Ethan Lowe

Ontological dependence is a relation—or, more accurately, a family of relations—between entities or beings. For there are various ways in which one being may be said to depend upon one or more other beings, in a sense of “depend” that is distinctly metaphysical in character and that may be contrasted, thus, with various causal senses of this word. More specifically, a being may be said to depend, in such a sense, upon one or more other beings for its existence or for its identity. Some varieties of ontological dependence may be analyzed in modal terms—that is, in terms of distinctly metaphysical notions of possibility and necessity—while others seem to demand an analysis in terms of the notion of essence. The latter varieties of ontological dependence may accordingly be called species of essential dependence. Notions of ontological dependence are frequently called upon by metaphysicians in their proposed analyses of other metaphysically important notions, such as the notion of substance

Taking into account significant developments in the metaphysical thinking of E. J. Lowe over the past 20 years, _More Kinds of Being:A Further Study of Individuation, Identity, and the Logic of Sortal Terms_ presents a thorough reworking and expansion of the 1989 edition of _Kinds of Being_ Brings many of the original ideas and arguments put forth in _Kinds of Being_ thoroughly up to date in light of new developments Features a thorough reworking and expansion of the earlier work, rather than just a new edition Reflects the author's conversion to what he calls 'the four-category ontology,' a metaphysical system that takes its inspiration from Aristotle Provides a unified discussion of individuation and identity that should prove to be essential reading for philosophers working in metaphysics.

N. Denyer, Language, thought and falsehood in ancient Greek philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. xi + 222 pp. £35.00 Luis Vega, La trama de la demostración.. Madrid: 1990, Alianza Editorial, 413 pp. No price stated Daniel D. Merrill, Augustus De Morgan and the logic of relations. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990. xi + 259 pp. Dfl. 185/$ 114.00/£64.00 Georg Cantor, Briefe. Edited by Herbert Meschkowski and Winfried Nilson. Berlin, etc: Springer‐Verlag, 1991, viii + 535 pp. DM 158. The selected letters of Bertrand Russell. Volume 1: the private years. Edited by N. Griffin. London: Allen Lane. The Penguin Press, 1992. xxi + 553 pp. £25.00 Hourya Sinaceur, Corps et modèles. Paris, Vrin, 1991. 496 pp. 198 Ffr William Aspray, John von Neumann and the origins of modern computing. Cambridge, Mass, and London: The MIT Press, 1990. xvii + 376 pp., 8 + 22 pits. £31.50 Charles S. Chihara, Constructibilily and mathematical existence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. xv + 282 pp. £32.50 Penelope Maddy, Realism in mathematics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. xi + 204 pp. £25.00 Peter Hylton, Russell, idealism, and the emergence of analytic philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. xvii + 420 pp. £48.00/$!20.00 R. Barrett and R. Gibson. Perspectives on Quine. Oxford: basil blackweil, 1990. xxiii ‐f 358 pp. £31.50 D. Bell and Cooper, The analytic tradition. Meaning, thought and knowledge. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. xi + 225 pp. £35.00 Francis Watanabe, Critical thinking; an introduction to reasoning. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. xv+542 pp. £25.00 A. Cattani, forme delVargomentare. II ragionamento tra logica e retorica. Padova: Edizicmi C.B. 1990. 174 pp. 22.00 lire J. K. Lambert, Philosophical applications of free logic. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. 309pp. £40.00 G. Priest, R. Routley and J. Norman, Paraconsistent logic. Essays on the inconsistent. München, Hamden, Wien: Philosophia Verlag, 1989. xxii + 716pp. 398 DM Timoethy Williamson, Identity and discrimination. Oxford: Blackwell. 1990. xi + 173 pp. £30.00 Victor Sánchez, Studies on natural logic and categorial grammar. Amsterdam. 1991. vi + 197 pp. No price stated G. Klima, Ars Artium: essays in philosophical semantics, mediaeval and modern. Budapest: Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1988. 185 pp. No price stated Andrea Nye, Words of power: a feminist reading of the history of logic, New York and London, Routlcdge, 1990. xiii + 190pp. £9.99 T. M. Seebhom, D. Follesdal and J. N. Mohanty, Phenomenology and the formal sciences. Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kiuwer Academic Publishers, 1991. viii + 262 pp. £51,00/$!86.00/DK 150 Hans Burkhardt and Barry Smith, Handbook of metaphysics and ontology, 2 vols. Philosophia Verlag, Munich, Philadelphia, Vienna: 1991. 1005 pp. DM650/$ 433.50/£210

