BA Philosophy

Course: Metaphysics

Academic year 2022/23 (Fall)

Wednesday, 09 – 11 a.m.

Henning Tegtmeyer

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 Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. Thinking and Being, logic and metaphysics
3. Universals
4. Basic entities
5. Essence, matter and form
6. Time and space
7. Causation
8. Contingency and necessity
9. Body and soul
10. Life and death
11. God
12. Concluding discussion

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1. Introduction
(a) The object and the task of metaphysics
 Metaphysics is a discipline that examines reality (or Being) on the highest pos-
sible level of universality. It asks question such as: ‘What is reality made of?
Why is there anything at all? What does it mean to say that a certain thing exists?
How can existence claims be justified? What are the basic structures of reality?’
 The term ‘metaphysics’ was first introduced as the title of one of Aristotle’s
books. But the word was not coined by Aristotle himself but, at least according
to a popular legend, by Andronicus of Rhodes who tried to order the Corpus
Aristotelicum according to subject matters. He had the impression that the book
is a continuation of Aristotle’s Physics, and so he called it “meta ta physika”,
which means ‘to be read after the Physics lectures’.
 The Greek preposition ‘meta’, however, can have several further meanings. Be-
sides ‘after’, it can also mean ‘beyond’ and ‘about’. If physics is the science of
nature (phusis), then metaphysics is perhaps the science that reaches beyond na-
ture, to the supernatural and the immaterial? Or is metaphysics rather a meta-
level science, a philosophy of physics? Does it belong to the philosophy of sci-
ence?
 All three options have been defended by metaphysicians. Whereas Aristotelians
hold that metaphysics somehow builds on physics (with which it overlaps qua
subject matter), Platonism believes that the exclusive task of metaphysics is to
move beyond the physical towards a superior, ‘purer’ level of reality, i.e., to the
pure forms and universal principles of immaterial Being. Especially in the 20th
century, however, the programme of ‘naturalizing metaphysics’ has given rise
to, among other things, the idea of reshaping metaphysics as a conceptual frame-
work for contemporary physics. James Ladyman is one of the protagonists of
this approach, which turns metaphysics into a branch of the philosophy of sci-
ence.
 Anyway, these three understandings of what the task of metaphysics is do not
necessarily exclude each other. It is possible to hold that metaphysics is a uni-
versal theory of what there is (ontology) and that one of its tasks is to examine
whether there is a supernatural or at least super-sensible level of reality and how,

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 if at all, it is related to the sensible world of material things (philosophical the-
ology). Both views can be combined with the view that metaphysics should take
the findings of modern science in general and of modern physics in particular
seriously, albeit not necessarily within the framework of Ladyman’s naturalism.
 It is important, however, to stress the difference between metaphysics and epis-
temology. Metaphysics seeks to know what there is whereas epistemology aims
at finding out how we come to know things about what there is, how we form
justified beliefs about reality, etc. These are logically distinct questions that de-
fine distinct philosophical disciplines. Mixing up the one with the other is a very
common flaw in several varieties of mainstream 20th century philosophy, both
in its ‘analytic’ and its ‘continental’ flavours.
 Metaphysics does aim at reality rather than at our ideas and images of reality.
However, ideas, images, and mental representations are mental entities, and the
ontological status of mental entities is a genuinely metaphysical question.

(b) Metaphysics and science

 The view that metaphysics is a science and that it should be coherent with the
findings of other sciences presupposes the traditional view that philosophy in
general is, or ought to be, scientific.
 The core argument for its scientific necessity was already presented by Aristotle
himself. It is based on the observation that every science explores a particular
region of Being or reality. For example, mathematics focuses on quantitative
reality whereas physics examines reality insofar as it changes. Astronomy, a
subdiscipline of physics, is about celestial bodies and their motions, and biology
is about living beings. Musicology studies harmonies and sounds, etc. Techni-
cally speaking, each science picks out a certain class of objects under a certain
respect. In other words, each science has a certain scope. For example, biology
focuses on organic reality; if it addresses minerals, too, it does so only insofar
as minerals are relevant for metabolism. Science specialises. In doing so, scien-
tists presuppose that the broader domain of which its specific objects form a part
is examined by another science that is more universal. For example, arithmetic,
algebra and geometry are subdisciplines of mathematics, and chemistry is di-
vided into organic and inorganic chemistry. In other words, different sciences

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 belong to a hierarchical order of disciplines and subdisciplines. Based on this,
Aristotle argues that there must be a most universal science that addresses Being
or reality as such, i.e., on the level of the highest possible universality. This level
is reached if Being is addressed as Being, and this is what metaphysics does and
why it is necessary.
 Aristotle also considers the possibility that metaphysics factually coincides with
physics. This would be the case if everything that exists is ultimately material,
as materialism suggests. We will discuss materialism in several respects during
these lectures. Even in that case, however, physics and metaphysics would differ
conceptually, given that physics studies Being as being mobile whereas meta-
physics examines Being as such. Whether or not everything that exists is mate-
rial is a metaphysical question, and materialism is a metaphysical view.
 There is also the view, however, that metaphysics is not or should not be scien-
tific, that it should address reality on a more profound level and not by using
scientific methods. Especially in the 20th century, some authors argued that met-
aphysics should be based on intuition or divination. This view attracted a lot of
critique, and Logical Positivism based its rejection of metaphysical thinking on
such a view. According to the members of the Vienna Circle (Rudolf Carnap,
Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, and others) and their followers in Germany, Aus-
tria, the UK and the US, metaphysics is a pseudo-science like astrology. This
view is not very common today, though. Currently, many philosophers accept
metaphysics as a legitimate philosophical discipline again, assuming that it is
committed to the methods and rational standards of scientific philosophy. Many
philosophers suggest, however, that metaphysics ought to argue against scien-
tistic reductivism. More on this in the final section of this lecture.
 Others, however, criticise metaphysics precisely because it is committed to sci-
ence. The most prominent of them is Martin Heidegger. For him, metaphysics
is not only the origin of science but the basis of the scientific will to power that
characterises the age that we live in and that started with Plato and Aristotle.
Many scholars, however, consider this to be a rather extravagant and unconvinc-
ing view of metaphysics and its history. We will not address it in more detail in
this course.

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 (c) Metaphysics and religion
 Other philosophers, by contrast, rather suggest that there is a special affinity
between metaphysics and religion. For example, Jürgen Habermas holds that
metaphysics emerged out of the religious ideas of an ancient cast of priests and
that its origins are prescientific.1 This echoes Heidegger’s criticism that meta-
physics is ultimately ‘ontotheology’, i.e., a conflation of ontology, i.e., the quest
for Being as such, with theology, i.e., the search for the Being of God, the Sa-
cred, the Absolute, the First Cause, etc.2
 From a historical point of view, however, this view seems a bit arbitrary, given
that many philosophers who engaged in metaphysics got involved in serious
conflicts with the religious authorities of their time. This holds for Anaxagoras,
Plato and Aristotle, but also for Moses Maimonides, Averroes, Giordano Bruno,
René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Christian Wolff, Immanuel Kant, and many
others. There is certainly no pre-established harmony between metaphysics and
traditional religion.
 Nevertheless, it is correct to point out that religious beliefs have ontological
commitments and that these commitments are in need of metaphysical scrutiny.
For example, polytheists hold that there are many gods whereas monotheists be-
lieve that there can be only one. Christians commit themselves to the view that
this God is triune and that Jesus of Nazareth was the incarnation of the second
divine person. None of this is accepted by Jews, nor by Muslims. From a meta-
physical point of view, these divergent religious beliefs can be jointly false but
they cannot be jointly true because they are logically incompatible. Hence it is
a task of metaphysics to examine the truth or at least the coherence of religious
beliefs. For example, ‘Is monotheism compatible with the notion of Trinity?’
and ‘Is incarnation possible?’ are genuine metaphysical questions. The subdis-
cipline that examines theological issues from a metaphysical point of view is
called metaphysical theology or simply natural theology. It will be discussed in
the penultimate lecture.

1
Cf. J. Habermas (2019): Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie I: Die okzidentale Konstellation von Glauben und
Wissen, Berlin, 316-318.
2
Heidegger takes over the term ‘ontotheology’ from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant uses it to refer to the
so-called ontological argument (see below). Heidegger, by contrast uses the term more broadly to refer to any
kind of metaphysics that posits a first principle of Being.

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(d) Reduction and reductionism
 Science is reductive by definition, and so is metaphysics. It abstracts from
what is particular and contingent and focuses on what is universal and nec-
essary, on global structures rather than insignificant details. This is unavoid-
able and legitimate as long as one does not deny or forget that particularity,
contingency and individuality exist, too. If one does, one is a reductionist.
 Reductionism is the attempt to reduce theoretical complexity by explaining
certain aspects of reality away. Currently, there are different reductionist pro-
jects in science and philosophy, e.g., in the philosophy of mind. For example,
reductive materialism holds that the mind is just the working of the human
brain whereas AI functionalism suggests that the brain is one of the many
ways in which the functioning of an operating mind can be instantiated. Each
of these two programmes is reductionist in its own way.
 Another variety of reductionism is scientism. Scientism assumes that the only
legitimate epistemic authority is empirical science. It rejects not only meta-
physics but also any appeal to common sense and common experience. The
latter is an epistemological challenge that we will not consider in this course.
In terms of metaphysics, however, scientism is challenged by the fact that
the empirical sciences change their view of reality every now and then, some-
times quite drastically, i.e., in so-called paradigm shifts (Thomas S. Kuhn).
This is not really a problem for epistemology but it becomes massive if we
assume that empirical science tells us what the world is ultimately like.

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2. Thinking and Being, logic and metaphysics
(a) The principle of non-contradiction
 Metaphysics is a theoretical enterprise, and just as any other theoretical pro-
gramme, it needs a conceptual framework. This must be in line with the univer-
sal standards of scientific reasoning that are defined by the laws of logic.
 A basic presupposition of scientific thinking in general and of metaphysical
thinking in particular is the principle of non-contradiction. It states that one and
the same proposition cannot be both true and false. In symbolic notation:
 ¬ (p ˄ ¬ p) (‘It is not the case that p and non-p.’)
 A corollary to the law of non-contradiction is the law of the excluded middle
which says that every well-formed proposition is either true or false. This means
that there is no ‘third’, ‘middle’ option between truth and falsity. Note that this
should not be conflated with the idea that we can determine for every well-
formed proposition whether it is true or false. The latter is the basic idea of mod-
ern verificationism, which is not a metaphysical but an epistemological position.
 Aristotle held that the principle of the excluded middle follows from the princi-
ple of non-contradiction but many modern logicians disagree. They hold that
some propositions are neither true nor false. For them, this view is compatible
with the principle of non-contradiction, which classical modern logic adopts,
too. For metaphysics, this debate does not matter much since it aims at finding
true metaphysical propositions and at eliminating false ones.
 Even scepticism is not committed to denying the validity of the principle of non-
contradiction. What sceptics doubt is the applicability of the laws of logic to
reality since reality might be chaotic, incoherent and unintelligible. If that were
the case, the project of metaphysics would be hopeless.
 A view that can lead to sceptical consequences is Heraclitus’s claim that reality
is in continuous and thoroughgoing flux so that the very idea of grasping it in
propositions is misguided. Note, however, that this is a proposition, too. In 20th
century philosophy and theology, similar claims have been made, e.g., by the
American theologian John Caputo. He argues, building on Derrida’s deconstruc-
tivism, that reality is ultimately inscrutable and that we should free ourselves
from determinate worldviews, including metaphysical ones.
 Following Aristotle, many anti-sceptical philosophers suspect that scepticism is
not entirely sincere and that the refusal to form any beliefs about reality is just
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 an intellectual game. They argue that even sceptics have quite determinate be-
liefs about reality as soon as they stop philosophising. For example, sceptics
build their own actions on certain beliefs about how things are in their environ-
ment. Anti-sceptics argue that sceptics commit a performative self-contradiction
when they presuppose in their actions what they deny in theory.
 Caputo also argues that there is no clear difference between precise and vague
language, nor does he accept the distinction between literal and metaphorical
meanings.3 But neither of these claims seems convincing. Regarding the first, it
seems rather unproblematic to tell terms with a determinate meaning from those
the meaning of which is vague, and in many cases, it is even possible to replace
vague terms by precise ones. Regarding the second, metaphors build on literal
meanings. For example, understanding that Paul is a human being and that no
human being is a glacier suffices to understand that ‘Paul is glacial’ is perhaps
a metaphor (a ‘frozen’ metaphor as linguists say). In many contexts, ‘Paul is
very unfriendly’ would be a literal equivalent. Metaphors are terms that are
transferred from one domain of application (their literal meaning) to another one
(their metaphorical meaning). Aristotle calls this a transition from one genus to
another (metabasis eis allo genos). Understanding a metaphor entails realising
this transition or transferral of meaning.4 If Caputo were right, understanding
metaphors would become impossible. Perhaps this is Caputo’s own intended
conclusion. In light of the practice of interpreting poetry and of mastering met-
aphors in everyday conversation, however, such a claim would not have much
to recommend itself.

(b) Predication
 So far, we have treated propositions as unanalysed entities. But we should take
into account their internal structure. Of course, the structure of sentences varies
with the grammatical differences between different natural languages. But logi-
cians from Plato and Aristotle to Noam Chomsky argue that the underlying deep

3
Cf. John D. Caputo (1997): The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Religion without Religion, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
4
Cf. Nelson Goodman (1968): Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Goodman’s own view of the literal-metaphorical distinction differs slightly from the one that is suggested here.

9
 grammar is the same in all natural languages. At bottom, this is the grammar of
predication.
 In predication, something is said about something. There is a logical subject S
to which a certain predicate P is attached: S is P. In Chomsky’s slightly different
terminology: A proposition consists at least of a noun phrase and a verb phrase,
the former consisting of a noun or pronoun and perhaps additional components
such as adjectives, articles, genitive attributes etc., the latter of a verb plus addi-
tional components such as adverbs, direct and indirect objects that may or may
not be there. The basic idea is the same: In simple propositions, two logical com-
ponents, subject and predicate, are conjoined, and it is this combination allows
propositions to be the bearers of truth values. Complex propositions are com-
pounds of simple propositions, and their truth values result from their composi-
tion and the truth values of their constituents. Example: Suppose that ‘Socrates
is rational’ and ‘Plato is rational’ are true simple propositions. Then ‘Socrates
and Plato are rational’ must be true, too. (If p is true and q is true, then (p and q)
is true.)
 But how should the structure of propositions be interpreted? According to se-
mantic holism, propositions are bearers of truth values, but the contribution of
their components to the truth of the whole is opaque since their truth or falsity
is context-dependent. The same thing can be said in many ways, and one and the
same sentence can have different meanings and truth values in different contexts.
Moreover, holists take the structure of propositions to be purely conventional.
Therefore, they reject the correspondence theory of truth, i.e., the view that
propositions are true in virtue of corresponding to the states of affairs that they
refer to or false in virtue of failing to do so. Holists tend to prefer the coherence
theory of truth, i.e., the view that propositions are true in virtue of being coherent
with other true propositions or false in virtue of failing to do so. Critics of this
view observe that coherence is a necessary but not a sufficient truth condition.
It simply spells out the principle of non-contradiction but does not enable us to
understand what renders a proposition true in the first place.

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  Ultimately, semantic holism is attractive for outspoken opponents of the very
idea of metaphysics. Logical empiricists such as Willard Van Orman Quine and
pragmatists such as Robert Brandom share this aversion against metaphysics.5
 Semantic atomism, by contrast, holds that the components of propositions are
bearers of meaning and that the meaning and truth value of the whole proposition
results from the combination of its constitutive parts. Moreover, they commit
themselves to the correspondence theory of truth. That is, they believe that true
propositions correspond to actual states of affairs and that false propositions fail
to do so. They also hold that the different meaning bearers in true propositions
refer to different entities within the overall state of affairs that the proposition is
about, and that at least one meaning bearer within a false proposition fails to do
so. In this respect, Aristotle, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and the young Lud-
wig Wittgenstein were all semantic atomists.
 Clearly, semantic holism blocks the way to metaphysics, and hence we should
try out semantic atomism if we want to engage in metaphysics. Note, however,
that semantic atomism does not commit us to any particular metaphysical view.
For example, it is compatible with Spinoza’s metaphysical view according to
which the most basic propositions are those about God or nature and that all
other propositions can be derived from them.

(c) Categories
 Semantic atomism forces us to consider the way in which the structure of prop-
ositions can represent the structure of reality. In order to do so, however, we
must establish a conceptual framework that allows us to distinguish between the
different kinds or aspects of reality, a system of concepts that divides reality on
the highest available level of universality. Ever since Aristotle, such a concep-
tual framework is called a system of metaphysical categories.
 Category research used to be a central philosophical activity. The Aristotelian
system of categories used to be the unchallenged standard for categorial distinc-
tions for European thinking prior to the 18th century. Since then, rivalling sys-

5
Cf. W.V.O. Quine (1960): Word and Object, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; R. Brandom (1994): Making It Explicit.
Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

11
 tems have emerged, e.g., Kant’s table of categories in the Critique of Pure Rea-
son or Hegel’s Science of Logic. Within the phenomenological tradition, Franz
Brentano and his student Edmund Husserl dedicated a large part of their work
to category research, and so did Martin Heidegger, at least to some extent, in
Being and Time. Following Husserl and Heidegger, Gilbert Ryle drew the atten-
tion of analytic philosophers to the significance of categories and category mis-
takes in conceptual thinking. Since then, however, category research has been
neglected even by analytic metaphysics, except for Jonathan Lowe and a few
other analytic metaphysicians.
 But how do we get a system of categories? The standard method is to look at the
structure of predication. Something is predicated of something else. The predi-
cate, however, can be turned into the subject of another predication, and so forth.
We say ‘Socrates is wise’ but also ‘Wisdom is a virtue’ and ‘Virtues are good
properties of the human soul’. Does this mean that all there is are predicates and
predicates of predicates? That would be bad news because it would mean that
there is no starting point for predication, no foothold in reality.
 And that is not how it is. Basic predication is about something that is not a pred-
icate. For example, ‘Socrates’ is not a predicate but the proper name of an object,
a human being with certain properties that true predication denotes. ‘Socrates is
wise’ is true because Socrates possesses the property of wisdom.
 Following Aristotle in this respect, Jonathan Lowe observes that both objects
and properties belong to kinds. Hence we should distinguish between ‘objects’
and ‘object kinds’ or ‘species of objects’, and we should also distinguish be-
tween ‘properties’ and ‘property kinds’ or ‘species of properties’. This leads to
a four-category ontology that distinguishes not only horizontally between ob-
jects and properties but also vertically between universals and particulars.6
object kinds property kinds

particular objects particular properties

6
Cf. E.J. Lowe (2006): The Four-Category Ontology. A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural Science, Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press.

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 The four sides of this rectangle represent four different modes of predication,
i.e., universal property ascription (upper horizontal), individual property ascrip-
tion (lower horizontal), instantiation (left vertical) and exemplification (right
vertical). Mixing them up causes category mistakes.
 Arguably, however, we need a more fine-grained analysis of the right-hand side.
‘Property’ is an umbrella term that seems to cover a broad and heterogenous
variety of different types of properties. Aristotle argues for ten categories, one
for objects (substance) and 9 different property types. Kant, Brentano, Husserl,
and Heidegger come up with different systematisations and different lists of cat-
egories.
 What we need in any case, however, is a distinction between intrinsic and rela-
tional properties that corresponds to the logical difference between one-place
and many-place predicates. Intrinsic properties are represented by one-place, or
monadic, predicates F(x) whereas relational properties are represented by many-
place predicates, e.g., dyadic predicates S(x,y), triadic predicates T(x,y,z), etc.
Intrinsic properties are those that belong to one (kind of) thing whereas relational
properties link several things to one another. Examples of intrinsic properties
are height, skin colour, intelligence, virtue, etc. Examples of relational properties
are parenthood, kinship, friendship, distance, victory and defeat, etc. Tradition-
ally, it was assumed that intrinsic properties can be further divided into quanti-
ties and qualities. But modern philosophy is critical about this dichotomy, argu-
ing that quality can be reduced to quantity or vice versa.
 Another traditional assumption is that relations presuppose the intrinsic proper-
ties of the relata, or as Aristotle puts it, that “relation is the weakest category”.
Modern relational ontologies, however, reverse this order by claiming the pri-
ority of relational properties.
 Another important category is causation, or, within Aristotle’s system, the com-
bination of agency and patience, doing and undergoing.
 Two more contested candidates for a list of categories are space and time. Aris-
totle takes both to be categories whereas Kant argues that they are forms of in-
tuition. This issue will be discussed in the sixth lecture.

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 (d) Inference
 Like any other scientific discipline, metaphysics proceeds by reasoning. The two
main modes of reasoning that are discussed by metaphysicians are deduction
and induction. Deduction proceeds top-down, from first universal principles to
more specific propositions. Induction, by contrast, operates bottom-up, from
collecting more specific propositions to first universal principles. Note that this
notion of induction differs from Hume’s conception of induction according to
which induction is the transition from a finite set of particular propositions to a
universal proposition. Both forms of inductive inference are sometimes prob-
lematic, but for different reasons. In Hume’s case, the induction basis can never
be complete whereas in Aristotle’s case, it can. For example, if one has under-
stood the life cycle of both North American beavers and Eurasian beavers, one
is entitled to infer propositions about beavers in general (given that there are no
further species of beavers than these two).
 Aristotle, following Plato in this respect, preferred the inductive approach to
metaphysics. He sought to infer the first principles of metaphysics from our
knowledge of the cosmos.
 In classical modern metaphysics, by contrast, there is a strong preference for
deduction. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Wolff and many others argue that met-
aphysics should be modelled as a mathematical science, i.e., in an axiomatic
way. However, there is no consensus whatsoever about what the axioms are or
should be.
 In contemporary metaphysics, both modes of reasoning are applied by some and
criticised by others.
 Some philosophers hold that the main instrument of metaphysical reasoning
should be counterfactual thinking as a form of thought that combines deductive
and inductive reasoning in a peculiar way. It proceeds by inventing counterfac-
tual scenarios that are more or less bizarre, and to draw inferences about meta-
physical necessities and possibilities from an analysis of these scenarios. Other
philosophers resolutely deny the value of thought experiments for metaphysics.

14
3. Universals
(a) Platonism
 Categories are supposed to be the most universal concepts that jointly cover eve-
rything there is. That entails that they are universals par excellence. But certainly
they are not the only ones since there is an indefinite number of further univer-
sals that fall under them. So what is the ontological status of categories and other
universals?
 Logically speaking, a universal is a term that applies to many things, and ulti-
mately to particulars. Most metaphysicians assume that both universals and par-
ticulars exist, but in which sense can the universals be said to exist, too?
 A historically important and appealing position is Platonism, which some also
call realism and still others objective idealism. It holds that universals are the
most fundamental objects of metaphysics that exist eternally and independently
of anything else that participates in them, and especially independent of partic-
ulars that only exist in virtue of participating in universals. It is called Platonism
because of Plato’s work, whereas ‘realism’ refers to its claim about the real ex-
istence of universals, and ‘objective idealism’ captures its claim that the univer-
sals or ideas exist independently of the human mind. Both terms are slightly
misleading, though, since metaphysical realists are not necessarily Platonists
(many nominalists are metaphysical realists, too), and ‘objective idealism’ is
sometimes also identified with Hegel’s practical and political philosophy, which
does not presuppose metaphysical Platonism.
 Platonism is said to posit universals as prior to particulars (universalia ante rem).
This priority, however, is not temporal since universals are taken to be a-tem-
poral. It is rather a metaphysical priority, i.e., an asymmetrical dependence rela-
tion between particulars and universals.
 Many philosophers with a training in mathematics or physics find Platonism at-
tractive because they are familiar with the study of invariant, ideal, ‘eternal’ ob-
jects the properties of which are only approximated but never truly instantiated
by physical reality. They assume that a scientific study of reality is a study of
these idealised, invariant and supposedly eternal orders and structures that phys-
ical entities approximate. For example, Augustine writes that everything real has

15
 an order, a number and a measure, and this is a profoundly Platonic claim. But
there are also some fundamental problems that Platonism wrestles with.
 First of all, Platonism is committed to the claim that the universals or ideas exist
mind-independently. Together with the claim that universals are independent of
their instances, this leads to the idea that non-instantiated universals might exist,
too. But what distinguishes a non-instantiated universal from a fictitious univer-
sal such as ‘unicorn’? Coherence is not enough. The notion of unicorns is per-
fectly coherent, but it would be strange to learn that ‘unicorn’ exists as a non-
instantiated universal.
 Second, universals are taken to be causally inert. In virtue of being immutable
and eternally identical with themselves, universals are said to be beyond the
changes within physical reality.7 Physical reality is said to emanate from the
universals, but emanation is not a causal concept. And yet universals are taken
to be that which is ultimately real. This clashes with the widespread intuition
that things that really exist stand in causal relations to one another.
 Third, Platonism turns the existence of everything besides the universals them-
selves into a gradual affair. Particulars exist more or less depending on to which
extent they participate in the universals. But being the member of a species is an
all-or-nothing affair rather than something gradual. One lion is not more of a
lion than another, and one human being is not more human than another.
 From these and similar observations, Aristotle draws the conclusion that the
whole idea that existence is either being a universal or participating in a univer-
sal is misleading and unnecessary.
 The most straightforward conclusion is that universals do not exist in separation
from the particulars that instantiate them. This is an application of ‘Ockham’s
Razor’, the maxim that the medieval nominalist William of Ockham formulated
and that states that entities should not be postulated if one can do without them.
With this principle of ontological parsimony, we naturally move on to nominal-
ism, which is the opposite extreme to Platonism.

7
Classical theism takes God to be eternal and immutable, and yet theists assume that God, as the creator of the
world, stands in a certain causal relation to it. Since this problem is not immediately related to the problem of
universals, I merely mention it without going into it.

16
 (b) Nominalism
 Nominalists claim that the universals are not prior but posterior to the things that
fall under them (universalia post rem). There are different versions of nominal-
ism that are more or less radical.
 Radical nominalists claim that universals are nothing but conventional common
names that we humans use to order things in accordance with our contingent
interests. They have no grounds in the things themselves. In 20th century philos-
ophy, this view is jointly held by logical empiricists, pragmatists, and construc-
tivists who all claim that our pre-scientific and scientific images of reality, in
which universals play a central role, are purely conventional and contingent. As
a consequence, these philosophies ultimately reject the project of metaphysics.
 Moderate nominalism, however, which is also called conceptualism, is less rad-
ical. Nominalists such as William of Ockham or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz hold
that universals are concepts that the human mind produces in order to reduce the
complexities of given reality. Our finite minds cannot master the potentially in-
finite number of similarities and differences in all the things that have existed,
exist and will exist. Therefore, we group things in classes or species to make
things cognitively easier for us.
 And yet these concepts are neither arbitrary nor purely conventional but
grounded in the actual similarities between different things. For example, differ-
ent dogs resemble each other qua dogs, and they also resemble cats and horses
qua mammals. But the number of similarities between different dogs is greater
and that of the similarities between a dog and a horse. Therefore, we feel entitled
to conceive of dogs as belonging to the same species and of dogs and horses as
belonging to the same genus.
 Species, genera, classes and sets are conceived as abstract entities that are
grounded both in real similarities and in the concept-forming capacities of the
mind. Most nominalists also highlight the need of idealization, e.g., in the appli-
cation of mathematical models in scientific explanation.
 Most nominalists assume that different and mutually incompatible taxonomies
of real things are possible. Traditional nominalism held that the Aristotelian sys-
tem of categories is still the most useful and convenient way to partition Being

17
 whereas 19th and 20th century nominalism often argues for conceptual pluralism.
This unites moderate and radical varieties of contemporary nominalism.
 It is often claimed that nominalism tends to atheism but this is unfounded. Me-
dieval nominalism was to a large extent built on religious grounds, i.e., on the
modern humility (devotio moderna) that stresses the infinite distance between
the human and the divine mind. This impetus is still present in Leibniz’s plea
for a nominalist interpretation of universals.
 One powerful objection against nominalism is that it cannot explain why things
resemble each other. Radical nominalists such as Nelson Goodman downplay
the significance or even deny that things resemble each other prior to the way
we look at them.8 Moderate nominalists such as John Locke do not go so far but
use the concept of resemblance as an unexplained explainer.9 They beg the ques-
tion why it is legitimate to take similarities for granted in the first place. More-
over, nominalists are unable to explain why some similarities are more funda-
mental than others, e.g., why dog-ness is species-constitutive whereas fur colour
is not. Goodman’s claim that this is just a matter of convention does not seem
convincing.

(c) Moderate realism

 Moderate realists hold that universals exist not only in the human mind but also
in things (universalia in re). They claim that this is more than just a compromise
between Platonism and nominalism. Moderate realists like Thomas Aquinas also
claim that this is Aristotle’s authentic teaching, notwithstanding the fact that me-
dieval nominalists claim to be authentic Aristotelians, too.
 Moderate realists agree with Platonism that universals have a mind-independent
existence which makes room for true universal propositions without idealiza-
tion. At the same time, they agree with nominalism that these universals do not
exist prior to and independent of the particulars that fall under them. That is, just
like nominalism, moderate realism holds that there is an asymmetric dependence
relation between particulars and universals. Universals are grounded in particu-
lars but not vice versa. Non-instantiated universals can exist in the human and

8
Cf. Goodman (1968), chapter I.
9
Cf. John Locke (1689): An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, London, book II, chapter 8.

18
 perhaps in the divine mind but not mind-independently. The concepts that we
use to classify reality correspond to the nature of the substances and properties
(accidents) that they refer to. This has to do with the formal and material consti-
tution of substances. More about this in the next lecture.
 As other middle positions, moderate realism attracts criticism from both ex-
tremes. For example, Hegel accuses moderate realism of being ‘too tender with
things’ whereas nominalists tend to find the moderate realist’s attitude towards
universals incoherent.

(d) Agnosticism
 Another radical option is agnosticism with respect to universals.
 One famous representative of this view is Immanuel Kant. He famously claims
that our concepts merely apply to things as they appear to us and not to things in
themselves. Given that categories are the most universal concepts, he also warns
us not to apply his list of categories to things in themselves.
 Kant refuses to answer the question whether things in themselves are one or
many, universals or particulars. From his point of view, this is unavoidable. And
yet it establishes an agnosticism that appears unsatisfactory from a metaphysical
point of view.

19
4. Basic entities
(a) Materialism
 A more general question is that of basicality. Platonists hold that universals are
more basic than particulars, and that more general universals are more basic than
more specific ones. This motivates the search for the highest universal, the One
or the Good in Platonism. Platonists assume that this highest universal must also
be the most fundamental principle of reality. It is most basic insofar as every-
thing else depends on it whereas it does not depend on anything else itself. This
is why Neo-Platonism rejected Christianity. If the One does not depend on any-
thing it does not depend on God, but God depends on it.
 If one rejects Platonism, one does not thereby get rid of the basicality issue since
reducing dependent entities to independent entities belongs to the core tasks of
metaphysics.
 One plausible option is materialism. It holds that matter is the foundation of
reality, that every real entity depends on matter as its constitution whereas matter
exists independently.
 Since antiquity, however, there have been two rivalling accounts of matter. At-
omism considers matter to be discrete, i.e., to consist of indivisible particles, the
atoms. Anti-atomism considers matter to be non-discrete such that every con-
ceivable portion of matter is divisible. Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Gas-
sendi, and many other philosophers of nature were atomists whereas Aristotle,
Descartes, Schelling and others were anti-atomists.
 Modern physics somehow wavers between atomism and anti-atomism. Given
that there are subatomic particles, the so-called atoms are not properly atomic.
Quantum physics postulates a wave-particle duality on the subatomic level.
Waves, however, are continuous entities whereas particles are discrete.
 A problem of materialism in general is how to explain the diversity of and the
many levels of internal complexity in material things. Why is there not just one
amorphous heap of uniform matter but planets, stars, rocks, liquids, gases,
plants, animals, etc. and why are there so many different kinds of each? Anti-
materialists like Aristotle argue that a second principle is needed to account for
this diversity and conclude that some metaphysical dualism needs to be adopted
instead of materialistic monism. Some materialists argue that complexity comes

20
 about by chance. Ernst Bloch, by contrast, who defended a materialism that is
informed by Aristotle, held that matter itself has an inbuilt tendency towards
increasing complexity and evolution. This forces him, however, to posit two op-
posite tendencies in matter: one that causes change, and evolution, and another
that inhibits change and evolution and promotes stability.

