It has been on my Amazon wish list for a while, and this list has 850 items currently! Thanks for remembering me of it. I may move this title nearer to the top since it is quite intriguing.

You're welcome. Since the OUP link for Wiggin's book now seems dead (at least on my end) here is another one: Needs, Value, Truth.

I think where postmodernism fails is that it takes this limitation to be a warrant for a kind of indiscriminate relativism, that as there are no absolutes, in the traditional sense, and as science is a matter of falliballistic hypotheses, then all manner of truths are 'in the eye of the beholder', so to speak. — Wayfarer

Absolutism (dogmatic metaphysics, as Kant would call it, metaphysical realism, as Putnam would call it) ignores the constitutive role of human concepts in the disclosure of the empirical world. Indiscriminate relativism ignores constraints that are internal to conceptualized empirical reality. Putnam has proposed an alternative to both a naive conception of objectivity (embodied in scientific modernity) and the unqualified rejection of objectivity. He advocated this alternative under the label Realism with a Human Face. John McDowell and David Wiggins also have advocated forms of naturalized Kantianism that appeal to both Wittgenstein and Aristotle in order to demystify the role of human concepts in the constitution of empirical reality (while also bridging the gap between practical and theoretical reason). If post-modernism is correct in its criticism of absolutist metaphysics, thinkers like Putnam, McDowell and Wiggins have suggested that this criticism can be acknowledged while a suitably pragmatized Kantian concept of objectivity (which Wiggins also called 'A Sensible Subjectivism' -- see Chapter 5 in his Needs, Value, Truth) can be salvaged.

What was this broad agreement (if there was one) like in 1000AD (or 1000CE if you like)?
Significance indeed. — Frederick KOH

I am not questioning that physics, and the atomic theory of matter, are significant intellectual achievements. They most certainly are. I am rather arguing that such material sciences aren't any different from other sciences in point of reliance on (often merely tacit and uncritical) interpretation of the scope of their claims (e.g. the interpretation of their "laws", and of what would constitute falsification of then, or admissible auxiliary hypotheses, or genuine boundaries of the domain of the specific science, etc.) I am also questioning the reductionist assumption that material composition of the ordinary objects of the human and natural worlds are any more fundamental or determinative than other equally significant (in point both of definition and behavioral determination) formal and relational features of them.

The last time things became degenerative, physicists rushed to the new paradigm. — Frederick KOH

It's mostly the young folks with open (and also unformed and naïve) minds who readily embrace emerging paradigms. Scientists who already have been trained, and have been successfully operating within, the older paradigm often stick to it until they die (as Max Planck famously observed). Lorentz came close to develop the special theory of relativity bet never embraced it. Einstein pioneered some key aspects of the new QM but never relinquished the degenerative quest for hidden variables. Fields like biology, medicine, geology, cognitive and social sciences, etc., of course furnish plenty of examples of die hard degenerative research programs that linger on for decades and stubborn advocates of the status quo. Philosophy is, of course, no exception even though is has a built in anti-dogmatic character. I am not lamenting any of this. It seems to be a necessary consequence of the fact that access to uninterpreted empirical reality is impossible.

I am very sure ornithologists agree with chemists and physicists about what birds are made out of. — Frederick KOH

Physicists can't agree among themselves what atoms are made out of, let alone what birds are. "...Being made out of..." is a relational predicate of restricted scope that has furthermore variable, contextually determined, interpretations. A lump of coal is 'made of' carbon atoms in a different way than a sport team is 'constituted of' individual players (at a given time) or a bird is 'made of' living organs. That's because things that are "made out of" distinctive parts also are characterized by form, and not just matter. Furthermore, what kind of form (or functional organization) they exemplify contributes to the specification of the "...made out of..." relational predicate that relates the whole object to its significant parts (in addition to defining what sort of object it is). Consider also, a computer being 'made out of' elementary logical gates, a governments being 'made out of' agencies, etc. etc.

