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26Balls and AllIn S. Kleinschmidt (ed.), Mereology and Location, Oxford University Press. pp. 91-116. 2014.This paper describes a plausible view of the nature of physical objects, their mereological connections to each other, and their relation to spacetime. As well as being parsimonious, the view provides a plausible context for denying all of the following: (1) A theory that objects endure through time (and do not have temporal parts, as normally conceived) cannot claim that material objects are identical to space-time regions they occupy. (2) At least one of the family of mereological connecti…Read more
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100The question of moral ontologyPhilosophical Perspectives 28 (1): 201-221. 2014.Our ordinary moral practices not only suppose that some people ought to perform some actions, and that some outcomes are morally better or worse than others, but also that there are rights, duties, goodness, and other apparently abstract moral entities. What should we make of these entities, and the talk of these entities? It is not straighforward to account for these entities in other terms. On the other hand, this paper will argue that talk of such entities is not easily eliminated from goo…Read more
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68Charles S. Chihara, the worlds of possibility, modal realism and the semantics of modal logic (review)Studia Logica 76 (3): 443-446. 2004.
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462The A Posteriori ArmchairAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (2): 211-231. 2015.A lot of good philosophy is done in the armchair, but is nevertheless a posteriori. This paper clarifies and then defends that claim. Among the a posteriori activities done in the armchair are assembling and evaluating commonplaces; formulating theoretical alternatives; and integrating well-known past a posteriori discoveries. The activity that receives the most discussion, however, is the application of theoretical virtues to choose philosophical theories: the paper argues that much of this is …Read more
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114Liar-like paradox and object language featuresAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 45 (1). 2008.We argue that it would seem to be a mistake to blame Liar-like paradox on certain features of the object language, since the effect can be created with very minimal object languages that contain none of the usual suspects (truth-like predicates, reference to their own truth-bearers, negation, etc.).
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100Personification and Impossible FictionsBritish Journal of Aesthetics 55 (1): 57-69. 2015.Impossible fictions are not just the creations of puzzle-seeking philosophers or artists experimenting with the limits of fiction. Impossibilities can be found in relatively mundane fiction as well. This article argues that the device of personification, especially of abstract entities such as death or duty, yields impossible fictions, arguing against a number of strategies that might be tried to show that these cases of personification do not yield impossibilities.
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333Stalnaker's 1975 motivates an account of the truth conditions of indicative conditionals that seems in tension with the truth-conditions he offers. This paper discusses how best to resolve this tension.
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977Cosmic LoopsIn Ricki Bliss & Graham Priest (eds.), Reality and its Structure: Essays in Fundamentality, Oxford University Press. pp. 91-106. 2018.This paper explores a special kind of loop of grounding: cosmic loops. A cosmic loop is a loop that intuitively requires us to go "around" the entire universe to come back to the original ground. After describing several kinds of cosmic loop scenarios, I will discuss what we can learn from these scenarios about constraints on grounding; the conceivability of cosmic loops; the possibility of cosmic loops; and the prospects for salvaging local reflexivity, asymmetry and transitivity of grounding…Read more
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569Fictionalist Attitudes about Fictional MattersIn Mark Eli Kalderon (ed.), Fictionalism in Metaphysics, Clarendon Press. pp. 204-233. 2005.A pressing problem for many non-realist1 theories concerning various specific subject matters is the challenge of making sense of our ordinary propositional attitude claims related to the subject in question. Famously in the case of ethics, to take one example, we have in ordinary language prima facie ascriptions of beliefs and desires involving moral properties and relationships. In the case, for instance, of “Jason believes that Kylie is virtuous”, we appear to have a belief which takes Kylie …Read more
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1597Epistemic Dispositions: Reply to Turri and BronnerLogos and Episteme 3 (4): 629-636. 2012.We reply to recent papers by John Turri and Ben Bronner, who criticise the dispositionalised Nozickian tracking account we discuss in “Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know.” We argue that the account we suggested can handle the problems raised by Turri and Bronner. In the course of responding to Turri and Bronner’s objections, we draw three general lessons for theories of epistemic dispositions: that epistemic dispositions are to some extent extrinsic, that epistemic dispositions can have manifestatio…Read more
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140The Impossible: An Essay on Hyperintensionality, by Mark Jago (review)Mind 124 (496): 1299-1302. 2015.
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503Consequentialism and Side ConstraintsJournal of Moral Philosophy 6 (1): 5-22. 2009.Many people are inclined to think that consequences of actions, or perhaps reasonably expected consequences of those actions, have moral weight. Firing off shotguns in crowded areas is typically wrong, at least in part, because of the people who get maimed and killed. Committed consequentialists think that consequences (either actual consequences, or expected consequences, or intended consequences, or reasonably expected consequences, or maybe some other different shade) are all that matters, mo…Read more
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92Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David Lewis (review)Philosophical Review 112 (2): 263-266. 2003.David Lewis’s work in the past few decades produced a powerful and thought-provoking system, and this collection of eleven essays represents state-of-the-art engagement with that system across a range of topics. The title would suggest that the papers would deal in particular with Lewis’s doctrine of Humean supervenience, the doctrine that all the contingent truths are ultimately determined by instantiations of fundamental categorical properties at points of space-time, and the spatiotemporal re…Read more
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622What Would Teleological Causation Be?In Metaphysical Essays, Oxford University Press. 2006.As is well known, Aristotelian natural philosophy, and many other systems of natural philosophy since, have relied heavily on teleology and teleological causation. Somehow, the purpose or end of an obj ect can be used to predict and explain what that object does: once you know that the end of an acorn is to become an oak, and a few things about what sorts of circumstances are conducive to the attainment of this end, you can predict a lot about the sprouting of the acorn and the subsequent behavi…Read more
APA Central Division
Notre Dame, Indiana, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
General Philosophy of Science |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Meta-Ethics |