Showing papers in "Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume in 1999"

Self And Body: Sydney Shoemaker

Abstract: A major objection to the view that the relation of persons to human animals is coincidence rather than identity is that on this view the human animal will share the coincident person’s physical properties, and so should (contrary to the view) share its mental properties. But while the same physical predicates are true of the person and the human animal, the difference in the persistence conditions of these entities implies that there will be a difference in the properties ascribed by these predicates, with the result that the physical properties that determine the person’s mental states will belong to the person and not to the human animal.

Aristotle On Well-Being And Intellectual Contemplation: David Charles

Abstract: Aristotle, it appears, sometimes identifies well-being (eudaimonia) with one activity (intellectual contemplation), sometimes with several, including ethical virtue. I argue that this appearance is misleading. In the Nicomachean Ethics , intellectual contemplation is the central case of human well-being, but is not identical with it. Ethically virtuous activity is included in human well-being because it is an analogue of intellectual contemplation. This structure allows Aristotle to hold that while ethically virtuous activity is valuable in its own right, the best life available for humans is centred around, but not wholly constituted by, intellectual contemplation.

I–David Papineau

Abstract: This paper disputes the common assumption that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses a problem for naturalism. My overall strategy is to argue that norms of judgement derive from moral or personal values, particularly when such values are attached to the end of truth. While there are philosophical problems associated with both moral and personal values, they are not special to the realm of judgement, nor peculiar to naturalist philosophies. This approach to the normativity of judgement is made possible by naturalist views of truth, that is, views which do not presuppose normativity in explaining truth.

Aristotle on well-being and intellectual contemplation: Dominic Scott

Abstract: In Nicomachean Ethics X 7-8, Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of eudaimonia, primary and secondary. The first corresponds to contemplation, the second to activity in accordance with moral virtue and practical reason. My task in this paper is to elucidate this distinction. Like Charles, I interpret it as one between paradigm and derivative cases; unlike him, I explain it in terms of similarity, not analogy. Furthermore, once the underlying nature of the distinction is understood, we can reconcile the claim that paradigm eudaimonia consists just in contemplation with a passage in the first book requiring eudaimonia to involve all intrinsic goods.

The inaugural address: Why there couldn't be zombies

Abstract: Philosophical zombies are exactly as physicalists suppose we are, right down to the tiniest details, but they have no conscious experiences. (It is presupposed that all explicable physical events are explicable physically.) Are such things even logically possible? My aim is to contribute to showing not only that the answer is ‘No’, but why. (I concede that systems superficially like human beings might exist and lack consciousness.) My strategy has two prongs: a fairly brisk argument which demolishes the zombie idea; followed by an attempt to throw light on how something can qualify as a conscious perceiver. The argument to show that zombies are impossible exploits the point that in order to be able to detect our own ‘qualia’ we should have to be somehow sensitive to them; which the zombie idea rules out. The attempt to make clear why my zombie twin must be conscious exploits the idea that we have a reasonably clear grasp of a ‘Basic Package’ of psychological concepts.

II–Gallen Strawson: Self, Body, and Experience

Abstract: What are the grounds of self-consciousness? I consider 29 proposals and reject 22, including a number of proposals that experience of body (or bodies) is necessary for self-consciousness. A popular strategy in debates of this sort is to argue that one cannot be said to have some concept C (e.g. the concept ONESELF, necessary for self-consciousness) unless one has a need or a use for C given the character of one's experience considered independently of the character that it has given that one possesses C. I suggest that such arguments are invalid.

Logic and Existence: Timothy Williams

Abstract: The paper defends the intelligibility of unrestricted quantification. For any natural number n , ‘There are at least n individuals’ is logically true, when the quantifier is unrestricted. In response to the objection that such sentences should not count as logically true because existence is contingent, it is argued by consideration of cross-world counting principles that in the relevant sense of ‘exist’ existence is not contingent. A tentative extension of the upward Lowenheim–Skolem theorem to proper classes is used to argue that a sound and complete axiomatization of the logic of unrestricted universal quantification results from adding all sentences of the form ‘There are at least n individuals’ as axioms to a standard axiomatization of the first-order predicate calculus. Of the many questions on which logic is neutral, one is usually supposed to be this: ‘How many individuals are there?’ On the alternative view defended below, truths about the number of individuals are logically true. They are not contingent logical truths, for it is not contingent what individuals there are.

