October 11, 2023
Philosophy and Science Fiction, Unit 3: Free Will
Still working on additional reading recommendations for my scifi class! The task for unit 3 is to analyse a work of science fiction in which it is unclear whether a character chooses or acts freely. Required Reading FictionPhilosophy Week 1: Determinism and Free Will (half week)None McKenna and Coates, "Compatibilism", SEP, sections 1 and 2 Various thought experiments selected from van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (1983) and Dennett, Elbow Room (1984) Week 2: Reflective Endorsement and Free WillTriptree, "Love Is the Plan The Plan Is Death" (1973)Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" (1971)...
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February 17, 2021
Cavendish and Plato on Parts of the Mind
some rational Parts, may in one composed figure, have opposite actions; As for example, the Mind of man may be divided, so as to hate one person, and love another: nay, hate and love one and the same person, for several things, at the same time: as also, rejoice and grieve at the same time. For example; A Man has two Sons, one is kill'd in the Warrs, and the other comes home with victory and honour; the Father grieves for the slain Son, and rejoices for the victorious Son: for, the Mind being material, is dividable as well as...
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March 16, 2020
An Argument that Divine Knowledge Must be Active
Among the basic assumptions of classical philosophical theology are God's aseity and impassibility. The former is God's attribute of being a se (literally, from Godself) in such a way that God is in no way derived from or dependent on anything else. The latter is God's attribute of being incapable of being acted upon (nothing can do anything to God). In humans, when we know something we believe it because its true, and in the typical case this 'because' is at least partly causal. (This raises notorious problems for, e.g., mathematical knowledge, but never mind that.) If, however, God is...
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Topic(s):
Aristotle
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Divine Attributes
,
Graham Oppy
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Lucretius
,
Mental Representation
,
Metaphysics
,
Omniscience
,
Philosophical Theology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Ralph Cudworth
,
Thomas Aquinas
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May 21, 2019
Berkeley on Divine and Human Spirits
It is pretty widely accepted, among those scholars who have considered the matter, that Berkeley endorses a univocal account of theological language. That is, Berkeley holds—contrary to traditional philosophical theology—that the word 'wise' is applied to God and to Socrates in the same sense, although with an infinite difference of degree. Philosophers who hold such a view are often said to anthropomorphize God (see, e.g., O'Higgins). However, comparing Berkeley's account with the prior tradition, it would be more accurate to say that Berkeley divinizes the human being than that he anthropomorphizes God. The strongest indication in this direction is found...
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April 25, 2019
Leibnizian Supercomprehension
In a recent paper, Juan Garcia has argued that Leibniz is, in an important sense, "a friend of Molinism."1 For those who are familiar with contemporary versions of Molinism (e.g., Flint), this suggestion is rather surprising, since Leibniz is clearly a theological determinist: he holds that God chooses every detail of the actual world. Further, a key feature of Molinism (particularly as it is understood in recent analytic philosophy) is the idea that God's options for creation are limited by contingent but prevolitional counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. The contrary assumption, that God could have actualized any possible world, was dubbed...
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Topic(s):
Alvin Plantinga
,
Antoine Arnauld
,
Conditionals
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Divine Attributes
,
Free Will
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Metaphysics
,
Molinism
,
Philosophical Theology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Language
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Providence and Sovereignty
,
Thomas P. Flint
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November 3, 2018
"William King on Free Will"
A preprint of my paper "William King on Free Will" is now available on my writings page. This paper was in fact accepted by Philosophers' Imprint in July. Since the journal is open access and has usually been very fast in my previous experience, I hadn't bothered to post a preprint in advance. However, it seems that staff turnover has resulted in substantial publication delay at the journal, so I've decided to post the preprint after all. Here is the abstract: William King's De Origine Mali (1702) contains an interesting, sophisticated, and original account of free will. King finds 'necessitarian'...
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October 30, 2018
Why Isn't God a Perfect Frankfurt-Intervener?
In a number of publications on the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, Linda Zagzebski has argued that principles derived from consideration of Frankfurt cases dissolve the problem. Essentially, Zagzebski suggests, the presence of a counterfactual intervener cannot make an action unfree. If there is no interference in one's action in the actual world nothing that goes on in some other possible world can render one unfree. If, however, we accept this principle, then the fact that God foreknows one's action shouldn't render one unfree either, since God's foreknowledge does not intervene in the course of one's action. Zagzebski...
