Vasubandhu on intentional action: From mind-body to mind-only (Allison Aitken)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 7th from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Allison Aitken (Columbia).

Title: Vasubandhu on intentional action: From mind-body to mind-only

Abstract: Jonathan Schaffer argues that mereological nihilism “culminates in monism.” In other words, the same sorts of parsimony considerations that motivate the rejection of real composites ultimately lead to a monist ontology. In this talk, I show how the 4th-5th century Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu makes a similar argument, but instead of proposing an existence monism, as Schaffer does, Vasubandhu advances a type-monism–specifically, a form of metaphysical idealism on which all that exist are mental representations. I show how he exploits challenges confronting mereological nihilists when it comes to accommodating intentional action in their ontologies in order to call into question the explanatory utility of matter itself. He first uses puzzles concerning the metaphysics and causal mechanics of action to eliminatively reduce bodily action to mental action, and then leverages the same principle of parsimony that motivates his external world realist interlocutors to exclude real composites from their ontology to jettison matter from the picture altogether. I consider reasons why Vasubandhu resists existence monism and instead takes his type-monism to be the simplest sufficient ontology capable of explaining the sorts of things that matter most to him and his fellow-Buddhists, like intentional actions that are both morally significant and causally efficacious.

The iterative conception of pluralities (Davide Sutto)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 24th from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Davide Sutto (Oslo).

Title: The iterative conception of pluralities

Abstract: Georg Cantor informally distinguished between “consistent” and “inconsistent” multiplicities as those many things that, respectively, can and cannot be thought of as one, i.e., as a set. In this talk I propose a framework that clarifies the distinction through a contemporary development of the iterative conception of set. Reshaping Tim Button’s Level Theory by means of plural logic, I define and axiomatize the notion of a plural level. This provides an explanation of Cantor’s consistent multiplicities as level-bound pluralities, namely as those pluralities that appear at some level of the plural cumulative hierarchy of sets. Furthermore, it also yields a development of set theory from plural logic that retains the full power of the comprehension axiom schema. This feature is especially relevant as it enables a parallel understanding of inconsistent multiplicities as those pluralities that are not level-bound, that is, as proper classes.