II–Julia Tanney: Normativity and Thought

Abstract: This paper attempts to describe why it is not possible to account for normative phenomena in non-normative terms. It argues that Papineau’s attempt to locate norms of judgement ‘outside’ content, grounded in an individual’s desires or reasons, mislocates the normativity that is thought to resist appropriation within a ‘world that conceives nature as the realm of law’. It agrees, however, that a theory of content that locates norms ‘inside’ content will not be forthcoming—at least if this is to require fashioning the norms that in some sense govern judgment or thought into individually necessary conditions for contentful states.

I–Cora Diamond

Abstract: Hilary Putnam has argued against philosophical theories which tie the content of truth-claims closely to the available methods of investigation and verification. Such theories, he argues, threaten our idea of human communication, which we take to be possible between people of different cultures and across periods of time during which methods of investigation change dramatically. Putnam rejects any reading of Wittgenstein which takes him to make a close tie between meaning and method of verification. What strands in Wittgenstein’s thought appear to lend support to such a reading? Can we do justice to the role which method of verification does have for Wittgenstein while retaining our hold on the idea that communication between people is possible despite substantial differences in methods of verification and investigation? Thus it is as if the proof did not determine the sense of the proposition proved; and yet as if it did determine it. But isn't it like that with any verification of any proposition?

II–Bob Hale: Arithmetic Reflection without Intuition

Abstract: Michael Potter considers several versions of the view that the truths of arithmetic are analytic and finds difficulties with all of them. There is, I think, no gainsaying his claim that arithmetic cannot be analytic in Kant’s sense. However, his pessimistic assessment of the view that what is now widely called Hume’s principle can serve as an analytic foundation for arithmetic seems to me unjustified. I consider and offer some answers to the objections he brings against it.

Logic And Existence: Ian Rumfitt

Abstract: Frege’s logicism in the philosophy of arithmetic consisted, au fond , in the claim that in justifying basic arithmetical axioms a thinker need appeal only to methods and principles which he already needs to appeal in order to justify paradigmatically logical truths and paradigmatically logical forms of inference. Using ideas of Gentzen to spell out what these methods and principles might include, I sketch a strategy for vindicating this logicist claim for the special case of the arithmetic of the finite cardinals.

I–R.M. Sainsbury

Abstract: Evans argued that most ordinary proper names were Russellian: to suppose that they have no bearer is to suppose that they have no meaning. The first part of this paper addresses Evans’s arguments, and finds them wanting. Evans also claimed that the logical form of some negative existential sentences involves ‘really’ (e.g. ‘Hamlet didn’t really exist’). One might be tempted by the view, even if one did not accept its Russellian motivation. However, I suggest that Evans gives no adequate account of ‘really’, and I point to unclarities in Wiggins’s similar, but distinct, attempt to use ‘really’ in the logical form of true negative existentials.

II–David Wiggins

Abstract: Evans was not wrong (i maintain) to say that the senses of genuine proper names invoke and require objects. Names in fiction or hypothesis mimic such names. Pace Evans, Sainsbury and free logicians, proper names are scopeless. (Evans’s ‘Julius’ is not a name.) Names create a presumption of existential generalization. In sentences such as ‘Vulcan does not really exist’, that presumption is bracketed. The sentence specifies by reference to story or report a concept identical with Vulcan and declares it be really uninstantiated. (The sentence, which partakes of play , is a kind of palimpsest.) It is explained why this second level view of ‘exists’ is to be preferred.

How Old Are These Bones? Putnam, Wittgenstein and Verification: Steven Gerrard

Abstract: Hilary Putnam introduced a puzzle about a citizen of the 17th century who speculates that some mysterious bones are over a million years old. I compare this situation, where the speculation is ahead of the method of carbon dating, with speculating about (1) a mathematical theorem before there is a proof, and (2) a riddle before there is an answer. All these cases are helpfully illuminated by Meno’s paradox and, especially, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics. I draw some conclusions about Wittgenstein’s methodology both in his philosophy of mathematics and his more general philosophy, focusing on the roles of local perspicuity and changing our way of looking at things.