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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: This is Philosophy
- Sprache: Englisch
Metaphysics—the philosophical study of the nature of reality—is a dynamic sub-field which encompasses many of the most fundamental and elusive questions in contemporary analytic philosophy. A concise and focused introduction to contemporary metaphysics, This is Metaphysics: An Introduction takes readers with minimal technical knowledge of the field on a guided tour of the intellectual landscape of the discipline.
Approachable and engaging, the book covers a broad range of key topics and principles in metaphysics, including classification, the nature and existence of properties, ontology, the nature of possibility and necessity, and fundamental questions concerning being and existence. Each chapter challenges readers to grapple with thought-provoking examples that build upon the seminal theoretical contributions of contemporary metaphysicians like Peter van Inwagen and David Lewis, and concludes with a “Doing Metaphysics” section encouraging readers to think through substantive metaphysical questions while weighing possible arguments and objections. A thoughtful and comprehensive introduction provides a framework for author Kris McDaniel’s pedagogical approach, and each section incorporates multi-platform online resources and plentiful footnotes to support further reading and deeper conceptual engagement.
A welcome addition to the popular This is Philosophy series, This is Metaphysics is a reader-friendly survey of metaphysics for philosophy majors, undergraduates in introductory philosophy courses, and curious members of the general public interested in investigating this expansive and enigmatic area of study.
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Table of Contents
Cover
AN INTRODUCTION TO
THIS IS METAPHYSICS
0.1 Who is This Book for?
0.2 Philosophy, Including Metaphysics, is for Everyone
0.3 An Overview of Metaphysics and Other Areas of Philosophy
0.4 Remarks for Instructors
0.5 Acknowledgments
1 CLASSIFICATION
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Two Kinds of Classification
1.3 Classification Confusions
1.4 Do Things Objectively Belong Together?
1.5 Two Questions about Classification
1.6 Classification and Properties
1.7 Doing Metaphysics
Further Reading
2 PROPERTIES
2.1 Introduction to the Metaphysics of Properties
2.2 Are Properties Theoretical Posits?
2.3 Issues in Language: Reference to Properties in Ordinary Speech
2.4 More Issues in Language: Properties as the Referents of Predicates
2.5 Issues in Metaphysics: Causation
2.6 Issues in Metaphysics: The Ontology of Events
2.7 Issues in Metaphysics: The Ontology of Material Objects
2.8 Tropes, Universals, and States of Affairs
2.9 Intrinsic and Extrinsic Properties
2.10 Perceptual Qualities
2.11 Doing Metaphysics
Further Reading
3 PARTS AND WHOLES
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The Sufficiently Stuck Together Theory
3.3 The Mind‐Dependence Theory of Composition
3.4 Life is the Answer?
3.5 Vagueness
3.6 Vagueness and Composition
3.7 A Radical Answer to the Special Composition Question: Compositional Nihilism
3.8 Another Radical Answer: Compositional Universalism
3.9 Other Questions about Parts and Wholes
3.10 Doing Metaphysics
Further Reading
4 POSSIBILITY AND NECESSITY
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Different Kinds of Possibility and Necessity
4.3 The Idea of Possible Worlds
4.4 A Case for Possible Worlds
4.5 Some Theories of the Nature of Possible Worlds
4.6 An Alternative Theory of Possible Worlds: Propositions First
4.7 Another Alternative Theory of Possible Worlds: Primitive Possible Objects
4.8 Accidental and Essential Features
4.9 Theories of Possible Worlds and Theories of Essential Features
4.10 Doing Metaphysics
Further Reading
5 TIME
5.1 Introduction to the Philosophy of Time
5.2 Methodological Issues in the Philosophy of Time
5.3 The Container View vs. the Relationalist View
5.4 Does Time Itself Change?
5.5 Time and Reasonable Emotions
5.6 How Do Things Persist through Time?
5.7 Doing Metaphysics
Further Reading
6 FREEDOM
6.1 Freedom and Why it Might Matter
6.2 The Static View and Freedom
6.3 Causal Determinism and Freedom
6.4 Compatibilism: Alternative Possibilities Compatibilism
6.5 Compatibilism 2: No Constraints Compatibilism
6.6 Indeterminism
6.7 Laws of Nature
6.8 Doing Metaphysics
Further Reading
7 META‐METAPHYSICS
7.1 Getting More Meta
7.2 The Epistemology of Metaphysics
7.3 The Philosophy of Language of Metaphysics
7.4 The Metaphysics of Metaphysics
7.5 The Ethics of Metaphysics
7.6 Doing Metaphysics
Further Reading
GLOSSARY
INDEX
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Two Puppy Pictures.
