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102Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence (edited book)CSLI Publications. 2000.Philosophers and theorists have long been puzzled by humans' ability to talk about things that do not exist, or to talk about things that they think exist but, in fact, do not. _Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence_ is a collection of 13 new works concerning the semantic and metaphysical issues arising from empty names, non-existence, and the nature of fiction. The contributors include some of the most important researchers working in these fields. Some of the papers develop an…Read more
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68Supervenience and Object-Dependant PropertiesJournal of Philosophy 102 (1): 5-32. 2005.I argue that the semantic thesis of direct reference and the meta- physical thesis of the supervenience of the non-physical on the physical cannot both be true. The argument first develops a necessary condition for supervenience, a so-called conditional locality requirement, which is then shown to be incompatible with some physical object having object dependent properties, which in turn is required for the thesis of direct reference to be true. We apply this argument to formulate a new argument …Read more
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190Ambitious, yet modest, metaphysicsIn Ryan Wasserman, David Manley & David Chalmers (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, Oxford University Press. pp. 260--289. 2009.There is a long history of worrying about whether or not metaphysics is a legitimate philosophical discipline. Traditionally such worries center around issues of meaning and epistemological concerns. Do the metaphysical questions have any meaning? Can metaphysical methodology lead to knowledge? But these questions are, in my opinion, not as serious as they have sometimes (historically) been taken to be. What is much more concerning is another set of worries about metaphysics, which I take to the…Read more
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154Review 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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157Innocent 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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113How 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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8Towards non-being: the logic and metaphysics of intentionality (review)Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 14 (1): 116-117. 2008.
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50Review 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,
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mathematics |