Even if one conceded that, in a sense, most every "thing" (i.e. broadly "material" things) are made out of atoms (or "physical matter", whatever that turns out to be), material constitution just is one among many of the defining features that most material things have. So, this allegedly broad agreement among different sorts of scientists, regarding the ultimate material composition of empirical entities, would be agreement about very little that is of significance to the understanding of the empirical world (unless one is a rather naive and uncritical reductionist).

As long as we don't call all of it (the interpretation) "philosophy", which was my original point. — Frederick KOH

Yes, sure. Scientist sometimes tend to be dogmatic and philistine, especially when they are faithful to the religions of scientism and reductionism. In that case, when they specialize in the science of hammers, they are happy to proclaim that the whole world is made up of nails and nothing else. This needs not hamper their professional abilities so long as they are operating within productive research programs (as often happens within episodes of Kuhnian "normal science") and there is lots of fruitful "puzzle solving" to be accomplished within the prevailing scientific paradigm. When those research programs become "degenerative" (Imre Lakatos), then those scientists often are happy to ignore more productive areas of research, and they keep on hammering screws with a sledgehammer.

Why limit your assertion to formalisms and quantum theory?
Why would your assertion not apply as well to plain prose in a less mathematical endeavor?
In fact why would it not apply to doing washing machine settings based on what the manual says? — Frederick KOH

My assertion wasn't limited to quantum theory. Quite the contrary, it purports to apply to all domains of empirical discourse, scientific or not. This may have seem to be surprising to early discoverers of QM (or contemporary thinkers who haven't assimilated its lessons) since classical particle mechanics (and classical field theories) would have seem to offer clear paradigms of "uninterpreted" (or "purely objective") mathematical description of fundamental "material" reality. Prior to QM, physics had been viewed as the science of the "primary qualities" of objects, in the sense of Locke (as distinguished from "secondary qualities" that aren't intrinsic to objects but merely characterize their propensities to affect our sense organs and our minds in specific ways).

But QM turned out to display the mechanics of the smallest bits of mere "matter" not to constitute an exceptions to the case of the "high level" sciences that can't abstract from concepts essentially pegged to human interests. The indispensability of human interpretation in the cognitive apprehension of empirical objets turns out to apply across the board, as Kant had already seen it to be the case even concerning Locke's "primary quality" concepts (including, notoriously, spatial and temporal relationships).

The difference is that you cannot "take out the formal and empirical parts of your enquiry" except in abstracto. And it is the in concreto that really matters. — John

Yes, I quite agree. This is especially true when the "formal part" of the inquiry is being identified with some abstract and uninterpreted formalism, as the earlier mention to the "shut up and calculate" approach to empirical science suggested. In actual cases of scientific practice -- i.e. "in concreto" -- a specific interpretation always is either tacitly assumed or agreed upon (but always only partially rendered explicit) by scientists who work within a shared theoretical or technological paradigm. Such a background understanding is required if the formalism is to be brought to bear determinately to specific experimental setups or domains of empirical observation.

It is paradoxical that the "shut up and calculate" approach has come to be associated with the so called Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics while the actual intent of Bohr and Heisenberg was to stress the ineliminability of the background "classical" features of the experimental conditions (and thus also of the agency of the observers) in the definitions of quantum "observables". One thing that the formalism of QM (be it Heisenberg's, Schrödinger's, Dirac's or any other picture) can't achieve on its own is defining the nature of the observables. There is no self-sufficient and uninterpreted use of the formalism of quantum theory that can be of any use in making predictions of empirical observations. The "shut up and calculate" approach to empirical science is a total non-starter.

So the issue here, appears to be that since there are such objects, black holes, whose mass is contained within the Schwartzchild radius, doesn't this indicate that GR is inadequate for understanding some aspects of the universe? — Metaphysician Undercover

It's merely a theory of gravitation. It is adequate for the very restricted purpose of understanding the phenomenon of gravitation as a manifestation of the metric of space-time (and what it is that determines this metric: spatial distributions of energy and momentum). But it is also limited in scope since it is a "classical" theory that becomes inadequate for energy and density scales where quantum fluctuations become relevant. Hence, we can't really know, within the general relativity framework, what happens to the metric of space-time near singularities or in the very early universe.