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September 5, 2018
Two Varieties of Occasionalism
As Elisabeth of Bohemia famously pointed out, Descartes appears to be committed to the following inconsistent triad: In every instance of causation, there is an a priori conceptual connection between cause and effect. There are no conceptual connections between mind and body. Mind and body interact causally. The most common response to this problem among Descartes's 17th century followers was occasionalism, the view that bodily phenomena do not genuinely cause mental phenomena but are merely reliably correlated with them, and vice versa, so that bodily phenomena may be called occasions of mental phenomena and mental phenomena may be called occasions...
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August 7, 2018
A Theological 'Slippery Slope' Argument for Compatibilism
When I first began studying philosophy, I was a convinced libertarian about free will. My reasons included supposed direct introspection together with what I now take to be two distinct but related intuitions, which I will now call the consequence argument intuition and the buck-stopping intuition. (I wouldn't have explained them like this back then, of course: I'm trying to do some autobiographical rational reconstruction.) The consequence argument intuition is the notion that if an event is necessitated—whether logically, metaphysically, or causally/nomologically—by factors outside my control, then that event is itself outside my control, and an event outside my control...
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Topic(s):
Action Theory
,
Agent Causation
,
Causation
,
Creation and Conservation
,
Divine Attributes
,
Divine Freedom
,
Free Will
,
Metaphysics
,
Molinism
,
Philosophical Theology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Providence and Sovereignty
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July 6, 2018
Philosophy and Trust in the Senses, from Montaigne to Berkeley
I want to begin this post with a longer sequence of quotations than is usual. The reason is that simply juxtaposing the quotations goes a long way toward telling the story I want to tell. Here, then, is a sequence of comments on philosophy and trust in the senses, ranging in date from 1580 to 1713: We want to find out by reason whether fire is hot, whether snow is white, whether anything within our knowledge is hard or soft. There are ancient stories of the replies made to the man who doubted whether heat exists—they told him to jump...
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Topic(s):
Epistemology
,
Galileo Galilei
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Metaphysics
,
Michel de Montaigne
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Rene Descartes
,
Sense Perception
,
Skepticism
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May 18, 2018
Berkeley and Lokayata
Berkeley famously argues that "what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived ... [is] perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence, out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them" (Principles, sect. 3). He aims to demonstrate this principle, he says, "In opposition to sceptics and atheists" (Three Dialogues, subtitle). As Berkeley saw it, human knowledge and traditional religion were under attack from 'freethinkers' and the root of this attack was the doctrine that real physical things must be something beyond or...
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Topic(s):
Epistemology
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Idealism/Phenomenalism
,
Lokayata School
,
Materialism
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Sense Perception
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May 13, 2018
Locke's Experimental Philosophy of Ideas
A post I've written on the methodology of Locke's
Essay, based on a portion of my
"Ideas and Explanation" paper, is now live on the
Early Modern Experimental Philosophy blog.
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February 21, 2018
"Ideas and Explanation in Early Modern Philosophy"
I have posted a new draft, "Ideas and Explanation in Early Modern Philosophy," to my writings page. Abstract: Malebranche argues that ideas are representative beings existing in God. He defends this thesis by an inference to the best explanation of human perception. It is well-known that Malebranche's theory of vision in God was forcefully rejected by philosophers such as Arnauld, Locke, and Berkeley. However, the notion that ideas exist in God was not the only controversial aspect of Malebranche's approach. Another controversy centered around Malebranche's view that ideas are to be understood as posits in an explanatory theory. Opponents of...
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January 8, 2018
Stillingfleet on the "Fundamental Mistake" of the Way of Ideas
The Rules established in the Schools ... seem to lay the foundation of all other Knowledge in these Maxims ... [but in fact] where our Ideas are determined in our Minds, and have annexed to them by us known and steady, Names under those settled Determinations, there is little need, or no use at all of these Maxims ... he that needs any proof to make him certain, and give his Assent to this Proposition, that Two are equal to two, will also have need of proof to make him admit that What is, is. John Locke, An Essay concerning...
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October 14, 2017
Intentionality and Theodicy
The following line of thought is commonly found in analytic philosophy of mind: the reason calculators, for instance, are not minds is that the symbols they manipulate in order to solve mathematical problems to not mean anything to them (the calculators). It is not that their symbols/representations lack meaning or reference. Rather, they have the meaning or reference they do because of our conventions and the aims and purposes we have for calculators. This is known as derived intentionality. Our mental states, on the other hand, exhibit original intentionality. Their meaningfulness is not due to someone else's employment of those...
