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The extended mind in ontological entanglementsIn Anna Marmodoro & Jonathan Hill (eds.), The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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111The Senses and the History of Philosophy (edited book)Routledge. 2019.The study of perception and the role of the senses have recently risen to prominence in philosophy and are now a major area of study and research. However, the philosophical history of the senses remains a relatively neglected subject. Moving beyond the current philosophical canon, this outstanding collection offers a wide-ranging and diverse philosophical exploration of the senses, from the classical period to the present day. Written by a team of international contributors, it is divided into …Read more
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468Gregory of Nyssa on the creation of the worldIn Anna Marmodoro & Brian D. Prince (eds.), Causation and Creation in Late Antiquity, Cambridge University Press. pp. 94-110. 2015.
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272Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671, by Robert Pasnau: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. xiv + 796, £80 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (2): 416-419. 2013.
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392The Metaphysics of Relations (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2016.Fifteen philosophers offer new essays exploring the metaphysics of relations from antiquity to the present day. They address topics as diverse as ancient and medieval reasons for scepticism about polyadic properties; recent attempts to reduce causal and spatiotemporal relations; recent work on the directionality of relational properties; powers ontologies and their associated problems; whether the most promising interpretations of quantum mechanics posit a fundamentally relational world; and whe…Read more
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38Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union, by Michael GormanFaith and Philosophy 35 (2): 261-264. 2018.
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45Stoic BlendsProceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 32 (1): 1-24. 2017.The Stoics’ guiding principle in ontology is the Eleatic principle. Their existents are bodies that have the power to act and be acted upon. They account both for the constitution of material objects and the causal interactions among them in terms of such dynamic bodies. Blending is the physical mechanism that explains both constitution and causation; and is facilitated by the fact that for the Stoics all bodies exist as unlimited divided. In this paper I offer a novel analysis of this Stoic sta…Read more
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23Does the inherence herutistic take s to psychological essentialism?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (5): 494-495. 2014.We argue that the claim that essence-based causal explanations emerge, hydra-like, from an inherence heuristic is incomplete. No plausible mechanism for the transition from concrete properties, or cues, to essences is provided. Moreover, the fundamental shotgun and storytelling mechanisms of the inherence heuristic are not clearly enough specified to distinguish them, developmentally, from associative or causal networks.
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17A History of Mind and Body in Late Antiquity (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2018.The mind-body relation was at the forefront of philosophy and theology in late antiquity, a time of great intellectual innovation. This volume, the first integrated history of this important topic, explores ideas about mind and body during this period, considering both pagan and Christian thought about issues such as resurrection, incarnation and asceticism. A series of chapters presents cutting-edge research from multiple perspectives, including history, philosophy, classics and theology. Sever…Read more
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15Everything in Everything: Anaxagoras's MetaphysicsOup Usa. 2017.The book argues that Anaxagoras's theory of extreme mixture, with a share of everything in everything, is underpinned by an ontology of physical causal powers, which exist as endlessly partitioned. Anaxagoras is thus the first ante litteram 'gunk lover' in the history of metaphysics; his reality is atomless.
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1348Structural Powers and the Homeodynamic Unity of OrganismsIn William M. R. Simpson, Robert C. Koons & Nicholas J. Teh (eds.), Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science, Routledge. pp. 169-184. 2017.Although they are continually compositionally reconstituted and reconfigured, organisms nonetheless persist as ontologically unified beings over time – but in virtue of what? A common answer is: in virtue of their continued possession of the capacity for morphological invariance which persists through, and in spite of, their mereological alteration. While we acknowledge that organisms‟ capacity for the “stability of form” – homeostasis - is an important aspect of their diachronic unity, we argue…Read more
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288It's a Colorful WorldAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 43 (1). 2006.Abstract: I defend the intuition that the phenomenology of our experience is right in attributing the colors we see to objects; but although colors are properties of objects, they are constitutively dependent on the perceiver’s experiences. I offer a metaphysical account for this primitivist intuition, in response to David Chalmers’ arguments against it, drawing inspiration from Aristotle’s theory of causation.
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58Composition Models of the Incarnation: Unity and Unifying RelationsReligious Studies 46 (4). 2010.In this paper we investigate composition models of incarnation, according to which Christ is a compound of qualitatively and numerically different constituents. We focus on three-part models, according to which Christ is composed of a divine mind, a human mind, and a human body. We consider four possible relational structures that the three components could form. We argue that a ’hierarchy of natures’ model, in which the human mind and body are united to each other in the normal way, and in whic…Read more
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19The Author's Voice in Classical and Late Antiquity (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2013.This volume focuses on the authorial voice in antiquity, exploring the different ways in which authors presented and projected various personas. In particular, it questions authority and ascription in relation to the authorial voice, and considers how later readers and authors may have understood the authority of a text's author.
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122The Metaphysics of the Incarnation (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2011.This book offers original essays by leading philosophers of religion representing these new approaches to theological problems such as incarnation.
