PHIL 4513: METAPHYSICS
Dr. Neal Judisch
Dale Hall Tower 618
Office Phone: 325-5950
neal.judisch@ou.edu
Fall 2008
T 3:00-6:00
Seminar Room
Course Overview
Metaphysics as Aristotle conceived it concerns the investigation of being qua being. We shall take a
somewhat broader approach to the discipline (as has been common since the modern era) so as to
include philosophical questions that arise in connection with particular features of reality – the
physical, the psychological, the active, and so on – under the aspect of those features, and not strictly
under the aspect of being as such. That is to say, we’ll be roaming beyond the traditional boundaries
of first philosophy and poaching upon the preserves of physics, philosophy of mind and the like
with a view toward considering not only what there is, but also how things “work” according to
their own peculiar natures and how it all “hangs together.”
Required Text
Peter van Inwagen & Dean Zimmerman. 1998. Metaphysics: The Big Questions. Oxford: Blackwell.
Additional articles will be made available as needed.
Student Evaluation
Grades will be assigned on the basis of two short papers 5 pages in length, (25% each) and one term
paper 10-12 pages in length (50%). The first paper is due on the 6th week of class. The second
paper is due on the 12th week of class. The term paper is due on the last day of class.
Tentative Reading/Discussion Schedule
Week 1: Metaphysics: scope and method; Universals
– van Inwagen & Zimmerman, “What is Metaphysics?” (pp. 1-13)
Week 2: Properties; Concrete Particulars
– Price, “Universals and Resemblances,” (pp. 23-40).
– Williams, “Elements of Being,” (pp. 40-52); Zimmerman, “Distinct Indiscernibles and the
Bundle Theory,” (pp. 58-66).
Week 3: Time
– McTaggart, from The Nature of Existence, (pp. 67-74).
– Optional: Broad, “Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy,” (pp. 74-80); Smart, “Space-Time
World,” (pp. 94-100).
Week 4: Change
– Chisholm, “Identity through Time,” (pp. 173-185); Lewis, “Problem of Temporary Intrinsics,”
(pp. 204-206).
– Optional: Zimmerman, “Temporary Intrinsics and Presentism,” (pp. 206-219); Quine, “Identity,
Ostension, and Hypostasis,” (pp. 186-188); Lewis “In Defense of Stages,” (pp. 190-192).
Week 5: Personal Identity
– Chisholm, “Which Physical Thing Am I?” (pp. 291-296); Swinburne “The Dualist Theory,”
(pp. 317-333); Shoemaker, “A Materialist Account,” (pp. 296-310).
Week 6: Causation – First Paper Due
– Hume, “Constant Conjunction,” (pp. 221-226); Reid, “Efficient Cause and Active Power,”
(pp. 226-227).
– Lewis, “Causation,” Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973), pp. 556-567.
Week 7: Freedom (I)
– Hobart, “Free Will as Involving Determinism & Inconceivable Without It,” (pp. 343-356);
Chisholm, “Human Freedom and the Self,” (pp. 356-365).
– Optional: Kane, from The Significance of Free Will, Oxford (1996); van Inwagen, from An Essay on
Free Will, Oxford (1983).
Week 8: Freedom (II)
– O’Connor, “The Agent as Cause,” (pp. 374-380); Kane, “Two Kinds of Incompatibilism,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (1989), pp. 219-254; van Inwagen, “The Mystery of
Metaphysical Freedom,” (pp. 365-374).
– Optional: Clarke, “On the Possibility of Free, Rational Action,” Philosophical Studies 88 (1997),
pp. 37-57.
Week 9: Mental Causation (I)
– Davidson, “Mental Events,” in Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford (1980); Kim, “The Myth of
Nonreductive Materialism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63
(1989), pp. 31-47.
Week 10: Mental Causation (II)
– McLaughlin, “Type Epiphenomenalism, Type Dualism, and the Causal Priority of the
Physical,” Philosophical Perspectives 3 (1989), pp. 109-135; Horgan, “Mental Quausation,”
Philosophical Perspectives 3 (1989), pp. 47-76; Kim, Physicalism, Or Something Near Enough,
Princeton (2005), chapters 5-6.
Week 11: Freedom & Mental Causation Reviewed
– Sosa, “Free Mental Causation!” (unpublished manuscript); Unger, “Free Will and
Scientiphicalism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2002), pp. 1-25.
Week 12: Agency – Second Paper Due
– Velleman, “What Happens When Someone Acts?” Mind 101 (1992), pp. 461-481; Nagel, “The
Problem of Autonomy,” in The View From Nowhere, Oxford (1986).
– Optional: Bishop, “Agent-Causation,” Mind 92 (1983), pp. 61-79.
Week 13: The World; God
– James, “The Problem of Being,” (pp. 415-418); Parfit, “The Puzzle of Reality,” (pp. 418-427).
– Rowe, “The Cosmological Argument and the Principle of Sufficient Reason, (pp. 431-441);
Anselm, from the Proslogion, (pp. 441-443); Malcolm, “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” (pp.
443-453).
Week 14: Thanksgiving Holiday – No Class
Week 15: Realism & Anti-Realism
– Quine, “Speaking of Objects,” (pp. 385-388); Putnam, “After Metaphysics, What?” (pp. 388392); Sosa, “Nonabsolute Existence and Conceptual Relativity” and the Addendum, (pp. 399410).
Week 16: Wrap Up – Term Paper Due