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October 8, 2017
Two Observations upon Observations upon Experimental Philosophy
I am currently re-reading Margaret Cavendish's Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, as I will be teaching it in the near future. There are two features of the text that have struck me this time through, to which I was perhaps less attuned on my last read: I am struck by the extent to which Cavendish's reasons for panpsychism match the reasons given in more recent discussions (e.g., Nagel, Chalmers). The basic line of argument seems to be: human beings are made of ordinary matter, just like everything else. But human beings have sensitive/rational capacities that can't be explained mechanically. So there...
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March 3, 2017
Idealism and Christian Theology: Introduction
I have been asked to review Joshua Farris and Mark Hamilton's Idealism and Christian Theology for Faith and Philosophy. In accord with a previous practice I have found useful, I will be blogging through the book, one post per chapter, in preparation to write the review. This post will be not so much a discussion of the book's introduction as my own way of framing and approaching the issues in the book. The fundamental paradox of theological anthropology in the Abrahamic tradition is the understanding of the human being as the breath of God dwelling in the dust of the...
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Topic(s):
Christology
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Idealism/Phenomenalism
,
Jonathan Edwards
,
Joshua Farris
,
Mark Hamilton
,
Materialism
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
The Eucharist
,
Theology
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January 18, 2017
"Locke, Arnauld, and Abstract Ideas"
I've posted a new draft to my writings page, "Locke, Arnauld, and Abstract Ideas". Current work in the history of philosophy mostly treats Arnauld as a footnote to other philosophers, but the fact that he's needed as a footnote in discussions of Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, and Locke suggests that his historical importance is greater than his 'footnote' status suggests. Further, what little English-language secondary literature on Arnauld exists is mostly divided into three categories: work on the Port-Royal Logic and Grammar (including, especially, the influence of these works on Locke), work on the controversy with Malebranche (and the direct realism...
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December 5, 2016
Princess Elisabeth's Refutation of Descartes
I also find that the senses show me that the soul moves the body, but they teach me nothing (no more than do the understanding and the imagination) of the way in which it does so. For this reason, I think that there are some properties of the soul, which are unknown to us, which could perhaps overturn what your Metaphysical Meditations persuaded me of by such good reasoning: the nonextendedness of the soul. This doubt seems to be founded on the rule that you give there, in speaking of the true and the false, that all error comes to...
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September 28, 2016
"What Descartes Doubted, Berkeley Denied, and Kant Endorsed"
I've posted a new draft, "What Descartes Doubted, Berkeley Denied, and Kant Endorsed," to my writings page. This is actually a rewrite of a much older paper; the original idea pre-dates my dissertation. In it, I argue (among other things) that Kant's fundamental complaint against Berkeley is that Berkeley's empiricism leaves him with cognitive resources too sparse for the construction of a genuine world. In particular, Kant targets Berkeley's rejection of the application of the concept of substance to perceived objects. Of course, in Language and Structure I argue that Berkeley is aware of these sorts of problems and develops...
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March 30, 2016
"Arnauld's Verbal Distinction" in History and Philosophy of Logic
I've just heard that
"Arnauld's Verbal Distinction between Ideas and Perceptions" will appear in
History and Philosophy of Logic. It is unfortunate that Arnauld doesn't get more attention; I'm trying to do something about that!
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December 19, 2015
REP Article on Port-Royal
My article on Port-Royal for the
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is now available
here. (Unfortunately, a subscription is required to see the complete article; only the opening summary is freely available.) The article focuses primarily on the theory of mind and language in the Port-Royal
Grammar (1660) and
Logic (1662).
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November 10, 2015
June 15, 2015
Understanding Sentences: Port-Royal, Locke, and Berkeley
According to the Port-Royal Logic, "words are distinct and articulated sounds that people have made into signs to indicate what takes place in the mind" (Buroker 74). Similarly, according to Locke, the use of language requires that one ``be able to use [articulate] Sounds, as Signs of internal Conceptions; and to make them stand as marks for the Ideas within his own Mind, whereby they might be made known to others, and the Thoughts of Men's Minds be conveyed from one to another" (EHU 3.1.2). Passages like these support Berkeley's interpretation of his predecessors as holding that, in the proper...
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Topic(s):
Antoine Arnauld
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Jennifer Smalligan Marušić
,
John Locke
,
Mental Representation
,
Metaphysics
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Language
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
The Way of Ideas
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May 19, 2015
Molinism and Circularity
Yesterday, I discussed Thomas Flint's response to the grounding objection in chapter 5 of Divine Providence: The Molinist Account. Today, I want to discuss his response to Robert Adams in chapter 7. Adams' objection turns on a notion of explanatory priority which, Flint complains, is not adequately defined. Flint argues that there is an equivocation in the argument, and that Adams relies on a transitivity assumption which is not plausible when applied across the different sorts of priority involved. I think, however, that Flint is mistaken on both counts: first, the notion in question is not equivocal. Rather, it is...
