MA EXAMINATION IN METAPHYSICS: STUDY QUESTIONS

Summer 2009

1. What is the principle of the identity of indiscernibles? Is there more than one? Is any of them true?

2. Philosophers as diverse as Kant, Moore and Kripke have struggled with the question “Is existence a predicate?” Exactly what hangs on this question and how is it to be answered?

3. Can conceptual analysis help us discover metaphysical truths?

4. The death of correspondence theories of truth has been widely heralded. What exactly is a correspondence theory of truth, and why would anyone be tempted to hold such? Why are such theories supposed to be untenable? Are they?

5. What is the relation between a statue and the lump of clay of which it is made?

6. What are bare particulars? Are there good reasons for believing in such things? Evaluate arguments for and against them.

7. What is a fact? Are there such things? Why or why not?

8. Quine has offered a criterion for evaluating the existential commitments of a discourse. He has also described this criterion as trivial. Describe the criterion and what philosophical work he (and others) have tried to make it do. Is the criterion trivial?

9. Is Lewis’ argument of temporary intrinsics successful for perdurance views and against endurance views?

10. According to Lewis, we should believe modal realism “because the hypothesis is serviceable and that’s a reason to think it is true.” Is “serviceability” a good reason to believe something in general? He also says claims that believing in possible worlds is a matter merely of accepting permissible paraphrases of ordinary pre-theoretic claims that we already accept. Is it? Is that a good reason to believe in them?

11. Why might someone hold that nothing has parts? Why might someone hold that everything has parts? Is there a stable intermediate position?

12. What is the distinction between natural kinds and other sorts of properties? What would it be for universals to be “sparse”? How are the notions of natural kinds and sparse universals related? Are there natural kinds? Are universals sparse?