(b) Immaterialism
 Immaterialism has many forms. Its most extreme is the subjective idealism of
George Berkeley. It holds that material reality is just an illusion and that reality
consists of minds and their ideas (with God causing those ideas). Berkeley de-
veloped this theory as a radicalisation of Locke’s empiricism but it does not seem
too plausible.
 A more moderate form of immaterialism is neutral monism. Neutral monists
hold that reality is not constituted by matter but by some neutral basic substance
from which matter and material things emerge.
 Baruch Spinoza can be considered a neutral monist since he claims that thinking
at extension, the basic attributes of mind and matter, are attributes of the under-
lying substance which Spinoza calls god or nature.
 Another neutral monist is Arthur Schopenhauer with his claim that the world is
grounded in an anonymous, a-personal will that produces the world of appear-
ances in which matter is just as apparent and unreal as minds, individuality, and
personal identity.
 Some critics argue, however, that neutral monism is just another variety of ma-
terialism and its alternative conception of the basic substance is just an alterna-
tive conception of matter.

(c) Dualism
 Dualism seeks to grant matter its full weight as an ontological principle. At the
same time, dualists hold that a second principle is needed to account for those
features of material reality that are difficult to explain merely with reference to
matter.
 There are different kinds of dualism, though. At the extremes, we have Cartesian
substance dualism and Aristotelian hylemorphic dualism.

21
  Cartesian substance dualism claims that there are basically two kinds of sub-
stances, i.e., bodies (res extensae) and minds (res cogitantes). Bodies are deter-
mined by extension and by mechanical laws, minds by ideas and the laws of
thinking. According to Descartes, substances of the two kinds have nothing in
common. And yet he claims that human beings are compounds of a body and a
mind (a ‘Ghost in a machine’, as Gilbert Ryle says).10 He also claims that God
is an infinite mind that created both bodies and finite minds.
 Later Cartesians like Malebranche and Leibniz argue that mind-body interaction
is brought about by divine intervention, either occasionally (by divine interven-
tion) or structurally (by a pre-established harmony). Whereas Malebranche de-
fends occasionalism, Leibniz offers an account of pre-established harmony as
being more in line with traditional Christian theology. More on this in lecture 9.
 Spinoza rejects the whole idea of mind-body interaction as incoherent. This is a
primary motive for his own choice of neutral monism.
 Hylemorphic dualism argue in the opposite direction. Whereas Descartes holds
that the two substances are not only conceptually distinct but metaphysically
separate, Aristotle argues that matter (hyle) and form (morphe) are conceptually
distinct but metaphysically inseparable, at least in material substances. Matter
and form jointly constitute material substances. The one cannot exist without the
other, but their causal roles are different. More about this in the next lecture.

(d) Process metaphysics

 A radical alternative to materialism, neutral monism, and dualism is process
metaphysics. It was first proposed by Henri Bergson and then systematically
developed by Alfred North Whitehead. It gained a lot of popularity among theo-
logians after Whitehead’s American student Charles Hartshorne had developed
process theology. Process metaphysicians argue that traditional metaphysics pri-
oritizes substance but that it is preferable to prioritize process. But materialists
such as Ernst Bloch were also influenced by process thinking.
 The basic idea is that what we call objects (or substances) does not exist prior to
the processes in which they are involved. Therefore, Bergson and Whitehead
argue, these processes are prior to the substances that are constituted by them.

10
Cf. Gilbert Ryle (1949): The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson.

22
  For them, reality is a process that is constituted by processes. The smallest pro-
cess units that can be discerned are occasions (in Whitehead’s terminology) or
events (in most contemporary versions of process theory). What the tradition
conceives of as substances are nothing but factors that play a role in them. It
follows that there is no identity over time but just temporal connectedness.
 Derek Parfit reconstructs the notion of personal identity within a process-meta-
physical framework.11 According to him, there is no transtemporal personal
identity but only certain temporal relations between the different time slices in
which agents are involved in events. From this view, it follows, however, that
persons like Whitehead and Parfit have no transtemporal existence. For example,
we cannot say that the author of Reasons and Persons (RP) is the same man who
also wrote On What Matters (OWM) (2011/2017). What we must say instead is
that there are certain temporal and causal relations between Parfit (RP) and Parfit
(OWM).
 Whitehead recognises that the very grammar of natural language suggests sub-
stance metaphysics. He therefore argued for the invention of a radically new
language that answers to the needs of process metaphysics. And yet his own
meta-language in Process and Reality is the ordinary predicative language that
we are all familiar with.
 Peter F. Strawson criticises process metaphysics as revisionary.12 It wants us to
give up the conceptual framework of ordinary and scientific thinking and to
adopt an entirely new framework of process thought. Strawson then seeks to
demonstrate that everything that process metaphysics wants to say can be ex-
pressed within ordinary substance metaphysics. Therefore, a Whiteheadian revi-
sion of thinking and language is superfluous.
 Strawson’s own son Galen Strawson, however, argues for Parfit’s process-met-
aphysical account of personhood.13

11
Cf. Derek Parfit (1984): Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Oxford University Press, part III.
12
Cf. Peter F. Strawson (1951): Individuals. An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, London: Methuen, “Introduc-
tion”.
13
Cf. Galen Strawson (2009): Selves. An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

23
5. Essence, matter and form
(a) Natural versus artificial
 The concepts of essence, matter and form are characteristic of metaphysical es-
sentialism. Its best-known variety is hylemorphic essentialism, but there are
other forms of essentialism that do not build on Aristotelian metaphysics.
 The hylemorphic framework is very elaborate, and this might be one reason why
it still is extremely influential today. The basic claim is that material substances
are compounds of matter and form. This leaves open whether there can be un-
formed matter or immaterial substances, too. We will return to these issues.
 A very basic distinction within hylemorphic dualism is one between natural sub-
stances and artefacts. Artefacts are not substances in the proper sense of the term
but accidental compounds of a certain raw material that is then brought into a
contingent form by a maker (artist, craftsman, designer…) in accordance with a
certain purpose that is external to the material itself. For example, a piece of
metal is connected to a wooden handle and then whetted to turn it into a knife.
Or a pile of wood and bricks is arranged in such a way as to form a hut. This
account also covers the fine arts, e.g., pictorial representation, narratives and
poems, pieces of music, etc.
 In general, the relation between matter and form in artefacts is accidental. One
and the same piece of matter can be brought into different forms. For example,
a piece of metal can be turned into a tool or into a sculpture. Conversely, one
and the same form can be realised in different kinds of raw material. For exam-
ple, a statue can be made of wood, marble, bronze, and even of cardboard. The
only limits are those of suitability. For example, you cannot turn a liquid into a
dagger without freezing it first.
 Since Aristotle begins his analysis of substances proper with a consideration of
how artefacts are composed of matter and form, Heidegger accuses him to pro-
ject the process of technical production onto the natural generation of sub-
stances. In fact, the opposite is true. Artefacts do not count as substances because
they come into being accidentally, i.e., by technical manipulation, which Aris-
totle classifies as a form of violence. Substances proper, by contrast, come into
being in a non-violent, natural way. Artefacts do not generate other artefacts;
substances do.

24
 Aristotle summarises this difference in the claim that art (techne) imitates nature
(physis). In the 18th century, this was narrowed down to a claim about the fine
arts, which were taken to be governed by the principle of imitation (mimesis).
But this claim can be found in Aristotle’s Physics; it is not about poetry or paint-
ing. It rather claims that the production of artefacts imitates the way in which we
humans and other animals take advantage of nature by making use of the mate-
rial properties that substances have anyway. For example, we can seek shelter in
a cavern or under a tree, but we can also build our own shelter by using suitable
material. Non-human animals do that, too. Ants construct anthills, bees build
hives, foxes dig holes in the ground, etc.
 Because of these and further differences, we can lay artefacts to one side and
focus on substances proper.

(b) The role of matter

 In nature, we have a tight connection between matter and form. If you mix hy-
drogen and oxygen and add just a little energy, water will emerge. Similarly, if
an animal digests food, metabolism will transform this into bodily matter and
energy.
 Matter is receptive to form. In other words, it has the passive potency to receive
form. Formed matter is receptive to new forms in tightly limited ways.
 If we remove a particular form, however, a given piece of matter gains back
additional potencies to be formed differently. For example, if you crush grains
of wheat, you destroy the granular form of the wheat grains. Thereby you gain
wheat flour, and this can be transformed into bread.
 Alternatively, you can further decompose the flour into its biochemical compo-
nents, each of which having the potency to undergo further transformations.
 This raises the question whether there is matter devoid of any form, or prime
matter, as Aristotle calls it.
 In any case, the chemical elements are not prime matter since they have different
forms. Like the ancient and medieval physicists in general, Aristotle believed
that there are four elementary kinds of matter whereas contemporary chemistry
has discovered more than 100 kinds of chemical elements. The exact number,
however, is not relevant for the argument. Aristotle also held that all the elements

25
 can be transformed into one another whereas the modern accounts are obviously
much more sophisticated. This does not matter here either. The only thing that
matters is that the elements differ from one another in virtue of having different
forms.
 Aristotle postulates the existence of prime matter because of theoretical reasons.
That is, if there are material substances that are composed of matter and form
and if removing the form of a material substance reduces it to matter with a less
complex form, there must be a lower limit of possible reductions. It is matter
without any form in particular.
 Prime matter is purely potential. This entails that it cannot be encountered in
experience since everything we encounter in experience is necessarily formed.

(c) The role of form

 With form, determinateness comes in. Form is the principle of actuality which
turns potential Fs into actual Fs. For example, it is the molecular form of water
that distinguishes actual H2O from a mere mixture of hydrogen and oxygen (po-
tential water).
 Material form does not exist independently of matter, though. And since there
are neither free-floating forms nor self-informing materials, the formation of
matter always requires an efficient cause. More on this in the lecture on causa-
tion.
 Forms provide material substances with active powers. This is why material sub-
stances can causally interact with one another.
 Forms are not universals, however, but as particular as piece of matter are. In
traditional Aristotelianism, this has not always been clear, though. For example,
the young Thomas Aquinas held that forms as such are universals that are con-
tracted by matter, which serves as the principle of individuation. But this view
is confronted with many difficulties. For example, if matter individuates a par-
ticular substance, how can it be that this substance survives the partial or even
total replacement of the matter that constitutes it (which is what actually happens
in living beings)? Ultimately, this view turns material substances into copies of

26
 other conspecific substances. Moreover, this view seems incompatible with Ar-
istotle’s claim that the soul is the form of a living being since souls are particu-
lars. Therefore, Aquinas eventually gave up this view.

(d) Essence and definition

 Hylemorphism is an essentialism. It claims that substances are what they are in
virtue of having an essence.
 What the essence of a given substance is can be read off its essential definition.
The essential definition of things determines the quiddity or what-ness of things;
it tells us what they are.
 Essentialists distinguish sharply between nominal and real or essential defini-
tions whereas nominalists either claim that every definition is nominal (Hobbes)
or that only God knows the essential definitions of things (Leibniz).
 Nominal definitions allow us to tell substances that belong to a certain species
from those that do not. Aristotle uses ‘Human beings are animals with earlobes’
as an example of a nominal definition. Given that human beings (probably) are
the only animals that have earlobes, this works well as a nominal definition. At
the same time, it is not informative about what human beings are and why they
behave the way they do.
 Essential definitions, by contrast, give us a clue to the essence or nature of a
thing. Finding the essential definition is one of the major tasks of scientific re-
search from an essentialist point of view. At the same time, it is often hard to
find. We should be prepared to admit that many of the definitions of natural
kinds we find in the textbooks are nominal rather than essential.
 Logically speaking, an essential definition distinguishes a species by setting it
apart from other species that fall under the same genus. This is done by referring
to the next higher (proximate) genus and to the specific difference that distin-
guishes the species in question from others (Definitio fit per genus proximum et
differentiam specificam). For example, the essential definition of human beings
is that human beings are rational animals. ‘Animal’ is the proximate genus, ‘ra-
tional’ the differentia. That human beings are animals and that they are rational
is the key to understanding human life, human sociality, human institutions, etc.

27
 According to Aristotle, essences are grounded in matter and form, and therefore
essential definitions implicitly refer to matter and form. For example, ‘animal’
refers to the organic human body. ‘rational’ to the rational soul that forms human
life.

28
6. Time and space
(a) Anti-realism
 If we want to understand motion, we need the concepts of time, space, and
causation. Causation will be examined in the following lecture.
 In spite of flying in the face of common sense, anti-realism regarding space
and time has a long history in philosophy that reaches back at least to Zeno
of Elea, a disciple of Parmenides’s. Zeno invented a series of paradoxes that
he takes to follow from the assumption that motion and time exist. The in-
tended conclusion is that this assumption is false, and hence that neither mo-
tion nor time exist. This is meant as a confirmation of Parmenides’s doctrine
that Being is whereas Non-Being is not. This doctrine is taken to exclude
change.
 The most famous of Zeno’s paradoxes are probably ‘Achilles and the tor-
toise’ and the ‘flying-arrow paradox’. The first suggests that Achilles, the
fastest runner, cannot overturn a tortoise that runs before him, although tor-
toises are extremely slow runners. The distance between them gets increas-
ingly smaller but will never be zero. The second suggests that no flying arrow
ever moves because every flying arrow occupies a definite spatial position at
each point in time during its flight. But occupying a definite position means
being at rest. Hence the flying arrow is at rest rather than in motion.
 Aristotle argued that these and other Zenonian paradoxes are sophisms. They
rest on the false assumption that time and space are composed of discrete
units, i.e., of atomic moments and atomic points. But both space and time are
continuous magnitudes, and moments and points are limits rather than inte-
gral parts of temporal durations and spatial extensions.
 Zeno primarily argues that time is an illusion but accepts the reality of space.
Other versions of spacetime-related anti-realism cover both space and time.
Platonism somehow oscillates between realism and anti-realism by granting
space and time an inferior degree of reality in comparison with the superior
reality of the eternal and immutable forms. Augustine, who is heavily influ-
enced by (Neo-)Platonism without being a (Neo-)Platonist himself, ex-
presses the same ambivalence in his meditation on the nature of time in his

29
 Confessions. On the one hand, he suggests that the essence of time is pres-
ence and that the past and the future do not actually exist. Presence, however,
is an inherently subjective, indexical notion that cannot be rendered objec-
tive. On the other hand, a merely subjective account of time would bring us
back to Zeno’s view that time is just a subjective, psychological notion,
which is incompatible with the idea that change is real, which Augustine also
wishes to preserve because of theological reasons.
 A sophisticated anti-realism about space and time is presented in Kant’s
Transcendental Aesthetics, the first section of the Critique of Pure Reason
(CPR). Kant argues that space and time are forms of intuition rather than
mind-independent dimensions of change. His argument presupposes the
claim that things in themselves cannot be known. But we do not only know
space and time; we even have a priori mathematical models of both, i.e.,
geometry (space) and arithmetic (time). Hence neither time nor space are
things in themselves. But since every object we encounter has a position in
space and time, space and time are not objects but forms of intuition.
 In the 20th century, the British Hegelian John E.M. McTaggart argued for the
non-reality of time (and space). He suggests that time (as a succession of
temporal moments) can be represented in two ways which he calls the A
series and the B series. The A series is the order of time according to present,
past, and future. The B series is the same order but seen absolutely, as a tran-
sitive and asymmetrical relation of moments in which each moment follows
an earlier one. He then argues that the B series is just an abstraction from the
A series but that the A series is intrinsically subjective. Along similar lines,
he also denies the reality of space and matter, arguing that reality is ulti-
mately immaterial.
 Bertrand Russell criticises the claim that the B series presupposes the A se-
ries, arguing that each moment in time can be objectively determined and
that the reality of time can thus be preserved.
 And yet claims about the alleged non-reality of time and space still have
some currency in modern metaphysics. For example, Schopenhauer looks for
metaphysical views that resemble his own in Eastern traditions such as the

30
 Bhagavad Gita or in Buddhism since both seem to claim that space, time,
and matter are just illusions that the ascetic mind should overcome.