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Topic(s):
Action Theory
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Divine Attributes
,
Explanation
,
Free Will
,
Metaphysics
,
Molinism
,
Philosophical Theology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Providence and Sovereignty
,
Robert Merrihew Adams
,
Thomas P. Flint
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February 18, 2015
Machine Consciousness in "Supertoys Last All Summer Long"
I've gotten myself scheduled to teach an interdisciplinary honors college seminar on science-fiction and philosophy in the coming fall. I've started working on a syllabus, which means I have the enjoyable task of looking through a lot of science-fiction stories to think about which ones provide the most interesting explorations of philosophical questions. Along the way, I noticed something very interesting about Brian Aldiss's "Supertoys Last All Summer Long". This 1969 short story was the basis for the 2001 movie A. I. Artificial Intelligence, which was begun by Kubrick and finished by Spielberg after Kubrick's death. According to Aldiss's introduction...
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September 1, 2014
January 9, 2014
Conee on the Ontological Argument
According to Leibniz, any answer to the question 'why is there something rather than nothing?' must bottom out in "a necessary being, which carries the reason for its existence within itself, otherwise we still would not have a sufficient reason at which we can stop" (Principles of Nature and Grace, sect. 8, tr. Woolhouse and Francks). The coherence of such a being has, however, been questioned. What would it be for a being to 'carry the reason for its existence within itself?' What kind of impossibility could there be in the supposition that some particular being does not exist? Earl...
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Topic(s):
Anselm
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
David Hume
,
Earl Conee
,
Existence of God
,
Fictional Objects
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Immanuel Kant
,
Mental Representation
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontological Argument
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Language
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Tyron Goldschmidt
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September 27, 2013
Quote of the Day: Margaret Cavendish on Rational Animals
That all other animals, besides man, want reason, [Descartes] endeavours to prove in his discourse on method, where his chief argument is, that other animals cannot express their mind, thoughts or conceptions, either by speech or any other signs, as man can do: For, says he, it is not for want of organs belonging to the framing of words, as we may observe in parrots and 'pies, which are apt enough to express words they are taught, but understand nothing of them. My answer is, that one man expressing his mind by speech or words to another, doth not declare...
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January 29, 2013
A Theistic Argument for Compatibilism
One often hears it asserted that most theists are metaphysical libertarians. This seems to be supported, at least in the case of theistic philosophers, by the PhilPapers survey where target faculty specializing in philosophy of religion, who were overwhelmingly more likely to be theists than their peers in other specializations (72.3% for religion specialists vs. 14.6% overall), were also overwhelmingly more likely to be libertarians (57.4% vs. 13.7%). (Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to compare theists to non-theists across the board, so we just have this correlation among religion specialists.) Now, I suppose there are some reasons...
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Topic(s):
Agent Causation
,
Causation
,
Divine Attributes
,
Divine Freedom
,
Divine Necessity
,
Free Will
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Metaphysics
,
Philosophical Theology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Thomas Aquinas
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September 28, 2012
The Value Component of Plantinga's Free Will Defense
A defense (in Plantinga's sense) against the logical problem of evil requires two components: a metaphysical component, which claims that a certain scenario is logically possible, and a value component, which claims that if the scenario in question were actual then it would be consistent with God's goodness to weakly actualize a world containing evil. In Plantinga's Free Will Defense (FWD), the scenario in question is one in which every creaturely essence suffers from transworld depravity (TWD). Now, in both The Nature of Necessity and God, Freedom, and Evil Plantinga's focus is squarely on the metaphysical component, defending the coherence...
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July 26, 2012
Leibniz, Lewis, and Freedom to Break Laws/Divine Decrees
In his classic paper, "Are We Free to Break the Laws?", David Lewis argued that although we are not free to break the laws of nature, we are free to perform certain actions such that, if we performed them, a law would have been broken. This is supposed to allow compatibilists to secure alternate possibilities: it's true that in order for me to raise my arm right now, either the past or the laws of nature would have to have been different, but it's not true that if I raised my arm right now I would thereby alter the past...
