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  1. Laws and symmetry.Bas C. van Fraassen - 1989 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists, in terms of symmetry and invariance. In this book van Fraassen argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. He analyzes and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe there are, and argues that we should disregard the idea of law as an adequate clue to science. After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the author develops the empiricist (...)
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  • What are natural kinds?1.Katherine Hawley & Alexander Bird - 2011 - Philosophical Perspectives 25 (1):205-221.
    We articulate a view of natural kinds as complex universals. We do not attempt to argue for the existence of universals. Instead, we argue that, given the existence of universals, and of natural kinds, the latter can be understood in terms of the former, and that this provides a rich, flexible framework within which to discuss issues of indeterminacy, essentialism, induction, and reduction. Along the way, we develop a 'problem of the many' for universals.
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  • The Tools of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Science.Theodore Sider - 2020 - Oxford, England and New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    Metaphysics is sensitive to the conceptual tools we choose to articulate metaphysical problems. Those tools are a lens through which we view metaphysical problems; the same problems look different when we change the lens. There has recently been a shift to "postmodal" conceptual tools: concepts of ground, essence, and fundamentality. This shift transforms the debate over structuralism in the metaphysics of science and philosophy of mathematics. Structuralist theses say that patterns are "prior" to the nodes in the patterns. In modal (...)
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  • Plural Slot Theory.T. Scott Dixon - 2018 - In Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 11. Oxford University Press. pp. 193-223.
    Kit Fine (2000) breaks with tradition, arguing that, pace Russell (e.g., 1903: 228), relations have neither directions nor converses. He considers two ways to conceive of these new "neutral" relations, positionalism and anti-positionalism, and argues that the latter should be preferred to the former. Cody Gilmore (2013) argues for a generalization of positionalism, slot theory, the view that a property or relation is n-adic if and only if there are exactly n slots in it, and (very roughly) that each slot (...)
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  • A Critical Introduction to Properties.Sophie Allen - 2016 - London, UK: Bloomsbury.
    What determines qualitative sameness and difference? This book explores four principal accounts of the ontological basis of properties, including universals, trope theory, resemblance nominalism, and class nominalism, considering the assumptions and ontolological commitments which are required to make each into a plausible account of properties. -/- The latter half of the book investigates the applications of property theory and the different conceptions of properties which might be adopted with these in mind: first, the possibility and desirability of individuating properties, and (...)
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  • The atlas of reality: a comprehensive guide to metaphysics.Robert C. Koons & Timothy Pickavance - 2017 - Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Edited by Timothy H. Pickavance.
    The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics presents an extensive examination of the key topics, concepts, and guiding principles of metaphysics. Represents the most comprehensive guide to metaphysics available today Offers authoritative coverage of the full range of topics that comprise the field of metaphysics in an accessible manner while considering competing views Explores key concepts such as space, time, powers, universals, and composition with clarity and depth Articulates coherent packages of metaphysical theses that include neo-Aristotelian, Quinean, Armstrongian, (...)
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  • Ostrich nominalism.Michael Devitt - 2024 - In A. R. J. Fisher & Anna-Sofia Maurin (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Properties. London: Routledge.
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  • A World of States of Affairs.D. M. Armstrong - 1997 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...)
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  • The Problem of Order in Relational States of Affairs: A Leibnizian View.Francesco Orilia - 2008 - In Guido Bonino & Rosaria Egidi (eds.), Fostering the Ontological Turn: Gustav Bergmann (1906-1987). Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. pp. 161-186.
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  • Properties, causation, and projectibility: Reply to Shoemaker.Richard Swinburne - 1980 - In Laurence Jonathan Cohen & Mary Brenda Hesse (eds.), Applications of inductive logic: proceedings of a conference at the Queen's College, Oxford 21-24, August 1978. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 313-20.
    SHOEMAKER IS WRONG TO CLAIM THAT ALL THE GENUINE PROPERTIES OF THINGS ARE NOTHING BUT POTENTIALITIES FOR CONTRIBUTING TO THE CAUSAL POWERS OF THINGS. FOR THE ONLY GROUNDS FOR ATTRIBUTING CAUSAL POWERS TO THINGS ARE IN TERMS OF THE EFFECTS WHICH THOSE THINGS TYPICALLY PRODUCE. BUT ALL EFFECTS ARE ULTIMATELY INSTANTIATIONS OF PROPERTIES, AND IF THESE WERE NOTHING BUT POTENTIALITIES TO PRODUCE EFFECTS, THERE WOULD BE A VICIOUS INFINITE REGRESS, AND NO ONE WOULD EVER BE JUSTIFIED IN ATTRIBUTING PROPERTIES TO (...)
