The question of whether it is permissible to quantify into a modal context is re-examined from an empiricist perspective. Following Wiggins, it is argued that an ontology of continuants implies essentialism, but it is also argued, against Wiggins, that the only conception of necessity that we need to start out with is that of analyticity. Essentialism, of a limited kind, can then be actually generated from this. An exceptionally fine-grained identity criterion for continuants is defended in this context. The debate (...) between Wiggins and Ayer over the legitimacy of de re modality is then examined in the light of these results, and it is argued that my position is consistent with Ayer’s minimalist assumptions. It is also argued that non-continuants will not sustain the essential/accidental distinction, thus giving some concessions to the sceptics. It is also shown that there are close connections between these issues and the more modern two-dimensionalist way of disentangling the necessary from the a posteriori, and that the latter needs to learn from the former. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue for a novel three-dimensionalist solution to the problem of persistence, i.e. cross-temporal identity. We restrict the discussion of persistence to simple substances, which do not have other substances as their parts. The account of simple substances employed in the paper is a trope-nominalist strong nuclear theory, which develops Peter Simons' trope nominalism. Regarding the distinction between three dimensionalism and four dimensionalism, we follow Michael Della Rocca's formulation, in which 3D explains persistence in virtue of same (...) entities and 4D in virtue of distinct entities. SNT is a 3D'ist position because it accounts for the persistence of simple substances in virtue of diachronically identical ‘nuclear’ tropes. The nuclear tropes of a simple substance are necessary for it and mutually rigidly dependent but distinct. SNT explains qualitative change by tropes that are contingent to a simple substance. We show that it avoids the standard problems of 3D: temporal relativization of ontic predication, Bradley's regress and coincidence, fission and fusion cases. The temporal relativization is avoided because of the analysis of temporary parts that SNT gives in terms of temporal sub-location, which is atemporal part–whole relation. (shrink)

One premise in David Lewis’s well-known argument from temporary intrinsic properties in favor of temporal parts is the intuition that material objects exemplify such properties simpliciter, that is, without qualification. The argument has spawned a large critical literature, with commentators questioning the simpliciter premise’s motivation, content, dialectical force, and status as an intuition. The present essay has two chief goals: to provide a novel framework for clarifying Lewis’s simpliciter premise and to explain how the resulting clarification upends a wide range (...) of attempts in the literature to evade his conclusion. Central to both goals is the observation that exemplification simpliciter best comports with our most fundamental notion of property exemplification, a notion that applies equally well to material and atemporal abstract objects. (shrink)

Here is a problem at the heart of the metaphysics of the natural world: How, if at all, can a unity undergo change? This problem incorporates two questions. First, in virtue of what is a thing a genuine unity? And second, the issue that’s more obvious in the formulation of the question: how, if at all, can such a unity undergo change? There are two basic approaches to this problem present in Newton’s physics. The more familiar grounds unity and change (...) in space and time, the second in the laws of nature. The latter approach is set out in this paper. I argue that a law-constitutive approach to the entities that are the subject-matter of Newton’s physics offers a principle of unity for things, be they simple or composite, and for the parts of composites, such that we also gain an account of what it is for a genuine unity to undergo change in its properties whilst retaining its numerical identity. I end by arguing that the law-constitutive approach favors endurantism over perdurantism. This paper is intended as an example of a particular approach to the relationship between metaphysics and philosophy of physics, according to which, as a philosopher, one engages with physics as a part of the history of philosophy, beginning with our deepest philosophical questions and using the development of physics read as a contribution to natural philosophy to explore how these questions are transformed, re-worked, addressed, and sometimes rendered non-questions. (shrink)

Within philosophy of physics it is broadly accepted that presentism as an empirical hypothesis has been falsified by the development of special relativity. In this article, I identify and reject an assumption common to both presentists and advocates of the block universe and then offer an alternative version of presentism that does not begin from spatiotemporal structure, which is an empirical hypothesis, and which has yet to be falsified. While some features of familiar presentism are lost, a sufficient core remains (...) to warrant the label. (shrink)