The paper deals with the question whether musical works are created or discovered. In the preliminaries some ontological presuppositions concerning the nature of a musical work setting the stage for the whole debate and the Creationist and Platonist views are discussed. The psychological concepts of creation and discovery are distinguished from their ontological counterparts and it turns out that only the ontological ones are relevant in this context and that the Creationist arguments fail to prove the point in question. Finally (...) it is argued that there is not necessaryly a conflict between the positions of the creationist and the Platonist, if they are construed in an appropriate way. The Creationist view that to compose is to create and the Platonist that to compose is to discover are compatible, at least if creation is understood in a quite natural and common sense way. (shrink)

The University of Minnesota organized a conference ("Evolution and Public Education," December 5, 1981) to help clarify issues in the creation/evolution controversy and to examine arguments of the proponents of scientific creationism. This six-part book, a revised version of a resource manual compiled for the conference: (1) discusses the theory of evolution and its place in science education; (2) examines the creationist movement; (3) states the position of scientific creationists; (4) responds to creationists' arguments against evolution; (5) explores legal (...) issues in the controversy; and (6) provides some perspectives on attempts to treat the Genesis creation account as science. The fifth section, on legal issues, includes Judge Overton's decision striking down the Arkansas Creationism Act, as well as pieces of legislation which reveal the changing tactics of creationists, who first sought to ban the teaching of evolution in the 1920s, then sought equal time for biblical creationism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and now seek a two-model approach to earth science/biology teaching (evolution as one model, scientific creationism as the other). A comprehensive bibliography lists most of the important works that directly address the controversy, as well as many publications on the philosophy of science and faith issues. (JN). (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an alternative strategy, Platonized Naturalism, for reconciling naturalism and Platonism and to account for our knowledge of mathematical objects and properties. A systematic (Principled) Platonism based on a comprehension principle that asserts the existence of a plenitude of abstract objects is not just consistent with, but required (on transcendental grounds) for naturalism. Such a comprehension principle is synthetic, and it is known a priori. Its synthetic a priori character is grounded in the fact (...) that it is an essential part of the logic in which any scientific theory will be formulated and so underlies (our understanding of) the meaningfulness of any such theory (this is why it is required for naturalism). Moreover, the comprehension principle satisfies naturalist standards of reference, knowledge, and ontological parsimony! As part of our argument, we identify mathematical objects as abstract individuals in the domain governed by the comprehension principle, and we show that our knowledge of mathematical truths is linked to our knowledge of that principle. (shrink)

Glaucon in Plato's _Republic_ fails to grasp intermediates. He confuses pursuing a goal with achieving it, and so he adopts ‘mathematical platonism’. He says mathematical objects are eternal. Socrates urges a seriously debatable, and seriously defensible, alternative centered on the destruction of hypotheses. He offers his version of geometry and astronomy as refuting the charge that he impiously ‘ponders things up in the sky and investigates things under the earth and makes the weaker argument the stronger’. We relate his (...) account briefly to mathematical developments by Plato's associates Theaetetus and Eudoxus, and then to the past 200 years' developments in geometry. (shrink)

According to Goodman one important advantage of his Structure of Appearance over Carnap’s Aufbau is that his is a nominalist, whereas Carnap’s is a platonist, construction. Superficially, it is clear enough why Goodman should say this: Carnap employs set-theory, whereas Goodman allows himself only mereology. One object of this paper is to show that this superficial impression is rather misleading—that closer comparison of the two books reveals that each has a claim to be regarded as the more nominalist. Another aim (...) is to show that Goodman takes his book to be quintessentially nominalist partly because his conception of nominalism is somewhat eccentric. And a third aim is to show that when nominalism is understood in Goodman’s fashion it is difficult to see what the motivation for it is; more specifically, that Goodman’s arguments for his version of nominalism are not compelling. (shrink)

