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  1. Normative realism and ontology: reply to Clarke-Doane, Rosen, and Enoch and McPherson.T. M. Scanlon - 2017 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (6):877-897.
    In response to comments on my book, Being Realistic about Reasons, by Justin Clarke-Doane, David Enoch and Tristram McPherson, and Gideon Rosen, I try to clarify my domain-based view of ontology, my understanding of the epistemology of normative judgments, and my interpretation of the phenomenon of supervenience.
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  • Working from Within: The Nature and Development of Quine's Naturalism.Sander Verhaegh - 2018 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a ‘naturalistic’ approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy—the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning—philosophers today largely (...)
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  • Informal proof, formal proof, formalism.Alan Weir - 2016 - Review of Symbolic Logic 9 (1):23-43.
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  • Sign and Object : Quine’s forgotten book project.Sander Verhaegh - 2019 - Synthese 196 (12):5039-5060.
    W. V. Quine’s first philosophical monograph, Word and Object, is widely recognized as one of the most influential books of twentieth century philosophy. Notes, letters, and draft manuscripts at the Quine Archives, however, reveal that Quine was already working on a philosophical book in the early 1940s; a project entitled Sign and Object. In this paper, I examine these and other unpublished documents and show that Sign and Object sheds new light on the evolution of Quine’s ideas. Where “Two Dogmas (...)
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  • The Eleatic and the Indispensabilist.Russell Marcus - 2015 - Theoria 30 (3):415-429.
    The debate over whether we should believe that mathematical objects exist quickly leads to the question of how to determine what we should believe. Indispensabilists claim that we should believe in the existence of mathematical objects because of their ineliminable roles in scientific theory. Eleatics argue that only objects with causal properties exist. Mark Colyvan’s recent defenses of Quine’s indispensability argument against some contemporary eleatics attempt to provide reasons to favor the indispensabilist’s criterion. I show that Colyvan’s argument is not (...)
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  • In defense of quine’s ostrich nominalism.Guido Imaguire - 2014 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 89 (1):185-203.
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  • Quine and Ontology.Oswaldo Chateaubriand - 2003 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 7 (1-2):41-74.
    Ontology played a very large role in Quine’s philosophy and was one of his major preoccupations from the early 30’s to the end of his life. His work on ontology provided a basic framework for most of the discussions of ontology in analytic philosophy in the second half of the Twentieth Century. There are three main themes (and several sub-themes) that Quine developed in his work. The first is ontological commitment: What are the existential commitments of a theory? The second (...)
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  • Truth and Scientific Change.Gila Sher - 2017 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 48 (3):371-394.
    The paper seeks to answer two new questions about truth and scientific change: What lessons does the phenomenon of scientific change teach us about the nature of truth? What light do recent developments in the theory of truth, incorporating these lessons, throw on problems arising from the prevalence of scientific change, specifically, the problem of pessimistic meta-induction?
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  • Objectivity, Realism, and Proof. FilMat Studies in the Philosophy of Mathematics.Francesca Boccuni & Andrea Sereni (eds.) - 2016 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.
    This volume covers a wide range of topics in the most recent debates in the philosophy of mathematics, and is dedicated to how semantic, epistemological, ontological and logical issues interact in the attempt to give a satisfactory picture of mathematical knowledge. The essays collected here explore the semantic and epistemic problems raised by different kinds of mathematical objects, by their characterization in terms of axiomatic theories, and by the objectivity of both pure and applied mathematics. They investigate controversial aspects of (...)
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  • Boarding Neurath's Boat: The Early Development of Quine's Naturalism.Sander Verhaegh - 2017 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (2):317-342.
    W. V. Quine is arguably the intellectual father of contemporary naturalism, the idea that there is no distinctively philosophical perspective on reality. Yet, even though Quine has always been a science-minded philosopher, he did not adopt a fully naturalistic perspective until the early 1950s. In this paper, I reconstruct the genesis of Quine’s ideas on the relation between science and philosophy. Scrutinizing his unpublished papers and notebooks, I examine Quine’s development in the first decades of his career. After identifying three (...)
