Switch to: References

Citations of:

(1988)

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. The limits of the just-too-different argument.Ragnar Francén & Victor Moberger - 2024 - Ratio 37 (1):64-75.
    According to moral non-naturalism, the kind of genuine or robust normativity that is characteristic of moral requirements cannot be accounted for within a wholly naturalistic worldview, but requires us to posit a domain of non-natural properties and facts. The main argument for this core non-naturalist claim appeals to what David Enoch calls the 'just-too-different intuition'. According to Enoch, robust normativity cannot be natural, since it is just too different from anything natural. Derek Parfit makes essentially the same claim under the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Identity Physicalism vs Ground Physicalism about Consciousness.Adam Pautz - forthcoming - In G. Rabin (ed.), Grounding and Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
    Unlike identity physicalism, ground physicalism does not achieve the physicalist dream. It faces the T-shirt problem for ground physicalism (Pautz 2014; Schaffer this volume; Rubenstein ms). In the case of insentient nature, it may be able to get by with small handful of very general ground laws to explain the emergence of nonfundamental objects and properties – for example, a few “principle of plenitude”. But I argue that for the case consciousness it will require a separate huge raft of special, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Resurrection, Reassembly, and Reconstitution: Aquinas on the Soul.Eleonore Stump - 2006 - In Bruno Niederberger & Edmund Runggaldier (eds.), Die menschliche Seele: Brauchen wir den Dualismus? pp. 151-172.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • The Ontology of Events.Paul Forrester - manuscript
    Consider the most recent Yale-Harvard football game, an event which occurred on 11/20/21 in New Haven, lasting about three hours. This event, like many college football games before, was composed of four quarters, each of which was composed of possessions, each of which was composed of downs, each of which was composed of particular movements, tackles and decisions of the individual players. Each of these parts of the game was itself an event, occurring in a smaller region of space and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Fictional Universal Realism.Jeffrey Goodman - 2022 - Metaphysica 23 (2):177-192.
    Certain realists about properties and relations identify them with universals. Furthermore, some hold that for a wide range of meaningful predicates, the semantic contribution to the propositions expressed by the sentences in which those predicates figure is the universal expressed by the predicate. I here address ontological issues raised by predicates first introduced to us via works of fiction and whether the universal realist should accept that any such predicates express universals. After assessing arguments by Braun, D. and Sawyer, S. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • How to minimize ontological commitments: a grounding-reductive approach.Reuben Sass - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-22.
    Some revisionary ontologies are highly parsimonious: they posit far fewer entities than what we quantify over in ordinary discourse. The most radical examples are minimal ontologies, on which physical simples are the only things that exist. Highly parsimonious ontologies, and especially minimal ones, face the challenge of either accounting for the truth of our ordinary quantificational discourse, or paraphrasing such discourse away. Common strategies for addressing this challenge include classical reduction, paraphrase nihilism, and a distinction between ontological and existence commitments. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Review of Why Free Will is Real, Christian List, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. [REVIEW]Derk Pereboom - 2022 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 17 (1):229-234.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The phenomenon objection to conceptual engineering.Mark Pinder - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (11):3281-3305.
    Conceptual engineering is sometimes presented as an alternative to conceptual analysis. But one important objection to conceptual analysis threatens to carry across: that philosophy investigates phenomena—knowledge, truth, freedom, etc.—rather than concepts of those phenomena. This poses a prima facie problem insofar as conceptual engineering targets concepts or terms rather than phenomena. Call it the ‘phenomenon objection’. I begin by examining recent discussions of the phenomenon objection by Cappelen and Scharp, rejecting their responses. I then clarify and strengthen the objection, discussing (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Lightweight and Heavyweight Anti-physicalism.Damian Aleksiev - 2022 - Synthese 200 (112):1-23.
