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abstract: One activity for which philosophers are perhaps best known is having disputes with one another. Some non-philosophers, and increasingly many philosophers, believe that a number of these disputes are silly or misguided in some way. Call such silly or misguided disputes defective disputes. When is a dispute defective? What kinds of defective disputes are there? How are these different kinds of defective disputes different from one another? What does it mean to call a dispute 'merely verbal'? These questions come up for consideration in Part One of this manuscript. In Part Two I examine whether certain disputes in ontology and over the nature of possible worlds are defective in any of the ways described in Part One. I focus mainly on the question of whether these disputes are merely verbal disputes, though I examine whether they are defective in any other ways. I conclude that neither dispute is defective in any of the senses that I make clear in Part One. Moreover, I conclude that even some defective philosophical disputes can be worth consideration under certain circumstances. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Philosophy 2011

Metaontological discourse, inquiring into the nature, methodology, and aims of ontology, has functioned as the war ground for those skeptical of ontological projects against those who believe that ontological inquiry is substantive (i.e., meaningful, important, worth pursuing). I call the inquiry which engages in determining criteria to distinguish substantive from nonsubstantive inquiry/discourse: “the metaphysics of discourse”. In this project, I identify three frameworks in the metaphysics of discourse: Easy Ontology, The “Merely Verbal” Framework, and Metaphysical Structuralism. My primary concern is to show that these discourse frameworks or dismissive strategies all fail to provide sufficient criteria to properly delineate substantive from non-substantive inquiry. My approach is to accept a dismissive strategy, apply it to disputes in the metaphysics of race and gender, and run through its consequences. Each framework, when applied to disputes in the metaphysics of race and gender, incorrectly renders the disputes non-substantive. These implications are unacceptable, because the disputes in metaphysics of race and gender are prima facie substantive disputes. We find that each application of a dismissive strategy provides us the basis for developing a web of problematic assumptions running throughout the metaphysics of discourse. Namely: 1) that the metaphysics of discourse itself can be robustly normatively neutral, 2) that discovering linguistic defects in an inquiry (often about “the meaning” or “the right meaning” of terms) is sufficient to conclude that an inquiry is non-substantive and that 3) we determine a better candidate for theory choice in substantive inquiry by determining which candidate is more objectively accurate (in a vague sense). I will conclude that these assumptions lead to an oppressive metaphysics of discourse, then I briefly suggest a feminist, pragmatist, and democratic-objective basis for a new one.

This essay consists of a comparative study of the ontological argument for the existence of God asformulated by St. Anselm of Canterbury and René Descartes. The comparative analysis itselfconsists of two parts. Firstly, a comparative study of the argument itself, and an examination of theunderlying metaontological commitments that form the basis of the respective arguments, whichare then likewise contrasted. The stated purpose is to examine whether two versions of theontological argument that appear to be similar may have an underlying framework that makes themfundamentally fundamentally distinct in a way that is not immediately apparent. The analysis foundthat this was the case, and that there are significant differences in how the argument is formulated.This is of interest especially as these two thinkers wrote in and were influenced by widely differingcultural, intellectual and academic contexts, which may be reflected in their work. Ontologicalarguments for the existence of God as a phenomenon is a metaphysical argument that seeks toprove that God exists without relying on empirical and observational evidence. Rather, one seeksthrough these ontological arguments to show that the existence of God is self-evident.With Anselm and Descartes this happens in a seemingly very similar yet fundamentally differentway. The results of this study demonstrate differences that appear primarily in the starting point forthe respective discourses, as well as in the methodology that is applied. Anselm bases his discourseon a distinctly neoplatonic foundation regarding the highest good, which he later extrapolates to amore comprehensive reasoning regarding the distinction between different natures according togreatness, of which goodness is one such greatness. Descartes, on the other hand, anchors hisdiscourse in scholastic philosophy and especially the idea of the causal principle of transference,especially in relation to human consciousness and the idea or the concept of God which manifeststherein. These results have been achieved primarily by examining Anselm's arguments based onsecondary sources that relate both directly and indirectly to his ontological argument, which in itssimplicity otherwise consists almost in its entirely of a self-evident descriptive definition of whatGod is. However, the differences that emerge are not of such a degree that a division of these twoargument into different categories can be made with a high degree of confidence. On the otherhand, it is of interest to analyze these underlying frameworks for ontological arguments in order toalso be able to analyze the potential influence or impact of various contextual aspects such as place,time and prevailing academic culture as this essay attempts to do.