What does it mean to say that this person at this time is 'the same' as that person at an earlier time? If the brain is damaged or the memory lost, how far does a person's identity continue? In this book two eminent philosophers develop very different approaches to the problem.

SHOEMAKER IS WRONG TO CLAIM THAT ALL THE GENUINE PROPERTIES OF THINGS ARE NOTHING BUT POTENTIALITIES FOR CONTRIBUTING TO THE CAUSAL POWERS OF THINGS. FOR THE ONLY GROUNDS FOR ATTRIBUTING CAUSAL POWERS TO THINGS ARE IN TERMS OF THE EFFECTS WHICH THOSE THINGS TYPICALLY PRODUCE. BUT ALL EFFECTS ARE ULTIMATELY INSTANTIATIONS OF PROPERTIES, AND IF THESE WERE NOTHING BUT POTENTIALITIES TO PRODUCE EFFECTS, THERE WOULD BE A VICIOUS INFINITE REGRESS, AND NO ONE WOULD EVER BE JUSTIFIED IN ATTRIBUTING PROPERTIES (...) TO OBJECTS. (shrink)

La théologie naturelle faisait partie de la tradition philosophique occidentale jusqu’à ce que Hume et Kant affirment qu’il y a des limites fondamentales à l’intelligibilité, ou au moins au savoir possible, de ce qui dépasse l’expérience ; et donc qu’il ne peut exister d’arguments solides partant du monde naturel et concluant à l’existence de Dieu. Je défends que, bien que nos concepts doivent en effet être dérivés de notre expérience, ils peuvent avoir une application bien au-delà de notre expérience ; (...) et que la science moderne nous a montré comment des théories à propos de choses au-delà de notre expérience pouvaient être rendues probables par les données de l’expérience. Un point important dans les arguments de Hume et de Kant est que le concept de ‘cause’ n’a d’application que pour les successions régulières d’événements observables. J’argumente contre eux en montrant que, puisque nous dérivons originairement ce concept de notre propre expérience quand nous sommes cause d’événements, son application n’est en aucun cas limitée aux successions régulières d’événements observables. J’en conclus que les arguments de Hume et Kant n’ont pas du tout de force pour montrer l’impossibilité d’une théologie naturelle solide. (shrink)

I have argued in many places that a carefully articulated version of Descartes’ argument to show that he is essentially an immaterial soul is sound. It is conceivable that I who am currently conscious continue to exist without my body, and that can only be if there is currently a non-bodily part of me which alone is essential for me. Recent counter-arguments of Alston and Smythe, Moser and van der Nat, Zimmerman, and Shoemaker are rejected.

I have argued in many places that a carefully articulated version of Descartes’ argument to show that he is essentially an immaterial soul is sound. It is conceivable that I who am currently conscious continue to exist without my body, and that can only be if there is currently a non-bodily part of me which alone is essential for me. Recent counter-arguments of Alston and Smythe, Moser and van der Nat, Zimmerman, and Shoemaker are rejected.

Special volume of Philosophical Topics in honor of Sydney Shoemaker.

Any property has two sorts of causal features: “forward‐looking” ones, having to do with what its instantiation can contribute to causing, and ldquo;backward‐looking” ones, having to do with how its instantiation can be caused. Such features of a property are essential to it, and properties sharing all of their causal features are identical. Causal necessity is thus a special case of metaphysical necessity. Appeals to imaginability have no more force against this view than they do against the Kripkean view that (...) statements like “Gold is an element” are metaphysically necessary. (shrink)

Since the appearance of a widely influential book, Self-Knowledge and Self-ldentity, Sydney Shoemaker has continued to work on a series of interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This volume contains a collection of the most important essays he has published since then. The topics that he deals with here include, among others, the nature of personal and other forms of identity, the relation of time to change, the nature of properties and causality and the relation (...) between the two, dualism and immortality, and the nature of mental states. All the essays show the same care and precision in argument as the earlier book, but they also reveal a substantial shift in Professor Shoemaker's position to a form of materialism. In fact, a number of papers together constitute what is probably the most subtle and rigourous defence yet of a sophisticated functionalism in the account of the mind. (shrink)

Since the appearance of a widely influential book, Self-Knowledge and Self-ldentity, Sydney Shoemaker has continued to work on a series of interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This volume contains a collection of the most important essays he has published since then. The topics that he deals with here include, among others, the nature of personal and other forms of identity, the relation of time to change, the nature of properties and causality and the relation (...) between the two, dualism and immortality, and the nature of mental states. All the essays show the same care and precision in argument as the earlier book, but they also reveal a substantial shift in Professor Shoemaker's position to a form of materialism. In fact, a number of papers together constitute what is probably the most subtle and rigourous defence yet of a sophisticated functionalism in the account of the mind. (shrink)

What does it mean to say that this person at this time is 'the same' as that person at an earlier time? If the brain is damaged or the memory lost, how far does a person's identity continue? In this book two eminent philosophers develop very different approaches to the problem.

