Department of Philosophy
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Item 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 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 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 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 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.Item The Beginning of Personhood: A Thomistic Biological Analysis(Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2000-04) Eberl, Jason T.“When did I, a human person, begin to exist?” In developing an answer to this question, I utilize a Thomistic framework which holds that the human person is a composite of a biological organism and an intellective soul. Eric Olson and Norman Ford both argue that the beginning of an individual human biological organism occurs at the moment when implantation of the zygote in the uterus occurs and the “primitive streak” begins to form. Prior to this point, there does not exist an individual human organism, but a cluster of biological cells which has the potential to split and develop as one or more separate human organisms (identical twinning). Ensoulment (the instantiation of a human intellective soul in biological matter) does not occur until the point of implantation. This conception of the beginning of human personhood has moral implications concerning the status of pre-implantation biological cell clusters. A new understanding of the beginning of human personhood entails a new understanding of the morality of certain medical procedures which have a direct affect on these cell clusters which contain human DNA. Such procedures discussed in this article are embryonic stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, procured abortion, and the use of abortifacient contraceptives.Item Converging Concerns: Feminist Bioethics, Development Theory, and Human Rights(University of Chicago Press, 2003) Donchin, AnneItem 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 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 An alternative to conceptual analysis in the function debate(2004) Schwartz, Peter H.