Autonomy

This chapter relates the philosophical concept of multiple realizability to the physics concept of universality. It discusses and responds to Elliott Sober’s defense of reductionism in the face of multiple realizability. Further, it introduces an important explanatory question (labelled AUT). This asks how systems that are heterogeneous at some micro-scale can exhibit the same pattern of behavior at the macro-scale. It is shown that reductionists do not have the resources to provide a successful answer. Two, related, answers are proposed. One involving Renormalization Group arguments, the other invoking the theory of homogenization.

Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Modality

Chapter four argues that ignoring a fundamental explanatory question has led interpreters to misunderstand Spinoza’s views on necessity, contingency, possibility, and impossibility. Although the scope of Spinoza’s necessitarianism has also been hotly debated, a central question has gone largely unasked: just what is modality, according to Spinoza? By focusing first on his analysis of necessity, we gain insight into more familiar questions of modal distribution: what exists necessarily, contingently, and so forth. Spinoza ultimately endorses a form of what might now be called anti-essentialism, according to which the modal status of some things depends partly on how those things are conceived. Hence Spinoza affirms both the genuine contingency and strict necessity of one and the same thing’s existence, depending on how it is conceived. After considering Spinoza’s defense of this account, the author turns to why Spinoza thinks we do not, in fact, adopt necessitarian perspectives on the world.

Objective Morality, Subjective Morality, and the Explanatory Question

A common presupposition in metaethical theory is that moral assessment comes in (at least) two flavors, one of which is sensitive to our epistemic circumstances, the second of which is not so sensitive. Though this thought is popular, a number of questions arise. In this paper, I limit my discussion to what I dub the "explanatory question": how one might understand the construction of subjective moral assessment given an explanatorily prior objective assessment. I argue that a proper answer to this question is important not simply for its own sake, but because it also sheds new light on important challenges to the existence of both objective and subjective moral obligations.