Dean Zimmerman

Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. OSM offers a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. Besides independent essays, volumes will often contain a critical essay on a recent book, or a symposium that allows participants to respond to one another's criticisms and questions. Anyone who wants to know what's happening in metaphysics can start here.

Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. OSM offers a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philsophy of mind and philosophy of science. Besides independent essays, volumes will often contain a critical essay on a recent book, or a symposium that allows participants to respond to one another's criticisms and questions. Anyone who wants to know what's happening in metaphysics can start here.

This is the tenth volume of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. As with earlier volumes, these essays follow the tradition of providing a non-sectarian and non-partisan snapshot of the subdiscipline of philosophy of religion. This subdiscipline has become an increasingly important one within philosophy over the last century, and especially over the past half-century, having emerged as an identifiable subfield at the same time as other emerging subfields such as the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language. This volume continues the initial intention behind the series: attracting the best work from philosophers well known for their work in philosophy of religion, while also including essays by philosophers working mainly in other subfields when their research addresses religious matters. This inclusive approach to the series provides an opportunity to mitigate some of the costs of greater specialization in our discipline, while at the same time inviting wider interest in the work being done in the subfield. Volumes also typically contain the winner of the Sanders Prize in the Philosophy of Religion and other essays submitted to that competition.

Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. OSM offers a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philsophy of mind and philosophy of science. Besides independent essays, volumes will often contain a critical essay on a recent book, or a symposium that allows participants to respond to one another's criticisms and questions. Anyone who wants to know what's happening in metaphysics can start here.

The nature of persons is a perennial topic of debate in philosophy, currently enjoying something of a revival. In this volume for the first time metaphysical debates about the nature of human persons are brought together with related debates in philosophy of religion and theology. Fifteen specially written essays explore idealist, dualist, and materialist views of persons, discuss specifically Christian conceptions of the value of embodiment, and address four central topics in philosophical theology: incarnation, resurrection, original sin, and the trinity.

Howard Robinson’s From the Knowledge Argument to Mental Substance contains two quite different arguments from the vagueness of composite objects to the conclusion that I am not a physical object at all. One of them, developed over the course of several chapters, takes the following form: All composite physical objects (and only composite physical objects are candidates to be a human being) are non-fundamental; non-fundamental things are inevitably vague in various ways; this vagueness shows that we must “make a conceptual interpretation of them,” treating them as “artefacts of conceptualisation”; and this in turn precludes our identifying ourselves with any such things. Some interesting morals fall out of close consideration of Robinson’s argument; but, in the end, materialists can reasonably resist it.

This chapter focuses on a gap in existing cognitive scientific explanations of religion: although they may explain various religious beliefs, they are weak at explaining religious experiences—including the very perception-like experiences that believers often take as grounding their belief in God. The account argues that cognitive science of religion (CSR) to date provides neither the full-blown concept of a deity nor dedicated cognitive resources for arriving at the perception of one. The gap is not inevitable, however: it is shown how certain religious experiences could indeed qualify as direct perceptions of God, on a traditional model of perception. Moreover, one can explain how humans acquired the conceptual and computational resources to perceive supernatural beings by supposing that human beings have actually interacted with such beings in evolutionarily significant ways throughout history. The chapter closes with some epistemic implications of looking at CSR in this “reformed” way.

William Rowe argues that if an omnipotent, omniscient being were faced with an infinite hierarchy of better and better worlds to create, that being could not also be unsurpassably morally excellent. His argument assumes that, at least in ideal circumstances, degree of moral goodness must be perfectly expressed in the degree of goodness of the outcomes chosen. Reflection upon the application of analogous expression principles for certainty and desire shows that such principles can be expected to fail for anyone capable of facing an infinite range of options.

The paper has two parts: First, I describe a relatively popular thesis in the philosophy of propositional attitudes, worthy of the name 'taking tense seriously'; and I distinguish it from a family of views in the metaphysics of time, namely, the A-theories (or what are sometimes called 'tensed theories of time'). Once the distinction is in focus, a skeptical worry arises. Some Atheorists maintain that the difference between past, present, and future, is to be drawn in terms of what exists: growing-block theorists eschew ontological commitment to future entities; presentists, to future and past entities. Others think of themselves as A-theorists but exclude no past or future things from their ontology. The metaphysical skeptic suspects that their attempt to articulate an 'eternalist' version of the A-theory collapses into merely 'taking tense seriously' - a thesis that does not imply the A-theory. The second half of the paper is the search for a stable eternalist A-theory. It includes discussion of temporary intrinsics, temporal parts, and truth.

If extended objects were just sums of unextended parts, no satisfactory theory of contact would be possible. So extended objects are not decomposable into sets of simples. The fact that extended things do not possess a single decomposition into a set of smallest, indivisible parts places important constraints upon the analysis of propositions involving mass terms. In particular, it rules out those which construe masses of matter as set-theoretical constructions out of the parts of things. Consequently, any correct "semantics for mass terms" must recognize as individuals in their own right the masses of matter out of which tables, trees, and human bodies are composed. Although ordinary objects are generally regarded as capable of surviving changes in their parts, masses of matter cannot survive such changes. For instance, if the mass of matter now composing a certain statue does not share every part in common with the mass which made up that statue yesterday, then yesterday's mass of matter is numerically distinct from today's. ;These facts lead to the following argument for mereological essentialism: If there were an object that gained or lost a part, then it would be wholly coincident with a distinct thing--namely, the mass of matter then constituting it. Since masses of matter must count as individuals, and not sets of parts of things that are not themselves masses, objects that gain or lose parts would have to be wholly coincident with objects that cannot. But if both mass and statue weigh 100 pounds, and each is a distinct object in its own right, how is it that I can lift "both" without straining my back? One of the two must be more fundamental, more "real" than the other. Since simple coincidence between mass and constituted object is absurd, there are no objects that gain or lose parts. Part-changing objects are either fictions, logical constructions, or, perhaps, "disturbances" occurring to masses of matter. Neither relative identity theories, temporary identity theories, nor the doctrine of temporal parts can provide the resources to block this argument.

Lynne Rudder Baker and many others think that paradigmatic instances of one object constituting another—a piece of marble constituting a statue, or an aggregate of particles constituting a living body—involve two distinct objects in the same place at the same time. Some who say this believe in the doctrine of temporal parts; but others, like Baker, reject this doctrine. Such philosophers, whom one might call “coincidentalists”, cannot say that these objects manage to share space in virtue of sharing a temporal part confined to just that place and time. But what can or should coincidentalists say about the nature of constitution? Many have analyzed the relation as one of sharing, “at some level”, all and only the same parts. Most have agreed that such massive part-sharing is at least a central component of and necessary condition for constitution. The heart of Baker’s Persons and Bodies, and its most significant contribution to the development of coincidentalism, is a theory of constitution that makes no appeal to mereology. The leading idea in Baker’s account is, instead, a modal one: objects belonging to constituted kinds are the necessary result of putting objects belonging to appropriate constituting kinds in the right circumstances, circumstances which the constituting objects need not have been in. So putting a piece of man-shaped marble in the right circumstances necessarily results in the existence of a second object, a statue, constituted by the marble; but the piece of marble need not have fallen into these circumstances or any others in which it would constitute a statue.