According to the Asymmetry, it is wrong to bring a miserable child into existence but permissible not to bring a happy child into existence. When it comes to procreation, we don’t have complete procreative liberty. But we do have some discretion. The Asymmetry seems highly intuitive. But a plausible account of the Asymmetry has been surprisingly difficult to provide, and it may well be that most moral philosophers – or at least most consequentialists – think that all reasonable efforts to (...) provide such an account have by now been exhausted. In this paper, I argue that, despite the difficulties, the Asymmetry is too important to be set aside. I also note a handful of accounts of the Asymmetry that have been proposed and why they fail. It seems, for example, that it will not do to say that some people matter morally and others don’t, or that a person matters morally in some worlds but not others. My own conclusion is that, while we are bound to say all people matter morally – you, me and the merely possible – we are not bound to say that all their losses– or all ours– matter morally. We can instead distinguish between morally significant and insignificant losses, with the distinction between the two being a matter of where the loss is incurred in relation to the person who incurs it. This way of looking at things – which I call Variabilism– provides the basis for a plausible account of the Asymmetry. The availability of such an account suggests, I think, that our prospects for rescuing the Asymmetry are bright. (shrink)

Child Versus Childmaker investigates a "person-affecting" approach to ethical choice. A form of consequentialism, this approach is intended to capture the idea that agents ought both do the most good that they can and respect each person as distinct from each other. Focusing on cases in which a conflict of interest arises between "childmakers"—parents, infertility specialists, embryologists, and others engaged in the task of bringing new people into existence—and the children they aim to create, the author considers what we today (...) owe those who will come into existence tomorrow. (shrink)

This article critically examines some of the inconsistency objections that have been put forward by John Broome, Larry Temkin and others against the so-called "person-affecting," or "person-based," restriction in normative ethics, including "extra people" problems and a version of the nonidentity problem from Kavka and Parfit. Certain Pareto principles and a version of the "mere addition paradox" are discussed along the way. The inconsistencies at issue can be avoided, it is argued, by situating the person-affecting intuition within a non-additive form (...) of maximizing consequentialism – a theory which then competes with such additive, or aggregative, forms of maximizing consequentialism as "totalism" and "averagism.". (shrink)

The Asymmetry consists of two claims. (A) That a possible person's life would be abjectly miserable –less than worth living – counts against bringing that person into existence. But (B) that a distinct possible person's life would be worth living or even well worth living does not count in favour of bringing that person into existence. In recent years, the view that the two halves of the Asymmetry are jointly untenable has become increasingly entrenched. If we say all persons matter (...) morally whether they exist or not and on that basis try to explain the first half of the Asymmetry, we lose the second half of the Asymmetry. If we say that some persons do not matter morally and some do and on that basis try to explain the second half of the Asymmetry, we lose the first half of the Asymmetry – or else find ourselves with a principle that is either inconsistent or otherwise deeply troubled in some way that has nothing to do with the content of the Asymmetry itself. In this article, I propose an alternative approach to the Asymmetry which I will call Variabilism. By understanding each and every person, whether existing or not, to matter morally but variably– such that the moral significance of any loss incurred by any person is considered to depend, not on who incurs that loss and whether that person matters morally, but rather on where that loss is incurred in relation to the person who incurs it – we can both nicely ground the two halves of the Asymmetry and avoid the conceptual difficulties that have plagued competing approaches. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Broome and others have argued that it makes no sense, or at least that it cannot be true, to say that it is better for a given person that he or she exist than not. That argument can be understood to suggest that, likewise, it makes no sense, or at least that it cannot be true, to say that it is worse for a given person that he or she exist than that he or she never have existed at (...) all. This argument is of critical importance to the question of whether consequentialist theory should take a traditional, aggregative form or a less conventional, person‐affecting, or person‐based, form. I believe that, potentially, the argument represents a far more serious threat to the person‐based approach than does, for example, Parfit's two medical programmes example. Parfit's example nicely illustrates the distinction between aggregative and person‐based approaches and raises important questions. But the example — though not, I think, by Parfit — is sometimes pressed into service as a full‐fledged counterexample against the person‐based approach. As such, I argue, the example is not persuasive. In contrast, the Broomeian argument, if correct, is definitive. For that argument relies on certain metaphysical assumptions and various uncontroversial normative claims — and hence nicely avoids putting into play the controversial normative claims that lie at the very heart of the debate. The purpose of the present paper, then, is to evaluate the Broomeian argument. I argue that this potentially definitive challenge to a person‐based approach does not in fact succeed. (shrink)

