I’ve posted a draft of my commentary on Kathrin Koslicki’s The Structure of Objects (OUP, 2008). The commentary will be published in a special issue of the Italian journal Humana.Mente. The issue is on Composition, Counterfactuals and Causation, and is edited by Massimiliano Carrara, Roberto Ciuni, and Giorgio Lando. Other contributors include Andrea Borghini, Louis deRosset, Ned Hall, Henry Laycock, Giuliano Torrengo, and others. I’ve linked to the penultimate version of my commentary, comments are welcome! In her book Koslicki presents a neo-Aristotelian account of composition; my review compares this account with the more traditional Lewisian approach.

After some expected delays, my Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics volume (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) has finally progressed into production! There are still some things that need to be sorted out and I have no idea how long the copy editing will take — that’s entirely up to CUP — but I hope to see the book in print well before the year is over. Since any major changes are unlikely at this point, I dare to publicize the full table of contents (below). I may make (parts of) the introduction available later, but for now this will be the teaser!

1. Tuomas E. Tahko: Introduction
2. Kit Fine: What Is Metaphysics?
3. Tuomas E. Tahko: In Defence of Aristotelian Metaphysics
4. Tim Crane: Existence and Quantification Reconsidered
5. Eric T. Olson: Identity, Quantification, and Number
6. Gary Rosenkrantz: Ontological Categories
7. Alexander Bird: Are Any Kinds Ontologically Fundamental?
8. John Heil: Are Four Categories Two Too Many?
9. Peter Simons: Four Categories – and More
10. Joshua Hoffman: Neo-Aristotelianism and Substance
11. Louis M. Guenin: Developmental Potential
12. Storrs McCall: The Origin of Life and the Definition of Life
13. Kathrin Koslicki: Essence, Necessity, and Explanation
14. David S. Oderberg: No Potency without Actuality: The Case of Graph Theory
15. E. J. Lowe: A Neo-Aristotelian Substance Ontology: Neither Relational Nor Constituent

Cannabis: What Were We Just Talking About?

The latest addition to the Wiley-Blackwell Philosophy for Everyone series is now out: Cannabis: What Were We Just Talking About?. I’ve got a paper in the volume as well, it’s entitled ‘Reefer Madness: Cannabis, the Individual, and Public Policy‘. You can buy the volume from Amazon (but you can download my paper from the previous link as well). The volume is edited by Dale Jaquette. I haven’t got my complimentary copy yet, so I haven’t read the other papers, but some of the titles certainly look interesting.

I’ve got the Beer & Philosophy volume from the same series and might also get the Wine & Philosophy, Whisky & Philosophy, and Running & Philosophy volumes. The idea is that these are accessible to the public, and I think that Wiley-Blackwell are hoping to sell a good few copies. My own contribution isn’t particularly ‘sexy’, it’s more of a survey article about the implications of cannabis use from the point of view of the individual on one hand and the society on the other hand. Just a bit of fun for me really, as I wrote a couple of papers about drug policy when I was still in high school and I thought it would be fun to return to the topic with a more rigorous touch.

I was pleased to hear recently that a volume edited by my friend Philip Goff, who is currently at the University of Hertfordshire, has been accepted for publication by Palgrave-Macmillan. The volume is called ‘Spinoza on Monism’ and it combines historical work on Spinoza with contemporary work on monism. What makes me especially happy about it is that myself and a colleague of mine from Durham, Donnchadh O’Conaill (who has his viva today!) are also contributing a joint paper to the volume. Our contribution is entitled ‘Priority Monism and Conceptual Pluralism’, and is effectively a reply to Jonathan Schaffer’s (who is also contributing) paper, ‘Monism: the Priority of the Whole’. Other contributors include Terry Horgan and Galen Strawson.

We look at Schaffer’s reply to the so called ‘commonsense argument’ against monism due to Russell, who claimed that pluralism is favoured by commonsense. Schaffer argues that Russell’s case against monism is based on a misinterpretation: (priority) monism does not suggest that only one thing exists, but rather that only one thing is fundamental. Schaffer asks us to think of a heap; the grains of sand in the heap would seem to be prior to the whole, the heap. But a heap is not an integrated whole, rather, it is a mere aggregate. So, even if commonsense suggests that in the case of the heap the parts are prior to the whole, there may be other cases where the whole is prior to the parts, such as a circle and its semicircles—here commonsense would seem to suggest that the circle must be prior. Accordingly, Schaffer (p. 12) turns the commonsense argument to its head:

1. According to commonsense, integrated wholes are prior to their arbitrary portions.
2. According to commonsense, the cosmos is an integrated whole.
3. According to commonsense, the many proper parts are arbitrary portions of the cosmos.
4. According to commonsense, the cosmos is prior to its many proper parts.

