Metafysik Flashcards
Abundant ontology
an ontology that posits a relatively large number of types of entities.
Abundant theory of universals (or properties)
a version of realism about universals (or properties) that posits a relatively large number of distinct universals (or properties); in the extreme case, a universal (or property) corresponding to any term that is applied to a multiplicity of entities.
Actualism
the view that everything that exists actually exists, nothing is merely possible.
A-features
tensed features of events such as their happening in the past, present, or future.
Agent causation
the view that human agents are sometimes causes.
Alexander’s dictum
the entities that exist are all and only those that possess causal powers.
A-series
an ordering of events in terms of their being past (or more past), present, or future (or more future).
A-theory of time
the view that the A-facts are not reducible to the Bfacts.
B-features
tenseless yet temporal features of events, e.g. one event’s happening five years before or after another.
Block universe view
the combination of the B-theory of time and eternalism.
Brutal composition
the view that there is no true, interesting, and finite answer to the Special Composition Question.
B-series
an ordering of events in terms of their dates and times and permanent relations of being earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with each other.
B-theory of time
the view that the A-facts of time are reducible to the B-facts.
Categorical features
features that just concern what an object is like actually in itself at a certain time.
Class nominalism
the view that properties are to be identified with the classes of objects that instantiate them.
Compatibilism
the view that free will is compatible with determinism.
Conceptualism
the view that universals exist, however they are entities that depend on our mind’s grasp of them.
Contingent
what is neither necessary nor impossible.
Conventionalism
a position that seeks to reduce modal claims to facts about what follows or does not follow from the conventions of our language.
Conventionalism
a position that seeks to reduce modal claims to facts about what follows or does not follow from the conventions of our language.
Counterfactual
a conditional asserting what would have been the case had things gone differently than how we suppose they actually go.
Counterfactual theory of causation
a theory that reduces facts about causation to facts about what would have happened in various counterfactual circumstances.
De dicto modality
concerns the modal status of propositions (or dictums), whether they are possible, necessary, or contingent.
De re modality
concerns the modal status of features of individuals, such as whether a certain feature of an individual is essential or contingent.
Determinism
the position that the laws are such that given any state of the universe, one can use them to predict with certainty what the state of the universe will be at any other time.
Diachronic identity
identity over time.
Dispositional features
features about how an object might behave in various situations.
Efficient cause
what brings an object or event into being.
Endurantism
the view that what persistence amounts to is strict numerical identity over time.
Epiphenomenon
an event that is the result of another event but that has no effects of its own.
Epistemicism
the view that vagueness is ignorance; it is not a matter of fundamental indeterminacy in the world or indeterminacy in what our words or concepts apply to, but our ignorance about what our words or concepts apply to.
Epistemic possibility
something that is compatible with everything that one knows.
Ersatz modal realism
the view that there are possible worlds (worlds that can play a similar role to the concrete worlds of the modal realist), but that these are not additional universes in the same sense as our universe.
Essentialism
the view that objects themselves, independently of any ways we may categorize them, have certain properties necessarily.
Essential properties (essences)
properties that hold of an individual by necessity that make them the kinds of things they are.
Eternalism
the view that past, present, and future objects and events are equally real.
Exdurantism (the stage view)
identifies the familiar material objects we ordinarily think of as persisting with temporary stages.
Existentialism
the view that it is the kind of things we do that determines our essences, the kind of people we are. We do not possess innate essences that determine who we are and what we will do.
External time
distinguished from personal time in David Lewis’s account of time travel, it is time itself.
Fictionalism
what is required for the truth of sentences in a given domain is to be understood by analogy with truths of fiction.
Final cause
the purpose or goal for which an object exists or why it is the way it is at a given time.
Forms
the universals that constitute the fundamental entities of Plato’s ontology.
Four dimensionalism
the doctrine of temporal parts, the view that in addition to spatial parts, objects have temporal parts.
Framework (Carnapian)
a linguistic system including rules of grammar and meaning.
Frankfurt case
a case in which intuitively one acts freely and so is morally responsible for an action, and yet one did not have the ability to do otherwise.
Grounding
the relation that one set of facts bears to another set of facts when the one metaphysically explains the other.
Growing block theory
the view that past and present objects and events are real; future objects and events are not.
Hard determinism
the view that free will is incompatible with determinism and so human beings lack free will.
Hard incompatibilism
the view that free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism and so free will is impossible.
Humeanism about laws
the view that the facts about the laws of nature are reducible to facts about regularities in what happens in our universe.
Hylomorphism
the Aristotelian view that substances are complex objects made of both matter (hyle) and form (morphe¯).