That doesn't indicate that there is anything inherent within GR which would make you expect to find a black hole, it indicates that certain types of stars when understood under GR make you expect to find a black hole. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course. General relativity is a deterministic theory. It only tells you what to expect given some empirically realized initial conditions. Likewise, there isn't anything inherent to Newtonian mechanics which would make you expect to find a billiard ball in a pocket. But, given that some billiard balls are subjected to impacts thus and so and then let roll freely, then they are expected to end up in a pocket. Likewise, given that some stars naturally evolve in such a way that they contract within their Schwartzschild radii, then they are expected to become black holes.

I don't see how this could be true. What is it inherent within GR which would make you expect to see a black hole? — Metaphysician Undercover

General Relativity is a theory of gravitation that lawfully relates the distribution of energy and momentum in space-time with the metric of space-time (thus specifying its "curvature"). It follows from this lawful relation (i.e. Einstein's field equations) that whenever a spherical distribution of mass achieves a density such that it is contained within its Schwarzschild radius, then the escape velocity at the surface attains the speed of light. Past this point, the mass can't possibly not collapse into a singularity (and there can't possibly not occur the formation of an event horizon at the Schwarzschild radius) consistently with Einstein's field equations.

It also is the case that for a stellar mass to achieve a density such that it is contained within its Schwartzschild radius is a very common occurrence with dying stars only slightly more massive than our Sun, or with dense galactic cores.

I thought this was the title of Harry Frankfurt's next book.

The existence of white wholes is close to being a logical consequence of the existence of black holes (plus some plausible symmetry assumptions). Most black holes are rotating. That is, they have non-zero angular momenta inherited from the conserved angular momenta of the collapsing stuff that made them up and that they later accreted. Rotating black holes are called Kerr black holes (strictly speaking only when they have zero electric charge, but that is inessential). Rather than having a point singularity (as have non rotating black holes) they have an annular singularity. If one falls into a Kerr black hole from a direction outside of its equatorial plane, then one ought to be able to go trough the annular singularity while not getting crushed, nor stretched by huge tidal forces, provided only the Kerr black hole is large enough, and it has sufficient angular momentum, as might be the case with many massive black holes that are located in galactic cores. If the metric of space time past those inbound trajectories into the annular singularity is symmetrical with the metric in the "inbound" region, then a falling traveler (or any inbound object) ought to emerge from the black hole somewhere, from a white whole, presumably. Where would one emerge, and whether this would occur somewhere in this universe at all, is anyone's guess.

Right. So maybe it's not so much the CO2, but the massive deforestation that is happening. — Harry Hindu

Not sure what you mean with "not so much..." It's not either one or the other; it's both. According to an IPCC AR4 figure (fourth assessment report) the "CO2 equivalent" net emissions from deforestation and biomass decay represents 17.3% of the total anthropogenic contribution to the enhanced greenhouse effect, while the fossil fuel burning contribution is 56.6%. (The rest is from N2O, CH4, other greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic sources of CO2 such a cement production.)

Right, it's rhythmic. CO2 drops during southern hemisphere summer, if I recall correctly, and goes up in the winter. — Mongrel

Yes, this seasonal cycle occurs because of the annual death and regrowth of land vegetation over mostly northern hemispheric land masses.

As I said before, we put CO2 in the environment just by breathing. — Harry Hindu

Our exhaling CO2 through breathing is part of a carbon neutral cycle and didn't have any direct incidence on the recent increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration. That's because the CO2 that animals (including us) exhale all comes from plant food and the pants that are eaten already had extracted this CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. So, through this whole nutrition/metabolism cycle, as much CO2 is taken out from the atmosphere and continuously incorporated into the biomass as is continuously emitted by it (including through fermentation of dead biomass). By contrast, the CO2 that we release through burning fossil fuels had previously been stored underground over hundred million years and now is released back by us into the atmosphere in a time frame of mere decades. This is why current atmospheric CO2 concentration is higher now than it has been over the last million years (and likely much longer) and still is climbing at breathless speed (pun intended).