We wish to challenge premise 3. Schaffer defends this premise as follows: ‘Commonsense appreciates that there are many ways to carve the world. Consider all the ways that one may slice a pie, or all the ways of drawing lines on a map. There seems no objective ground for carving things in just one way’ (p. 12). This line of thought bears some similarity to what Putnam and Dummett have suggested, i.e. the idea of conceptual relativity/pluralism and the view of reality as an amorphous lump, respectively. We suspect that there is something wrong with line of thought. The position Putnam and Dummett reject is roughly that there is a complete scheme (CS) – a way of carving up the universe such that (i) every portion so carved is independent of all and any parochial interests, and (ii) every object which can be said to exist is a portion so carved. No scheme can possibly meet both (i) and (ii) – in particular, there are many objects which exist but whose specifications are dependent on our parochial interests (e.g. interest rates, moral patients, nonrepresentational artwork, music).

This much is correct in the line of thought at hand, but even if we cannot have a complete scheme, we might be able to have something very much like it, call it a near-complete scheme (NCS) – a way of carving up the universe such that (i) every portion so carved is non-parochial, and (ii) every object which can be said to exist is either a portion so carved, or is ontologically dependent on some such portion or combination of portions. An NCS keeps the first part of the CS, but sacrifices the second, while nonetheless holding to an important asymmetry between the objects it picks out and the objects which other, parochial schemes pick out – it captures the sense we have that interest rates, music, moral patients and so on all depend for their existence on the existence of things which are not themselves interest rates, music or moral patients, and in many cases do not require the existence of interest rates etc. in order for themselves to exist.

We will offer two arguments in favour of a NCS: an ontological and a semantic one. The ontological argument suggests that there are dependency relations such that if certain macro-physical phenomena exist, such as nonrepresentational artworks, or indeed any such macro-physical objects, then there must be some underlying physical order – non-arbitrary micro-physical phenomena – which is necessary for the existence of those macro-physical objects. The semantic argument suggests that you can slice the pie in as many different ways as you like, but in order to be aware that what you are doing is slicing a pie which can be sliced in many other ways, your conception of the pie cannot be just ‘what I have when I put these slices together’ – precisely because you can slice the pie in many other ways, this description, while correct, isn’t sufficient – it fails to capture the independence of the pie from any particular way of slicing it.

The upshot of this paper is a clear challenge for Schaffer’s defence of priority monism against the commonsense argument. If we are right, it seems that the commonsense argument can stand its ground.

That’s effectively the abstract of the paper, but we still have to write it!

UPDATE: This volume has now been published!

I have hinted towards a project that I’ve been working on in a few previous posts to this blog, and I am now happy to finally be able to advertise the project in detail. It is an edited volume entitled Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics, and I have just been offered a contract for this volume by Cambridge University Press.

The volume brings together 14 new essays from leading philosophers working in, or at least sympathetic to what might be called ‘Aristotelian’ metaphysics. ‘Aristotelian’ in this context should not be taken to refer to Aristotle’s metaphysics, this is not a historical volume on Aristotle’s philosophy. The label merely refers to a certain conception of philosophy and metaphysics, perhaps best described with the idea of metaphysics as a ‘first philosophy’, that is, metaphysics as prior to science, or as a study of the most fundamental structure of reality. It should be noted however that not all the contributors necessarily commit to this type of view, but they do all take it seriously. Accordingly, to a certain extent this is a volume on the methodology of philosophy and metaphysics, although these matters will not necessarily be discussed explicitly. However, the motivation behind this volume is exactly to showcase this conception of metaphysics and to contrast it with a more deflationary conception of metaphysics (and its methods) which could perhaps be called ‘Quinean’. The list of contributors is as follows:

• Professor Alexander Bird, University of Bristol
• Professor Tim Crane, University of Cambridge
• Professor Kit Fine, New York University
• Dr. Louis M. Guenin, Harvard University
• Professor John Heil, Washington University
• Professor Joshua Hoffman, University of North Carolina
• Dr. Kathrin Koslicki, University of Colorado
• Professor E. J. Lowe, Durham University
• Professor Storrs McCall, McGill University
• Professor David Oderberg, University of Reading
• Professor Eric Olson, University of Sheffield
• Professor Gary Rosenkrantz, University of North Carolina
• Professor Peter Simons, Trinity College Dublin
• Dr. Tuomas E. Tahko, Durham University

In addition, I will write an introduction to the volume. Although this is not a volume on Aristotle’s metaphysics, many of the themes of the volume are familiar from, or inspired by Aristotelian metaphysics, specifically: ontological categories, the notion of substance, essence, identity, ontological dependence, and the ontology of species. Some of the contributions defend neo-Aristotelian accounts of the topics. Other proposed topics, which also relate to Aristotelian themes, include quantification, natural kinds, persistence, and powers. I will provide more details about the contents of the volume at a later stage.

I am hoping to get the volume together some time during summer 2010 and hopefully it will be out soon after that. I am grateful to Dr. Hilary Gaskin from Cambridge University Press for her support during the early stages of the project.

In other news, my article ‘On the Modal Content of A Posteriori Necessities’ has now been published online at Wiley InterScience. E-mail me for a pdf-offprint if you haven’t got institutional access to Theoria. Or simply download the penultimate version from my papers section.