Constitutivity in Flavour Perception

Within contemporary philosophy of perception, it is commonly claimed that flavour experiences are paradigmatic examples of multimodal perceptual experiences. In fact, virtually any sensory system, including vision and audition, is believed to influence how we experience flavours. However, there is a strong intuition, often expressed in these works, that not all of these sensory systems make an equal contribution to the phenomenology of flavour experiences. More specifically, it seems that the activities of some sensory systems are constitutive for flavour perception while others merely influence how we experience flavours. This paper aims to answer the question regarding the constitutive factors of flavour perception in a twofold way. First, a theoretical framework is developed, relying on debates regarding constitutivity in analytic metaphysics and philosophy of science, which defines the stronger and weaker senses in which the activities of sensory systems may be constitutive for flavour perception. Second, relying on empirical results in flavour science, the constitutive status of activities related to distinct sensory systems in the context of flavour perception is investigated.

Dreams of a Final Theory T

The grander metaphysical schemes popular in Hertz’s era often suppressed conceptual innovation in manifestly unhelpful ways. In counterreaction, Hertz and his colleagues stressed the raw pragmatic advantages of “good theory” considered as a functional whole and rejected the armchair meditations upon individual words characteristic of the metaphysical imperatives they spurned. Rudolf Carnap’s later rejection of all forms of “metaphysics” attempts to broaden these methodological tenets to a wider canvas. In doing so, the notion of an integrated, axiomatizable “theory” became the shaping tenet within our most conception of how the enterprise of “rigorous conceptual analysis” should be prosecuted. Although Carnap hoped to suppress all forms of metaphysics, large and small, through these means, in more recent times, closely allied veins of “theory T thinking” have instead encouraged a revival of grand metaphysical speculation that embodies many of the suppressive doctrines that Hertz’s generation rightly resisted (I have in mind the school of “analytic metaphysics” founded by David Lewis). The proper corrective to these inflated ambitions lies in directly examining the proper sources of descriptive effectiveness in the liberal manner of a multiscalar architecture.

Forms and Structure in Plato's Metaphysics

This book investigates the thought of two of the most influential philosophers of antiquity, Plato and his predecessor Anaxagoras, with respect to their metaphysical accounts of objects and properties. It introduces a fresh perspective on these two thinkers’ ideas, displaying the debt of Plato’s theory to Anaxagoras’s, and principally arguing that their core metaphysical concept is overlap; overlap between properties and things in the world. Initially Plato endorses Anaxagoras’s model of constitutional overlap, and subsequently develops qualitative overlap. Overlap is the crux to our understanding of Plato’s theory of participation of objects in Forms; of his account of relatives without relations; of the role of Forms as causes; of the transcendent normativity of Forms; of the metaphysics of necessity; and of the role of the Great Kinds and of the paradeigma in the development of Plato’s thought. This book shows Plato as ground-breaking in the history of metaphysics, in different ways from those acknowledged so far, and with respect to more metaphysical questions than had been hitherto appreciated; for example, Plato’s treatment of structure as a property of things, and his introduction of the first ever account of metaphysical emergence. In addition to these results, the book makes Anaxagoras’s and Plato’s systems philosophically accessible to us, today’s philosophers, by applying conceptual tools from analytic metaphysics to the study of ancient metaphysics. In this way, the book brings Anaxagoras’s and Plato’s ideas to bear on todays’ philosophical discussions and opens up new venues of research for current philosophical discussions.

Metaphysics

This chapter introduces some central issues and themes in feminist philosophical engagements with metaphysics. It provides an outline of what feminist metaphysics typically deals with and how to understand what this putative sub-discipline of metaphysics aims to achieve. One issue that has been increasingly discussed is whether feminist and “mainstream” metaphysics are compatible. The paper considers this question and examines whether one prominent strand of contemporary analytic metaphysics, Frank Jackson’s “serious metaphysics,” undermines feminist metaphysics. In so doing, the paper first presents in more detail themes central to feminist metaphysics. Next it outlines Jackson’s view. Finally, the paper will consider the compatibility of feminist and “serious” metaphysics, concluding that feminist metaphysics both is and is not compatible with Jackson’s metaphysics, depending on how we understand his project. Nevertheless, the paper suggests that this may not be because feminist metaphysicians are misguided in some sense; rather, issues internal to Jackson’s view generate the gap.

Cien años de Metafísica dentro de la tradición filosófica analítica. Introducción a la sección monográfica sobre metafísica analítica contemporánea

Introduction to the monographic section on contemporary analytic metaphysics

Realism in Theology and Metaphysics

Since the early 2000s, increasing attention has been paid in two separate disciplines to questions about realism and ontological commitment. The disciplines are analytic metaphysics on the one hand, and theology on the other. Chapter 1 discusses two arguments for the conclusion that realism in theology and metaphysics—that is, a realist treatment of doctrines in theology and metaphysics—is untenable. The first is due to Peter Byrne, the second to Bas van Fraassen. The chapter concludes that practitioners of metaphysics and theology ought simply to ignore this conclusion. Those who are already sceptical of theology or metaphysics or both will find in the objections plenty to agree with. But they should not convince the unconvinced.

What Quine (and Carnap) Might Say about Contemporary Metaphysics of Time

This chapter explores the relations between Quine’s and Carnap’s metaontological stances on the one hand, and contemporary work in the metaphysics of time on the other. Contemporary metaphysics of time, like analytic metaphysics in general, grew out of the revival of the discipline that Quine’s critique of the logical empiricists made possible. At the same time, the metaphysics of time has in some respects strayed far from its Quinean roots. This chapter examines some likely Quinean and Carnapian reactions to elements of the contemporary scene. The main claim is that contemporary temporal metaphysics is characterized by a degree of metaphysical seriousness that goes beyond anything found in either Carnap or Quine. The chapter also suggests that there are affinities between Carnapian approaches to temporal ontology and deflationary attitudes towards the question of whether time passes.

The Discarded Mind: From Divine Ideas to Secular Concepts

SummaryThis article proposes an overdue corrective to declinist genealogies of modernity that trace a trajectory from the participatory ontology of late-antique and high-scholastic metaphysics – in which created reality is taken to exemplify patterns in God’s creative blueprint – to a nominalist ontology of discrete, singular particulars whose unity and intelligibility is grounded only in the linguistic capacities of the human subject. It does so by advancing two connected historical claims. First, the shift should be understood less in terms of the substitution of universals for vocal signifiers, as historical accounts of the rise of nominalism have tended to argue, but rather in terms of the slow substitution of divine ideas for human concepts. Second, from the earliest origins of the split between continental and analytic philosophy, the shift from divine intellectualism to secular conceptualism generated sceptical threats both for the phenomenological tradition – crystallized most dramatically in the dilemma of ‘correlationism’ that variously occupies Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Quentin Meillassoux – but equally acutely for analytic metaphysics, from Frege’s concepts and Russell’s universals to Michael Dummett’s semantic verificationism. The article concludes that for all the differences between these stances, they are forms of ersatz participatory realism that each endorse an intellectualist account of reality free of the theological commitments that once underpinned it, even though this came at the cost of a wholesale rejection of realism.