[Textop-en-phil] Metaphysics section

[Larry Sanger]

All,

I've decided to just kick off the discussion of some outline issues, rather
than waiting until I've finished putting the text into The Outline, the
content of which is growing nearly every day, here:

http://www.textop.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_Outline

You might notice, by the way, that I made the top two levels of the outline
wiki page section headings.  I *hope* this makes it a little easier to
follow.  At least it provides a nice little table of contents, as you'll
see.

I thought I would kick things off by raising a few issues about the first
section of the outline, which I have titled "Metaphysics."  Here's what it
looks like right now.

Metaphysics 
	Nature 
	Fiction 
	Motion 
	Time 
	Causality 
	Divinity 
	1.	to file elsewhere: Religion 
	2.	to file elsewhere: origin: Explanation of religion 
	3.	to file elsewhere: objection: Argument against religion per
se 
	4.	Theism -- the doctrine or belief in the existence of a God
or gods 
		1.	object: Concept of God 
			1.	naturalness: Naturalness of the concept of
God 
			2.	conceivability: God's conceivability 
			3.	result: Man's relationship with God 
			4.	personification: God personified 
		2.	origin: Origin of the belief in God 
		3.	argument: Arguments for the existence of God 
			1.	Best argument for the existence of God 
			2.	Ontological argument for the existence of
God 
			3.	Cosmological argument for the existence of
God 
	5.	issue: Issues in philosophy of religion 
		1.	Freedom and predestination (or foreknowledge) 
	Life

Here are some issues of which I'd appreciate any discussion:

1. I shouldn't be using names of disciplines, like "metaphysics," as node
headings, should I?  It has always made me uncomfortable.  The reason I
chose discipline names is in order to dodge difficult questions that could
be raised about the relationship between the top-level headings and the
subheadings.  For instance, while each of the concepts under the heading
"metaphysics" have been studied-as-part-of metaphysics, if I were to
substitute "Being" or "Being in General" or "Being qua Being" or "Stuff in
General" (which have been proposed as the object, in general of
metaphysics), then I would have to answer questions like "Wait, do 'fiction'
and 'divinity' really belong under 'being'?"  So you could help me think
about this.

2. Bear in mind that the outline is meant eventually to serve *all*
disciplines, not just philosophy.  Where do you see physical principles,
like theorems from Newton's *Principia*, fitting in this outline?  Is
another top-level node necessary, or what?

3. Any ideas on more interesting internal structure, given the list of
metaphysical subtopics?  To wit: nature, fiction, motion, time, causality,
divinity, and life.  Feel free to propose a few chunkless nodes just to make
a little sense of it all.  I just haven't even tried to do this!

4. The material re religion I put there only because...nevermind, it's a
long story.  Question: where should the stuff about religion, its
explanation and the argument against it, be moved?  Look at the chunks
before answering this please.

--Larry

----------------
Dr. Larry Sanger
Director of Collaborative Projects, Digital Universe Foundation
100 Enterprise Way, Suite G370, Scotts Valley, CA 95066
larry.sanger at dufoundation.org http://www.dufoundation.org/