Metaphysics

114 flashcards by MentisLibrary

The core debates about what exists and what it is like: universals, identity and persistence, modality and essence, causation, time, free will, mind and body, parts and wholes, and realism. For students in a first metaphysics course.

What question is metaphysics asking?

What there is, and what it is like, at the most general level: which kinds of thing exist and what their most basic features are. Aristotle called it first philosophy, the study of being as being.

Ontology

The study of what exists and of the most general categories things fall under. An ontology is also the particular list of kinds a given theory commits itself to.

Quine's criterion of ontological commitment

To be is to be the value of a bound variable. A theory is committed to whatever must exist for its regimented first-order sentences to come out true.

Substance, in the classical sense

A thing that exists in its own right and bears properties, as against a property, which exists only in something else. Aristotle's primary substances are individual things like this horse.

Bundle theory of objects

An object just is a bundle of co-instantiated properties, with no underlying bearer. There is nothing more to a lemon than the yellowness, sourness, shape and the rest, held together.

Bare particular (substratum)

A thing considered apart from all its properties, posited as what individuates one object from another that is qualitatively identical to it. It has no nature of its own.

Abstract vs concrete objects

Concrete objects are located in space and time and enter causal relations; abstract objects, if they exist, do neither. The line is drawn differently by different authors and resists a clean definition.

Platonism about mathematical objects

Numbers and sets exist mind-independently, outside space and time, and mathematical statements are true or false because of how they are.

Mathematical fictionalism

Mathematical statements are literally false, since there are no numbers, but they are useful fictions that let us describe the physical world efficiently.

Ontological parsimony

The methodological rule that a theory positing fewer kinds of entity is preferable, other things being equal. Qualitative parsimony, fewer kinds, is usually weighted more heavily than quantitative, fewer things.

Aristotle's categories

Ten most general kinds under which anything can fall: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, having, doing, and being affected. Everything said of a subject falls into one of them.

Is existence a property?

Kant argued that it is not a real predicate: saying a thing exists adds nothing to the concept of it, but posits an instance of that concept. Modern logic follows him by treating existence as a quantifier.

Meinong's theory of objects

Every thought has an object, including thoughts of golden mountains and round squares, so there are objects that do not exist. Being an object is separated from existing.

Grounding

A non-causal relation of metaphysical dependence: one fact holds in virtue of another. It is what philosophers mean when they say the mental is grounded in the physical, or a whole in its parts.

The problem of universals

Distinct things can share a feature. Two red apples are alike in a way that seems to call for explanation. Is there one entity, redness, present in both, or only two particulars that resemble each other?

Platonic realism about universals

Universals exist independently of their instances, outside space and time. Particular things are what they are by participating in the Forms, which they only imperfectly resemble.

Aristotelian (immanent) realism

Universals exist, but only in the things that instantiate them. There are no uninstantiated universals, and a universal is wholly present in each of its many instances.

Nominalism about universals

Only particulars exist. What a set of similar things share is not an entity but a predicate that applies to them, or membership in a class.

Resemblance nominalism

Properties are analysed away in terms of primitive resemblance among particulars. To be red is to resemble the red things closely enough, with resemblance taken as basic and unanalysed.

Trope theory

Properties are particulars, not universals: the redness of this apple is one entity and the redness of that apple another. Similar tropes resemble but are numerically distinct.

One over many argument

Because many things can be one in kind, there must be one entity they share. It is the classic argument for universals: the shared feature is offered as the best explanation of the shared truth.

Third man argument

If a Form is required to explain what many large things share, and the Form of Largeness is itself large, then a further Form is needed to cover the Form and its instances, and so on without end.

Bradley's regress

If a relation ties a thing to its property, something must tie the relation to the thing, and so on forever. The tie itself always needs a further tie.

Determinable and determinate

A determinable is a general property fixed only within a range; a determinate is a fully specific way of having it. Every determinate necessarily brings its determinable with it.

Sparse vs abundant properties

Abundant properties correspond to every meaningful predicate, however gerrymandered. Sparse or natural properties are the ones that carve nature at its joints and do explanatory work.

Numerical vs qualitative identity

Numerically identical means being one and the same thing. Qualitatively identical means merely being exactly alike. Two new coins can be qualitatively identical while remaining two things.

Leibniz's law (indiscernibility of identicals)

If a and b are one and the same thing, then whatever is true of a is true of b. It is close to uncontroversial, and puzzles that seem to break it usually rest on a misdescription.

Identity of indiscernibles

The converse of Leibniz's law: if a and b share every property, they are the same thing. It is disputed, because it seems to rule out by fiat a universe of two exactly similar things.

Ship of Theseus

A ship has every plank replaced over time. The repaired ship seems to be the original by continuity, yet a ship rebuilt from the discarded planks seems to be the original by material composition.

Endurantism

An object persists by being wholly present at each moment it exists. The whole thing, not a part of it, is there today and was there yesterday.