More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Metaphysics is one of the traditional four main branches of philosophy, alongside ethics, logic, and epistemology.
what philosophy is all about.
inspires the sense of wonder
The notion of a particular
It is something I cannot see or touch, because all I experience is a thing’s properties,
the properties are bound together inseparably.
a substratum view of particulars,
Sometimes a consequence is so ridiculous that it can be taken as good grounds for rejecting the initial supposition. Such a counterintuitive consequence will have reduced the supposition from which it sprang to absurdity.
And to talk as if the thing can in some way exist independently of those properties was perhaps the mistake that led us to absurdity.
while the bundles of properties come and go, a particular thing is a succession of such bundles with an appropriate continuity running throughout.
a thought experiment.
But a relation, it will be recalled, is also something that a Platonist thinks belongs in their heavenly realm.
There would be a Form of resemblance, therefore.
realism about properties
its transcendent nature:
in the regular world of which we feel part.
an immanent realism,
exist only in its i...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
those complex wholes are nothing more than sums of parts arranged in a specific way.
substances or integrated wholes
Some qualities are thought of as so special that they emerge at a certain higher level of reality
apparent case is consciousness or the mind.
reductionist is someone who insists that the parts can ultimately explain all the workings of the whole.
emergentism is the claim that wholes are more than sums of parts.
something to be more than its parts
parts. The idea would be that processes in our world occur in smooth, indivisible, and integrated wholes.
Our predictions are not entirely reliable as things stand but reliable enough for us to get by.
it is part of a pattern.
The world is then being understood as a patchwork of unconnected events, some of which just happen to fall into patterns.
who think the cause really does produce its effect and those who think there is nothing more than a pattern of events, with no real connection between them.
One thought is that time is some thing itself and acts as a background in which events are situated.
To exist seems a condition of bearing properties,
They have minds and, some think, souls or spirits.
we are embodied in a mortal organism but, thought Descartes, it was possible for us to survive the deaths of our bodies. Our minds could live on after death, as immortal souls. This is a strongly metaphysical claim, yet perhaps a common one, certainly among those who are religious. Along with a belief in the existence of God, perhaps it is one of the most common of all metaphysical beliefs, which shows that more of us are metaphysicians than we think.
what would count as a spiritual substance.
