What Are the Metaphysical Issues?

1. What Are the Metaphysical Issues? • Metaphysics: questions about the nature of reality • Nature of ultimate reality • permanence and change • appearance and reality • Nature of human reality • mind-body problem • freedom and determinism

2. Metaphysical Positions • Monism • Materialism • Idealism • Dualism

3. Conceptual Tools for Metaphysics • Simplification of complexity • Ockham's razor • Inference to the best explanation • used by both science and metaphysics

4. Ontology • Questions about what is most fundamentally real • Fundamental reality • that upon which everything else depends • that which cannot be created or destroyed

5. Metaphysical Categories • Things that are not real: eliminativist strategy • Realities reducible to more fundamental realities: reductionist strategy • Things that are fundamentally real

6. Plato’s Metaphysics • Nonphysical realities: Platonic Forms • Degrees of reality • Allegory of the cave

7. Propositions of the Mind-Body Problem • The body is a physical thing • The mind is a nonphysical thing • The mind and body interact and causally affect one another • Nonphysical things cannot causally interact with physical things • These four statements cannot all be true

8. Positions on the Mind-Body Problem • Mind-body dualism • Interactionism • Parallelism • Occasionalism • Physicalism • Identity theory (reductionism) • Eliminativism • Functionalism

9. Descartes’s Arguments for Mind-Body Dualism • Principle of the nonidentity of discernibles • Argument from doubt • Discourse on the Method • Argument from divisibility • Argument from consciousness • Meditations on First Philosophy

10. The Cartesian Compromise • Division of reality • Science’s authority in the physical realm • Religion’s authority in the spiritual realm • Interactionism

11. Physicalism: An Alternative to Dualism • Four problems of dualism: • Where is the mind-body interaction? • How does the interaction occur? • Conservation of energy? • Success of brain science?

12. The Positive Case for Physicalism • Correlation between mental events and brain states • Consciousness may be a by-product of low-level physical processes

13. Forms of Physicalism • Identity theory, or reductionism • Mental events are identical to brain events • Brain research will answer all questions about the mind • Eliminativism • Labels traditional psychological theories as folk psychology • No beliefs or desires, only brain states and processes

14. Functionalism • Minds are constituted by a certain pattern or relation between the parts of a system • Minds have multiple realizability • Mental states are defined in terms of their causal role (how they function)

15. Artificial Intelligence • Can computers think? • Turing test • Strong AI thesis: an appropriately programmed computer can think • Weak AI thesis: a computer can only simulate mental activities

16. Issues of Freedom and Determinism • How do nature/nurture, heredity/ environment affect us ? • consider identical twins, separated at birth • What is the origin of our actions? • What implication does determinism have for moral responsibility?

17. Types of Freedom • Circumstantial • ability to do what we choose • freedom from external forces • Metaphysical • free will • relates to our internal condition, not external forces • Most philosophy is concerned with metaphysical freedom

18. Positions on Freedom • Determinism • Libertarianism • Incompatibilism • Hard determinism • Compatibilism

19. Hard Determinism • Problems with libertarianism • Positive arguments for determinism • Denial of the possibility of moral responsibility

20. Objections to Libertarianism • Conflicts with the scientific world view • Requires the problematic notion of uncaused events • Fails to explain that we can influence other people's behavior

21. The Positive Case for Determinism • 1. Every event, without exception, is causally determined by prior events • 2. Human thoughts and actions are events • 3. Therefore, human thoughts and actions are, without exception, causally determined by prior events

22. Determinist Thinkers • Spinoza • pantheism • free will is an illusion • B.F. Skinner • radical behaviorism • reduction of all mental terms to scientific statements about behavioral probabilities

23. Tenets of Libertarianism • We are not determined • We do have freedom of the will • We have the capacity to be morally responsible for our actions

24. Objections to Determinism • Determinism makes an unwarranted generalization from a limited amount of evidence • Determinism undermines the notion of rationality • Determinism confuses methodological assumptions of science with metaphysical conclusions

25. Types of Antideterminism • Indeterminism • Some events are uncaused • Agency theory • Event-causation • Agent-causation • Radical existential freedom • Jean-Paul Sartre

26. Arguments for Libertarianism • Argument from introspection • Argument from deliberation • Argument from moral responsibility

27. Compatibilism • Soft determinism • We are both determined and morally responsible for our actions • Voluntary actions take place when the determining causes reside within the agent, not externally

28. Hierarchical Compatibilism (Frankfurt) • First-order desires • Second-order desires • Second-order volitions