The truth-making principle is one of the main subjects in contemporary meta- physics, and this paper is an elementar exposition of the main issues of the on-going debate. I will proceed as follows. First, I will expose the basics, including the principle’s range, the main kinds of truth-making, the main interpretations of the principle, and some applications. Second, I will expose some technical issues about ontological commitment, reification, necessity, reality, and truth.

In “Tense and Reality”, Kit Fine () proposed a novel way to think about realism about tense in the metaphysics of time. In particular, he explored two non-standard forms of realism about tense, arguing that they are to be preferred over standard forms of realism. In the process of defending his own preferred view, fragmentalism, he proposed a fragmentalist interpretation of the special theory of relativity, which will be our focus in this paper. After presenting Fine's position, we will raise (...) a problem for his fragmentalist interpretation of STR. We will argue that Fine's view is in tension with the proper explanation of why various facts obtain. We will then consider whether similar considerations also speak against fragmentalism in domains other than STR, notably fragmentalism about tense. (shrink)

Irad Kimhi considers the conundrum, first addressed by Parmenides, of how negative facts can be the case and be thought, to be the puzzle that philosophy has been working to solve since Plato and Aristotle and wants to do his part by criticizing Frege's dissociation of sense and force and developing a more Aristotelian account of judgment. Michael Della Rocca considers the conundrum a hopeless aporia that we must avoid by embracing Parmenides' radical monism of being and in a recent (...) article (“Parmenides' insight and the possibility of logic”) aims to show that Kimhi is confronted with exactly the kind of insoluble difficulties that he that finds in Frege. The present article agrees with Kimhi that we can think about what is not the case, although thinking reaches all the way to what IS the case. But Della Rocca is right that Kimhi cannot explain by virtue of what we are able to do this. The counter‐proposal says: (1) Thinking reaches to being in that we have learned to read things in the intersubjective spatial field of consciousness as model tokens of singular propositions about them. (2) Negation can be thought of because thinking has its very origin in absolute, non‐well‐founded negation. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that if the Identity of Indiscernibles is not necessarily true, then Haecceitism ensues—where Haecceitism is the view that there are maximal possibilities that include all the same qualitative possibilities, and yet differ with respect to the non-qualitative possibilities they include. This goes against the common intuition that Anti-Haecceitism is compatible with the Identity of Indiscernibles being only contingently true. My argument is interesting in many respects. First, it shows that in any modal framework there is (...) a connection between the number of worldbound ordinary spatio-temporal objects, and the number of overall possibilities. Second, it has repercussions for the tenability of some philosophical positions, like Generalism, which is usually interpreted as entailing Anti-Haecceitism while at the same time being compatible with the claim that the Identity of Indiscernibles is not necessarily true. If I am correct, Generalism and similar philosophical accounts turn out to be inconsistent. Finally, it provides a strong argument for Haecceitism, given that the majority of authors today find counterexamples to the Identity of Indiscernibles extremely convincing, and many philosophical positions have been and continue being criticised on the basis of their commitment to the Identity of Indiscernibles. The paper is structured as follows: I introduce Haecceitism and the Identity of Indiscernibles in Sects. 1 and 2 respectively. Drawing on a result from the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, which I survey in Sect. 3, I give my main argument in Sect. 4. Finally, I discuss some implications in Sect. 5. (shrink)