The Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics (Blackwell Philosophy Guides)

356 Pages·2002·1.64 MB·English

by  Richard M. Gale

The Blackwell Guide to
Metaphysics
Blackwell Philosophy Guides
Series Editor: Steven M. Cahn, City University of New York Graduate School
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The Blackwell Guide to
Metaphysics
Edited by
Richard M. Gale
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Contents
List of Contributors vii
Preface viii
1 Physics, Metaphysics, and Method in Newton’s Dynamics 1
Lawrence Sklar
2 Causation 19
Wesley C. Salmon
3 What Events Are 43
Jonathan Bennett
4 Time, Temporality, and Paradox 66
Richard M. Gale
5 A Thomist Metaphysics 87
John J. Haldane
6 The Concept of Ontological Category: A New Approach 110
Lorenz B. Puntel
7 Universals and Predication 131
Bruce Aune
8 Composition as a Fiction 151
Gideon Rosen and Cian Dorr
9 What Do We Refer to When We Say “I”? 175
Peter van Inwagen
10 Personal Identity: The Non-Branching Form of “What Matters” 190
Jennifer E. Whiting
vi Contents
11 Idealism 219
T. L. S. Sprigge
12 An Idealistic Realism: Presuppositional Realism and Justificatory
Idealism 242
Nicholas Rescher
13 Overcoming a Dualism of Concepts and Causes: The Basic
Argument of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” 263
Robert Brandom
14 Metaphysical Realism and Logical Nonrealism 282
Panayot Butchvarov
15 The Metaphysics of Possibilia 303
William G. Lycan
16 The Actual and the Possible 317
Alexander R. Pruss
Index 334
Contributors
Bruce Aune, Professor, University of Massachusetts.
Jonathan Bennett, Professor Emeritus, Syracuse University.
Robert Brandom, Distinguished Service Professor, University of Pittsburgh.
Panayot Butchvarov, Professor, University of Iowa.
Cian Dorr, Graduate Student, Princeton University.
Richard M. Gale, Professor, University of Pittsburgh.
John J. Haldane, Professor, University of Saint Andrews.
William G. Lycan, Professor, University of North Carolina.
Alexander R. Pruss, Assistant Professor, Georgetown University.
Lorenz B. Puntel, Professor, University of Munich.
Nicholas Rescher, University Professor, University of Pittsburgh.
Gideon Rosen, Associate Professor, Princeton University.
Wesley C. Salmon, University Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh.
Lawrence Sklar, Professor, University of Michigan.
T. L. S. Sprigge, Professor, University of Edinburgh.
Peter van Inwagen, Professor, University of Notre Dame.
Jennifer E. Whiting, Associate Professor, Cornell University.
Preface
Just as the best way to learn how to hit tennis strokes is to watch good players in
action, the best way, in fact the only way, to learn how to do metaphysics is to be
exposed to paradigm cases of metaphysics in action and then try to answer in kind.
The purpose of this volume is to supply students of philosophy with just such
paradigm displays so that they can begin doing metaphysics on their own. It is not
an accident that none of the included essays attempts to say what metaphysics is,
to describe the methods for doing it and the rules or criteria for assessing the
success of a metaphysical theory. For all such metaphilosophical attempts have
failed miserably. But the history of metaphysics, as well as the essays in this volume,
shows that one can successfully engage in the metaphysical language-game even
though one cannot articulate the rules of the game in virtue of which we can keep
score and thus determine who wins and who loses.
Not all philosophers accept this favorable evaluation of the history of meta-
physics. Whereas I view it as one of the glories of our species, one of our great-
est cultural achievements, there are deconstructionists of traditional metaphysics
who see it as a shocking scandal because it is a history of perennial and intractable
disagreements. The disputants cannot even agree upon a decision procedure for
resolving their disagreements. This demand for a cognitive discipline to have a
decision procedure for determining who is right smacks of scientism in which the
methods employed by the sciences, as well as the way in which they use concepts,
are taken to be legislative for all contexts and disciplines, a discipline’s failure to
measure up to these scientific standards showing that it is bogus. The only effec-
tive response to the deconstructionist’s scientistically-based indictment of meta-
physics as meaningless is to do more metaphysics. I hold that the essays in this
volume constitute just such a response. In spite of the hype job of various intel-
lectual historians that we are in a post-this or post-that era, it is still business as
usual within philosophy. Metaphysics is alive and kicking.
The Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics
Edited by Richard M. Gale
Copyright © 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd
Chapter 1
Physics, Metaphysics,
and Method in
Newton’s Dynamics
Lawrence Sklar
Newton’s masterful scientific achievement was constructed under the influence of
much previous philosophical discussion and controversy that went beyond the
limits of scientific debate narrowly construed. Much that Newton says in the Prin-