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Topic(s):
Abilities
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
David Lewis
,
Free Will
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
Grace/Predestination
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Metaphysics
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Theology
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July 3, 2012
The Port-Royalists on Judgment and Other Mental Operations
Locke famously defines judgment, knowledge, etc., in terms of the joining or separating of ideas. It is quite probable that Locke's source for this is the Port-Royal Logic. There are two well-known problems with this view. First, according to this view in order to think that Peter is not living I must mentally separate the idea of Peter from the idea of living, but if I do that then its not clear how this judgment, that Peter is not living, can be a unit which can be, for instance, embedded in complex sentences. Locke makes matters worse by talking about...
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May 25, 2012
Quote of the Day: What is a Soul?
In my last post, I discussed a variety of conceptions of the soul in the history of Christian thought and of Western philosophy more generally. One of the points I was making is that, for an ancient Greek (or Latin) writer, talking about a 'soul' (Gr. psuche, Lat. anima) does not automatically mean believing in something immaterial. Today (while reading Antoine Arnauld's On True and False Ideas, ch. 24), I came across a passage from Augustine which makes this quite clear. Augustine is arguing that the soul is immaterial, i.e. he's defending substance dualism. Here's how he describes his opponents'...
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May 17, 2012
A Brief History of Christian Conceptions of the 'Soul'
It is sometimes said that Christianity presupposes the existence of a soul, that, due to the progress of science, this view is no longer credible, and that, therefore, Christianity can no longer be taken seriously. It is very probable that there are some combinations of views, widely held among self-identified 'Christians', which can be effectively criticized along these lines. However, there are several puzzling features about this line of thought. The first is that it is not clear what the relevant 'progress of science' is supposed to be. Neuroscience is indeed advancing, but it can hardly be considered so advanced...
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Topic(s):
Aristotle
,
Augustine
,
Historical Thinkers
,
John of Damascus
,
Metaphysics
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Plato
,
Rene Descartes
,
The Church
,
Thomas Aquinas
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March 27, 2012
January 18, 2012
The Mod Squad
Lewis Powell has
announced the formation of
The Mod Squad, a group blog devoted to the history of modern philosophy. My first post over there,
King's Theory of Election has just gone live. In the future, I will cross-post everything here as I have been doing with my
Prosblogion posts, but for now I will just encourage readers to check things out over there.
Continue reading "The Mod Squad"
November 7, 2011
Berkeley's 'Master Argument' and the Theory of Mental Representation
I apologize for the very light posting; I have been busy stressing about my upcoming qualifying exam. But I thought I would break my silence today for some thoughts about (as usual) Berkeley. The following passage from Berkeley's Dialogues (L&J p. 200) is rather notorious: Phil. ... I am content to put the whole [debate] upon this issue. If you can conceive it possible for any mixture or combination of qualities, or any sensible object whatever, to exist without the mind, then I will grant it actually to be so. Hyl. If it comes to that, the point will soon...
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September 14, 2011
Reid on Character in HPQ!
I have just officially received word that my paper, "Thomas Reid on Character and Freedom," will appear in the April 2012 issue of
History of Philosophy Quarterly! Unfortunately, the journal has a moderately restrictive archival policy, so I have had to take down the online copy of the paper for now. (If I understand correctly, I can upload it to archives like philpapers and academia.edu after one year, and post it to my own web-site after three.) I'll post a link to the official version when it comes out, so that if you are subscribed, or your university is, you can get to it.
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September 10, 2011
Berkeley, Commonsense, and Surprising Discoveries
Suppose (as happens often) that scientists, or philosophers, or explorers, or whoever, make some sort of surprising discovery, one that appears to be at odds with our commonsense view of the world. How should we react? It seems that there are three possible courses: either one rejects commonsense, or one rejects the alleged discovery, or one attempts to revise and/or reinterpret things to synthesize the two perspectives. An example: periodically results come out in neuroscience which purport to show that some brain event, of which the subject is unconscious, occurs significantly before a subject makes a supposedly free conscious choice,...
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July 21, 2011
Berkeley and Sergeant
John Sergeant was a late seventeenth century English proponent of Roman Catholicism and Aristotelian philosophy. He is now mostly forgotten, though he is occasionally mentioned as a critic of Locke, partially because Locke and Stillingfleet discuss Sergeant's criticisms of Locke in their famous dispute. (Stillingfleet disowns Sergeant's criticisms; Stillingfleet and Sergeant had earlier been embroiled in a theological dispute about the rule of faith.) I mentioned a while ago that I think the Locke-Stillingfleet debate was an important influence on Berkeley. It looks like Sergeant may have been an important influence as well. First, in section 12 of the preface...
