mechanics. Two or more compounds which share a molecular formula, but which differ with respect to their structures, have identical Hamiltonian operators within the quantum mechanical formalism. As a consequence, the properties of all such isomers yield precisely the same calculated quantities such as their energies, dipole moments etc. The only means through which the difference between the isomers can be recovered is to build their structures into the quantum mechanical calculations, something that is carried out by the application of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation.
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4077082.963931
In philosophy, the empirical success of a science is often explained by the fact that it has managed to discover some law(s) of nature. This line of thought has not been thoroughly explored with respect to chemistry. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by showing how we could think about laws in chemistry. Specifically, it briefly presents how laws of nature are understood in philosophy of science. It then discusses two case studies from chemistry—the periodic table and chemical reactions—and explains how general ideas about law-hood can be applied to these cases. Lastly, it presents research questions and philosophical problems that arise by considering chemistry from the perspective of laws. This analysis illustrates that there is value in thinking about laws in chemistry.
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4077126.963942
It is greatly to the credit of Anneli Je erson that she has managed to write a book on this oft-discussed topic that is actually interesting. It is also short and readable, twin virtues that make it an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a way into the debate or for a text to assign students. Je erson moves uently through the intellectual terrain, objecting to some versions of what ‘brain disorder’ might mean, before proposing her own version and then discussing the implications of her account for questions of agency and moral responsibility. This nal discussion on issues around moral responsibility is likely to make the book especially attractive for students and practitioners who want not just to learn about the metaphysics of psychopathology but also to get a wider sense of why it matters, and to connect the ontology with moral psychology. Philosophers of psychiatry are building connections with phenomenology and also looking for relevance in more applied areas, and the last chapter of the book will help anyone starting out to understand the literature connecting philosophical psychopathology with debates over agency and moral responsibility. I recommend that chapter heartily. Like much of the book, it is a model of clear, painstaking discussion of the issues, and you will bene t from reading it. I am going to focus, though, on the debate over whether mental disorders are brain disorders, which forms the core of the book.
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4077256.963955
Baxter, J. [2023]: ‘Kolja Ehrenstein’s Causal Pluralism in the Life Sciences’, BJPS Review of Books, 2023 The last century of philosophical work has seen a proliferation of competing causal theories: regularity theory, probabilistic causality, counterfactual analyses, interventionism, process theory. It’s common to nd authors expressing the attitude that there is no single, universal theory of causation. Yet, these authors often mean di erent things by the term ‘pluralism’. With this book, Ehrenstein aims to achieve greater clarity and rigor concerning claims of causal pluralism in the philosophy of science literature. Ehrenstein is sceptical of numerous claims of pluralism about causality in the life sciences. He argues that some causal distinctions, such as Mayr’s ultimate and proximate cause, are inherently incoherent and do not amount to a meaningful pluralism. Other claims to pluralism, such as Elliot Sober and Stuart Glennan’s analyses of causal relevance and causal production, are not helpful in resolving the disputes they were purported to address. Still other proposed causal concepts, notably the concepts of permissive and instructive causes, are not genuine cases of causal pluralism.
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4077274.963968
There is a story told over history and philosophy of biology camp res of a terror that once roamed these parts and scared biologists and philosophers alike: the essence monster. This was an ironic name, since if things have essences, monsters are the things that don’t, so the philosophers especially appreciated the paradox. However, like a good number of camp re stories, it is a fairy tale, mostly useful for scaring younglings. The essence monster is supposed to have killed progress in biology until Darwin freed us from the misperception that it was real. After that, the essence monster was itself killed o by the knights of the modern synthesis, until Michael Devitt revived it. Or so the new story goes. But you shouldn’t believe everything you hear over a camp re.
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4077335.963981
Mathematics is the “language of nature,” a privileged mode of expression in science. We think it latches onto something essential about the physical universe, and we seek theories that reduce phenomena to mathematical laws. Yet, this attitude could not arise from the philosophies dominant before the early modern period. In orthodox Aristotelianism, mathematical categories are too impoverished to capture the causal structure of the world. In the revived Platonism of its opponents, the natural world is too corrupt to exemplify mathematical perfection. Modern mathematical science required a novel tertium quid, due to Pietro Catena.
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4348401.963991
In many traditions, God is claimed to be everywhere. In this paper I introduce and defend a novel account of what this might mean. Recent literal accounts of omnipresence draw on discussions about the general nature of location in metaphysics, and my approach continues this theme. I first suggest there are independent reasons to develop a new primitive location relation – exact co-location – which is a generalisation of the relation of exact location. I then use this relation to articulate a version of divine omnipresence which avoids several of the challenges which arise for a literal interpretation of God being everywhere. The resulting view says that God is exactly co-located with every thing and every place, and therefore literally present everywhere, without bearing precisely the same relationship to things and space that we do.
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4348422.964002
There are many and varied claims made about divine presence in different religious traditions. The idea that God is omnipresent, i.e. everywhere, is the subject of this Handbook and is a staple of western theism and several other systems of belief. This chapter focuses on a different claim that’s made about where God is located, namely the rather puzzling assertion that Jesus Christ becomes present in a particular way in the Eucharistic celebration.