In his book Objects and Persons, Trenton Merricks has reoriented and fine-tuned an argument from the philosophy of mind to support a selective eliminativism about macroscopic objects.1 The argument turns on a rejection of systematic causal overdetermination and the conviction that microscopic things do the causal work that is attributed to a great many (though not all) macroscopic things. We will argue that Merricks’ argument fails to establish his selective eliminativism.

Adaptive management is commonly identified as a way to address situations where ecological and social uncertainty exists. Two discourses are common: a focus on experimentation, and a focus on collaboration. The roles of experimental and collaborative adaptive management in contemporary practice are reviewed to identify tools for bridging the discourses. Examples include broadening the scope of contributions during the buy-in and goal-setting stages, using conceptual models and decision support tools to include stakeholders in model development, experimentation using indicators of concern (...) to stakeholders, an experimental focus that reflects the level of statistical confidence required by management, and the engagement of stakeholders in data interpretation so that those affected by management outcomes can learn and adapt accordingly. In this context, a framework of questions that managers can use to reflect on both ecological and social uncertainties as they relate to individual management contexts is proposed. (shrink)

Two recent papers by Michael Burke bearing upon the persistence of people and commonplace things illustrate the fact that the quest for synchronic ontological economy is likely to encourage a disturbing diachronic proliferation of entities. This discussion argues that Burke's promise of ontological economy is seriously compromised by the fact that his proposed metaphysic does violence to standard intuitions concerning the persistence of people and commonplace things. In effect, Burke would have us achieve synchronic economy (rejection of coincident entities) by (...) postulating strongly counterintuitive transtemporal claims of numerical diversity. The argument is made that the price of Burkean economy is too high. (shrink)

Eric Olsen argues from the fact that we once existed as fetal individuals to the conclusion that the Standard View of personal identity is mistaken. I shall establish that a similar argument focusing upon dead people opposes Olson’s favored Biological View of personal identity.

By an incomplete sentence we shall understand a declarative sentence that can be used, without variation in its meaning, to make different statements in different contexts. Although the point deserves supporting argument, which we will not provide, sentences whose grammatical subjects are indexical expressions or demonstratives are obvious, plausible examples of incomplete sentences. Uttered in one context the sentence ‘He is ill’ may be used to make one statement, for example, that George is ill, while in another context the very (...) same sentence may be used to make a quite different statement, for example, that Paul is ill. (shrink)

Four non-Cartesian conceptions of a person are considered. I argue tor one of these, a position called animalism. I reject the idea that a (human) person coincides with, but is numerically distinct from, a certain human animal. Coinciding physical beings would both be psychological subjects. I argue that such subjects could not engage in self-reference. Since self-reference (or the capacity tor self-reference) is a necessary condition for being a person, no physical subject coincident with another such subject can be a (...) person. I take all of this to support the view that we (human persons) are identical with human animals. (shrink)

In The Nature of Necessity, Alvin Plantinga asserts that “the number 7 exists necessarily and Socrates does not.” This is, to my way of thinking, reasonable enough. Unhappily, cannot be reconciled with Plantinga's further claims that an object x has a property P essentially or necessarily if and only if x has P in every world in which x exists and existence is itself, although not “an ordinary property,” nevertheless a property.

Modal properties are notorious epistemic trouble-makers. That theme is very much at the heart of Michael Rea’s thesis that the Discovery Problem (roughly, the problem of explaining how we know when ascriptions of modal properties are true) has no naturalistic resolution. That might encourage the thought that supernaturalism will somehow resolve the problem. This paper argues that supernaturalism is unlikely to offer a solution of the Discovery Problem.