Figure 2.2 Each of A, B, C, and D is composed of exactly three parts that ar...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Two Ways to Lift a Piano.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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THIS IS PHILOSOPHY
Series editor: Steven D. Hales
Reading philosophy can be like trying to ride a bucking bronco—you hold on for dear life while “transcendental deduction” twists you to one side, “causa sui” throws you to the other, and a 300‐word, 300‐year‐old sentence comes down on you like an iron‐shod hoof the size of a dinner plate. This Is Philosophy is the riding academy that solves these problems. Each book in the series is written by an expert who knows how to gently guide students into the subject regardless of the reader’s ability or previous level of knowledge. Their reader‐friendly prose is designed to help students find their way into the fascinating, challenging ideas that compose philosophy without simply sticking the hapless novice on the back of the bronco, as so many texts do. All the books in the series provide ample pedagogical aids, including links to free online primary sources. When students are ready to take the next step in their philosophical education, This Is Philosophy is right there with them to help them along the way.
This Is Philosophy: An IntroductionSteven D. Hales
This Is Philosophy of Mind: An IntroductionPete Mandik
This Is Ethics: An IntroductionJussi Suikkanen
This Is Political Philosophy: An IntroductionAlex Tuckness and Clark Wolf
This Is Business Ethics: An IntroductionTobey Scharding
This Is MetaphysicsKris McDaniel
Forthcoming:
This Is Early Modern PhilosophyKurt Smith
This Is Environmental EthicsWendy Lee
This Is EpistemologyClayton Littlejohn and Adam Carter
This Is Bioethics: An IntroductionUdo Schuklenk
THIS IS METAPHYSICS
AN INTRODUCTION
KRIS McDANIEL
This edition first published 2020© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Kris McDaniel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: McDaniel, Kris, 1976– author.Title: This is metaphysics : an introduction / Kris McDaniel.Description: Hoboken, NJ, USA : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2020. | Series: This is philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2019056737 (print) | LCCN 2019056738 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118400777 (paperback) | ISBN 9781118400807 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781118400784 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Metaphysics.Classification: LCC BD111 .M464 2020 (print) | LCC BD111 (ebook) | DDC 110–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056737LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056738
Cover design: Wiley
Dedicated to Safira, Ranger, Nina, and Leneah, with love.
Note
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http://looksphilosophical.tumblr.com/
1CLASSIFICATION
1.1 Introduction
1.1 This chapter focuses on the common‐place activity of distinguishing and classifying objects of various kinds. You might wonder: Why start a book on metaphysics with a discussion of classification?
1.2 There are a couple of reasons. First, lurking behind this common‐place activity are a lot of metaphysical puzzles and questions! One of the cool things you’ll discover as you study metaphysics is that the world is a lot more complicated and much stranger than you initially might have thought. A good way to illustrate this is to start with something down‐to‐earth and rooted in our ordinary ways of thinking and talking. Once you see that even something that is seemingly straightforward has a tangle of puzzles hiding behind it, you’ll start to suspect that philosophical perplexities can arise about pretty much anything.
1.3 Second, the metaphysics of classification will provide a nice springboard for the discussions to follow on the metaphysics of properties (in Chapter 2) and the metaphysics of parts and wholes (in Chapter 3). These parts of metaphysics are somewhat more abstract than the more down‐to‐earth things we’ll begin with here, but they are intimately related to the metaphysics of classification, as we will see later on.
1.4 Let me give you a breakdown of this chapter. In Section 1.2, I will introduce and explain a distinction between two different ways of classifying objects: an objective and a subjective way. In Section 1.3, I will discuss some cases in which it seems that we have mistakenly taken a merely subjective classification to be an objective one. But even if we sometimes do make this sort of mistake, it does seem like we still often succeed in objectively classifying objects. Section 1.4 will present an argument for the conclusion that some things do objectively belong to each other. In Section 1.5, we will explore the question of what it takes for things to objectively belong together. This will naturally lead us to a discussion of the connection between the metaphysics of classification and the metaphysics of properties in Section 1.6. (And Chapter 2 will be focused more generally on the metaphysics of properties.) Finally, in Section 1.7, we’ll close with some further questions about classification to consider.
1.2 Two Kinds of Classification
1.5 Let’s start with something that seems easy. Think about this list of things: a cat, a dog, a kangaroo, a fish, and a loaf of bread. Suppose you were asked, “Which one of these things does not belong with the others?” I don’t think you’d have a problem answering. You’d unhesitatingly single out the loaf of bread. This wouldn’t even be a hard question for a small child. My five‐year old unhesitatingly singled out the loaf of bread too.
1.6 Suppose we take out the loaf of bread from the list and ask again, “Which one of these things does not belong with the others?” You might struggle a bit more this time, but you’d probably exclude the fish, although that isn’t the only defensible answer. For example, you might exclude the fish because each of the remaining three is a mammal. However, you might instead exclude the kangaroo on the grounds that each of the remaining three is commonly taken as a pet. (Even in Australia, it is not very common for someone to have a pet kangaroo.)
