Lynne Baker

Nonphilosophers, if they think of philosophy at all, wonder why people work in metaphysics. After all, metaphysics, as Auden once said of poetry, makes nothing happen.1 Yet some very intelligent people are driven to spend their lives exploring metaphysical theses. Part of what motivates metaphysicians is the appeal of grizzly puzzles (like the paradox of the heap or the puzzle of the ship of Theseus). But the main reason to work in metaphysics, for me at least, is to understand the shared world that we all encounter and interact with. And the shared world that we all encounter includes us self-conscious beings and our experience. The world that we inhabit is unavoidably a temporal world: the signing of the Declaration of Independence is later than the Lisbon earthquake; the Cold War is in the past; your death is in the future. There is no getting away from time.

I set out four general facts about things that we can refer to and talk about, whether they exist or not. Then, I set out an argument for the existence of God. Myargument, like Anselm’s original argument, is a reductio ad absurdum: It shows that the assumption that God does not exist leads to a contradiction. Theargument is short and in ordinary language. Each line of the argument, other than the reductio premise, is justified by one of the general facts. Finally, I consider some traditional objections to Anselm’s argument, and show how my updated version avoids them.

Any artefact – a hammer, a telescope, an artificial hip – may malfunction. Conceptually speaking, artefacts have an inherent normative aspect. I argue that the normativity of artefacts should be understood as part of reality, and not just “in our concepts.” I first set out Deflationary Views of artefacts, according to which there are no artefactual properties, just artefactual concepts. According to my contrasting view – the Constitution View – there are artefactual properties that things in the world really have. For example, there is a property of being a telephone per se; we apply our concept telephone to things that have that property. Things that have the property of being a telephone are constituted by, but not identical to, aggregates of particles. To be an artefact, an object must have an intended function, among other things. Telephones – in virtue of being the kind of objects that they are – are always subject to malfunction. And malfunctions, when they occur, are just as much part of the world as telephones are. The example of artefacts shows that what is in the world – what really exists – need not be “mind-independent” nor independent of our concepts.

In "Understanding the Language of Thought," John Pollock offers a semantics for Mentalese. Along the way, he raises many deep issues concerning, among other things, the indexicality of thought, the relations between thought and communication, the function of 'that'-clauses and the nature of introspection. Regrettably, I must pass over these issues here. Instead, I shall focus on Pollock's views on the nature of appearance and its role in interpreting the language of thought.' I shall examine two aspects of Pollock's views: (i) the distinction between comparative and noncomparative senses of 'red,' and (ii) the construal of narrow content in terms of input states and rational architecture. Consideration of the former will call into question the coherence of the distinction; consideration of the latter will suggest that comparative appearance states cannot play the theoretical role that Pollock assigns to them.

Mark Johnston takes reality to be wholly objective or impersonal, and aims to show that the inevitability of death does not obliterate goodness in such a naturalistic world. Crucial to his argument is the claim that there are no persisting selves. After critically discussing Johnston's arguments, I set out a view of persons that shares Johnston's view that there are no selves, but disagrees about the prospects of goodness in a wholly impersonal world. On my view, a wholly objective world is ontologically incomplete: Persons have irreducible first-person properties. My aim is to show that we can reject selves, but that we can retain persons and their essential first-person properties as ontologically significant.

Social Externalism is the thesis that many of our thoughts are individuated in part by the linguistic and social practices of the thinker’s community. After defending Social Externalism and arguing for its broad application, I turn to the kind of defeasible first-person authority that we have over our own thoughts. Then, I present and refute an argument that uses first-person authority to disprove Social Externalism. Finally, I argue briefly that Social Externalism—far from being incompatible with first-person authority—provides a check on first-personal pronouncements and thus saves first-person authority from being simply a matter of social convention and from collapsing into the subjectivity of “what seems right is right.”

ABSTRACT In September, 2016, I replied to an earlier draft of Oaklander’s Critique of my view of time for Manuscrito. Now he has published an extremely complex 50-page expanded version. There is no way that a reply in a journal could cover all the topics Oaklander discusses. So, I will stick mainly to my own view to which Oaklander was responding. My reply is in two parts. In the first, directed at Oaklander’s earlier draft, I say what I want to do in philosophy in general, and in the philosophy of time in particular. In the second part, I mention some places where he misunderstands my view.

Many Christians assume that there are only two possibilities for what a human person is: either Animalism (the view that we are fundamentally animals) or Immaterialism (the view that we are fundamentally immaterial souls). I set out a third possibility: the Constitution View (the view that we are material beings, constituted by bodies but not identical to the bodies that now constitute us.) After setting out and briefly defending the Constitution View, I apply it to the doctrine of resurrection. I conclude by giving reasons for Christians to prefer the Constitution View of human persons to both Animalism and Immaterialism.

Although prominent Christian theologians and philosophers have assumed the truth of mind/body dualism, I want to raise the question of whether the Christian ought to be a mind/body dualist. First, I sketch a picture of mind, and of human persons, that is not a form of mind/body dualism. Then, I argue that the nondualistic picture is compatible with a major traditional Christian doctrine, the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Finally, I suggest that if a Christian need not be a mind/body dualist, then she should not be a mind/body dualist.

Ever since the 1970’s, philosophers of mind have engaged in a lively discussion of Externalism. Externalism is the metaphysical thesis that the contents of one’s thoughts are determined partly by empirical features of one’s environment. Externalism appears to clash with another plausible thesis—the epistemological thesis that one can have knowledge of one’s own thoughts, without evidence or empirical investigation. Many have argued that the conjunction of these theses is incompatible. I have argued elsewhere for their compatibility.1 Here I’ll just assume that they are compatible and explore some consequences of conjoining a particular externalist thesis about the contents of thoughts (Social Externalism) with a particular thesis about self-knowledge (First-Person Authority).