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July 2, 2011
"Thomas Reid on Character and Freedom"
I have posted a new draft to my
workbench, "Thomas Reid on Character and Freedom". As always, comments are welcome.
Continue reading ""Thomas Reid on Character and Freedom""
June 29, 2011
A Short Story About Berkeley's Theory of Vision
On the plane back from Zurich last week I read a very interesting story, "He Who Shapes," by Roger Zelazny. This work won the Nebula for best novella in 1965. The story centers around essentially the same piece of technology depicted in the recent movie Inception: a device that allows two people to share a dream, with one of them, the 'shaper', in control of the dream world. However, unlike Inception, in which the technology is used primarily for corporate espionage, in "He Who Shapes" the device is used for psychotherapy. This would be interesting enough, but it gets better:...
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February 19, 2011
Berkeley and Leibniz Should be Friends
In his 1733 Theory of Vision Vindicated, commenting on the prevalence of the deist and free-thinking movements in England and Ireland, and justifying his association of these views with outright atheism, Berkeley writes: That atheistical principles have taken deeper root, and are farther spread than most people are apt to imagine, will be plain to whoever considers that pantheism, materialism, fatalism are nothing but atheism a little disguised; that the notions of Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibnitz [sic], and Bayle are relished and applauded; that as they who deny the freedom and immortality of the soul in effect deny its being, even...
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Topic(s):
Baruch Spinoza
,
Contemporary Thinkers
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Free Will
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
George Berkeley
,
Grace/Predestination
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Idealism/Phenomenalism
,
Metaphysics
,
Philipp van Limborch
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Pierre Bayle
,
Theology
,
Thomas Hobbes
,
Vere Chappell
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January 11, 2011
The Nature of the Visible Space in Berkeley's New Theory of Vision
One of the main aims of Berkeley's Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision is to argue that the application of spatial vocabulary ('far', 'near', 'big', 'small', 'right', 'left', etc.) to how things look ("visible objects") is derived from the primary meaning of that vocabulary as applying to how things feel ("tangible objects"). A big object is one you can't fit your arms around. An object looks big when the way it looks makes you think that you probably wouldn't be able to fit your arms around it. It is only by experience that we learn that objects we can't...
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November 29, 2010
Leibniz and Frankfurt on Freedom
The history of the debate on free will is sometimes narrated as follows: first, we have the 'classic compatibilists', starting from Hobbes, through Locke, Hume, and the positivists. At first these fellows square off against libertarians like Bramhall and Reid, who are (so the story goes) deservedly obscure. The debate is terribly unsophisticated: the compatibilists hold that freedom just is the ability to do what you want to do, the absence of any sort of external constraints. The libertarians require some kind of magic 'contra-causal' agent causation they can't explain. They slowly die out as English language philosophy is purified...
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Topic(s):
Augustine
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Contemporary Thinkers
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David Hume
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Ethics
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Free Will
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G. W. Leibniz
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Harry Frankfurt
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Historical Thinkers
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John Bramhall
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John Locke
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Martin Luther
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Metaphysics
,
Moral Psychology
,
Peter van Inwagen
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Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Roderick Chisholm
,
Thomas Hobbes
,
Thomas Reid
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September 23, 2010
A Non-Leibnizian Cosmological Argument
In my last Sobel post, I reconstructed the cosmological argument Sobel attributes to Leibniz in such a way that there was no obvious contradiction in the premises by using Leibniz's own resources. Here I want to try to produce an argument with more widely accepted premises. Recall that Sobel's reconstruction is as follows: (1)The World - the Cosmos - exists. (2) The World is contingent, it is a contingent entity. (3) For everything that exists - for every fact and every existent entity - there is a sufficient reason for its existence. (4) The sufficient reason for the existence of...
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Topic(s):
Agent Causation
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Causation
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Contemporary Thinkers
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Cosmological Argument
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Events
,
Existence of God
,
Free Will
,
Jordan Howard Sobel
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Philosophy of Religion
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August 12, 2010
More on FWD and Brute Contingencies
Yesterday, I noted that Plantinga's Free Will Defense (FWD), as it appears in The Nature of Necessity (NN) involves some very odd brute contingencies. These brute contingencies are not determined by God, or by anything else at all. They are truly brute: there is no reason or explanation for them. Furthermore, they limit God's power. When Plantinga admits that according to his theory "the power of an omnipotent God [is] limited by the freedom he confers upon his creatures" (NN 190), he cites William Wainwright, "Freedom and Omnipotence", Nous 2 (1968): 293-301. As it turns out, Wainwright is responding to...