Following the lead of Gustav Bergmann ( 1967 ), if not his precise terminology, ontologies are sometimes divided into those that are ‘relational’ and those that are ‘constituent’ (Wolterstorff 1970 ). Substance ontologies in the Aristotelian tradition are commonly thought of as being constituent ontologies, because they typically espouse the hylemorphic dualism of Aristotle ’s Metaphysics – a doctrine according to which an individual substance is always a combination of matter and form. But an alternative approach drawing more on the fourfold ontological scheme of Aristotle’s Categories is not committed to this doctrine and may regard individual (or ‘primary’) substances as having no constituent structure, their only possible complexity residing in their possession, in some cases, of a multiplicity of substantial parts. However, as we shall see, this does not imply that such an ontology falls instead into the relational camp: for although it invokes, in addition to the category of individual substance, also those of substantial kind (‘secondary’ substance), attribute, and mode (or ‘individual accident’), it need not and arguably should not take there to be external relations between entities in the different categories. On this view, truths of exemplification and instantiation, such as ‘Dobbin is white’ and ‘Dobbin is a horse’, do not need relational truthmakers. Hence, it can be maintained that there are no such relations as ‘exemplification’ and ‘instantiation’, at most only certain relational truths of exemplification and instantiation – truths whose logical form is relational. Th is being so, I shall argue, such an ontology cannot fairly be classified as a ‘relational’ one.

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..

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

It has long been debated whether objects are ‘sortally’ individuated. This paper begins by clarifying some of the key terms in play—in particular, ‘sortal’, ‘individuation’, and ‘object’. The term ‘individuation’ is taken to have both a cognitive and a metaphysical sense, in the former denoting the singling out of an object in thought and in the latter a determination relation between entities. ‘Sortalism’ is defined as the doctrine that only as falling under some specific sortal concept can an object be successfully singled out in thought. It is argued that such a view is too strong, but that a weaker one, ‘categorialism’, can be defended, this implying that a thinker cannot successfully single out an object in thought without having at least an implicit grasp of the criterion of identity that the object satisfies.

The thesis of 3D/4D equivalence states that every three-dimensional description of the world is translatable without remainder into a four-dimensional description, and vice versa. In representing an object in 3D or in 4D terms we are giving alternative descriptions of one and the same thing, and debates over whether the ontology of the physical world is "really" 3D or 4D are pointless. The twins paradox is shown to rest, in relativistic 4D geometry, on a reversed law of triangle inequality. But considering the twins as 3D beings who age through time, the paradox implies that time passes at different rates in different reference frames, and therefore that the concept of a single global or Absolute time is unsustainable

In the Second Meditation, Descartes famously asks at one point, ‘But what then am I?’ – to which his immediate answer is ‘A thing that thinks.’ It is this question, or rather the plural version of it, that Eric Olson examines in this excellent book. He thinks that it is – today, at least – a rather neglected question. He points out that it is wrong to confuse the question with the much more frequently examined question of what personal identity consists in. In fact, he thinks that possible answers to the two questions, even if not entirely independent of one other, constrain each other only to a rather limited extent. It is important to appreciate that Olson is not inquiring into what persons in general are, but only into what we human persons are. Olson explores all the major, and some of the less well-known, answers that have been offered to this question. He begins with the answer that he himself has defended in an earlier book, The Human Animal – the answer that we are human animals, that is, biological organisms of a certain kind. Indeed, Olson is, along with Peter van Inwagen, one of the best known ‘animalists’ – although he admits to being a little more tentative in his endorsement of this position now, for reasons that we shall come to later. The other views that he considers are these: that we are entities that are ‘constituted’ by, but not identical with, human animals (the view of Lynne Rudder …