M. Gregory Oakes

Descartes claims that the continued existence of material things is due the continuing action of Gods will. Such appeals to the divine, however, are rarely made by contemporary writers, but neither is any substitute explanation currently offered. I seek to fill this void by examining the relationship between one moment of material being and another. In particular, given a single material being at a single moment of time, what, if anything, ensures that there will exist any material thing at a later moment of time? I call this the problem of material continuation. ;I develop and assess such solutions as seem consonant with prevailing metaphysical views. Specifically, I develop one potential solution under the heading of "object ontology," the view that the material world is composed, at bottom, of enduring material particulars. In doing so, I make use of the views of van Inwagen, Johnston, and Merricks as stated in the closely related field of persistence theory . I develop a second potential answer in terms of "event ontology," the view that the basic material particulars of the world are events. Here, the views of Lewis and Shoemaker are most relevant. And I develop a third account of material continuation which derives from a combined ontology of objects and events. This view resembles most closely a view developed by Shoemaker. None of these solutions succeeds. ;The treatment of event ontology is of particular interest. The ontology of events I develop is modeled on Lewis's notion of the instantiation of basic physical properties at single spacetime points. Each such instantiation is an event. Certain, presumably causal relations must hold between temporally distant events in order to explain material continuation, but in a continuum of unextended events, these relations must be understood to hold both across a temporal gap and through further, intervening events. A Humean account of causation is equal to this task, but I reject such an account. A significant consequence of my analysis is that the perdurance theory of object persistence is coherent only on a Humean interpretation of causation

What is the relation of an earlier being to a later such that given the earlier there is or will be a later? I call this the question of material continuation. To answer, I offer a review of several philosophers’ thoughts, including those of Zeno, Aristotle, Descartes, Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead. While there is considerable variety among the ontological views of these philosophers, and indeed some direct opposition of both method and assertion, my review suggests that material continuation may be explained by reference to a principle of continual creation. This principle is reflected in Aristotle's unmoved mover, in Descartes's account of God's activity in persistence, in Bergson's concept of la durée, and in Whitehead's principle of creativity. It disappears from view in objective methodologies first emerging in pre-Socratic thought, made rigorous by the development of science by the modern philosophers such as Descartes, and realized in the scientist philosophy of Russell. I include some consideration of whether the creative principle might be ideal or divine.

Drawing on the basic philosophy of mind of the modern period, I offer a means of improving clarity of student written thought. Clarity of thought entails the sort of concept-sensation synthesis central to Kant’s account of human experience: or in more recent terminology, to be clear is to recognize the intention of a concept in a member of its extension. Simple analysis of concepts and of the mental state of understanding reveals structures that can help diagnose and repair conceptual weakness. I describe my means of teaching this method in an introduction to philosophy course.

This paper applies Plato’s cave allegory to Enron’s success and downfall. Plato’s famous tale of cave dwellers illustrates the different levels of truth and understanding. These levels include images, the sources of images, and the ultimate reality behind both. The paper first describes these levels of perception as they apply to Plato’s cave dwellers and then provides a brief history of the rise of Enron. Then we apply Plato’s levels of understanding to Enron, showing how the company created its image and presented information to support that image, and how the public eventually emerged from the cave to realize the truth about Enron’s actual accounting practices and financial state, which led to the corporation’s downfall. We find Plato’s allegory both useful in analyzing the relationship between Enron and the public and instructive about the power and moral responsibility of Enron’s executives.

Many students find themselves caught in an antinomy between “Rationalism”, a view of the world as open to objective, complete, and intellectual comprehension, and “Anti-realism”, the view that the Rationalist vision is façade since there is no objective perspective and any “truth” is relative to the individual. This paper offers a description of an introductory course that provides conceptual resources (through the use of Descartes, Hume, and Kant) for resolving the Rationalism-Antirealism debate. Such conceptual resources include: the representation/reality distinction, the fact/evidence disparity, the nature of skepticism, Kant’s distinction between Transcendental Idealism and Transcendental Realism, and the subject/object dichotomy.

Causal realists maintain that the causal relation consists in something more than its relata. Specifying this relation in nonreductive terms is however notoriously difficult. Michael Tooley has advanced a plausible account avoiding some of the relation’s most obvious difficulties, particularly where these concern the notion of a cross-temporal connection. His account distinguishes discrete from nondiscrete causation, where the latter is suitable to the continuity of cross-temporal causation. I argue, however, that such accounts face conceptual difficulties dating from Zeno’s time. A Bergsonian resolution of these difficulties appears to entail that, for the causal realist, there can be no indirect causal relations of the sort envisioned by Tooley. A consequence of this discussion is that the causal realist must conceive all causal relations as ultimately direct

While there has been considerable recent criticism of perdurance theory in connection with a Humean understanding of causality, perdurance theory conjoined with causal realism has received relatively little attention. One might, then, form the impression that perdurance theory under the auspices of causal realism is a relatively safe view. I shall argue, however, to the contrary. My general strategy is to show that there is no plausible way of spelling out the perdurance position (of the non-Humean, causal realist sort). I implement this strategy by revealing several general problems concerning the causally-connected temporal parts scheme. I begin with a short account of perdurance theory. There follows a description of two general views of causality and the two subsequent accounts of the perduring object; then, the criticism.