Starting with Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton's theology has often been caricatured as putting forward a “God of the gaps” argument for God's existence and continued involvement in the world. Peter Harrison has pointed out that this characterization of Newton's theology is “not entirely clear.” A closer look at Newton's letters and the drafts to the Opticks reveals that, rather than arguing God's providential ordering and care over the world, he takes these for granted and is reluctant to specify instances of (...) this order and care based on his physical research. He certainly believes in gaps in mechanical causes but is more eager to fill those gaps with nonmechanical natural causes than with God. Further, his system does not exhibit the two most prevalent weaknesses attributed to “God of the gaps” theologies: (1) that by describing God as intervening in natural causes his skill as a designer is maligned and (2) that by describing the physical details of God's involvement in the world one puts too much weight on theories likely to be replaced as science advances. Newton avoids the former weakness because it is only God's masterfulness as designer that he ties in any way to his theories of the physical world. He avoids the latter because he never points to God as the direct cause of any specific physical processes. Newton hoped that his system would cause his readers to marvel not only at God's providence but also at humankind's inability to sufficiently understand it. (shrink)

The ArgumentRecent historiography of the Scientific Revolution has challenged the assumption that the achievements of seventeenth-century natural philosophy can easily be described as the ‘mechanization of the world-picture.’ That assumption licensed a story which took mechanization as self-evidently progressive and so in no need of further historical analysis. The clock-work world was triumphant and inevitably so. However, a close examination of one key group of natural philosophers working in England during the 1670s shows that their program necessarily incorporated souls and (...) spirits, attractions and congruities, within both their ontology and their epistemology. Any natural philosophical strategy which excluded spirits and sympathies from its world was condemned as tending to subversion and irreligion. This examination shows that the term ‘mechanical philosophy’ was a category given its meanings within local contexts and carries no universal sense separate from that accomplished by these natural philosophers. It also shows how the experimental praxis was compelled to treat souls and spirits, to produce them through experimental labor, and then to extend these experimentally developed entities throughout the cosmos, both social and natural. The development of mechanical philosophy cannot be used to explain the cognitive and social structure of this program, nor its success: instead, the historical setting of experimental work shows how a philosophy of matter and spirit was deliberately constructed by the end of the seventeenth century. (shrink)

This paper sketches a taxonomy of forms of substantivalism and relationism concerning space and time, and of the traditional arguments for these positions. Several natural sorts of relationism are able to account for Newton's bucket experiment. Conversely, appropriately constructed substantivalism can survive Leibniz's critique, a fact which has been obscured by the conflation of two of Leibniz's arguments. The form of relationism appropriate to the Special Theory of Relativity is also able to evade the problems raised by Field. I survey (...) the effect of the General Theory of Relativity and of plenism on these considerations. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen a revived interest in super-substantivalism, the idea that spacetime is the only fundamental substance and matter some kind of aspect, property or consequence of spacetime structure. However, the metaphysical debate so far has misidentified a particular variant of super-substantivalism with the position per se. I distinguish between a super-substantival core commitment and different ways of fleshing it out. I then investigate how general relativity and alternative spacetime theories square with the different variants of super-substantivalism.

In this paper, I will develop a nontrivial interpretation of Feyerabend's concept of a hidden anomalous fact. Feyerabend's claim is that some anomalous facts will remain hidden in the absence of alternatives to the theories to be tested. The case of Brownian motion is given by Feyerabend to support this claim. The essential scientific difficulty in this case was the justification of correct and relevant descriptions of Brownian motion. These descriptions could not be simply determined from the available observational data. (...) An examination, however, of this case shows that no alternative theory is or historically was thought to be necessary in order to justify descriptions of Brownian motion that "directly" refute thermodynamics. While Feyerabend's appraisal of this case therefore is incorrect, a sense is developed in which successful alternatives lend inductive support to the correctness of refuting experimental descriptions. Crucial though to the explanation of this support is the notion of arguments that show the possibilities for improving experimental fit. (shrink)

Abstract The grammar of spatial and temporal concepts cannot, it is argued, be the same in their application to the (manifest) world as perceived and to the (nether) world of unobservable causes as modelled in physics. A parallel case is the dual meaning of colour words, for hues and for material dispositions. The keys to differentiating the two main ranges of uses of ?s? and ?t? are: differences in criteria of numerical and qualitative identity in the two ?worlds'; differences in (...) the logic of indexicals in each context; the explanatory role of powers. The differences can be illustrated in a close analysis of the concept of velocity. (shrink)