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  • On Occurrences of Types in Types.Wayne A. Davis - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (2):349-363.
    The different occurrences of a word in a sentence cannot be identified with the one word type, nor with its many tokens. What then are occurrences of a word? How can one type occur more than once in another type? Is the conception of ‘structural universals’ that leads to these questions incoherent, as Lewis maintained? I argue against the answer Wetzel suggested, which identifies sentences with functions from numbers to expressions, and propose instead that occurrences of one type in another (...)
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  • Stroud's Camap.Marc Alspector-Kelly - 2002 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2):276-302.
    In “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” Camap drew his famous distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ questions of existence, pronouncing the former meaningful and the latter meaningless. In The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, Barry Stroud understands Carnap to be applying the verification criterion of meaningfulness in order to refute Cartesian skepticism. I suggest that Stroud misrepresents both Carnap's aim and method. Camap was responding to critics who suggested that his willingness to quantify over abstract entities in his work in semantics violated his (...)
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  • Ontological Parsimony, Erosion, and Conservatism.Thomas Metcalf - 2016 - Metaphilosophy 47 (4-5):700-718.
    This article presents a novel argument against a common principle of parsimony in philosophy. First, it identifies a widely employed principle of positive ontological parsimony, according to which we should, ceteris paribus, prefer smaller ontologies to larger ontologies. Next, it shows how this principle is used as part of a strategy by which to argue for antirealist positions in many subfields of philosophy: the ockhamistic antirealist strategy. Third, it argues that this principle commits its adherents to an implausible epistemological thesis—the (...)
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  • Blurring Boundaries: Carnap, Quine, and the Internal–External Distinction.Sander Verhaegh - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (4):873-890.
    Quine is routinely perceived as saving metaphysics from Carnapian positivism. Where Carnap rejects metaphysical existence claims as meaningless, Quine is taken to restore their intelligibility by dismantling the former’s internal–external distinction. The problem with this picture, however, is that it does not sit well with the fact that Quine, on many occasions, has argued that metaphysical existence claims ought to be dismissed. Setting aside the hypothesis that Quine’s metaphysical position is incoherent, one has to conclude that his views on metaphysics (...)
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  • Carving Intuition at its Joints.Jason Schukraft - 2016 - Metaphilosophy 47 (3):326-352.
    A central metaphilosophical project seeks to evaluate the reliability of the types of evidence that figure in philosophical arguments and, relatedly, the justificatory status of relying on those types of evidence. Traditionally, metaphilosophers have approached this project via an analysis of intuition. This article argues that the category picked out by “intuition” is both too broad and too heterogeneous to serve as the appropriate target for metaphilosophical inquiry. Intuition is a gerrymandered and disjunctive kind, undeserving of the widespread attention it (...)
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  • The Bradleyan Regress, Non-Relational Realism, and the Quinean Semantic Strategy.Jonathan Reid Surovell - 2016 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 93 (1):63-79.
    Non-Relational Realism is a popular solution to the Bradleyan regress of facts or truths. It denies that there is a relational universal of exemplification; for an object a to exemplify a universal F-ness, on this view, is not for a relation to subsist between a and F-ness. An influential objection to Non-Relational Realism is that it is unacceptably obscure. The author argues that Non-Relational Realism can be understood as a selective application of satisfaction semantics to predicates like ‘exemplify’, and that (...)
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  • The nature of intuitions and their role in material object metaphysics.Andrew Higgins - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Illinois
    I argue for three central theses: ‘intuition’ is ambiguous, in material object metaphysics ‘intuition’ refers to pre-theoretical beliefs, and these pre-theoretical beliefs are generated by an innate physical reasoning system. I begin by outlining the relevant background discussions on the nature of intuitions and their role in philosophy to motivate the need for a more careful investigation of the meaning of ‘intuition’ and the role of intuitions in specific sub-disciplines of philosophy. In chapters one and two I argue that ‘intuition’ (...)
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  • Tracks of Relations and Equivalences-based Reasoning.G. Shtakser & L. Leonenko - 2011 - Studia Logica 97 (3):385-413.