(b) Absolute conceptions of space and time

 The other extreme is constituted by absolute conceptions of space and time.
The still most famous conception is Newton’s model of space and time as
existing absolutely and independently of the bodies that populate them. Ac-
cording to Newton, space is an infinite, three-dimensional container for bod-
ies whereas time is an independently existing fourth dimension. Both as-
sumptions are required to get Newtonian physics started.
 In his debate with Clarke, Leibniz challenged Newton’s absolute conception,
arguing that Newton’s space and time are coordinate systems that require an
absolute point zero to be absolute themselves. Actually, Newtonian physics
defines this point arbitrarily, in relation to a chosen perspective. Leibniz con-
cludes that no absolute conception of space and time is needed and that rel-
ative, perspectival conceptions suffice, provided that adequate methods for
perspective transformation are available. He suggests that not even God’s
perspective is privileged, in spite of being the perspective of omniscience.
Besides that, God’s perspective is unavailable to physics anyway.
 Kant, radicalising some of Leibniz’s points, argues (in the First and Second
Antinomy of Pure Reason in the Transcendental Dialectic of the CPR) that
the absolute conception of space and time leads to two antinomies that cannot
be resolved rationally. The first antinomy is that an infinite space and an
infinite time either go along with an infinite universe or with a finite uni-
verse. An infinite universe would be an infinite actual entity, which would
seem problematic in the case of space and utterly incoherent in the case of
time. A finite universe, however, would be located in an empty surrounding
space, and it would emerge after an infinite succession of empty time. Both
consequences seem unacceptable, too. The second antinomy builds on the
divisibility of space and time into segments and sequences. Either this divis-
ibility is infinite. Then neither space nor time would have constituent parts,
which seems unacceptable. Or it is finite, stopping at smallest units, space
and time atoms. These atoms, however, cannot have extensions since every

31
 extended thing is divisible. But how can something extension-less constitute
extension?
 Kant takes the two antinomies as indirect confirmations of his own subjec-
tivist interpretation of space and time as forms of intuition. But this is not
compelling. The antinomy can also be taken to lend support to a relativistic
conception of space and time.

(c) Relative conceptions of space and time

 Relative conceptions of space and time suggest that both space and time are
motion-relative, i.e., that space and time are the measure of the motion or
rest of material bodies. Two distinct bodies cannot occupy the same position
in space at one time, but they can change places and hence do so at different
times. If there is an entity that can neither be in motion nor at rest, it cannot
occupy a spatiotemporal position. For example, to say that God is omnipres-
ent implies that God is nowhere in particular at any given time.
 The arguably oldest relative conception of space and time can be found in
Aristotle’s Physics. Aristotle argues that space and time are not given inde-
pendently of the relative motions or the relative rest of bodies. For example,
we might truly state of a riverboat captain that he stands motionlessly on the
deck of his ship and of the ship that it glides down the river. From this we
can infer that the captain is both in motion and motionless, the former in
virtue of the ship’s motion, the latter in virtue of his own not moving around
on the ship. This is no contradiction because motion and rest are relative
notions; they are determined in relation to other bodies (the ship, the shore,
etc.).
 Aristotle further argues that the extension of bodies in space is measured by
using other bodies, e.g., a yardstick, and that the time that a motion takes is
measured with reference to other motions, e.g., of the sun (day and night) or
the moon (months). This is not a vicious circle since the measure and the
measured are different entities.
 In classical modern physics, Aristotle relativistic notions of space and time
were considered imprecise and anachronistic, and they were replaced by
Newton’s absolute conception.

32
 Einstein’s relativistic physics, however, reintroduces a motion-relative con-
ception of spacetime. What it adds to it is the notion of an infinite cosmos
without a centre. The consequences cannot be couched in Aristotelian terms
so easily, even though some contemporary Neo-Aristotelians try.

(d) Time, time consciousness, time measurement

 No matter whether realists find an absolute or a relative conception of space
and time more convincing, it will be important to distinguish between space
and time, on the one hand, and the way they are measured and consciously
represented, on the other hand.
 In the case of space, objects in space are conventionally represented as oc-
cupying a position in a three-dimensional coordinate system, and their size
is measured with conventional yardsticks, e.g., according to the metric sys-
tem. Objects in space are perceivable, e.g., visible or tangible, whereas space
itself is not.
 In the case of time, confusions are more frequent. For example, that the past
is (partly) preserved in memories whereas the future is (partly) anticipated in
expectations, hopes, or apprehensions is a fact about time consciousness.
McTaggart is right in arguing that the A series is subjective in this sense, but
from this it does not follow that time itself is subjective.
 Time measurement is partly based on conventions and partly on natural facts.
For example, the change of day and night on earth is a natural rhythm that
structures time on earth in a natural way, including the opposition between
midnight and noon. But the division of day and night into hours, minutes,
and seconds is conventional. There is no point in saying that time consists
of, say, seconds or milliseconds, since any division of time into intervals is
an arbitrary division of a continuous magnitude, as Aristotle correctly held.
That does not speak against time measurement at all since conventional
measures can be very useful as long as one keeps in mind that they are based
on convention.

33
7. Causation
(a) Anti-realism about causation
 Sceptical doubts concerning the notion of causation are a distinctively mod-
ern phenomenon. The first and most famous sceptic is David Hume who fa-
mously argued that the idea of causation can neither be justified a priori nor
a posteriori. It cannot be justified a priori because causal relations can only
be discovered empirically. Causal notions such as ‘attraction’, ‘repulsion’,
‘warming up’, ‘cooling down’, ‘procreating’ or ‘killing’, etc., cannot be de-
duced from abstract concepts but must be discovered in experience. It cannot
be justified a posteriori, however, since causes are unobservable entities.
What is given to us in experience is just regular conjunction but not causal
connection. What we observe is that one event is followed by another. What
we cannot observe is that the one causes the other. Hence the concept of
causation cannot be philosophically justified at all.
 Hume concludes that the concept of causation is not grounded in reasoning
but in custom. In other words, if we observe certain patterns in the sequences
of events that we witness, that is, if we observe that events e of the type E
are regularly followed by events f of the type F, we are psychologically in-
clined to project a necessary connection onto this conjunction, and hence to
believe that E-events cause F-events. Causal links are a useful fiction that
helps us to handle our expectations. What is given to us in experience is just
regularity rather than causal necessity.
 For Hume himself, this creates a problem, given that, as an empiricist, he
holds that all our ideas and beliefs are grounded in sense impressions. Im-
pression, however, is a causal notion. His scepticism about causation thus
tends to undermine the foundations of his own epistemology.
 Kant, wo was deeply impressed by Hume’s scepticism, responded to the lat-
ter’s doubts about causation by arguing that causation is a necessary a priori
concept, a category. At the same time, however, Kant agrees with Hume that
given causal relations can only be discovered empirically. Whether this suf-
fices to dispel Hume’s doubt is an open question.
 In the 20th century, Bertrand Russell held that physics can do without causa-
tion since the laws of physics are expressed in the form of equations that

34
 refer to physical correlations rather than to causal connections. This claim,
however, seems a bit extravagant, given that physicists usually hold that the
laws of nature define a universal framework for physical causation.
 A different way to account for causation and disposition was developed by
David Lewis.14 In his analysis, an event f is caused by another event e iff the
following counterfactual proposition is true: f would not have come about
without e having come about first. In a second move, the causal power to
bring about f can be ascribed to e, too. Lewis himself analyses counterfactu-
als like these in terms of possible-world semantics, but that is not necessary.
 However, the problem with this account is that it is explanatorily weaker than
the concept of causation. It cannot properly distinguish between causes,
causal factors, enabling or inhibiting conditions, and effects. For example,
an influenza is regularly preceded by a sore throat but the sore throat does
not cause the influenza. In fact, Lewis’s approach fails to move beyond
Hume’s regularism.

(b) Events and causal agents

 Hume assumes that the subject matter of causation are events. Many 19th and
20th century philosophers take this assumption to be self-evident and not in
need of further argument.
 However, ‘event’ is an indeterminate notion. Both the duration of an event
and the entities that are involved in it are heavily description-relative. There-
fore, the very idea that events are caused by events causes is puzzling. The
same holds for event ontologies like the one that Donald Davidson sug-
gests.15 Events usually do not have clear spatiotemporal limits, and therefore
it is notoriously unclear what it means to say that events cause further events.
 As Arthur Prior points out, events involve things, and what changes in an
event is not simply the event itself but the things that are involved in it. For
example, a fire is an event in which some combustible material, e.g., wood,
is burnt to ashes. The event is precisely this change, and it is brought about
by an efficient cause, i.e., by someone or something setting the wood on fire.

14
David Lewis, Counterfactuals, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1973.
15
Donald Davidson (1967): “The Logical Form of Action Sentences”, in: Nicholas Rescher (ed.): The Logic of Deci-
sion and Action, Pittsburgh, 81-120.

35
 Basically, things are involved in causation in two ways, i.e., as agents or as
patients. In the given example, the causal agent is the person or thing that
ignites the wood whereas the wood is the patient that undergoes combustion.
Agent, patient and action (in the broadest possible sense of the term) jointly
constitute the event that we call a fire.
 The notion of causal agency (and patience), and of activity and passivity in
general provides us with a good starting point to further think about causa-
tion, causal links and causal powers.

(c) Matter and form

 In this context, matter and form must be reconsidered according to their
causal roles. For, matter and form do not only jointly determine the essence
of bodies (or material substances) but also the way in which they are involved
in causal interactions.
 It is commonly assumed that matter accounts for the passive potencies of
bodies, i.e., to the way in which they can be affected by efficient causes, their
dispositions to be changed, enhanced, protected or destroyed by causal
agents. For example, dry wood is combustible (passive potency); it can be
burned.
 Conversely, form is taken to account for the active potencies that bodies pos-
sess. For example, if the soul is the form of a living being, then it is also the
active power that enables a living being to perform vital operations such as
taking in food, perception, and locomotion.
 Bodies are compounds of matter and form, and hence bearers of active and
passive potencies. They can affect other bodies and be affected by them. For
actual causal interaction to take place, however, there must be a match be-
tween an active and a corresponding passive potency. At the same time, in-
hibiting factors must be absent, e.g., firewood must not be wet.
 In general, matter and form are not causal agents themselves but enabling
dispositions that make causal agency and patience possible.

36
(d) Final causes
 Classical modern philosophy (with Hume as an exception) accepts material
and efficient causation but does not really consider formal causation. Argu-
ably, many modern philosophers use equivalent concepts such as ‘determi-
nacy’. What the founders of modern philosophy (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza)
are explicit about is the rejection of Aristotelian final causes. They denounce
final causation as a suspicious notion of backward causation according to
which an entity or event can be caused by another, posterior event or entity.
This, however, is not Aristotle’s view. The claim is rather that there are goal-
directed or end-driven motions and that, in such cases, the pursue of the end
plays a decisive causal role that cannot be reduced to any of the other causes.
 Only few modern philosophers, however, are so radical to dismiss final cau-
sation entirely. Spinoza is one of them. Other thinkers such as Descartes,
Locke, and Kant accept final causation in intentional agency since they as-
sume that intentional agency is caused by an immaterial res cogitans, a think-
ing substance. This allows them to avoid teleology (from the Greek telos =
end, goal) in physics but to preserve it in ethics. Leibniz even holds that tel-
eology is the governing principle of the monads in general, not just of human
souls. All these thinkers wrestle with the problem how the immaterial soul
can causally interact with the material body (the mind-body problem) and
develop different strategies to solve it.
 Intentional agency seems to be a clear case of teleology. Agents do things
for the sake of reaching certain goods that they seek to attain. To use Kant’s
famous example: Landlords build large houses in order to rent them to ten-
ants and so to earn money. Therefore, the building and renting is the efficient
cause of the rent whereas the rent is the final cause of the building and rent-
ing. Moral agency is another example of goal-directed activity. For example,
A lends help to B because A has promised to do so; hence helping is for the
sake of promise-keeping (or perhaps for the sake of pleasing B).
 More recently, the Aristotelian observation that animal behaviour and life
processes in general are goal-directed, too, has been rediscovered and taken
seriously by many philosophers of biology, and biologists use teleological

37
 vocabulary frequently, but often without being aware of doing so. For exam-
ple, the hunting behaviour of predators and the defence mechanisms of prey,
the collaborative interaction of social animals, and the growth and flourish-
ing of living beings in general, including plants and microorganisms, is
clearly end-driven. This suggests that the field in which final causes operate
is much broader than that of intentional agency and even broader than that
of conscious activity (including animal behaviour). Many philosophers now-
adays assume that animals have consciousness, too. But consciousness is not
the borderline that divides the sphere in which final causes exist from the
sphere in which it does not.
 Another issue is the overall order of nature as an enabling condition of life
and of the different life forms that mutually depend on each other. This is
often also called teleology. But this topic belongs to the philosophy of life
and cannot be addressed under the general heading of causation.
 Against the critics of final causes, it suffices to say that the claim is not that
every motion has a final cause. Only goal-directed motions have one.

38
8. Modality: contingency and necessity
(a) Determinism
 If there is motion, the question whether motions are contingent or necessary
must be raised. If one holds the latter, one is a determinist. If one holds that
not every motion is necessary, one is an indeterminist.
 Determinism is a popular view in philosophy and in science. It has many
varieties, though.
 One is the static determinism of immutable being that Parmenides and the
Eleatic school of philosophy promoted. It denies the very possibility of
change on the basis of the distinction between being and non-being. This
position entails determinism. Everything that exists does so necessarily, and
if things are a certain way, they are so necessarily.
 Eleatic thinking is not very popular anymore. The dominant form of deter-
minism in modernity is causal determinism. The underlying assumption is
that every change is entirely determined by its cause that is taken to be gov-
erned by deterministic natural laws. The overall picture is that of a causal
nexus, a universal web of causes and effects in which every change comes
about with necessity. This view is summarised in the idea of Laplace’s de-
mon, i.e., in Pierre-Simon Laplace’s thought experiment that an intelligent
demon that knew the complete condition of the universe at a given time and
all the natural laws that govern it could predict the condition of the whole
universe for any moment in the future. Laplace was a causal determinist. He
believed that the future is fully determined by the past and that our ignorance
of the future is just an effect of our partial ignorance of the past and of the
natural laws.
 More recently, some neuroscientists have argued that free will does not exist
because our actions are predetermined by the way our brains work. They cite
the Libet experiments as empirical evidence, but Libet’s experiments do not
support the claim in any unequivocal way. Causal determinism is read into
the evidence rather than found in it.

39
  Moreover, those who claim that human agency is not determined by the
genes but by education and by societal impacts are usually no less determin-
istic than those who assume that genetic structures are the determining fac-
tors of human behaviour. The nature-nurture distinction is a red herring in
the debate about determinism. Most of the neuroscientists and neuro-philos-
ophers who argue for determinism assume that a combination of genetic and
societal factors causes human behaviour in such a way that no alternative
possibilities exist. Therefore, they argue that our common-sense ideas about
free will and moral responsibility are vacuous.
 Another form of determinism, which is not so common nowadays, is theo-
logical determinism. It assumes that God determines every change in the
world according to some predefined outcome. Usually, this view is spelled
out in terms of final causes: whatever happens is in accordance with the di-
vine will. Obviously, this view raises the theodicy problem, i.e., the question
of how a good God can want evil things to happen. This problem will be
discussed in lecture 11. Note that not every conception of divine providence
presupposes theological determinism. Some are compatible with indetermin-
ism.
 Indeterminism does not have to deny causal determination entirely. Someone
who claims that not every change is a deterministic event is an indeterminist,
too. One of the most prominent indeterminists of our time is Peter van In-
wagen.16
 Some philosophers argue that we should redefine the concept of free will to
make it compatible with causal determinism. This view is called compatibil-
ism. Its most prominent contemporary proponent is Harry Frankfurt.17 Its
negation is called incompatibilism. Incompatibilists can be either determin-
ists or indeterminists.

