Browsing by Author "Burke, Michael B."
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Item Copper Statues and Pieces of Copper: A Challenge to the Standard Account(1992) Burke, Michael B.On the most popular account of material constitution, it is common for a material object to coincide precisely with one or more other material objects, ones that are composed of just the same matter but differ from it in sort. I argue that there is nothing that could ground the alleged difference in sort and that the account must be rejected.Item Dion and Theon: An Essentialist Solution to an Ancient Puzzle(1994) Burke, Michael B.Dion is a full-bodied man. Theon is that part of him which consists of all of him except his left foot. What becomes of Dion and Theon when Dion’s left foot is amputated? Employing the doctrine of sortal essentialism, I defend a surprising answer last defended by Chrysippus: that Dion survives while the seemingly unscathed Theon perishes.Item Dion, Theon, and the Many-Thinkers Problem(2004) Burke, Michael B.Dion is a full-bodied man. Theon is that part of him which consists of all of him except his left foot. What becomes of Dion and Theon when Dion’s left foot is amputated? Employing the doctrine of sortal essentialism, in Burke 1994 (J. Phil.) I defended a surprising position last defended by Chrysippus: that Dion survives while the seemingly unscathed Theon perishes. This paper defends that position against objections by Stone, Carter, Olson, and others. Most notably, I offer here a novel, conservative solution to the many-thinkers problem, a solution that enables us to accept the existence of brain-containing person-parts (such as the pre-amputation Theon) while denying that those person-parts are thinking, conscious beings.Item Embryo Adoption: Implications of Personhood, Marriage, and Parenthood(2008-04-14T12:30:19Z) McMillen, Brooke Marie; Brand, Peggy Zeglin; Eberl, Jason T.; Burke, Michael B.One’s personal claims regarding personhood will influence his moral belief regarding embryo adoption. In Chapter One, I consider the personhood of the human embryo. If the human embryo is a person, we are morally obligated to permit the practice of embryo adoption as an ethical means to save human persons. However, for those who do not claim that an embryo is a person at conception, embryo adoption is not a necessary practice because we have no moral obligation to protect them. There are still others who claim that personhood is gained at some point during gestation when certain mental capacities develop. I offer my own claim that consciousness and sentience as well as the potential to be self-conscious mark the beginning of personhood. Embryo adoption raises several questions surrounding the institution of marriage. Due to its untraditional method of procreation, embryo adoption calls into question the role of procreation within marriage. In Chapter Two, I explore the nature of the marriage relationship by offering Lisa Cahill’s definition of marriage which involves both a spiritual and physical dimension, and then I describe the concept of marriage from different perspectives including a social, religious, and a personal perspective. From a personal perspective, I explore the relationship between marriage and friendship. Finally, I describe how the concept of marriage is understood today and explore the advantages to being married as opposed to the advantages of being single. Embryo adoption changes the way we customarily think about procreation within a family because in embryo adoption, couples are seeking an embryo from another union to be implanted into the woman. This prompts some philosophers to argue that embryo adoption violates the marriage relationship. In Chapter Three, I further consider the impact of embryo adoption on the family as an extension of the marital relationship as well as the impact of embryo adoption on the traditional roles of motherhood and fatherhood. I examine motherhood by looking at how some philosophers define motherhood and when these philosophers claim a woman becomes a mother. After considering these issues regarding motherhood, I examine the same issues surrounding fatherhood. Peg Brand, PhD., ChairItem Hume and Edwards on 'Why is there Something Rather than Nothing?'(1984-12) Burke, Michael B.Suppose that five minutes ago, to our astonishment, a healthy, full-grown duck suddenly popped into existence on the table in front of us. Suppose further that there was no first moment at which the duck existed but rather a last moment, T, at which it had yet to exist. Then for each moment t at which the duck has existed, there is an explanation of why the duck existed at t: there was a moment t’ earlier than t but later than T such that the duck existed at t’, and it was only to be expected that a healthy duck would survive the brief time from t’ to t. But do these explanations, taken collectively, explain why the duck, instead of never having existed at all, has existed at all moments later than T? Presumably not. But if not, this seems to discredit the style of explanation offered by David Hume and Paul Edwards for the infinite regress they hypothesize of causes and effects.Item Is My Head a Person?(Ontos Verlag., 2003) Burke, Michael B.It is hard to see why the head and other brain-containing parts of persons are not themselves persons, or at least thinking, conscious beings. Some theorists have sought to reconcile us to the existence of thinking person-parts. Others have sought ways to avoid them, but by radical theories that abandon the metaphysic implicit in ordinary ways of thinking. This paper offers a novel, conservative solution, one on which the heads and other brain-containing parts of persons do exist but are neither persons, thinkers, nor conscious beings. A much briefer statement of the solution is found in section 5 of Burke 2004.Item Preserving the Principle of One Object to a Place: A Novel Account of the Relations Among Objects, Sorts, Sortals, and Persistence Conditions(1994) Burke, Michael B.The article provides a novel, conservative account of material constitution, one that employs sortal essentialism and a theory of dominant sortals. It avoids coinciding objects, temporal parts, relativizations of identity, mereological essentialism, anti-essentialism, denials of the reality of the objects of our ordinary ontology, and other radical departures from the metaphysic implicit in ordinary ways of thinking. Defenses of the account against important objections are found in Burke 1997, 2003, and 2004, as well as in the often neglected six paragraphs that conclude section V of this article.Item The Staccato Run: A Contemporary Issue in the Zenonian Tradition(2000) Burke, Michael B.The “staccato run,” in which a runner stops infinitely often while running from one point to another, is a prototype of the “superfeat” (or "supertask”), that is, a feat involving the completion in a finite time of an infinite sequence of distinct, physically individuated acts. There is no widely accepted demonstration that superfeats are impossible logically, but I argue here, contra Grunbaüm, that they are impossible dynamically. Specifically, I show that the staccato run is excluded by Newton’s three laws of motion, when those laws are supplemented with a certain defensible philosophical judgment.