Tom Stoneham

Time and Truth : The Presentism-Eternalism Debate

There are many questions we can ask about time, but perhaps the most fundamental is whether there are metaphysically interesting differences between past, present and future events. An eternalist believes in a block universe: past, present and future events are all on an equal footing. A gradualist believes in a growing block: he agrees with the eternalist about the past and the present but not about the future. A presentist believes that what is present has a special status. My first claim is that the familiar ways of articulating these views result in there being no substantive disagreement at all between the three parties. I then show that if we accept the controversial truthmaking principle, we can articulate a substantive disagreement. Finally, 1apply this way of formulating the debate to related questions such as the open future and determinism, showing that these do not always line up in quite the way one would expect.

Combinatorialism and the possibility of nothing

We argue that Armstrongs Combinatorialism allows for the possibility of nothing by giving a Combinatorial account of the empty world and show that such an account is consistent with the ontological and conceptual aims of the theory. We then suggest that the Combinatorialist should allow for this possibility given some methodological considerations. Consequently, rather than being ‘spoils for the victor’, as Armstrong maintains, deciding whether there might have been nothing helps to determine which metaphysics of modality is to be preferred.

When did Collier read Berkeley

Arthur Collier (1680–1732) was a Wiltshire clergyman educated at Oxford. He was Rector of a parish neighbouring that of John Norris, the English Malebranchian, and was himself passionately interested in metaphysics. In 1713 he published a slim volume called Clavis Universalis which argued for an immaterialism similar to Berkeley’s. We know that by 1714 Collier had read Berkeley, and by 2 June 1713 Berkeley knew of the Clavis, though it is unclear whether he had read it himself or merely been told about it. We also know that Collier came to his conclusions independently, because there is an early manuscript of the Clavis dated 1708 (Benson 1837: 18). The question I address here is whether Collier had read Berkeley before the Clavis was published. The Three Dialogues was published in the same year as Collier’s Clavis Universalis though, according to Johnston (1923: 366 n1), slightly later in the year. Collier would certainly have had opportunity to read the Principles and by the time of a letter dated 8 March 1714 he had obviously read some of Berkeley’s writings, since he gives an account of a point of

Action, Knowledge and Embodiment in Berkeley and Locke

Embodiment is a fact of human existence which philosophers should not ignore. They may differ to a great extent in what they have to say about our bodies, but they have to take into account that for each of us our body has a special status, it is not merely one amongst the physical objects, but a physical object to which we have a unique relation. While Descartes approached the issue of embodiment through consideration of sensation and imagination, it is more directly reached by consideration of action and agency: whenever we act upon the world, we act by moving our bodies. So if we can understand what an immaterialist such as Berkeley thinks about agency, we will have gone a fair way to understanding what he thinks about embodiment. §1 discusses a recent flurry of articles on the subject of Berkeley’s account of action. I choose to present Berkeley as a causal-volitional theorist (realist) not because I think it is the uniquely correct interpretation of the texts, but because I find it more philosophically interesting as a version of immaterialism. In particular, it raises the possibility of a substantive account of human embodiment which is completely unavailable to the occasionalist. §2 articulates an apparent philosophical problem for Berkeley qua causal-volitional theorist and show that Locke was aware of a related problem and had a solution of which Berkeley would have known. §3 distinguishes two interpretations of Berkeley’s famous denial of blind agency – as the assertion of a weak representational condition or a strong epistemic one – and provide evidence that there was a well-established debate about blind powers in the seventeenth century which took the metaphor of blindness as indicating an epistemic rather than merely representational failing. What remains to do in §4 is to consider whether Berkeley, with his own peculiar commitments, could in fact accept this account of agency.

Quine on Quantification and Existence

Quine’s justly famous paper “On What There Is” introduced a criterion of ontological commitment which has been almost universally accepted by analytic philosophers ever since. In this paper I try to unpack some of the substantive and controversial philosophical commitments that are presupposed by this criterion. The aim is not to show that the criterion is incorrect, but merely that it is not as obvious as it is taken to be by many, and that we might have reasons to explore alternative ways of thinking about ontological commitments.

Conditionals and Bi-conditionals in Constitutive Theories of Self-Knowledge

Any claim that a substantive philosophical debate with many players and a long history can be analysed as containing just two opposing positions, should be taken as an invitation to find a middle ground. One such attempt is Stoneham (1998), and in this very brief note I shall sketch how that position avoids the regress problem for constitutive accounts, and also the problem of brute error. I shall end by suggesting that the stronger constitutive model is motivated by a misunderstanding of the relation between epistemology and belief formation. An account of the aetiology of our second-order beliefs need not also be an account of their epistemic status.

Transparency, Sense and Self-Knowledge

0. If you understand me, then you know what I am saying, that is, you know what my words (and sentences) mean. Understanding is an epistemic notion roughly equivalent to knowledge of meaning. The philosophy of language is particularly interested in this kind of knowledge, concentrating much energy on the question: what is it for someone to know what a sentence means? In this paper I am going to concentrate upon one particular aspect of that project, namely the question of whether knowledge of meaning is epistemologically distinguished.