Author Archives: robkoons

Mental Causation: Rational Animals

Let’s turn our attention now to the most interesting case: that of the rational animal (the human being). Human beings have the capacity not only to sense and to imagine but to understand. Understanding in this sense involves the capacity to grasp something universal, a concept that can be used to formulate general propositions andContinue reading “Mental Causation: Rational Animals”

Mental Causation: Non-Rational Animals

It’s relatively easy to see how mental causation, both active and passive, would work on the interactionist model. We can simply apply our usual assumptions about per se efficient causal powers. What is more interesting is to work out how such causation could happen on the two emanationist models. To keep things relatively simple, let’sContinue reading “Mental Causation: Non-Rational Animals”

Two Models of The Soul

Here is a major choice point: is the soul part of the whole substance (the human person or organism) or not? What does it mean for something to be part of some whole? Or, equivalently, what does it mean for something to be a whole composed of certain parts? I propose the following necessary conditionContinue reading “Two Models of The Soul”

Four Arguments for Persisting Prime Matter

Here are four arguments in support of my “master argument” for prime matter. Imagine a world consisting of a single perfectly spherical and continuous substance. It will have infinitely many parts – e.g., an uncountable infinity of hemispheres. Each hemisphere will instantiate the very same species of quantitative accident (i.e., size and shape). If weContinue reading “Four Arguments for Persisting Prime Matter”

Master Argument for Prime Matter

[1] A prime material is the same thing as what I’ve called a bit or parcel of prime matter. [2] It might be even simpler to postulate that each prime material bears numerically the same quantitative accident through all changes, but hylomorphists can’t go this far. When a prime material undergoes substantial change across species,Continue reading “Master Argument for Prime Matter”

A Three-Valued B Theory for Aristotelians?

Let’s turn our attention now to the B Theory, in particular, to what I’ve called the Mixed B Theory. We can suppose that all actual substances and accidents, past, present, and future, are combined eternally with acts of existence, distinguishing them from merely possible substances and accidents. Is such a model compatible with Aristotelianism? SeeContinue reading “A Three-Valued B Theory for Aristotelians?”

Time and Modality: Mapping the Territory

Are actuality and presentness perfectly analogous? David Lewis would say Yes, since both are the by-products of the linguistic phenomenon of indexicality. Non-actual and non-present things and events are as much part of the reality as the actual present. We’ll just call this view ‘Lewisian’. There’s two kinds of A Theorists who could agree withContinue reading “Time and Modality: Mapping the Territory”

Inegalitarian (Aristotelian) A Theory

Storrs McCall’s Falling Branches model (1976) is the most attractive version of the A Theory of time for Aristotelians, since it relies on the changing modal status of possible events. It is also easy to combine with the idea that all possibilities branch off from the actual world. We can suppose that every event orContinue reading “Inegalitarian (Aristotelian) A Theory”

Objections to Aristotelian Substances

The Argument from Vagueness (David Lewis and Jonathan Schaffer) Unlike atoms and the whole cosmos, the boundaries of Aristotelian substances seem vague and arbitrary. Response: the vagueness is only epistemic. The true parts of a substance are essentially parts of it. The Empirical Argument from Atomism It is hard to believe that individual particles, atoms,Continue reading “Objections to Aristotelian Substances”