    I define two metaphysical positions that anti-physicalists can take in response to Jonathan Schaffer’s ground functionalism. Ground functionalism is a version of physicalism where explanatory gaps are everywhere. If ground functionalism is true, arguments against physicalism based on the explanatory gap between the physical and experiential facts fail. In response, first, I argue that some anti-physicalists are already safe from Schaffer’s challenge. These anti-physicalists reject an underlying assumption of ground functionalism: the assumption that macrophysical entities are something over and above (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Epistemology of Modality: Between the Rock and the Hard Place.Ilkka Pättiniemi, Rami Koskinen & Ilmari Hirvonen - 2021 - Acta Philosophica Fennica 97:33-53.
    We review some of the major accounts in the current epistemology of modality and identify some shared issues that plague all of them. In order to provide insight into the nature of modal statements in science, philosophy, and beyond, a satisfactory epistemology of modality would need to be suitably applicable to practical and theoretical contexts by limited beings. However, many epistemologies of modality seem to work only when we have access to the kind of knowledge that is at least currently (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Four-Case Argument and the Existential/Universal Effect.Andrew J. Latham & Hannah Tierney - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (6):2379-2389.
    One debate surrounding Derk Pereboom’s (2001, 2014) four-case argument against compatibilism focuses on whether, and why, we judge manipulated agents to be neither free nor morally responsible. In this paper, we propose a novel explanation. The four-case argument features cases where an agent is the only individual in her universe who has been manipulated. Let us call manipulation whose scope includes at least one but not all agents existential manipulation. Contrast this with universal manipulation, which affects all agents within a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Too Many Animals, Too Many Thinkers.Kristin Seemuth Whaley - manuscript
    Animalism, the thesis that each of us is a human animal, is a prominent materialist account of what we are. Animalism is often motivated by an attractive line of reasoning, the Thinking Animal Argument. And, independently, animalism has been challenged by appeals to a metaphysical puzzle, the problem of the many. In this paper, I draw attention to the relationship between the Thinking Animal Argument and the problem of the many. I further argue that in virtue of this relationship, animalists (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • A pragmatic approach to the ontology of models.Antonis Antoniou - 2021 - Synthese (3-4):1-20.
    What are scientific models? Philosophers of science have been trying to answer this question during the last three decades by putting forward a number of different proposals. Some say that models are best understood as abstract Platonic objects or fictional entities akin to Sherlock Holmes, while others focus on their mathematical nature and see them as set theoretical structures. Although each account has its own strengths in offering various insights on the nature of models, several objections have been raised against (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Complex Ideas and Hume’s Separability Principle.Hsueh M. Qu - 2022 - Mind 131 (522):517-534.
    In this paper, I will argue that a number of Hume’s claims generate a putative inconsistency with regard to complex ideas and independent existence. I first provide a prima facie argument for the existence of this inconsistency. Then, I examine a number of attempts to rescue Hume from this problem, and argue that each of them fails, before proposing my own solution.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Being Sympathetic to Bad-History Wrongdoers.Craig K. Agule - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (1):147-169.
    For many philosophers, bad-history wrongdoers are primarily interesting because of what their cases might tell us about the interaction of moral responsibility and history. However, philosophers focusing on blameworthiness have overlooked important questions about blame itself. These bad-history cases are complicated because blame and sympathy are both fitting. When we are careful to consider the rich natures of those two reactions, we see that they conflict in several important ways. We should see bad-history cases as cases about whether and how (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Mathematical anti-realism and explanatory structure.Bruno Whittle - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6203-6217.
    Plausibly, mathematical claims are true, but the fundamental furniture of the world does not include mathematical objects. This can be made sense of by providing mathematical claims with paraphrases, which make clear how the truth of such claims does not require the fundamental existence of mathematical objects. This paper explores the consequences of this type of position for explanatory structure. There is an apparently straightforward relationship between this sort of structure, and the logical sort: i.e. logically complex claims are explained (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • An Algorithmic Metaphysics of Self-Patterns.Majid D. Beni - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11.
    The paper draws on an algorithmic criterion to demonstrate that the self is a composite, scattered, and patterned object. It also addresses the question of extendedness of the self-pattern. Based on the criteria drawn from algorithmic complexity, I argue that although the self-pattern possesses a genuinely extended aspect the self-pattern and its environment do not constitute a genuine composite object.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Why animalism matters.Andrew M. Bailey, Allison Krile Thornton & Peter van Elswyk - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (9):2929-2942.
    Here is a question as intriguing as it is brief: what are we? The animalist’s answer is equal in brevity: we are animals. This stark formulation of the animalist slogan distances it from nearby claims—that we are essentially animals, for example, or that we have purely biological criteria of identity over time. Is the animalist slogan—unburdened by modal or criterial commitments—still interesting, though? Or has it lost its bite? In this article we address such questions by presenting a positive case (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Epistemic self-esteem of philosophers in the face of philosophical disagreement.János Tőzsér & László Bernáth - 2020 - Human Affairs 30 (3):328-342.
    Our paper consists of four parts. In the first part, we describe the challenge of the pervasive and permanent philosophical disagreement over philosophers’ epistemic self-esteem. In the second part, we investigate the attitude of philosophers who have high epistemic self-esteem even in the face of philosophical disagreement and who believe they have well-grounded philosophical knowledge. In the third section, we focus on the attitude of philosophers who maintain a moderate level of epistemic self-esteem because they do not attribute substantive philosophical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Wiley-Blackwell: A Companion to Free Will.Joe Campbell, Kristin M. Mickelson & V. Alan White (eds.) - 2023 - Wiley.
    "We wish this volume to be a sure companion to the study of free will, broadly construed to include action theory, moral and legal responsibility, and cohort studies feathering off into adjacent fields in the liberal arts and sciences. In addition to general coverage of the discipline, this volume attempts a more challenging and complementary accompaniment to many familiar narratives about free will. In order to map out some directions such accompaniment will take, in this introduction we anchor the thirty (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Tamers, deniers, and me.Michael Della Rocca - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (4):1101-1119.
    This paper critically examines a prominent and perennial strategy—found in thinkers as diverse as Kant and Shamik Dasgupta—of simultaneously embracing the Principle of Sufficient Reason and also limiting it so as to avoid certain apparently negative consequences of an unrestricted PSR. I will argue that this strategy of taming the PSR faces significant challenges and may even be incoherent. And for my purposes, I will enlist a generally derided argument by Leibniz for the PSR which will help us to see (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Explaining contingent facts.Fatema Amijee - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (4):1163-1181.
    I argue against a principle that is widely taken to govern metaphysical explanation. This is the principle that no necessary facts can, on their own, explain a contingent fact. I then show how this result makes available a response to a longstanding objection to the Principle of Sufficient Reason—the objection that the Principle of Sufficient Reason entails that the world could not have been otherwise.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • Superexplanations for counterfactual knowledge.Antonella Mallozzi - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (4):1315-1337.
    I discuss several problems for Williamson’s counterfactual-theory of modal knowledge and argue that they have a common source, in that the theory neglects to elucidate the proper constraints on modal reasoning. Williamson puts forward an empirical hypothesis that rests on the role of counterfactual reasoning for modal knowledge. But he overlooks central questions of normative modal epistemology. In order for counterfactual reasoning to yield correct beliefs about modality, it needs to be suitably constrained. I argue that what is needed is, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Between Atomism and Superatomism.T. Scott Dixon - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 49 (6):1215-1241.
    There are at least three vaguely atomistic principles that have come up in the literature, two explicitly and one implicitly. First, standard atomism is the claim that everything is composed of atoms, and is very often how atomism is characterized in the literature. Second, superatomism is the claim that parthood is well-founded, which implies that every proper parthood chain terminates, and has been discussed as a stronger alternative to standard atomism. Third, there is a principle that lies between these two (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Organisms, activity, and being: on the substance of process ontology.Christopher J. Austin - 2020 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (2):1-21.
    According to contemporary ‘process ontology’, organisms are best conceptualised as spatio-temporally extended entities whose mereological composition is fundamentally contingent and whose essence consists in changeability. In contrast to the Aristotelian precepts of classical ‘substance ontology’, from the four-dimensional perspective of this framework, the identity of an organism is grounded not in certain collections of privileged properties, or features which it could not fail to possess, but in the succession of diachronic relations by which it persists, or ‘perdures’ as one entity (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • The Consequence of the Consequence Argument.Marco Hausmann - 2020 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 34 (4):45-70.
