Robert Charles Koons

Prime matter plays an indispensable role in Aristotle’s philosophy, enabling him to avoid the pitfalls of both naïve Platonism and nominalism. Prime matter is best thought of as a kind of infinitely divisible and atomless bare particularity, grounding the distinctness of distinct members of the same species. Such bare particularity is needed in symmetrical situations, like a world consisting of indistinguishable Max Black spheres. Bare particularity is especially important in modern physics, given the homogeneity and isotropy of space. With the importance of fields in classical, relativistic, and quantum physics, we have good reason to prefer something like Aristotle’s continuous, infinitely divisible matter over indivisible particles. Mass and energy in relativistic physics also points in the direction of prime matter as the enduring substrate of these quantities. Recent work on Aristotelian interpretations of quantum mechanics, further underscores the contemporary relevance of prime matter.

I deliberately choose a provocative title for this article. I’m sure some of you thought, when reading the title, that there must have been some sort of typo. ”The place of natural theology in Lutheran thought”? Isn’t that like addressing the place of Marxism is modern conservative thought, or the place of astrology in modern physics? Surely, there is no place for natural theology, for philosophical attempts to demonstrate the existence of God, in Lutheran thought, with its emphasis on reason over faith, on the lived experience of a relationship with 1 Natural Theology in Lutheran Thought..

There is much common ground between such a Thomistic version of hylomorphism and emergent individualism. Both theories include a rejection of physicalism, in both its reductive and nonreductive versions, based on physicalism's failure to account adequately for qualia, intentionality, normativity, and mental causation. The author argues for the superiority of hylomorphism over emergent individualism on each of three issues: the nature of the causes of the existence of persons, the possibility of disembodied personal survival, and the nature of the influence of mind on body. The author shows a conceptual map for the philosophy of mind. This map provides the readers with a way of distinguishing emergent individualism from Thomistic hylomorphism, namely, whether this is an essential causal dependence of the human person on the human body at each moment of the person's existence.

This book is a very good example of a movement in contemporary analytic philosophy propounding "the philosophy of action." This movement begins with work by Donald Davidson in the 1960s and 1970s in which he argues for the intelligibility of the belief-desire model of rational behavior implicit in common sense and in much of social science. Major contributors to the school include William Alston, Robert Audi, and Alvin Goldman. This movement has three essential characteristics: a conservative attitude toward the basic elements of commonsense or "folk" psychology; an armchair, nonexperimental methodology; and the avoidance of formal logic, and a concomitant lack of interest in the logical issues arising from the investigation of intentional notions. This book exemplifies well all three of these characteristics.

The ancient puzzle of the Liar was shown by Tarski to be a genuine paradox or antinomy. I show, analogously, that certain puzzles of contemporary game theory are genuinely paradoxical, i.e., certain very plausible principles of rationality, which are in fact presupposed by game theorists, are inconsistent as naively formulated. ;I use Godel theory to construct three versions of this new paradox, in which the role of 'true' in the Liar paradox is played, respectively, by 'provable', 'self-evident', and 'justifiable'. I also construct in modal operator logic a paradox involving reflexive empirical reasoning. Unlike the paradox of the Liar, the paradox of reflexive reasoning does not depend on self-reference. ;I consider various solutions to the Liar paradox and evaluate how well these solutions cope with the paradox of reflexive reasoning. I then formalize the solution to the paradoxes which I favor: the indexical-hierarchical approach, first sketched out by Charles Parsons and Tyler Burge. In this solution, occurrences of the predicate 'true' in sentence-tokens are contextually relativized to levels of a hierarchy. Drawing also on some brief remarks of Bertrand Russell and Charles Parsons, I develop an account of the kind of schematic generality needed for this theory to be statable. ;Finally, I demonstrate that the principles shown to be paradoxical are in fact presupposed by contemporary game theorists in their reliance on the notion of common knowledge or, more precisely, mutual belief. I create novel analyses of and corresponding solutions to several recalcitrant puzzles within game theory, including the "chain-store paradox"