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August 11, 2010
Some Odd Brute Contingincies in Plantinga's Free Will Defense
Once upon a time, many philosophers believed that there was a logical problem of evil. That is, it was held that the (obviously true) proposition that there is some evil in the world logically entails that there is no God. (Where God is conceived as omnipotent and perfectly good.) I imagine that a lot of philosophers still believe this, but today few are arguing for it in print. Instead, atheist philosophers now typically put forth an evidentiary problem of evil. That is, they propound an argument something like this: The more evil there is, the less likely it is that...
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June 2, 2010
What is the Problem with Empiricism, Realism, and the Way of Ideas?
After discussing my last post offline with Lewis yesterday, I wanted to clarify this claim: "The argument points to serious problems with the combination of empiricism, realism, and the 'way of ideas.'" The problems I have in mind are difficulties with being justified in believing in, or perhaps even capable of expressing, realism. That is, there are certain views that seem natural if one accepts empiricism and the way of ideas which lead to the denial of realism. Here is, I think, the best example. Empiricism is an explanatory program for philosophy of mind which systematically favors explanations of the...
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Topic(s):
Empiricism
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Epistemology
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George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
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Idealism/Phenomenalism
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Metaphysics
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Realism
,
Sense Perception
,
The Way of Ideas
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May 29, 2010
Can Immediate Perception Save Realism? (Hint: No)
As I mentioned in my last post, now that the term is over I am catching up on some stuff I've been meaning to read. Another item on that list is Georges Dicker's "Anti-Berkeley" which appeared in British Journal for the History of Philosophy in 2008. Dicker's aim is to show that many of Berkeley's arguments are good, but immaterialism, nevertheless, does not follow. Dicker thinks that Berkeley's arguments are best seen as showing us how to formulate a better version of materialism than the one common in Berkeley's day. So, for instance, Dicker thinks that Berkeley successfully refutes the...
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Topic(s):
Contemporary Thinkers
,
George Berkeley
,
Georges Dicker
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Idealism/Phenomenalism
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Realism
,
Sense Perception
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March 27, 2010
How Reductive Theories of Mental Representation Lead to Phenomenalism
It seems initially plausible to suppose that mental representation can be reduced to phenomenal character. That is, we all know that when we think about things we get into certain states of mind, and there is such a thing as what it's like to be in that state of mind. Now, when we think about things, we are representing the world as being in certain ways. It is tempting to suppose that this representing can be explained entirely in terms of the what-it's-like (phenomenal character). According to naive forms of representative realism, this is because that phenomenal experience resembles the...
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November 2, 2009
Does 'The Desk is Black' Express a Proposition?
According to standard versions of subjunctive phenomenalism, such as the version developed by C. I. Lewis, sentences purporting to be about physical objects can be analyzed into long conjunctions of subjunctive conditionals having to do only with sense data and voluntary actions. It's very difficult to actually state these conditionals, but they are supposed to say things like 'if I'm in such and such a condition, and I do X, I will experience Y'. Alva Noë is not a phenomenalist, but he expresses some similar ideas about the nature of perception. Specifically, Noë argues that perception does not involve the...
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Topic(s):
Alva Noë
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C. I. Lewis
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Familiar Objects
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Idealism/Phenomenalism
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Language
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Sense Perception
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September 18, 2009
Quote of the Day: A Source in Descartes for Berkeley's Visual Language Theory?
We must take care not to assume - as our philosophers [i.e. the scholastics] commonly do - that in order to have sensory awareness the soul must contemplate certain images [i.e. the species] transmitted by objects to the brain; or at any rate we must conceive the nature of these images in an entirely different manner from that of the philosophers. For since their conception of the images is confined to the requirement that they should resemble the objects they represent, the philosophers cannot possibly show us how the images can be formed by the objects, or how they can...
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April 9, 2007
Libertarian Compatibilism?
In metaphysics, libertarianism is the view that human beings (and other free beings) are free because they can do otherwise. Determinism is the view that the conjunction of the laws of nature with all the facts about the configuration of the world at some time t entail all the facts about the configuration of the world at all times. Compatibilism is the view that free will and determinism are logically compatible, and incompatibilism is the view that they are not. Libertarianism is generally taken to entail incompatibilism, and is contrasted with compatibilist theories of free will. However, in her recent...
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March 19, 2007
Rational Atheism Entails Rational Solipsism?
