E. J. Lowe

(1950 - 2014)

The aim of the paper is to prove the consistency of libertarianism. We examine the example of Jane, who deliberates at length over whether to vacation in Colorado (C) or Hawaii (H), weighing the costs and benefits, consulting travel brochures, etc. Underlying phenomenological deliberation is an indeterministic neural process in which nonactual motor neural states n(C) and n(H) corresponding to alternatives C and H remain physically possible up until the moment of decision. The neurophysiological probabilities pr(n(C)) and pr(n(H)) evolve continuously according to the different weights Jane's judgement attaches to C and H at different times during the deliberation. The overall process is indeterministic, since Jane's exact judgemental weighting would vary slightly were the process to be repeated from the same initial conditions. The weighting is however rational, and entirely under Jane's control. This controlled, rational, indeterministic process shows that libertarianism is a consistent philosophical thesis

Mental causation has been a hotly disputed topic in recent years, with reductive and non-reductive physicalists vying with each other and with dualists over how to accommodate, or else to challenge, two widely accepted metaphysical principles—the principle of the causal closure of the physical domain and the principle of causal non-overdetermination—which together appear to support reductive physicalism, despite the latter’s lack of intuitive appeal. Current debate about these matters appears to have reached something of an impasse, prompting the question of why this should be so. One possibility well worth exploring is that, while this debate makes extensive use of ontological vocabulary—by talking, for instance, of substances, events, states, properties, powers, and relations—relatively little attempt has been made within the debate itself to achieve either clarity or agreement about what, precisely, such terms should be taken to mean. Hence, the debate has become somewhat detached from broader developments in metaphysics and ontology, which have lately been proceeding apace, providing us with an increasingly rich and refined set of ontological categories upon which to draw, as well as a much deeper understanding of how they are related to one another. In preparing this volume, the editors invited leading metaphysicians and philosophers of mind to reflect afresh upon the problem of mental causation in the light of some of these recent developments, with a view to making new headway with one of the most challenging and seemingly intractable issues in contemporary philosophy.

If metaphysics is centrally concerned with charting the domain of the possible, the only coherent account of the ground of metaphysical possibility and of our capacity for modal knowledge is to be found in a version of essentialism: a version that I call serious essentialism, to distinguish it from certain other views which may superficially appear very similar to it but which, in fact, differ from it fundamentally in certain crucial respects. This version of essentialism eschews any appeal whatever to the notion of possible worlds in its account of the nature and ground of metaphysical possibility, for reasons that which I shall endeavour to explain and justify in this paper.

One currently popular methodology of metaphysics has it that ‘intuitions’ play an evidential role with respect to metaphysical claims. This chapter defends a realist methodology of metaphysics that implies that any rational being, simply in virtue of being rational, is necessarily capable of grasping the essences of at least some mind-independent entities. The notion of essence in play here is Aristotelian, whereby an entity’s essence is captured by an account of what that entity is, or what it is to be that entity. Concepts are just ways of thinking of things and, as such, may or may not be adequate to the real natures — the essences — of the things being thought of. Our ‘intuitions’, particularly as revealed by aptly constructed thought experiments, may cast interesting light on some of our concepts, but they are not and cannot be reliable guides to mind-independent truths of essence.

An individual, as this term will be understood here, is an entity to which the concepts of unity and identity fully and determinately apply. That is to say, an entity x is an individual just in case x determinately counts as one entity and x has a determinate identity. Many philosophers tacitly assume that all entities are individuals in the foregoing sense, and indeed that it is a necessary truth that they are. But this can certainly be disputed. It is, very arguably, both logically and metaphysically possible for there to be nonindividuals. The aim of this chapter is to clarify and explore both the notion of an individual and that of a nonindividual, to propose a typology of entities based on the individual/nonindividual distinction, and to illustrate the potential of these notions for application within and across the sciences.

It is argued that the dispute between philosophical naturalism and theism can, ultimately, only be rationally resolved in favor of theism, owing to certain internal inadequacies of philosophical naturalism that are commonly overlooked by both its friends and its foes. The criticisms of philosophical naturalism focus on certain questions concerning the ontological status of the objects of human reason and probe into the nature of human rationality and the conditions of its possibility. There is an implicit challenge to mainstream philosophical opinion concerning the relationship between human thought and reasoning and the sorts of facts about human brains that can be revealed by empirical neuroscience.

