Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Content Preservation', 'Anselm's Argument' and 'The Individuation of Events'

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7 ideas

5. Theory of Logic / G. Quantification / 2. Domain of Quantification

18914	Davidson controversially proposed to quantify over events [Davidson, by Engelbretsen]
	Full Idea: An alternative, and still controversial, extension of first-order logic is due to Donald Davidson, who allows for quantification over events.
	From: report of Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969]) by George Engelbretsen - Trees, Terms and Truth 3
	A reaction: I'm suddenly thinking this is quite an attractive proposal. We need to quantify over facts, or states of affairs, or events, or some such thing, to talk about the world properly. Objects, predicates and sets/parts is too sparse. I like facts.

7. Existence / B. Change in Existence / 4. Events / b. Events as primitive

9843	You can't identify events by causes and effects, as the event needs to be known first [Dummett on Davidson]
	Full Idea: Davidson's criterion for the identity of events is a mistake, because we cannot know the causes and effects of an event until we know what that event comprises.
	From: comment on Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969]) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.10
	A reaction: How many attempts by analytical philosophers to give necessary and sufficient conditions for things seem to founder in this way. Their predecessor is at the end of 'Theaetetus'; you have to know what the sun is before you can define it.

14602	Events can only be individuated causally [Davidson, by Schaffer,J]
	Full Idea: Davidson claims that events can only be individuated causally.
	From: report of Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969], 3) by Jonathan Schaffer - Causation and Laws of Nature 3
	A reaction: Schaffer rejects this in favour of individuating events by their spatiotemporal locations and intrinsic natures (which seem to be property instantiations, a la Kim). Schaffer was a pupil of David Lewis.

14004	We need events for action statements, causal statements, explanation, mind-and-body, and adverbs [Davidson, by Bourne]
	Full Idea: Davidson claims that we require the existence of events in order to make sense of a) action statements, b) causal statements, c) explanation, d) the mind-body problem, and e) the logic of adverbial modification.
	From: report of Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969], Intro IIb) by Craig Bourne - A Future for Presentism
	A reaction: Events are a nice shorthand, but I don't like them in a serious ontology. Prior says there objects and what happens to them; Kim reduces events to other things. Processes are more clearly individuated than events.

7. Existence / B. Change in Existence / 4. Events / c. Reduction of events

8278	The claim that events are individuated by their causal relations to other events is circular [Lowe on Davidson]
	Full Idea: Davidson has urged that events are individuated by the causal relations which they bear to one another, in accordance with the principle that events are identical just in case they have the same causes and effects. But the principle is viciously circular.
	From: comment on Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969]) by E.J. Lowe - The Possibility of Metaphysics 7.4
	A reaction: You wouldn't want to identify a person just by their relationships, even though those will certainly be unique. Generally it is what I am (right now) naming as the Functional Fallacy: believing that specifying the function of x explains x.

13. Knowledge Criteria / C. External Justification / 1. External Justification

9382	Subjects may be unaware of their epistemic 'entitlements', unlike their 'justifications' [Burge]
	Full Idea: I call 'entitlement' (as opposed to justification) the epistemic rights or warrants that need not be understood by or even be accessible to the subject.
	From: Tyler Burge (Content Preservation [1993]), quoted by Paul Boghossian - Analyticity Reconsidered §III
	A reaction: I espouse a coherentism that has both internal and external components, and is mediated socially. In Burge's sense, animals will sometimes have 'entitlement'. I prefer, though, not to call this 'knowledge'. 'Entitled true belief' is good.

28. God / B. Proving God / 2. Proofs of Reason / a. Ontological Proof

1422	God's existence is either necessary or impossible, and no one has shown that the concept of God is contradictory [Malcolm]
	Full Idea: God's existence is either impossible or necessary. It can be the former only if the concept of such a being is self-contradictory or in some way logically absurd. Assuming that this is not so, it follows that He necessarily exists.
	From: Norman Malcolm (Anselm's Argument [1959], §2)
	A reaction: The concept of God suggests paradoxes of omniscience, omnipotence and free will, so self-contradiction seems possible. How should we respond if the argument suggests God is necessary, but evidence suggests God is highly unlikely?