Easy Ontologists, most notably Thomasson (2015), argue that ontological questions are shallow. They think that these questions can either be answered by using our ordinary conceptual competence—of course tables exist!—or are meaningless, or else should be answered through conceptual re-engineering. Ontology thus is “easy”, requiring no distinctively metaphysical investigation. This paper raises a two-stage objection to Easy Ontology. We first argue that questions concerning which entities exist are inextricably bound up with “ontological category questions”, which are questions concerning the identity (...) of and differences between kinds of entities. We then argue that ontological category questions do not have trivial answers, are meaningful, and cannot be answered through conceptual re-engineering. Easy Ontology hence does not constitute a comprehensive ontological methodology. While some of ontology might be easy, category questions form a central part of ontology and are not answered easily. (shrink)

One might well wonder—is there a category under which every thing falls? Offering an informative account of such a category is no easy task. For nothing would distinguish things that fall under it from those that don’t—there being, after all, none of the latter. It seems hard, then, to say much about any fully general category; and it would appear to do no carving or categorizing or dividing at all. Nonetheless there are candidates for such a fully general office, including (...) thing, being, entity, item, existent, and—especially—object.[ It is not obvious that there is any fully general category (whether object or otherwise). Accordingly, not all accounts of object assign it to a fully general category, instead allowing that there are non-objects. On those views, object does indeed divide. Accounts of object, then, differ with respect to whether there are non-objects. And this is not the only fault line. Other dimensions of difference include what objects there are and what objects are. Accordingly, this entry will survey three broad questions about the category object: What, if any, is its contrast or complement? What is its extension? What is its nature? (shrink)

In recent work, Amie Thomasson has sought to develop a new approach to the philosophy of the categories which is metaphysically neutral between traditional realist and conceptualist approaches, and which has its roots in the ‘correlationalist’ approach to categories put forward in Husserl’s writings in the 1900s–1910s and systematically charted over the past few decades by David Woodruff Smith in his studies of Husserl’s philosophy. Here the author aims to provide a recontextualization and critical assessment of correlationalism in a Husserlian (...) vein. To this end, the author presents, first, the reasons why, later in his life, Husserl himself found his earlier treatment of categories philosophically naive, and why he increasingly advocated for a more genetic-teleological account. The author then draws upon arguments made a century earlier by Schelling and Hegel, in criticism of Fichte, to point up what might remain philosophically unsatisfying about even the post-correlationalist genetic position of the later Husserl, in light of the pronounced trend in Husserl’s own development, on the questions of reason and spirit, toward absolute idealism. (shrink)

Democracy is usually contrasted with the concept of dictatorship, and is defined as a type of government in which power flows from the citizens to the leaders of government, who are selected through free elections. This article argues, that if the concept of democracy is generalized to be universally applicable, then the concept of hypothetical gods’ right to rule results in dictatorship. Whereas the concepts of dictator and tyrant originally had a more positive meaning, those meanings have changed. However, the (...) concept of the gods in the philosophical debate has avoided a similar redefinition in light of democracy, despite the fact, that it involves the same negation of modern fundamental rights. The basic democratic idea posits that all of its members have a full and equal status. If this status is generalized to be universally applicable, then it follows that humankind likewise are not second and first class among hypothetical gods. The existence or nonexistence of the gods is here defined as the secondary question, whereas the principal acceptance of hypothetical gods’ right to rule in a democratic context with respect to concepts of freedom is defined as the primary question. The position of heroical apatheism is argued as an alternative to positions such as theism, atheism, and agnosticism. These positions only concern themselves with the ontological or epistemological question of whether the gods exist, whereas heroical apatheism concerns itself with the primary component missing so far, namely democratic rights and dignity. This is a discussion that I consider as having been overlooked in modern philosophical discussions. (shrink)

Language was central to Hobbes's understanding of human beings and their mental abilities, and criticism of other philosophers' uses of language became a favorite critical tool for him. This paper connects Hobbes's theories about language to his criticisms of others' language, examining Hobbes's theories of propositions and truth, and how they relate to his claims that various sorts of proposition are absurd. It considers whether Hobbes in fact means anything more by 'absurd' than 'false'. And it pays particular attention to (...) Hobbes's categorization of causes of absurdity and of types of incoherent proposition, arguing that Hobbes's approach is only loosely related to later discussions of category mistakes. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 1. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