The contemporary debate over God and abstract objects is hampered by a lack of conceptual clarity concerning two distinct metaphysical views: absolute creationism and divine conceptualism. This confusion goes back to the fount of the current debate, the article “Absolute Creation” by Thomas Morris and Christopher Menzel, who were not of one mind concerning God’s relation to abstract objects. Confusion has followed in their wake. Going forward, theistic philosophers need to distinguish more clearly between a sort of modified (...) class='Hi'>Platonism, according to which abstract objects depend ontologically on God, and a sort of divine psychologism, according to which objects typically thought to be abstract are, in fact, concrete mental entities of some sort. (shrink)

"Aristotle versus Plato. For a long time that is the angle from which the tale has been told, in textbooks on the history of philosophy and to university students. Aristotle's philosophy, so the story goes, was au fond in opposition to Plato's. But it was not always thus."--from the Introduction In a wide-ranging book likely to cause controversy, Lloyd P. Gerson sets out the case for the "harmony" of Platonism and Aristotelianism, the standard view in late antiquity. He (...) aims to show that the twentieth-century view that Aristotle started out as a Platonist and ended up as an anti-Platonist is seriously flawed. Gerson examines the Neoplatonic commentators on Aristotle based on their principle of harmony. In considering ancient studies of Aristotle's Categories, Physics, De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, the author shows how the principle of harmony allows us to understand numerous texts that otherwise appear intractable. Gerson also explains how these "esoteric" treatises can be seen not to conflict with the early "exoteric" and admittedly Platonic dialogues of Aristotle. Aristotle and Other Platonists concludes with an assessment of some of the philosophical results of acknowledging harmony. (shrink)

Repeatable artworks like musical works have presented theorists in the ontology of art with a puzzle. They seem in some respects like eternal, immutable objects and in others like created, historical objects. Creationists have embraced the latter appearances and attempted to compel Platonists to follow them. I examine in detail each argument in a cumulative case for Creationism, showing how the Platonist can respond. The conclusion is that the debate between Platonists and Creationists is a stalemate. In order for (...) progress to be made in the first-order debate, second-order progress on the metaontology of art needs to come first. (shrink)

Absolute creationism is a sort of theistic Platonism, which preserves intact the host of abstract objects but renders them dependent upon God. From its inception, absolute creationism has been dogged by a vicious circularity that has come to be known as the bootstrapping objection. Many philosophers, including the author, have taken the bootstrapping objection to be decisive against absolute creationism. But a review of the most sophisticated statement of the objection suggests a way out for the (...) absolute creationist. By denying a constituent ontology the absolute creationist can avoid the vicious circularity, since explanatorily prior to his creation of properties God can be just as he is without exemplifying properties. Still, in light of the metaphysical idleness of such abstract entities, theists would be well advised to deny instead the Platonist’s presumed criterion of ontological commitment and so to avoid realism altogether. (shrink)

Resumo Neste artigo o autor apresenta cinco abordagens diferentes ao debate entre o platonismo e o nominalismo: a quantificacional, a reducionista, a dependência da mente / linguagem, a extensional versus intensional, a hierárquica. Cada uma apresenta suas vantagens e desvantagens que devem ser discutidas em detalhe. Palavras-chave : existência, meta-metafísica, nominalismo, platonismoIn this paper I present five different approaches to the debate between Platonism and Nominalism: the quantifier approach, the reductionist approach, the mind / language dependence approach, the (...) extension versus intension approach and the hierarchichal approach. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages that have to be discussed in detail. Keywords : existence, metametaphysics, nominalism, platonism. (shrink)

Repeatable artworks like musical works have presented theorists in the ontology of art with a puzzle. They seem in some respects like eternal, immutable objects and in others like created, historical objects. Creationists have embraced the latter appearances and attempted to compel Platonists to follow them. I examine in detail each argument in a cumulative case for Creationism, showing how the Platonist can respond. The conclusion is that the debate between Platonists and Creationists is a stalemate. In order for (...) progress to be made in the first-order debate, second-order progress on the metaontology of art needs to come first. (shrink)