The non-identity problem is really a collection of problems having distinct logical features. For that reason, non-identity problems can be typed. This article focuses on just one type of non-identity problem, the problem, which includes Derek Parfit's depletion example and many others. The can't-expect-better problem uses an assessment about the low probability of any particular person's coming into existence to reason that an earlier wrong act does not harm that person. This article argues that that line of reasoning is unusually (...) treacherous in that it makes not just one hard-to-detect error in what is done with the relevant probability assessments but rather alternates between two. We sort out one fallacy only to fall, against all odds (as it were), into a second. By avoiding both errors, we become able to discern harm in cases in which the can't-expect-better problem argues there is none. We will then be in a position to set aside the can't-expect-better problem as an objection against the person-based intuition that acts that are must be at least some existing or future person. (shrink)

This book aims to give an account, called Variabilism, of the moral significance of merely possible persons and to use Variabilism to illuminate abortion. In doing so it lays the groundwork for a more productive discussion on abortion.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 8, Page 38-39, August 2012.

Lawyers and philosophers have found it challenging to construct an account of when an act causes harm that is broad enough to address multiple agent problems but not so broad that it fails to distinguish between genuinely harming a person and imposing a condition on a person that we deem undesirable. Thus, we may think an act causes harm only if it makes a difference to a person and, more specifically, makes things worse for that person. If the effect is (...) the same whatever the one agent does in virtue of what a second agent does or is prepared to do, it may seem that what the one agent does makes no difference. Multiple agent problems are endemic. Legal hypotheticals include the example of two fires, each ‘tortiously’ set, converging on a single barn. The physician faces a multiple agent problem when he or she understands that refusing to provide the fertility treatment a patient demands will just lead to another physician providing the treatment instead. And corporations face the problem when they project that conscientiously refraining from drilling for oil at a particular site will not safeguard that site but rather open the door to equally deleterious activities of still other corporations. This paper argues that a useful first step in developing an account of harm in the multiple agent context is to recognize that often, even if the individual agent cannot make things better for a person, the group can. It seems, however, that a fully adequate account will also show how and when the harm that the group imposes on a person devolves to the agent. This paper proposes such an account. Requirements include: that the agent is a member of a group implicated in the harm; that the agent participate in the bringing about of that harm; and that the agent’s non-participation would not have made things worse for the person. To avoid the charge of harm, then, and still participate in the harm that is done by the group, the agent’s participation must make things better for the person; simply not making things worse, once the other conditions are satisfied, is not enough to avoid the charge of harm. Advantages of the proposed account include its ability to discern as an exception cases in which the agent’s non-participation would have made things worse for the person and to distinguish cases involving a mix of natural and man-made causes. (shrink)

This paper considers two objections based in axiological considerations against the position that whether a given outcome, or possible future or world, is morally worse than a second world may depend in part on what is going on at a third world. Such a wide-angled approach to determining worseness is critical to the solution I have previously proposed in connection with the nonidentity problem. I argue that both objections fail.

