Elselijn Kingma argues that, in cases of mammalian placental pregnancy, the foster (roughly, the post-implantation embryo/foetus) is part of the gravida (the pregnant organism). But she does not consider the possibility of proper overlap. I show that this generates a number of serious problems for her argument and trace the oversight to a quite general issue within the literature on biological individuality. Doing so provides an opportunity to pull apart and clarify the relations between some importantly distinct questions concerning organismality (...) and organismic parthood, and to identify the implications that this has for those who want to draw on this literature when making metaphysical or mereological arguments. (shrink)

Lampert and Waldrop have recently presented a puzzle about moral responsibility and logical truth, in which they derive a contradiction from three apparently plausible principles: (A) no one is responsible for any logical truth; (B) if no one is responsible for something, then no one is responsible for what it strictly implies; and (C) someone is responsible for something. They argue that, in response, we must give up (B)—a principle that plays a key role in arguments for incompatibilism. In this (...) paper, I argue that this response is mistaken, and that the lesson to be drawn lies elsewhere. For the puzzle also rests on a conception of logical truth according to which there are contingent logical truths. And, given this conception, (A) is false—for reasons independent of (B). So the import here concerns, not a connection between responsibility and the debate over incompatibilism, but a connection between responsibility and the debate over the correct conception of logical truth: one can hold on to (A), or hold on to the relevant conception of logical truth, but not both. (shrink)

Barlassina and Del Prete argue that the past can change, on the basis that there is no other explanation for the truth values of certain claims involving the past-tense predicate ‘won the Tour de France in 2000’. To establish this, they argue that no contextualist account of this predicate will be able to explain these truth values. I show that their argument straightforwardly fails. Not only does a tweak to the contextualist account they consider suffice to explain these truth values, (...) there is in fact an even simpler and more plausible non-contextualist account that can do the same work. Put simply: there is no puzzle of the changing past. (shrink)

In his 2022 article ‘A puzzle about the fixity of the past’, Lampert argues that standard views concerning knowledge and the semantics of ‘actually’ conflict with a widely held principle concerning the fixity of the past. I show that his attempt to establish the conflict fails, as it rests on the implicit assumption that a past mental state or utterance involving a modal indexical must have the same content across worlds with a shared past, when in fact it must, given (...) its character, differ in content. (shrink)