Kris McDaniel

At the beginning of the twentieth century, idealism was the metaphysical view to be beat. Mary Whiton Calkins was an important early twentieth-century philosopher (and psychologist), and a prominent advocate of a version of idealism. This chapter assesses her version of idealism. Among the topics discussed are whether the absolute is a person, whether finite persons have free agency, whether there is a correspondence between apparent physical objects and minds, and the status of relations. In addition, her version of idealism is contrasted with the idealistic views of some of her contemporaries, including F. H. Bradley and J. M. E. McTaggart.

Many philosophers are attracted to the view that composition is identity. In this chapter, a case is made for a stronger view: that parthood is identity. The argument is that (i) a whole is numerically identical to each of its parts considered individually rather than collectively and (ii) parthood can be analysed in terms of identity. This view can be defended provided that certain reasonable background assumptions are granted, namely,that objects endure rather than persist by way of having temporal parts, that objects endure through spacetime rather than time, that the exemplification of all properties and relations must be relativized to spacetime regions, and that numerical identity can be relative to spacetime regions. A series of versions of the view that parthood is identity are formulated, each more sophisticated than its predecessor. Once arriving at the (tentatively) final formulation, a series of objections to this view are formulated and responded to.

Let’s provisionally understand compositional pluralism as the doctrine that there is more than one basic parthood relation. This chapter investigates to what extent compositional pluralism and composition as identity can form a coherent package of views. Since there are good arguments for compositional pluralism and the author feels the intuition that gives some support to composition as identity, he is motivated to determine this. But regardless of whether you feel attraction to either of these two views, it is worth thinking about how versions of them might interact with each other, since doing so is likely to lead to interesting thoughts about parthood and identity. Accordingly the chapter distinguishes between several versions of compositional pluralism and composition as identity. It argues that many versions of compositional pluralism are compatible with even very strong versions of composition as identity.

At the beginning of the twentieth century many attempts were made to demonstrate by means of speculative metaphysics that time is a mere appearance. The most famous of these purported demonstrations is McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time. Although it is not widely viewed as successful, it did set the agenda for analytic philosophers pursuing the philosophy of time in the second half of the twentieth century. Complementing the arguments of speculative metaphysics are the arguments of speculative philosophy of physics. The theory of special relativity seemed to some to show that temporality per se was not metaphysically fundamental but should instead be seen as an aspect of spatiotemporality. Kurt Gödel attempted to argue from the unreality of time by appeal to considerations stemming from the theory of general relativity. More recently, some physicists and philosophers of physics have entertained the hypothesis that spatiotemporality is itself a derivative feature that emerges from a more fundamental nonspatiotemporal framework.

Bernard Williams argued for the importance of what he called “categorical desires” in understanding the evil of death and the unattractiveness of immortality. He claimed that a being who lived long enough would lose the ability to form such desires; she would not choose to live, nor would she have reason to live, nor would her death be bad for her. This promises to have implications for the badness of the deaths of nonhumans, fetuses, and infants, and for the wrongness of killing them. We examine several ways of explicating the notion of a categorical desire. We conclude that it is a mistake to take categorical desires to be relevant to understanding the evil of death or the wrongness of abortion, infanticide, or carnivorism.

Edith Stein, who began her career as Husserl’s research assistant, was an important philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, but her work was ultimately marginalized in Nazi Germany and she died in a concentration camp. This paper unearths and discusses her first substantive work, On the Problem of Empathy, which is the problem of how other persons and their inner states can be given to others. In terms of “the problem of other minds,” how we perceive those is through the irreducible intentional state of empathy. Stein wants to distinguish between the descriptive-psychological (distinguished by Husserl’s ideation of intentional states) and genetic-psychological (supported by empirical analysis) aspects of this problem. Stein felt empathy was an act of ideation through which we can systematically and comprehensively discern not only others’ spiritual types but our own. Empathy is a prerequisite for both knowledge of others and the self.