David lewis has argued that--Despite the 'fission' cases--One may consistently hold both that what matters in survival is "mental continuity and connectedness" and that what matters in survival is identity. To prove his point, He produces a certain theory of persons. Derek parfit and penelope maddy have objected that the theory lewis produces does not actually have the advantages he claims for it. In this paper, The author questions their objections, And then argues that, Even though lewis's theory has many (...) virtues, No sufficiently knowledgeable person can be justified in accepting it (here and now) as an adequate theory of persons. (shrink)

Thus, there is a compelling policy argument as well as a suggestive constitutional argument that the practice of selling parental rights in general, and in particular the practice of commercial surrogacy, should not be permitted. These arguments favor the approach adopted in New York State as opposed to any more latitudinarian approach that would permit commercial surrogacy. Clearly, if the payment of money in exchange for parental rights should be prohibited, then we have a strong basis on which to reject (...) the intentionalist theory, along with any other theory tht would link the parentage of a child with the payment of money. This conclusion is in no way undermined by the various arguments recited in part V above that favor the intentionalist theory since, as we have seen, these arguments are flawed. (shrink)

When her baby was born last June, Rossana Dalla Corte, age sixty-two, was thought to be the oldest woman ever to have given birth. Her pregnancy was achieved at a private fertility clinic in Italy, the same clinic that treated “Jennifer F.,” a London woman who, on Christmas day, 1993, at the age of fifty-nine, gave birth to twins. The reproductive procedure, likely to become more common during the next few years, has received intense scrutiny from health officials in Great (...) Britain, France, and Italy. Moral questions concerning that procedure already have been taken up by the popular press in the United States. Such questions can be expected to take on a new urgency as the United States considers reshaping its health care system and, specifically, the circumstances under which coverage for infertility treatment will be provided. (shrink)

This collection of essays investigates the obligations we have in respect of future persons, from our own future offspring to distant future generations.

In this anthology of new and classic articles, fifteen noted feminist philosophers explore contemporary ethical issues that uniquely affect the lives of women. These issues in applied ethics include autonomy, responsibility, sexual harassment, women in the military, new technologies for reproduction, surrogate motherhood, pornography, abortion, nonfeminist women and others. Whether generated by old social standards or intensified by recent technology, these dilemmas all pose persistent, 'nagging,' questions that cry out for answers.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Enviornment 6.2 (2001) 114-118 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Child versus Childmaker: Future Persons and Present Duties in Ethics and the Law Child versus Childmaker: Future Persons and Present Duties in Ethics and the Law. Melinda A. Roberts. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Pp. 235. ISBN 0-8476-8901-8 (Paperback) This book will provide the reader with a systematic examination of some of the most (...) difficult philosophical issues involved in procreation, and most notably those raised by wrongful life claims and the non-identity problem. Can an action without which a given child would not even exist be simultaneously said to harm this very child? This is the key question addressed in this book. It is relevant not only to bioethicists, but also to those concerned with the possibility of harming members of future generations in general. The author proceeds with remarkable clarity in three steps. First, she unveils the core intuition and unfolds the key implications of what is standardly referred to as the person-affecting view. Second, she focuses on the now famous non-identity problem that is supposed to raise a serious challenge to the plausibility of the person-affecting view. Third, wrongful life and human cloning are taken as illustrations of the problem.The starting point is thus the person-affecting or personalist view. The author argues that what is at stake in such a view is not only a concern for [End Page 114] persons (as opposed to plants or stones), but also for definite persons. The core intuition that "what is bad must be bad for someone" (Derek Parfit) implies a comparison between two states of the same person. As she puts it, "the pairwise comparisons of worlds appealed to within personalism are always in respect of particular people" (6). This does not necessarily imply consequentialism, contrary to what Roberts claims (e.g., 1), at least if we understand the latter, for example, as Philip Pettit does. 1 Moreover, one may very well argue that what is at the heart of the person-affecting intuition is a sense that an action needs to be assessed on the basis of its effect on persons, which would not necessarily imply that such effects require a comparison between two states of the same person. Nevertheless, the extent to which a person-affecting conception--as defined by Roberts--will be in trouble depends on the extent to which comparisons between the same person's states cannot operate. This is precisely where to introduce the idea of a non-identity context, that is, a situation in which not committing an allegedly harmful act would or could also have meant the nonexistence of the allegedly harmed person. For example, had a medical doctor not committed this preconceptional diagnostic mistake (or a father taken a slower or faster means of transportation to come back home), this child would or could not have existed. Can we thus say that the practitioner harmed the child who turned out to be heavily handicapped due, for example, to a genetically transmissible disease (or that the father harmed his child by leaving him with a very polluted environment due to his use of big cars as a means of transportation)?One key feature of Roberts's approach is that she restricts the scope of the non-identity problem to cases where not committing the allegedly harmful action would have made it impossible for this child to have existed ("two-alternative" cases) (26, 319, 325). This entails that whenever this very child could still have come to existence in the allegedly harmful action's absence, whatever the likelihood of such a coming to existence, we would fall outside a non-identity context ("three-alternative" cases) (27; 94-95). What matters to Roberts is whether or not the same child could have been born better than he is, not whether he would, as a matter of fact, have been born at all. The consequence is that in cases where the same child could have been born, say, unhandicapped, the author remains... (shrink)