That is why, pragmatically, I am able to agree with Aletheist's point about identity, in the case of an artefact, being a matter of designation - because a ship is not a being, but a collection of parts, and as such, has no intrinsic identity. It is what it is, purely as a matter of designation. — Wayfarer

That would be to say that artifacts and inanimate objects (such as rocks, planets, storms and rivers) have merely nominal essences while only human beings (and possibly plants and non-rational animals) have real essences. But I thinks that's too sharp a dichotomy. Artifacts and inanimate objects may only have being though their being embedded into the practical form of life of human beings, but that is enough to confer them essences of a stronger sort than merely nominal essences as traditionally conceived, or so it seems to me. Conversely, there also is a need to pragmatize our own essences in something like the Sartrian existentialist fashion. We have some inescapable freedom (however constrained) and responsibility to make ourselves the sort of thing that we essentially are, and not just to build artifacts, or cognitively carve nature, in accordance with our given needs and interests.

That would be the ship with all its "accidents"... — apokrisis

Thanks. There is much to agree with in you post, and maybe some to disagree with (or to clarify about my own position) but I must give to what you have written much more thought.

The identity at issue in this thread regarding the ship of Theseus is a relations between particulars. This relations is also called "numerical identity" and can be defined as the relation that each and every particular holds with itself and nothing else. It is what Leibniz's law(s) is (are) about (i.e. the identity of indiscernibles and the somewhat less controversial indiscernibility of identicals). If the identity of A and B were simply a matter of them being instantiations of the same type, then Leibniz's law of identity of indiscernibles would be quite trivial while his law of indiscernibility of identicals would be trivially false rather than trivially true. Wayfarer also would be identical with John, presumably, since both are instanciations of the type "human being".

Also, numerical identity is not a relation that holds between species (as opposed to genera) but rather between particulars (as opposed to universals). The general/specific distinction is not the same as the universal/particular distinction. (Distinguishing clearly those two distinctions has payoffs in the philosophy of law, the philosophy of action, and meta-ethics, as Richard Hare and, following him, David Wiggins, have suggested.)

No, a ship reconstructed from discarded parts could never qualify as the original for two reasons; firstly because it would not replicate the physical condition the ship had been in at any point in its history, and secondly because those discarded parts had ceased to be part of the ship, and had remained so for varying periods, and had thus not participated in its entire history. — John

It could actually come even closer to replicating the physical condition the ship originally had been in than the continuously maintained ship does. Your second objection, if valid, would entail that a fully disassembled object could never be reassembled as the same object it originally was. Disassembling a piece of furniture for purpose of shipping, for instance, would amount to irreversibly destroying it, on your view.

It's true that replacement parts did not participate in the entire history of the ship either but current parts had become part of the ship and remained so until the time when any substitution might be proposed.

This doesn't explain why, on your view, some objects can't still persist in disassembled states, or, at least, couldn't be brought back into "active" existence as (numerically) the same objects that they originally were before disassembly. What if you are chopping some wood and the head of the axe flies off the handle. After you've glued the two parts back together, is it necessarily a new axe that you have now manufactured, on your view? Why might this not count as your having repaired the old axe?

The identity of the ship does not reside in any part, but in the whole structure, with its entire historical trajectory and facticity.

Yes, I agree with this but I would go eve further and -- following darthbarracuda -- I would potentially include the ship's external relationship to *other* things (including ourselves, our pragmatic interests, and our conceptual skills) as part of the determination of the objects identity though time (or as part of the transcendental constitution of the object's form, to put it in a Kantian/Aristotelian way).

What other reason can you think of for the parts of a ship being replaced over time other than their dysfunctionality or lack of aesthetic appeal? — John

The reason why someone might collect the discarded parts might be because she sees the process through which a ships is being continuously maintained and repaired through substitution of material parts to amount, in this specific case, to a progressive destruction of a historically significant artifact and she hopes to, some day, be in possession of all the original parts and to be able to reconstitute the original. Your insistence that this is not possible because the continuously maintained functional artifact *is* (and remains) *the* original "ship of Theseus" is begging the question against her.