cipia also ranges beyond the confines of experimental or even theoretical science
and into the realm of what we usually think of as philosophy. And Newton’s work
gave rise, possibly more than any other work of science before or since (except-
ing just possibly the work of Darwin and Einstein) to vigorous philosophical as
well as scientific discussion. Let us look at some of the philosophical issues behind,
within, and ensuing from Newton’s work.
It is convenient to group the discussions into three broad categories. First, there
is the “metaphysical” debate over the nature of space, time, and motion. Next
there is the debate over what can be properly construed as a scientific explanation
of some phenomenon. Lastly, there is the controversy over what the appropriate
rules are by which scientific hypotheses are to be credited with having reasonable
warrant for our belief. We will discuss these three broad topics in turn.
The Metaphysics of Space, Time, and Motion
There are passages in Aristotle that some read as an anticipation of the doctrine
about space and time called “relationism,” as when he speaks of the place of an
object in terms of the matter surrounding it or talks of time as the “measure of
motion.” But the full-fledged doctrine of relationism is a product of the scientific
revolution. The doctrine is first explicitly stated by Descartes in his later work, is
accepted by Huyghens, and is worked out in great detail by Leibniz. In one of
the most curious episodes in the history of scientific and philosophical thought,
Newton, who all along was philosophically predisposed against relationism,
changes the whole character of the metaphysical debate about the nature of space
2 Lawrence Sklar
and time by offering a scientific, almost an “experimental,” refutation of the rela-
tionist’s claims.
In the ancient tradition there is a sense in which there is no real debate going
on about the absolute or relational notion of motion. Motion is taken to be a
property of an object that is not a merely relative property. An object is either at
rest or in motion, and one need not supplement assertions about the state of the
object by noting that the rest or motion is being posited with respect to some ref-
erence object that one has in mind. On the other hand, given the belief that the
earth is at rest in the center of the universe, the earth itself, with its cosmic posi-
tion, provides the standard of rest relative to which objects are adjudged to be at
rest or in motion.
The strong impetus toward relationism arose out of the desire, beginning with
Copernicus himself, to make the earth’s rotational motion creditable. In defend-
ing his views against his critics, Copernicus speaks of earthly things as sharing in
the earth’s natural motion. In trying to back up Copernicanism Galileo points out
how physical experiments fail to distinguish smooth motions in a straight line on
the earth’s surface. After all, a ball dropped from the mast of a ship, although in
motion with respect to the pier, is at rest with respect to the ship itself. No wonder,
then, that it drops to the foot of the mast.
Descartes generalized this to the claim that it was nonsensical to speak of an
object being at rest or being in motion simpliciter. An object could be at rest or
in motion only with respect to some other object taken as the reference relative
to which rest or motion, and kind of motion, was to be specified. Descartes used
the doctrine of the relativity of motion, combined with the suggestion that we
usually speak of things as moving when they are in motion with respect to the
things continuous with them, to claim that his theory of the earth driven in a
vortex of the plenum about the sun could be properly said to be at rest. Descartes’
relationism is plainly also motivated by the new anti-Aristotelian view of the space
of the cosmos. Instead of a finite realm marked out by an earth at the center and
the starry sphere at the boundary, the cosmos is, for Descartes, as for Giordano
Bruno, an infinite Euclidean three-dimensional space. In such a space, alike at
every point and in every direction, nothing in the nature of “space itself” provides
a reference frame for position or for motion.
Leibniz gives a worked out account of a metaphysics of space and time that is
relationist through and through. A nice presentation of his views can be found in
a series of letters he exchanged with Samuel Clarke, a disciple of Newton and
defender of Newton’s absolutism. Leibniz’s views of space and time are actually a
portion of a deeper metaphysics on his part about which we can only make the
briefest remarks. Partly as a response to the difficulty of imagining a causal rela-
tionship between mind and matter, and partly motivated by thoughts about per-
ception and its relation to the world that drove later philosophers to varieties of
idealism and phenomenalism, Leibniz posits a world composed solely of spiritual
beings and their properties, the monads. These basic constituents have no causal
relations to one another. But they experience coherent lives due to a “pre