Fraser MacBride

G. F. Stout’s intellectual life course was a journey that transformed him from analytic psychologist to metaphysician. His journey both influenced and echoed the development of philosophy in the British Isles, a development that played out in the pages of _Mind_ under his editorship. The chapter charts anew the course of Stout’s intellectual development and the shifting contours of _Mind_ during his editorship and explores afresh this neglected period of the history of philosophy. Inter alia the chapter argues that Stout wasn’t the Hegelian monist that Russell portrayed him to have been, that Stout didn’t owe his ideas about intentionality to Brentano, and that the criticism of his analytic psychology by Cook Wilson and his students, H. A. Prichard and H. W. B. Joseph, were a key factor in compelling Stout to develop a distinctive metaphysics of possibilities conceived realistically to address their criticisms.

This chapter argues that W. V. Quine and D. K. Lewis, despite their differences and their different receptions, came to a common intellectual destination: epistemological structuralism. The chapter begins by providing an account of Quine’s epistemological structuralism as it came to its mature development in his final works, _Pursuit of Truth_ (1990) and _From Stimulus to Science_ (1995), and the chapter shows how this doctrine developed out of his earlier views on explication and the inscrutability of reference. It then turns to the correspondence between Quine and Lewis which sets the scene for Lewis’s adoption of structuralism vis-à-vis set theory in the Appendix to his _Parts of Classes_ (1990). The chapter concludes, drawing further from Lewis’s correspondence, by arguing that Lewis proceeded from there to embrace in one of his own final papers, ‘Ramseyan Humility’ (2001), an encompassing form of epistemological structuralism, whilst discharging the doctrine of reference magnetism that had hitherto set Lewis apart from Quine.

In this paper I argue that we cannot interpret second-order quantification as quantification over an abundant supply of properties and relations conceived as the referents of predicates. My argument forges a hitherto unexplored connection between debates typically conducted independently, one about whether there are converse relations, the other about the interpretation of second-order quantifiers. I begin from the semantics of converse predicates. Either pairs of mutually converse predicates co-refer or they do not. If they do co-refer, I argue that we lack an understanding of the relevant class of higher-order predicates which are required for second-order quantification over a domain of relations. If they don’t co-refer but pick out distinct converse relations, then I argue that whilst we may make some abstract sense of the higher-order predicates in question we do so only at the cost of having to impute implausible readings to lower-order constructions. Either way, I conclude that second-order quantification should not be interpreted as quantification over relations conceived as the referents of predicates.

Modality is standardly thought to come in two varieties: de dicto and de re. De re modality concerns the attribution of modal features to things or individuals, and enshrines a commitment to Aristotelian essentialism. This chapter considers how David Lewis's conception of de re modality fits into his overall metaphysics. The hypothesis is that the driving force behind his metaphysics in general, and his adherence to counterpart theory in particular, is the distinctly Humean thought that necessary connections between distinct existences are literally unintelligible. Lewis's appeal to counterpart theory in his account of truthmakers is explicitly aimed at delivering a truthmaker principle that eschews necessary connections. Lewis's attitude towards several well‐rehearsed debates in contemporary ontology and the reasons underlying that attitude closely mirror Hume's incendiary verdict on "divinity and school metaphysics." Finally, de re modality is connected with his adherence to the doctrine of "Humean supervenience".

Kant linked the necessary and the a priori, taking them to be equivalent in extension. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein, I argue, severed this Kantian link decades before Kripke. This is because, I explain, Wittgenstein held that even though the categories of atomic objects are necessary, they aren’t a priori, but, in a certain sense, a posteriori. To make my case I develop an interpretation of the ontology and epistemology of the Tractatus before charting the philosophical route whereby Wittgenstein travelled from his starting position in the ‘Notes on Logic’ (1913) via the Notebooks (1914–1916) to arrive at his destination, his conception of the categories in the Tractatus.

Is second-order logic logic? Famously Quine argued second-order logic wasn't logic but his arguments have been the subject of influential criticisms. In the early sections of this paper, I develop a deeper perspective upon Quine's philosophy of logic by exploring his positive conception of what logic is for and hence what logic is. Seen from this perspective, I argue that many of the criticisms of his case against second-order logic miss their mark. Then, in the later sections, I go beyond Quine to develop a novel case that quantification into polyadic predicate position, understood as requiring quantifiers to range over relations, isn't intelligible.

In an unpublished speech from 1991, David Lewis told his audience that he counted ‘the metaphysician Carnap ’ amongst his historical ancestors. Here I provide a novel interpretation of the Aufbau that allows us to make sense of Lewis’s claim. Drawing upon Lewis’s correspondence, I argue it was the Carnap of the Aufbau whom Lewis read as a metaphysician, because Carnap’s appeal to the notion of founded relations in the Aufbau echoes Lewis’s own appeal to the metaphysics of natural properties. I further maintain that Lewis was right to read Carnap this way and that the notion of a founded relation has a legitimate claim to be both logical and metaphysical. I also argue that Carnap’s initial response to Goodman’s puzzle about ‘grue’ relies upon a metaphysics of simple properties which also prefigures Lewis’s own response to Goodman invoking natural properties.