E. J. Lowe

(1950 - 2014)

In his paper ‘‘Bad luck once again’’ Neil Levy attacks our proof of the consistency of libertarianism by reiterating a time-worn compatibilist complaint.1 This is, that what is not determined must be due to chance. If A has a choice of X or Y, neither X nor Y being causally determined, then if A chooses X it can only be by chance, never for a reason. The only ‘‘reason’’ that could explain the choice of X over Y would have to be a causally sufficient reason, which would rule out A’s having a genuine choice in the first place. Either X is causally necessitated or X is realized by sheer luck. But that these are the only alternatives is untrue. The exercise of deliberative reason opens the way between the Scylla of causal necessitation and the Charybdis of chance, as we shall try to make clear. The central core of Levy’s argument is that any attempt to give a reasons-based explanation of a contrastive fact must fail. A contrastive fact is a fact of the kind ‘‘Jane decides to vacation in Hawaii rather than Colorado,’’ or ‘‘Jane assigns a greater weight to surfing that to white-water rafting.’’ In the last three paragraphs of his paper Levy argues that Jane’s assigning more weight to surfing than to rafting cannot be a reasons-based assignment, because, as he puts it, ‘‘the reasons that would explain the weighting are the weighted reasons themselves.’’ Similarly, prior to making her Hawaii⁄ Colorado decision, Jane has..

In this paper, it is argued that metaphysics, conceived as an inquiry into the ultimate nature of mind-independent reality, is a rationally indispensable intellectual discipline, with the a priori science of formal ontology at its heart. It is maintained that formal ontology, properly understood, is not a mere exercise in conceptual analysis, because its primary objective is a normative one, being nothing less than the attempt to grasp adequately the essences of things, both actual and possible, with a view to understanding as far as we can the fundamental structure of reality as a whole. Accordingly, it is urged, the deliverances of formal ontology have a modal and epistemic status akin to those of other a priori sciences, such as mathematics and logic, rather than constituting rivals to the claims of the empirical sciences, such as physics.

Patrick Grim, The incomplete universe:totality, knowledge, and truth. Cambridge, Mass, and London: The MIT Press, 1991. xiv + 165pp. £22.50 Jan SebestikLogique et mathématique chez Bernard Bolzano. Paris:Vrin, 1992. 522 pp. 198Fr J. De Lorenzo, Kant y la matemâtica. El uso constructivo de la razön pura Madrid:Editorial Tecnos, 1992. 180 pp. No price stated F. Coniglione, R. Poli And J. Woleintski, Polish scientific philosophy:The Lvov-Warsaw school. Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 1993. xi + 358pp. No price stated I. Kant Lectures on logic. Translated and edited by J. Michael Young. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1992. xxxii + 695 pp. £55.00 Michael Dummett, The seas of language. Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1993. xvii + 482 pp. £40.00 Stephen Read,, Sophisms in medieval logic and grammar. Acts of the Ninth European Symposium for Medieval Logic and Semantics held at St Andrews, June 1990. Dordrecht, Boston, London:Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993. xvii + 421pp. $157.50 James D. McCawley, Everything that linguists have always wanted to know about logic∗ ∗but were ashamed to ask. Second edition. Chicago and London:The University of Chicago Press, 1993. xxi + 633pp. £25.95/$37.50 ; £79.25/$113.75 Theodor Ebert, Dialektiker und frühe Stoiker bei Sextus Empiricus. Untersuchungen zur Entstehung der Aussagenlogik. Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. 347 pp. DM 85.00 Entre la logique et la foi. Entretiens avec Joseph-M. Bochenski recueillis par Jan Parys. Translated from the Polish by Eric Morin-Aguilar. Montricher :Editions Noir-sur-Blanc, 1990. 353 pp. SFr 40.00 Noel Balzer, The human being as a logical thinker. Amsterdam and Atlanta:Rodopi 1993, 148 pp. No price stated R. I. G. Hughes, A philosophical companion to first-order logic. Indianapolis:Hackett, 1993, viii + 309 pp. No price stated Shahid Rahman, Über Dialoge, Protologische Kategorien und andere Seltenheiten, Frankfurt, Peter Lang Verlag, 1993. 318 pp. No price stated Claire Ortiz Hill, Word and object in Husserl, Frege, and Russell. The roots of twentieth century philosophy. Athens, Ohio:Ohio University Press, 1991. xiii + 215pp., $34.95

In Lowe (2007), I queried the validity of the following inference-schema: This issue is an important one, because it seems to be something like this schema that is relied upon by those philosophers who seek to establish a posteriori truths about the essences of particular entities – notably, particular chemical substances, such as water and gold – by appeal to a combination of empirical information about those entities and certain (alleged) essential truths of a general and a priori character. As one illustration of schema (I), I cited the following inference: I raised various doubts about the validity of this particular inference, whose conclusion (3a) is, if true, an a posteriori truth about the essence of a particular man, John. (Clearly, if the truth of (3a) can be established only by inference from (1a) and (2a), then, since (2a) is undoubtedly an a posteriori claim, (3a) can only be an a posteriori truth.) I also raised more general doubts about schema (I).

When, for example, we say of something that it ‘is an object’, or ‘is an event’, or ‘is a property’, we are engaging in categorial predication: we are assigning something to a certain ontological category. Ontologicalcategorization is clearly a type of classification, but it differs radically from the types of classification that are involved in thetaxonomic practices of empirical sciences, as when a physicist saysof a certain particle that it ‘is an electron’, or when a zoologist saysof a certain animal that it ‘is a mammal’, or when a meteorologist says of a certain weather‐phenomenon that it ‘is a hurricane’. Classifications of the latter types presuppose that the items being classified have already been assigned to appropriate ontologicalcategories, such as the categories of object, species, or event. What do categorial predications mean? How are their truth‐conditions to be determined, and how can those truth‐conditions be known to be satisfied? Do they have truthmakers? Questions like these are amongst those addressed in the present paper.

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

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.

John Heil's new book (Heil 2003) is remarkable in many ways. In a concise, lucid and accessible manner, it develops a complete system of ontology with many strikingly original features and then applies that ontology to fundamental issues in the philosophy of mind, with illuminating results. Although Heil acknowledges his intellectual debts to C. B. Martin (p. viii), he is unduly modest about his own contribution to the development and application of this novel metaphysical system. A full examination of the position that Heil defends would require a book in itself, so I shall limit myself to discussing some of its central themes and to explaining a few doubts that I have concerning some aspects of it.

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.