Suppose that Depletion will reduce the well-being of future people. Many of us would like to say that Depletion is wrong because of the harm to future people. However, it can easily be made to seem that Depletion is actually harmless – this is the non-identity problem. I discuss a particularly ingenious attempt by Melinda Roberts to attribute a harm to Depletion. I will argue that the magnitude of Roberts's harm is off target by many orders of magnitude: it (...) is just too tiny to explain the intuitive wrong of Depletion. (shrink)

Can it be better or worse for a person to be than not to be, that is, can it be better or worse to exist than not to exist at all? This old 'existential question' has been raised anew in contemporary moral philosophy. There are roughly two reasons for this renewed interest. Firstly, traditional so-called “impersonal” ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, have counter-intuitive implications in regard to questions concerning procreation and our moral duties to future, not yet existing people. Secondly, (...) it has seemed evident to many that an outcome can only be better than another if it is better for someone, and that only moral theories that are in this sense “person affecting” can be correct. The implications of this Person Affecting Restriction will differ radically, however, depending on which answer one gives to the existential question. Melinda Roberts (2003) and Matthew Adler (2009) have defended an affirmative answer to the existential question using an assumption that one can asribe a zero level of wellbeing to a person in a world in which that person doesn't exist. Contrariwise, Derek Parfit (1984), John Broome (1999), and others have worried that if we take a person’s life to be better for her than non-existence, then we would have to conclude that it would have been worse for her if she did not exist, which is absurd: Nothing would have been worse or better for a person if she had not existed. The paper suggests that an affirmative answer to the existential question can avoid such absurdities: One can claim that, say, it is better for a person to exist than not to exist, without implying that it would have been worse for a person if she had not existed or that her level of wellbeing would then have been lower. (shrink)

