Metaphysics Commons^™

Amazon Book Review Of Dwayne Tunstall's Doing Philosophy Personally (2013), Theodore Walker

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

An Amazon.com customer book review of Doing Philosophy Personally: Thinking about Metaphysics, Theism, and Antiblack Racism (Fordham University, 2013) by Dwayne A. Tunstall

Inception And Ibn 'Arabi, Oludamini Ogunnaike

Journal of Religion & Film

Many philosophers, playwrights, artists, sages, and scholars throughout the ages have entertained and developed the concept of life being a "but a dream." Few works, however, have explored this topic with as much depth and subtlety as the 13thC Andalusian Muslim mystic, Ibn 'Arabi. Similarly, few works of art explore this theme as thoroughly and engagingly as Chistopher Nolan's 2010 film Inception. This paper presents the writings of Ibn 'Arabi and Nolan's film as a pair of mirrors, in which one can contemplate the other. As such, the present work is equally a commentary on the film based on …

Learning From Experience: A Philosophical Perspective, Ethan Landes

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This work examines philosophical solutions to David Hume’s problem of induction—a skeptical attack on our ability to learn from experience. I explore the logical, ontological, and epistemic difficulties behind the everyday assumption that the future will resemble the past. While historical solutions by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper have been unsuccessful at tackling these complications, combining recent work on natural kinds and naturalistic epistemology has promise. Ultimately, I expand on work done by Howard Sankey, Hilary Kornblith, and Brian Ellis to create an account of nature and epistemology that explains why objects in nature have predictable behavior. …

Humans And Nature: Finding Meaning Through Metaphysics, Justin Stone

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Before the 19th Century, natural philosophers explored the inner workings of nature and humanity using many different modes of thinking such as logic, mathematics, physics, and metaphysics. The incorporation of these varied concepts brought about a comprehensive understanding of nature and how humans relate to nature. Theories were devised from incorporeal ideas, data was gathered from the human senses, and concrete evidence was pursued to support philosophy. However, through the years from ancient times to modernity, natural philosophy slowly limited its use of revelation and metaphysics, restricting the quest for knowledge to the methodical gathering of empirical data. Science, as …

Everything Is Flat: The Transcendence Of The One In Neoplatonic Ontology, Joshua Packwood

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation research addresses the relationship between the One and everything else in Neoplatonic metaphysics. Plato is vague in describing this distinction and thus much of late antiquity attempts to fill in the gaps, as it were. The potential difficulty, however, is that the hierarchy of existence in late antiquity is susceptible to being understood as postulating a being that is "beyond being." To avoid this difficulty, I propose an interpretation of Dionysius the Areopagite to show that being is, by definition, intelligible and thus finite and limited. Since the first principle is that which is infinite it therefore cannot …

Review Of Getting Causes From Powers By Stephen Mumford And Rani Lill Anjum, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Some philosophers have suggested that having powers in one’s ontology has the advantage of providing resources for an account of causation (see Cartwright 1999; Harré 1970; Mill 1843; Whitehead 1929). But what would a theory of causation look like if we assume that powers are real? In Getting Causes from Powers, Mumford and Anjum make what is perhaps the first sustained attempt to answer that question. The basic idea is that, if there are powers, understood as property-like entities that have manifestations which can be merely possible, then causation is a matter of powers manifesting. According to the authors, …

A Response To Clark Pinnock's Hope For The Unevangelized As Seen In A Wideness In God's Mercy, Joshua Covert

Masters Theses

This paper will offer a response to Clark H. Pinnock's hope for the unevangelized as seen in A Wideness in God's Mercy. Pinnock argues that God saves individuals based upon their faith not primarily their knowledge. Pinnock develops a concept called the faith principle which he uses to support his claims. Pinnock provides five examples of unevangelized persons who are saved through faith without knowledge of Christ. Through Pinnock's faith principle and these five examples he argues that the unevangelized do not need special revelation - knowledge of Christ. It will be argued that the five examples provided by Pinnock …

Nominalism In Mathematics - Modality And Naturalism, James S.J. Schwartz

Wayne State University Dissertations

I defend modal nominalism in philosophy of mathematics - under which quantification over mathematical ontology is replaced with various modal assertions - against two sources of resistance: that modal nominalists face difficulties justifying the modal assertions that figure in their theories, and that modal nominalism is incompatible with mathematical naturalism.

Shapiro argues that modal nominalists invoke primitive modal concepts and that they are thereby unable to justify the various modal assertions that figure in their theories. The platonist, meanwhile, can appeal to the set-theoretic reduction of modality, and so can justify assertions about what is logically possible through an appeal …

Review Of Nature's Challenge To Free Will By Bernard Berofsky, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Identifying Pathway Proteins In Networks Using Convergence, Kathryn Dempsey Cooper, Hesham Ali

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

One of the key goals of systems biology concerns the analysis of experimental biological data available to the scientific public. New technologies are rapidly developed to observe and report whole-scale biological phenomena; however, few methods exist with the ability to produce specific, testable hypotheses from this noisy ‘big’ data. In this work, we propose an approach that combines the power of data-driven network theory along with knowledge-based ontology to tackle this problem. Network models are especially powerful due to their ability to display elements of interest and their relationships as internetwork structures. Additionally, ontological data actually supplements the confidence of …

Review Of Peter Alward's "Empty Revelations", Jeffrey C. Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

I here review Peter Alward's monograph Empty Revelations

The I Think, Self-Awareness And Reflexivity : A Reconstructed Kantian Model Of Self-Awareness, Jie Yin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

I aim to explore, in this dissertation, whether Kant has a plausible view on self-awareness in his Critique of Pure Reason, and that if the answer is positive, then in what way one could best appreciate his insight; and besides that, I also want to explore how Kant's view sheds light on contemporary debate on self-awareness. I aim to consider two questions addressed by Howell (2006) as below: (A) how exactly the I think functions, designatively, to represent the self and bring it to our thought-awareness, and (B) how, theI thinK orI, a simple representation and a mere designation of …

A Problem For Fine Individuation And Artist Essentialism, Jeffrey C. Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

Fine Individuation says it’s impossible for distinct people who are not collaborating on a work of art to produce one and same artwork.  This is an intra-world thesis, but is necessarily true, if true at all.  Author-Essentialism says it’s impossible for someone else to produce one and the same work of art produced by some actual artist.  This is an alleged necessary truth regarding cross-world relations.  Both theses have been vigorously defended.  I here argue that both are false, but for reasons that are entirely novel.

Speaking A Word For Nature: Thoreau's Philosophical Saunter, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Thoreau's extraordinary essay "Walking" is obviously an encomium on what the author calls "the art of Walking" and an exhortation to readers to understand and practice that art. Yes, but we must realize that he speaks of the art of walking in no "pedestrian" sense (if this expression may be excused). Thoreau not only wants us to think the unthought in ordinary walking but to participate in the essay's performance of an allegory or analogue of the practice that he calls sauntering to the Holy Land; it becomes an itinerary through the fields of language that reveals unsuspected sights and …