Abed Azzam offers a fresh interpretation of Nietzsche's engagement with the work of Paul the Apostle, reorienting the relationship between the two thinkers while embedding modern philosophy within early Christian theology. Paying careful attention to Nietzsche's dialectics, Azzam situates the philosopher's thought within the history of Christianity, specifically the Pauline dialectics of law and faith, and reveals how atheism is constructed in relation to Christianity. Countering Heidegger's characterization of Nietzsche as an anti-Platonist, Azzam brings the philosopher closer to Paul through (...) a radical rereading of his entire corpus against Christianity. This approach builds a compelling new history of the West resting on a logic of sublimation, from ancient Greece and early Judaism to the death of God. Azzam discovers in Nietzsche's philosophy a solid, tangible Pauline structure and virtual, fragile Greek content, positioning the thinker as a forerunner of the recent "return to Paul" led by Badiou, Agamben, Žižek, and Breton. By changing the focus of modern philosophical inquiry from "Nietzsche and philosophy" to "Nietzsche and Christianity," Azzam initiates a major challenge to the primacy of Plato in the history of Western philosophy and narrow certainties regarding Nietzsche's relationship to Christian thought. (shrink)

How does a school of thought, in the area of philosophy, or indeed of religion, from roots that may be initially open-ended and largely informal, come to take on the features that later mark it out as distinctive, and even exclusive? That is the theme which is explored in this book in respect of the philosophical movement known as Platonism, stemming as it does from the essentially open-ended and informal atmosphere of Plato's Academy. John Dillon focuses on a number (...) of key issues, such as monism versus dualism, the metaphysical underpinnings of ethical theory, the theory of Forms, and the reaction to the Sceptical 'deviation' represented by the so-called 'New Academy'. The book is written in the lively and accessible style of the lecture series in Beijing from which it originates. (shrink)

A nominalist account of statements of number (e.g., ‘There are exactly two moons of Mars’) is rebutted.

Despite being an established and accepted scientific theory for 150 years, repeated public polls show that evolution is not believed by large numbers of people. This essay examines why people do not accept evolution and argues that its poor representation in some science textbooks allows misconceptions, established and reinforced in early childhood, to take hold. There is also a lack of up‐to‐date examples of evidence for evolution in school textbooks. Poor understanding by science graduates and teachers of the nature of (...) science and incorrect definitions by them of key terminology, serve only to undermine efforts to improve public understanding of evolution. This paper has several recommendations, including the introduction of evolution to primary age children and a call to bring evolution back as the central tenet of biology. (shrink)

One of the particular problems in the debate between science and theology regarding human origins seems to be an apparent controversy between the continuous character of evolutionary processes leading to the origin of Homo sapiens and the punctual understanding of the act of creation of man seen as taking place in a moment in time. The paper elaborates scientific arguments for continuity or discontinuity of evolution, and what follows, for the existence or nonexistence of a clear borderline between our species (...) and the rest of the living world. It is argued that, due to the conventional character of the notion of species, anthropology is unable to point to a moment in time or a place on Earth when or where Homo sapiens came into existence as a ‘really new’ species. The argument of the non˗specificity of humans is reinforced by considering emotional homologies between man and apes, “cultural” transmission of the patterns of behaviour in animals, or their mental and communicational abilities. All this is in line with a more general philosophical view of ontological continuity of the world. However, the argument is counterbalanced by pointing to such human characteristics as the ability to use abstract notions, or those forms of human behaviour which do not seem to have their animal analogues. In turn, various possibilities of theological interpretations of the act of creation of man are pointed out and a question is considered as to what extent theology is interested in a "momentary" account of this act. By pointing to theological accounts proposed as early as the 2nd century, it is argued that a vision of God – the craftsman who ‘builds’ its creation step by step, or even less restrictive forms of divine interventionism, are theologically inadequate. The original opposition between the continuity of evolutionary processes and ‘punctual’ character of creation is thus weakened and, from that perspective, a solution to the controversy in question is sought. One of such solutions, an “evolutionary model of creation”, a form of evolutionary creationism, proposed by a Polish philosopher Kazimierz Kloskowski, is presented. This model is based on two assumptions, stemming from process philosophy and evolutionary epistemology. The need to apply them in constructing a coherent view on evolution and creation is critically considered in the paper. (shrink)

