Oscar Jablon

In this thesis, I make intelligible Plotinus’ notion of sympathy by explicating the cause of sympathy within Plotinus’ universe and the effects of sympathy. I do this by using a framework inspired by the Stoic literature on sympathy which distinguishes between three interrelated features of sympathy: Unity, global sympathy, and local sympathy. I show that for Plotinus sympathetic interactions are possible because of the numeric identity of soul with all its parts. I also show that the cause of this unity is the result of two metaphysical principles which govern a series of productions, which results in a diminishing unity from Plotinus first principle, the One, to matter which has no unity. I argue that the unity of soul is both necessary and sufficient for global sympathy (part-to-whole sympathetic interaction) but only necessary for local sympathy (part-to-part sympathetic interaction). In addition, I also explicate the underlying mechanisms of both local and global sympathy by appealing to the likeness principle (for local sympathy) and the inherent ‘Love’ and ‘Strife’ within the universe (for global sympathy).

In this thesis I present and defend Kris McDaniel’s ontological pluralism. Ontological pluralism for McDaniel is the doctrine that there are different ways of being. In The Fragmentation of Being (2017) McDaniel wants to motivate this thesis for reasonable ontological outlooks. For example, if you believe there only exists concrete entities and abstract entities, you might also believe that these entities have a different way of being. McDaniel’s motivation for ontological pluralism is theoretical. The theoretical motivation attempts to show how being behaves differently when we apply it to entities of different kinds. If McDaniel can show that being behaves differently when applied to objects of different kinds, then we can begin to see why we would have good reason to think there are different ways of being. McDaniel has two tests to show this, the first is showing if a feature is systematically variably axiomatic (SVA) or systematically variably polyadic (SVP). If a feature is SVA, then the principles which govern a feature differ systematically for different kinds of entities and if a feature is SVP, then the number of entities needing to saturate the feature differ systematically when applied to different kinds of entities. McDaniel argues that if being is either SVA or SVP for some reasonable ontological schema, then we have good reason to be ontological pluralist. In this thesis I will defend this position against several objections which come from Terenton Merricks, Sungil Han, and Wouter Cohen. The objections they present attack different aspects of McDaniel’s thesis which attempt to undermine the justification for positing a difference in being. I will argue that these objections fail for various reasons.