Commonplace things such as hawks and handsaws pose philosophical problems at least as imposing as those presented by abstract objects such as numbers and divine beings. Van Inwagen's metaphysic of material beings emerges from what he perceives to be the proper answer to the Special Composition Question, which is, roughly, the following: Under what conditions do various things compose a single thing? The first eight sections of the book address and dismiss various extreme and moderate proposals for resolving this question. (...) Van Inwagen argues vigorously for the view that our world contains, aside from mereologically "simple" entities, only living organisms, the activity of whose various parts constitutes a life. Strictly speaking, there are no tables, chairs, ships, or handsaws. A handsaw is merely a "virtual" and not a genuine object, whereas my cat is a genuine and not merely a virtual object. Felines and humans and other macroscopic individuals are composed of various cells, which themselves are composed of simples, whereas the nonentity that is my bicycle is merely virtually composed of various macroscopic and microscopic virtual objects. Van Inwagen argues that none of this contradicts our ordinary beliefs about the world we inhabit. Although there are, strictly speaking, no inanimate objects other than simples, there are various simples that are arranged bicycle-wise and still other simples arranged ship-wise. It is a corollary of van Inwagen's answer to the Special Composition Question that such simples compose nothing. Since there is nothing such simples compose, there really are no such things as bicycles and ships. Artisans do not create in the sense of causing things to exist, but only rearrange simples in ship-like and table-like ways. The situation is different when we consider biological conception and the emergence of a human life. In this case, but not in artifact cases, a new individual arrives on the cosmic stage. Van Inwagen argues that conception leaves us with "a new individual" which itself perishes when it divides. You were never a zygote, since you presently exist, although your zygote--the zygote from which you developed--does not. It is argued that lives are "infected with vagueness at both ends." In various borderline cases, there are simples such that there is simply no correct yes or no answer to the question, Does the activity of these simples constitute a life? Accordingly there is no determinate answer to the question, Do these simples compose something? Van Inwagen argues against the Linguistic Theory of Vagueness and offers a detailed defense of the vagueness of identity. In cases of vague diachronic identity, there is a sense in which the transitivity of identity principle fails. Starting with premises that are half-truths, this principle may in certain cases license a false conclusion. (shrink)

We are confronted by a metaphysical problem and discover, to our dismay, that standard proposals for its resolution have strongly counterintuitive corollaries. That naturally encourages consideration of previously overlooked or neglected ways out of the problem. As it turns out, one of these unorthodox proposals has a leg up on the various standard ways out of our problem. Metaphysical progress.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Insurrectionist Ethics: Radical Perspectives on Social Justice ed. by Jacoby Adeshei Carter and Daryl ScrivenDuncan R. CordryEdited by Jacoby Adeshei Carter and Daryl Scriven Insurrectionist Ethics: Radical Perspectives on Social Justice Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, 295 pp.In the collected volume Insurrectionist Ethics, edited by Jacoby Adeshei Carter and Daryl Scriven, contributors engage in discussion over the ethics of revolt. Faced with the systemic persistence of immiseration, (...) and given normative morality's complicity in sustaining such systems of domination, what ethical and practical recourse do the oppressed have to liberate themselves? This is a question which runs throughout the book and motivates the problem of an 'insurrectionist ethics,' as coined by Leonard Harris: a field of ethics which takes up a position, as he writes in the foreword, "that is in, starts from, and sojourns to a different place" (p. xiii). It is a re-imagining of the ethical which departs from romanticized notions of agency and reason, often in ways that favor descriptions over normative or explanatory principles. This shift gives it a high degree of flexibility with respect to its approach, which nevertheless remains guided by a common "insurrectionist sentiment" that lends consistency to the works of the text's contributors: they all "favor the abolition of what creates non-being, living death and necro-being" (p. xi). The book is split into a total of five topical sections, each of which discusses a different facet of insurrectionist ethics: its conceptions and context, its ties to liberation theory throughout the Americas, applications and correctives for its theory, its relation to pragmatism, and its future. Bookending contributions from the editors unpack the meaning and definition of an insurrectionist ethics.In this review, I survey several chapters of the volume by discussing Scriven's and Carter's definitions and examining a few ways in which these definitions produce tensions in a few selected contributions. Doing so will highlight some important differences between [End Page 110] the authors' approaches to insurrectionist ethics while underscoring the consistency which commits them to abolition; ultimately, Insurrectionist Ethics is as much an invitation as it is an introduction to the tradition it espouses.Scriven's introductory chapter, "The Very Idea of Insurrectionist Ethics," exposes an insurrectionist ethic within the thought of David Walker, while Carter's conclusive essay, "Death by a Thousand Cuts: Insurrectionist Ethics in a Present less Oppressive than the Past," attempts to pin down a definition by analyzing its essential elements. Their difference in approach is not insignificant. What is revealed through Scriven's angle, for example, is that insurrectionist ethics is indeed a tradition—to work through the meaning of such an ethics is to lend historical weight to the lives of past and present insurrectionists and to declare solidarity with their actions at the level of valuation. A number of such figures circulate throughout the volume, including David Walker, Maria W. Stewart, Alain L. Locke, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Tommy Curry, and Leonard Harris. With the exception of the latter-most, none of these figures make direct contributions to the collection (although their spirits animate it). Its status as a tradition means that insurrectionist ethics is not limited to the confines of this volume, itself more knot than archive: such a tradition reaches well beyond the text and invites its readers to extend its concepts and debates in all directions. It has not one past but several, and not one future but many.Furthermore, Scriven's essay points out that insurrectionist ethics is not simply an indictment of corrupt institutions on the basis of some moral framework or other—it is foremost an outright rejection of the alliance between customary morality and systems of oppression; it searches for an ethos that condones direct action against such systems, operating at a philosophical level to produce conceptual and theoretical weaponry that "incite resistance and demands action" (p. xiv). Yet, as the form of the volume itself demonstrates, the arguments and methods of reasoning deployed by insurrectionists (past and present) to condone such actions has tended to vary, sometimes drastically. Nonetheless, the multiplicity which properly belongs to this tradition—a point explored further in... (shrink)