I first ask what it is to make up a story. In order to answer that question, I give existence and identity conditions for stories. I argue that a story exists whenever there is some narrative content that has intentionally been made accessible. I argue that stories are abstract types, individuated by the conditions that must be met by something in order to be a properly formed token of the type. However, I also argue that the truth of our story (...) identity attributions---sentences like, "Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings is the same story as JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings''---are relative to their context of use, so that the same attribution of identity might be true in one context or false in another because of a change in what's being said about the works in the differing contexts. From those existence and identity conditions, I draw the conclusions that story is best understood to be a phase sortal of some abstract types, and that what it is to make up a story is to identify a type of narrative representation and its content, such that the content is neither based on actual events nor on the content of other stories to an objectionable degree. In chapter 2, I ask what it is for a story to be complete. I argue for the general meta-thesis I call "Completion Pluralism", viz. that there are many kinds of artwork completeness, many corresponding senses of 'complete', and no kind of artwork completeness is objectively more important than any other. I give a pair of arguments against those who would deny Completion Pluralism, endorsing Completion Monism instead. First, I show how Monistic analyses of the one (or one most important) kind of artwork completeness fail. I also show that each Monistic theory's failure is contingent on the assumption of Completion Monism: the denial of Completion Monism dissolves each argument against the extensional adequacy of extant theories of artwork completeness. I argue that this is all best explained by the idea that Completion Pluralism is true. Second, I argue that Completion Pluralism fits best with the variety of interests that we bring to questions about artwork completeness: there is no single or overriding concern we have when we want to know whether an artwork is complete. We shouldn't expect completeness to be a single sort of thing, then. I show how to put Completion Pluralism to work by identifying different kinds of artwork completeness in artworks. Finally, I introduce a new kind of completeness particular to stories, what I call "narrative completion", and show how it's distinct from other kinds of completeness discussed. In chapter 3, I argue that the distinction between fictional and non-fictional stories is the degree to which stories are made-up. In short, a fictional story is a made-up story. I first provide a couple desiderata for thinking about theories of fiction, then show how the two most popular extant theories of fiction---the prop theory and the genre theory---fall short in meeting one or more of those desiderata to some extent. I then show how the theory that fictions are made-up stories better meets the desiderata, using my account of what it is to make up a story from chapter 1. I turn to explicitly ontological matters in chapter 4. Addressing the question of what stories are, I show that both the theses that they are eternal and immutable and that they are created and historical seem plausible for independent reasons. I discuss a schema of an argument some philosophers who hold to the latter view (those I call "Creationists") attempt to give for their view. However, I show how those who hold to the view that stories are eternal and immutable ("Platonists") can account for all the same appearances as the Creationists, usually at least as well and sometimes with a better accounting. Similar, deductive arguments for Platonism will give rise to similar responses from the Creationist, however. In the end, then, the style of argument in particular is unlikely to advance the discussion much. Finally, I attempt to advance the discussion by building an abductive case for Platonism. First, I vindicate a particular metaontological methodology for the debate at hand, a methodology that allows for "revisionary" outcomes in our ontologies of art objects. Second, I build a case for Platonism by arguing that it best explains a number of features of stories discussed in the previous chapters. Moreover, I argue that Creationism is committed to an implausible account of how some abstract objects come into existence. Given the combination of those facts, I argue that we should prefer Platonism to Creationism. (shrink)

The platonism/nominalism debate in the philosophy of mathematics concerns the question whether numbers and other mathematical objects exist. Platonists believe the answer to be in the positive, nominalists in the negative. According to non-factualists, the question is ‘moot’, in the sense that it lacks a correct answer. Elaborating on ideas from Stephen Yablo, this article articulates a non-factualist position in the philosophy of mathematics and shows how the case for non-factualism entails that standard arguments for rival positions fail. In (...) particular, showing how and why non-factualists reject nominalism illuminates the originality and interest of their position. (shrink)