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  • Principles of Mathematics.Bertrand Russell - 1937 - New York,: Routledge.
    First published in 1903, _Principles of Mathematics_ was Bertrand Russell’s first major work in print. It was this title which saw him begin his ascent towards eminence. In this groundbreaking and important work, Bertrand Russell argues that mathematics and logic are, in fact, identical and what is commonly called mathematics is simply later deductions from logical premises. Highly influential and engaging, this important work led to Russell’s dominance of analytical logic on western philosophy in the twentieth century.
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  • Structure-making.Kris McDaniel - 2009 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (2):251-274.
    Friends of states of affairs and structural universals appeal to a relation, structure-making, that is allegedly a kind of composition relation: structure-making ?builds? facts out of particulars and universals, and ?builds? structural universals out of unstructured universals. D. M. Armstrong, an eminent champion of structures, endorses two interesting theses concerning composition. First, that structure-making is a composition relation. Second, that it is not the only (fundamental) composition relation: Armstrong also believes in a mode of composition that he calls mereological, and (...)
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  • From a Logical Point of View.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1953 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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  • Metaphysics.Peter Van Inwagen - 1993 - Cambridge, MA: Routledge.
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  • Formal Ontology and Conceptual Realism.Nino Barnabas Cocchiarella - 2007 - Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer.
    Theories about the ontological structure of the world have generally been described in informal, intuitive terms. This book offers an account of the general features and methodology of formal ontology. The book defends conceptual realism as the best system to adopt based on a logic of natural kinds. By formally reconstructing an intuitive, informal ontological scheme as a formal ontology we can better determine the consistency and adequacy of that scheme.
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  • Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics.Peter Strawson - 1959 - London, England: Routledge. Edited by Wenfang Wang.
    The classic, influential essay in 'descriptive metaphysics' by the distinguished English philosopher.
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  • The Powers Metaphysic.Neil E. Williams - 2019 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Neil E. Williams develops a systematic metaphysics centred on the idea of powers, as a rival to neo-Humeanism, the dominant systematic metaphysics in philosophy today. Williams takes powers to be inherently causal properties and uses them as the foundation of his explanations of causation, persistence, laws, and modality.
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  • Metaphysics: An Introduction to Contemporary Debates and Their History.Anna Marmodoro & Erasmus Mayr - 2019 - New York: Oup Usa. Edited by Erasmus Mayr.
    This volume introduces readers to a selected number of core issues in metaphysics that have been central in the history of philosophy and remain foundational to contemporary debates, that is: substances; properties; modality and essence; causality; determinism and free will. Anna Marmodoro and Erasmus Mayr take a neo-Aristotelian approach both in the selection and presentation of the topics. But Marmodoro and Mayr's discussion is not narrowly partisan-it consistently presents opposing sides of the debate and addresses issues from different philosophical traditions, (...)
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  • The Unity of the Proposition.Richard Gaskin - 2008 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Richard Gaskin analyses what is distinctive about sentences and the propositions they express--what marks them off from mere aggregates of words and meanings respectively. Since he identifies the world with all the true and false propositions, his account has significant implications for our understanding of the nature of reality.
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  • Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.Nelson Goodman - 1965 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
    In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims.
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  • Natural Laws as Dispositions.Florian Fischer - 2018 - Boston: De Gruyter.
    Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the vast topic of laws of nature. Thus, it first outlines the alleged characteristics of the laws of nature, namely truth, objectivity, contingency, necessity, universality, grounding counterfactuals and their role in science. Among these aspects, the peculiar modal status of laws of nature will be identified as the ‘holy grail’ of the debate. The second part of this chapter is concerned with the three main families of theories of laws of nature – neo-humean, (...)
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  • Causal powers and isomeric chemical kinds.Andrew McFarland - 2018 - Synthese 195 (4):1441-1457.
    Some philosophers have claimed that kinds can be construed as mereologically complex structural properties. This essay examines several strategies aimed at construing a certain class of natural kinds, namely isomeric chemical kinds, in accordance with this view. In particular, the essay examines views which posit structural proper parts in addition to micro-constitutive parts to individuate isomeric chemical kinds. It then goes on to argue that the phenomenon of chirality in stereochemistry gives the proponent of kinds-as-complex-properties evidence for positing the existence (...)
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  • Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science.Travis Dumsday - 2018 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Dispositionalism is the view that causal powers are among the irreducible properties of nature. It has long been among the core competing positions in the metaphysics of laws, but its potential implications for other key debates within metaphysics and the philosophy of science have remained under-explored. Travis Dumsday fills this major gap in the literature by establishing new connections between dispositionalism and such topics as substance ontology, ontic structural realism, material composition, emergentism, natural-kind essentialism, perdurantism, time travel, and spacetime substantivalism. (...)
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  • Metaphysics of States of Affairs: Truthmaking, Universals, and a Farewell to Bradley’s Regress.Bo R. Meinertsen - 2018 - Singapore: Springer Singapore.
    This book addresses the metaphysics of Armstrongian states of affairs, i.e. instantiations of naturalist universals by particulars. The author argues that states of affairs are the best candidate for truthmakers and, in the spirit of logical atomism, that we need no molecular truthmakers for positive truths. In the book's context, this has the pleasing result that there are no molecular states of affairs. Following this account of truthmaking, the author first shows that the particulars in (first-order) states of affairs are (...)
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  • On the Genealogy of Universals: The Metaphysical Origins of Analytic Philosophy.Fraser MacBride - 2018 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    The concepts of particular and universal have grown so familiar that their significance has become difficult to discern, like coins that have been passed back and forth too many times, worn smooth so their values can no longer be read. On the Genealogy of Universals seeks to overcome our sense of over-familiarity with these concepts by providing a case study of their evolution during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, a study that shows how the history of these (...)
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  • The Quest for Emergence.Michele Paolini Paoletti - 2017 - Munich: Philosophia.
    The Quest for Emergence is a comprehensive philosophical introduction to emergence. It includes the illustration and discussion of the major varieties of emergentism. The book also introduces many scientific examples of emergence and all the problems and objections affecting emergentism. In the introduction, the author provides a characterization of emergence and of some key distinctions: for example, the one between weak and strong emergence. The second chapter contains a short history of British Emergentism. The configurational forces objection against emergentism is (...)
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  • Science in Metaphysics : Exploring the Metaphysics of Properties and Laws.Livanios Vassilis - 2017 - Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
    This book explores the dispositional and categorical debates on the metaphysics of properties. It defends the view that all fundamental properties and relations are contingently categorical, while also examining alternative accounts of the nature of properties. Drawing upon both established research and the author's own investigation into the broader discipline of the metaphysics of science, this book provides a comprehensive study of the many views and opinions regarding a most debatable topic in contemporary metaphysics.
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  • The Categorial Structure of the World.Reinhardt Grossmann - 1983 - Indiana University Press, C1983.
    A study of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. It features a prologue that considers the meaning of the tragedy for a post-Waco, post-9/11 world.
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  • Negative Properties.Nick Zangwill - 2011 - Noûs 45 (3):528-556.
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  • Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of Intentionality.Edward N. Zalta - 1988 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
    This book tackles the issues that arise in connection with intensional logic -- a formal system for representing and explaining the apparent failures of certain important principles of inference such as the substitution of identicals and existential generalization -- and intentional states --mental states such as beliefs, hopes, and desires that are directed towards the world. The theory offers a unified explanation of the various kinds of inferential failures associated with intensional logic but also unifies the study of intensional contexts (...)
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  • An alternative theory of nonexistent objects.Alan McMichael & Ed Zalta - 1980 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 9 (3):297-313.
    The authors develop an axiomatic theory of nonexistent objects and and give a formal semantics for the language of the theory.
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  • Three Arguments for Humility.David Yates - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (2):461-481.
    Ramseyan humility is the thesis that we cannot know which properties realize the roles specified by the laws of completed physics. Lewis seems to offer a sceptical argument for this conclusion. Humean fundamental properties can be permuted as to their causal roles and distribution throughout spacetime, yielding alternative possible worlds with the same fundamental structure as actuality, but at which the totality of available evidence is the same. On the assumption that empirical knowledge requires evidence, we cannot know which of (...)
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  • Inverse functionalism and the individuation of powers.David Yates - 2018 - Synthese 195 (10):4525-4550.
    In the pure powers ontology (PPO), basic physical properties have wholly dispositional essences. PPO has clear advantages over categoricalist ontologies, which suffer from familiar epistemological and metaphysical problems. However, opponents argue that because it contains no qualitative properties, PPO lacks the resources to individuate powers, and generates a regress. The challenge for those who take such arguments seriously is to introduce qualitative properties without reintroducing the problems that PPO was meant to solve. In this paper, I distinguish the core claim (...)
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  • The Metaphysics of Emergence.Hong Yu Wong - 2005 - Noûs 39 (4):658 - 678.
    The following framework of theses, roughly hewn, shapes contemporary discussion of the problem of mental causation: (1) Non-Identity of the Mental and the Physical Mental properties and states cannot be identified with specific physical properties and states. (2) Causal Closure (Completeness) of the Physical The objective probability of every physical event is fixed by prior physical events and laws alone. (This thesis is sometimes expressed in terms of explanation: In tracing the causal history of any physical event, one need not (...)
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  • How superduper does a physicalist supervenience need to be?Jessica Wilson - 1999 - Philosophical Quarterly 49 (194):33-52.
    Note: this is the first published presentation and defense of the 'proper subset strategy' for making sense of non-reductive physicalism or the associated notion of realization; this is sometimes, inaccurately, called "Shoemaker's subset strategy"; if people could either call it the 'subset strategy' or better yet, add my name to the mix I would appreciate it. Horgan claims that physicalism requires "superdupervenience" -- supervenience plus robust ontological explanation of the supervenient in terms of the base properties. I argue that Horgan's (...)
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  • Dispositions and the Argument from Science.Neil E. Williams - 2011 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (1):71 - 90.
    Central to the debate between Humean and anti-Humean metaphysics is the question of whether dispositions can exist in the absence of categorical properties that ground them (that is, where the causal burden is shifted on to categorical properties on which the dispositions would therefore supervene). Dispositional essentialists claim that they can; categoricalists reject the possibility of such ?baseless? dispositions, requiring that all dispositions must ultimately have categorical bases. One popular argument, recently dubbed the ?Argument from Science?, has appeared in one (...)
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  • On an Argument for Humility.Ann Whittle - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 130 (3):461-497.
    Considerations upon the nature of properties and laws have led some philosophers to claim that the correct epistemic attitude with regards to the intrinsic properties of particulars is scepticism. I examine one particularly clear version of this line of argument, and contend that a serious form of scepticism is not established. However, I argue that the theories of properties and laws underlying the argument have unwanted metaphysical implications. These provide a stronger reason to jettison the analyses. I end by sketching (...)
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  • A functionalist theory of properties.Ann Whittle - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1):59-82.
    I consider a grand, yet neglected proposal put forward by Shoemaker—a functionalist theory of all properties. I argue that two possible ways of developing this proposal meet with substantial objections. However, if we are prepared to endorse an ontology of tropes, one of these functionalist analyses can be developed into an original and informative theory of properties.
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  • Names for relations.Peter Van Inwagen - 2006 - Philosophical Perspectives 20 (1):453–477.
    A proper presentation of this theory [sc. of properties] would treat properties as a special kind of relation. And it would treat propositions as a special kind of relation: it would treat properties as monadic relations and propositions as 0-adic relations. But I will not attempt to discuss relations within the confines of this paper.[ii].
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  • Relations, monism, and the vindication of Bradley's regress.William F. Vallicella - 2002 - Dialectica 56 (1):3–35.
    This article articulates and defends F. H. Bradley's regress argument against external relations using contemporary analytic techniques and conceptuality. Bradley's argument is usually quickly dismissed as if it were beneath serious consideration. But I shall maintain that Bradley's argument, suitably reconstructed, is a powerful argument, plausibly premised, and free of such obvious fallacies as petitio principii. Thus it does not rest on the question‐begging assumption that all relations are internal, as Russell, and more recently van Inwagen, maintain. Bradley does not (...)
