PHILOSOPHY 203: METAPHYSICS 2014-1 ASSIGNMENT #4

Write an essay of about 1800 words (no more than 2000 words) – roughly 6 double-spaced pages – on one of the following topics, taken from Garrett, chs. 5,7,8,9 and related posted class notes.  It is due in class on the last day of classes, Wednesday April 9th, or in the instructor’s Department  mailbox by 4:00 P.M. that same day, and will be worth 25% of your final grade.  No handwritten assignments will be accepted, and no vinyl folders.  Just staple your numbered pages together in the upper left hand corner, making sure that your full name and student id# appear at the top.  The body of the paper should be preceded by an abstract, single spaced, in italics, and just a few sentences long, which clearly and succinctly says what the paper is about, identifying its main conclusions, discussion issues, or line of argument.    Make sure that credit is given, in proper footnotes, to any sources or ideas other than your own, including direct and indirect quotations; and that should include the precise page numbers where the ideas or quotes occur.  Lateness policy:   This paper is due in class Wednesday April 9th, or no later than 4:00 PM that same day in the instructor’s Department mail box.  If for some reason you are not able to make this deadline for a legitimate reason, you need to let the instructor know in advance, the sooner the better.  Please don’t wait until the last minute.   My grades must be submitted about a week after your deadline for submission.  I need time to grade papers.  And if I am to grant a deferred grade, I will need to have the proper documentation to support that (e.g., doctor’s note). 

  1. What, if anything, can we learn about what the identity of medium-sized physical artifacts over time consists in, from puzzles like Lumpl and Goliath and/or the Ship of Theseus?  You may choose one.  Be sure to address the role any essentialist considerations may have played in discussions of the puzzle(s) you consider.
  2. Explain and critically assess what is at issue between perdurantist and endurantist conceptions of the persistence of physical objects over time.  What do you see as a primary motivation for these respective views?  Does the Extensionality Principle, applied to temporal parts, give us a criterion of identity for objects through time, as opposed to a mere criterion of identification? Why or why not?
  3.  Hume explains the “directionality” of the causal relation, i.e. its going in the direction from  cause to effect, in terms of time: the cause must temporally precede the effect.  This is something that he claims to find in our idea of causation, and forms part of his reductive account of causation in non-causal terms.  There is a striking contrast between Hume’s view and what is sometimes referred to “the causal theory of time”:  the latter view, which arises in the context of the Special Theory of Relativity, is, very roughly, that the time-like paths through space-time, the ones that determine the “temporal priority” of an event e1 to an event e2  are to be reductively explained in terms of the possibility of a causal influence being directed along that path from e1 to e2.  In other words, it turns Hume’s account on its head!  (Those space-time theorists should have read Hume!)  This rather lengthy preamble finally brings us to our question: If causal priority is not temporal priority, then what is it?  Can a counterfactual account of causation supply an answer?
  4. The idea that, in instances of a causal relation between particular events, the cause event somehow necessitates the occurrence of the effect event, is an idea that Hume claims we mistakenly project onto the world based on our psychological propensity to expect like effects from like causes.  But Hume never challenges the idea that instances of causation are to be subsumed under deterministic law-like (but contingent) universal generalizations.  But a lot of physics and other science has flowed under the bridge since Hume’s time. Requiring that causal relations be subsumable under such universal generalizations threatens to make the notion of causation irrelevant to a good deal of contemporary scientific explanation, at least.   In this context, critically consider Anscombe’s singularist account of causation.  In what ways does it try to address those concerns?
  5. Two broadly different kinds of metaphysical accounts of time are outlined and critically reviewed by Garrett:  so called ‘A-theories’ and ‘B-theories’.  Explain the main differences between them, and then choose one of these kinds, and a particular version of it (e.g., if it is an A-theory, then you might opt for Presentism, or the Growing Universe View), and then either defend it or argue against it, taking the pros and cons considered by Garrett into account.
  6. What is time travel supposed to be?  What do different metaphysical accounts of time imply about the possibility of time travel?  Are there some constraints on the very coherence of the notion of time travel (here you may want to consider differences between travel into the far future and travel into the near or distant past)?   If we were time travelling while conscious, what might we expect to see, and what would our experience of time be like?