The problematic features of Quine's set theories NF and ML are a result of his replacing the higher-order predicate logic of type theory by a first-order logic of membership, and can be resolved by returning to a second-order logic of predication with nominalized predicates as abstract singular terms. We adopt a modified Fregean position called conceptual realism in which the concepts (unsaturated cognitive structures) that predicates stand for are distinguished from the extensions (or intensions) that their nominalizations denote as singular (...) terms. We argue against Quine's view that predicate quantifiers can be given a referential interpretation only if the entities predicates stand for on such an interpretation are the same as the classes (assuming extensionality) that nominalized predicates denote as singular terms. Quine's alternative of giving predicate quantifiers only a substitutional interpretation is compared with a constructive version of conceptual realism, which with a logic of nominalized predicates is compared with Quine's description of conceptualism as a ramified theory of classes. We argue against Quine's implicit assumption that conceptualism cannot account for impredicative concept-formation and compare holistic conceptual realism with Quine's class Platonism. (shrink)

The paper argues that ancient dogmatic Platonists, beginning with Antiochus, reconstructed Plato’s ethics in different ways, as a result of their different emphasis on parts of Plato’s work and often argued with each other about what Plato’s ethics actually was. This situation, it is argued, is due to the existence of different strands of ethical views found in Plato’s work itself, such as, for instance, the Protagoras and the Gorgias versus the central books of the Republic and the Philebus (...) on the question of what eudaimonia consists in. The paper argues against the thesis of Julia Annas, outlined in her Platonic Ethics Old and New, that ancient dogmatic Platonists considered the argument of the Republic as being essentially the same with that of all Platonic dialogues and that they unanimously represented Plato’s ethical position as the view that virtue is sufficient for happiness. The testimonies regarding the ethics of Platonists like Antiochus, Plutarch, Numenius, Taurus, or Atticus rather suggest a picture of variance and tension about the reconstruction of Plato’s ethics. Antiochus, Plutarch, and Taurus, for instance, are guided by the theory of the partite soul and maintain that for Plato emotions should be balanced by reason, a view they also find in Aristotle, whereas Eudorus and Atticus appear to favor the elimination of all emotions. Alcinous and, more systematically, Plotinus tend to reconcile and synthesize into a system the different views found in Plato’s dialogues, which brings them to attribute to Plato a complex ethical doctrine. This synthesis corroborates the evidence examined in the paper in support of the view that ancient Platonists recognized diverse strands of ethics in Plato and, far from being unanimous about what Plato’s ethics was, varied significantly in their reconstruction of it. (shrink)

The Enhanced Indispensability Argument (Baker [ 2009 ]) exemplifies the new wave of the indispensability argument for mathematical Platonism. The new wave capitalizes on mathematics' role in scientific explanations. I will criticize some analyses of mathematics' explanatory function. In turn, I will emphasize the representational role of mathematics, and argue that the debate would significantly benefit from acknowledging this alternative viewpoint to mathematics' contribution to scientific explanations and knowledge.

Salmon and Soames argue against nominalism about numbers and sentence types. They employ (respectively) higher-order and first-order logic to model certain natural language inferences and claim that the natural language conclusions carry commitment to abstract objects, partially because their renderings in those formal systems seem to do that. I argue that this strategy fails because the nominalist can accept those natural language consequences, provide them with plausible and non-committing truth conditions and account for the inferences made without committing themselves to (...) abstract objects. I sketch a modal account of higher-order quantification, on which instead of ranging over sets, higher order quantifiers are used to make (logical) possibility claims about which predicate tokens can be introduced. This approach provides an alternative account of truth conditions for natural language sentences which seem to employ higher-order quantification, thus allowing the nominalist to evade Salmon’s argument. I also show how the nominalist can account for the occurrence of apparently singular abstract terms in certain true statements. I argue that the nominalist can achieve this by, first, dividing singular terms into real singular terms (referring to concrete objects) and only apparent singular terms (called onomatoids), introduced for the sake of brevity and simplicity, and then providing an account of nominalistically acceptable truth conditions of sentences containing onomatoids. I develop such an account in terms of modally interpreted abstraction principles and argue that applying this strategy to Soames’s argument allows the nominalists to defend themselves. (shrink)