    The aim of my paper is to compare three alternative formal reconstructions of van Inwagen’s famous argument for incompatibilism. In the first part of my paper, I examine van Inwagen’s own reconstruction within a propositional modal logic. I point out that, due to the expressive limitations of his propositional modal logic, van Inwagen is unable to argue directly (that is, within his formal framework) for incompatibilism. In the second part of my paper, I suggest to reconstruct van Inwagen’s argument within (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Quantification in the Ontology Room.Bradley Rettler - 2019 - Dialectica 73 (4):563-585.
    There is a growing movement towards construing some classic debates in ontology as meaningless, either because the answers seem obvious or the debates seem intractable. In this paper, I respond to this movement. The response has three components: First, the members of the two sides of the ontological debates that dismissivists have targeted are using different quantifiers. Second, the austere ontologist is using a more fundamental quantifier than her opponent. Third, the austere ontologist’s more fundamental quantifier is a restriction of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Epistemic Paternalism, Epistemic Permissivism, and Standpoint Epistemology.Elizabeth Jackson - 2020 - In Amiel Bernal & Guy Axtell (eds.), Epistemic Paternalism Reconsidered: Conceptions, Justifications and Implications. Lanham, Md: Rowman & LIttlefield. pp. 201-215.
    Epistemic paternalism is the practice of interfering with someone’s inquiry, without their consent, for their own epistemic good. In this chapter, I explore the relationship between epistemic paternalism and two other epistemological theses: epistemic permissivism and standpoint epistemology. I argue that examining this relationship is fruitful because it sheds light on a series of cases in which epistemic paternalism is unjustified and brings out notable similarities between epistemic permissivism and standpoint epistemology.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Identidad personal y ontología de la persona.José Tomás Alvarado Marambio - 2016 - Universitas Philosophica 33 (66):77-112.
    It is argued here that it is part of our concept of a ‘person’ that persons should be, by its nature, able to endure in time. In no conception of persons as ‘perduring’ entities with different temporal parts for different times, or as sequences of stages in the relation of ‘being a survival of ’ between them, it is possible to make sense of some of our normative intuitions about persons. It is argued also that the traditional psychological theory of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Epistemology of Disagreement: Why Not Bayesianism?Thomas Mulligan - 2021 - Episteme 18 (4):587-602.
    Disagreement is a ubiquitous feature of human life, and philosophers have dutifully attended to it. One important question related to disagreement is epistemological: How does a rational person change her beliefs (if at all) in light of disagreement from others? The typical methodology for answering this question is to endorse a steadfast or conciliatory disagreement norm (and not both) on a priori grounds and selected intuitive cases. In this paper, I argue that this methodology is misguided. Instead, a thoroughgoingly Bayesian (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Maximality, Function, and the Many.Robert Francescotti - 2019 - Metaphysica 20 (2):175-193.
    In the region where some cat sits, there are many very cat-like items that are proper parts of the cat (or otherwise mereologically overlap the cat) , but which we are inclined to think are not themselves cats, e.g. all of Tibbles minus the tail. The question is, how can something be so cat-like without itself being a cat. Some have tried to answer this “Problem of the Many” (a problem that arises for many different kinds of things we regularly (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The Conceptual Impossibility of Free Will Error Theory.Andrew J. Latham - 2019 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 15 (2):99-120.
    This paper argues for a view of free will that I will call the conceptual impossibility of the truth of free will error theory - the conceptual impossibility thesis. I will argue that given the concept of free will we in fact deploy, it is impossible for our free will judgements - judgements regarding whether some action is free or not - to be systematically false. Since we do judge many of our actions to be free, it follows from the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Responsibility Without Freedom? Folk Judgements About Deliberate Actions.Tillmann Vierkant, Robert Deutschländer, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & John-Dylan Haynes - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10 (1133):1--6.
    A long-standing position in philosophy, law, and theology is that a person can be held morally responsible for an action only if they had the freedom to choose and to act otherwise. Thus, many philosophers consider freedom to be a necessary condition for moral responsibility. However, empirical findings suggest that this assumption might not be in line with common sense thinking. For example, in a recent study we used surveys to show that – counter to positions held by many philosophers (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • The World Is a Necessary Being.Chad Vance - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (1):377-390.
    A standard conception of metaphysical modality accepts that Some de re modal claims are true, These should be understood in terms of a possible worlds semantics, and There is trans-world identity. For instance, it seems true that Humphrey could have won the election. In possible worlds speak, we say that there exists a possible world where Humphrey wins the election. Furthermore, had that possibility been actualized instead of this one, Humphrey—our Humphrey, the very same man—would still have existed. Here, I (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Mind-Object Identity: A Solution to the Hard Problem.Riccardo Manzotti - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • The Face‐Value Theory, Know‐that, Know‐wh and Know‐how.Giulia Felappi - 2019 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 8 (1):63-72.
    For sentences such as (1), "Columbus knows that the sea is unpredictable", there is a face-value theory, according to which ‘that’-clauses are singular terms denoting propositions. Famously, Prior raised an objection to the theory, but defenders of the face-value theory such as Forbes, King, Künne, Pietroski and Stanley urged that the objection could be met by maintaining that in (1) ‘to know’ designates a complex relation along the lines of being in a state of knowledge having as content. Is the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Free Will, Determinism, and Epiphenomenalism.Mark Balaguer - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
    This paper provides articulates a non-epiphenomenal, libertarian kind of free will—a kind of free will that’s incompatible with both determinism and epiphenomenalism—and responds to scientific arguments against the existence of this sort of freedom. In other words, the paper argues that we don’t have any good empirical scientific reason to believe that human beings don’t possess a non-epiphenomenal, libertarian sort of free will.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Physics and Metaphysics.Claudio Calosi - 2018 - Humana Mente 4 (13).
    It is notoriously difficult to define Metaphysics1, its content, its method, its language, its scope. Thus I will not even try an attempt here. I will rest content to point out some widely held characterizations. A long and highly influential tradition maintains that Metaphysics is the study of being qua being. It is concerned with what there is, what kind of things are the things that there are, what properties do they have, how they are related. In this sense Metaphysics (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Substances.John Heil - 2018 - Humana Mente 26 (5):645-658.
    ABSTRACTThe paper takes up a conception of substances according to which substances are simple property bearers, properties being modes, particular qualitative ways individual substances are. What a substance does or would do is determined by its qualities. Efficient causation is to be understood as the manifesting of powers possessed by substances owing to their qualitative natures. Although complexes, entities with substantial parts, are not substances, they would be no less real, no less participants in the causal fray. What the substances (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Perception and ordinary objects.Alex Byrne - 2018 - In Javier Cumpa & Bill Brewer (eds.), The Nature of Ordinary Objects. New York: Cambridge University Press.
    The paper argues -- against the standard view in metaphysics -- that the existence of ordinary objects like tomatoes is (near-enough) established by the fact that such things are apparently encountered in perception.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • (In)compatibilism.Kristin M. Mickelson - 2023 - In Joe Campbell, Kristin M. Mickelson & V. Alan White (eds.), Wiley-Blackwell: A Companion to Free Will. Wiley. pp. 58-83.
    The terms ‘compatibilism’ and ‘incompatibilism’ were introduced in the mid-20th century to name conflicting views about the logical relationship between the thesis of determinism and the thesis that someone has free will. These technical terms were originally introduced within a specific research paradigm, the classical analytic paradigm. This paradigm is now in its final stages of degeneration and few free-will theorists still work within it (i.e. using its methods, granting its substantive background assumptions, etc.). This chapter discusses how the ambiguity (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Ontological Commitment and Quantifiers.T. Parent - 2020 - In Ricki Bliss & James Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This is a slightly opinionated review of three main factions in metaontology: Quineans, Carnapians, and Meinongians. Emphasis is given to the last camp, as the metaontological aspect of Meinongianism has been underappreciated. The final section then offers some general remarks about the legitimacy of ontology, touching on ideas I have developed in other publications.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Ontological Commitment.Daniel Durante Pereira Alves - 2018 - AL-Mukhatabat 1 (27):177-223.
    Disagreement over what exists is so fundamental that it tends to hinder or even to block dialogue among disputants. The various controversies between believers and atheists, or realists and nominalists, are only two kinds of examples. Interested in contributing to the intelligibility of the debate on ontology, in 1939 Willard van Orman Quine began a series of works which introduces the notion of ontological commitment and proposes an allegedly objective criterion to identify the exact conditions under which a theoretical discourse (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Existential Instantiation, Arbitrary Reference and Supposition.Wylie Breckenridge - manuscript
    Existential instantiation is a rule of inference that allows us infer, from the proposition that there are some p things, the proposition that a is a p thing. What role does 'a' play here? According to one account, recently defended by Breckenridge and Magidor, we use 'a' to refer to a p thing. I argue that this cannot be right. I propose an alternative account, according to which we use 'a' to refer to a supposedly p thing.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Substance Causation.Michele Paolini Paoletti - 2023 - Philosophia 51 (1):287-308.
    I defend the thesis that, if there are substances, substance causation (i.e., causation by substances) is the only sort of causation in the universe – or the only fundamental sort. Subsequently, I develop an account of substance causation that is partly grounded on a peculiar interpretation of absolute change (i.e., of entities' coming and ceasing to be) and qualitative change, on some ontological assumptions about modes (i.e., individual properties that ontologically depend on their bearers) and powers. Finally, I reply to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Meta-metaphysics.Tuomas Tahko - 2018 - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Meta-metaphysics concerns the nature and methodology of metaphysics and metaphysical inquiry. The emergence of meta-metaphysics as a systematic area of study is relatively recent, going back to the late 1990s. But the issues pursued in meta-metaphysics are certainly not novel: an age old question about the nature of metaphysics is whether it is possible to obtain knowledge about metaphysical matters in the first place, and if it is, how this knowledge is obtained.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Mereological Nihilism and Puzzles about Material Objects.Bradley Rettler - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (4):842-868.
    Mereological nihilism is the view that no objects have proper parts. Despite how counter‐intuitive it is, it is taken quite seriously, largely because it solves a number of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects – or so its proponents claim. In this article, I show that for every puzzle that mereological nihilism solves, there is a similar puzzle that (a) it doesn’t solve, and (b) every other solution to the original puzzle does solve. Since the solutions to the new (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • The Two‐Stage Luck Objection.Seth Shabo - 2020 - Noûs 54 (1):3-23.
    The Luck Objection is an influential family of challenges to libertarianism. In recent years, discussions of the Luck Objection have reached an impasse of sorts. On one hand, existing responses to the objection have failed to satisfy libertarianism’s many critics. On the other hand, a growing number of libertarians seem unimpressed by existing formulations of the objection. To break the impasse, I present a two-stage version of the objection. The first stage has the limited objective of showing that supposed exercises (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Composition, identity, and emergence.Claudio Calosi - 2016 - Logic and Logical Philosophy 25 (3):429-443.
    Composition as Identity is the thesis that a whole is, strictly and literally, identical to its parts, considered collectively. McDaniel [2008] argues against CAI in that it prohibits emergent properties. Recently Sider [2014] exploited the resources of plural logic and extensional mereology to undermine McDaniel’s argument. He shows that CAI identifies extensionally equivalent pluralities – he calls it the Collapse Principle – and then shows how this identification rescues CAI from the emergentist argument. In this paper I first give a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • A Dispositional Theory of Health.Sander Werkhoven - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (4):927-952.
    A satisfactory account of the nature of health is important for a wide range of theoretical and practical reasons. No theory offered in the literature thus far has been able to meet all the desiderata for an adequate theory of health. This article introduces a new theory of health, according to which health is best defined in terms of dispositions at the level of the organism as a whole. After outlining the main features of the account and providing formal definitions (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations