I have quoted from Bernard Williams’ Shame & Necessity before, and drawn on his notion of “supernatural necessity”. To recap: the “supernatural” here is just a label to catch on to something that was operative, according to Williams, in ancient Greek notions of fate and necessity; but the label itself is not really meant to be informative: there is nothing interesting to draw from it about...
Moons ago I wrote that when we encounter interesting coincidences there seems to be a tendency, on the subject’s part, to interpret the situation in terms of quasi-causal agents (“the universe is trying to tell me something”) which are understood, however, to not be causal agents: they are stand-ins for what would play the role of a causal agent, if there was causation, with the simultaneous...
If we were to stick rigidly to Davidson’s views in all respects, we’d be even worse off, for then we’d be lacking even a way to formulate this. That’s because Davidson insists that there is no such thing as metaphor in semantics at all: what is communicated in language are only literal meanings. (What counts as metaphor in imagistic or poetic language is, according to Davidson, entirely an aspect...
I’m still concerned with my ongoing analysis of interesting coincidences, along the guiding example of the death of Damocles; but I interrupt the main flow once more for a little piece of reflection. This time, however, it’s less of a metaphysical Fingerübung than rather some ontological handwringing. I’m just going to outline a complication, not having found what looks the best approach to it...
Davidson hovers in the background in several of my recent posts, particularly where I try to sort out the connections, in scenarios of interesting coincidences, between the ontological layer (roughly: what types of entities exist), laws and lawlike constraints, and causality. It’s time to make this more explicit (and acknowledge some intellectual debts, too). The two elements I’m importing here...
I’m still in the process of deepening the analysis of the death of Damocles episode. I’ve just introduced new bits of terminology, distinguishing figurations from configurations, and clarified some of the more technical metaphysical details; now I’ve started exploring how they work together. 11. The metaphorical in “metaphorical interrelations” is more on the conceptual than on the...
I’m still in the process of deepening the analysis of the death of Damocles episode. I’ve just introduced new bits of terminology, distinguishing figurations from configurations, and clarified some of the more technical metaphysical details; it’s time to explore how they work together. 10. A central feature of figurations is the metaphorical connection which holds between some of the events in...
As a quick little metaphysical Fingerübung, we might have a look at some characteristics of figurations and configurations, and their components. Configurations are particulars: they are bound to an individual subject (a person, albeit potentially a fictional one) and in part made up of that subject’s psychological processes. They’re not individual mental states, however, in the sense a mental...
At this point I shall introduce more terminology, some of which I’ll borrow from mediaeval notions. A set of events like that of the death of Damocles and his clock stopping, where some can be understood as a metaphorical expression of others in the set, I’ll call a figuration (from the Latin figuratio). In the middle ages, there was a sense (in theology and philosophy) that things and events in...
Even with more clarity now about the type of explanation (one that involves an underlying nomic constraint), which likely is what the felt need for an explanation points to when it comes to interesting coincidences, it still very much looks as if an essential ingredient is missing. In our guiding example, the story of the death of Damocles, this came into play via two interconnected features:...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.