Cut-Down List of Study Questions for Metaphysics Test 1:
Parfit on being and explanation:
1. Why does Parfit hold that even an infinite series of events cannot explain itself?
2. How does the many-worlds hypothesis explain the appearance of ‘fine-tuning’?
3. How would God’s existence explain ‘fine-tuning’?
4. Distinguish cosmic and local possibilities.
5. What is the ‘all worlds’ hypothesis?
6. Do you agree with Parfit that the axiarchic view makes sense? Explain his reasons & yours. **
7. What is the brute fact view?
8. What is a credible selector?
Aquinas’ five ways:
1. What are the ‘obvious observations’ that ground Aquinas’ arguments from change and motion?
2. What ‘powerful principles’ drive these arguments?
3. How does Aquinas use a feature of finite sequences to argue that an infinite sequence is
impossible? Does this really work? What would Parfit suggest as an alternative? Can these
cosmological arguments be saved here? Discuss.
4. How are necessity and possibility related to existence in time for Aquinas?
5. What is the powerful principle in Aquinas’ argument from the ‘guidedness of nature’?
Paley on Design:
1. What, in the end, are the two points that are required (according to Paley) for his argument
regarding the watch to go through?
2. What does Paley mean when he describes the watch’s production as ‘a result connected with the
utilities of other beings’? What important point about natural selection does this remark call
attention to? Does this fact about natural selection undermine Paley’s argument? Discuss. **
3. Why does Paley reject the suggestion that an infinite series of watches might solve the puzzle
without requiring a designer?
4. Are living things really as analogous to Paley’s watch as he evidently believes? Discuss. **
Mackie on Evil:
1. Explain, briefly, the conflict Mackie sees between God’s omnipotence, God’s being ‘wholly good’
and the existence of evil.
2. What does Mackie mean by an ‘adequate’ solution to the problem of evil? Give two examples.
3. What limitation on the omnipotence of God is usually accepted?
4. What is wrong with the suggestion that evil is a ‘necessary means’ to some goods?
5. How does the possibility (and actuality) of higher level evils (as well as goods) undermine the
suggestion that the world is better with some evils in it than it could be if it were purely good?
6. How does Mackie argue that free will is compatible with people always choosing the good?
7. What problem does the existence of free will pose for God’s omnipotence?
Aristotle’s Categories:
1. What is it for one thing to be predicated of another?
2. What is Aristotle’s first criterion for being a substance?
3. What are secondary substances?
4. Explain Aristotle’s hierarchy of substances (what is more and what is less of a substance)? What
is the basis of this hierarchy?
5. What is the difference between a secondary substance and a term like ‘white’? (Hint: it has to do
with qualification & its relation to a (primary) substance.)
6. What seems ‘most distinctive’ of substance?
Locke on Substance:
1. What leads us to form complex ideas of substances?
2. Why do we tend to think of such ideas as simple, rather than complex?
3. How does Locke describe our ‘notion of pure substance in general’?
4.
5.
Why does Locke say we have as clear an idea of spirit as of body?
What is a ‘power’ (distinguish two kinds of powers Locke describes)?
Adams on Primitive Thisness and Primitive Identity:
1. What does Adams give as his definition of a ‘thisness’?
2. What’s the difference between Scotus’ haecceities and Adams’s notion of a ‘thisness’?
3. How do more complex suchnesses get built out of basic ones?
4. What definition of thesis of the ‘identity of indiscernables’ does Adams adopt?
5. What sort of situation would count as a refutation of the Identity of Indiscernables? Explain how
the qualitative characterization of possible worlds together with the qualitative characterization of
how an individual is (what suchnesses it has) in each possible world where it exists provides a
qualitative equivalent to every ‘thisness’. **
6. What is Hacking’s response to such arguments against identity of indiscernables?
7. Explain the almost-identical twins case that Adams considers. When he alters the twins to make
the two qualitatively identical, does this really leave us confident that there are still two twins?
Quine, ‘On What There is’:
1. What makes it hard for Quine to express his ontological disagreement with McX?
2. How does Wyman avoid accepting the subsistence of contradictory entities like the round square
cupola on Berkeley College?
3. What is reduction ad absurdam?
4. What is the Russellian analysis of ‘The round square cupola on Berkeley College is not’?
5. How does Quine propose to apply this lesson to the case of names like ‘Pegasus’?
6. How can we ‘involve ourselves in ontological commitments’, if our uses of names and of
predicates do not involve such commitments (as Quine argues)?
7. What is the formalist’s account of how mathematicians manage to come to agreement on theorems
even though the formalist claims there really are no such things as numbers and other abstract
mathematical entities?
8. What is Quine’s overall conclusion regarding how to choose an ontology?
Van Inwagen, Material Beings:
1. What is van Inwagen’s general thesis about what there is?
2. Explain the point of van Inwagen’s ‘bligers’ story.
3. Is van Inwagen right to say that he is not ‘proposing an analysis of common language’? How else
are we to understand his account of what someone ordinarily means when she says, ‘There is a
chair before me’? What is van Inwagen’s response to this challenge? Discuss.
4. What is required for some xs to compose a thing, y, according to van Inwagen?
5. What is the empiricist objection to the argument for our own existence that declares we are aware
(conscious) of ourselves as thinking beings?
6. Why does van Inwagen believe computers cannot think?
7. What is ‘mereological unity’?
8. Do you think the notion of ‘life’ is clear enough to carry the metaphysical weight van Inwagen
loads it with? Compare it with the answers he considers to the ‘special composition question’ that
would allow the existence of ordinary objects. Discuss & justify your answer. **
Plato, selections from Parmenides, Republic:
1. How does Socrates defend the view that, while it is one and wholly located in many separate
places, a form is nevertheless one and not really separate from itself?
2. Explain Parmenides’ sail analogy.
3. Explain how separating likeness from partaking of the form leads Socrates to a position that
avoids Parmenides’ regress.
4. Who do you think Socrates has in mind when he describes the prisoner freed from the cave, finally
brought to see the world and the sun, and then returned to the cave only to find his fellow
prisoners mock him for his damaged eyesight?
5. What is education supposed to achieve, according to Plato?
6. What is wrong if the educated simply remain ‘in the far away Isles of the Blessed’?
Armstrong, selections from Universals: An Opinionated Introduction:
1. What does the ‘principle of instantiation for universals’ hold?
2. Why is the Platonist view of universals unacceptable to naturalists?
3. What is the ‘universalia in rebus’ view of universals?
4. What is the ‘argument from meaning’ for the existence of uninstantiated universals?
5. What is the argument from the imperfection of ordinary things?
6. Why does Armstrong reject the argument from the imperfection of ordinary things?
7. Why does Armstrong deny that there are disjunctive or negative universals?
8. What does Armstrong see as the ‘best guide’ to what universals there are?
9. What is the ‘truth maker principle’?
10. How is it that there can be two different states of affairs with ‘the same constituents’? Give an
example.
11. How does Armstrong think we should conceive of the world?