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148Review of "Philosophy of mathematics: An introduction to the world of proofs and pictures" by James Robert Brown (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (2): 413-416. 2001.
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151Innocent statements and their metaphysically loaded counterpartsPhilosophers' Imprint 7 1-33. 2007.One puzzling feature of talk about properties, propositions and natural numbers is that statements that are explicitly about them can be introduced apparently without change of truth conditions from statements that don't mention them at all. Thus it seems that the existence of numbers, properties and propositions can be established`from nothing'. This metaphysical puzzle is tied to a series of syntactic and semantic puzzles about the relationship between ordinary, metaphysically innocent stateme…Read more
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112How metaphysics is special: comments on BennettPhilosophical Studies 173 (1): 39-48. 2016.Karen Bennett argues that there is no distinct problem with metaphysics, and she proposes a disjunctive conception of the subject matter of metaphysics. This paper critically examines her arguments and positive view. I defend that metaphysics prima facie is distinctly problematic, and I raise some questions about Bennett’s disjunctive conception of the subject matter of metaphysics and the a priori aspect of its methodology
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7Towards non-being: the logic and metaphysics of intentionality (review)Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 14 (1): 116-117. 2008.
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46Review of "Conceptions of Truth" by Wolfgang Künne (review)Philosophical Review 114 (1): 136-138. 2005.This review mostly discusses Künne's positive proposal about truth, his Modest Account. In particular, I discuss propositional quantification, which is required for Künne's formulation of the Modest Account, and under what conditions this kind of quantification is acceptable. I argue that it requires a view of propositions which he rejects,
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173Quantification and non-existent objectsIn T. Hofweber & A. Everett (eds.), Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence, Csli Publications. 2000.
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298A puzzle about ontologyNoûs 39 (2). 2005.Ontology is the philosophical discipline that tries to find out what there is: what entities make up reality, what is the stuff the world is made from? Thus, ontology is part of metaphysics, and in fact it seems to be about half of all of metaphysics. It tries to establish what (kinds of) things there are, the other half tries to find out what the (general) properties of these things are and what (general) relations they have to each other. Settling questions in ontology would bring with it majo…Read more
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106Ontology and objectivityDissertation, Stanford University. 1999.Ontology is the study of what there is, what kinds of things make up reality. Ontology seems to be a very difficult, rather speculative discipline. However, it is trivial to conclude that there are properties, propositions and numbers, starting from only necessarily true or analytic premises. This gives rise to a puzzle about how hard ontological questions are, and relates to a puzzle about how important they are. And it produces the ontologyobjectivity dilemma: either (certain) ontological ques…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mathematics |