Jiri Benovsky

Given Carnap’s view according to which many philosophical problems are merely pseudo-problems, the question about how to choose between competing philosophical theories becomes the question of choosing between different linguistic frameworks. In this essay, I focus on meta-theoretical criteria which we might want to use to evaluate and select philosophical theories—namely, their theoretical virtues. I take as an example a typical case of a metaphysical debate where a sort of a dead-end has been reached, namely the debate concerning Trope Theory, the Theory of Universals, and Nominalism. I examine how these rival views 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—and I show that there is not much of a difference between the ways these theories handle it. In a more general way I then argue that there is little reason for preferring one theory over the other. To do this, I examine several meta-theoretical criteria for the evaluation of theories such as explanatory power, simplicity, compatibility with current science, and others, focusing on the role that primitives play in metaphysical theories.

In this chapter, I discuss various cases of metaphysical equivalence. I focus on the case of the Bundle theory and Substratum theory of material objects and the case of Relationism and Substantivalism about time, and in both cases I argue for a kind of equivalence between these traditional enemies. I explore several versions of the Bundle theory and the Substratum theory. 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. I then examine other versions of these views that are not equivalent to the others. I then turn my attention to Relationism and Substantivalism about time. In this chapter, I try to make some progress with respect to the debate between these two views, and I do this mainly by examining the strategies they use to face the possibilities of ‘empty time’ and ‘time without change’. As we shall see, the two allegedly very different rival views are much less different than has been thought: their structure is extremely similar, their strategies are extremely similar, and they can both face the possibilities of ‘empty time’ and ‘time without change’ in the same way. Thus, I argue in favour of a certain kind of equivalence between these two views as well.

In this chapter, I discuss the case of a metaphysical debate that has been the target and centre of interest for many of those who work on meta-metaphysics, namely the problem of how objects persist through time: the endurantism versus perdurantism controversy. Some have argued, for various reasons, that this debate is a good example of a merely verbal one, where two allegedly competing views are in fact translatable one into the other—they end up, contrary to appearances, to be equivalent. In my discussion, I conclude that this is correct, but only to some extent, and that there does remain room for substantive disagreement. The second thing that I wish to achieve in this chapter is to start to defend a metaontological view that emphasizes a point which I think is often taken and acknowledged by many of those who are involved in metaontology, but which is not so often explicitly defended, namely that when asking the question “Are metaphysical debates substantive or verbal?” the correct answer is “It depends." Some debates are substantive, some debates are merely verbal, sometimes it is true that a problem or a question can be formulated in equally good frameworks where there is no fact of the matter as to which one is correct or where we just cannot know it. Furthermore, importantly, as my examination of the persistence debate will show, there is room for the view that such a debate is largely merely verbal but not entirely and that some parts of it are substantive, and decidable by philosophical methods. It is possible, and it is the case with respect to the persistence debate, that inside a debate some points are merely verbal while other are places of substantive disagreement. A moral of this is that, at the end of the day, the best way to do meta-metaphysics is to do first-level metaphysics.

This chapter concerns primitiveness. Indeed, my way of arguing for or against equivalence claims in the previous chapters largely depends on the nature of primitives and on the role they play in each of the theories involved, and it is now time to be explicit about this. In general, in most metaphysical debates a lot depends on primitives—indeed, metaphysical theories rely heavily on the use of the primitives that they typically appeal to. So, I will emphasize here the utmost importance of primitives in the construction of metaphysical theories and in the subsequent evaluation of them. I will claim that almost all of the explanatory power of metaphysical theories comes from their primitives, and I will scrutinize the notion of “power” and “explanatory”. All together, these points will naturally lead me to defend a global view on the nature of the metaphysical enterprise: what is at stake in metaphysics is to find out not just what there is or what there is not, but what is more fundamental than what—to find out what are the best primitives. Relationships between my view and the current debate concerning the notion of grounding will be discussed.

In Part I, we have seen various claims of metaphysical equivalence. The claim I make in this chapter, using the example of Trope Theory, the Theory of Universals, and Nominalism, is not one of them: I will not claim that these theories are in any sense equivalent. My claim will be different, yet related: the three views, while being different, do the same job in very much the same way when it comes to solving the problem of attribute agreement, and even when one acknowledges the differences there are between the competitors, there is little ground to pick a winner. I am not interested in this claim only for the sake of the debate between Trope Theory, Nominalism and the Theory of Universals. Indeed, as we shall see, the reasons why I claim that it is so difficult to choose one theory over the other can be applied to other cases as well. My claim here is mostly critical: I limit myself to showing that we metaphysicians are in an uncomfortable position with respect to these views when we try to choose between them, but I do not suggest a way out (this will be the task of the following chapter).