I don't see a paradox, even in that case. In that case the unused ship rebuilt out of unattractive parts would be the fucking ugly Ship of Theseus. Even if it were used by a different crew it still wold not be called 'the Ship of Theseus'. If it replaced the Ship of Theseus then it would be the replica built out of old ugly parts that became the new Ship of Theseus for some stupid reason. — John

You seem to be arguing that, in a case where some artifact is being disassembled and later reassembled, then what determines the identity of the reassembled artifact with the original is the beauty or ugliness of the reassembled object, or the wisdom or stupidity of the motivation for assembling it. What if there were an wise and intelligent motivation for reassembling a ship from its original parts, and the reassembled item would be even prettier than the continuously repaired ship?

If they had been individually defective, then what kind of a ship could be built out putting them all back together? The fucking useless Ship of Theseus, perhaps? — John

You can imagine a variation of the story where the planks have been replaced for merely cosmetic reasons and the paradox remains.

As I said before, I am on board with doing what we can, but it will require reaching widespread consensus on both the problem and the solutions. — aletheist

The main obstacle to reaching consensus on the existence of the problem (and the anthropogenic cause of global warming) is the politically motivated resistance of Republicans in the American Congress.

'Inconvenient Truth' showed ten years ago that the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been clearly measurable since the 1970's when observations started being made in Hawaii. — Wayfarer

Just picking a nit: The continuous Mauna Loa CO2 record reaches back to 1958. There are earlier spot observations when Charles Keeling was refining his pioneering measurement methods.

Even if I grant that there is "a preponderance of evidence" for this, it does not rise to the level of being "beyond a reasonable doubt." — aletheist

This is a standard of evidence that is required before a jury delivers a verdict of criminal culpability, such that the convicted individual is liable to be jailed. If the way in which you are cooking you chicken is liable to burn the house down, then "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" isn't required to justify finding a safer way to cook your chicken.

What something is is not simply a question of its material constitution but of its relationship to other things as well. — darthbarracuda

This is a very important point. — aletheist

This is a very important point indeed. While trying to find out ways of explaining "top-down causation" to some friends of mine, this has come close to becoming my philosophical motto.

When this point is not sufficiently attended to, then the relation of material constitution becomes liable to be confused with numerical identity. But something can persist through time as the thing it is (and remain the same individual) while gaining and/or losing material parts. So, material constitution isn't identity. The statue isn't (or need not be) the lump of bronze that it is made of since it can be destroyed while, at the same time, the lump of bronze persists. Likewise, a ship isn't (or need not be) the set of planks that make it up -- even with the qualification that the planks remain suitably arranged so as to preserve its function -- since the ship can persist through the replacement of some (or even all) of its planks.

Those considerations, though, only partially solve the paradox of the ship of Theseus. I owe the fuller illumination of this problem to Peter Simons (Parts: A Study in Ontology, OUP 1995/2000) and David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance Renewed, Cambridge University Press, 2001)

The trouble with the standard telling of the story of the ship of Theseus is that, while it makes explicit the issue of the relationship of "the ship" with its parts, it obscures the fact that there are actually two different contenders for being the object singled out as "the ship" (since "ship" signifies two different sortal concepts with incompatible persistence and identification criteria associated to them, as explained below); and both of them metaphysically relate to their parts in different ways thus pulling our intuitions regarding the persistence and identity conditions of this (ambiguously named) object in two different directions.

There is first the historical artifact -- some sort of a relic -- that we may think of as "the ship of Theseus" and which is such that we do care very much about its retaining at least some -- and maybe most -- of its original constituents. Else, at some point in time, it ceased to be what it was qua historical artifact (or relic). The same is true of most works of arts, such as a Picasso painting say, where we do care that the canvas, or paint, not be replaced even as the form might be maintained.