Appeals to metaphysics have lately come to ascendancy in analytic legal philosophy. Over the last 20 years or so, a new discourse framework has emerged in analytic legal metaphysics that focusses on the explanatory question of how law is made. By any measure the most influential refinement of this question is to be found in Mark Greenberg's seminal 2004 article How Facts Make Law. This essay tries to exert some pressure on this familiar question by posing the categorial question of (...) what type of entities different theories of law take up as ontologically basic for their inquiry. The essay singles out four exemplary avenues for answering the categorial question. Introducing a categorial instead of explanatory lens is an overdue step in the process of updating the metaphysical toolbox of contemporary analytic theories of law. The categorial question of what kind of entity law is ismeant to complement the explanatory question of how law is made in a way that makes disagreements about the metaphysical-explanatory demands of theories of law more tractable or amenable to principled adjudication. (shrink)

In this thesis I argue against unrestricted mereological hybridism, the view that there are absolutely no constraints on wholes having parts from many different logical or ontological categories, an exemplar of which I take to be ‘mixed fusions’. These are composite entities which have parts from at least two different categories – the membered (as in classes) and the non-membered (as in individuals). As a result, mixed fusions can also be understood to represent a variety of cross-category summation such as (...) the abstract with the concrete, the physical with the non-physical, and the possible with the impossible, just to name a few. -/- Proposed by David Lewis (1991) alongside his defence of classical mereology (the major theory of parthood which permits such transcategorial composites through its principle of unrestricted composition) it is my contention that mixed fusions are an under-examined consequence of indiscriminate mereological fusion which harbour a multitude of complications. In my attempt to discern their substantive character, throughout this thesis I make a case study of mixed fusions and uncover several problematic consequences which I think follow from their most plausible assessment. -/- These include: (1) that mixed fusions’ probable membership relations may lead to dubious foundational loops in the mereological Universe, or (2) otherwise that mixed fusions oblige an implausible ontological priority of the mereological Universe as a whole; (3) that mixed fusions contradict the reductive account of set theory they are proposed within, by plausibly being seen to have the same members as their class parts, and (4) that mixed fusions therefore confound a mereological thesis of Composition as Identity, which some (including Lewis) use to support classical mereology – a consequence which is potentially self-defeating; (5) that mixed fusions as sums of abstract and concrete entities both subvert Lewis’s (1986) system of modal realism, while (6) also undermining less expansive theories of possible worlds; and finally, (7) that even where some of the foregoing is resisted, it remains implausible that mixed fusions are ontologically innocent, because their supposed distinction from their parts in this case ensures that they need to be counted as additional entities in one’s ontology. -/- To be clear, I do not advance a theory of mereological hybrid nihilism in the sense of denying all cases of transcategorial composition. (I only cover a few select instances of mereological hybridism via mixed fusions after all.) Rather, I deny that mereological hybridism is plausible in full generality, by demonstrating that any cases of it are at least limited by the constraints that I identify. This in turn vindicates a call for a restriction on parthood theories and composition principles which allow certain types of categorially mixed entities – including restricting classical mereology with its principle of unrestricted composition. -/- Although theories of parthood like the standard classical mereology are not ordinarily developed for the sake of mereological hybrids like mixed fusions, these and other transcategorial composites are still among the logical consequences of such parthood systems operating with sufficient generality. The significance of my thesis, then, comes from showcasing how some of these kinds of entities do not conform to the systems in which they are included as required, and hence I argue for the rejection of unrestricted mereological hybridism as well as any mereological principles which support it. (shrink)

Is it possible to get by with just one ontological category? We evaluate L.A. Paul's attempt to do so: the mereological bundle theory. The upshot is that Paul's attempt to construct a one category ontology may be challenged with some of her own arguments. In the positive part of the paper we outline a two category ontology with property universals and kind universals. We will also examine Paul's arguments against a version of universal bundle theory that takes spatiotemporal co-location instead (...) of compresence or coinstantiation as the feature by which we can identify genuine bundles. We compare this novel theory, bundle theory with kinds, and Paul's mereological bundle theory and apply them to a case study concerning entangled fermions and co-located bosons. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a categorial theory of meaning which asserts that the meaning of a sentence is the function from the actualization of some potentiality or the potentiality of some actuality to the truth of the sentence. I argue that it builds on the virtues of David Lewis’s Possible World Semantics but advances beyond problems that Lewis’s theory faces with its distinctly Aristotelian turn toward actuality and potentiality.