In Child versus Childmaker Melinda Roberts provides an enlightening analysis and a cogent defense of a version of the person-affecting restriction in ethics. The rough idea of this restriction is that an action, state of affairs, or world, cannot be wrong, or bad, unless it would wrong, or be bad for, someone. I shall focus solely on Roberts’s core principles, and thus shall not address her interesting chapter-length discussions of wrongful life cases and of human cloning cases. The person-affecting (...) intuition can be spelled out in a deontic and in an axiological form: -/- Deontic Person-Affecting Restriction: An action, state of affairs, or world is wrong only if it would wrong someone. Axiological Person-Affecting Restriction: An action, state of affairs, or world is worse than another only if it is worse for someone. -/- Roberts develops and defends the deontic version of the person-affecting restriction. Indeed, as her discussion (and those of others) makes clear, it is quite unlikely that there is a coherent version of the axiological form of the intuition (e.g., because of problems of transitivity). Roberts rightly rejects any appeal to impersonal ranking of worlds, and appeals only to the (many) personal rankings of worlds of the individuals involved. Roberts defends the view that worlds in which a person does not exist can be ranked in terms of that person’s well-being (how good that world would be for him/her) along with the worlds in which he/she does exist. Worlds in which the person has a life worth living are ranked more highly for that person than worlds in which he/she doesn’t exist (along with some worlds with indifferent existence), and the latter worlds are ranked more highly than worlds in which the person exists but doesn’t have a life worth living. Although this is somewhat controversial (some would deny that we can assess how good a world is for a person who doesn’t exist in it), it seems exactly right to me. Throughout I shall assume, as does Roberts, that non-existence has a value of zero (and thus that lives worth living have positive values, and that lives not worth living have negative values). In what follows I shall formulate Roberts’s theory as a theory of the permissibility of actions. In most of the book, Roberts formulates her theory as one of the permissibility of worlds, but, as I shall argue below, such assessments have little normative relevance, since they ignore the probabilities of realization (which depend on what actions are performed). The core of Roberts’s theory is just as plausible, and in some ways more powerful, when (as is sometimes the case in the book) it takes actions to be the objects of assessment. To start with, however, I shall make a highly restrictive assumption (not made by Roberts) that will effectively eliminate the difference between assessing actions and assessing worlds within the sort of welfaristic consequentialist framework that Roberts presupposes. I shall assume that if a given action were performed, then a specific world would be realized. We shall assume, that is, that there are no uncertainties involved. Everything is completely determined by which of the feasible actions is performed. Later in this paper, I will address the problems that arise once this simplifying assumption is dropped. (shrink)

According to “the asymmetry”, the fact that a future person would have a life not worth living counts against bringing that person into existence but the fact that a future person would have a life worth living does not count in favour of bringing that person into existence. While this asymmetry seems intuitive, it is also puzzling: if we think that it is of moral importance to prevent people from living lives not worth living, shouldn't we also that it is (...) of moral importance to create people with lives worth living? Melinda Roberts has suggested a view, “Variabilism”, which she argues solves this problem. I argue that Variabilism fails as a solution to the asymmetry. First, Variabilism relies on a particular distinction between gains and losses which is at least as puzzling as the asymmetry itself. Second, in some cases Variabilism is incompatible with the asymmetry. In these cases, the fact that a person would have a life worth living does count in favour of creating her. (shrink)

The wrongful disability problem arises whenever a disability-causing, and therefore (presumptively) wrongful, procreative act is a necessary condition for the existence of a person whose life is otherwise worth living. It is a problem because it seems to involve no harm, and therefore no wrongful treatment, vis-à-vis that person. This essay defends the nonconsequentialist, rights-based, account of the wrong-making features of wrongful disability. It distinguishes between the person-affecting restriction, roughly the idea that wrongdoing is always the wronging of some person, (...) and the harm principle, the idea that all wrongings are harmings. It argues, first, that the harm principle should be rejected, in light of offending intuitions in salient examples. Rejection of the harm principle is not only independently plausible, but also paves the way for a nonconsequentialist diagnosis of wrongful disability. This diagnosis conceives of wrongdoing as a failure to express adequate respect for the humanity or personhood inherent in the person created. The paper defends a theory of humanity-respecting rights that accommodates plausible intuitions about satisficing and fairness, without resorting to consequentialist premises that lead to well-known impossibility results and paradoxes. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the question of whether a person’s existence can be better (or worse) for him than his non-existence. Recently, Nils Holtug and Melinda A. Roberts have defended an affirmative answer. These defenses, I shall argue, do not succeed. In different ways, Holtug and Roberts have got the metaphysics and axiology wrong. However, I also argue that a person’s existence can after all be better (or worse) for him than his non-existence, though for reasons other than (...) those provided by Holtug and Roberts. (shrink)