(b) Necessity and possibility

 In any case, we should think more about the logic of modal notions such as
necessity and possibility.

16
Cf. P. van Inwagen (1983): An Essay on Free Will, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
17
Cf. H. Frankfurt (1988): The Importance of What We Care About. Philosophical Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

40
 Modal logic is as old as logic itself. Aristotle already examined the logical
relations between necessity, actuality, and possibility. 20th century modal
logic builds on this tradition.
 A proposition p is said to be necessarily true if its negation cannot be true. In
formal notation: □p → ¬ ◊ ¬ p (If p is necessary then non-p is not possible.
The converse also holds: If non-p is not possible then p is necessary.). More-
over, a proposition is said to be not necessarily true if its negation is possible
as well. In formal notation: ◊p ˄ ◊ ¬ p (p and non-p are both possible.). A
true proposition p is called contingent if its negation can be true, too. In for-
mal notation: p ˄ ◊ ¬ p. Moreover, necessity entails actuality; actuality en-
tails possibility. In formal notation: □p → p → ◊p (If p is necessary then p;
if p then p is possible.). The converse does not hold: The possibility of p does
not entail its actuality; the actuality of p does not entail its necessity.
 Modal logic, i.e., the logic that uses modal operators such as □ and ◊, is neu-
tral with respect to the different varieties of necessity and possibility that can
be distinguished. For example, it is neutral with respect to the distinction
between merely logical and real modalities that many philosophers are in-
terested in.
 The notion of logical possibility is very liberal since it regards the principle
of non-contradiction as the only dividing line between the possible and the
impossible. In modal notation: ¬ □ (p ˄ ¬ p) (It is not possible that both p
and non-p.).
 Some philosophers spell out the underlying idea in terms of conceivability.
An inconsistent set of beliefs cannot describe a conceivable scenario. Con-
versely, every conceivable scenario can be described by a consistent set of
propositions that are jointly possible in virtue of their logical compatibility.
 Quine famously argued that modalities are description-relative. What counts
as necessary under one description (or according to one linguistic conven-
tion) can be contingent under another. For him, modal terms are purely con-
ventional and hence not interesting from a philosophical point of view. He
held that the concepts of real necessity and real possibility are vacuous.

41
 For Quine, this also holds for the analytic-synthetic distinction that analytic
philosophy took over from Kant but that it simplified by denying the exist-
ence of synthetic a priori propositions. For many Logical Empiricists, a
proposition can be known a priori if it can be known by mere reflection.
Otherwise it can only be known a posteriori, i.e., empirically. From this point
of view, logical and mathematical truths can be known a priori because they
are analytic, whereas empirical truths can only be known a posteriori be-
cause they are synthetic. Logical Empiricism also assumes that the only nec-
essary truths are analytic whereas empirical truths are contingent. However,
since Quine holds that analytic propositions depend on conventions, he con-
cludes that the whole analytic-synthetic distinction is convention-dependent,
too.

(c) Possible worlds

 Saul Kripke does not agree with Quine’s view of modality, but he also criti-
cises the orthodox empiricist view that a posteriori propositions are always
contingent. He holds that the natural laws are not a priori but a posteriori
but that they express natural necessities. Hence there are necessary a poste-
riori propositions.
 Regarding possibility, Kripke defends the common-sense view that many
things can be otherwise than they are. For example, Richard Nixon won the
presidential elections in 1968 but he could have lost them. What is the logic
behind counterfactual statements like this?
 Kripke, David Lewis and other modal logicians suggest that the best availa-
ble model for interpreting modal propositions such as ◊p ˄ ◊ ¬ p is possible-
worlds semantics. Modal logic borrows this term from Leibniz who famously
claimed that God created the best of infinitely many possible worlds. But
Kripke and Lewis are not primarily interested in the idea of creation but in
the notion of a possible world.
 Syntactically speaking, a possible world is a set of propositions p, q, r, s, t.
Semantically speaking, it is taken to refer to a possible complex state of af-
fairs (a ‘world’) if it does not contain a contradiction. It is very close to an-
other possible world p, q, ¬ r, s, t which differs from the first in only one

42
 respect (e.g., in Nixon’s not winning the 1968 elections).18 Other possible
worlds, e.g., m, n, o, p, r, are more remote.
 ‘◊p’ is then defined as being equivalent with ‘There is a possible world wn
in which p’. ‘□p’ is defined as being equivalent with ‘In every possible
world, p’.
 Alvin Plantinga famously applied possible-worlds semantics to the ontolog-
ical argument for God’s existence, arguing that a supreme, absolutely perfect
being must exist in every possible world. That is, if such a being is possible
at all (i.e., if there is at least one possible world in which it exists), it must
exist in all of them in order to be really perfect. Plantinga uses this argument
as a demonstration not of the truth of theism but of its coherence.19
 Kripke’s and Lewis’s views of modality differ in two important respects. (1)
Whereas Kripke holds that possible-worlds semantics is just a heuristic tool
to detect and analyse different kinds of modality, Lewis argues that possible
worlds do actually exist and that we inhabit one of them. (2) Lewis denies
trans-world identity and claims that the entities that populate one possible
world have counterparts in those possible worlds that are close enough to
the first. Kripke argues that trans-world identity is crucial for understanding
possibilities and that Lewis’s counterpart theory is ultimately incoherent. For
example, the Nixon that wins the 1968 elections in one possible world must
be the same that loses them in another possible world rather than a counter-
part-Nixon.
 As a consequence, Plantinga’s version of the ontological argument works
within Kripke’s semantics but not within a Lewisian framework (because of
the lack of trans-world identity).
 Kripke argues that proper names such as Plato, Hannah Arendt, or Richard
Nixon should be interpreted as rigid designators that denote identical entities
in different modal contexts. For example, had Hannah Arendt gone to Pales-
tine instead of the US in 1941, she would still have been the same person.

18
Of course, the idea that one fact could be different whereas everything else is unaltered is an idealization.
Arguably, the world that we live in would be very different from what it is now if Nixon had lost the election in
1968. But we can concede the idealization for the sake of the argument.
19
Cf. Alvin Plantinga (1974): The Nature of Necessity, Oxford: Clarendon, chapter X. Actually, Plantinga formalizes
Leibniz’s version of the ontological arguments that starts with a proof of the claim that a perfect being can exist,
i.e., that the notion of a perfect being does not entail a contradiction. More on this in lecture 11.

43
 Personal identity in different modal contexts is an important requirement for
the comparability of different possibilities.
 At the same time, Kripke also argues, together with Hilary Putnam, that nat-
ural-kind terms are rigid, too. For example, the fact that water is H2O holds
in all possible worlds where water exists. Hence a different liquid with the
same phenomenal qualities but with another chemical composition, say
XYZ, would not be water. Kripke and Putnam argue that this example is not
as far-fetched as it might seem. For example, it took humankind a long time
to find out that gold and fool’s gold (pyrite) are actually two different mate-
rials, in spite of the resemblance. With this, Kripke re-establishes the notion
of essence in contemporary metaphysics. Essences are robust in different
modal contexts (or across different possible worlds).20
 What Kripke does not offer is an account of tensed modalities. This is done
by Nuel Belnap and others.21 What we want to express is the idea that there
are tensed possibilities, i.e., possibilities that emerge at some point in time
and vanish later. To do justice to this intuition, Belnap develops the model
of branching time. According to this model there is a certain state of affairs
p at t1 that gives access to the two possible states q1 and q2 at t2, q1 giving
access to further possible states r1 and r2 whereas q2 gives access to the alter-
native states s1 and s2. If q1 comes about, r1 and r2 are still possible but s1 and
s2 are not. If q2 comes about, it is the other way round. And given that time
is irreversible, once either q1 or q2 come about, p is a past fact that cannot
change. The past is fixed and determinate.
 Belnap suggests that this is a good semantic model for agency and decision-
making. Agents are confronted with choices. By making them, they rule out
certain options but gain access to further options. In the given example, q1
gives access to r1 and r2 but not to s1 and s2. For Belnap, this offers us a
realistic image of the structure of agency, no matter whether p, q, r and s are
taken to stand for distinct courses of action or for the distinct outcomes of
alternative courses of action. It is a model of free choices that presupposes

20
Just as an aside: Husserl’s method of eidetic variation serves the same purpose as Kripke’s possible-worlds
semantics, i.e., to find out what essentially belongs to a thing and what is merely an accidental property. A prop-
erty is essential if its removal destroys the identity of its bearer; otherwise it is accidental.
21
Cf. Nuel Belnap/Ming Xu/Michael Perloff (2001): Facing the Future. Agents and Choices in Our Indeterministic
World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

44
 indeterminism. As Belnap emphasises, however, determinists can use the
same model to claim that the alternative options are ultimately mere illusions
and that there is ‘a thin red line’ that connects the only possible states of
affairs, actions, and events, i.e., the actual and necessary ones.
 Belnap’s model of branching time is also used to represent moral obligations,
e.g., the obligation to bring about a certain state of affairs rather than another.
For example, there can be a moral requirement for an agent A to see to it that
p1 comes about rather than p2, say, to help B with her removal instead of
failing to do so.

(d) Dispositions and powers

 In spite of Kripke’s warning to view possible-worlds semantics primarily as
a methodological tool, thinking about possible worlds has gained a life of its
own in contemporary modal metaphysics, with an overemphasis on thought
experiments in which metaphysical possibilities are ‘tested’ in terms of their
conceivability. Neo-Aristotelian essentialists such as Kit Fine are worried
about this trend because they suspect that doing so might distract philosophy
from engaging in Kripke’s original project, i.e., to find a way to determine
the real necessities and possibilities in things.22
 Kit Fine argues that modal metaphysics as it is customarily done does not
allow us to distinguish between mere conceivability and real possibility, nor
does it account for the difference between inconceivability and real impossi-
bility. Both ‘◊p’ and ‘¬ ◊p’ can be read both ways.
 His claim is that modalities such as necessities and possibilities must be
grounded in the actual properties of things. This is a further step towards
essentialism that Fine himself calls modal actualism.
 Other Neo-Aristotelians, e.g., Stephen Mumford and Barbara Vetter, argue
that one way to spell out this idea is to analyse the inherent dispositions of
things that explain what how they tend to behave and what can happen to
them.23

22
Cf. Kit Fine (2005): Modality and Tense. Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
23
Cf. Stephen Mumford (1998): Dispositions, Oxford: Clarendon Press; Barbara Vetter (2015): Potentiality. From
Disposition to Modality, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

45
 One way to go further might be to distinguish between powers and other
dispositions. For example, the fragility of glass is usually understood as a
disposition. However, it is not a power but rather a power limit. Glass cannot
resist a certain amount of pressure without breaking. But pressure is the ex-
ertion of a power that another thing has.
 Distinguishing between powers and other dispositions might be a promising
way to regain the traditional distinction between active and passive poten-
cies.
 In any case, however, one will have to overcome the empiricist unwillingness
to engage with unobservable entities. Powers and other dispositions are un-
observable by definition. Their actualisations are observable. This suggests
that ‘p → ◊p’ can also be read as ‘The actuality of p implies that the causally
involved agents and patients have actualised the powers and dispositions that
are required for p’. This is a bit roundabout, but it should be considered a
truism nonetheless.
 This approach also promises to provide us with a robust notion of contin-
gency: ‘p ˄ ¬ □p’ can be read as ‘The required dispositions and powers might
as well not have been actualised, or not actualised as required’. In such a
case, we speak of a contingent event.
 Many philosophers argue that the whole world is contingent. Note that this
is a different use of this modal term. Kripke, Fine, Mumford, Vetter and other
modal realists speak about inner-worldly necessity and contingency, not
about world-transcending modal considerations.

46
9. Body and Soul
(a) Hylemorphism
 Having gone through the basic concepts and core topics of general meta-
physics, we now turn to two topics of special metaphysics, i.e., to the soul
and to God. The subdisciplines that do so are called rational psychology and
natural (rational) theology.
 The classical approach to the metaphysics of the soul is Aristotle’s
hylemorphic account of body and soul. It starts from an examination of what
living beings are.
 Aristotelianism conceives of living being as being alive in virtue of being
ensouled bodies. Souls are the form whereas organic bodies are the matter
of living substances. Together, they constitute living beings.
 Living beings are self-movers that preserve themselves. However, they do
not bring themselves into existence but need conspecific other living beings
(parents) that procreate them. The parents are considered the efficient causes
of living beings. Horses beget horse, and human beings beget human beings.
 Qua form, souls are not material compounds but rather metaphysically sim-
ple entities. Yet a soul is a form of a living material being and therefore tied
to matter (with the intellect, it is slightly different, though; see below).
 This, however, does not keep the soul from having formal parts, which are
associated with the potencies or powers that a soul has. The powers of the
soul are discovered by comparing plants, animals, and human beings.
 Plants live and grow by converting inorganic matter into organic matter. As
such, they are the basis of all other forms of live since all other living beings
need organic matter as food. Therefore, plants own a nutritive power which
allows them to take in matter and to transform it into a part of their own body
mass in metabolism. Many plants also propagate by dividing themselves and
by spreading offspring in their environment. Some plants even have bipolar
sexes. Nonetheless, those plants do not copulate like animals but rather pro-
create offspring with the help of a medium or catalyst, e.g., bees and other
insects. Moreover, plants can protect themselves against infections and re-
pair damaged tissue. Therefore, Aristotle regards all these activities as the

47
 acts of one underlying soul power, which he calls the vegetative soul. A veg-
etative soul is a complete plant soul. Different plants have different vegeta-
tive souls. For example, the soul of a potato plant obviously differs from the
soul of an apple tree since potato plants and apple trees are differently struc-
tured plants with different life cycles.
 Animals have vegetative powers, too, but these do not exhaust the range of
powers that an animal soul has. To be sure, animals can take in and digest
food, too, but unlike many plants they feed on organic matter only. On top
of that, animals have a twofold set of powers, i.e., perception (aisthesis) and
desire (orexis). On the one hand, animals can perceive their environment
through their senses. Primitive animals have at least one sense, i.e., touch,
whereas more complex animals have more than one. Aristotle thinks that
there are not more than five senses, but he treats that as an empirical ques-
tion. On the other hand, animals are motivated to move themselves in ac-
cordance with desire and fear. That is, animals are attracted by things they
desire (food, mating partners) and driven to flee from things they fear (pred-
ators, dangerous situations of all kinds). Some animals are also capable to
defend themselves against their enemies or to attack others. In general, ani-
mals are capable of locomotion, and they orient themselves guided by per-
ception and desire. Perception and desire are therefore the powers of an an-
imal soul, and different animals have different souls with different sets of
perceptive and orectic powers. In addition, higher animals have additional
capacities, most of all imagination and memory.
 Human beings are rational animals. That is, they have souls with vegetative
and animal powers just like plants and animals. On top of that, however, they
also have a rational soul with a twofold set of powers. On the one hand, the
rational soul has the power to understand the objects one perceives, i.e., to
grasp their essences and to know what they do, both on the particular and on
the universal level. This is the theoretical part of rationality. On the other
hand, the rational soul has the power to distinguish between good and bad,
and to prefer the good qua good. This is the practical part of the rational soul.
The rational part of the human soul is also called the intellect (nous).
 All in all, the human soul can be represented as a pyramid:

48
 rational soul: theoretical thought practical thought

animal soul: perception desire/fear

Vegetative soul

 Yet Aristotle insists that the soul is essentially one in spite of its inner com-
plexity. That is, animals have one soul rather than two, and human beings
have one soul rather than three. Moreover, within the hierarchy of the soul
powers, the superior powers rule over the inferior ones, at least more or less.
For example, an animal is master over its bodily movements but not over the
operations of the vegetative soul. Metabolism is not under the control of de-
sire and fear.
 In the human soul, the intellect governs the animal soul, or at least it ought
to. In weak-willed persons, however, the rational control over the animal
desires does not work properly. Human beings must acquire virtues in order
to establish the order of the soul that is proper to rational animals. All the
virtues have to do with the proper order and cooperation between the differ-
ent parts and powers of the rational soul.
 Notwithstanding the overall claim that the human soul is one, Aristotle holds
that the intellect is radically different from all the other powers of the soul.
That is, the intellect is neither material, nor is it tied to a part of the body, in
spite of the fact that the intellect needs sensory input to work properly.
Thought is always and necessarily based on perception, either immediately
or mediated through other thoughts. Ultimately, only perception can provide
thoughts with content.
 Nonetheless, the intellect is radically immaterial. Aristotle argues for that
claim inductively in an almost phenomenological manner. He does so by
comparing perceptions with thoughts, which leads him to note the following
differences: (1) Perception is based on the senses, and the senses have their
proper objects, e.g., visible, audible, tangible things. Some objects are koina,
i.e., perceivable through different senses, e.g., a fire can be both seen and
felt. Yet the senses are essentially limited. One cannot see a sound or hear a

49
 colour. By contrast, the intellect has no proper objects but is capable to grasp
everything. The intellect, unlike the senses, is a universal power of cognition.
(2) The senses are limited in a further respect. They allow us to perceive their
objects only within a certain range of intensity. We do not see visible things
if the light is either lacking or too intense, and we do not hear noises that are
too muted or too loud. In extreme cases, we might even become blind or deaf
because the sense organ has been physically damaged. The intellect, by con-
trast, is not damaged by objects that are either too easy or too difficult to
understand. The contrary is true: difficulties strengthen the intellective
power of the human soul. (3) The senses capture the accidental properties of
objects. Animals, including human beings, perceive objects as, e.g., col-
oured, shaped in a certain way, as desirable or repugnant, beautiful or ugly.
But only human beings also perceive objects as what and how they are in
themselves. The capacity to know essences is a gift of the intellect that ani-
mals lack. (4) In connection with (3) and (4), Aristotle also holds that the
intellect, unlike the senses, cannot be damaged by damaging a sense organ.
According to him, this even holds for brain damages. They can affect the
cooperation between perception and thought since the brain, for Aristotle, is
the organ in which the different sensory inputs are coordinated. This might
be a serious inhibition for world-guided thought and for communicating
thought to others. But it does not destroy the capacity to think as such.
 Therefore, Aristotle cautiously claims that the intellect might legitimately
regarded as immortal and calls the intellect ‘somehow divine’. This has
caused Aristotle scholars to wonder how this can be reconciled with his in-
sistence on the unity of the soul. Averroes finally came up with the sugges-
tion that the intellect is not a proper power of the human soul at all but merely
the essence of God in which we somehow participate in a rather passive way.
This doctrine was defended, among others, by the Averroist school at the
Sorbonne in the 13th century, most notably by Siger of Brabant. It was heav-
ily criticised by both Islamic and Christian theologians.

50
  Aquinas accuses Averroes of an incorrect interpretation of Aristotle and tries
to prove – via a close reading of Aristotle’s De Anima – that the intellect is
an integral part of the individual human soul in Aristotle.24
 All in all, Aristotle is an essentialist about species and species membership.
Precisely this allows him to have an understanding of race that excludes rac-
ism. Racism is the view that racial differences are essential. From the stand-
point of Aristotelian biology, this is a mistake since racial differences are
accidental.

(b) Cartesian dualism

 Cartesian dualism is remarkably disinterested in the phenomena of life. Des-
cartes himself is so much occupied with separating minds from bodies (and
to thereby prove the immortality of the soul, i.e., the mind) that he does not
devote much attention to phenomena of non-human life. By the way, this is
a criticism that Aristotle raised against his teacher Plato, too.
 Descartes argues that the human mind is an entirely autonomous immaterial
substances that causally interacts with the human body that it happens to be
connected with by an act of God’s will. The body as such is conceived as a
self-moving machine, a robot that is moved by the will via the pineal gland.
 This view was heavily attacked by Spinoza, who held that two radically dif-
ferent substances cannot interact causally. Malebranche, in defending Carte-
sianism, accepts this critique and replaces Descartes’s empirical hypothesis
concerning the pineal gland by occasionalism, i.e., the idea that mind-body
interaction is made possible by occasional divine intervention.
 In non-human animals, motion is caused by unconscious physiological
mechanisms that God has installed to turn them into robots or automata, too.
For Descartes, animals neither perceive things, nor do they experience pleas-
ure and pain since both perceptions and feelings are mental phenomena. For
him, the ascription of perceptions and feelings to animals is an anthropo-
morphic projection that cannot be justified.
 In identifying soul and mind, Descartes excludes biology as a science of its
own, reducing it to a study of the mechanical structures of organisms. This

24
Cf. his De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas.

51
 reductionism was already criticised in Descartes’s own lifetime, e.g., by An-
toine Arnauld in his objections against the Meditations. Later, however, Ar-
nauld became an ardent defender of Cartesianism, e.g., in his correspondence
with Leibniz.
 The Jesuit Pierre Boudin also rejected Cartesian metaphysics for its failure
to take animal life seriously. Moreover, he criticised Descartes’s alleged
proof of the immortality of the soul. Immortality is only granted by an act of
divine grace, and we believe in its possibility as an article of faith. In proving
the indestructibility of the mind, Descartes proves too much, thus establish-
ing immortality as a metaphysical necessity. For Bourdin, this must be a fal-
lacy. Descartes later took this point and weakened his claim without giving
it up entirely.
 Descartes was not immediately taken seriously as a biologist, but his views
unfolded in 18th and 19th century materialism. For example, Julien Offray de
La Mettrie offered an entirely mechanistic account of the human body in the
Cartesian tradition but assumed that human beings are automata, too
(L’homme machine, Leiden 1747). Whether or not La Mettrie considered
himself a mindless machine too is an open question.

(c) Panpsychism
 Cartesian dualism leaves no conceptual space for a notion of life within his
rigid dualism of body and mind. The broad concept of soul is reduced to the
narrow concept of res cogitans. As a consequence, Cartesianism does not
accept any sharp distinction between organic and inorganic nature, thus es-
tablishing a lifeless, mechanical notion of nature, as Schelling and other Ger-
man Idealists complain.
 An extremely different position is that of panpsychism. If Cartesian dualism
holds that there is no genuine life without consciousness, panpsychism holds
that life is everywhere, including those objects that we usually conceive of
as inanimate. The best-known and most elaborate pan-psychist theory is
Leibniz’s monadology.
 There is a certain dualism in Leibniz, too, but the dualism he introduces is
not a substance dualism but a dualism of appearance and reality. The things

52
 that are given to us in appearance are physical bodies whose motions are
governed material and efficient causality, i.e., by the deterministic laws of
physics. And yet bodies are not things in themselves but things for us or, as
Leibniz also calls them, well-founded phenomena. Reality in itself is consti-
tuted by monads, and these are governed by formal and final causes, i.e., by
teleology. This dichotomy of appearance and reality has a formative impact
on Kant’s transcendental philosophy.
 Hence Leibniz claims that the material bodies that we perceive in our envi-
ronment are in fact made up of monads, extension-less atoms capable of per-
ception or representation. The monads are the true substances whereas ma-
terial bodies are mere aggregates of monads and thus easily destroyed. In
contrast to bodies, monads are indestructible because they are simple. In that
respect they resemble both Cartesian minds and Spinoza’s substance. None-
theless, Leibniz claims that monads are created by the almighty God and can
be destroyed by God if He wants to.
 Every monad differs from every other monad because otherwise they would
be all one, according to Leibniz’s law.25 But the differences between differ-
ent monads can only be differences in quality. Monads are essentially per-
ceiving atoms, and so differences between monads must be differences in
perception.
 In this context, Leibniz refuses the causal theory of perception according to
which perceiving an object means being causally affected by that object in a
certain way. For Leibniz, this is impossible because monads ‘do not have
windows’ through which the extended pictures of objects could pass.
 But how can a monad then be said to perceive the world? How can it have a
perceptual perspective on the world, as Leibniz claims it does? Leibniz
claims that perceptions are brought about by God who can establish the cor-
relation of perceiving and being perceived for two arbitrary monads X and
Y.26 The correlation of perceiving and being perceived is a first instance of
pre-established harmony.

25
That is the law of the identity of indiscernibles. It says that two things are identical if they do not differ in any
respect. Conversely, if two things are not identical there must be at least one difference, i.e., an attribute that
only one of them possesses.
26
This idea is clearly inspired by Nicolas Malebranche’s occasionalism; see above.

53
  Now, although every monad perceives the world, the monads still differ with
respect to the degree of clarity and distinctness that their perceptions can
achieve. Some monads are so numb that they hardly seem to perceive any-
thing, and these make up what we call inanimate matter. Strictly speaking,
nothing is inanimate. Still, some things might appear to be inanimate since
they do not represent the world but in a dark, confused, and inarticulate man-
ner. At the other extreme, there are highly transparent, highly articulated per-
ceptions, ultimately clear and distinct, logically structured and with self-ev-
ident truth values attachable to them. Leibniz calls these apperceptions and
the underlying capacity the faculty of apperception. He also claims that ap-
perception require acts of reflection, or self-consciousness that allows the
perceiving monad to know that it perceives an object.
 Human souls can have clear and distinct perceptions and apperceptions alt-
hough there might be enormous differences between one human soul and
another.
 Leibniz also says that every monad is an entelechy, a perfect being that
strives for further perfection. The term entelechy is borrowed from Aristotle
who says that the soul is the first entelechy of a living being (whereas its
operations are second entelechies).27
 That the monad strives for further perfection also means that it has desires
or, as Leibniz calls them, appetites. The term appetite is of scholastic origin
and refers both to the drives, needs and desires of animals, to human desire
and to the human and angelic will. For Leibniz, this usage is supported by
his own view that there are only gradual differences between the different
levels of appetite. For him, it is correct to say that a human volition is nothing
but a clearly and distinctly articulated desire; while it is also correct to say
that a brute desire is nothing but a dark and confused volition. Thus, appetites
allow for degrees as perceptions do.
 This also means that monads are not only perceptive of the world but also
centres of agency. They are automata, as Leibniz says, borrowing from Ar-
istotle again.

27
Cf. Aristotle, De Anima II 1.

54
 In this way, Leibniz also allows for freedom of the will. This does not violate
the principle of sufficient reason since every act of a monad has a sufficient
reason. It is free to the degree that the monad represents it in a clear and
distinct manner. Thus, the concept of freedom allows for degrees to the same
extent that appetites do. In this way, Leibniz tries to reconcile Cartesian free
will with Spinoza’s determinism. It does justice to the latter since the princi-
ple of sufficient reason is the general principle from which the principle of
causal determinism is derived. It also does justice to the former since Des-
cartes himself identifies free will with insight into rational necessity, i.e.,
with a certain kind of clear and distinct thought.

(d) Materialism
 In the 19th century, however, deterministic materialism became the dominant
paradigm in the philosophy of life, with vitalism (F. Nietzsche, W. Dilthey,
H. Driesch, H. Bergson, W. James) as a dissenting minority view. Material-
ism holds that the phenomena of life can be explained with exclusive refer-
ence to the underlying physiological and hence material constellations of liv-
ing bodies. Vitalists claim, by contrast, that vital powers are an additional
variety of natural powers that cannot be reduced to the powers that govern
inorganic bodies. Monistic materialism considers life and consciousness as
epiphenomena of a certain interplay of physical and chemical powers
whereas vitalism suggests a metaphysical dualism between inorganic and or-
ganic nature.
 Within contemporary philosophy of mind, materialism is preoccupied with
the debate between emergence accounts and supervenience accounts of con-
sciousness. Simply put, supervenience theories hold that wherever there is a
well-functioning brain in a functioning body there is also consciousness but
no consciousness in the absence of brain and body. Emergence theories, by
contrast, suggest that consciousness emerges from the functioning of a brain
in inscrutable ways.
 After all, the difference is not as huge as it is often taken to be. That is, su-
pervenience theory posits a strong correlation between brain and conscious-
ness without offering a causal account. Emergentism, by contrast, assumes

55
 that the correlation between brain and consciousness (or mind) is weaker and
that no causal relation between the one and the other can be identified. Nev-
ertheless, both treat consciousness or mind as epiphenomena that are unilat-
erally dependent on underlying material structures. Therefore, both are vari-
eties of materialism.
 It seems fair to say that emergentism is a no-theory theory that denies that
there ever will be a theoretical account of how the brain produces the mind.
For many materialists, this view is attractive insofar as it reflects the inability
of materialism to give a positive account of what life is.28 Emergentism is
also used as a negative answer to the question concerning the origin of life
in the process of cosmic evolution.
 It is worth emphasising, however, that empirical science is not necessarily
materialistic. There are scientists who commit themselves to mind-brain du-
alism. This holds, e.g., for John Eccles, the 1963 Noble Prize Winner in
Physiology.29
 Besides that, neo-Aristotelian approaches have a powerful revival in contem-
porary philosophy. They argue that philosophy of mind cannot be carried out
independently of a broader philosophy of life and that life is a neglected topic
ever since Descartes.

28
For a nuanced approach, cf. Paul Humphreys (2016): Emergence. A Philosophical Account, Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
29
Cf. John Eccles and Karl Popper (1977): The Self and Its Brain, Berlin: Springer.

56
 10. Life and death
(a) Personal identity beyond death
 During this and the following lecture, we will move to more speculative is-
sues in metaphysics that do not always admit of bold truth claims but merely
of the comparison of different conceivable views with respect to their greater
or lesser plausibility. One of them is the question of immortality, i.e., of the
ongoing existence of a person after physical death. This question has a huge
existential significance for every human being, and it is therefore no accident
that philosophers have contemplated this topic ever since the beginning of
metaphysics.
 Materialism does not leave room for a robust notion of immortality since
materialists claim that the mind is an epiphenomenon of physiological struc-
tures and states. If these structures and states are removed, the mind ceases
to exist.
 Some materialists like the idea that the physical particles that constitute their
bodies, as it were, ‘survive’ the death of the body as a material compound.
How comforting this idea can be, however, is not very clear, given death
does not leave any consciousness behind that could witness this survival of
the particles, at least not if materialism is correct. In fact, this idea does not
pull any theoretical weight since it can be transformed without loss into a
general recognition of the putative fact that the world will last longer than
one’s own life.
 Other materialists seek comfort in the idea that one might in a sense ‘survive
death’ in the memories of ones friends and beloved ones. Arguably, however,
personal memories of the departed do not survive the third generation of rel-
atives, and after that, only very few celebrities are really remembered by later
generations of human beings.30
 Ernst Bloch and other materialists build their hopes on scientific progress
that might eventually help us to overcome physical mortality with a ‘drug
against death’ or at least to boost our longevity.31 However, Karel Čapek’s

30
This and other related points that I will discuss in this lecture are raised by Holm Tetens (2013): “Die Möglichkeit
Gottes. Ein religionsphilosphischer Versuch”, in: Sebastian Rödl/Henning Tegtmeyer (eds.): Sinnkritisches Philo-
sophieren, Berlin: de Gruyter, 11-38, and Tetens (2015): Gott denken. Ein Versuch über rationale Theologie, Stutt-
gart: Reclam.
31
Cf. Ernst Bloch (1986): The Principle of Hope, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

57
 drama The Macropoulos Case (and Leoš Janáček’s opera under the same
title) rather suggest that physical immortality might not be really desirable
conditions after all.32
 In a way, the materialistic view of human life is already discussed and criti-
cised in Plato’s Phaedo. In the text, Socrates, lying on his deathbed after
having drunken the hemlock, argues for the immortality of the soul and the
desirability of death. His students Cebes and Simmias challenge him by ask-
ing him why the relation between the soul and the body should not be com-
pared to the relation between a musical chord and the well-tuned lute with
which it is produced. The chord supervenes on touching a well-tuned lute in
the right way, and it disintegrates once the lute is out of tune. Hence the chord
is unilaterally dependent on the tuning of the lute. Socrates replies that the
analogy breaks down if we consider how the soul is related to the body, i.e.,
as its master and ruler. No chord, by contrast, can be the ruler and master of
the instrument that is used to produce it.
 Socrates then argues that the soul is the principle of life and that death is
opposed to life, hence soul and death are incompatible notions.
 For Aristotle, however, this proves either not enough or too much. It does
not prove enough if the argument just entails that a living being is not dead
while being alive, which is trivial. It proves too much if it is taken to entail
that no soul can ever die. For, this would mean that plants and animals are
immortal, too. Aristotle concludes that philosophers should hesitate to come
up with proofs of immortality.
 Holm Tetens (cf. footnote 30) argues in a different way. Picking up Kant’s
idea of a moral obligation to believe in immortality in the Critique of Prac-
tical Reason, he argues that the naturalistic view that human life ends with
bodily death is ethically unbearable because it leaves the last word to the
cruelties, crimes and injustices that human beings inflict on others, with no
final retributive justice and no reconciliation and comfort for the victims of
history.

32
Cf. Bernard Williams (1973): “The Macropoulos Case. Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality”, in: Problems
of the Self. Philosophical Papers 1956-1972, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 88-100.

58
 Materialists such as Derek Parfit and Galen Strawson (cf. footnotes 11 and
13) deny personal identity over time even in one and the same life. They
think that what we call personal identity over time is just a causal connection
between different episodic selves that instantaneously come into being and
cease to exist to give way to other episodic selves. But this piece of revision-
ary metaphysics is of no help here at all.

(b) Reincarnation, metamorphosis, metempsychosis

 What we want if we want immortality is hence neither physical longevity nor
a mere being remembered by some fellow human beings but rather some
more robust personal identity beyond death. If we take Tetens’s point seri-
ously, this preservation of personal identity after death would include the
preservation of accountability and moral responsibility for one’s life and ac-
tions.
 John Locke famously argued that continuous memory is a necessary and suf-
ficient condition of personal identity. If that were correct and if we were to
link this conception to the notion of personal immortality, it would yield that
to be immortal would entail to remember the details of one’s past life.
 In his paper on incarnation, Peter Geach rejects Locke’s conception as nei-
ther necessary nor sufficient for personal identity. Memories are not neces-
sary given that we often forget things that we did or that happened to us in
the past. This does not entail that we cannot be held responsible for our for-
gotten deeds and that we have no right to claim compensation for things that
others did to us and that we do not remember. They are not sufficient since
people sometimes have false memories and since human memory can even
be manipulated and altered in various ways. If that is the case, we should not
build our conceptions of what immortality might be on Locke’s idea of con-
tinuous memory.
 What we look for is a much more robust idea of personal identity beyond
death. Geach discusses several traditional notions of rebirth after death. One
of them is metempsychosis, i.e., the idea that one and the same soul succes-
sively inhabits different bodies belonging to different species. Geach men-

59
 tions the idea of a human soul dwelling in a tree after the death of the corre-
lated human body. This idea is already present in Plato’s Republic, in which
it is used for a system of rewards and punishments for virtuous and vicious
agency in human life. Following Aristotle, Geach finds the underlying idea
incoherent because a tree can only be kept alive and functioning by a plant
soul and not by a rational soul that lacks the required vital powers. How can
such an essentially different soul still be said to be identical with the former
soul?
 Metamorphosis, i.e. the idea that a soul might transform a body in such a
way that it turns into the body of a living being belonging to a different spe-
cies is equally incoherent, and for the same reasons. It goes without saying
that this notion of metamorphosis ought not to be confused with the biolog-
ical concept of metamorphosis, e.g., with the transformation of caterpillars
into butterflies, of maggots into flies, or of tadpoles into frogs. All these bi-
ological transformations take place within one and the same species; only the
outward shape changes drastically.
 The only idea that is not as openly incoherent is reincarnation, i.e., the idea
that one and the same human soul can successively be united with numeri-
cally different human bodies. As Vittorio Hösle notes, however, the very no-
tion of reincarnation requires a substantial notion of the ego; it seems incom-
patible with the idea that the ego is just an illusion.33
 If Locke’s idea that memory indicates personal identity over time is not reli-
able, however, there is no good reason to believe in reincarnation. Moreover,
in the absence of any memory of an alleged previous life, any ascription of
personal identity between person A having passed away in 1822 and person
B living in 2022 will be entirely arbitrary.

(c) Cartesian Dualism

 For Cartesian dualism, neither immortality nor reincarnation would seem a
problem, given the accidental relation between the mind or the self on the

33
Cf. Vittorio Hösle (2021): “Seine Geschichte der Philosophie. Zum Alterswerk von Jürgen Habermas”, Philoso-
phische Rundschau 68, 2, 164-207, 172. Things look slightly different, however, if reincarnation is not considered
as something to hope for but rather as something that one should be afraid of, i.e., as a prolongation of that
continuous illusion of subjective, personal existence. The coherence of such a view must be examined separately.

60
 one hand and the body on the other. Descartes initially took himself to have
proven the immortality of the soul, and this would also leave room for rein-
carnation, i.e., for the reunification of the same mind with a different body at
a different time. The same would hold for Leibniz, by the way, even though
neither Descartes nor Leibniz consider reincarnation.
 Geach also addresses McTaggart, who fully identified the self with the pure,
immaterial mind that constitutes a person. McTaggart was an atheist but
firmly believed in immortality. Given his dualism, this can be made coherent,
if one assumes that the mind does not need divine grace for immortality since
it is immortal by nature. On this basis, McTaggart firmly believed in reincar-
nation. He thought that this idea of necessary immortality and reincarnation
can be a source of great comfort and can even be used to explain certain
moral phenomena, e.g., the spontaneous sympathy that strangers sometimes
feel for each other. For McTaggart, they must have known each other in an
earlier life.
 Note, however, that the very idea of reincarnation opens conceptual space
for rather uncanny options, e.g., one and the same body being inhabited by
different souls or minds at different times or even at the same time. For
Geach, however, the latter is not a real option even given schizophrenia. We
speak of someone who suffers from such a mental disorder as a split person-
ality, but this does not suggest that the different personalities are actually
produced by different minds. They are rather products of one disordered
mind.
 To challenge McTaggart’s view, Geach raises the question how this alleg-
edly pure ego that Descartes and Mc Taggart claim to discover within them-
selves by introspection is related to the common-sense notion of a person
being the bearer of a proper name. According to McTaggart, Julius Caesar
and Peter Geach can be identical in virtue of being two different incarnations
of one and the same person. According to common sense, this cannot be the
case since Julius Caesar and Peter Geach are two different persons.
 Geach argues that the Cartesian arguments for the non-identity between a
pure self and an embodied person are weak and guilty of the masked-man

61
 fallacy.34 The very fact that Descartes and McTaggart abstract from the
mind-body unity that we call a person does not prove that persons are bodi-
less. This is a classical objection against Cartesianism.
 In the light of these considerations, Geach concludes that there are no philo-
sophical reasons at all to believe in reincarnation. This also means, of course,
that the very idea of a disembodied mind surviving bodily death has no solid
foundation.

(d) Hylemorphism
 Hylemorphism is much more reluctant to ascribe immortality to the human
soul. For, first of all, it rules out reincarnation. One soul is united to only one
body, and it shapes that body in accordance with its own formative powers
and under external circumstances that delimit the exertion of these powers,
e.g., the availability of healthy food, etc. Hylemorphists consider it incon-
ceivable for one soul to migrate to another body or for several souls to inhabit
one and the same body simultaneously or subsequently since, for them, nei-
ther body nor soul would survive such a transition.
 For similar reasons, hylemorphists find it inconceivable that a pure self
should continue to exist in a disembodied state. Aristotelians argue that only
the intellect might have the power to survive physical death, given that the
intellect is immaterial. At the same time, however, the intellect needs sensual
input and a bodily output to form meaningful thoughts and to perform acts
of the will that change physical reality. A disembodied intellect would have
neither the one nor the other. Hence it would be in a rather miserable condi-
tion. In his notes on Aristotle’s De Anima, Albert the Great considers the
possibility that the souls in purgatory might be in such a condition before
reuniting with their resurrected bodies again.
 One might object that hylemorphism collapses into Cartesian dualism at this
point. This is not correct, though. Cartesians assume that the mind or intellect
can immediately interact with the body via the nervous system (which Car-
tesians take to be a mechanical apparatus). Aristotelian dualists, by contrast,

34
The fallacy runs as follows: P1: I do not know who the masked man is. P2: I know who my father is. C: My father
cannot be the masked man.

62
 do not suggest that the intellect sets the body into motion on its own. It rather
does so by communicating with the animal soul, which moves the body and
is moved by it via its organs.
 Most Aristotelian dualists therefore hold two opposite views of immortality
and personal identity beyond death to be equally conceivable: either it is the
resurrection of the body or there is no immortality at all. If they are Chris-
tians, they prefer the former on the basis of faith rather than as a metaphysical
theorem.

63
 11. God
(a) Ontological arguments
 John Hick and Arthur McGill characterise the so-called ontological argument
for God’s existence as “many-faced”.35 Indeed, this argument has been pre-
sented in many different varieties.
 Building on Augustine and on neo-Platonic sources, Anselm of Canterbury first
developed the notion of God as a supremely perfect being (ens perfectissimum)
in his Monologion. In this text, he already holds that such a being must exist, but
he relies on a general explication of the concept of being that turns out to be
inconclusive with respect to the intended outcome, i.e., that God exists.
 In his Proslogion, he therefore comes up with a much simpler and more straight-
forward argument that he finds irresistible. He calls it “the one argument” (unum
argumentum) that he has been looking for all the time. In this text, Anselm ima-
gines a dialogue with a biblical figure, i.e., with “the fool who says in his heart
that there is no God”. Why does the fool, i.e., the atheist, think so? Apparently,
he takes this to be an ordinary existence claim of the same form as ‘Sherlock
Holmes does not exist’. The term ‘God’ looks like a proper name that may or
may not refer to an existing entity. In order to get further, however, it is useful
to replace this term by a description that characterise the kind of entity that we
think of when we use the term ‘God’. We think of God as being such that nothing
greater can be conceived.
 Can we conceive that there is nothing to which this description applies? Then
anything that exists would be greater than that which is greater than anything
that can be conceived, which is an open contradiction. Hence we must claim that
such a supremely perfect being exists, and even that it necessarily exists (ens
necessarium). Otherwise, any being that necessarily exists would be greater than
this perfect being. Therefore, God must also be greater than anything that can be
conceived; otherwise, there could be things that are greater than God.
 Is this an ontological argument? This is dubitable, given that Anselm presents it
as an imaginary dialogue with an atheist. It seems more dialectical than properly
ontological.

35
Cf. John Hick and Arthur C. McGill (eds.) (1967): The Many-Faced Argument. Recent Studies on the Ontological
Argument for the Existence of God, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock.

64
 Does it establish God’s existence? At least it establishes the claim that the non-
existence of a supremely perfect being is inconceivable. Thomas Aquinas ob-
jects that this argument is merely about the incoherence of atheism but fails to
establish the extra-mental existence of God. In a similar vein, Kant holds that
“existence is not a predicate”, i.e., that existence is not a perfection that can be
added or subtracted from the properties of a perfect being. I assume that Anselm
would accept both points. Regarding the first, he can grant that the argument is
about conceivability, but this is what the debate with the atheist is about anyway.
Regarding the second, he can grant that existence is not a property. And yet
existence is the precondition of having properties. Therefore, Kant’s objection
does not render the argument invalid.
 In the middle ages, the ontological argument has been held in great esteem in
the Franciscan tradition, e.g., by John Duns Scotus.
 René Descartes presents his argument in two stages in the third and fifth of his
Meditations. He starts from the observation that rational beings have an innate
idea of rational perfection that contrasts with their own obvious imperfection as
thinkers and agents. He takes this to be God’s signature on the human mind and
hence as a proof of God’s existence. Based on this, he argues that God’s perfec-
tion must entail existence.
 Leibniz argues that Descartes’s argument simply presupposes the possibility of
supreme perfection. That is, Descartes merely assumes that the notion of su-
preme perfection does not contain a contradiction. He then argues that God’s
perfections are characterized by affirmative predicates and that affirmative pred-
icates cannot contradict each other. In order to make this work, predicates that
entail a negation or limitation must be excluded, too. Hence God cannot be said
to have a certain colour or size or to have certain affections since colours, sizes,
and affections are properties of finite bodies. God, by contrast, must be taken to
be infinite and hence immaterial. ‘Immaterial’ might look like a negative predi-
cate but it is not. That is, ‘immaterial’ is the negation of ‘material’, which entails
finitude and hence negation. ‘Immaterial’ is a double negation and hence an af-
firmative predicate. In this way, we get a list of divine attributes (such as omnis-
cience, omnipotence, infinity, immateriality, etc.) that neither express nor entail

65
 a negation. Based on them, the argument that such a being necessarily exists can
proceed.
 Spinoza, Hegel, Schelling and others offer their own variations of the ontological
argument. Alvin Plantinga restates it on the basis of possible-worlds semantics
as we have seen above. Norman Malcolm and David Lewis took it to be chal-
lenging and unrefuted, but the latter without becoming a theist himself.36
 All in all, the ontological argument is polarizing. Whereas some philosophers
find it extremely profound, others reject it as a logical trick that is played on
them. It continues to find ardent defenders and passionate critics.

(b) Cosmological arguments

 The history of cosmological arguments for God’s existence goes back to Aristo-
tle’s Physics and Metaphysics. In both lectures, Aristotle argues that an eternal
cosmos needs a prime mover as the first cause of cosmic motion, and that such
a prime mover must be unmoved, a perfect divine being, a pure intellect.
 Systematizing Aristotle’s argument, Thomas Aquinas presents his cosmological
argument in two varieties. In the Summa contra gentiles, he synthesizes Aristo-
tle’s related claims from Physics and Metaphysics in a long and complex chain
of reasoning. In the Summa Theologiae, he distinguishes five ways or rather five
salient aspects of the cosmological argument that need to be highlighted.37
 The first relevant aspect (way) is the difference between actuality and potency
in a moving universe. Every motion that takes place in the universe is the actu-
alisation of a potency. Such an actualisation presupposes something actual, e.g.,
an agent that brings it about. Such an agent might be brought to actual existence
by another actual entity, but such a chain of actualisations cannot have an infinite
number of chains. There must be a first actuality, an actual being that is not
potential in any way (actus purus). This is what we call God.

36
Cf. Norman Malcolm (1960): “Anselm’s Ontological Argument”, Philosophical Review 69, 41-62; David Lewis
(1970), “Anselm on Actuality”, Nous 4, 175-188.
37
I take it that reading the Five Ways (quinque viae) as one argument with different aspects renders the reasoning
more powerful than an isolated analysis of each ‘way’. A classic example of the latter approach is Anthony Kenny
(1969): The Five Ways. Saint Thomas Aquinas’ proof of God’s Existence, London: Routledge. An excellent inter-
pretation and discussion of Thomas’s theology can be found in Rudi te Velde (2006): Aquinas on God. The ‘Divine
Science’ of the Summa Theologiae, Farnham: Ashgate.