Two kinds of epistemological sceptical paradox are reviewed and a shared assumption, that warrant to accept a proposition has to be the same thing as having evidence for its truth, is noted. 'Entitlement', as used here, denotes a kind of rational warrant that counterexemplifies that identification. The paper pursues the thought that there are various kinds of entitlement and explores the possibility that the sceptical paradoxes might receive a uniform solution if entitlement can be made to reach sufficiently far. Three (...) kinds of entitlement are characterized and given prima facie support, and a fourth is canvassed. Certain foreseeable limitations of the suggested antisceptical strategy are noted. The discussion is grounded, overall, in a conception of the sceptical paradoxes not as directly challenging our having any warrant for large classes of our beliefs but as crises of intellectual conscience for one who wants to claim that we do. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne presents a substantially rewritten and updated edition of his most celebrated book. No other work has made a more powerful case for the probability of the existence of God. Swinburne gives a rigorous and penetrating analysis of the most important arguments for theism: the cosmological argument; arguments from the existence of laws of nature and the 'fine-tuning' of the universe; from the occurrence of consciousness and moral awareness; and from miracles and religious experience. He claims (...) that while none of these arguments are deductively valid, they do give inductive support to theism and that, even when the argument from evil is weighed against them, taken together they offer good grounds to support the probability that there is a God. The overall structure of the discussion and its conclusion have been retained for this new edition, but much has been changed in order to strengthen the argumentation and to take account of Swinburne's subsequent work on the nature of consciousness and the problem of evil, and of the latest philosophical and scientific writing, especially in respect of the laws of nature and the argument from fine-tuning. This is now the definitive version of a classic in the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Although Responsible Conduct of Research training is common in the sciences, the effectiveness of RCR training is open to question. Three key factors appear to be particularly important in ensuring the effectiveness of ethics education programs: educational efforts should be tied to day-to-day practices in the field, educational efforts should provide strategies for working through the ethical problems people are likely to encounter in day-to-day practice, and educational efforts should be embedded in a broader program of on-going career development efforts. (...) This article discusses a complex qualitative approach to RCR training development, based on a sensemaking model, which strives to address the afore-mentioned training concerns. Ethnographic observations and prior RCR training served the purpose of collecting information specific to a multi-disciplinary and multi-university research center with the goal of identifying metacognitive reasoning strategies that would facilitate ethical decision-making. The extensive qualitative analyses resulted in the identification of nine metacognitive reasoning strategies on which future RCR training will be developed. The implications of the findings for RCR training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

"Faith and Reason is the final volume of a trilogy on philosophical theology.

What is it for there to be a God, and what reason is there for supposing him to conform to the claims of Christian doctrine? In this pivotal volume of his tetralogy, Richard Swinburne builds a rigorous metaphysical system for describing the world, and applies this to assessing the worth of the Christian tenets of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Part I is dedicated to analyzing the categories needed to address accounts of the divine nature--substance, cause, time, and (...) necessity. Part II begins by setting out, in terms of these categories, the fundamental doctrine of Western religions--that there is a God. After pointing out some of the different ways in which this doctrine can be developed, Swinburne spells out the simplest possible account of divine nature. He then goes on to clarify the implications of this account for the specifically Christian doctrines of the Trinity (that God is "three persons in one substance") and of the Incarnation (that God became incarnate in Jesus Christ). Swinburne finds that there are good reasons to believe the Christian additions to the core Western idea of God. The Christian God builds upon Swinburne's acclaimed previous work to form a self-contained text which will no doubt become a classic in the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

At least since Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, it has increasingly become accepted that the existence of God is, intellectually, a lost cause, and that religious faith is an entirely non-rational matter--the province of those who willingly refuse to accept the dramatic advances of modern cosmology. Are belief in God and belief in science really mutually exclusive? Or, as noted philosopher of science and religion Richard Swinburne puts forth, can the very same criteria which scientists (...) use to reach theories about everything from DNA to the Big Bang be used to argue for the existence of God? In Is There a God? Swinburne presents a powerful and approachable case for the existence of God. Using the methods of scientific reasoning, Swinburne rigorously argues that science, far from replacing God, provides good grounds for belief in God. With each new discovery and advance, from black holes to quarks, superstrings to continuing evolution, science brings us closer to a complete understanding of how things work--but science can only go so far. Though it can explain much of how the universe works, science doesn't tell us why there is a universe at all. We can understand much of how life evolved, but why is there any life on earth? We can name and explicate scientific laws, but how is it that they operate in the universe? The Darwinian theory holds that the complex animal and human bodies that are here today exist because, ages ago, there were certain chemicals on earth, and given the laws of evolution, it was probable that complex organisms would emerge. But why those laws rather than any other? Why those chemicals? In Swinburne's view, the ultimate grand unifying theory is possible only by a belief in what he calls theism, acknowledging the existence of God: it was God who brought about the natural laws so that humans and animals would evolve. The watch may have been made, Swinburne asserts in reference to Richard Dawkins, with the aid of some blind screwdrivers (or even a blind watchmaking machine), but they were guided by a watchmaker with some very clear sight. At the heart of his argument is Swinburne's belief that the very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing there is an even deeper cause of that order. By embracing a belief in God that acknowledges the truth in science, Swinburne's elegant argument supplies an essential spiritual element to our understanding of order and beauty, the structure beneath the chaos of the natural world. This informed and provocative volume will be essential reading for all readers of popular science, philosophy, and religion. (shrink)

