Benjamin Schnieder

The article is primarily concerned with the notion of a truth-maker. An explication for this notion is offered, which relates it to other notions of making something such-and-such. In particular, it is shown that the notion of a truth-maker is a close relative of a concept employed by van Inwagen in the formulation of his Consequence Argument. This circumstance helps understanding the general mechanisms of the concepts involved. Thus, a schematic explication of a whole battery of related notions is offered. It is based on an explanatory notion, introduced by the sentential connector “because”, whose function is examined in some detail. Finally, on the basis of the explication proposed, an argument is developed to the effect that the objects usually regarded as truth-makers are not apt to play this role

This volume contains fifteen essays in honour of Wolfgang Künne. The essays deal with issues from the philosophy of language and logic, broadly conceived. They cover topics ranging from truth, reference, and the ontology of abstract objects, to action, intentionality, and speech acts. By taking into account the works of early analytic philosophers—including Bolzano, Frege, Peirce, Husserl, and Wittgenstein—they foster our understanding of the history of the ideas discussed, while at the same time contributing to the systematic debate. The collection also includes an up-to-date bibliography of Künne's published work.

Wenn Plato weise ist, dann gibt es mindestens dreierlei: Plato, die Weisheit und Platos Weisheit. Dies sind beispielhafte Vertreter von drei ontologischen Kategorien (Substanz, universelle Eigenschaft, partikularisierte Eigenschaft), die grundlegend für unsere Weltorientierung sind. Als Beitrag zur deskriptiven Metaphysik im Sinne P.F. Strawsons entwickelt Schnieder eine Konzeption dieser Kategorien und ihres Zusammenhangs. Er expliziert und verteidigt klassische Ideen der Philosophiegeschichte mit analytischer Methodik und unter Einbezug von sprachphilosophischen, modallogischen und mereologischen Erwägungen. Unter anderem argumentiert er, dass Substanzen aufgrund ihrer existentiellen Unabhängigkeit eine ontologische Sonderstellung zukommt. Indem es auf das erneut erwachsene Interesse an der Metaphysik reagiert und Grundzüge der aktuellen Debatten voraussetzungsarm erläutert, kann das Buch auch als allgemeine kritische Einführung in das Thema dienen.

ld English manors have their ghosts. And though I would not want to call analytic philosophy a ‘manor’, nor exactly ‘old’, it certainly is of some decent English origin, and it left adolescence a while ago. No wonder then, that it is not exempt from haunting terrors. One particular spectre has been haunting it for decades; it already gave some analytic pioneers the creeps, and we still now and then find people terrified by it: the ghost of old Bradley has not yet found its rest and keeps on threatening people with his notorious regress. The present essay is a lecture in exorcism; much of the fear old Bradley spread, so I will argue, peters out once we dare to look it in the eye. However, this essay is not primarily exegetical, and especially not an attempt in interpreting Bradley. I find Bradley’s writings, to say the least, not particularly accessible. Discussions of isolated passages from his longer treatises will probably be less fruitful than a careful study of the positions within the whole argumentative structure, supplied by the examination of Bradley’s intellectual upcoming. His treatments on relations and properties, in which he develops the famous regress argument, are motivated by a radical goal: a vindication of some form of monism. To reach this goal, he tries to deconstruct the most basic categories of our ordinary conceptual framework. Thus, he holds that..

The article discusses an idea of how to extend the notion of rigidity to predicates, namely the idea that predicates stand in a certain systematic semantic relation to properties, such that this relation may hold rigidly or nonrigidly. The relation (which I call signification) can be characterised by recourse to canonical property designators which are derived from predicates (or general terms) by means of nominalization: a predicate signifies that property which the derived property designator designates. Whether signification divides into rigid and non-rigid cases will then depend uponwhether canonical property designators divide into rigid and non-rigid ones. But, I shall argue, they do not, and so the only notion of rigidity gained this way is trivial. To show this, I first focus on the kind of canonical property designators which could be thought to be nonrigid, canonical designators such as having the colour of ripe tomatoes which themselves contain non-rigid property designators. An argument to the effect that such complex canonical designators are non-rigid is rebutted, five arguments to the effect that they are rigid are formulated, and finally an explanation of their rigidity based on the general nature of canonical property designators is presented.

Gaskin's book The Unity of the Proposition is very rich in material. I will focus only on its central thesis: Gaskin holds that Bradley's regress (more precisely, one particular version of it) is not only innocent, but in fact philosophically significant because it plays a crucial role in solving what Gaskin calls the problem of the unity of the proposition . In what follows, I first explain what that problem is meant to be ( section 1 ), then I present and criticise Gaskin's proposal about how Bradley's regress bears on the problem ( section 2 ), and finally I sketch an alternative approach to the problem ( section 3 ).

Ein Lebewesen und sein Leben verbindet offenbar eine innige Beziehung. Aber welche genau? Das ist die Leitfrage dieses Artikels. Im Anschluss an die Klarstellung, dass es sich nicht um die Beziehung der Identität handelt, wird gezeigt, dass sich die Frage mittels einer Konstruktion des internen Akkusativs beantworten lässt. Die dabei ausgedrückte Beziehung ist, so das Plädoyer des Artikels, eine der ontologischen Abhängigkeit. Es werden zwei Erklärungen eines Abhängigkeitsbegriffs vorgestellt, deren zentraler Begriff einerseits ein modaler und andererseits ein explanatorischer ist, und es wird diskutiert, inwiefern der jeweilige Begriff die Antwort auf die Leitfrage stützt.

The paper is a detailed reconstruction of Bernard Bolzano’s account of merely possible objects. According to Bolzano, there are some objects which are merely possible. They are neither denizens of space and time nor members of the causal order, but they could have been so. Examples are merely possible persons, mountains etc., objects which are neither actual nor persons or mountains, but which could have been both. Bolzano’s views are contrasted with the theory of Alexius Meinong, and it is shown that they have a modern counterpart in the accounts of merely possible objects that were developed by Bernard Linsky & Ed Zalta, and by Timothy Williamson

The article is a critical examination of Joshua Hoffman’s and Gary Rosenkrantz’ approach to the traditional category of individual substance. On several places they offered an analysis of the concept of a substance in terms of some highly sophisticated notion of generic independence. Though ingenious, and even though it might be extensionally adequate, their account cannot provide an informative analysis of the concept in question, because it exhibits a peculiar kind of circularity. It is shown that one cannot establish, on the basis of their analysis, that a given entity is a substance, if one does not already know that it is one in advance. The circularity of their account is examined in detail, and it is explained how it could have arisen.