Suppose that you travel back in time to talk to your younger self in order to tell her that she (you) should have done some things in her (your) life differently. Of course, you will not be able to make this plan work, we know that from the many versions of `the grandfather paradox' that populate the philosophical literature about time travel. What will be my centre of interest in this paper is the conversation between you and... you - i.e. the older you that travelled back in time and the younger you, when you first meet. As we shall see, given this situation, endurantists will have to endorse a strange consequence of their view: you will turn out to be a universal while your properties will turn out to be particulars.

The claim that having aesthetic properties supervenes on having non-aesthetic properties has been widely discussed and, in various ways, defended. In this article, I aim to demonstrate that even if it is sometimes true that a supervenience relation holds between aesthetic properties and ‘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 increasingly popular relation of grounding does amuch better job than supervenience.

This open access book is about exploring interesting borderline cases of art. It discusses the cases of gustatory and olfactory artworks, proprioceptive artworks, intellectual artworks, as well as the vague limits between painting and photography. The book focuses on the author’s research about what counts as art and what does not, as well as on the nature of these limits. Overall, the author defends a very inclusive view, 'extending' the limits of art, and he argues for its virtues. Some of the limits discussed concern our senses, some concern vagueness and fuzzy boundaries between different types of works of art, some concern the amount of human intention and intervention in the process of creation of an artwork, and some concern the border between art and science. In these various ways, by understanding better such borderline cases, Benovsky suggests that we get a better grip on an understanding of the nature of art.

In this article, I defend Lewisian modal realism against objections arising from the possibility of ‘Island Universes’ and other similar cases. The problem comes from Lewis’ claim that possible worlds are spatio-temporally isolated. I suggest a modification of Lewisian modal realism in order to avoid this family of objections. This modification may sound quite radical since it amounts to abandoning the very notion of a possible world, but as radical as it may sound it in fact remains well in the spirit of Lewis’ original view.

In this article I shall consider two seemingly contradictory claims: first, the claim that everybody who thinks that there are ordinary objects has to accept that they are vague, and second, the claim that everybody has to accept the existence of sharp boundaries to ordinary objects. The purpose of this article is of course not to defend a contradiction. Indeed, there is no contradiction because the two claims do not concern the same ‘everybody’. The first claim, that all ordinary objects are vague, is a claim that stems both from common sense intuitions as well as from various types of ontologies of ordinary objects. This puts then pressure on theories of vagueness to account for the vague nature of ordinary objects – but, as we shall see, all theories of vagueness have to accept the existence of sharp thresholds. This is obvious in the case of epistemicism, and it is a well‐known defect of supervaluationism, but as we will see friends of metaphysical vagueness do have to endorse the existence of sharp thresholds in their theory as well. Consequently, there are reasons for dissatisfaction with these accounts, since they do not seem to be able to do the job we asked them to do.†

Imagination plays an important role in depiction. In this chapter, I focus on photography and I discuss the role imagination plays in photographic depiction. I suggest to follow a broadly Waltonian view, but I also depart from it in several places. I start by discussing a general feature of the relation of depiction, namely the fact that it is a ternary relation which always involves "something external." I then turn my attention to Walton's view, where this third relatum of the relation of depiction is largely analyzed in terms of the role imagination plays in depiction. I consider the objection to his view that not all cases of depiction involve imagination – for instance, documentary photographs – as well as Walton's own strategy to face this objection, and I argue that it is partly adequate and partly wrong. As we will see, first, it is an unnecessary mistake to insist too heavily on the fact that photographs are produced in a mechanic way (as opposed to, say, paintings), and second, 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. I illustrate the view I want to advocate for by a series of different cases, where the nature of the role that imagination, knowledge/belief, and inference play in depiction will become apparent.

The link between intuitions and metaphysics is a strong and important one, and there is hardly any metaphysical discussion where intuitions do not play a crucial role. In this chapter, I first offer some quite general critical considerations about the role of intuitions in metaphysical debates, and I then focus on a particular kind of intuitions, namely those that come, at least partly, from experience. There seems to be a route from experience to metaphysics, and this is the core of my interest here. In order to better understand such ‘arguments from experience’ and the kind of relationship there is between this type of intuitions and metaphysical theories, I examine several cases where a kind of experience-based intuition seems to motivate or support a metaphysical theory. At the end of the day, I argue that this route is a treacherous one, and that in all of the cases I concentrate on, phenomenological considerations are in fact orthogonal to the allegedly ‘corresponding’ metaphysical claims.

In this chapter, I put forward the claim that metaphysical theories possess aesthetic properties, grounded in non-aesthetic properties, and that these play a crucial role in theory evaluation and theory choice. The general claim that aesthetic properties supervene on non-aesthetic properties is a largely debated one. In this chapter, I address this issue from an angle which has not really been 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 is the somewhat more special, theoretical case of the beauty of philosophical theories (with a focus on metaphysical theories). 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 base—that is, about what it is exactly that the beauty of a theory is supposed to supervene on. The relation of supervenience itself is questioned. We shall see that aesthetic properties of theories play a crucial role in theory choice and evaluation. Finally, I offer reasons to think better of a kind of anti-realism that the claims I have been defending in this book appear to lead to.

