scholarly journals Disturbances in the Ether

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tony Rex Smith
Keyword(s):  
Physical Dependence ◽  
Counterfactual Analysis ◽  
Philosophical Practice ◽  
Causal Dependence ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Specific Concern ◽  
As If

<p>We criticise the current philosophical practice of invoking causation as a solution to various problems in various fields of philosophy. Our specific concern is that many of these solutions to problems rely on the intuition that causation is "the cement of the universe". We question whether several different analyses of causation which are supposed to substantiate this intuition (or at least are treated as if they substantiate this intuition) in fact substantiate this intuition. We begin by establishing a basic desideratum for such an analysis of causation - that causal dependence ought to track physical dependence in this universe. We investigate in turn a Lewis-style counterfactual analysis of causation, the transference analysis developed by Aronson, Fair and Heathcote, and the process analyses developed by Salmon and Dowe. Rather to our surprise, none of the analyses fulfil our basic desideratum. Although this is not in itself conclusive grounds for scepticism about causation, our results speak against casually invoking analyses of causation in order to solve particular varieties of philosophical problems.</p>

scholarly journals Disturbances in the Ether

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tony Rex Smith
Keyword(s):  
Physical Dependence ◽  
Counterfactual Analysis ◽  
Philosophical Practice ◽  
Causal Dependence ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Specific Concern ◽  
As If

<p>We criticise the current philosophical practice of invoking causation as a solution to various problems in various fields of philosophy. Our specific concern is that many of these solutions to problems rely on the intuition that causation is "the cement of the universe". We question whether several different analyses of causation which are supposed to substantiate this intuition (or at least are treated as if they substantiate this intuition) in fact substantiate this intuition. We begin by establishing a basic desideratum for such an analysis of causation - that causal dependence ought to track physical dependence in this universe. We investigate in turn a Lewis-style counterfactual analysis of causation, the transference analysis developed by Aronson, Fair and Heathcote, and the process analyses developed by Salmon and Dowe. Rather to our surprise, none of the analyses fulfil our basic desideratum. Although this is not in itself conclusive grounds for scepticism about causation, our results speak against casually invoking analyses of causation in order to solve particular varieties of philosophical problems.</p>

scholarly journals Crisis and the Poverty of Nations: Two Market Products Which Value Explains Better

1999 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Freeman
Keyword(s):  
The Universe ◽  
As If

AbstractIn Sarsi I seem to discern the firm belief that in philosophising one must support oneself on the opinion of some celebrated author, as if our minds ought to remain completely sterile and barren unless wedded to the reasoning of someone else…that is not how things are. Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze.

Emanuel Swedenborg

1869 ◽  
Vol 15 (70) ◽  
pp. 169-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Maudsley
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual World ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
The World ◽  
Emanuel Swedenborg ◽  
Moral Feeling ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Universe ◽  
As If

Few are the readers, and we cannot boast to be of those few, who have been at the pains to toil through the many and voluminous writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Indeed, it would not be far from the truth to say that there are very few persons who have thought it worth their while to study him at all seriously; he is commonly accounted a madman, who has had the singular fortune to persuade certain credulous persons that he was a seer. Nevertheless, whether lunatic or prophet, his character and his writings merit a serious and unbiased study. Madness, which makes its mark upon the world, and counts in its train many presumably sane people who see in it the highest wisdom, cannot justly be put aside contemptuously as undeserving a moment's grave thought. After all, there is no accident in madness; causality, not casualty, governs its appearance in the universe; and it is very far from being a good and sufficient practice to simply mark its phenomena, and straightway to pass on as if they belonged, not to an order, but to a disorder of events that called for no explanation. It is certain that there is in Swedenborg's revelations of the spiritual world a mass of absurdities sufficient to warrant the worst suspicions of his mental sanity; but, at the same time, it is not less certain that there are scattered in his writings conceptions of the highest philosophic reach, while throughout them is sensible an exalted tone of calm moral feeling which rises in many places to a real moral grandeur. These are the qualities which have gained him his best disciples, and they are qualites too uncommon in the world to be lightly despised, in whatever company they may be exhibited. I proceed then to give some account of Swedenborg, not purposing to make any review of his multitudinous publications, or any criticism of the doctrines announced in them with a matchless self-sufficiency; the immediate design being rather to present, by the help mainly of Mr. White's book, a sketch of the life and character of the man, and thus to obtain, and to endeavour to convey, some definite notion of what he was, what he did, and what should be concluded of him.*