Are persons substances or modes? Two currently dominant views may be characterized as giving the following rival answers to this question. According to the first view, persons are just biological substances. According to the second, persons are psychological modes of substances which, as far as human beings are concerned, happen to be biological substances, but which could in principle be non-biological. There is, however, also a third possible answer, and this is that persons are psychological substances. Such a view is inevitably associated with the name of Descartes, and this helps to explain its current unpopularity, since substantial dualism of his sort is now widely rejected as ‘unscientific’. But one may, as I hope to show, espouse the view that persons are psychological substances without endorsing Cartesianism. This is because one may reject certain features of Descartes's conception of substance. Consequently, one may also espouse a version of substantial dualism which is distinctly non-Cartesian. One may hold that a person, being a psychological substance, is an entity distinct from the biological substance that is his or her body, and yet still be prepared to ascribe corporeal characteristics to this psychological substance. By this account, a human person is to be thought of neither as a non-corporeal mental substance, nor as the product of a mysterious ‘union’ between such a substance and a physical, biological substance. This is not to deny that the mind—body problem is a serious and difficult one, but it is to imply that there is a version of substantial dualism which does not involve regarding the ‘mind’ as a distinct substance in its own right.

There is a widespread assumption that the classical work in philosophical semantics of Saul Kripke (1980) and Hilary Putnam (1975) has taught us that the essences of natural kinds of substances, such as water and gold, are discoverable only a posteriori by scientific investigation. It is such investigation, thus, that has supposedly revealed to us that it is an essential property of water that it is composed of H2O molecules. This is the way in which Scott Soames, in a recent paper, makes the point in the case of water and H2O: [Here is] how a Kripkean explanation of the necessary a posteriority of [‘Water = H2O’] would go – or at any rate my version of it. The account holds that ‘water’ is a non-descriptive, directly-referential term designating a substance – where substances are taken to be physically constitutive kinds (instances of which share the same basic physical constitution). It is further assumed that a kind of this sort may have different instances in different world-states, and that if a and b are kinds with the same instances in all possible world-states, then a is b. These are clearly metaphysical assumptions, to which we add the natural corollary that for any substance, s, if, in some possible world-state, instances of s have a certain molecular structure, then instances of s have that structure in every world-state. In other words, we assume that it is an essential property of a substance that instances of it have the molecular structure they do. From this it follows that [‘Water = H2O’] is necessary if true, and that ‘H2O’– which I take to be equivalent to ‘the substance instances of which have a molecular structure with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom’– is a rigid designator. Being true, [‘Water = H2O’] is, therefore, necessary. Since knowing the proposition it expresses requires knowing of a certain substance that its instances have a particular chemical structure, [‘Water = H2O’] is knowable only a posteriori. (Soames 2007: 36)

A self or person does not appear to be identifiable with his or her organic body, nor with any part of it, such as the brain; and yet selves seem to be agents, capable of bringing about physical events as causal consequences of certain of their conscious mental states. How is this possible in a universe in which, it appears, every physical event has a sufficient cause which is wholly physical? The answer is that this is possible if a certain kind of naturalistic dualism is true, according to which the conscious mental states of selves, although not identifiable with physical states of their brains, are emergent effects of prior physical causes. Moreover, mental causation on this model promises to explain certain aspects of physical behaviour which may appear arbitrary and coincidental from a purely physical point of view.

[ES] Desde una perspectiva ontológica tradicional, y con la declarada intención de alejarse del relativismo contemporáneo, el presente escrito busca establecer algunos principios básicos para mantener la posición de la metafísica como el estudio sistemático de la realidad como un todo, y de la ontología como la ciencia del ser, sustentada en una teoría de categorías. Estas categorías están diferenciadas por las características distintivas de existencia e identidad de sus respectivos miembros, tomándose como «categorías ontológicas fundamentales» aquellas en donde sus miembros tienen condiciones para estas características de existencia e identidad que no sean especificables en una forma exhaustiva, en términos de dependencia ontológica, entre esos miembros y los miembros de otras categorías ontológicas. Este escrito hace entonces una revisión de las diferentes teorías de categorías ontológicas, y sus respectivas interpretaciones de cuántas y cuáles categorías deben ser reconocidas. [EN] From a traditional ontological perspective, and with the declared intention to move away from contemporary relativism, this paper aims to establish some basic principles to maintain the position of Metaphysics as the systematic study of reality as a whole, and Ontology as the science of being, based on a theory of categories. These categories are differentiated by the distinctive features of existence and identity of their respective members, taking as «fundamental ontological categories» those where its members have conditions for these characteristics of existence and identity that are not exhaustively specifiable, in terms of ontological dependence, between those members and members of other ontological categories. This paper then makes a revision of the different theories of ontological categories, and their respective interpretations of how many and which categories should be recognized.