    It is known that the Restricted Predicate Calculus can be embedded in an elementary theory, the signature of which consists of exactly two equivalences. Some special models for the mentioned theory were constructed to prove this fact. Besides formal adequacy of these models, a question may be posed concerning their conceptual simplicity, "transparency" of interpretations they assigned to the two stated equivalences. In works known to us these interpretations are rather complex, and can be called "technical", serving only the purpose (...)
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  • From a Phono-Logical Point of View: Neutralizing Quine’s Argument Against Analyticity.Reese M. Heitner - 2006 - Synthese 150 (1):15-39.
    Though largely unnoticed, in "Two Dogmas" Quine himself invokes a distinction: a distinction between logical and analytic truths. Unlike analytic statements equating 'bachelor' with 'unmarried man', strictly logical tautologies relating two word-tokens of the same word-type, e.g., 'bachelor' and 'bachelor' are true merely in virtue of basic phonological form, putatively an exclusively non-semantic function of perceptual categorization or brute stimulus behavior. Yet natural language phonemic categorization is not entirely free of interpretive semantic considerations. "Phonemic reductionism" in both its linguistic and (...)
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  • What is Nominalistic Mereology?Jeremy Meyers - 2012 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 43 (1):71-108.
    Hybrid languages are introduced in order to evaluate the strength of “minimal” mereologies with relatively strong frame definability properties. Appealing to a robust form of nominalism, I claim that one investigated language \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$\mathcal {H}_{\textsf {m}}$\end{document} is maximally acceptable for nominalistic mereology. In an extension \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$\mathcal {H}_{\textsf {gem}}$\end{document} of \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$\mathcal {H}_{\textsf {m}}$\end{document}, a modal analog (...)
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  • Conventionalism and the Impoverishment of the Space of Reasons: Carnap, Quine and Sellars.Kenneth R. Westphal - 2015 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 3 (8).
    This article examines how Quine and Sellars develop informatively contrasting responses to a fundamental tension in Carnap’s semantics ca. 1950. Quine’s philosophy could well be styled ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism’; his assay of radical empiricism is invaluable for what it reveals about the inherent limits of empiricism. Careful examination shows that Quine’s criticism of Carnap’s semantics in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ fails, that at its core Quine’s semantics is for two key reasons incoherent and that his hallmark Thesis of Extensionalism (...)
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  • Composition.Daniel Z. Korman & Chad Carmichael - 2016 - Oxford Handbooks Online.
    When some objects are the parts of another object, they compose that object and that object is composite. This article is intended as an introduction to the central questions about composition and a highly selective overview of various answers to those questions. In §1, we review some formal features of parthood that are important for understanding the nature of composition. In §2, we consider some answers to the question: which pluralities of objects together compose something? As we will see, the (...)
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  • Existence Assumptions and Logical Principles: Choice Operators in Intuitionistic Logic.Corey Edward Mulvihill - 2015 - Dissertation, University of Waterloo
    Hilbert’s choice operators τ and ε, when added to intuitionistic logic, strengthen it. In the presence of certain extensionality axioms they produce classical logic, while in the presence of weaker decidability conditions for terms they produce various superintuitionistic intermediate logics. In this thesis, I argue that there are important philosophical lessons to be learned from these results. To make the case, I begin with a historical discussion situating the development of Hilbert’s operators in relation to his evolving program in the (...)
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  • Must Naturalism Lead to a Deflationary Meta-Ontology?Matthew Haug - 2014 - Metaphysica 15 (2):347-367.
    Huw Price has argued that naturalistic philosophy inevitably leads to a deflationary approach to ontological questions. In this paper, I rebut these arguments. A more substantive, less language-focused approach to metaphysics remains open to naturalists. However, rebutting one of Price’s main arguments requires rejecting Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment. So, even though Price’s argument is unsound, it reveals that naturalists cannot rest content with broadly Quinean, “mainstream metaphysics,” which, I suggest, naturalists also have independent reasons to reject.