A Variety of Causes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Noordhof
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Property ◽  
Causal Chain ◽  
The Other ◽  
Counterfactual Analysis ◽  
Humean Supervenience ◽  
Transitive Relation ◽  
Fundamental Type ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Natural Way

Metaphysicians often focus on what is vertically fundamental, appealing to grounding or truth-making, rather than what is horizontally fundamental: what must be common to any metaphysical picture of the universe. There is a case for causation being one such feature. But how should it be characterized? A revised semantics for counterfactuals provides the basis for a new counterfactual analysis of causation that is compatible with Humean supervenience but also appropriate for a non-Humean metaphysical framework. Causes (independently of their competitors) both make the chance of an effect very much greater than its mean background chance in the circumstances and actually influences the probability of the effect in this way at the time at which the effect occurred via a complete causal chain. Causation understood in this way is a non-transitive relation. It is neutral over the metaphysics of causes and effects but allows a natural way for events to be understood as one fundamental type of causation, the other being property causation. Although negative causal statements are true, there are no cases of negative causation. The analysis explains how causation involving substantial processes is only one variety of causation, others include double prevention. It allows for a variety of micro- and macro-properties to be the basis of the difference between cause and effect. Laws are patterns of causation realized in different ways in different metaphysical pictures. The analysis of causation characterizes a horizontally fundamental property whose modal character depends upon its different realizations.

Realisation of Self and Power

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Didier Debaise
Keyword(s):  
Final State ◽  
Actual Entity ◽  
End Point ◽  
Generic Term ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Universe ◽  
As If

The process of individuation has an end. The passage from disjunctive diversity to the unity of a new entity embodied by the subject has a conclusion, namely, the effective realisation of the entity, its full actualisation. This end point of individuation is reached following the determination of every positive and negative prehension of the entity, that is, when all of its relations with other entities have been established. It is, then, fully a perspective, a being-situated in the universe, a junction between and a unity of everything that exists. It attains, in its final state of concrescence, what Whitehead calls ‘satisfaction’. This ‘satisfaction’ is not a common end, identifiable with all the others, as if there were a pre-existing finality in individuation that would be actualised in a particular manner. It is ‘a generic term: there are specific differences between the “satisfactions” of different entities, including gradations of intensity’ (PR, 84). In the same way that every prehension is singular and belongs to the subjective orientation of every actual entity, the end of an entity is specific, it is that end for that entity.

scholarly journals Coleridge and Communication

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Bewell
Keyword(s):  
Muscular Strength ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
The One ◽  
Intelligible World ◽  
State Of Tension ◽  
Communication Breakdowns ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Do So ◽  
As If ◽  
Held Back