[Sydney Shoemaker] A major objection to the view that the relation of persons to human animals is coincidence rather than identity is that on this view the human animal will share the coincident person's physical properties, and so should share its mental properties. But while the same physical predicates are true of the person and the human animal, the difference in the persistence conditions of these entities implies that there will be a difference in the properties ascribed by (...) these predicates, with the result that the physical properties that determine the person's mental states will belong to the person and not to the human animal. /// [Galen Strawson] What are the grounds of self-consciousness? I consider 29 proposals and reject 22, including a number of proposals that experience of body is necessary for self-consciousness. A popular strategy in debates of this sort is to argue that one cannot be said to have some concept C unless one has a need or a use for C given the character of one's experience considered independently of the character that it has given that one possesses C. I suggest that such arguments are invalid. (shrink)

A major objection to the view that the relation of persons to human animals is coincidence rather than identity is that on this view the human animal will share the coincident person's physical properties, and so should (contrary to the view) share its mental properties. But while the same physical predicates are true of the person and the human animal, the difference in the persistence conditions of these entities implies that there will be a difference in the properties ascribed by (...) these predicates, with the result that the physical properties that determine the person's mental states will belong to the person and not to the human animal. (shrink)

[Sydney Shoemaker] A major objection to the view that the relation of persons to human animals is coincidence rather than identity is that on this view the human animal will share the coincident person's physical properties, and so should (contrary to the view) share its mental properties. But while the same physical predicates are true of the person and the human animal, the difference in the persistence conditions of these entities implies that there will be a difference in (...) the properties ascribed by these predicates, with the result that the physical properties that determine the person's mental states will belong to the person and not to the human animal. /// [Galen Strawson] What are the grounds of self-consciousness? I consider 29 proposals and reject 22, including a number of proposals that experience of body (or bodies) is necessary for self-consciousness. A popular strategy in debates of this sort is to argue that one cannot be said to have some concept C (e.g. the concept ONESELF, necessary for self-consciousness) unless one has a need or a use for C given the character of one's experience considered independently of the character that it has given that one possesses C. I suggest that such arguments are invalid. (shrink)

[Sydney Shoemaker] A major objection to the view that the relation of persons to human animals is coincidence rather than identity is that on this view the human animal will share the coincident person's physical properties, and so should (contrary to the view) share its mental properties. But while the same physical predicates are true of the person and the human animal, the difference in the persistence conditions of these entities implies that there will be a difference in (...) the properties ascribed by these predicates, with the result that the physical properties that determine the person's mental states will belong to the person and not to the human animal. /// [Galen Strawson] What are the grounds of self-consciousness? I consider 29 proposals and reject 22, including a number of proposals that experience of body (or bodies) is necessary for self-consciousness. A popular strategy in debates of this sort is to argue that one cannot be said to have some concept C (e.g. the concept ONESELF, necessary for self-consciousness) unless one has a need or a use for C given the character of one's experience considered independently of the character that it has given that one possesses C. I suggest that such arguments are invalid. (shrink)

In Physical Realization, Sydney Shoemaker considers the question of how physicalism can be true: how can all facts about the world, including mental ones, be constituted by facts about the distribution in the world of physical properties? Physicalism requires that the mental properties of a person are 'realized in' the physical properties of that person, and that all instantiations of properties in macroscopic objects are realized in microphysical states of affairs. Shoemaker offers an account of both these (...) sorts of realization, one which allows the realized properties to be causally efficacious. He also explores the implications of this account for a wide range of metaphysical issues, including the nature of persistence through time, the problem of material constitution, the possibility of emergent properties, and the nature of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

Sydney Shoemaker is one of the most influential philosophers currently writing on philosophy of mind and metaphysics. The essays in this collection deal with the way in which we know our own minds, and with the nature of those mental states of which we have our most direct conscious awareness. Professor Shoemaker opposes the 'inner sense' conception of introspective self-knowledge. He defends the view that perceptual and sensory states have non-representational features - 'qualia' - that determine what (...) it is like to have them. Amongst the other topics covered are the unity of consciousness, and the idea that the 'first-person perspective' gives a privileged route to philosophical understanding of the nature of mind. This major collection is sure to prove invaluable to all advanced students of the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. (shrink)