This paper is a review essay of Ottavio Marzocca, Biopolitics for Beginners. Knowledge of Life and Government of People, Milan/Udine: Mimesis International, 2020. Pp. 457. ISBN: 9788869771781 (paperback). It focuses on Marzocca's investigations into biopolitics, a topic of which the author offers an original ecological reconfiguration. The proposed reflections, which address the recent pandemic crisis of COVID-19, are developed from the work of Foucault but are not limited to this thinker. In fact, they offer an articulate examination of the issue (...) by also taking into broad consideration the thought of authors such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Donzelot, Robert Castel, Pierre Rosanvallon, Nikolas Rose, Melinda Cooper and Gregory Bateson. (shrink)

Neo-teleology is the two part thesis that, e.g., (i) we have hearts because of what hearts are for: Hearts are for blood circulation, not the production of a pulse, so hearts are there--animals have them--because their function is to circulate the blood, and (ii) that (i) is explained by natural selection: traits spread through populations because of their functions. This paper attacks this popular doctrine. The presence of a biological trait or structure is not explained by appeal to its function. (...) To suppose otherwise is to trivialize natural selection. (shrink)

Natural selection is commonly interpreted as the fundamental mechanism of evolution. Questions about how selection theory can claim to be the all-sufficient explanation of evolution often go unanswered by today's neo-Darwinists, perhaps for fear that any criticism of the evolutionary paradigm will encourage creationists and proponents of intelligent design.In Biological Emergences, Robert Reid argues that natural selection is not the cause of evolution. He writes that the causes of variations, which he refers to as natural experiments, are independent of (...) natural selection; indeed, he suggests, natural selection may get in the way of evolution. Reid proposes an alternative theory to explain how emergent novelties are generated and under what conditions they can overcome the resistance of natural selection. He suggests that what causes innovative variation causes evolution, and that these phenomena are environmental as well as organismal.After an extended critique of selectionism, Reid constructs an emergence theory of evolution, first examining the evidence in three causal arenas of emergent evolution: symbiosis/association, evolutionary physiology/behavior, and developmental evolution. Based on this evidence of causation, he proposes some working hypotheses, examining mechanisms and processes common to all three arenas, and arrives at a theoretical framework that accounts for generative mechanisms and emergent qualities. Without selectionism, Reid argues, evolutionary innovation can more easily be integrated into a general thesis. Finally, Reid proposes a biological synthesis of rapid emergent evolutionary phases and the prolonged, dynamically stable, non-evolutionary phases imposed by natural selection. (shrink)

Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking may be relatively effortful. Yet adults routinely engage in effortful processes when needed. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate their resources to achieve successful communication? We begin with the observation that the shared goal of communication induces a natural division of labor: The resources one agent chooses to allocate toward perspective-taking should depend on their expectations about the other's (...) allocation. We formalize this idea in a resource-rational model augmenting recent probabilistic weighting accounts with a mechanism for (costly) control over the degree of perspective-taking. In a series of simulations, we first derive an intermediate degree of perspective weighting as an optimal trade-off between expected costs and benefits of perspective-taking. We then present two behavioral experiments testing novel predictions of our model. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the presence or absence of occlusions in a director–matcher task. We found that speakers spontaneously modulated the informativeness of their descriptions to account for “known unknowns” in their partner's private view, reflecting a higher degree of speaker perspective-taking than previously acknowledged. In Experiment 2, we then compared the scripted utterances used by confederates in prior work with those produced in interactions with unscripted directors. We found that confederates were systematically less informative than listeners would initially expect given the presence of occlusions, but listeners used violations to adaptively make fewer errors over time. Taken together, our work suggests that people are not simply “mindblind”; they use contextually appropriate expectations to navigate the division of labor with their partner. We discuss how a resource-rational framework may provide a more deeply explanatory foundation for understanding flexible perspective-taking under processing constraints. (shrink)

