Volume 15, Issue 2 -

Contemporary defenders of non-disjunctivism take a representationalist philosophy of mind for granted; all kinds of conscious intentional states/acts/events are automatically regarded as being representations. The paper presents an alternative anti-representationalist view of the mind. It differs from other present-day anti-representationalisms in arguing that all conscious phenomena contains a this-worldly something called “from-pole”, and it denies that an intentional content and the corresponding intentional object always are distinct entities. The view is set in contrast to both a transcendental ego tradition and a no from-pole tradition. Hereby, the paper defends the common sense-like view that we are persons who directly perceive, act in, and talk about things in a common world.

The basic divide in the metaphysics of time is between those who defend a dynamic view and those who defend a static view. Whereas the former hold that time does truly pass, the latter take the passage of time to be some sort of illusion. Recently, however, an alternative minority view developed, according to which passage is identical either with the succession of times in the four-dimensional manifold or with the temporally ordered sequence of events located at these. I want to argue that something is wrong with the identity theory of passage. If passage and time qua part of the manifold are identical, then talk of passage should be translatable into talk about time qua part of the manifold (and vice versa). I show that this is not always possible.

Merricks (2007; Truth and Ontology . Oxford: Clarendon Press) argues for and defends a novel version of primitivism about truth: being true is a primitive monadic but non-intrinsic property. This examination consists of the following triad: a critical discussion of Merricks’ argument for his view, a rejection of his objection against Horwich’s (1998; Truth , 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press) minimalist theory of truth, and a direct objection against his view on the grounds that it entails being true is a mysterious and suspicious property. The conclusion is that Merricks’ primitivism should be rejected.

The thesis is that conscious states and intentional states are the same things, although the property that makes a state a conscious state is different from the property that makes it an intentional state. Against those who say that sensations such as pains are conscious but not intentional states, it is argued that they are in fact intentional states. Against those who say dispositional mental states such as beliefs are intentional states but not conscious states, it is argued that they are in fact not intentional states. It is further argued that those unconscious mental states that are not merely dispositional mental states are, in the relevant sense, conscious states and therefore also intentional states. The argument is conducted within the framework of a briefly summarized ontology of mind.

Call the realist thesis that the truth of statements of the form “ a is F” entails the existence of properties only via the schema “ a is F iff a instantiates F-ness” introductionism ; call the nominalist thesis that the schema “ a is F iff a instantiates F-ness” doesn’t really introduce properties into the domain of discourse anti-introductionism . I’ll show that both introductionism and anti-introductionism presuppose two crucial assumptions concerning abstract singular terms and predicates, that in turn constitute the pivots of an (allegedly) cogent argument against realism, that is the so-called nominalist’s gambit . Moreover, moving from the phenomenon that I’ll call property-anaphora, I hold that these presuppositions are reciprocally incompatible. I’ll conclude that introductionism and anti-introductionism are positions based on an inconsistent ground, and that the nominalist’s gambit is without force.

I argue that David Lewis’s philosophically dominant conception of time travel cannot straightforwardly handle what we might call cases of relativistic time travel – that is, the sort of time travel which could only plausibly occur in a relativistic setting. I evaluate whether or not the Lewisian account can be successfully adapted such that it would able to analyse potential cases of relativistic time travel satisfactorily while still being employable in the analysis of those cases that make no mention of physics or the structure of spacetime. This is primarily an analytical and explanatory exercise, rather than a polemical one.

Huw Price has argued that naturalistic philosophy inevitably leads to a deflationary approach to ontological questions. In this paper, I rebut these arguments. A more substantive, less language-focused approach to metaphysics remains open to naturalists. However, rebutting one of Price’s main arguments requires rejecting Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment. So, even though Price’s argument is unsound, it reveals that naturalists cannot rest content with broadly Quinean, “mainstream metaphysics,” which, I suggest, naturalists also have independent reasons to reject.

The central objection to the constitution view is the too many thinkers problem – if the animal that constitutes you thinks and you are not it, then there are two thinkers within the region you occupy. Lynne Rudder Baker claims that the animal thinks only derivatively, in virtue of constituting the person that thinks nonderivatively, and this leads to a solution to the too many thinkers problem. This paper offers two objections to Baker’s solution. First, the idea of derivative/nonderivative properties faces a dilemma unacceptable to constitutionalists: either the too many thinkers problem is reinstated or the constitution view is undermined by the idea itself. Further, Baker should concede that the person thinks in virtue of brain functions. This implies, contra Baker’s claim, that the person thinks derivatively and the animal thinks nonderivatively. The paper also considers a way in which Baker might respond to the two objections.

To hold that only one conscious thing is sitting in your chair, philosophers have appealed to maximality : If a property M is maximal , then anything that has property M does not have large proper parts that have property M . Philosophers have said that ordinary objects are maximal, including houses, cats, rocks, and have argued by analogy that consciousness is maximal. I argue that the maximality principle mistakenly excludes some members of a kind. Thus, it is not the correct principle to explain why, for example, you are conscious but the proper part that is all-of-you-but-your-arm is not conscious.

The relevance of mereology for metaphysics is a perennial theme. In particular, the part-whole relation is applied recently to colocated qua-objects of different sortals: say, a statue and its constituting piece of clay. K. Koslicki (2008. The structure of objects . Oxford: Oxford University Press) claims that only the lump is part of the statue; moreover, its proper part, but not vice versa since the statue has an immaterial part not shared by the lump. She backs her claim by appealing to the weak supplementation principle (WSP). M. Donnelly (2011. “Using mereological principles to support metaphysics.” The philosophical quarterly 61:225–46) is critical with the asymmetry argument. I point out that the asymmetry argument trades on the equivocity of the very notion of “part”. In the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition Koslicki’s neo-Aristotelianism appeals to, “part” shows up with various meanings not all of them admitting the mereological reading of “part” her argument hinges on. With her argument, the absurd consequence ensues that the lump can also be shown to have an immaterial part not shared by the statue. I show that the presumed immaterial parts cannot be proper parts of composites, only their improper parts. Thus they fail to fall under (WSP). My ultimate goal is to disentangle the mereological and the metaphysical threads by showing what goes with what without taking sides either with the mereologist or the traditional metaphysician.

I ate my broccoli, though my broccoli did not eat me. The eating relation, like many other relations, differentiates between its arguments. The fact that eating holds between a and b does not entail that it holds between b and a . How are we to make sense of this? The standard view is that relations are sensitive to the order of their arguments. As natural as this view is, it has been the target of a powerful objection from Kit Fine. I examine Fine’s objection and defend the standard view.