Jiri Benovsky

Is the self a substance, as Descartes thought, or is it 'only' a bundle of perceptions, as Hume thought ? In this paper I will examine these two views, especially with respect to two central features that have played a central role in the discussion, both of which can be quickly and usefully explained if one puts them as an objection to the bundle view. First, friends of the substance view have insisted that only if one conceives of the self as a substance is it possible to account for genuine particularity of selves and genuine persistence through time of them. I will discuss in detail this claim as well as a special case of persistence - the case of a fission of a self - and I will ask, as Shoemaker (1997) did, how such a case can be handled by the two competing theories. The second central point of traditional disagreement concerns independence : it is often said that only a substance, but not a mere bundle, is independent enough of its properties to play properly the role of a self, and I will have something to say about this. Concerning all these points, my thesis will be a meta-theoretical one : contrary to appearances, both views can accommodate all of them (particularity at a time, persistence, fission, independence) in the same way, and I will examine two possible conclusions to be drawn from this : either that the differences between the two views are no more than terminological and that they turn out to be equivalent views, or that the differences are metaphysical but that it is epistemically under-determined which one of the views we should choose.

The practice of attributing aesthetic properties to scientific and philosophical theories is commonplace. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of such an aesthetic judgement about a theory is Quine's in 'On what there is': "Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes". Many other philosophers and scientists, before and after Quine, have attributed aesthetic properties to particular theories they are defending or rejecting. One often hears that a view is "elegant", "attractive", "beautiful", or even "sexy". [...] The general claim that aesthetic properties supervene on non-aesthetic properties is a largely debated one. In this paper, I wish to address this issue from an angle which has not been really explored so far: I shall neither concentrate on cases of artefacts nor of natural objects, like the beauty of a painting or the beauty of a sunrise, rather, my main centre of attention will be the somewhat more special, theoretical case of the beauty of philosophical theories (with a focus on metaphysical theories). As we will see, there are some interesting issues concerning claims that attribute aesthetic properties to theories, in part because, even if such claims are commonplace in philosophy and in science, little has been said about the nature of the relevant supervenience basis – that is, about what it is exactly that the beauty of a theory is supposed to supervene on. Moreover, we shall see that aesthetic properties of theories play a crucial role in theory choice and evaluation. Indeed, it seems that the aesthetic properties of a theory can be appealed to in theory evaluation and when it comes to preferring one theory over another. But before we ask ourselves what role the attribution of aesthetic properties to theories can play, I will adress the question how theories come to have their aesthetic properties in the first place.

In this paper, I explore several versions of the bundle theory and the substratum theory and compare them, with the surprising result that it seems to be true that they are equivalent (in a sense of 'equivalent' to be specified). In order to see whether this is correct or not, I go through several steps : first, I examine different versions of the bundle theory with tropes and compare them to the substratum theory with tropes by going through various standard objections and arguing for a tu quoque in all cases. Emphasizing the theoretical role of the substratum and of the relation of compresence, I defend the claim that these views are equivalent for all theoretical purposes. I then examine two different versions of the bundle theory with universals, and show that one of them is, here again, equivalent to the substratum theory with universals, by examining how both views face the famous objection from Identity of Indiscernibles in a completely parallel way. It is only the second, quite extreme and puzzling, version of the bundle theory with universals that is not be equivalent to any other view; and the diagnosis of why this is so will show just how unpalatable the view is. Similarly, only a not-so-palatable version of the substratum theory is genuinely different from the other views; and here again it's precisely what makes it different that makes it less appealing.

Merely rhetorically, and answering in the negative, Kendall Walton has asked: "Isn't photography just another method people have of making pictures, one that merely uses different tools and materials – cameras, photosensitive paper, darkroom equipment, rather than canvas, paint, and brushes? And don't the results differ only contingently and in degree, not fundamentally, from pictures of other kinds?" Contra Walton and others, I wish to defend in this article a resounding "Yes" as being the correct answer to these questions. It is a widely shared view that photographs are somehow special and that they fundamentally differ from hand-made pictures like paintings, both from a phenomenological point of view (in the way we experience them), and an epistemic point of view (since they are supposed to have a different – greater – epistemic value than paintings, giving us a privileged access to the world). In what follows, I shall reject almost the totality of these claims, and as a consequence there will remain little difference left between photographs and paintings. As we shall see, 'photographs are always partly paintings' – a claim that is true not only of retouched digital photographs but of all photographs, including traditional ones made using photosensitive film and development techniques.

Is there an entity such that it can be in two places at the same time ? According to one traditional view, properties can, since they are immanent universals. But what about objects such as a person or a table ? Common sense seems to say that, unlike properties, objects are not multiply locatable. In this paper, I will argue first of all that endurantism entails a consequence that is quite bizarre, namely, that objects are universals, while properties are particulars. I then conclude by examining and rejecting two theories according to which objects can wholly be in two places at the same time.

In his book The Metaphysics of Beauty Nick Zangwill argues for the claim that aesthetic properties metaphysically necessarily depend on sensory properties. This claim plays a role in his argument against physicalist aesthetic realism as well as in the formulation of his own response- dependence view. In this article, I offer reasons to resist the aesthetic/ sensory dependence claim by a discussion of the case of theories, theorems, proofs, and similar theoretical objects, which do possess genuinely aesthetic properties, while these do not depend on any sensory properties. I argue against Zangwill’s claim that such attributions of aesthetic properties are merely metaphorical.