And then, secondly, there is the functional artifact -- the seafaring vessel -- that retains its identity through carrying forward its function (through maintenance and repair, etc.) This object is not the same thing that we previously named "the ship of Theseus", though nothing prevents us from giving it the same name, just as two different men can be called "Peter". The crucial thing is that, whatever name we give "it", the "it" that is at issue very much depends on the way "it" (and the sets of its material parts) not only hang together, functionally, but the way in which "it" (and the relevant function) relates to our pragmatic interests. Since nothing stands in the way of our having simultaneous pragmatic interests in singling out more than one object -- e.g. an historical artifact and a functional artifact -- then, it may occur that the original "ship of Theseus" (as singled out at the moment of its historical origin -- had material constituents that make up two different objects that merely happen to occupy the same space and share the same material constituants at that point in time but are liable to have divergent histories, spatial trajectories and material constituants some time in the future.

At the end of the story, there is one historical artifact that is identical to the original "ship of Theseus" (the historical artifact that essentially originally belonged to Theseus) and another, different, functional artifact that is identical to the original functional artifact that we also want to name, misleadingly, "the ship of Theseus". This is the functional seafaring vessel that, as it happens, originally but non-essentially belonged to Theseus. Just as is the case for the statue of Hermes and the lump of bronze that materially constitute it at a time, those two "ships" (qua historical artifact and qua functional artifact) are two different objects.

(This accounts rests on David Wiggins's thesis of the sortal dependence of identity, whereas the account earlier suggested by Wayfarer relies on the thesis of relative identity, defended by Peter Geach. I think Wiggins's account accomplished what Geach's account seeks to achieve while eliminating its severe logical problems)

Thus there are more facts than members of T, therefore no "totality of facts" can exist QED. — tom

You've only shown there to be no infinite and denumerable totality of facts. There could still be a finite, or a non-denumerable, totality of facts. At any rate, that would not be ruled out on the basis of such a proof.

There's no way of adjudicating what 'maximally great' might be. (Mermaid beauty contest? Who would be called on to judge?) — Wayfarer

Why? Cartoon Donald Trump, of course.

If you are going to quote, then the name is "Consistent Histories" or "Decoherent Histories". — tom

Yes, I meant "consistent histories". Thanks. Michel Bitbol's paper Decoherence and the Constitution of Objectivity is relevant to this discussion, as well as Rom Harré's The Transcendental Domain of Physics, both published in Constituting Objectivity: Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics, Michel Bitbol, Pierre Kerszberg and Jean Petitot, eds.

Right! Because the Aristotelean term for 'substance' was originally 'ouisia', which is nearer in meaning to 'being' than to what we now designate as 'substance'; and only beings are 'bearers of predicates', or 'subjects', per se - '[primary] substance is that which is always subject, never predicate'. So this enables a distinction between the nature of 'beings' and 'objects', which I think has been subsequently lost or forgotten. — Wayfarer

Yes, living things, for Aristotle, are the paradigms of substance in the strongest sense. They display a unity of mater and form in the sense that their identifiable proper parts only are active qua essentially being parts of those beings (i.e. having as their proper function to sustain the characteristic activity of the substance they are a part of). The human heart is essentially a part of a human being, and so is human blood, human bone tissue, etc. This is why the elements also are considered to be primary substances according to Aristotle, for there is no part of fire that isn't essentially fire (according the the ancient Greek conception of fire as one among four elements, of course). Still, my point was that under this construal, artifacts, stones and planets also are primary "beings", i.e. primary bearers of high-level predicates that only apply to beings of that kind. It just so happens that they are imperfect substances, in a sense, since their matter is imperfectly united with their form. Their overarching forms (i.e. their essential qualities or functions) only partially inform the structure of their parts, and those parts thus retain a unity of form that is alien to the substances they are constituents of. For instance, a chair can be made made of wooden planks that retain their identities as wooden planks while they merely (and accidentally) lay a hand, as it were, to enabling the characteristic function of the chair (and thus, also, enable its existence qua functional artifact) while they are well fitted parts of it.

