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  1. (1 other version)On what grounds what.Jonathan Schaffer - 2009 - In Ryan Wasserman, David Manley & David Chalmers (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 347-383.
    On the now dominant Quinean view, metaphysics is about what there is. Metaphysics so conceived is concerned with such questions as whether properties exist, whether meanings exist, and whether numbers exist. I will argue for the revival of a more traditional Aristotelian view, on which metaphysics is about what grounds what. Metaphysics so revived does not bother asking whether properties, meanings, and numbers exist (of course they do!) The question is whether or not they are fundamental.
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  • Grounding in the image of causation.Jonathan Schaffer - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (1):49-100.
    Grounding is often glossed as metaphysical causation, yet no current theory of grounding looks remotely like a plausible treatment of causation. I propose to take the analogy between grounding and causation seriously, by providing an account of grounding in the image of causation, on the template of structural equation models for causation.
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  • On the Plurality of Worlds.David Lewis - 1986 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 178 (3):388-390.
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  • (2 other versions)Counterfactuals.David Lewis - 1973 - Foundations of Language 13 (1):145-151.
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  • Conceptual analysis, dualism, and the explanatory gap.Ned Block & Robert Stalnaker - 1999 - Philosophical Review 108 (1):1-46.
    The explanatory gap . Consciousness is a mystery. No one has ever given an account, even a highly speculative, hypothetical, and incomplete account of how a physical thing could have phenomenal states. Suppose that consciousness is identical to a property of the brain, say activity in the pyramidal cells of layer 5 of the cortex involving reverberatory circuits from cortical layer 6 to the thalamus and back to layers 4 and 6,as Crick and Koch have suggested for visual consciousness. .) (...)
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  • The logical form of action sentences.Donald Davidson - 1966 - In Nicholas Rescher (ed.), The Logic of Decision and Action. University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 81--95.
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  • (1 other version)Four Decades of Scientific Explanation.Wesley C. Salmon & Anne Fagot-Largeault - 1989 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 16 (2):355.
    As Aristotle stated, scientific explanation is based on deductive argument--yet, Wesley C. Salmon points out, not all deductive arguments are qualified explanations. The validity of the explanation must itself be examined. _Four Decades of Scientific Explanation_ provides a comprehensive account of the developments in scientific explanation that transpired in the last four decades of the twentieth century. It continues to stand as the most comprehensive treatment of the writings on the subject during these years. Building on the historic 1948 essay (...)
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  • Contrastive causation.Jonathan Schaffer - 2005 - Philosophical Review 114 (3):327-358.
    Causation is widely assumed to be a binary relation: c causes e. I will argue that causation is a quaternary, contrastive relation: c rather than C* causes e rather than E*, where C* and E* are nonempty sets of contrast events. Or at least, I will argue that treating causation as contrastive helps resolve some paradoxes.
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  • On the Plurality of Grounds.Shamik Dasgupta - 2014 - Philosophers' Imprint 14.
    This paper argues that ground is irreducibly plural: a group of facts can be grounded together, as a collective, even though no member of the group has a ground on its own. This kind of plural grounding is applied to the metaphysics of individuals and quantities, yielding a “structuralist” view in each case. Some more general implications of plural grounding are also discussed.
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  • A logic for 'because'.Benjamin Schnieder - 2011 - Review of Symbolic Logic 4 (3):445-465.
    In spite of its significance for everyday and philosophical discourse, the explanatory connective has not received much treatment in the philosophy of logic. The present paper develops a logic for based on systematic connections between and the truth-functional connectives.
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  • (1 other version)On What Grounds What.Jonathan Schaffer - 2009 - In Ryan Wasserman, David Manley & David Chalmers (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
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  • Explanatory knowledge and metaphysical dependence.Jaegwon Kim - 1994 - Philosophical Issues 5:51-69.
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  • Contrastive Explanation.Peter Lipton - 1990 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 27:247-266.
    According to a causal model of explanation, we explain phenomena by giving their causes or, where the phenomena are themselves causal regularities, we explain them by giving a mechanism linking cause and effect. If we explain why smoking causes cancer, we do not give the cause of this causal connection, but we do give the causal mechanism that makes it. The claim that to explain is to give a cause is not only natural and plausible, but it also avoids many (...)
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  • Identity criteria and ground.Kit Fine - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (1):1-19.
    I propose formulating identity criteria as generic statements of ground, thereby avoiding objections that have been made to the more usual formulations.
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  • An Introduction to Grounding.Kelly Trogdon - 2013 - In Benjamin Schnieder, Miguel Hoeltje & Alex Steinberg (eds.), Varieties of Dependence: Ontological Dependence, Grounding, Supervenience, Response-Dependence (Basic Philosophical Concepts). Munich: Philosophia Verlag. pp. 97-122.
    General discussion of grounding, including its formal features, relations to other notions, and applications.
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  • Some Varieties of Non-Causal Explanation.James Woodward - 2018 - In Alexander Reutlinger & Juha Saatsi (eds.), Explanation Beyond Causation: Philosophical Perspectives on Non-Causal Explanations. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter explores the possibility of weakening the criteria for causal explanation in Making Things Happen to yield various forms of non-causal explanation. These include the following: retaining the idea that explanations must answer what if things had been different questions but dropping the requirement the answers to such questions must take the form of claims about what would happen under interventions. Retaining the w- question requirement but allowing generalizations that hold for mathematical or conceptual reasons to figure in explanations. (...)
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  • Questions and Answers: Metaphysical Explanation and the Structure of Reality.Naomi Thompson - 2019 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (1):98-116.
    This paper develops an account of metaphysical explanation according to which metaphysical explanations are answers to what-makes-it-the-case-that questions. On this view, metaphysical explanations are not to be considered entirely objective, but are subject to epistemic constraints imposed by the context in which a relevant question is asked. The resultant account of metaphysical explanation is developed independently of any particular views about grounding. Toward the end of the paper an application of the view is proposed that takes metaphysical explanations conceived in (...)
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  • Introduction: Scientific Explanation Beyond Causation.Alexander Reutlinger & Juha Saatsi - 2018 - In Alexander Reutlinger & Juha Saatsi (eds.), Explanation Beyond Causation: Philosophical Perspectives on Non-Causal Explanations. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This is an introduction to the volume "Explanation Beyond Causation: Philosophical Perspectives on Non-Causal Explanations", edited by A. Reutlinger and J. Saatsi (OUP, forthcoming in 2017). -/- Explanations are very important to us in many contexts: in science, mathematics, philosophy, and also in everyday and juridical contexts. But what is an explanation? In the philosophical study of explanation, there is long-standing, influential tradition that links explanation intimately to causation: we often explain by providing accurate information about the causes of the (...)
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  • The logical Form of Action Statements.".Donald Davidson - 1966 - In Nicholas Rescher (ed.), The Logic of Decision and Action. University of Pittsburgh Press.
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  • What is a criterion of identity?E. J. Lowe - 1989 - Philosophical Quarterly 39 (154):1-21.
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  • A Puzzle About 'because'.Benjamin Schnieder - 2010 - Logique Et Analyse 53.
    The essay is a partial investigation into the semantics of the explanatory connective ‘because’. After three independently plausible assumptions about ‘because’ are presented in some detail, it is shown how their interaction generates a puzzle about ‘because’, once they are combined with a common view on conceptual analysis. Four possible solutions to the puzzle are considered.
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  • Paradoxes of Phenomenal Character.Timothy Williamson - 1990 - In Identity and Discrimination. Cambridge, Mass., USA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 88–108.
    This chapter contains sections titled: The concept of phenomenal character is closely related to that of a phenomenal quality. If phenomenal characters are just maximally specific phenomenal qualities, it would follow that there are no phenomenal characters either. The first section gives reasons for fearing that observational predicates are susceptible to sorites paradoxes, but denies that predicates such as “painful” are perfectly observational. They are instead phenomenal, in a sense developed in the second section. The third section considers and rejects (...)
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  • Reduction and reductive explanation : is one possible without the other?Jaegwon Kim - 2008 - In Jakob Hohwy & Jesper Kallestrup (eds.), Being Reduced: New Essays on Reduction, Explanation, and Causation. New York: Oxford University Press.
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  • The Myth of Identity Conditions.Michael Jubien - 1996 - Philosophical Perspectives 10:343-356.
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  • Impredicative Identity Criteria.Leon Horsten - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 80 (2):411-439.
    In this paper, a general perspective on criteria of identity of kinds of objects is developed. The question of the admissibility of impredicative or circular identity criteria is investigated in the light of the view that is articulated. It is argued that in and of itself impredicativity does not constitute sufficient grounds for rejecting a putative identity criterion. The view that is presented is applied to Davidson’s criterion of identity for events and to the structuralist criterion of identity of places (...)
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  • One-Level versus Two-Level Identity Criteria.E. J. Lowe - 1991 - Analysis 51 (4):192 - 194.
    E. J. Lowe; One-level versus two-level identity criteria, Analysis, Volume 51, Issue 4, 1 October 1991, Pages 192–194, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/51.4.192.
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  • Substance, Identity and Time.Harold Noonan - 1988 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 62:79-100.
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  • Contrastive Explanation.Christopher Hitchcock - 2013 - In Martijn Blaauw (ed.), Contrastivism in philosophy. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
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  • Nominals, facts, and two conceptions of events.Hugh J. McCann - 1979 - Philosophical Studies 35 (2):129 - 149.
    According to one view of english nominals, imperfect nominals designate facts, and perfect nominals, events. it is argued here that this is mistaken. of imperfect nominals only "that"-clauses are fact designators; imperfect gerundive nominals are to be classed with perfect nominals as event designators. there are, however, two conceptions of events, arising from two different conceptions of time. the events designated by imperfect gerundives are to be conceived as spread out in time, divisible into parts, and such that the same (...)
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  • (1 other version)Word and Concept.Zeno Vendler - 1970 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 4:220-231.
    If a speaker says something in a language and one of the listeners knows L but another does not, then, normally, A will understand what S said but B will not. What is it, exactly, that A, but not B, succeeds in doing in this case, and how to account for the difference? This is a fundamental problem, which the philosophy of language should be able to solve, yet, to my knowledge, has not done so to date.
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