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  • N. Goodman, Jazyky umění: Nástin teorie symbolů. [REVIEW]Tomas Hribek - 2008 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 15 (2):273-278.
    A review of the Czech translation of Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art. I emphasize Goodman's move away from the issue of the definition of art, and the fruitfulness of the autographic/allographic distinction.
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  • Real Work for Aggregates.Robert Pargetter John Bigelow - 2006 - Dialectica 60 (4):485-503.
    In this paper reasons are given for accepting a paradigmatically ‘metaphysical’ thesis called Unrestricted Mereological Composition, or something close to it. These reasons are drawn from thoroughly empirical considerations that played a significant role in the history of physical sciences, particularly in the emergence of the Newtonian laws of motion. Roughly: this metaphysical thesis is supported by a principle of ‘inference to the best explanation’ of observations of the very same kind that paradigmatically furnish evidence supporting or undermining empirical theories (...)
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  • Composition, Persistence, and Identity.Nikk Effingham - 2009 - In Robin Le Poidevin, Simons Peter, McGonigal Andrew & Ross P. Cameron (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics. New York: Routledge. pp. 296.
    An introduction to composition, persistence, and identity.
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  • ‘‘Quine’s Evolution from ‘Carnap’s Disciple’ to the Author of “Two Dogmas.Greg Frost-Arnold - 2011 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 1 (2):291-316.
    Recent scholarship indicates that Quine’s “Truth by Convention” does not present the radical critiques of analytic truth found fifteen years later in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” This prompts a historical question: what caused Quine’s radicalization? I argue that two crucial components of Quine’s development can be traced to the academic year 1940–1941, when he, Russell, Carnap, Tarski, Hempel, and Goodman were all at Harvard together. First, during those meetings, Quine recognizes that Carnap has abandoned the extensional, syntactic approach to philosophical (...)
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  • No Simples, No Gunk, No Nothing.Sam Cowling - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (1):246-260.
    Mereological realism holds that the world has a mereological structure – i.e. a distribution of mereological properties and relations. In this article, I defend Eleaticism about properties, according to which there are no causally inert non-logical properties. I then present an Eleatic argument for mereological anti-realism, which denies the existence of both mereological composites and mereological simples. After defending Eleaticism and mereological anti-realism, I argue that mereological anti-realism is preferable to mereological nihilism. I then conclude by examining the thesis that (...)
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  • Truth as Composite Correspondence.Gila Sher - 2015 - In T. Achourioti, H. Galinon, J. Martínez Fernández & K. Fujimoto (eds.), Unifying the Philosophy of Truth. Dordrecht: Imprint: Springer. pp. 191-210.
    The problem that motivates me arises from a constellation of factors pulling in different, sometimes opposing directions. Simplifying, they are: (1) The complexity of the world; (2) Humans’ ambitious project of theoretical knowledge of the world; (3) The severe limitations of humans’ cognitive capacities; (4) The considerable intricacy of humans’ cognitive capacities . Given these circumstances, the question arises whether a serious notion of truth is applicable to human theories of the world. In particular, I am interested in the questions: (...)
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  • Worlds and Propositions: The Structure and Ontology of Logical Space.Phillip Bricker - 1983 - Dissertation, Princeton University
    In sections 1 through 5, I develop in detail what I call the standard theory of worlds and propositions, and I discuss a number of purported objections. The theory consists of five theses. The first two theses, presented in section 1, assert that the propositions form a Boolean algebra with respect to implication, and that the algebra is complete, respectively. In section 2, I introduce the notion of logical space: it is a field of sets that represents the propositional structure (...)
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  • Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology.Barry Smith (ed.) - 1982 - Philosophia Verlag.
    A collection of material on Husserl's Logical Investigations, and specifically on Husserl's formal theory of parts, wholes and dependence and its influence in ontology, logic and psychology. Includes translations of classic works by Adolf Reinach and Eugenie Ginsberg, as well as original contributions by Wolfgang Künne, Kevin Mulligan, Gilbert Null, Barry Smith, Peter M. Simons, Roger A. Simons and Dallas Willard. Documents work on Husserl's ontology arising out of early meetings of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy.