But my main point was that Kant is justified in using his category of substance with the broader extension (to encompass "imperfect substances") since it functions as a necessary formal principle of the intellect that allows us to gain empirical knowledge of all sorts of material "beings" (e.g. boats, planets, rocks) other than just living organisms or chemical elements. My main aim in bringing those metaphysical considerations to bear on the present discussion was to show why and how our conception of "planets" (a "sortal concept", which is a concept of a "substance" in the broader, imperfect sense) still must be presupposed to be operative in the asking of the question regarding the existence of the Earth in the distant past. It is this concept of a planet, incorporating the understanding of its specific mode of existence, that determines the truth conditions of the intelligible claim about the past existence of the object, regardless of the fact that the bits of rock and magma that make up the planet may have a somewhat "accidental" (imperfect) unity from a scholastic point of view.

I think there's a bit of equivocation going on here. It think that Newtonian physics only deals with mass, not 'substance' in the formal sense, the sense of which you so ably set forth in your earlier response to me; in fact it's this very point which differentiates modern physics from its Aristotelean precedents. — Wayfarer

The difference may cut even deeper if, as Aaron R mentioned in another thread, true Aristotelian substances are unities of matter and form, of dunamis and energeia. In that case, the only true substances are living organisms, and also, arguably, pure chemicals or chemical elements (as argued by Aryeh Kosman in The Activity of Being: An Essay in Aristotle's Ontology). Artifacts and non-living objects like stones and mountains are substances only by analogy. (The unity of their material parts is accidental according to scholastic metaphysics). This definition, though, may be a bit too narrow for purpose of Kantian epistemology. Kant's category of substance has wider extension. If we thus broaden the strict Aristotelian concept to encompass any enduring object ("continuant") then we lose the intimate unity of matter and form but we get a formal concept of substance more suited for analyzing the variegated ontologies of the "special sciences" (and our empirical cognition of their objects) and of the many areas of the human world.

What classical mechanics typically deals with are such things as idealized point particles, rigid bodies, homogeneous incompressible fluids and unbreakable ropes. Real objects that approximate the behavior of those things (gas molecules, liquid water, billard balls, levers, planets, etc.), considered over short enough time frames and gentle enough mutual interactions, can be considered the "substances" of classical mechanics -- a science not concerned about attributes of "form" other than mass, geometrical shape, and the object's powers to exert Newtonian forces on one another (or to generate force fields). The massive objects that thus approximately obey the laws of classical mechanics, and considered merely as such, still have individuation and persistance conditions, albeit trivial ones (since they don't undergo generation, corruption or mereological variations). They are re-identifiable enduring objects and Kant's arguments in his Analogies of Experience speak to our concepts of them (among very many other concepts that are alien to physics proper). They also have specific powers. They are typical substances in the broad sense of contemporary analytic metaphysics (Peter Strawson, David Wiggins, ...) that owes as much to Kant as it owes to Aristotle.

Were the questions distinctively mathematical/logical? Was there some scientific or philosophical theme that you remember (e.g. paradoxes of physics, ethical dilemmas... ?

Does that not belong to the Metaphysics as art thread? In any case, please mods, don't delete it!

I don't think I would agree with this statement, specifically the part about enduring substance not falling under the purview of physical law. I think that Newton's first law, sometimes called the law of inertia, provides the formal concept of enduring substance. I admit that this law takes enduring substance for granted, but that's what laws of physics do, they take for granted what the law states. What this laws says, is that any substance will continue to exist, exactly as it has, in the past, unless acted upon by a force. So what this law does is describe enduring substance, as that which continues to exist as it has, in the past, unless it is acted upon. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is a very specific sort of substance that strictly obeys Newton's first (or second) law. It's a substance that is either defined as the mereological sum of its material parts, or that consists in an essentially indivisible mass. Substances that can survives the loss of some of their massive parts, or maintain their identities though the accretion of new massive parts, such as plants, animals, most artifacts, and celestial bodies, don't strictly obey Newton's laws of motion precisely because of the principle of conservation of momentum (which is a consequence of those strict laws). Those laws only strictly apply to physical "matter", things that have invariant mass. When an ordinary substance gains or loses parts, conservation of momentum only applies to the unchanging mereological sum of this substance and of the parts that it either lost or gained.