In the Fourth Dialogue of Berkeley's Alciphron, Alciphron the "Free-Thinker" challenges Berkeley's spokesman, Euphranor, to present a proof of the existence of God. Alciphron, however, lays down some quite stringent conditions: First then, let me tell you I am not persuaded by metaphysical arguments; such, for instance, as are drawn from the ideas of an all-perfect being, or the absurdity of an infinite progression of causes. This sort of arguments I have always found dry and jejune; and, as they are not suited to my way of thinking, they may perhaps puzzle, but never will convince me. Secondly, I am...
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February 24, 2007
Foreknowledge, Free Will, and the Grandfather Paradox
Compatibilism is belief in actions that are both free and determined. Usually, one hears such phrases as "what I will to do, I must do" (I think Hume phrases it something like this) or "I am free to act according to my nature." The idea is that human beings have determinate natures and they act as their natures determine. They are free because nothing outside determines their actions. Theories that posit a more robust freedom of the will are called "libertarian" (no relation to the political theory referred to in my tagline). Usually one hears phrases like "I am free...
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January 4, 2007
Why Idealism?
I talk a lot about Berkeley on this blog, and it has probably become clear to most regular readers that I am quite sympathetic to his position. There are a number of reasons for holding to various forms of idealism, and I have already discussed the chain of inferences which leads Berkeley to his theory. Important also is Berkeley's critique of matter, which proceeds by collapsing Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities (this collapse is almost universally viewed as successful by later philosophers), then applying Locke's arguments that secondary qualities are not actually in the objects to all perceived...
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November 15, 2006
On Synergism
Gerald has a piece on
Augustine and the synergism/monergism distinction up at
Iustificare. Gerald believes that the real question is not about synergism vs. monergism, but rather about the resistability of grace. I think he is probably right about this, but I question his definition of synergism, since synergism is
working together, but he seems to interpret it as simple concurrence. If I want God to do something, but have no power in myself to make it happen, it's not clear that this is synergism. However, Jesus does say "this is the work of God: that you believe in the One He has sent" (John 6:29). So let's suppose that believing or willing is a "work" (
ergon) for the purpose of synergism. I have two points to make...
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June 30, 2006
Berkeley's Taxonomy of Ideas
Since my post on Berkeley's metaphysics generated so much interesting discussion, I thought I would write a post on Berkeley's taxonomy of ideas. A particularly interesting (to me) aspect of this discussion is the way it plays into his critique of John Locke's theory of abstraction. Also of interest is the way this view (may have) influenced Immanuel Kant's epistemology of metaphysics. I'll skip lightly over that last one, because I don't understand Kant very well (who does?), but I re-read the Prolegomena recently and was thinking about this, so I'll float a few ideas by toward the end of...
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June 10, 2006
The Foundational Argument of Berkeleian Metaphysics
Metaphysics (theory of reality) is notoriously difficult to get off the ground. There is very little to start from, because everything else starts from here. However, as Descartes so famously observed, I, the one reasoning about metaphysics, am, in fact, reasoning about metaphysics, and therefore must, in some sense, exist. Descartes has been challenged by Neitszche (in Beyond Good and Evil) and others, for his inference from "there is thinking going on" to "there must be a substance which does the thinking," and, as little sympathy as I have for Neitzsche in general, I think that this may be a...
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May 2, 2006
"Three Persons, One Substance" - Paradox or Solution?
I seem to have opened quite the can of worms in my post on Church dogma the other day when I said: There seem to be some clear (to me) cases of Christian dogma that are not obviously uniquely deriveable from Scripture. For example, consider the formulation of the trinity as three persons (Greek hupostaseis and/or prosopa, Latin personae) in one substance/essence (Greek ousia, Latin essentia and/or substantia). This type of formulation is extremely common in the Christian tradition, and is derived primarily from the Chalcedonian Creed. However, I don't think we can say that it is obviously uniquely deriveable...
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Topic(s):
Aristotle
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Bible
,
Church Dogmatics
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Metaphysics
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
The Church
,
The Trinity
,
Theology
,
Thomas Aquinas
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January 27, 2006
Persons as Events
Over the semester break, I took some time to look at Peter van Inwagen's paper "Materialism and the Psychological-Continuity Account of Personal Identity" (Philosophical Perspectives 11 (1997): 305-319) and, as I realized that I don't have a good candidate for submission to Monday's Philosopher's Carnival, I thought this would be a good time to write down some thoughts that I had in connection with this paper and (very) broadly Lockean "psychological continuity" accounts of personal identity in general. The aim of van Inwagen's paper is to show that these kind of psychological continuity accounts require the existence of immaterial substances,...
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