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  • The Concept of Existence: History and Definitions by Leading Philosophers.Raul Corazzon - unknown
    "Philosophical discussion of the notion of existence, or being, has centered on two main problems which have not always been very clearly distinguished. First, there is the problem of what we are to say about the existence of fictitious objects, such as centaurs, dragons, and Pegasus; second, there is the problem of what we are t o say about the existence of abstract objects, such as qualities, relations, and numbers. Both problems have tempted philosophers to say that there are inferior (...)
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  • Ordinary objects.Daniel Z. Korman - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    An encyclopedia entry which covers various revisionary conceptions of which macroscopic objects there are, and the puzzles and arguments that motivate these conceptions: sorites arguments, the argument from vagueness, the puzzles of material constitution, arguments against indeterminate identity, arguments from arbitrariness, debunking arguments, the overdetermination argument, and the problem of the many.
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  • Indispensability Arguments and Their Quinean Heritage.Jacob Busch & Andrea Sereni - 2012 - Disputatio 4 (32):343 - 360.
    Indispensability arguments for mathematical realism are commonly traced back to Quine. We identify two different Quinean strands in the interpretation of IA, what we label the ‘logical point of view’ and the ‘theory-contribution’ point of view. Focusing on each of the latter, we offer two minimal versions of IA. These both dispense with a number of theoretical assumptions commonly thought to be relevant to IA. We then show that the attribution of both minimal arguments to Quine is controversial, and stress (...)
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  • Ontologia e metafisica.Achille C. Varzi - 2002 - In Franca D’Agostini & Nicla Vassallo (eds.), Storia della Filosofia Analitica. Einaudi. pp. 81-117.
    A critical survey of topics that play a central role in contemporary analytic ontology and metaphysics, including, identity, persistence through time, the problem of universals, the notion of ontological commitment, and the boundary between semantic issues and metaphysics proper.
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  • What do symbols symbolize?: Platonism.Alan Ross Anderson - 1974 - Philosophia Mathematica (1-2):11-29.
    The dispute between nominalists and Platonic realists has been with us for a long time — long enough to have assumed many forms. I don't want to rehearse the history of these various debates, or even to look at the matter from a historical point of view. But I would like to begin by distinguishing two quite different skirmishes in the general battle, one of which is new, and one of which is very old. We begin with the new one, (...)
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  • On the Substitutional Characterization of First-Order Logical Truth.Matthew McKeon - 2004 - History and Philosophy of Logic 25 (3):205-224.
    I consider the well-known criticism of Quine's characterization of first-order logical truth that it expands the class of logical truths beyond what is sanctioned by the model-theoretic account. Briefly, I argue that at best the criticism is shallow and can be answered with slight alterations in Quine's account. At worse the criticism is defective because, in part, it is based on a misrepresentation of Quine. This serves not only to clarify Quine's position, but also to crystallize what is and what (...)
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  • William Tait. The provenance of pure reason. Essays on the philosophy of mathematics and on its history.Charles Parsons - 2009 - Philosophia Mathematica 17 (2):220-247.
    William Tait's standing in the philosophy of mathematics hardly needs to be argued for; for this reason the appearance of this collection is especially welcome. As noted in his Preface, the essays in this book ‘span the years 1981–2002’. The years given are evidently those of publication. One essay was not previously published in its present form, but it is a reworking of papers published during that period. The Introduction, one appendix, and some notes are new. Many of the essays (...)
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  • A scientific enterprise?: A critical study of P. Maddy, Second Philosophy: A Naturalistic Method[REVIEW]Stewart Shapiro & Patrick Reeder - 2009 - Philosophia Mathematica 17 (2):247-271.
    For almost twenty years, Penelope Maddy has been one of the most consistent expositors and advocates of naturalism in philosophy, with a special focus on the philosophy of mathematics, set theory in particular. Over that period, however, the term ‘naturalism’ has come to mean many things. Although some take it to be a rejection of the possibility of a priori knowledge, there are philosophers calling themselves ‘naturalists’ who willingly embrace and practice an a priori methodology, not a whole lot different (...)
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  • (Book Review) Ontological independence as the mark of the real. [REVIEW]Mark Colyvan - 2005 - Philosophia Mathematica 13 (2):216-225.
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  • Quine's double standard: undermining the indispensability argument via the indeterminacy of reference.Otávio Bueno - 2003 - Principia 7 (1-2):17-39.
    Quine has famously put forward the indispensability argument to force belief in the existence of mathematical objects (such as classes) due to their indispensability to our best theories of the world (Quine 1960). Quine has also advocated the indeterminacy of reference argument, according to which reference is dramatically indeterminate: given a language, there’s no unique reference relation for that language (see Quine 1969a). In this paper, I argue that these two arguments are in conflict with each other. Whereas the indispensability (...)
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  • Meaning and Aesthetic Judgment in Kant.Eli Friedlander - 2006 - Philosophical Topics 34 (1-2):21-34.
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  • Stroud’s Carnap.Marc Alspector-Kelly - 2002 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2):276-302.
    In “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” Carnap drew his famous distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ questions of existence, pronouncing the former meaningful and the latter meaningless. In The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, Barry Stroud understands Carnap to be applying the verification criterion of meaningfulness in order to refute Cartesian skepticism. I suggest that Stroud misrepresents both Carnap’s aim and method. Carnap was responding to critics who suggested that his willingness to quantify over abstract entities in his work in semantics violated his (...)
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  • How nominalist is Hartry field's nominalism?Michael D. Resnik - 1985 - Philosophical Studies 47 (2):163 - 181.
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  • Applications and limits of mereology. From the theory of parts to the theory of wholes.Massimo Libardi - 1994 - Axiomathes 5 (1):13-54.
    The discovery of the importance of mereology follows and does not precede the formalisation of the theory. In particular, it was only after the construction of an axiomatic theory of the part-whole relation by the Polish logician Stanisław Leśniewski that any attempt was made to reinterpret some periods in the history of philosophy in the light of the theory of parts and wholes. Secondly, the push for formalisation - and the individuation of mereology as a specific theoretical field - arise (...)
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  • Logic and Ontology.Nino B. Cocchiarella - 2001 - Axiomathes 12 (1-2):117-150.
    A brief review of the historicalrelation between logic and ontologyand of the opposition between the viewsof logic as language and logic as calculusis given. We argue that predication is morefundamental than membership and that differenttheories of predication are based on differenttheories of universals, the three most importantbeing nominalism, conceptualism, and realism.These theories can be formulated as formalontologies, each with its own logic, andcompared with one another in terms of theirrespective explanatory powers. After a briefsurvey of such a comparison, we argue (...)
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  • Reducing possible worlds to language.Phillip Bricker - 1987 - Philosophical Studies 52 (3):331 - 355.
    The most commonly heard proposals for reducing possible worlds to language succumb to a simple cardinality argument: it can be shown that there are more possible worlds than there are linguistic entities provided by the proposal. In this paper, I show how the standard proposals can be generalized in a natural way so as to make better use of the resources available to them, and thereby circumvent the cardinality argument. Once it is seen just what the limitations are on these (...)
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  • Sixteen days.Barry Smith & Berit Brogaard - 2003 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28 (1):45 – 78.
    When does a human being begin to exist? We argue that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. We lay down a set of conditions for being a human being, and we determine when, in the course of normal fetal development, these conditions are first satisfied. Issues dealt with along the way include: modes of substance-formation, twinning, the nature of the intra-uterine environment, and the nature of the (...)
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  • Syntactic reductionism.Richard Heck - 2000 - Philosophia Mathematica 8 (2):124-149.
    Syntactic Reductionism, as understood here, is the view that the ‘logical forms’ of sentences in which reference to abstract objects appears to be made are misleading so that, on analysis, we can see that no expressions which even purport to refer to abstract objects are present in such sentences. After exploring the motivation for such a view, and arguing that no previous argument against it succeeds, sentences involving generalized quantifiers, such as ‘most’, are examined. It is then argued, on this (...)
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