Metaontology is the branch of philosophy that focuses on questions that naturally arise when doing ontology. This Element offers the reader (some of) the elements of metaontology by way of an opinionated overview of (some of) its central arguments and positions. The first section of this Element focuses on whether there are nonexistent objects. It discusses historical figures such as Suarez, Brentano, Twardowski, and Meinong, as well as contemporary figures such as Lewis, van Inwagen, Thomasson, and Zalta. The second section focuses on whether ontological questions are trivial to answer and whether ontological debates are merely verbal debates. Can there be different concepts of existence or different meanings of 'exists' or other ontological expressions? If ontological questions are nontrivial, are they nontrivial only if a substantive metaphysical view is true? Even if there aren't different senses of 'exist,' might there be different modes of being or ways to exist?

A lot of people want to know what makes a life worth living. Some people think that a person's life is worth living if and only if that person experiences a greater amount of pleasure than pain throughout the course of her life, and that a life is better or worse to the extent that the balance of pleasure over pain is higher or lower. But I think that the theory that a person's life is worth living if and only if that person experiences throughout her life a greater amount of pleasure than pain, and that a life is a better or worse life to the extent that the balance of pleasure minus pain in that life is higher or lower, is a false theory. Here is an argument against the theory that a person's life is worth living if and only if that person experiences throughout her life a greater amount of pleasure than pain, and that a life is a better or worse life to the extent that the balance of pleasure minus pain in that life is higher or lower.

In "Abhidharma Metaphysics and the Two Truths", I argued that a version of ontological pluralism—the view that there are different modes of being—is a philosophically satisfactory account of the doctrine of two truths as found in Abhidharma metaphysics, and that it is superior to accounts in the secondary literature.1 According to my account, the doctrine of two truths is best construed as a view that distinguishes between conventional and ultimate reality, the former of which is enjoyed by persons while the latter is enjoyed by only short-lived, impartite dharmas.2 Conventional truth and ultimate truth understood as features of sentences, beliefs, or propositions are...

The distinction between "the two truths" was initially developed to resolve seeming contradictions in the Buddha's teachings.1 The Buddha teaches that persons should act compassionately, that persons will be reincarnated, and that persons do not exist. The first two lessons seem inconsistent with the third. Consistency could be restored by distinguishing kinds of truth: the first and second lessons are conventionally true, but it is conventionally but not ultimately true that persons exist.2In addition to this semantic distinction, there is an ontological distinction between modes of being that also promises to restore consistency. As many note, "the two truths" is a distinction between entities at least as much as...

In this paper, I formulate, elucidate, and defend a version of modal realism with overlap, the view that objects are literally present at more than one possible world. The version that I defend has several interesting features: (i) it is committed to an ontological distinction between regions of spacetime and material objects; (ii) it is committed to compositional pluralism, which is the doctrine that there is more than one fundamental part-whole relation; and (iii) it is the modal analogue of endurantism, which is the doctrine that objects persist through time by being wholly present at each moment they are located.

Peter van Inwagen presented a powerful argument against the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which I henceforth abbreviate as ‘PSR’. For decades, the consensus was that this argument successfully refuted PSR. However, now a growing consensus holds that van Inwagen’s argument is fatally flawed, at least when ‘sufficient reason’ is understood in terms of ground, for on this understanding, an ineliminable premiss of van Inwagen’s argument is demonstrably false and cannot be repaired. I will argue that this growing consensus is mistaken and that a powerful argument relevantly similar to van Inwagen’s should still concern us, even when we understand ‘sufficient reason’ in terms of ground.

I focus here on the teleological suspension of the ethical as it appears in Fear and Trembling. A common reading of Fear and Trembling is that it explores whether there are religious reasons for action that settle that one must do an action even when all the moral reasons for action tell against doing it. This interpretation has been contested. But I defend it by showing how the explicit teleological suspension of the ethical mirrors implicit teleological suspensions of the epistemological and prudential, and by articulating how it might be necessary for God to suspend the ethical in order to forgive us for our wrongdoings to others. I also discuss whether God’s commands are implicitly conditional, whether religious reasons to act, believe, and forgive are in each case grounded in divine commands, and what role love plays in each type of teleological suspension.