Lawrence Cahoone

This essay explores a simple argument for a Ground of Being, objections to it, and limitations on it. It is nonsensical to refer to Nothing in the sense of utter absence, hence nothing can be claimed to come from Nothing. If, as it seems, the universe, or any physical ensemble containing it, is past-finite, it must be caused by an uncaused Ground. Speculative many-worlds, pocket universes and multiverses do not affect this argument, but the quantum cosmologies of Alex Vilenkin, and J. B. Hartle and Stephen Hawking, which claim that the universe came from literally nothing, would. I argue that their novel project cannot work for reasons both physical (their "nothing" is actually a vacuum state governed by eternal physical laws) and methodological (physical theory cannot explain the emergence of the physical per se). Thus my argument stands. However, as David Hume showed, a posteriori arguments like mine infer a creation, and Creator, of a certain character, namely, a stochastic concept of creation and a panentheistic, partly physical Creator lacking omniscience and omnipotence. Rather than undermining the cosmological argument, as Hume intended, these limitations liberate the concept of the Ground from unnecessary problems, as Hartshorne suggested.

A metaphysics of the world described by contemporary science faces the problem of the relative ontological status of microphysical constituents (e.g. elementary particles), ultimate mathematical structures (e.g. of the Standard Model and General Relativity), and complex macroscopic systems with their arguably emergent properties. Justus Buchler's ordinal metaphysics, which provides a "view from anywhere" by analyzing whatever is under consideration through its location in an order of relationships, refusing to privilege any type of being, contributes a fresh perspective to this discussion. While Buchler's metaphysics of natural complexes might seem too pluralistic to be compatible with physicalism—since the latter grants metaphysical priority to the physical and to science's claims about it—a physicalist account can be conceived inside his ordinal metaphysics. Like the Aristotelian "metaphysics of the middle," such an approach avoids both the Democritean metaphysics of Simples and the Platonist metaphysics of the Whole. In so doing it provides special resources for conceiving the status of wholes and components commonly disputed by reductionists and emergentists, e.g. complex material systems, organisms, and minds. Towards that end, this paper sketches the outlines of an ordinal physicalism.

I argue that hunting is not a sport, but a neo-traditional cultural trophic practice consistent with ecological ethics, including a meliorist concern for animal rights or welfare. Death by hunter is on average less painful than death in wild nature. Hunting achieves goods, including trophic responsibility, ecological expertise and a unique experience of animal inter-dependence. Hunting must then be not only permissible but morally good wherever: a) preservation of ecosystems or species requires hunting as a wildlife management tool; and/or b) its animal deaths per unit of nutrition is lower than that caused by farming practices. Both conditions obtain at least some of the time

The struggle between the parties bent on inflating humanity's self-conception and those bent on deflating it continues. Mind, consciousness, soul, reason, free will, language, culture, tool-use—all have been invoked as the unique character of the human, some deriving from Judeo-Christian religion, others from classical philosophy and modern anthropology. Opponents, sometimes motivated by ethical concerns about the treatment of animals, and buoyed by scientific advances in animal and especially primate studies, have either deconstructed these traits or ascribed them to nonhumans. Seeking to block human exploitation of nonhuman species, they argue that humans are not "exceptional" and possess no "cognitive module" ..

The work of justus buchler is used to critique and to suggest a reformulation of certain ideas in jurgen habermas's "theory of communicative action", Most especially his analysis of modernity in terms of the conflict between "lifeworld" and "system." the difficulties of this dualistic analysis are examined. A buchlerian "pluralistic" alternative is suggested, For which the pathologies of modernity are attributed, Not to the dominance of the system, But to the condition of dominance "per se", That is, The reduction of effective plurality

Following Dorothy Gale over Thomas Wolfe, there’s no place like Clark, and it is a great pleasure to come home today, in a panel organized by one of my teachers, Gary Overvold, chaired by another, Bernie Kaplan, with yet another, Walter Wright, in attendance, not to mention my friend Bob Scharf, to comment on the work of an admired colleague, Joe Margolis. I will add to the standard list of Clark boosterisms by noting that Charles Peirce—a figure important for Joe, and for me, as will be obvious—wrote in 1900 that “the Clark University... has perhaps the most elevated ideal of any university in the world....” I gratefully thank Gary for the invitation to this elevation, and Joe Margolis for sending me a lot of free material to criticize.

Paul Shepard, a Rousseau armed with modern evolutionary ecology, presents our most rational primitivism. In his work, ecology recapitulates mythology. His critique of civilization compares to 20th century critics of “alienation,” except for Shepard the break with “authentic” existence is not Modern industrialism but Neolithic agrarianism. His argument remains largely impractical. Yet his late work suggests a reasonable meliorism. He recognized that his “Techno-Cynegeticism” may find room in a postmodern society that is hostile to agro-industrial, but not to what Ernest Gellner called “Durkheimian” or pre-agrarian,social forms. Hope for the wild lies not in razing the modern “system” but in riddling it with restored wild lacunae. Or, paraphrasing Thoreau, the salvation of the world lies in the feral.