1.7 But suppose I gave you the following list of things: a neutron star, the number 2, the dream you had last night, and a blade of grass. Now the question “Which one of these does not belong with the others?” is much harder to answer. Why is this? I suggest that it is because any way of excluding one of these items from the list leaves us with a list of three things that don’t really belong together any more than the original four. And you recognize, at least implicitly, this fact.
1.8 But why do some groups of things belong together while other groups of things do not? A complete answer to this question requires some metaphysics: specifically, we need a theory that explains what belonging together amounts to in general. This theory will be a metaphysical theory of classification. (We’ll discuss this further in the Section 1.5.)
1.9 A classification of a group of things is just a way of breaking up that group of things into groups. Let’s say that a classification of things is a good way of classifying things when it breaks things into groups, and anything in one of those groups belongs with all the other things in that group but doesn’t belong with the things that are in a different group. Venn diagrams provide a good way of illustrating this idea.1 Suppose we have a group of things w, x, y, and z.
Suppose that w and x belong together and that y and z belong together, but also that no collection of exactly three of them belong together. Then a good classification would divide up our initial group of four things into two groups of two things. We could represent this classification with a picture:
In this classification w and x have been put together and separated from y and z, and y and z have also been put together.
1.10 So far, we have kept things pretty simple. One complication is that belonging together probably comes in grades or degrees. That is, some things will belong together to a greater extent than other things. Think about this list of things: me, my wife, my two daughters, and my dog Ranger. Ranger is the odd man (odd dog?) out in this list. But now consider a larger list: me, my wife, my daughters, my dog Ranger, and the number 2. Despite being even, the number 2 is the odd number out. What this shows is that although Ranger doesn’t belong in the first group as much as my daughters do, he definitely belongs in the second group much more than the number 2. So, he must belong with me, my wife, and my daughters to some extent.
1.11 What this means is that instead of focusing simply on the question of whether a specific classification is a good way of classifying, we should also consider the more general question of when a given classification is a better classification than another. We won’t have a complete theory of classification if we don’t consider this more general question.
1.12 The second complication is that there are different reasons why we judge that things belong together, and these different reasons will sometimes lead to different and apparently conflicting ways of classifying objects. But these different ways of classifying objects don’t really conflict. We already saw an illustration of this phenomenon. Let’s return to one of the lists of things that we thought about at the beginning, specifically the one that consisted of a cat, a dog, a kangaroo, and a fish. There seemed to be two equally respectable ways of breaking this list into groups. We might separate the fish from the remaining three on the grounds that the remaining three are mammals; but we may also separate the kangaroo from the remaining three on the grounds that only the remaining ones are commonly taken as pets. Is there any point in trying to decide which of these two classifications is better? Isn’t how we classify things largely dependent on what we are interested in, what we care about, what we desire, and so forth?
1.13 Sort of. There’s an important difference between the two kinds of classifications just mentioned. One of them classifies animals by looking to see whether they are related to us in some interesting social way: the classification that excludes kangaroos is based on the observations that we don’t interact with kangaroos in (some of) the ways in which we interact with dogs, cats, and fish. But it wasn’t inevitable that we don’t typically have kangaroos as pets. Imagine a possible situation in which we have kangaroos as pets instead of cats: if that possible situation had actually happened, then we probably would have felt that it was cats rather than kangaroos that do not belong on the list.
1.14 But now think about the other kind of classification, the one that excludes fish because they are not mammals. This classification isn’t based on our desires or interests, and it doesn’t classify things on the basis of how these creatures relate to us. Mammals could have existed even if no human beings had ever evolved on the planet. And mammals still would have belonged with each other in a way that cats, dogs, fish, and kangaroos do not. Moreover, we can’t easily imagine possible scenarios in which, for example, dogs fail to be mammals. We can imagine possible situations in which there are things that have the same outward physical appearance as dogs and that have similar behaviors to dogs, which aren’t themselves mammals. But that’s not the same thing as imagining a situation in which dogs aren’t mammals.
1.15 One lesson to draw from these observations is that, roughly, there can be (at least) two kinds of systems of classification. We might classify objects because we are interested in how they relate to us. We can think of these as subjective classification systems because they are driven by our interests, desires, values, and so on. But a system of classification might also classify things on a more objective basis, that is, on grounds that are independent of whether that system of classification reflects anything about how reality relates to us or what we care about. Some things objectively belong together. An objective classification system is one that classifies things together in a way that matches how they objectively belong together.