Identity of Indiscernibles
a metaphysical principle stating that necessarily, if any objects are qualitative duplicates, then they are identical.
Immanent
an entity that is located in space and time, where it is instantiated.
Incompatibilism
the view that free will is incompatible with determinism.
Indeterminism
the denial of determinism.
Indispensability argument
an argument for realism (Platonism) about mathematical entities from the premises that (1) we should be committed to all and only the entities that are indispensable to our best scientific theories, and (2) the claim that mathematical entities are indispensable to our best scientific theories.
Instantiation
the relation between a property and an entity that has that property.
Intrinsic properties
properties objects have just in virtue of how they are in themselves, not how they are in relation to other things.
Leibniz’s law
the metaphysical principle that necessarily, if a and b are identical, then they must share all of the same properties.
Libertarianism
the view that free will is incompatible with determinism and so determinism is false.
Linguistic ersatzism
a form of ersatz modal realism that interprets possible worlds to be sentences or other linguistic entities.
Linguistic (or semantic) vagueness
vagueness that is the result of semantic indecision; there not being facts to determine precisely in all cases what our terms apply to.
Logical positivism
a movement in philosophy originating in Austria and Germany in the 1920s; a movement critical of metaphysics, arguing that all knowledge of the world must originate in sense experience and logic.
Logical Possibility
what does not entail any contradiction.
Logicism
the view that mathematics is reducible to logic.
Maximal property
a property F is maximal if large parts of an F are not themselves Fs.
Mereological atom
an object lacking any proper parts.
Mereological nihilism
the view that there are no mereologically complex objects, only simples.
Mereological relations
part/whole relations.
Mereological sum
the mereological sum of some objects x1, x2, . . ., xn is the object that contains x1, x2, . . ., xn as parts.
Mereological universalism
the view that composition occurs for any spatially disjoint objects whatsoever.
Meta-ontology
the study of what one is doing, or what one should be doing, when one is engaged in an ontological debate.
Metaphysical vagueness
vagueness that results from how the world is objectively, not how we think or talk about it; fundamental indeterminacy in what exists or what features things have.
Mind-body dualism
the view that there are two kinds of substances, minds (mental substances) and bodies (material substances).
Modal claims
those that express facts about what is possible, impossible, necessary, or contingent.
Modal logic
the branch of logic that represents modal claims.
Modal properties
properties having to do with what is possible, impossible, necessary, or contingent.
Modal realism
the view that in addition to the actual world, there exist other alternative universes, possible worlds, just as real as our own; and that it is in virtue of the nature of these universes that our modal claims are true or false.
Moving spotlight view
a view that combines eternalism with the Atheory of time.
Naturalism
the view that it is within science itself that reality is to be identified and described.
Natural kind
a group of objects in which each member of the group shares some objective, mind-independent similarity.
Nominalism
- the view that there are no such things as abstract entities; 2. the view that there are no such things as universals; 3. the view that there are no such things as mathematical entities.
Nomological possibility or necessity
possibility or necessity according to the laws of nature.
Numerical identity (or identity in the strict sense)
oneness, the sense of ‘a is identical to b’ meaning that a and b are the same object, that they are one.
Objection from Coextension
an argument against class nominalism that there are more properties than those that may be recognized by the class nominalist, since two predicates may have the same extension and yet refer to two distinct properties.
Ockham’s Razor
the principle that one should not multiply one’s ontological commitments beyond necessity.
One Over Many
an argument for realism about universals that starts from a premise about some similarities between a group of objects and concludes that there is a universal (a one) that runs through these individual objects (the many).
Ontological commitments
the types of entities one ought to believe in, given the sentences he or she accepts.
Ontological dependence
when one entity depends on another for its continued existence.
Ontology
- the study of what there is; 2. a particular theory about the types of entities there are.
Openness of the future
the view that there are not any determinate facts about the future.
Origins essentialism
the view that the origins of material objects and organisms are essential to them.
Ostrich nominalism
a version of nominalism that denies the existence of properties and refuses to answer the question of what it is in virtue of which objects are similar or appear to have certain features.
Particular
any entity that may not be multiply instantiated.
Perdurantism (the worm view)
the view that material objects persist by having temporal parts at different times.
Personal time
distinguished from external time in David Lewis’s account of time travel, elapsed time as measured by the normal behavior of physical objects ticks of a watch, aging processes of human beings, etc.
Physicalism
the view that physics alone can provide a complete description of what there is in our world and what it is like.
Platonism
- the view that there are such things as the Platonic Forms; 2. the view that there are such things as abstract, mathematical entities.
Possibilism
the view that at least some entities are not actual, but merely possible.