Although much has been written about Coleridge’s ideas concerning language, less has been said about the role that communication plays in his work, particularly his use of language as a medium for bridging the distance between himself and others. Coleridge felt that great poetry could successfully overcome this gap, and in his poetry there are moments when he felt that he was fully tuned-in to an intelligible universe created by an all-loving and all-communicating God. Such moments, when the “One Life” was revealed to him were based upon a theory of communication in which the universe was the medium of divine communication. More frequently, however, Coleridge was troubled by bad reception, by what he understood to be a failure of communication, times when he was denied complete participation in a fully intelligible world and when the gap separating himself from others and from nature appeared as a chasm. “Sometimes when I earnestly look at a beautiful Object or Landscape,” he writes in a notebook, “it seems as if I were on the brink of a Fruition still denied--as if Vision were an appetite: even as a man would feel, who having put forth all his muscular strength in an act of prosilience, at that very moment held back -- he leaps & yet moves not from his place” (Notebooks III, no 3767). At such times, Coleridge felt “held back,” wanting desperately to move forward from his sense of isolation but unable to do so. This state of tension, in the desire for complete communication in a context of communication breakdowns, characterizes Coleridge’s best writing. For Coleridge, poetry was the highest form of human communication, and the task of a poet was to use language to move his readers beyond the need for words. When communication failed, he felt that he was a failed poet. This essay will examine Coleridge’s commitment to the idea of perfect communication at the same time as it suggests that one aspect of Coleridge’s strength as a writer lies in those moments when he grappled with the fallibility of human communication and sought to build community in a world in which our relationship to others also includes isolation, misdirection, darkness, strangeness, and ghosts.

Materialism and Spiritualism

1917 ◽  
Vol 63 (263) ◽  
pp. 494-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Maudsley
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Complete Regeneration ◽  
As If

Of all the consoling illusions which mankind have harboured to irradiate, hearten, seduce and dupe them in their onward way to the perfection, universal peace and brotherhood which they hope and expect to approach, if not attain—after the devastating deluge of this long war for an unknown Divine event is over—none is perhaps more wildly irrational than that of a complete regeneration of human nature, and the coming of a perfect transformation scene on the troubled earth; for all the world as if the method of vital progress which has been since the beginning of life is appointed to come abruptly to a stop, or to be reversed; with the optimistic belief, too, that life shall be thereby exalted and glorified immeasurably. Could the fatuity of egotistic optimism go farther? Was the universe specially created to be a stage on which man—equally with other species and the rest of animate nature—lives, suffers, decays, and dies, might play his transitory part? Was that the illusive goal which at its outset launched it on its transcendental aim and its mysterious career, along which it has groaned since in long protracted travail? Naturally in that matter the devotees of religion believe the most, hope the most, cry aloud the most; otherwise their faith might be rudely shaken.

Simplicity and Theology

1996 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Fawkes ◽  
Tom Smythe
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Order ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Cosmological Argument ◽  
Not Given ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Basic Physics ◽  
Richard Swinburne ◽  
The Universe ◽  
As If

Richard Swinburne has given a defense of arguments for the existence of God (and in particular of teleological arguments) in his book The Existence of God (1979/1991). This paper argues that such theistic arguments fail, and poses some general problems for theistic arguments. Swinburne's use of a principle of simplicity is not given adequate justification and, if justified, works against theism. There are adequate rebuttals to Swinburne's arguments that depend upon there being few particles of basic physics, universal laws of nature, cogent cosmological argument, and temporal order in the universe. Theistic arguments falter on malleability, on going well beyond evidence, on anthropomorphism, on treating consistency as if it were evidence or explanation, on selective and inconsistent use of principles, and on a lack of any serious attempt to disprove hypotheses. All of this serves to support the conclusion suggested by Hume's posthumous theological writings that theistic arguments are so malleable, profligate, overreaching, equivocal, anthropomorphic, selective, inconsistent, and uncritical as to be inept.

Life, meaning of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Life Meaning ◽  
Philosophical Discussion ◽  
Central Topic ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Universe ◽  
As If

This is an obscure yet central topic in philosophy. Often associated with the question whether human beings are part of a larger or divine purpose, the question,‘What is the meaning of life?’ seems to invite a religious answer. Much philosophical discussion, however, questions the necessity of this association. Attention to the inevitability of death has often seemed to make life’s meaning problematic, but it is not obvious how immortality could make the difference between meaning and its absence. The theme of absurdity runs through much discussion of those who believe the universe to be indifferent. Though our lives have no significance, they argue, we must live as if they do. In the face of this absurdity, some advocate suicide, others defiance, others irony. One may also turn away from the issue of cosmic significance, and look for meaning elsewhere.

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