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Exploring various aspects of modern and ancient metaphysics as they relate to the hypothesis that powers (or dispositions) are the sole elementary building block in ontology.Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ powers/dispositions metaphysics •process vs substance ontology •causation, grounding, persistence •emergence and reduction •modality, necessity, laws, quidditism •relations and structuralism •Aristotle, Stoics, Marcus Aurelius, Empedocles •perception, mind, agency, freedom •ancient medical powers (Galen, Hippocratic)This podcast presents academic talks that examine metaphysics and ancient philosophy through the lens of “powers” or dispositions, alongside competing ontological frameworks that emphasise structure, relations, laws, or processes. Across the series, speakers investigate how causal efficacy should be understood—whether causation is best modelled as interaction, production, or manifestation of reciprocal powers—and how such accounts bear on necessity, counterfactuals, interference, and the connection between causation and scientific practice. A recurrent theme is modality: what grounds necessity and possibility, how to assess debates like quidditism, and whether scientific laws or structuralist interpretations of physics can replace dispositional properties.
The podcast also engages broadly with questions of fundamentality and persistence, including whether ordinary macroscopic objects or biological organisms count as metaphysically basic, how composite entities endure through time, and how grounding and composition might be given a causal treatment. Several episodes connect these issues to philosophy of mind and emergence, clarifying different senses of emergence and assessing whether “strong” emergence is coherent or evidentially supported.
Ancient sources provide another major strand. Aristotle, the Stoics, Empedocles, Galen, and later figures are used to probe dynamics, perception, action and responsibility, ethics, political philosophy, and theories of organismic and cosmic organisation. Topics include Aristotle on perception (common sense, multimodality, common sensibles), thought and memory, habituation and moral development, and the status of collective agency and knowledge of other minds. Historical case studies—ranging from ancient medical powers to debates about structure and quality, relations, and even Eucharistic metaphysics in a Cartesian setting—are used to test contemporary metaphysical assumptions and methods, including what it would take for metaphysical inquiry to count as knowledge.