Folk theories—untutored people’s (often implicit) theories about various features of the world—have been fashionable objects of inquiry in psychology for almost two decades now (e.g., Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994), and more recently they have been of interest in experimental philosophy (Nichols 2004). Folk theories of psychology, physics, biology, and ethics have all come under investigation. Fol...

objects | mathematics, philosophy of | mathematics, philosophy of: indispensabilityarguments in the | mathematics, philosophy of: Platonism | nominalism: in metaphysics |ontological commitment | Platonism: in metaphysics | plural quantification | Quine, Willardvan Orman

CONTENTS 1. McMullin on revolutions Initial statement. McMullin's challenges McMullin's own epistemology: retroduction My own question for Ernan 2. Empiricism vs Metaphysics Initial statement. Impossibility of a thesis driven critique Critique indeed value-driven, in part How can a stance provide an effective critique? Jauernig: the values involved Analogy to a moral stance How does this apply ...

or speculative to be considered a science of sincere importance. This is because in Metaphysics, there is no set of superior or empirical observations, nor, is there a valid set of logical arguments which could definitively prove metaphysical axioms to be either true or false. Therefore, a metaphysical truth usually implies a belief about the perceived environment or world. Nevertheless, what m...

Metaphysics is the science of being and asks the question “What really exists?” The answer to this question has been sought for by mankind since the beginning of recorded time. In the past 2500 years there have been many answers to this question and these answers dominate our view of how physics is done. Examples of questions which were originally metaphysical are the shape of the earth, the mo...

Despite it being the focal point of his theoretical system, I argue that Jung’s notion of the archetypes is one of his least understood concepts because it was nebulous to Jung himself. Jung vacillated between viewing archetypes as analogous to primordial images and ideas inherited from our ancestral past, formal a priori categories of mind, cosmic projections, emotional and valuational agencie...

Introduction What can psychology, understood as a study of the nature of mental phenomena, tell us about metaphysics, understood as an account of the nature of being and of the most general properties of the world? At a certain degree of generality this question is itself a metaphysical one: how can what we know about our own minds tell us something about the world? But the meaning of the quest...

Philosophers of religion sometimes appeal to physics to provide support for the hypothesis that God exists. More generally, metaphysicians sometimes appeal to physics to provide support for claims about the fundamental nature of the world. But given the current state of inquiry in physics, where the two most fundamental theories are incompatible, such arguments of physics-based metaphysics are ...

The relationship between metaphysics and science has recently become the focus of increased attention. Ladyman and Ross, in particular, have accused even naturalistically inclined metaphysicians of pursuing little more than the philosophy of A-level chemistry and have suggested that analytic metaphysics should simply be discontinued. We shall by contrast argue, fi rst of all, that even metaphys...

Critics of contemporary metaphysics argue that it attempts to do the hard work of science from the ease of the armchair. Physics, not metaphysics, tells us about the fundamental facts of the world, and empirical psychology is best placed to reveal the content of our concepts about the world. Exploring and understanding the world through metaphysical reflection is obsolete. In this paper, I will...