Possible worlds analysis of modality
an analysis of claims about possibility and necessity in terms of what is true at various possible worlds (including the actual world)
Predicate nominalism
a view denying the existence of properties. Predicates may be satisfied or not satisfied by objects, but there need be no property that exists to explain this fact
Presentism
the view that only presently existing objects and events are real.
Primitivist theory of causation
a theory according to which causal facts are not reducible to any noncausal facts, including facts about regularities, laws, counterfactuals, or probabilities.
Principle of charity
a convention of philosophical debate to, when reasonable, try to interpret one’s opponent’s claims as true and her arguments as valid.
Principle of naturalistic closure
the principle that any metaphysical claim to be taken seriously at a time should be motivated by the service it would perform in showing how two or more scientific hypotheses, at least one of which is drawn from fundamental physics, jointly explain more than what is explained by the hypotheses taken separately.
Problem of temporary intrinsics
a problem raised for endurantism by David Lewis, who argued that the endurantist cannot account for change in an object’s intrinsic properties.
Problem of the Many
a philosophical problem about the existence and identity of material objects introduced by the philosopher Peter Unger in 1980. The problem stems from the fact that ordinary material objects (like persons, rocks, tables, and stars) seem not to have well-defined physical boundaries. There are several precisely defined objects with determinate boundaries that may be associated with any ordinary material object. This raises the question of which if any of these precisely defined objects it is identical to.
Proper part
x is a proper part of y just in case x is a part of y and x is not identical to y.
Protocol statement
a statement that may be directly verified by sense experience.
Qualitative identity
the sense of ‘a is identical to b’ meaning that a and b share all of the same qualities (the same color, same shape, same size, etc.).
Realism about universals
the view that universals exist and they are mind-independent entities.
Realism about universals
the view that universals exist and they are mind-independent entities.
Realization
one object or objects realize another when the former plays the role of implementing the latter, e.g. when some hardware components implement a particular program.
Reference class problem
this is the problem that the probability we assign to an event seems to depend on our way of conceptualizing it (placing it against a reference class) on a given occasion. This may vary depending on the context making it difficult to say what is the probability of the event.
Regimentation
the procedure of representing statements in symbolic logic to make it as clear as possible what follows from those statements.
Regularity theory of causation
a theory of causation that explains causal relations in terms of the regular occurrence of patterns of events.
Self-forming actions
important actions in the life of a person that decide the kind of person he or she will be.
Semantic ascent
when, in order to address a question, a philosopher “ascends to the semantic plane,” addressing first a question about the meaning of certain key terms in the original question.
Semantic theory
an account of a proposition’s or set of propositions’ meanings and truth conditions.
Shrinking block theory
the view that present and future objects and events are real; past objects and events are not.
Social kind
a group of objects in which each member of the group shares some similarity based in existing social practices, institutions, or conventions.
Social construction
a classification whose members constitute a social kind.
Soft determinism
the view that determinism is true and it is compatible with the existence of free will.
Sparse ontology
an ontology that posits a relatively small number of types of entities.
Sparse theory of universals (or properties)
a version of realism about universals (or properties) that posits a relatively small number of distinct universals (or properties); in the extreme case, there are only universals (or properties) corresponding to types recognized by our fundamental physical theories.
Special Composition Question
the question for any xs, when is it the case that there is a y such that the xs compose y.
Surface freedom
being able to act in such a way that one’s desires are satisfied.
Supervenience
one set of facts about a class of entities (the As) supervenes on another set of facts about a class of entities (the Bs) when there can be no change in the A-facts without a corresponding change in the B-facts.
Synchronic identity
identity at a time.
Theism
the thesis that God exists.
Three dimensionalism
the view that although objects may have spatial parts, they never have temporal parts.
Transcendent
a transcendent entity is one that is not located in space or time.
Trope
an abstract particular, e.g. the shape of the Empire State Building.
Trope theory
the theory that properties are tropes, or abstract particulars.
Truthmaker theory
the theory that truths have truthmakers, some entities or sets of entities that make them true.
Two Object View
the view that material objects are numerically distinct from the matter of which they are made.
Ultimate freedom of the will
having the ability to satisfy one’s desires and being the ultimate source of those desires.
Universal
a type of entity that is repeatable, that may be instantiated at multiple locations at once by distinct entities.
Verificationist theory of meaning
the meaning of a statement is given by its conditions of verification.
Verificationist theory of truth
a sentence is only capable of truth or falsity if it is capable of being verified or falsified.
Verificationist theory of truth
a sentence is only capable of truth or falsity if it is capable of being verified or falsified.
To be wholly present at a time
to have all of one’s parts exist at that time.
World-line
the path of any object through space-time.