Mesoscale modeling is often considered merely as a practical strategy used when information on lower-scale details is lacking, or when there is a need to make models cognitively or computationally tractable. Without dismissing the importance of practical constraints for modeling choices, we argue that mesoscale models should not just be considered as abbreviations or placeholders for more “complete” models. Because many systems exhibit different behaviors at various spatial and temporal scales, bottom-up approaches are almost always doomed to fail. Mesoscale models (...) capture aspects of multi-scale systems that cannot be parameterized by simple averaging of lower-scale details. To understand the behavior of multi-scale systems, it is essential to identify mesoscale parameters that “code for” lower-scale details in a way that relate phenomena intermediate between microscopic and macroscopic features. We illustrate this point using examples of modeling of multi-scale systems in materials science and biology, where identification of material parameters such as stiffness or strain is a central step. The examples illustrate important aspects of a so-called “middle-out” modeling strategy. Rather than attempting to model the system bottom-up, one starts at intermediate scales where systems exhibit behaviors distinct from those at the atomic and continuum scales. One then seeks to upscale and downscale to gain a more complete understanding of the multi-scale system. The cases highlight how parameterization of lower-scale details not only enables tractable modeling but is also central to understanding functional and organizational features of multi-scale systems. (shrink)

Author Robert Wright shows how Buddhist meditative practice can loosen the grip of anxiety, regret, and hatred, and deepen your appreciation of beauty and other people." -- Adapted from book jacket.

Group beneficial norms are common in human societies. The persistence of such norms is consistent with evolutionary game theory, but existing models do not provide a plausible explanation for why they are common. We show that when a model of imitation used to derive replicator dynamics in isolated populations is generalized to allow for population structure, group beneficial norms can spread rapidly under plausible conditions. We also show that this mechanism allows recombination of different group beneficial norms arising in..

Hegel's holistic metaphysics challenges much recent ontology with its atomistic and reductionist assumptions; Stern offers us an original reading of Hegel and contrasts him with his predecessor, Kant.

The first unquestionably big idea in the history of philosophy was the idea of form. The idea of course belonged to Plato, and was then domesticated at the hands of Aristotle, who paired form with matter as the two chief principles of his metaphysics and natural philosophy. In the medieval period, it was Aristotle’s conception of form and matter that generally dominated. This was true for both the Islamic and the Christian tradition, once the entire Aristotelian corpus became available. For (...) this reason, although there is much to say about the fate of Platonic Forms in medieval thought, the present chapter will focus on the Aristotelian tradition.1 Aristotelian commentators have been puzzled by form and matter for as long as there have been Aristotelian commentators. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that these are topics about which Aristotelians have never formed a very clear conception, and that their failure to do so was the principal reason why Aristotelianism ceased to be a flourishing research program from the seventeenth century onward. For those who aspire to a modern revival of Aristotelianism, the concepts of form and matter can easily take on the aspect of a kind of Holy Grail, such that if only we could get these ideas clearly in focus, we could see our way forward on any number of philosophical fronts, such as the union of mind and body, the coherence and endurance of substances, the nature of causality, and so on. The historical record, however, suggests that this hope is a snare and delusion, insofar as there has never been any such thing as the theory of form and matter. Although medieval philosophers of all kinds used this terminology incessantly, it had no more of a fixed meaning than does the ubiquitous contemporary philosophical talk of “properties.” Hence, the most a general survey of the topic can do is consider some of the more important areas of agreement and disagreement. (shrink)

Selected by CHOICE as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1995.

This essay argues that aristotle's doctrine of nominal definition is his semantic theory for natural-Kind terms. It offers a new interpretation of that doctrine. On this interpretation nominal definitions are initial working theoretical accounts of natural kinds which serve as starting points for scientific inquiry. As such, Nominal definitions have existential import. They make an implicit reference to the most familiar actual instances of the kinds they define and they define the essences of those kinds by reference to those instances. (...) Nominal definitions are, Thus, Accounts of real essences as much as real definitions. They are initial incomplete accounts of such essences and it is as such that they explicate the meanings of (natural-Kind) terms. (shrink)