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6Tree proofs for syllogisticStudia Logica 48 (4). 1989.This paper presents a tree method for testing the validity of inferences, including syllogisms, in a simple term logic. The method is given in the form of an algorithm and is shown to be sound and complete with respect to the obvious denotational semantics. The primitive logical constants of the system, which is indebted to the logical works of Jevons, Brentano and Lewis Carroll, are term negation, polyadic term conjunction, and functors affirming and denying existence, and use is also made of a…Read more
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6Mind and opacityDialectica 49 (2-4): 131-46. 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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108Truth-MakersSwiss Philosophical Preprints. 2009.During the realist revival in the early years of this century, philosophers of various persuasions were concerned to investigate the ontology of truth. That is, whether or not they viewed truth as a correspondence, they were interested in the extent to which one needed to assume the existence of entities serving some role in accounting for the truth of sentences. Certain of these entities, such as the Sätze an sich of Bolzano, the Gedanken of Frege, or the propositions of Russell and Moore, were…Read more
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5Mathematik als wissenschaft der gestaltenIn Reinhard Fabian (ed.), Christian von Ehrenfels: Leben und Werk, Rodopi. pp. 8--112. 1986.
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15To Be and/or Not to BeIn Leila Haaparanta & Heikki J. Koskinen (eds.), Categories of Being: Essays on Metaphysics and Logic, Oxford University Press. pp. 241. 2012.
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1Meinong, consistency, and the absolute totalityIn Alfred Schramm (ed.), Meinongian Issues in Contemporary Italian Philosophy, De Gruyter. pp. 233-254. 2005.
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9Essay reviewHistory and Philosophy of Logic 15 (2): 227-235. 1994.stanislaw lesniewski, Collected Works, Edited by Stanislaw J. Surma, Jan T. Srzednicki and D. I. Barnett, with an annotated bibliography by V. Frederick Rickey. Warsaw:PWN?Polish Scientific Publishers; and Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer. 2 vols., xvi + 794 pp. $274/£163/Dfl. 480
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12Continuants and occurrents, IAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 74 (1). 2000.[Peter Simons] Commonsense ontology contains both continuants and occurrents, but are continuants necessary? I argue that they are neither occurrents nor easily replaceable by them. The worst problem for continuants is the question in virtue of what a given continuant exists at a given time. For such truthmakers we must have recourse to occurrents, those vital to the continuant at that time. Continuants are, like abstract objects, invariants under equivalences over occurrents. But they are not a…Read more
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1Zugang zum Idealen: Spezies und Abstraktion (Ⅱ. Logische Untersuchung, §§ 1-12)In Verena E. Mayer & Christopher Erhard (eds.), Edmund Husserl: logische Untersuchungen, Akademie Verlag Berlin. pp. 77-91. 2008.
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2L'intentionalité, la décenie décisifIn D. Laurier & F. Lepage (eds.), Essaies sur le language et l'intentionalité, Bellarmin/vrin. pp. 17-34. 1992.
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Review of D.M. Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs (review)European Journal of Philosophy 7 119-124. 1999.
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10Bolzano's MonadologyBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (6): 1074-1084. 2015.Bernard Bolzano, known in his lifetime as ‘the Bohemian Leibniz’, is best known as a logician and mathematician, but he also developed a monadology in which the monads, which he called ‘atoms’, have spatial location and physical properties. This essay summarizes and assesses his monadology
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8Whose Fault? The Origins and Evitability of the Analytic–Continental RiftInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 9 (3). 2001.This is a broad survey of the chronology of the rift between continental and analytic philosophy, starting in 1899. Whereas at that time there was no discernible divide, as the twentieth century progresses we can see a gradual parting of the ways in which philosophy was done, culminating in a period of maximum separation in 1945-68, followed by some convergence. There is one substantial historical thesis proposed, and facts are adduced from the chronology to back it up: that the divide was never…Read more
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17Identity through time and trope bundlesTopoi 19 (2): 147-155. 2000.This paper brings together two theories that I have propounded separately elsewhere. The first is the view that concrete individuals are constituted completely by tropes, that they are trope bundles. The second and more recently developed theory is that of the two major categories of concrete individuals, continuants and occurrents, the latter are ontologically more basic than the former and that continuants are to be viewed as invariants among occurrents under equivalence relations. The latter …Read more
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Pourquoi presque tout--mais non pas exactement toute chose--est une entité'In Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.), La Structure Du Monde, Vrin, Paris. pp. 265--76. 2004.
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9The Price of Positivity : Mumford and NegativesIn Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.), Metaphysics and Truthmakers, Ontos Verlag. pp. 331-333. 2007.
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4Extended SimplesThe Monist 87 (3): 371-384. 2004.I argue that the assumptions that physically basic things are either mereologically atomic, or that they are continuous and there are no atoms, both face difficult conceptual problems. Both views tend to presuppose a largely unquestioned assumption, that things have parts corresponding to the geometric parts of the regions they occupy. To avoid these problems I propose a third view, that physically simple things occupy a finite volume without themselves having parts. This view is examined enough…Read more
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18Negatives, numbers, and necessity some worries about Armstrong's version of truthmakingAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (2). 2005.This Article does not have an abstract
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Austrian philosophers on truthIn Markus Textor (ed.), The Austrian contribution to analytic philosophy, Routledge. pp. 1--159. 2006.In this chapter, I shall consider what the principal Austrian philosophers from Bolzano to Popper have had to say on the subject of truth. Since I shall cover a fair number of philosophers and theories, my considerations will be mainly confined to two linked questions: What – according to the philosopher in question – is the nature of truth? What ontology is required to explicate truth according to their account? Further questions concerned with our access to and knowledge of the truth will only…Read more
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2Truth in virtue of meaningIn Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.), Metaphysics and Truthmakers, Ontos Verlag. pp. 67-78. 2007.
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15Meinong's Theory of Sense and ReferenceGrazer Philosophische Studien 50 (1): 171-186. 1995.Gilbert Ryle wrote that "Meaning-theory expanded just when and just in so far as it was released from that 'Fido'-Fido box, the lid of which was never even lifted by Meinong". This paper sets out to relieve Ryle's oversimplification about Meinong and the role of meaning theory in his thought. One step away from canine simplicity about meaning is the recognition of a distinction between sense and reference, such as we find in Frege, Husserl, and the early Russell. In Über Möglichkeit und Wahrsche…Read more
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2 Categories, construction, and congruenceIn Richard Gaskin (ed.), Grammar in early twentieth-century philosophy, Routledge. pp. 54. 2001.
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Maccoll And Many-valued Logic: An Exclusive ConjunctionNordic Journal of Philosophical Logic 3 85-90. 1998.
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2ErratumPhilosophia Mathematica. forthcoming.Rafal Urbaniak. Leśniewski’s Systems of Logic and Foundations of Mathematics. Trends in Logic; 37. Springer, 2014. ISBN: 978-3-319-00481-5, 978-3-319-34416-4, 978-3-319-00482-2. Pp. xiii + 229.
Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland