From Terms & Methods pages
- ambiguities, equivocating
- a practical test or evidence to believe X is present (the epistemology of X), versus an “unpacking definition” or analysis of what we already understood by X (the metaphysics or nature of X), versus a stipulative definition of X
- questions about what X consists in (its nature), versus questions about the causes/mechanisms that bring X about
- conclusion, premises, assumptions
- deductively “valid” argument, “sound” argument, persuasive argument
- what makes it reasonable to think/expect/count something as an X, versus sufficient or necessary conditions (see below)
- notion of a “question-begging” argument (as philosophers use this label)
- dilemma (see Glossary page)
(The following won’t be on the first or second quiz.) From page on Conditionals, but we’ll discuss when we get to “Leibniz’s Law” in a few weeks:
- antecedent and consequent of a conditional
- necessary condition (what’s required to be an X), versus sufficient condition (what guarantees something is an X)
- biconditional, “if and only if” (“iff”)
- difference between converse and contrapositive of a conditional
- reductio
Introduced in Class
- self-conceptions (roles/categories that are important to you), your fundamental values, commitments and beliefs
- social identities (roles that shape how you relate to others and they relate to you), whether chosen or imposed, whether public or more private
- qualitative identity (being copies or duplicates of each other, at least at a given moment), versus numerical identity (being one and the same thing)
- necessary/essential properties, versus contingent/“accidental” properties
- examples where an X continues to exist but is no longer an X (so wasn’t essentially an X)
- what philosophical questions are raised by the Ship of Theseus?
- what philosophical questions are raised by the lump of clay and the statue it’s shaped into?
- contrast between what’s part of the definition of some notion (for example, “mother” or “substance”), and further contentious claims about the notion (perhaps even about what’s necessarily true of it)
- different conceptions of “personhood”
- questions about X’s nature or essence or unpacking definition, versus questions about how we know about Xs, versus empirical questions about Xs (such as how they’re created or come to be Xs)
- events/states/processes, properties/relations, facts and propositions, concrete individuals/substances
- intrinsic versus extrinsic/relational properties
- abstract versus concrete
- substances versus “derivative or dependent” objects (like bubbles, wrinkles, wits, waves, knots, holes, hikes)
- debate between (substance) dualists about the mind/body relation and materialist/physicalists (who are one kind of substance monists)
- mind versus soul, which can a materialist believe in?
- what is a “mental state”? what is the difference or relation between a mental state and a mind?
- being a materialist but denying that “your mind” is any substance
- Leibniz’s Law (also called “the indiscernibility of identicals”)
- Whether Leibniz Law says that it’s impossible for things to change their properties
- Relationship between Leibniz’s Law and the debate whether the statue and the lump of clay are one and the same thing, or two things in the same place?
- Does Leibniz’s Law say that if A and B have all the same properties, they are one and the same thing?
- the “divisibility” (has no parts) argument for dualism
- “I know that reporter is alive right now. I don’t know whether Superman is still alive. Hence that reporter is not Superman.”
- different ways in which our access to our own mental states is sometimes claimed to be “special” or “privileged”
- “I have no doubts about my own existence. I do have doubts about whether my body really exists. Hence I am not my body.”