D. M. Armstrong

The Nature of Mind and Other Essays

Bargaining with reading habit is no need. Reading is not kind of something sold that you can take or not. It is a thing that will change your life to life better. It is the thing that will give you many things around the world and this universe, in the real world and here after. As what will be given by this the nature of mind and other essays, how can you bargain with the thing that has many benefits for you?

Identity Through Time

Some philosophers in their work are led on to ever greater complexity; others seek simplicity and clarity of argument and vision. Each type of mind serves to check the shortcomings of the other. In our age philosophy is more professionalized than ever before, so as a result the first sort of mind is in the ascendant. All the more important, therefore, is the role of those who will not let their thought be dissipated in endless ramifications. Richard Taylor’s particular intellectual contribution has been to discover, or to restate, simple and direct, yet profound and forceful, arguments which lead to important conclusions about major philosophical issues. He has done this in a way which involves no sacrifice of contemporary standards of rigor and exactness.

Four Disputes About Properties

In considering the nature of properties four controversial decisions must be made. (1) Are properties universals or tropes? (2) Are properties attributes of particulars, or are particulars just bundles of properties? (3) Are properties categorical (qualitative) in nature, or are they powers? (4) If a property attaches to a particular, is this predication contingent, or is it necessary? These choices seem to be in a great degree independent of each other. The author indicates his own choices.

Consciousness and causality : a debate on the nature of mind

Two distinguished philosophers present opposing views on the questions of howthe objects of consciousness are perceived. (Philosophy)

Causes and laws

Our object in this paper is to show how causes and laws of nature are related. Contemporary scientific commonsense finds little problem here. If one token event (state, or whatever are taken to be causal relata) is taken to cause another, then it is assumed that, in general at least, this pair of tokens instantiates a law. The law may be probabilistic (statistical) only. The present state of scientific inquiry suggests that the fundamental laws that govern causal processes may be no more than probabilistic. But, barring controversial cases involving such things as free will and miracles, it is assumed that a law is always involved. Contemporary philosophy of science also finds little problem in the relation of cause and law. This is because it is orthodoxy, although now perhaps an orthodoxy on the defensive, that tokencausation is ontologically no more than the instantiation of a regularity in the behaviour of things, and equally that a law is ontologically no more than a regularity in the behaviour of things. Given this general approach, which can be and has been sophisticated in various ways, cause and law come naturally together. Because tokencausation instantiates a regularity, it automatically instantiates a law. It is not necessary to hold that each instantiation of a law is a case of causation. The causal laws might merely be a sub-species of the regularities that are laws, without contravening the spirit of a Regularity theory of causation and a Regularity theory of laws. We, however, reject both the Regularity theory of causation and the Regularity theory of laws. Once this is done, the relation between causes and laws becomes more problematic.

Reply to Simons and Mumford

I opt for propositions to play this role and suggest that propositions should further be identified with actual and possible intentional objects of belief, thought, and so on. My reason for introducing possible intentional objects is what we may call Newton’s argument, from Newton’s figure of the great ocean of undiscovered truth. If this is a good argument, mere possibilities will be involved even if propositions are rejected as truthbearers and my account of what propositions is also rejected. Simons says in particular that it is not clear that introducing possibilities here will allow us to give thisworldly truthmakers. I grant that it is not clear, but I hope that my Possibility Principle, that if p is true and if it is also true that 5 it is possible that not-p4, i.e., p is contingent, then the truthmakers for p (always available if Truthmaker Maximalism is true, as I think it is) will be truthmakers for 5 it is possible that not-p4.

Can a Naturalist Believe in Universals

I am very strongly drawn to the view that all there is is the space-time continuum. I call this view “Naturalism.” At the same time, I am very strongly drawn to the view that universals exist, that Locke was wrong when he said that all things that exist are only particulars (Essay, III, 3,10). But is it consistent both to be a Naturalist and also to accept universals? Many philosophers have thought that it is not. Those who are Naturalists think that they must be Nominalists. The space-time world is a world of particulars only. And if you are not a Nominalist, if you accept the existence of universals, then, it is thought, it is not possible to be a Naturalist. A philosopher who has recently argued from universals to the falsity of Naturalism is Reinhardt Grossmann (1983).

Excess adhesive flash upon bracket placement. A typodont study comparing APC PLUS and Transbond XT.

OBJECTIVE To determine if there is any significant difference in excess adhesive flash (EAF) with the use of APC PLUS adhesive coated appliance system and Transbond XT and if other variables such as side of the mouth, time taken to bond the brackets, the age of the orthodontic specialist, or the years of clinical experience affected the amount of EAF. MATERIALS AND METHODS Twenty orthodontic specialists bonded 20 preadjusted straight wire brackets (Victory, 3M Unitek) on a typodont with a Class I crowded malocclusion in a split-mouth design, with one-half of the brackets bonded with APC PLUS adhesive system and the other half with Transbond XT. The teeth were sputter coated with gold and an image was taken at 32x magnification in a scanning electron microscope (Philips XL30). The resultant tagged image file (TIF) was opened in AnalySIS Pro 3.1 (Soft Imaging System, Munich, Germany) and the area of EAF was measured. RESULTS t-Tests demonstrated that: (1) there was no statistically significant difference in EAF between two adhesives when bonding in different quadrants of dentition; and (2) there was no statistically significant difference in EAF between two adhesives overall. Analysis of variance models demonstrated there were no statistically significant differences found regarding the age of the orthodontic specialists, years of clinical experience, and time in performing the bonding. CONCLUSIONS The addition of a coloring agent to assist in the visualization of the excess adhesive does not reduce the amount of excessive adhesive around orthodontic brackets.

C. B. Martin, Counterfactuals, Causality, and Conditionals

I first met Charlie Martin in 1953 when I was taking the B.Phil. degree in Oxford. Charlie was doing a Ph.D. in Cambridge, where his supervisor was John Wisdom, his first real teacher. Charlie had come over from Cambridge with his wife and small daughters, to live in Oxford for a year. I think that he wanted a bit more philosophical action than could be found in Cambridge at that time. We used to talk a bit, although I did not understand much of what he was saying. But there could be no doubt of his passionate devotion to his subject or of his force and ability.

The scope and limits of human knowledge

This paper argues that the foundations of our knowledge are the bed-rock certainties of ordinary life, what may be called the Moorean truths. Beyond that are the well-established results within the empirical sciences, and whatever has been proved in the rational sciences of mathematics and logic. Otherwise there is only belief, which may be more or less rational. A moral drawn from this is that dogmatism should be moderated on all sides.