The most common definitions of the physical lead to a problem for physicalism. If the physical is the objects of physics, then unique objects of other sciences are not physical and, if the causal closure of the physical is accepted, cannot cause changes in the physical. That means unique objects of chemistry, the Earth sciences, and biology cannot causally affect physical states. But physicalism’s most reliable claim, the nomological dependence of nonphysical entities and properties on the physical, can be accepted by a naturalism that avoids such problems.

ABSTRACT When a philosopher and a dog play Frisbee, do they cognize the same Frisbee? Is Fido subject to the “myth of the given”? The questions are not silly, for as Marjorie Grene quipped, “Epistemology is a branch of ethology.” What follows accepts what is usually called a “correspondence” theory of truth and a “realist” account of human knowledge. Nothing new, but what will be distinctive is that it seeks to exploit an unusual naturalism deriving from the American philosophical tradition. It will particularly address the epistemic relation of sensing to knowing. A currently widespread view among those who object to realism can be traced to Wilfrid Sellars's 1956 critique of the “myth of the given.” Sellars argued that the normative “order of reasons” in which beliefs are adjudicated is discontinuous with the causal order of sensation or perception, so the former cannot be grounded in the latter. My claim will be that Sellars was half wrong, and the wrong half can be addressed by contemporary cognitive science and anthropology. The permission to employ the latter is granted by a special version of naturalism, “ordinal naturalism,” formed from the American philosophical tradition.

Post–World War Two philosophy in America has been divided into the mainstream of analytic philosophy and a family of nonanalytic schools of thought, for example, continental philosophy and American pragmatism. The current balance of power among these perspectives reflects an event that occurred forty years ago: the “Pluralist Revolt” at the 1979 APA Eastern Division Meetings. What follows is a progress report on the Revolt’s hopes. The tale has something to do with the recent history of philosophy, Richard Rorty, truth, and with the New York Christmas of 1979. It also has to do with recent politics. For while, as the Pluralists hoped, nonanalytic philosophy is today more prominent, and mainstream analytic philosophy more pluralist, than in the 1970s, political trends of recent decades have differently affected analytic and nonanalytic philosophers. The result may be a new version of what C. P. Snow called “The Two Cultures.”

Justus Buchler’s 1966 Metaphysics of Natural Complexes seems so unique as to be sui generis. In it he declares that everything discriminable in any way is a “natural complex,” including every fact, substance, particular, process, universal, experience, property, mind, etc., even the concept of a natural complex itself. Every natural complex obtains in multiple orders of relations to other complexes, so each complex has indefinitely many “integrities,” each its function in some order. No complex is any more or less real than any other; witches and whales are equally real, one in an order of historical fiction, another in the order of zoology. The totality of complexes is not a...

The American philosophical school called “Columbia Naturalism” began with Aristotle. That is, the naturalist thinkers at Columbia University over the first half of the 20th century, including John Dewey and Ernest Nagel, began with F.J.E. Woodbridge, Columbia’s famed Aristotelian from 1902 to 1937 and founder of The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods. Dewey arrived in 1904, retired in 1930. Later John Herman Randall took up the cause of interpreting Aristotle so as to be consistent with the “functionalist” naturalism of Dewey, presented in his 1960 Aristotle. A third generation philosopher...

Human “free will” has been made problematic by several recent arguments against mental causation, the unity of the I or “self,” and the possibility that conscious decision-making could be temporally prior to action. This paper suggests a pathway through this thicket for free will or self-determination. Doing so requires an account of mind as an emergent process in the context of animal psychology and mental causation. Consciousness, a palpable but theoretically more obscure property of some minds, is likely to derive from complex animals’ real-time monitoring of internal state in relation to environment. Following Antonio Damasio, human mind appears to add to nonhuman “core consciousness” an additional narrative “self-consciousness.” The neurological argument against free will, most famously from Benjamin Libet, can be avoided as long as “free will” means, not an impossible event devoid of prior causation, but an occasional causal role played by narrative self-consciousness in behavioral determination. There is no necessary incompatibility between the scientific and evolutionary exploration of mind and consciousness and the uniquely self-determining capabilities of human mentality which are based on the former.

This paper suggests a kind of naturalism that, while based in the natural sciences, can address questions of value and meaning, including the compatibility of religion and naturalism. Certainly any of its details may be wrong, and other theories may be more deeply or more comprehensively true. Nevertheless I think it is likely approximately true, and its direction should be capable of incorporation into successor theories (should any successors be interested). It is built to respond to three problems. First, its approach to general metaphysics avoids a number of criticisms of the genre, problems with conceiving the Whole, views from nowhere, and other methodological issues philosophers worry about. Second, its ..