For Kant, the moral law is the causal law of freedom. However, it is not an explanatory causal law. It is instead a causal law of imputation: it is a law according to which we can be held responsible for the actions the law declares necessary; that is, it is a law according to which we can be considered the causes of whether or not we act lawfully. In this way, the moral law makes possible a kind of causality that (...) is a “third thing” between natural necessity and blind chance. This essay traces the origins of this view to the Antinomy of Pure Reason of the first Critique and shows how it is refined in Kant’s foundational texts in practical philosophy of the 1780s and in his reflections on the nature of human evil from the 1790s. (shrink)

There is a long tradition of preferring local theories to ones that posit lawful or causal influence at a spacetime distance. In this paper, we argue against this preference. We argue that nonlocality is scientifically unobjectionable and that nonlocal theories can be known. Scientists can gather evidence for them and confirm them in much the same way that they do for local theories. We think these observations point to a deeper constraint on scientific theorizing and experimentation: the (quasi‐) isolation of (...) causal or lawful influence. We argue that this requirement ought to replace the locality desideratum in science. We then explore the possibility that the order of explanation has been reversed: perhaps it is isolatable influence that determines what counts as local in the first place. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore various views on which mind-body dualism is true, but the soul is located in the body. I argue that this sort of dualism (which I call 'somatic dualism') once was a not-uncommon view in the philosophy of mind. I also argue that it has the resources to reply to some of the problems thought to affect Cartesian dualism.

Hume’s discussion of space in the Treatise addresses two main topics: divisibility and vacuum. It is widely recognized that his discussion of divisibility contains an answer to Bayle, whose Dictionary article “Zeno of Elea” presents arguments about divisibility as support for fideism. It is not so widely recognized that, elsewhere in the same article, Bayle presents arguments about vacuum as further support for fideism. This paper aims to show that Hume’s discussion of vacuum contains an answer to these vacuum-based fideistic (...) arguments. Key to this answer is a distinction between two ways in which vacuum was conceived in the early modern period: i) as a genuine thing that has spatial properties, and yet is immobile, indivisible, and penetrable ; ii) as a mere absence of spatial things. This paper also aims to provide a novel defense of Hume against the long-standing objection that he is inconsistent in denying that we can conceive of a vacuum, while allowing that we can conceive of “invisible and intangible distance.” As I interpret him, Hume consistently denies that we can conceive of a positive vacuum, while allowing that we can conceive of two or more objects’ being arranged so as to have privative vacuum between them. (shrink)

Most academic publications refer to Parkour as a subversive and embodied tactic that challenges hegemonic discourses of discipline and control. Architecture becomes the playful ground where new ways to move take form. These approaches rarely address the material and embodied relations that occur in these practices and remain on the discursive plane of cultural signifiers. A theory of movement between bodies as the founding aspect of Parkour unfolds alternative concepts of body, space, time and movement beyond the discursive. Movement becomes (...) the leitmotif for a re-conceptualization of the relations between subjects and objects and abandons their division. With the example of Parkour, I will challenge anthropocentric approaches toward embodiment and instead foreground open-ended shifting configurations of places and their relation to movement. Parkour re-shapes rigid concepts of places and their human encounter through movement. Through its encounter with obstacles Parkour activates the silent potential for movement located in the relation between bodies and thus reaches beyond material boundaries (e.g., a wall). As a deterritorializing practice, I will use Parkour to re-consider the relations between different bodies such as architectural configurations, subjects and their urban ecologies to develop a relational model for movement to shape our everyday encounters with matter. (shrink)

This thesis analyses the ontological nature of quantum particles. In it I argue that quantum particles, despite their indistinguishability, are objects in much the same way as classical particles. This similarity provides an important point of continuity between classical and quantum physics. I consider two notions of indistinguishability, that of indiscernibility and permutation symmetry. I argue that neither sort of indistinguishability undermines the identity of quantum particles. I further argue that, when we understand in distinguishability in terms of permutation symmetry, (...) classical particles are just as indistinguishable as quantum particles; for classical physics also possesses permutation symmetry. (shrink)