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11Formal ontology combines two ideas, one originating with Husserl, the other with Frege: that of ontology of the formal aspects of all objects, irrespective of their particular nature, and ontology pursued by employing the tools of modern formal disciplines, notably logic and semantics. These two traditions have converged in recent years and this is the first collection to encompass them as a whole in a single volume. It assembles essays from authors around the world already widely known for thei…Read more
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266VérifacteursEtudes de Philosophie 9 104-138. 2008-2011.French translation of "Truth-Makers" (1984). A realist theory of truth for a class of sentence holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The co…Read more
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567Derrida degree: A question of honourThe Times 9 (May 9). 1992.A letter to The Times of London, May 9, 1992 protesting the Cambridge University proposal to award an honorary degree to M. Jacques Derrida.
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8Mark Steiner the applicability of mathematics as a philosophical problem (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (1): 181-184. 2001.
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70UnsaturatednessGrazer Philosophische Studien 14 (1): 73-95. 1981.Frege's obscure key concept of the unsaturatedness of functions is clarified with the help of the concepts of dependent and independent parts and foundation relations used by Husserl in describing the ontology of complex wholes. Sentential unity in Frege, Husserl and Wittgenstein: all have a similar explanation. As applied to linguistic expressions, the terms 'unsaturated' and 'incomplete' are ambiguous: they may mean the ontological property of Unselbständigkeit, inability to exist alone, or th…Read more
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25The Context of the Phenomenological MovementPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 44 (3): 426-428. 1984.
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5How to Do Things with ThingsIn Bruno Leclercq, Sébastien Richard & Denis Seron (eds.), Objects and Pseudo-Objects Ontological Deserts and Jungles from Brentano to Carnap, De Gruyter. pp. 3-16. 2015.
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345Numbers and ManifoldsIn Barry Smith (ed.), Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, Philosophia Verlag. pp. 160-197. 1982.
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450The Formalisation of Husserl’s Theory of Wholes and PartsIn Barry Smith (ed.), Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, Philosophia Verlag. pp. 111-159. 1982.
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401Moments as Truth MakersIn Werner Leinfellner (ed.), Language and Ontology, Hölder-pichler-tempsky / Reidel. pp. 159-161. 1982.Russell wrote in 1918 in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism: When I speak of a fact ... I mean the kind of thing that makes a proposition true or false. If I say 'It is raining', what I say is true in a certain condition of weather and is false in other conditions of the weather. The condition of weather that makes my statement true (or false as the case may be), is what I should call a 'fact'. If I say, 'Socrates is dead', my statement will be true owing to a certain physiological occurrence wh…Read more
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10Michael Dummett. Frege. Philosophy of mathematics. Duckworth, London, and Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991, xiii + 331 pp (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 61 (4): 1389-1391. 1996.
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248Barry Smith and His Influence On (Not Only, But Mainly My) PhilosophyCosmos + Taxis 4 (4): 38-41. 2017.Autobiographical survey of interactions between the author and Barry Smith, especially as concerns the background and influence of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy and work on the relevance of Adolf Reinach, Roman Ingarden and other Central-European thinkers to contemporary analytic philosophy.
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41On the Motives Which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism, by Roman IngardenJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 9 (2): 137-137. 1978.
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251Trouble Up at t’Ontological Mill: An Inconclusive DialogCosmos + Taxis 4 (4): 64-66. 2017.Grenon and Smith (2004) propose a framework for the ontology of things in space and time involving and invoking the distinction between continuants and occurrents, which has become a key element of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). The terminology of SNAP (from “snapshot:” state of a continuant at a time) and SPAN (how an occurrent develops over an interval or timespan) occurs in that paper’s title. While any commonsense ontology will have a place for both continuants and occurrents, there is much ro…Read more
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24Computer Composition and Works of Music: Variation on A Theme of IngardenJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 19 (2): 141-154. 1988.
