The Christian Vanguard

The following is an essay I had to write for class. Footnotes have been omitted, not by choice. Explain the account of matter that emerges from Metaphysics Book IX, Chapter 7. Though your focus should be on that text (and I do want you to tease out the line of argument there), I encourage you to draw from other things we have read by Aristotle, if you find it useful to do so. Matter, for Aristotle, is potentiality. To explain this, we must first consider what potentiality is. There is a limited range of potentialities, that is to say, X may be potential for Y but not for Z. To illustrate the range of potentials, Aristotle considers health. Not everything can be healed, like perhaps rocks or water, and so they cannot be said to have the potentiality for health, but only certain things have the potentiality for health, like humans or foxes. There is a categorical difference here. But within the appropriate categories, we have a question of how we discover it is potentially healthy (or po...

I wrote the following for my medical ethics class. Nothing in here is original. There were footnotes, but they don't transfer over in a copy-paste.  In this paper, I will argue that abortion is morally impermissible. I will begin with narrowing down questions that need to be answered in the debate. From there, I will examine what it is that I am, then explore why I have moral status, and argue that I am numerically identical to the fetus. Throughout all this, I will be contrasting it with the personhood view, which I take to be the strongest opposing view.  Suppose one day you are washing dishes, and your child comes up behind you and asks, “Mommy, can I kill this?” It would be foolish to answer without turning around and seeing what “this” refers to. If it is a worm on a fishing hook, it’s probably permissible to say, “Sure. Go do it outside.” However, if you saw your child was holding a knife to a puppy’s throat, you probably would not respond the same way. This sho...

If A and B share the same essences, like "Being" and "Goodness" share the same essence, does that mean that the terms we use for A and B respectively are synonymous? This question was brought up to me in the context of a discussion had on the Trinity and Divine Simplicity. If all three persons of the Trinity share in the same essence, then the terms would be synonymous, which is absurd. Obviously The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit do not refer to the same person and are not interchangeable.  But it doesn't follow that if something shares in the same essence that the terms must be synonymous, and this is illustrated when we think about the convertibility thesis, which is what my last few posts have been touching on. Though being and goodness are convertible and the same, they are not synonymous terms. They refer to the same thing, but differ in thought. “Good” expresses the idea of desirability, which the term “being” does not express. “Good” adds the ...

Probably the most well known objection to St. Anselm's Ontological argument, usually attributed to Kant, says that existence is not a predicate. When we inquire into the nature of things, we say that it is this shape and that color, and these statements have some meaningful content to them because we are able to predicate something to them. They tell us something about the object. However, saying that X exists tells us nothing about the nature of the object. So being is not a predicate.  This is not the view of the scholastics, and definitely not the view of St. Thomas Aquinas, who does say being (or existence) is a predicate. So how then do we deal with the above objection? Let's look at the mode of inquiry. When we ask what something is, we answer by giving a more common term to which we add a specific difference. So when we ask what a cat is, we say it is a mammal that has this or that distinguishing feature. We may ask what this more common thing is as well, and we ...

In the last few weeks, my social media accounts have been abuzz with the topic of abortion. One common defense of it has been something like, "Since unwanted children will not be aborted, they will most likely end up in the foster care system, where they will probably be abused and raped. So abortion is a better option." After I asked whether they would apply this logic to a two year old, they said they would. In the eyes of my interlocutors, death was a better option. This isn't an uncommon view. I would think most, if not all, persons who committed suicide thought the exact same thing and this motivated their suicide. So, is death better an abused life? In light of the convertibility thesis, it is not.  The convertibility thesis states that "being" and "good" are basically the same thing, just considered differently. Where there is being, there is goodness coextensive with it. If being alive is participating in being, and death is not participat...

The following is a short paper I wrote for my metaphysics class.  Wiggins claims that space can be mapped only by reference to its occupants. This doesn’t seem to be obviously true. Consider some world that has an infinite density, not much unlike how some scientists say the first moment of our universe was like, that is, every point of space is occupied by some matter. When the available space expands and the matter remains the same, the density of the world changes. This seems coherent. To say that space expands is to say that there are two points of space opposite of each other where that distance grows. But this seems coherent even without reference to matter occupying some point. So take T1 to be time in a world with infinite density. Then T2 is that same world where the available space is then doubled so that the world is then half the density. Now suppose the same thing without any matter in it whatsoever. We know that T1 and T2 have different amounts of space, and thi...

We often talk about possibilities or the way the world would have been. For example, I could be home sleeping in right now, or I could be a sailor in Hawaii. There are endless ways to talk about the way the world could have been, and these worlds actually exist. Under modal realism, any way the world could have been actually is. There are countless other worlds that are temporally-spatio isolated from us and from each other. They don’t overlap. They have no parts in common (except, maybe, universals). There is no causal connection. They exist truly and literally just as you are real and existing. There is no difference in the way they exist. They aren’t just real in our imagination, like in some abstract platonic heaven, but real and concrete. They exist simpliciter, or without qualification. Modal realism is serviceable in that we can quantify modal claims. So if I were to claim, “It is possible that I was President of the United States” we would ask how we make sense of that c...

Smart thinks that talk of “past”, “present”, and “future” can replaced by some reference to a subjects utterance. So “past” will be replaced with, “X is earlier than this utterance”, “present is replaced with, “X is simultaneous to this utterance” and “future” will be replaced with, “X is later than this utterance.” The same can be done for any sentence with a tense in it. When one utters “X is earlier than this utterance”, it could be objected that the word “is” in the sentence is tensed, and so even with the effort to phrase everything in a tenseless way, it is still necessary to smuggle in tensed language. Smart says we can amend the predicate to say, “X is earlier at this utterance” and referring to an utterance in this way makes no use of a tensed “is”. So for example, a tribe that had three sorts of numbers, that of being earlier than, equal to, or greater than the kings age, denoted by alpha, beta and gamma, but no tense is employed there either. 

The problem of temporary intrinsics is that for persisting things, they change their intrinsic properties, such as shape. When I sit, I have a bent shape and when I stand I have changed my shape to a straight shape. This is distinguished from it's relations such as weight and height. For example, being the heaviest person in the room (weight) is not an intrinsic property because a heavier man may enter the room and I am no longer the heaviest man, even though nothing intrinsic about me has changed. So the problem is to explain how this change in intrinsics is possible. Lewis’ solution to this problem is to say that things perdure , not endure. Under perdurance, I have temporal parts, and intrinsics would be properties of that particular temporal part, and obviously these parts differ from one another, so it is no mystery how a thing could change its intrinsics properties. So for example, a road perdures, that is, it has different parts at different times, but doesn’t endure i...

Something persists iff it exists at various times. There are two ways something can persist: by enduring or perduring. Something endures iff it persists by being wholly present at more than one time. Something perdures iff it persists by having different temporal parts or stages at different times, though no one part of it is wholly present at more than one time, also known as 4 Dimensionalism.

The problem given in the question “Can you bathe in the same river twice?” is that since the substance of the river is constantly renewed, it would seem that it is not the same river, and so our words, that is the names we give the things we are trying to describe, are too vague to denote that this is a river. The same is true of similar examples, such as the ship of Theseus.  Quine’s answer to the problem is to say that these questions don’t really concern the nature of identity, but rather, they concern what we choose to count as a river, a boat, or a person. What makes gives something the nature of identity is not that they have the same river stage or same river substance, but that it is a process of continually replacing the substance or stages of time. So we may be tempted to point at the Ganges River at two different times and say that because of the constant change of substance they are not both the Ganges River, but all that would be true here is that you are pointin...

Chalmers suggestion for addressing the hard problem is to posit that consciousness is a fundamental feature or law such as space, time, mass, and change in that it is not reducible or explained in terms of more basic entities. So it will have its own rules and regulations, like the other basic or fundamental features of our world do. He wants to call them psychophysical laws. This wouldn’t be without precedent for Chalmers as he notes that electromagnetic phenomena couldn’t be explained by previously known physical features and laws, and so they had to posit electromagnetic charge as a new basic feature of the world since nothing in the physical world could explain it. Likewise with consciousness, since there seems to be no already existing theories which encompasses it, then something new is required.

The easy problem of consciousness is figuring out how we receive information and how we respond. Some questions that fall under the easy problem are “How does the brain integrate information?” and “How is it that subjects can verbalize their internal state?” This is not to say that figuring out the answers to these questions are easy to do or are trivial, but that they are easy compared to the hard problem. And the hard problem asks how do physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience, or consciousness, at all? How experience works is the easy problem and why we have experience at all is the hard problem. One needs to figure out how to cover that explanatory gap.

Qualitative identity and numerical identity are different in that you can have multiple instances of a thing qualitatively but you cannot have multiple instances of the same numerical thing. Shoemaker uses a suitcase as an example. You can have multiple suitcases that have the same qualities, that it is a certain color, a certain shape, made of a certain material, or even have the same model number. Two people can buy the same suitcase in this sense. But numerical identity is a stronger claim in that it is really unique in what it points out. This numerical identity has an indiscernibility. So for example, if I have a Pen A, and I want to know that it is identical to Pen B, there should be no property that A has that B doesn’t have. So even if I have the same model number of pen, that Pen A is in my left hand while Pen B is in my right shows that there is something Pen A had that Pen B doesn’t, which is a particular location, and would thus be qualitative identity. There would be no s...

In my Metaphysics textbook, there is an article by David Parfit describing split brain experiments and its implications for the philosophy of mind. So, the experiments go something like this. You take a brain and you split it into the two hemispheres. Each part of the brain controls a different part of the body. Next, the patient is shown a card that is half blue and half red. Now, say the right eye is focused on the red, and the left eye is focused on the blue. Then ask the patient which color he sees, and his right arm will write red, and his left arm will write blue, but the patient cannot comprehend both at the same time. He thinks he only sees blue and he also thinks he only sees red. He cannot conjoin the two beliefs.  What Parfit says this proves is that our conscious is not a unified thing. Consciousness is supposed to  unify all beliefs, and this unified consciousness is what we call the self. But since we know that a single patient can have two streams of consci...