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27La nozione aristotelica di 'per sé' e la tradizione esegeticaDocumenti E Studi Sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale 11 1-34. 2000.Abstract: I examine the different classifications of the various senses of per se which Aristotle offers in his logical works and in his Metaphysics, and propose an original account of them explaining their interrelations.
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445Do powers have powers? More urgently, do powers need further powers to do what powers do? Stathis Psillos says they do. He finds this a fatal flaw in the nature of pure powers: pure powers have a regressive nature. Their nature is incoherent to us, and they should not be admitted into the ontology. I argue that pure powers do not need further powers; rather, they do what they do because they are powers. I show that at the heart of Psillos’ regress is a metaphysical division he assumes between a …Read more
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55Aristotle on Perceiving ObjectsOup Usa. 2014.How can we explain the structure of perceptual experience? What is it that we perceive? How is it that we perceive objects and not disjoint arrays of properties? By which sense or senses do we perceive objects? This book investigates Aristotle's views on these and related questions.
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3In Being One Only One? The Argument for the Uniqueness of the Platonic FormsApeiron (4): 211-227. 2008.‘Is being one only one? – The Argument for the Uniqueness of Platonic Forms’ Abstract: Each Form is unique in number; no two numerically distinct Forms can share the same nature. Plato argues for this claim in Republic X. I identify the metaphysical principles Plato presupposes in the premises of the argument, by examining the reasoning behind them, and offer a reconstruction of the argument showing the principles in use. I argue that the metaphysical significance of the argument’s conclusion is…Read more
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794Is Being One Only One? The Uniqueness of Platonic FormsApeiron 41 (4): 211-228. 2008.I am interested in examining the reasoning of Plato’s extremely condensed argument in Republic X for the uniqueness of Forms. I will explore the metaphysical principles and assumptions that are supplied in the text, or need to be presupposed in order to understand the reasoning in the argument. Further, I will reflect on the truth and philosophical significance of its conclusion.
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345Doing and Being: An Interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta, by Jonathan Beere.: Book Reviews (review)Mind 119 (476): 1138-1141. 2010.
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724The Union of Cause and Effect in Aristotle: Physics III 3Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 32 205-232. 2007.‘The Union of Cause and Effect in Aristotle : Physics III 3’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 32, pp. 205-232, May 2007.: I argue that Aristotle introduced a unique realist account of causation, which has not hitherto been appreciated in the history of philosophy: causal realism without a causal relation. In his account, cause and effect are unified by the ectopic actualization of the agent’s potentiality in the patient. His solution consists in the introduction of a property that belongs …Read more
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207The Metaphysics of Powers: Their Grounding and Their Manifestations (edited book)Routledge. 2010.This volume is a collection of papers that advance our understanding of the metaphysics of powers — properties such as fragility and electric charge. The metaphysics of powers is a fast developing research field with fundamental questions at the forefront of current research, such as Can there be a world of only powers? What is the manifestation of a power? Are powers and their manifestations related by necessity? What are the prospects for dispositional accounts of causation? The papers focus o…Read more
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22«Metaphysica V 7»: Diverse Soluzioni Esegetiche A ConfrontoDocumenti E Studi Sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale 12 1-59. 2001.L'A. offre l'analisi del libro D della Metafisica mettendo a confronto l'impostazione esegetica dei commentatori moderni con quelli medievali, in particolare è presa in esame la Lectura super librum Metaphysicorum di Paolo Veneto tradita dai mss. Pavia, BU, Aldini 324 e Casale Monferrato, Seminario Vescovile, I.a.3-6. Dopo aver analizzato le due principali linee interpretative della nozione di Essere negli esegeti moderni e la molteplicità dei suoi significati nel corpus aristotelico, l'A. passa…Read more
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3Do Powers Need Powers to Make Them Powerful? From Pandispositionalism to AristotleHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 26 (4): 337-352. 2009.
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132Anaxagoras’s Qualitative GunkBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (3): 402-422. 2015.Are there atoms in the constitution of things? Or is everything made of atomless ‘gunk’ whose proper parts have proper parts? Anaxagoras is the first gunk lover in the history of metaphysics. For him gunk is not only a theoretical possibility that cannot be ruled out in principle. Rather, it is a view that follows cogently from his metaphysical analysis of the physical world of our experience. What is distinctive about Anaxagoras’s take on gunk is not only what motives the view, but also the par…Read more
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133Moral Character versus Situations: an Aristotelian contribution to the debateJournal of Ancient Philosophy 5 (2). 2011.In everyday life we assume substantial behavioural reliability in others, and on the basis of it we talk of people as acting “in character” and “out of character”. This common assumption seems intuitively well founded. But recent experiments in social psychology have generated philosophical controversy around it. In the context of this debate, John Doris challenges Aristotle’s well known and influential view that people’s behavioural reliability with respect to acting virtuously is underpinned b…Read more
Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Religion |
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |