CFUL - Disputatio - Volume 9 - 2017
URI permanente para esta coleção:
Navegar
Entradas recentes
- Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital, by William Clare RobertsPublication . Raekstad, Paul
- The Metaphysics of Relations, by Anna Marmodoro and David YatesPublication . Ingthorsson, R. D.
- Why are Events, Facts, and States of Affairs Different?Publication . Polakof, Ana ClaraThis article claims that events, facts and states of affairs need to be differentiated. It takes as a starting point Chisholm’s (1976) claim that only his ontology of states of affairs explains effectively thirteen sentences related to propositions and events. He does this by reducing propositions and events to states of affairs. We argue that our ontology also solves those problems. We defend a hierarchized Platonist ontology that has concrete entities (objects and events) and abstract entities (properties, facts and states of affairs). The distinctions we propose allow us to explain the pre-analytic data analyzed by Chisholm without reducing entities. We claim that our ontology provides a different way of explaining that data, and is, thus, promissory.
- Do Time-Asymmetric Laws call for Time-Asymmetric Spacetime Structure?Publication . Peterson, DanielMany philosophers of physics take the failure of the laws of physics to be invariant under the time reversal transformation to give us good reason to think that spacetime is temporally anisotropic, yet the details of this inference are rarely made explicit. I discuss two reasonable ways of filling in the details of this inference, the first of which utilizes a symmetry principle proposed by John Earman and the second of which utilizes Harvey Brown’s account of spacetime. I contend that neither of the resulting arguments is sound.
- The Unificatory Power of Scientific RealismPublication . Park, SeungbaeThe no-miracles argument (Putnam 1975) holds that science is successful because successful theories are (approximately) true. Frost-Arnold (2010) objects that this argument is unacceptable because it generates neither new predictions nor unifications. It is similar to the unacceptable explanation that opium puts people to sleep because it has a dormative virtue. I reply that on close examination, realism explains not only why some theories are successful but also why successful theories exist in current science. Therefore, it unifies the disparate phenomena.
- Robustness and Up-to-us-nessPublication . Kittle, SimonFrankfurt-style cases purport to show that an agent can be morally responsible for an action despite not having any alternatives. Some critics have responded by highlighting various alternatives that remain in the cases presented, while Frankfurtians have objected that such alternatives are typically not capable of grounding responsibility. In this essay I address the recent suggestion by Seth Shabo that only alternatives associated with the ‘up to us’ locution ground moral responsibility. I distinguish a number of kinds of ability, suggest which kinds of abilities ground the truth of the ‘up to us’ locution, and outline how these distinctions apply to the indeterministic buffer cases.
- On the Plausibility of Idealism: Refuting CriticismsPublication . Kastrup, BernardoSeveral alternatives vie today for recognition as the most plausible ontology, from physicalism to panpsychism. By and large, these ontologies entail that physical structures circumscribe consciousness by bearing phenomenal properties within their physical boundaries. The ontology of idealism, on the other hand, entails that all physical structures are circumscribed by consciousness in that they exist solely as phenomenality in the first place. Unlike the other alternatives, however, idealism is often considered implausible today, particularly by analytic philosophers. A reason for this is the strong intuition that an objective world transcending phenomenality is a self-evident fact. Other arguments—such as the dependency of phenomenal experience on brain function, the evidence for the existence of the universe before the origin of conscious life, etc.—are also often cited. In this essay, I will argue that these objections against the plausibility of idealism are false. As such, this essay seeks to show that idealism is an entirely plausible ontology.
- The Problem of the Rock and the Grammar of ConsciousnessPublication . Brons, LajosThe “Problem of the Rock” (PoR) is a famous objection to Higher-Order (HO) theories of consciousness. According to PoR, the HO theorists’ claim that a mental state is conscious iff there is a higher-order mental state about it implies that a rock is also conscious iff there is a higher-order mental state about it. In this paper I show that this argument confuses two grammatically distinct attributions of consciousness, and that if the consequent equivocation fallacy is avoided, PoR is either a straw man argument or has an unproblematic conclusion.
- EditorialPublication . Marques, Teresa; Teixeira, Célia