<p>In this master’s thesis I defend a Quinean approach to ontology. I first describe the Quinean approach as consisting of three steps and three theses. All three theses have been challenged in the contemporary literature. In each chapter I describe one such challenge, and then provide a response. The first challenge states that ontology is actually easy. Proponents of this challenge include Matti Eklund’s maximalist, as well as Amie Thomasson. In response, I argue that the maximalist cannot consistently determine whether abstract entities exist. I also argue that Thomasson’s account involves a certain slide in logic and is, in certain cases, ontologically uninformative. I then turn to the second challenge, which states that traditional ontological questions are not even worth pursuing. Here I discuss the work of Rudolf Carnap and of Jonathan Schaffer. I argue that Carnap fails to provide a cogent argument for the meaninglessness of ontological questions. Furthermore, I argue that one should not adopt Schaffer’s Aristotelian view of metaphysics and ontology. I do so by constructing an argument, logically parallel to one of Schaffer’s own, to demonstrate that there are no fundamental grounds. Finally, I consider the challenge posed by an ambiguity in ‘existence’. According to Eli Hirsch, such an ambiguity results in verbal disputes. Hirsch argues that the remedy is to adopt ordinary English. In response, I accept that ‘existence’ is ambiguous. But I deny that this poses a significant problem for Quinean ontology.</p> / Master of Philosophy (MA)

<p> This dissertation seeks to formulate an integral psychology framework to better understand the nature and unfoldment of postformal, or postconventional, characterizations of individual consciousness evolution. To this end, an extensive critical evaluation and problematization of the disparate theoretical literatures indicated that while the egocentric and cosmocentric dimensions have been taken into account by various models, the psychocentric, or more specifically, the evolutionary soul dimension and its role in postconventional development has been largely overlooked. </p><p> With this background, there appeared to be hardly any substantial signs of agreement in the extensive and rapidly expanding literatures on human development. Such division has resulted in increasingly heated disagreements and debates concerning controversies of shape, goals, and, particularly, direction (e.g., structural-hierarchical versus spiral-dynamic models). Further, it was found that egocentric and cosmocentric biases bring to the fore a related set of problems that, in present-day formulation, can be summarized as the issue of epiphenomenalism along with the problem of identifying a facilitative agent (an ontological reference point that might help explain the how and why of stage change), which has apparently all but escaped developmental psychologists. </p><p> As a dialogue partner, the study adopts Sri Aurobindo and the Mother&rsquo;s rich integral acumen concerning the psychic being as an alternative assumption ground to both reveal and challenge some of the taken-for-granted assumptions found to underlie much of the ongoing theoretical debate. The guiding purpose of this dissertation, then, has been to advance the fields of both Western and integral yoga psychologies by contributing new and unique pathways to postconventional development&mdash;an integral psychology framework that places the deeper inmost source of evolution at the very center of a comprehensive whole person vision of human growth and development.</p>

Natural science tells us that the world is fundamentally physical - everything is ultimately constituted by physical properties and governed by physical laws. How do we square this picture of the world with the apparent fact that there are genuine causal relations at levels that aren’t described by physics? The problem of mental causation is at the heart of this issue. There are probably two reasons for this. Firstly, if there are any non-physical properties at all, surely mental properties are among them. And secondly, the reality of mental causation is arguably more important to us than the reality of any other kind of causation. Without it, it would be hard for us to make sense of ourselves as agents with free will and moral responsibility. The main purpose of this thesis is to defend a view that accepts a scientific worldview and still allows for mental properties to exist, be non-physical, and be genuine causes of actions and behaviour. Some philosophers are pessimistic that all these goals can be achieved. They think that the only way for mental properties to fit into the causal structure of the world is if these mental properties are really physical properties. I do not find the argument for this view compelling. As I will show, it relies on an implausibly strong constraint on causes that must be amended. Once amended, a new position emerges, the so-called Subset view, which is actually motivated by the very premises that initially pushed us towards a reductive view of mental properties.

The aim of this dissertation is to show that Aristotle’s ontology cannot provide a model for mathematics. To show this, I argue that (i) mathematical objects must be seen as fictional entities in the light of Aristotle’s metaphysics, and (ii) Aristotle’s mathematical fictionalism is not compatible with his metaphysical realism. My interpretation differs from that of other fictionalists in denying this compatibility. For Aristotle, mathematical objects are “something resulting from abstraction ([Greek phrase]).” For example, geometry investigates a man not qua man, but qua solid or figure. Traditionally, Aristotle’s abstraction has been interpreted as an epistemic process by which a universal concept is obtained from particulars; I rather show his abstraction as a linguistic analysis or conceptual separation by which a certain group of properties are selected: e. g., if a science, X, studies a qua triangle, X studies the properties which belong to a in virtue of a’s being a triangle and ignores a’s other properties. Aristotle’s theory of abstraction implies a mathematical naïve realism, in that mathematical objects are properties of sensible objects. But the difficulty with this mathematical naïve realism is that, since most geometrical objects do not have physical instantiations in the sensible world, things abstracted from sensible objects cannot supply all the necessary objects of mathematics. This is the so-called “precision problem.” In order to solve this problem, Aristotle abandons his mathematical realism and claims that mathematical objects exist in sensibles not as actualities but ‘as matter ([Greek phrase]).’ This claim entails a mathematical fictionalism in metaphysical terms. Most fictionalist interpretations argue that the fictionality of mathematical objects does not harm the truth of mathematics for Aristotle, insofar as objects’ matter is abstracted from sensibles. None of these interpretations, however, is successful in reconciling Aristotle’s mathematical fictionalism with his realism. For Aristotle, sciences are concerned with ‘what is ([Greek phrase])’ and not with ‘what is not ([Greek phrase]).’ Aristotle’s concept of truth rests on a realist correspondence to ‘what is ([Greek phrase])’: “what is true is to say of what is that it is or of what is not that it is not.” Thus, insofar as mathematical objects are fictional, Aristotle’s metaphysics cannot account for the truth of mathematics. / text

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