Many arguments for physicalism, the view that all that exists is describable in terms of physics, assume that, at some point, there will be enough convincing empirical evidence to show that folk psychology, the view that mental stuff or souls exist, is false. Let’s be clear: this would be a monumental feat and, so far, no one has come close. And, absent any empirical evidence, folk psychology carries on. So, what kind of evidence would do it? You can’t exactly show anyone that there is no mental/soulish stuff in the world. It’s no good pointing at a brain and saying, “see! There’s no soul there!” What you would need is…
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Would Determinism Make Love Unreal?
Compatbilists about free will hold that, although everything is determined by God, human beings are free because they are able to operate, uncoerced, according to their desires. Greg Boyd argues that such a view inhibits the possibility of loving relationships particularly when it comes to human relationships with God. He describes the following scenario in order to make his point: Suppose I were able to invent a computer chip that could interact with a human brain in a deterministic fashion, causing the person who carries the chip to do exactly what the chip dictates without the person knowing this. Suppose further that I programmed this chip to produce the perfect…
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A Cell Problem
Consider this weird thought experiment I was reading about in Peter Van Inwagen’s book, Material Beings. Imagine yourself as a freshly fertilized egg. Call it A. The single cell then becomes two cells, A and B. Now imagine that B fails to make it and A goes on to divide making A and C and so on. After grieving the loss of B it is reasonable to assume that A is you. But what if rather than A surviving, B survives instead? It would be equally reasonable to think that B was you. But now suppose that both A and B survive but that they become detached and go on to…
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Are You A Bouncy Physicalist? Take the Test and Find Out!
If you think reality is exhaustively physical, then you will probably be either a pessimist or an optimist about naturalistic scientific discovery. You will either conclude that it is highly likely that “folk psychology,” the belief that there are irreducibly mental, non-physical entities of some sort, will be shown to be false, or you will think that though it is possible that folk psychology will be proven false, it is unlikely. The latter position entails the belief that one should continue the naturalistic research program with a physicalist assumption even though you probably won’t be able to prove it. If you’re are an optimist, a bouncy physicalist, you will think…
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Problems of Kind and Identity: Why Gender Claims are Difficult to Ground
2015 was the year of unusual predication. What kind of thing I am mattered more than ever. Consider the following: “I am black”“I am a woman”“I am French” It was not obvious what it was that made a person any of these things. In ordinary speech we assume that some fact about the world makes a property ascription such as the above statements true about the entity we are referring to. However, the claims made by many people in 2015 were apparently fact-free claims. A man claimed to be a woman, Englishmen claimed to be Frenchmen and a white woman claimed to be a black woman. Let’s think about gender for a minute.…
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Book Review: Mumford’s Metaphysics
This is an excellent little book. Metaphysics can be opaque and this book takes the veil off some of the mystery without degrading the discipline. If you are married to a philosopher and think that talking about tables and chairs the way your spouse does is insane and irrelevant, then this book is for you. If you are a freshman who just got yourself an introduction to metaphysics but wished it was more introductory then this book is for you. If you are a highly decorated metaphysician but have forgotten how to explain what you do to the uninitiated this book will help. Stephen Mumford’s skill lies in navigating a…
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Nonfixity of Events
In his recent book, Deeper Exegesis, Peter Leithart suggests that texts are analogous to events. The analogy holds, he says, because events, like texts, change over time. What one text meant in one context is different to what it means when read at a different time. Events are similar, according to Leithart, they are not static, but subject to change over time as new properties are added to them. Although interpretation of text changes over time, I think it is a mistake to suggest texts are like events because they change over time. Events are ontologically slippery, but the view espoused by Leithart may actually negate some pretty basic views Leithart…
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Grounding Facts About the Mental in Facts About the Physical
A physicalist wants to be able to say the following: (A) There are no mental properties. (B) S believes p. There is an apparent inconsistency in these two claims. Most physicalists consider it implausible to suggest that (B) is false and so concede that (A) is false. In order to maintain the physicalist worldview they say that mental properties are nothing over and above physical properties. This is usually stated in terms of supervenience, something like this: a set A of properties supervenes on set B of properties if for any change to A properties there is a corresponding change to B properties and in every possible world in which A properties…