1.3 Classification Confusions
1.16 Sometimes we make mistakes about what things objectively belong together, and these mistakes are discovered only after painstaking scientific investigation. Here are some relatively straightforward examples to consider. An ordinary culinary classification might lump carrots, beets, and tomatoes into one group, while lumping oranges, apples, and grapes into another group. But from a more scientific perspective, tomatoes objectively belong more with oranges, apples, and grapes than they do carrots and beets. And as awareness of this fact has spread, how people use language to classify things has changed.2 Two hundred years ago the sentence “Tomatoes are fruits” might have seemed like a ridiculous thing to say to your average speaker of English, but that’s not the case today. Now many of us are happy to utter, “Tomatoes are fruits,” and believe that we say something true when we do. There is an interesting question of whether the word “fruit” has changed its meaning over time as a result of a greater awareness of the fact that tomatoes objectively belong more with grapes than they do with carrots. If the word has changed its meaning, then what was said two hundred years ago by “Tomatoes are not fruit” might well have been true too! But it would still have been false that tomatoes objectively belong with carrots more than they do with grapes.
1.17 A similar observation can be made about the word “fish.” Are whales fish? They used to be classified with other things that were called “fish,” but now we know that whales do not objectively belong with fish to the extent they were once thought to, and as a consequence, there is pressure not to call whales “fish.”3 One of the things that such scientific discoveries can teach us is that our beliefs about which things objectively belong together are subject to serious revision. An even more recent case is the reclassification of Pluto as not being a planet.4
1.18 Social scientists—psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and so on.—would be good people to consult if we wanted to know why people lump things together for subjective reasons. Maybe biology, zoology, animal psychology, and other sciences like them, might also play a role in helping us figure this out. And it will sometimes be a tough job. Occasionally the explanation for why a group of people ended up classifying some objects as belonging together can be so subtle that the people doing the classifying aren’t even aware of these reasons. And when this happens, sometimes people falsely believe that the things that they have subjectively lumped together really objectively belong together. As we will see in a moment, at times this can also affect how people classify each other.
1.19 Consider, for example, the practice of classifying persons on the basis of race. Many scientists believe that racial classifications are not backed up by the biological facts.5 Consider, for example, how a parent classified as belonging to one race can have a child classified as belonging to another race. The parent and child will likely have more biologically in common with each other than they would with other members of “the same race.” But as any student of the history of racism is aware, people discriminated on the basis of race because they thought that “racial classifications” grouped people into collections that objectively belonged together.6
1.20 If this is correct, then racial classifications are very subjective in the sense described earlier: racial classifications are based on contingent features of societies rather than on genuinely important objective features of the world. This seems to be a view that most people who accept the idea that race is socially constructed accept, though many augment this basic position with other philosophical theses.
1.21 Some philosophers have argued for an even stronger conclusion: there are no races. This is the position defended by the philosophers Kwame Anthony Appiah and Naomi Zack, among others.7 We’ll call this position race eliminativism. Here are the basic ideas behind race eliminativism: not all attempts at classifying entities are guaranteed to succeed. Sometimes we introduce terms to stand for groups that we initially take to objectively belong together—but because they don’t objectively belong together, we actually fail to classify things with those terms. Here’s an uncontroversial example of a failed attempt to classify people. A while ago, certain women were thought to have magical powers and were persecuted as a consequence. These persecuted women were called “witches.” According to their persecutors, not all women are witches—just those who have important characteristics in common, specifically magical abilities. The people who labeled these women “witches” thought that the women they persecuted objectively belonged together. But since there aren’t magical powers, the persecutors’ attempt to classify these women together was a colossal failure. The lesson we learn from their failure is that while there might be women who were thought to be witches, there really are no witches. Similarly, according to race eliminativism, when words that allegedly refer to races were first introduced, the people who introduced these words thought that there were really important and deep biological differences between human beings, and on the alleged basis of these differences, they attempted to objectively classify people. But these differences have proven to be either non‐existent or merely superficial. So, the attempt to objectively classify individuals on the basis of race is a failure just like the attempt to objectively classify individuals as witches. And so, according to race eliminativism, just as we learned that there are no witches, we should also conclude that there are no races.
1.22 One of the key theses of race eliminativism is that classification by race is intended to be an objective classification. And since this intent failed, the attempt to classify via race fails too. And so, there are no races. But if race eliminativism is true and there are no races, why do people talk as if there are? It is important to keep in mind the distinction I noted earlier, between two sorts of classification: one that is based on whether things objectively belong together and the other that is based on more subjective reasons. Probably the full explanation for the prevalence of classifying people on the basis of “race” will be understood only once we have better grappled with both the historical and contemporary reality of various forms of racial stratification and oppression. The fact that we do classify for subjective reasons might generate the appearance that there are races even though, according to race eliminativism, there really aren’t any.