Although much evidence indicates that young infants perceive unitary objects by analyzing patterns of motion, infantsÕ abilities to perceive object unity by analyzing Gestalt properties and by integrating distinct views of an object over time are in dispute. To address these controversies, four experiments investigated adultsÕ and infantsÕ perception of the unity of a center-occluded, moving rod with misaligned visible edges. Both alignment information and depth information affected adultsÕ and infantsÕ perception of object unity in similar ways, and infants perceived (...) object unity by integrating information about object features over time. However, infants perceived a moving, misaligned, three-dimensional object as indeterminate in its connectedness, whereas adults perceived it as connected behind the occluder. These findings indicate that the effectiveness of common motion in specifying unified surfaces across an occluder is reduced by misalignment of edges. Alignment information enhances perception of object unity either by serving directly as information for unity or by optimizing the detectability of motion-carried information for unity. In addition, young infants are able to retain information about edge orientation over short intervals in determining connectedness via a process of spatiotemporal integration. Ó 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved. (shrink)

Claims about ‘the meaning of life’ have tended to be made and discussed in conjunction with bold metaphysical and theological affirmations. For life to have meaning, there must be a comprehensive divine plan to give it meaning, or there must be an intelligible cosmic process with a ‘telos’ that a man needs to know if his life is to be meaningfully orientated. Or, it is thought to be a condition of the meaningfulness of life, that values should be ultimately ‘conserved’ (...) in some way, that no evil should be unredeemable and irrational. And it may be claimed that if death were to end our experience, meaninglessness would triumph. (shrink)

Implicit processes almost certainly preceded explicit processes in our evolutionary history, so they are likely to be more resistant to disruption according to the principles of evolutionary biology [Reber, A. S. . The cognitive unconscious: An evolutionary perspective. Consciousness and Cognition, 1, 93–133.]. Previous work . Knowledge, nerves and know-how: The role of explicit versus implicit knowledge in the breakdown of a complex motor skill under pressure. British Journal of Psychology, 83, 343–358.]) has shown that implicitly learned motor skills remain (...) stable under psychological pressure and concurrent cognitive demands, and recently [Poolton, J. M., Masters, R. S. W., & Maxwell, J. P. . Passing thoughts on the evolutionary stability of implicit motor behaviour: Performance retention under physiological fatigue. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 456–468.] showed that they also remain stable under conditions of anaerobic fatigue that would have significantly challenged the survival skills of our ancestors. Here we examine the stability of an implicitly learned motor skill under fatigue conditions that primarily tax a different physiological system , but which have equally strong evolutionary connotations. Participants acquired a throwing task by means of an errorless learning method or an errorful method. Motor performance in the errorless condition, but not the errorful condition, remained stable following an exhaustive VO2 max. running test. Our findings replicate and extend the work of Poolton et al., providing further support for Reber’s evolutionary distinction between implicit and explicit processes. (shrink)

R W K Paterson; Towards an Axiology of Knowledge, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 91–100, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1.