In this book, Jiri Benovsky takes a stand for a variant of panpsychism as being the best solution available to the mind-body problem. More exactly, he defends a view that can be labelled 'dual-aspect-pan-proto-psychism'. Panpsychism claims that mentality is ubiquitous to reality, and in combination with dual-aspect monism it claims that anything, from fundamental particles to rocks, trees, and human animals, has two aspects: a physical aspect and a mental aspect. In short, the view is that the nature of reality is 'phental' (physical-mental). But this does not mean, according to the author, that rocks and photons think or have conscious experiences, in the sense in which human animals have experiences. This is where pan-proto-psychism enters the picture as being a better theoretical option, where the mental aspects of fundamental particles, rocks, and trees are not experiential. Many hard questions arise here. In this book, Benovsky focuses on the combination problem: in short, how do tiny mental aspects of fundamental particles combine to yield macro-phenomenal conscious experiences, such as your complex experience when you enjoy a great gastronomic meal? What makes the question even harder is that the combination problem is not just one problem, but rather a family of various combination issues and worries. Benovsky offers a general strategy to deal with these combination problems and focuses on one in particular – namely, the worry concerning the existence of subjects of experience. Indeed, if standard panpsychism were true, we would need an explanation of how tiny micro-subjects combine into a macro-subject like a human person. And if panprotopsychism is true, it has to explain how a subject of experience can arise from proto-micro-mental aspects of reality. Benovsky shows that understanding the nature of subjectivity in terms of the growingly familiar notion of mineness in combination with a reductionist/eliminativist view of the self, allows us to have a coherent picture, where this type of combination problem is avoided, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Comment les objets matériels persistent-ils à travers le temps? Qu'est-ce que cela veut dire qu'un objet change tout en étant un et le même? Peut-il y avoir un monde sans temps? Le temps s'écoule-t-il même si rien ne change? Et, le temps lui-même, qu'est-ce que c'est? Consiste-t-il seulement en l'instant présent, ou le passé et le futur existent-ils également? Est-il possible de voyager dans le temps? Quelles propriétés le temps doit-il avoir pour permettre le voyage dans le temps? Est-il possible de changer le passé? Ce volume recueille des traductions inédites de textes issus de la philosophie du temps des XXe et XXIe siècles. Ces contributions de R. M. Adams, Jiri Benovsky, David Braddon-Mitchell, Michael Dummett, Graeme Forbes, Mark Heller, Paul Horwich, Robin Le Poidevin, David Lewis, D. H. Mellor, Sydney Shoemaker, Theodore Sider, J. J. C. Smart, W. V. O. Quine, et Peter Van Inwagen offrent des manières différentes de réagir à ces interrogations (et bien d'autres encore). Elles permettent ainsi au lecteur de découvrir la richesse des débats contemporains en philosophie du temps. On découvre ici une variété de notions, d'arguments et de théories, telles que l'endurantisme, le perdurantisme, le relationnisme et le substantialisme, mais également d'importantes considérations en ce qui concerne la causalité, l'identité, le changement, ou encore l'analyse de similarités entre le temps et l'espace. Le problème du voyage dans le temps se voit consacrer une section spéciale dans ce volume, car il a ceci de particulièrement intéressant : il sert de cas limite offrant la possibilité de tester les théories et de soulever de nombreuses questions philosophiques sur la nature du temps et du monde.

In this book, Jiri Benovsky defends the view that he doesn't exist. In this book, he also defends the view that this book itself doesn't exist. But this did not prevent him to write the book, and although in Benovsky's view you don't exist either, this does not prevent you to read it. Benovsky defends a brand of non-exceptionalist eliminativism. Some eliminativists, typically focusing on ordinary material objects such as chairs and hammers, make exceptions, for instance for blue whales (that is, living beings) or for persons (that is, conscious organisms). Benovsky takes one by one all types of allegedly existing objects like chairs, whales, and persons and shows that from the metaphysical point of view they are more trouble than they are worth – we are much better off without them. He thus defends an eliminativist view about ordinary objects as well as the 'no-Self' view, where he explores connections between metaphysics, phenomenology, and Buddhist thought. He then also considers the case of aesthetic objects, focusing on musical works and photographs, and shows that the claim of their non-existence solves the many problems that arise when one tries to find an appropriate ontological category for them, and that such an eliminativist view is more natural than what we might have thought. The arguments provided here are always topic-specific: each type of entity is given its own type of treatment, thus proving a varied and solid foundation for a generalized, non-exceptionalist, full-blown eliminativist worldview.