What the laws of physics are quite silent about -- and this was my main point -- are the principles that govern the conditions of persistence and individuation of ordinary empirical substances. This falls under the purview of irreducibly "higher-level" laws (such as the laws of biology) or depends on human conventions possibly tied up with specific pragmatic interests, in the case of artifacts, or some combination high level-laws and conventions in the case of objects that fall under semi-technical concepts such as planets, mountains, etc.

We could possibly design a robot to be conscious like humans. If they could create a model of sensory information and use that model to navigate the world and to contemplate themselves being aware of their world, then why would we say that this robot isn't conscious, or self-aware? — Harry Hindu

For sure. Such a robot would be aware that there are objects its world. This sort of objective empirical knowledge is dependent on the existence of a form of reflexive self-knowledge about ones own capacity for empirical knowledge (and of its fallibility -- the possibility of illusion). This robot's awareness, accompanied by self-awareness, would be qualitatively distincts from a cat's mere awareness of mice in its vicinity. That's something that falls short from an awareness that there objectively are mice in its vicinity.

There is more to having the relevant form of self-consciousness than possessing a descriptive "self-model", though. (Aristotle hints at the relevant distinction with the example of the physician who heals herself. There are two distinct ways one can heal oneself: as one would also heal another, through "prescribing" oneself exercise or some medicine, say, or spontaneously, through merely facilitating the natural process of cicatrisation, say. The relevant sort of self-knowledge that grounds empirical knowledge is likewise "spontaneous", in a sense. It characterizes the form of empirical knowledge -- that is: the form of the conceptual activity involved in the shaping of the experience, with the tacit self-acknowledgement of the epistemic responsibility from the knowing subject in bringing to bear the right concepts to her experience -- rather than just specifying its object by description as just one more item in the world who merely happens to refer to herself as "I".

The Myth of the Given is the one essay I have read, albeit, probably not very well or deeply. — Wayfarer

I was unaware that Sellars had written an essay with that title. Are you sure? John McDowell wrote Avoiding the Myth of the Given a few years back...

I am perturbed by the reference to materialism. I think I understand that Marx's interpretation of materialism is historical and economic, but I'm afraid I always tend to see materialism as being the prime philosophical adversary. Elsewhere, his books are referred to as an effort to re-vitalise the German idealist tradition. So I'm a bit nonplussed by that. — Wayfarer

I wouldn't make too much of that. This surprising gloss that Rödl has chosen to put on his project makes him no more of a materialist than Aristotle already was. Rödl's work "naturalizes" Kant, in a sense, through displaying how human beings, who are finite and essentially embodied substances, (in Aristotle's sense), and hence "material", can nevertheless gain a priori knowledge of the form of their own intellects in virtue of them already embodying this form as a rational capacity (rather than gaining knowledge of it empirically, which would be a sort of psychologism). Also, there is no mention of Marx or of materialism in Categories of the Temporal (and only a passing reference in just one chapter of Self-Consciousness).

Let me also reference this excellent albeit very short review of Categories of the Temporal by Aloisia Moser. (This is a direct link to the pdf file)

There is no measurement problem in realist no-collapse QM. — tom

Even in no-collapse intepretations, there is a process of decoherence into "coherent histories" (analogous to the "worlds" of the many world interpretation) that takes place. Coherent histories are correlated to (or "relative to") the macroscopic states of measurement apparatuses, or of the embodied human observers themselves who actively single our aspects of the world to observe, and who don't conceive of themselves as sorts of queer superposed Schrödinger cats). This is what "relative state" refers to in Everett's "relative-state formulation of QM".

So, in all the common interpretations of QM, including "no-collapse" interpretations, there always is a tacit reference to measurement operations, and the choice of the setup of a macroscopic measurement apparatus always refers back to the interests of the human beings who are performing the measurement. The processes of either "decoherence", or "collapse" of the wave function, (or of "projection" of the state vector), amount exactly to the same thing from the point of view of human observers. In order to escape this essentially perspectival human predicament, and ignore the measurement problem, you have to label all of empirically observable reality an illusion and proclaim the mathematical abstraction represented by the Schrödinger wave function of the whole universe "reality". "Reality," as you conceive of it, is beyond the reach of observation, or of our own empirical concepts.