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1096Fatalism as a Metaphysical ThesisManuscrito: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 39 (4). 2016.Even though fatalism has been an intermittent topic of philosophy since Greek antiquity, this paper argues that fate ought to be of little concern to metaphysicians. Fatalism is neither an interesting metaphysical thesis in its own right, nor can it be identified with theses that are, such as realism about the future or determinism.
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80Review of Berit Broogard, Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions (Oxford, 2012) (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201212. 2012.
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453Counterpart Theory and the Actuality OperatorMind 122 (485): 27-42. 2013.Fara and Williamson (Mind, 2005) argue that counterpart theory is unable to account for modal claims that use an actuality operator. This paper argues otherwise. Rather than provide a different counterpart translation of the actuality operator itself, the solution presented here starts out with a quantified modal logic in which the actuality operator is redundant, and then translates the sentences of this logic into claims of counterpart theory.
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59Time and ModalityIn Craig Callender (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time, Oxford University Press. pp. 91--121. 2011.With the rigorous development of modal logic in the first half of the twentieth century, it became custom amongst philosophers to characterize different views about necessity and possibility in terms of rival axiomatic systems for the modal operators ‘ ’ (‘possibly’) and ‘ ’ (‘necessarily’). From the late 1950s onwards, Arthur Prior began to argue that temporal distinctions ought to be given a similar treatment, in terms of axiomatic systems for sentential tense operators, such as ‘P’ (‘it was the…Read more
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231Is science first-order?Analysis 62 (4): 305-308. 2002.It is a popular view amongst some philosophers, most notably those with Quinean views about ontological commitment, that scientific theories are first-orderizable; that we can regiment all such theories in an extensional first-order language. I argue that this view is false, and that any acceptable account of science needs to take some modal notion as primitive.
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253Prior and the PlatonistAnalysis 62 (3): 211-216. 2002.The aim of this paper is to draw attention to a conflict between two popular views about time: Arthur Prior’s proposal for treating tense on the model of modal logic, and the ‘Platonic’ thesis that some objects (God, forms, universals, or numbers) exist eternally.1 I will argue that anyone who accepts the former ought to reject the latter.
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87Review of Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke, Harry Silverstein (eds.), Time and Identity (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (1). 2011.
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211Dummett on the Time-ContinuumPhilosophy 80 (311). 2005.Michael Dummett claims that the classical model of time as a continuum of instants has to be rejected. In his view, “it allows as possibilities what reason rules out, and leaves it to the contingent laws of physics to rule out what a good model of physical reality would not even be able to describe.” This paper argues otherwise