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  • Grounding theories of powers.Matthew Tugby - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):11187-11216.
    Necessitarianism, as we shall use the term, is the view that natural properties and causal powers are necessarily connected in some way. In recent decades the most popular forms of necessitarianism have been the anti-Humean powers-based theories of properties, such as dispositional essentialism and the identity theory. These versions of necessitarianism have come under fire in recent years and I believe it is time for necessitarians to develop a new approach. In this paper I identify unexplored ways of positing metaphysically (...)
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  • Platonic Dispositionalism.Matthew Tugby - 2013 - Mind 122 (486):fzt071.
    In this paper I argue that if one subscribes to dispositionalism — the view that natural properties are irreducibly dispositional in character — then one ought to favour a Platonic view of properties. That is, dispositionalists ought to view properties as transcendent universals. I argue for this on the grounds that only with transcendent universals in play can two central dispositionalist platitudes be accounted for in a satisfactory way. Given that dispositionalism is becoming an increasingly influential view in the metaphysics (...)
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  • The nature of laws.Michael Tooley - 1977 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (4):667-98.
    This paper is concerned with the question of the truth conditions of nomological statements. My fundamental thesis is that it is possible to set out an acceptable, noncircular account of the truth conditions of laws and nomological statements if and only if relations among universals - that is, among properties and relations, construed realistically - are taken as the truth-makers for such statements. My discussion will be restricted to strictly universal, nonstatistical laws. The reason for this limitation is not that (...)
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  • Exemplification and Universal Realism.Erwin Tegtmeier - 2013 - Axiomathes 23 (2):261-267.
    The relation between universal and particular is considered to be the Achilles’ heel of universal realism. However, modern universal realism with facts does not have the difficulties which traditional Platonic universal realism had. Its exemplification relation connecting particulars and universals in atomic facts is very different from Platonic participation. Bradley’s regress argument against the exemplification relation can be refuted in two different ways. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to avoid the assumption of an exemplification relation and thus to go without (...)
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  • Powerful qualities and pure powers.Henry Taylor - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (6):1423-1440.
    Many think that properties are powers. However, whilst some claim that properties are pure powers, others claim that properties are powerful qualities. In this paper, I argue that the canonical formulation of the powerful qualities view is no different from the pure powers view. Contrary to appearances, the two positions accept the same view of properties. Thus, the debate between them rests on an illusion. I draw out some consequences of this surprising result for issues over property individuation. Along the (...)
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  • How ontology might be possible: Explanation and inference in metaphysics.Chris Swoyer - 1999 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 23 (1):100–131.
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  • Theories of properties: From plenitude to paucity.Chris Swoyer - 1996 - Philosophical Perspectives 10:243 - 264.
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  • » The Nature of Natural Laws «.Chris Swoyer - 1982 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 60 (3):1982.
    That laws of nature play a vital role in explanation, prediction, and inductive inference is far clearer than the nature of the laws themselves. My hope here is to shed some light on the nature of natural laws by developing and defending the view that they involve genuine relations between properties. Such a position is suggested by Plato, and more recent versions have been sketched by several writers.~ But I am not happy with any of these accounts, not so much (...)
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  • Complex predicates and logics for properties and relations.Chris Swoyer - 1998 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 27 (3):295-325.
    In this paper I present a formal language in which complex predicates stand for properties and relations, and assignments of denotations to complex predicates and assignments of extensions to the properties and relations they denote are both homomorphisms. This system affords a fresh perspective on several important philosophical topics, highlighting the algebraic features of properties and clarifying the sense in which properties can be represented by their extensions. It also suggests a natural modification of current logics of properties, one in (...)
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  • The identity of the categorical and the dispositional.Galen Strawson - 2008 - Analysis 68 (4):271-282.
    Suppose that X and Y can’t possibly exist apart in reality; then—by definition—there’s no real distinction between them, only a conceptual distinction. There’s a conceptual distinction between a rectilinear figure’s triangularity and its trilaterality, for example, but no real distinction. In fundamental metaphysics there is no real distinction between an object’s categorical properties and its dispositional properties. So too there is no real distinction between an object and its properties. And in fundamental metaphysics, for X and Y to be such (...)
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