66
  The second relevant aspect is related to efficient causation. Every motion is ef-
ficiently caused by an agent. The same holds for the emergence of that agent,
too, since this is also a motion. But the chain of efficient causes cannot be infi-
nite; there must be a first efficient cause of universal motion. Aquinas argues,
following Aristotle, that this even holds for an uncreated, eternal universe. That
is, the universe is governed by a universal causal structure, a system of natural
laws, as we would say today, and this structure must be caused by a causal agent,
an efficient cause that is not the effect of a prior efficient cause.38 This is what
we call God.
 The third relevant aspect is modal. Every motion is a contingent event, i.e.,
something that can both happen and not happen. Its happening depends on an-
other entity. This entity can be contingent, too. But it cannot be contingency all
the way down since that what leave us clueless with respect to the question why
there is anything at all. Hence there must be a non-contingent, hence necessary
being (ens necessarium), and this is what we call God.
 The fourth relevant aspect is perfection. Everything that exists is more or less
perfect, and some things are more perfect than others. But perfection has a limit
in maximum perfection as an optimum. An optimal being, however, must exist,
and such a being is what we call God. It is at this point that Aquinas appropriates
Anselm.
 The fifth relevant aspect is teleology. Motions in this universe are in proportion
to the overall order of things; they stabilise the way in which things interact with
one another. This, however, is not due to the intelligence of the things that are
moved since many of them have no intelligence whatsoever. Hence there must
be an intelligence that causes the overall order, beauty and harmony of the uni-
verse, and that is what we call God.
 Spinoza and Leibniz present the argument in a simpler version. For them, there
must be a sufficient reason for the existence of the universe, and this reason
cannot be found in anything that is part of the world. For Spinoza, the reason can
only be God’s existence. Leibniz, by contrast, the sufficient reason is rather

38
In the second way, Aquinas deviates from Aristotle who does not hold that the prime mover can be an efficient
cause, given his immutability.

67
 God’s will to create the best possible world (which coincides with the actual
world).
 Francis Hutcheson, Franz Brentano, and Richard Swinburne argue that the or-
der, harmony and beauty of the universe are much more probable under the hy-
pothesis that an almighty, omniscient and omnibenevolent God created them
than under the hypothesis that there is no such intelligent author of the universe.
In doing so, they employ the methods of probabilistic reasoning to make their
point.
 Kant objected that cosmological arguments presuppose ontological arguments
and hence that a refutation of the former is unnecessary in the light of his own
alleged refutation of the latter. If we look at cosmological arguments, however,
it seems that Kant is wrong about this. Most proponents of cosmological argu-
ments do not accept ontological arguments as standing on their own feet, not
even Aquinas in his attempt at some integration. Brentano openly rejects the
ontological argument, and even Spinoza and Leibniz consider their cosmological
arguments logically independent of their ontological counterparts.
 Some philosophers argue that cosmological arguments rest on an outdated phys-
ical theory. This, too, cannot be confirmed. The physical assumptions that the
proponents of cosmological arguments use are minimal and not really contro-
versial, and the arguments themselves seem powerful, at least for people who
are open to this type of argument.
 Some religious believers reject philosophical theology completely, assuming
that philosophy addresses a different God than the God of faith. I will address
this worry in the last lecture.

(c) Moral arguments

 Kant himself is one of the first philosophers who presented a morality-based
argument for God’s existence (in the Critique of Practical Reason). For Kant,
there can be no successful theoretical (metaphysical) argument for the existence
of God. But he argues that practical philosophy can provide us with an ethical
argument to the effect that a practical belief in the existence of God is morally
required.

68
  The argument runs like this: We human beings are under the authority of a moral
law that is absolutely binding. At the same time, we have a natural desire for
happiness, and we are convinced that human agents who always act in accord-
ance with the moral law by simply following their sense of duty deserve to be
happy. Alas, however, earthly happiness is hardly ever morally deserved, and
many of those who deserve happiness suffer from unhappiness or even become
victims of horrible crimes. This condition is morally unbearable, and if we do
not want to fall into despair, we ought to believe that earthly injustice does not
have the last word. But since injustice cannot be eradicated, we ought to cultivate
the belief in an afterlife in which justice is restored by an omniscient and per-
fectly just divine judge. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant points out that we are
morally obliged to identify this God of the last judgment with the God who cre-
ated heaven and earth.
 We have seen how this argument is taken up by Holm Tetens. Tetens turns it
into an argument against naturalistic atheism.
 A common objection against Kant’s approach is that it presupposes doxastic vol-
untarism, i.e., the view that we can adopt and give up beliefs as we please. For,
the adoption of theistic beliefs can only be morally required if we are able to do
so. ‘Ought’ implies ‘Can’. Doxastic voluntarism is usually associated with Wil-
liam James, but James clearly adopts and further develops ideas that he takes
over from Kant. Many philosophers find doxastic voluntarism incoherent.39 Oth-
ers, including Fichte, find it legitimate in cases in which certain questions cannot
be answered on theoretical grounds alone, and in such cases, the requirements
of practical philosophy have priority.
 Other moral arguments for theism do not presuppose doxastic voluntarism. John
Henry Newman, for example, holds that as far as we know, all human beings
have some moral conscience, some awareness of the difference between good
and evil, and know that the one needs to be pursued and the other to be avoided,
and all human being know how it feels to have pangs of conscience. As Newman
argues, this proves the existence of a superhuman lawgiver that installs this
moral sense in us since moral conscience can neither be produced by education

39
Cf. Bernard Williams, “Deciding to believe”, in Williams (1973), 136-151.

69
 nor be installed on a conventional basis.40 Writers and philosophers such as C.S.
Lewis, Jacques Maritain, and Richard Swinburne present different versions of
such an argument from moral conscience.41

(d) Theodicy
 A standard objection against theism is based on the problem of theodicy. It is
already discussed in the Old Testament. The argument from theodicy runs like
this: If there is an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God, he would
not allow evil to exist. And yet evil does exist. Hence such a God does not exist.
 That can mean several different things: It can either mean that God does not exist
at all, or that he is either not omniscient (he does not know about the evils that
happen in the world) or not omnipotent (he knows them but is powerless against
them), or perhaps he is not omnibenevolent (he either wants evil things to hap-
pen or he does not care). Each of these options raises a problem for theism. The
first, atheism, is its simple and straightforward negation. The second and third
would seriously undermine any trust that believers are willing to put in God.
For, why should one hope for a God who is either ignorant about important
things or lacking the power to intervene? The fourth option would be the belief
in an evil or indifferent God that would undermine the idea that God deserves
worship, praise, and gratitude.42
 As has been said in a previous lecture, contemporary process theology bites the
bullet by adopting the second option: For them, God does not have the power to
prohibit and destroy evil, and they accept the implications that this move has for
the religious attitudes of theistic believers.
 However, there are also less revisionary responses by classical theists. The best-
known is probably Leibniz’s Essay on Theodicy. In this text, Leibniz seeks to
explain why even the best possible world must contain evil.

40
Cf. John Henry Newman (1870): An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 3rd edition, London: Burns, Oates, and
Co., 384-403.
41
For a general debate, cf. Charles Stephen Evans (2013): God and Moral Obligation, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
42
Cf. also John Leslie Mackie (1982): The Miracle of Theism. Arguments for and against the Existence of God,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

70
  He does so by distinguishing between metaphysical, physical and moral evil.
Metaphysical evils are the imperfections of finite creatures, including the mor-
tality of living beings. The universe cannot be absolutely perfect since it is dif-
ferent from God himself, who is the only absolutely perfect entity. Creating a
second God would be a pointless exercise.
 Physical evils that are caused by natural processes, e.g., floods, droughts, earth-
quakes, erupting volcanos, infectious diseases, etc. These evils are unavoidable
by-products of physical processes that are governed by natural laws, and they
contribute to the overall order and stability of nature. If God were to intervene
to protect his creatures against physical evils, he would jeopardize that order and
make the world a worse place to live in the long run.
 Moral evils are those evils that human beings inflict on each other. Just like vir-
tuous actions, vicious actions are genuine expressions of human free will. A
world that leaves from for free will is better than a deterministic world, and
therefore God tolerates moral evil for the sake of the preservation of freedom.
This tolerance, however, is not the last word since there are eternal rewards and
punishments for virtuous and vicious agents in the afterlife.
 Leibniz has often been criticised or even ridiculed for this optimism, especially
by Voltaire and Schopenhauer. With some hermeneutic charity, however, one
will find that Leibniz’s defence of divine goodness, justice, omniscience and
omnipotence is much more powerful than the widespread caricatures of his phi-
losophy suggest.
 In general, it is often suggested that evil is a problem for theism. What is over-
looked, however, is that evil raises an even greater problem for atheism. Tetens
can help us to recognise this point. If no transcendent perspective on life is avail-
able, then physical and moral evils will have the last word, at least in many cases.
Atheism cannot offer any salvific perspective. Within an atheistic perspective,
Schopenhauerian pessimism seems almost unavoidable.
 Atheists such as Philip Kitcher argue for an optimistic faith in scientific progress
and in evolution in general.43 But critics tend to find this secular optimism un-
founded.

43
Cf. Philip Kitcher (2014): Life after Faith. The Case for Secular Humanism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press;
― (2021): Moral Progress, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

71
12. Concluding discussion
(a) From logic to theology
 The trajectory of these lectures has lead us from logic to theology. The search
for metaphysical categories is the search for a conceptual framework for meta-
physical theory. A conceptual framework is constituted by the basic concepts
that are needed to make theoretical claims, to justify or criticise them, and to
draw determinate conclusions from such a discussion. In this respect, metaphys-
ics does not differ from any other philosophical or scientific discipline. What is
unique about metaphysical categories, however, is their level of universality.
Metaphysical categories are meant to be the most universal concepts that can be
conceived. Therefore, a system of metaphysical categories is all-encompassing
by definition. According to some postmodern critics of metaphysics, this is a
dangerously totalising ambition. How coherent this criticism is, however, is an
open question, given that categories are needed even for the identification of
entities that are difficult to categorise.
 Categories are universals, and because of this, the question concerning the on-
tological status of universals is urgent for metaphysics. Platonism, nominalism
and Aristotelian realism are the available options.
 A different question concerns basic entities. Once basic conceptual issues are
clarified, metaphysics starts from the observation that some things are more
basic than others. For example, things are more basic than the properties they
have, and also more basic than the operations they perform. The traditional for-
mal denomination for basic entities is ‘substance’. Hence the question is what
substances are and how they come into being. Materialism, immaterialism and
several varieties of dualism are the available options. Process metaphysics, how-
ever, criticises the traditional idea that thing-like substances are more basic than
the processes in which they are involved. Therefore, process metaphysics pro-
poses to reverse the traditional order and to regard processes as the most basic
entities.
 Time, space, causation, contingency, and necessity are concepts that metaphys-
ics cannot do without if it seeks to understand the world of things in motion of
which we are a part.

72
 The body-soul relation, including the body-mind relation is the standard topic of
modern philosophy of mind. Ultimately, however, the question how soul, mind,
and body are related to each other is a metaphysical question that ought to be
discussed within a metaphysics of life.
 Finally, natural theology is that metaphysical subdiscipline that examines
whether there is a supreme being with the means of philosophical reasoning
alone, that is, without relying on any faith-based assumptions. We can distin-
guish between ‘ontological’, a priori approaches and ‘cosmological’, a posteri-
ori approaches.

(b) Natural vs. revealed theology

 This raises the question how natural, philosophical theology is related to non-
philosophical, faith-based revealed theology. Traditionally, these two ways of
doing theology are held to be radically different. The first builds on reason and
argument, the other on authority and tradition.
 This, however, does not entail that they are opposed to each other. According to
a traditional Catholic view that Thomas Aquinas held and that was confirmed
by the First Vatican Council, natural theology is prior to revealed theology by
establishing what we can know about God, e.g., that he exists, that he is imma-
terial, eternal, etc. Then revealed theology settles the issues that unaided reason
alone cannot settle, e.g., regarding dogmas such as the Trinity, creation, incar-
nation, salvation, etc. According to this view, natural and revealed theology can
and ought to harmonise with each other, following Aristotle’s principle that a
truth can never contradict another truth.
 Thomas Aquinas also holds that philosophy is useful for the rational interpreta-
tion of scripture. It does not determine which interpretation of scripture is correct
but it marks out incoherent and unintelligible interpretations. The German Ide-
alist Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling goes further than that by claiming that
a philosophy of revelation is needed as a philosophical access to religious his-
tory.
 Fideism challenges these views. It holds that faith must transcend reason, freeing
itself from the dictates of philosophy. Famous Christian fideists are Blaise Pas-
cal, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (Schelling’s most influential opponent), and Søren

73
 Kierkegaard. Pascal famously held that the God of the philosophers does not
resemble the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jacobi argued for the need to
take a leap of faith (salto mortale) from reason to pure faith. Kierkegaard took
over this idea. But fideism is widespread not only in all Christian denominations
but also in Judaism and Islam.

(c) Natural law and human rights

 Another domain of metaphysical reflection is what Kant called the metaphysics
of morals. Kant’s way of treating it, however, is only one among many different
options. The basic question is what the ontological status of basic moral and
legal norms is. Are they merely established by convention or contract, as con-
tractualism holds, or do valid moral and legal norms reflect the intrinsic good-
ness or badness of certain ways of living together and interacting with each
other? The most important issue is justice. Is the distinction between just and
unjust actions and laws merely conventional (Hume), or are there actions and
laws that are just or unjust by nature and prior to any legislation?
 Natural law theory argues for the second option. It holds that human beings are
the bearers of inalienable rights that impose certain obligations on all other hu-
man beings, communities, and institutions. These rights must not be violated
without compelling reasons, e.g., in the case of war. Even then, however, human
rights impose rigid restrictions on the combatting parties. The theory of human
rights has its foundation in classical natural law theory.44
 Today, however, many human rights theorists and activists assume that human
rights are conventional, that these rights are bestowed upon human beings by
acts of legislation. For two reasons, this is a dangerous idea. First, it entails that
human rights can also be removed or taken away by new laws. Second, there is
also the opposite tendency towards an inflationary multiplication of human
rights (e.g., the alleged right to have a guaranteed minimal income from public
money). Such an inflation tends to undermine the very idea of a natural right in
the long run, e.g., by multiplying the conflicts between conflicting putative
rights.

44
Natural law theory had a powerful revival in the 20th century. An important book is John Finnis (1980): Natural
Law and Natural Rights, Oxford: Clarendon. Finnis builds his notion of human rights on an analysis of human
needs and human capabilities. This approach was taken over by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen.

74
  This widespread view is also reflected in the current debate about animal rights.
It lacks a proper metaphysical examination of the ontological preconditions for
being a bearer of rights and corresponding duties. Protecting animals against
human cruelty and preserving nature against exploitation and destruction are no-
ble and worthy goals of action, but from a metaphysical point of view, it seems
dubious whether a rights-based approach is really the right way to pursue them.
 Some natural law theorists focus one-sidedly on property rights. The question
concerning the right to acquire private property and its potential limits is an im-
portant legal and political question, but it is certainly not the only and not even
the most important natural right. The right to preserve one’s health and bodily
integrity, to protect one’s private life, religious liberty and the freedom of speech
(including academic freedom) are equally important further human rights.
 Another traditional field of natural law theory is just war theory. It is basically
the right to defend oneself against unprovoked attacks and to help someone who
is attacked in such a way (ius ad bellum; the right to strike back). An important
further part of just war theory is the ius in bello, i.e., the obligation to avoid
excessive violence in self-defence, to minimise the number of casualties, to
spare non-combatants, etc.45

(d) Concluding remarks

 Metaphysis is interdisciplinary by nature, and the debates between metaphysi-
cians, theologians, and legal theorists that I have hinted at in the previous sec-
tions confirms this observation anew. Metaphysics has to engage with the find-
ings of science but must have the right to criticise incoherent interpretations of
those findings.
 Wilfrid Sellars claims that metaphysics might be nothing but the remnants of a
traditional worldview that will sooner or later be entirely overturned by modern
science. In this context, Sellars wants to establish the scientia mensura criterion
of ontological truth and reference. Science ultimately tells us what exists and
what not, and nothing but science can.46

45
Cf. Michael Walzer (1977): Just and Unjust Wars, New York: Basic Books.
46
Cf. W. Sellars, Philosophy and the scientific image of man (1962), in: Science, perception and reality, London
1963.

75
 Sellars commits himself to scientism. This view tends to be self-destructive,
however, given that scientific paradigms often change drastically over time (see
lecture 1, section d above). Ultimately, these shifts reflect implicit metaphysical
paradigm shifts that are not sufficiently reflected in a philosophical way. Unlike
science, scientism is an ideology that can be dangerous if it becomes dogmatic
and silences critical voices. Science needs metaphysics as a critical companion.

76