Temporal Experience and Metaphysics

Mystical Experience and Metaphysics

In Chapter 2 of Beyond Physicalism, I suggest that mystical experience, if a source of genuine metaphysical insight, can shed light on a variety of extraordinary phenomena, including psi and near-death experience, as well as the mystery that is ordinary consciousness. It is striking that mystics are often left with the conviction that they came into contact with deeper realities during their ex...

Experience, Thought, and the Metaphysics of Time

Prosser Temporal Metaphysics in Z - Land

John Perry (1986) has argued that language, thought and experience often contain unarticulated constituents. John Campbell (1993, 1994, 1998) has taken up a similar theme with his distinction between monadic and relational notions and the related notion of causal indexicals, as has Sydney Shoemaker (1994). I shall argue (using Perry’s terminology) that the presence of unarticulated constituents...

Metaphysics of science between metaphysics and science

The paper argues that metaphysics depends upon science when it comes to claims about the constitution of the real world. That thesis is illustrated by considering the examples of global supervenience, the tenseless vs. the tensed theory of time and existence, events vs. substances, and relations vs. intrinsic properties. An argument is sketched out for a metaphysics of a fourdimensional block u...

By Peter Godfrey - Smith Theories and Models in Metaphysics METAPHYSICS

METAPHYSICS Peter Godfrey-Smith is professor of philosophy at Harvard University. He works primarily in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. He also has a more general interest in the philosophy of science, and makes excursions into metaphysics and epistemology. He has published two books so far: Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (1996) and Theory and Reality (2003)...