Endurantism, as opposed to perdurantism, is supposed to be the intuitive view. But the ‘endurantist intuition’ – roughly, that objects persist through time by being numerically identical and wholly located at all times at which they exist – is behind more than just endurantism. Indeed, it plays an important role in the motivation of some theories about the passage of time, and some theories about the nature of the subject. As we shall see, the endurantist intuition is often taken in these cases to be a reason, or at least a motivation, to endorse one or the other of these metaphysical theories. Sometimes, it is even said to constitute a basis for an argument in their favour. In this article, I show that such an appeal to this ‘endurantist intuition’ is misleading and wrong. I do not deny that there is an intuition of this kind, but I deny that it can play any philosophically significant role as a reason – and even less as a basis for an argument – in defending metaphysical theories such as endurantism, dualism, or the A-theory.

The claim that the having of aesthetic properties supervenes on the having of non-aesthetic properties has been widely discussed and, in various ways, defended. In this paper, I will show that even if it is sometimes true that a supervenience relation holds between aesthetic properties and the 'subvenient' non-aesthetic ones, it is not the interesting relation in the neighbourhood. As we shall see, a richer, asymmetric and irreflexive relation is required, and I shall defend the claim that the more-and-more-popular relation of grounding does a much better job than supervenience.

This article discusses a familiar version of trope theory as opposed to a familiar version of the theory of universals, examining how these two rivals address the problem of “attribute agreement”—a problem that has been at the root of the very reason for developing these theories in the first place. The article shows that there is not much of a difference between the ways these two theories handle the problem, and in a more general way it argues that there is little reason for preferring one theory over the other. It is not interested in this claim only for the sake of the debate between trope theory and the theory of universals. Indeed, the reasons why it claims that it is so difficult to choose one theory over the other can be applied to other cases as well (where they might lead to claims of metaphysical equivalence).

Finding an adequate definition of "life" has proven to be a tricky affair. In this article, I discuss the idea that nothing is really alive: we only say so. I shall argue that 'being alive' is not a genuine property of things, and that it only reflects the way we think and talk about things. An eliminativist strategy will then allow us to free ourselves from the burden of having to find a definition of life, and will allow us to focus on the genuinely interesting properties of living (and non-living) entities.

Dans ce livre sur les photographies, l'auteur defend l'idee que les photographies n'existent pas. En effet, pour le philosophe, la nature des photographies est assez evasive. Quel type d'entites sont-elles? Des objets materiels concrets comme des tirages papier? Des types abstraits qui peuvent etre instanties dans de nombreuses formes tres diverses (tirages, fichiers, images a l'ecran,...)? Nous allons voir qu'aucune categorie metaphysique traditionnelle ne parvient a rendre compte de la nature des photographies, et je soutiendrai alors la these que les photographies n'existent pas. Mais qu'elles existent ou pas, les photographies soulevent un certain nombre de questions philosophiques importantes. En particulier, on peut se demander de quelle maniere une photographie represente le monde et en quoi la representation consiste. Nous allons voir que les photographies ont (ou peuvent avoir) un contenu narratif qui joue un role central dans la maniere dont elles representent. Nous allons egalement aborder le cas particulier de representation de la duree temporelle: une image statique, telle qu'une photographie, comment peut-elle representer un intervalle temporel non-instantane.

Depiction and imagination are intimately linked. In this article, I discuss the role imagination (as well as inference and knowledge/belief) plays in depiction, with a focus on photographic depiction. I partly embrace a broadly Waltonian view, but not always, and not always for Walton's own reasons. In Walton's view, imagination plays a crucial role in depiction. I consider the objection to his view that not all cases of depiction involve imagination – for instance, documentary photographs. From this discussion, two points will emerge: first, we will see that it is an unnecessary mistake to insist too heavily on the fact that photographs are produced in a mechanical way (as opposed to, say, paintings), and second, we will see that the notion of "imagining-seeing", as it is articulated by Walton, is perhaps too strong and does not entirely do justice to the external character of the role imagination plays here. Focusing mainly on photographs, I then illustrate the view I want to advocate by a series of different cases, where the nature of the role that imagination, knowledge/belief, and inference play in depiction will become apparent.

When I say that I am a lot of things, I mean it literally and metaphysically speaking. The Self, or so I shall argue, is a plurality (notwithstanding the fact that ordinary language takes "the Self" to be a singular term – but, after all, language is only language). It is not a substance or a substratum, and it is not a collection or a bundle. The view I wish to advocate for is a kind of reductionism, in line with some – but not all – broadly Humean ideas. In short, I will defend the view there are the experiences and mental states we have, and that's it: no additional substances, and no bundles. This does not mean, however, that there is no Self – the Self simply is the experiences. I will try to articulate and defend this view by showing that it can accommodate what I take to be the three main desiderata for any theory of the Self to satisfy: first, that the Self is the subject of experience (a subject of mental states, in general); second, that there is a unity to the Self in the sense that our (conscious, phenomenal) experience is at least partly continuous or 'stream-like'; and third, that we do not die when we go to sleep or when we otherwise don't have any (conscious, phenomenal) experiences.

Depiction and imagination are intimately linked. In this article, I discuss the role imagination (as well as inference and knowledge/belief) plays in depiction, with a focus on photographic depiction. I partly embrace a broadly Waltonian view, but not always, and not always for Walton's own reasons. In Walton's view, imagination plays a crucial role in depiction. I consider the objection to his view that not all cases of depiction involve imagination – for instance, documentary photographs. From this discussion, two points will emerge: first, we will see that it is an unnecessary mistake to insist too heavily on the fact that photographs are produced in a mechanical way (as opposed to, say, paintings), and second, we will see that the notion of "imagining-seeing", as it is articulated by Walton, is perhaps too strong and does not entirely do justice to the external character of the role imagination plays here. Focusing mainly on photographs, I then illustrate the view I want to advocate by a series of different cases, where the nature of the role that imagination, knowledge/belief, and inference play in depiction will become apparent.