This article considers the significance of Kant’s schematized categories in the Critique of Pure Reason for contemporary metaphysics. I present Kant’s understanding of the schematism and how it functions within his critique of the limits of pure reason. Then I argue that, although the true role of the schemata is a relatively late development in Kant’s thought, it is nevertheless a core notion, and the central task of the first Critique can be sufficiently articulated in the language of the schematism. (...) A surprising result of Kant’s doctrine of the schematism is that a limited form of metaphysics is possible even within the parameters set out in the first Critique. To show this, I offer contrasting examples of legitimate and illegitimate forays into metaphysics in light of the condition of the schematized categories. (shrink)

According to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition ‘The Great Perfection’, we can distinguish between two basic dimensions of mind: an intentional dimension that is divided into perceiver and perceived and a non-dual dimension that transcends all distinctions between subject and object. The non-dual dimension is evident through its intuitional characteristics; an unbounded openness that is free from intentional limitations, a spontaneous luminosity which presences all phenomena, and self-awareness that recognizes the original resonance of beings. Owing to these characteristics, the descriptions of (...) this dimension exemplify an integrative way of speaking about primordial reality, which resolves the assumed dichotomy between kataphatic and apophatic discourses by pointing to a dimension that pervades all phenomena without being identified with any of those. In this article, I intend to discuss the characteristics of the non-dual dimension and their implications for our understanding of human consciousness and the inherent co-emergence of positive and negative perceptions of reality. (shrink)

The work is the presentation of a logical theory - Logic in Reality (LIR) - and of applications of that theory in natural science and philosophy, including ...

This paper (in Finnish) concerns the ontological status of categories of entities. I argue that categories are not be considered as further entities. Rather, it is suffcient for entities belonging to the same category that they are in exactly the same formal ontological relations and have the same general category features.

In The Principles of Mathematics, Russell writes: Whatever may be an object of thought, or may occur in any true or false proposition, or can be counted as one, I call a term. This, then, is the widest word in the philosophical vocabulary. I shall use as synonymous with it the words unit, individual and entity. The first two emphasize the fact that every term is one, while the third is derived from the fact that every term has being, i.e. (...) is in some sense. A man, a moment, a number, a class, a relation, a chimera, or anything else that can be mentioned, is sure to be a term'. Now in this remark, a certain extremely general, topic-neutral use of ‘object’ is singled out, a use in which the expression is treated as equivalent to (equally neutral) uses of ‘term’, ‘entity’, ‘unit’, ‘individual’, and ‘thing’. In addition, a claim is made to the effect that the content of the expression, with its emphasis on one, is such as to be adequate to comprehend the sum-total of existence, to include whatever there may be. The paper addresses the question of what this claim means, and whether it might be true. (shrink)

The current (still limited) use of the notion of informativeness in the domain of information system ontologies seems to indicate that such ontologies are informative if and only if they are understandable for their final recipients. This paper aims at discussing some theoretical issues emerging from that use which, as we will see, connects the informativeness of information system ontologies to their representational primitives, domains of knowledge, and final recipients. Firstly, we maintain that informativeness interacts not only with the actual (...) representational primitives, but also with their variability over time. Secondly, we discuss the correspondence between representational primitives and domains of knowledge of those ontologies. Finally, we explore the possibility of an epistemological discrepancy between human beings and software systems on the understanding of ontological contents. (shrink)

Impure Eliminativism about Categories is the idea that ontological categories are not wholly eliminable insofar as they have epistemic value to understand the nature of ordinary and scientific objects. From the perspective of Impure Eliminativism, different criticisms have been addressed to substantialist approaches in metaphysics and, in particular, to John Heil’s substance-mode two-category ontology. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this critical project by extending its scope to C. B. Martin’s substantialism. The thesis I defend is that (...) Martin’s substratum-trope two-category ontology satisfies the elimination criterion of Impure Eliminativism for ontological categories because either it is inconsistent or else it supplies a non-exhaustive and non-exclusive categorization of ordinary and scientific objects and their properties. First, I introduce Impure Eliminativism and its novel elimination criterion for ontological categories, and I survey recent criticisms of substantialism from that perspective. Second, I show that nothing satisfies Martin’s definition of substratum in a way that is consistent with Martin’s view on tropes. Third, I note that the attempts to avoid the inconsistency make the categorization supplied by Martin’s ontology either non-exhaustive or non-exclusive. I then conclude that Martin’s substratum-trope categorial system should be eliminated in accordance with the criterion of categorial elimination of Impure Eliminativism. (shrink)

The “context of discovery” and “context of justification” distinction has been used by Noretta Koertge and Lynn Hankinson Nelson in debates over the legitimacy of feminist approaches to philosophy of science. Koertge uses the context distinction to focus the conversation by barring certain approaches. I contend this focus masks points of true disagreement about the nature of justification. Nonetheless, Koertge raises important questions that have been too quickly set aside by some. I conclude that the context distinction should not be (...) used to block feminist philosophy of science because the use of the context distinction is deeply ambiguous, masking underlying debates about naturalism and the nature of justification. (shrink)