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22Alexius Meinong: Gesamtausgabe.Herausgegeben von R. M. Chisholm, R. Haller, und R. Kindinger†Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 11 (3): 290-295. 1980.
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14Alexius Meinong: Geamtausgabe.ErgÄNzungsband. Herausgegeben Von. R. Fabian Und R. HallerJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 11 (3): 290-295. 1980.
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18Experience and Judgment: Investigations in A Genealogy of Logic, by Edmund Husserl (review)Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 7 (1): 61-65. 1976.
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11Report on the Conference and Annual General Meeting of the British Society for PhenomenologyJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 4 (3): 289-290. 1973.
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21And Now for Something Completely Different: Meinong’s Approach to ModalityHumana Mente 6 (25). 2013.In the twentieth century three approaches to modality dominated. One denied its legitimacy. A second made language the source of modality. The third treats possible worlds as the source of truth for modal propositions Meinong’s account of modality is quite different from all of these. Like the last it has an ontological basis, but it eschews worlds in favour of a rich one-world ontology of objects and states of affairs, many of which notoriously fail to exist and some even more notoriously fail …Read more
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44Mereology and truth-makingLogic and Logical Philosophy 25 (3): 245-258. 2016.Many mereological propositions are true contingently, so we are entitled to ask why they are true. One frequently given type of answer to such questions evokes truth-makers, that is, entities in virtue of whose existence the propositions in question are true. However, even without endorsing the extreme view that all contingent propositions have truth-makers, it turns out to be puzzlingly hard to provide intuitively convincing candidate truth-makers for even a core class of basic mereological pro…Read more
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49PointersGrazer Philosophische Studien 94 (3): 381-390. 2017._ Source: _Volume 94, Issue 3, pp 381 - 390 Reference can fail in a way that intentionality cannot. Though the stream of phenomenal experience typically does not fail to target objects outside, it may do. How does the mind go about targeting objects beyond itself? The speculative conjecture of this paper is that it does so by a type of process which can be called _pointing_, and that the acts or act-aspects of pointing can be called _pointers_. The notion of a pointer has several suggestive root…Read more
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2Multivalence and Vagueness: A Reply to CopelandProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95 (1): 201-210. 1995.Peter Simons; Multivalence and Vagueness: A Reply to Copeland, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 201–210, https://
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7Road SafetyIn Jesús Padilla Gálvez & Margit Gaffal (eds.), Intentionality and Action, De Gruyter. pp. 23-34. 2017.
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27Objects and Objectives, Dignitatives and Desideratives: Meinong’s Objects of Cognition and AffectAxiomathes 27 (5): 443-453. 2017.Alexius Meinong is one of the foremost, most independent-minded, most distinctive, most misunderstood and most unjustly maligned of all philosophers. He was pilloried by his own teacher Brentano and his one-time admirer Bertrand Russell as what Gilbert Ryle called “perhaps the supreme entity-multiplier in the history of philosophy.” It is often enough to employ the adjective ‘Meinongian’ to cast a philosopher’s views into the outer darkness. But as supreme commentator J. N. Findlay observes, Mei…Read more
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11Mind and OpacityDialectica 49 (2-4): 131-146. 1995.Where there is mind there is representational opacity, and vice versa. Opacity arises because where there is representation there may be misrepresentation, and the status of the misrepresenting sign or state of the misrepresenting sign‐user can only be characterized via the terms used for a correctly represented object. Opacity is not a blight for naturalism, but must be recognized and exploited if naturalism is to adequately embrace the mental. Opacity is illustrated for language, for the menta…Read more
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22A Semantics for OntologyDialectica 39 (3): 193-216. 1985.SummaryLeśniewski presented his logical systems in a way which conformed to his nominalism, so the question arises whether Leśniewski's logic can be given a natural formal semantics which, unlike current versions, avoids commitment to abstract entities. Building on hints in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I develop the idea of a way of meaning which is the basis for what I call combinatorial semantics. I then consider whether this commits us to abstract objects or an intensional metalogic.
Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland