On this day in 1277 Étienne (Stephen) Tempier, bishop of Paris, declared that God could have made worlds other than this one, perhaps the first time anyone publicly argued for possible worlds.
Category: metaphysics
The Tortoise and the HareLoon
[draft] Achilles glanced up from his writing atop the Tortoise[1] and exclaimed, “Look! The Hare has caught up.” “No,” said the Tortoise apprehensively, “that isn’t the Hare, but the Hare’s all too clever cousin, the HareLoon.” “A real HareLoon! I’ve only ever seen them in pictures.” “Don’t get so worked up. She is always in a hurry but I can never tell if she is coming or going.” “Ah, but you should know the HareLoon […]
On Metaphysical Proficiency
Are you good at metaphysics? How good are you at metaphysics? When I consider these questions, the only sure thing is that there is no objective measure of metaphysical proficiency. I can’t even imagine standards by which we could judge it. It would be at least as hard to estimate as intelligence, and anyway, I doubt smarts correlates with metaphysical skill. Lots of smart people have said a lot of ridiculous things. I like to […]
Charity and OOPs
Given an Object Oriented Ontology ethics can present a problem.* It is not obvious how to fit ethics into an object oriented view: even if objects have ethical properties, ethics itself has to be considered just as arbitrary as any other property. One could, of course, hold some Deontological, Consequentialist or other ethical viewpoint, but this position would have to be justified on other grounds, since O.O.O. is silent on the matter. Hence having ethics […]
Aether Discontinuity
Assume space-time is quantized. This would mean that space-time is broken up into discrete bits. It then follows that time is broken up into discrete bits. This disagrees with basic experience: we can start counting time at any arbitrary point. “Now” could be any time whatsoever. Moreover, we run our physical experiments at any given point; we don’t have to wait to start our clocks. But what if our ability to run experiments at any […]
Review: After Finitude and Facticality
[cross-posted at The Road to Sippy Cups] Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude © has a very interesting discussion of Hume’s problem, Kant’s Copernican Revolution, the principle of sufficient reason and the relationship between dogmatism and fanaticism. Any one of his analyses on these topics makes the book worthwhile, but I’d like to focus on something different: the fundamental assumption of facticality. Meillassoux has a factical view of the world, meaning that the world is made up […]
The Rationality Cone
There are different sorts of constraints on thought. We forget things, we fail to infer consequences of our beliefs and we have features of perception, like blind spots, that affect our understanding of our surroundings. We also can be greatly affected by our emotions: when we are angry — when we see red — we are unable to see the anything but the things that are making us mad; when we are infatuated we are, […]
On Charitability
There is no such thing as a private reality. By private reality I mean any portion of reality that you alone can experience, that no one else could possibly understand. There is, however, reality that is yet unexperienced and unknown to you. Others may have experienced it before you, like explorers who have been to a far away place. If a philosopher is clever, it is possible that she found a way to imbue her […]
Of Duckrabbits and Identity
Of late I’ve become increasingly concerned with the meaning of identity. When we say, ‘x = x,’ we don’t mean that the x on the left is exactly identical to the x on the right because the x on the left is just that, on the left, and the x on the right is on the right, not the left. Since equality would be useless without having 2 different objects (try to imagine the use […]
Deriving Philosophy of Science
Two posts ago I claimed that The goal of science is, therefore, to separate the settled from the anomalous. So what is the settled? What is the anomalous? How are they separated? If we take these concepts to be fundamental then we are unable to analyze the concepts of settled, anomalous and separation scientifically: if they are at the bottom of all science, then everything within science depends upon them. How then to understand? At […]