Metaphysics

The following passage gives the topic for a recent essay contest sponsored by another professional journal of philosophy.
"Philosophers of different stripes have been attracted to an Eleatic Principle: to be real is to possess a power to affect (or to be affected by) other things. On such a view, science aims to identify powers of the fundamental entities and show how these can account for powers possessed by objects made up of those fundamental entities. Were this so, intrinsic properties of concrete objects would be powers; saying what something is would involve saying what it could do and what could be done to it."
This paper is an investigation of this “Eleatic Principle”—“to be real is to possess a power to affect (or to be affected by) other things”—and what it implies about and for science. Preliminary to that investigation, I trace the history of this idea (from Democritus, through Locke, to present day quantum theory) in order to get clear on two questions which arise from what is said in the paragraph above: Who are the “philosophers of different stripes” that have been attracted to this principle; and why have they been attracted to it? This leads to an investigation of where the language of “explanation” and “description” fits (or doesn’t fit) in physics, showing the extent to which the Eleatic Principle about powers can (or cannot) be of help to naturalists in saying what entities are real. Finally, I show that this “Eleatic Principle,” as promising as it might seem for giving natural science a firm metaphysical basis, turns out to be nonsense.

Many in the current legal culture perceive religious reasoning as irrational, as well as divisive and dangerous. Both legal scholars as well as state and federal judges agree that this perception affects the outcome of both free exercise and establishment cases. The two sides differ in that one side believes that to treat all religious claims as irrational, divisive, and dangerous is unjust; whereas, the other side thinks that this caricature is correct and that it needs to be
enforced.

Throughout the course of this paper, I attempt to provide a new means for interpreting Anaxagoras’ cosmogony by way of a brief but formal analysis of phenomenological temporality. By drawing primarily on Robert Sokolowski's analysis of the three domains of temporality (transcendent time, immanent time, and internal consciousness, respectively), in addition to the formal structure of the living present, I argue that Anaxagoras' Mind or _nous_ can be radically reinterpreted to accommodate, explain, and viably account for its characterization as pre-_kosmic_, "ruler of all things," an originary source of motion, as well as how we can avoid an apparent contradiction or paradox regarding Mind as a the only exception to his third principle: namely, that there is a Portion of everything in everything. After providing a critical exposition of Anaxagoras’ system and phenomenological temporality, I proceed by temporally analyzing the Eleatic notion of genesis and perishing in favor of Anaxagoras’ rejection of them, showing them to lead to strange paradoxes, and his rejection (as well as Parmenides’) to be well founded. I subsequently offer suggestions and analyses concerning potential reinterpretations of Anaxagoras’ Basic Ingredients, Portions, Seeds, and finally Mind via temporality. While much of this may be dismissed for various reasons by traditional pre-Socratic scholars, the goal of this paper is to challenge the physicalist, reductionist, and literalist interpretations of Anaxagoras that have dominated the literature, as well as open them up to renewed criticism and philosophical examination.

Accompagnata fin dal precoce esordio accademico da un’aura di genialità, la figura di Saul Kripke è una delle più aneddotiche, affascinanti e discusse della filosofia contemporanea di orientamento analitico. A partire dai primi anni sessanta, le sue idee hanno segnato una svolta, portando alla ribalta nuovi temi e problemi. Allo stesso tempo, l’opera di Kripke risulta spesso ostica per i non addetti ai lavori perché si avvale di argomenti mirati sottili e profondi, contenuti in un numero esiguo di testi, e si snoda lungo alcuni passaggi tecnici. In questo volume vengono presentati per la prima volta al pubblico italiano, in modo introduttivo e sistematico, i principali risultati filosofici degli scritti di Kripke, suddivisi per aree tematiche: logica, filosofia del linguaggio, metafisica.

A menudo se argumenta que la dependencia construida en términos de
«existencia» y «modalidad» no captura el en qué consiste la «dependencia ontológica
», principalmente porque ésta correlaciona ciertas entidades irrelevantemente
y, porque además, ella ha de satisfacer ciertas restricciones formales
de orden y hay, presuntamente, varios contraejemplos que demuestran que este
orden es infringido. La pretensión de esta contribución es argumentar que
la mayoría de objeciones, quizá no todas ellas, gozan de una aceptación inmerecida
sólo plausible si se descualifica la modalidad metafísica o se hacen
distinciones de razón y no en la realidad, inter alia.