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2Talk About Stuffs & Things: The Logic of Mass and Count NounsDissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995.My thesis examines the mass/count distinction; that is, to illustrate, the distinction between the role of "hair" in "There is hair in my soup" and "There is a hair in my soup". In "hair" has a mass-occurrence; in a count-occurrence. These two kinds of noun-occurrences, I argue, can be marked off from each other largely on syntactic grounds. Along the semantic dimension, I suggest that, in order to account for the intuitive distinction between nouns in their mass-occurrences and their singular c…Read more
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133Review of Theodore Sider, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (review)Philosophical Review 112 (1): 110-113. 2003.How do the familiar concrete objects of common sense persist through time? The four-dimensionalist argues that they perdure, that is, they persist through time by having temporal parts at each of the times at which they exist. The three-dimensionalist, on the other hand, holds that ordinary concrete objects endure; they lack an additional temporal dimension and persist, instead, by being “wholly present” at each of the times at which they exist.
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562Questions of OntologyIn Stephan Blatti & Sandra Lapointe (eds.), Ontology After Carnap, Oxford University Press. 2015.Following W.V. Quine’s lead, many metaphysicians consider ontology to be concerned primarily with existential questions of the form, “What is there?”. Moreover, if the position advanced by Rudolf Carnap, in his seminal essay, “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology ”, is correct, then many of these existential ontological questions ought to be classified as either trivially answerable or as “pseudo-questions”. One may justifiably wonder, however, whether the Quinean and Carnapian perspective on ont…Read more
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226The structure of objectsOxford University Press. 2008.The objects we encounter in ordinary life and scientific practice - cars, trees, people, houses, molecules, galaxies, and the like - have long been a fruitful source of perplexity for metaphysicians. The Structure of Objects gives an original analysis of those material objects to which we take ourselves to be committed in our ordinary, scientifically informed discourse. Koslicki focuses on material objects in particular, or, as metaphysicians like to call them "concrete particulars", i.e., objec…Read more
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878Ontological Dependence: An Opinionated SurveyIn Benjamin Schnieder, Miguel Hoeltje & Alex Steinberg (eds.), Varieties of Dependence: Ontological Dependence, Grounding, Supervenience, Response-Dependence (Basic Philosophical Concepts), Philosophia Verlag. pp. 31-64. 2013.This essay provides an opinionated survey of some recent developments in the literature on ontological dependence. Some of the most popular definitions of ontological dependence are formulated in modal terms; others in non-modal terms (e.g., in terms of the explanatory connective, ‘because’, or in terms of a non-modal conception of essence); some (viz., the existential construals of ontological dependence) emphasise requirements that must be met in order for an entity to exist; others (viz., th…Read more
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126Almost Indiscernible Objects and the Suspect StrategyJournal of Philosophy 102 (2): 55-77. 2005.This paper examines a variety of contexts in metaphysics which employ a strategy I consider to be suspect. In each of these contexts, ‘The Suspect Strategy’ (TSS) aims at excluding a series of troublesome contexts from a general principle whose truth the philosopher in question wishes to preserve. We see (TSS) implemented with respect to Leibniz’s Law (LL) in the context of Gibbard’s defense of contingent identity, Myro and Gallois’ defense of temporary identity, as well as Terence Parsons’ de…Read more
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451The crooked path from vagueness to four-dimensionalismPhilosophical Studies 114 (1-2): 107-134. 2003.In his excellent book, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (Sider, 2001), Theodore Sider defends a version of four-dimensionalism which he calls the ‘stage-theory’. This paper focuses on Sider's argument from vagueness and argues that, due to the problematic nature of the argument from vagueness, Sider’s case in favor of four-dimensionalism is in the end not successful.
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73Four-Eighths Hephaistos: Artifacts and Living Things in AristotleHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 14 (1). 1997.There is considerable dispute in the literature as to how much, in Aristotle's universe, living things and artifacts really have in common. To what extent is the relation between form and matter in living things comparable to the relation between form and matter in artifacts? Aristotle no doubt employs artifact-analogies rather frequently in describing the workings of living things. But where does the usefulness of these analogies reach its limits? In this paper, I argue that Aristotle's art…Read more
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263Review of Henry Laycock, Words Without Objects: Semantics, Ontology, and Logic for Non-Singularity (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (1): 160-163. 2007.
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309Varieties of ontological dependenceIn Fabrice Correia & Benjamin Schnieder (eds.), Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality, Cambridge University Press. pp. 186. 2012.A significant reorientation is currently under way in analytic metaphysics, away from an almost exclusive focus on questions of existence and towards a greater concentration on questions concerning the dependence of one type of phenomenon on another. Surprisingly, despite the central role dependence has played in philosophy since its inception, interest in a systematic study of this concept has only recently surged among contemporary metaphysicians. In this paper, I focus on a promising account …Read more
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131On the substantive nature of disagreements in ontologyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1). 2005.This paper concerns a fundamental dispute in ontology between the “Foundational Ontologist”, who believes that there is only one correct way of characterizing what there is, and the ontological “Skeptic”, who believes that there are viable alternative characterizations of what there is. I examine in detail an intriguing recent proposal in Dorr (2005), which promises to yield (i) a way of interpreting the Skeptic by means of a counterfactual semantics; and (ii) a way of converting the Skeptic to …Read more
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171Constitution and similarityPhilosophical Studies 117 (3): 327-363. 2004.Whenever an object constitutes, makes up or composes another object, the objects in question share a striking number of properties. This paper is addressed to the question of what might account for the intimate relation and striking similarity between constitutionally related objects. According to my account, the similarities between constitutionally related objects are captured at least in part by means of a principle akin to that of strong supervenience. My paper addresses two main issues. Fir…Read more
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464In Defense of SubstanceGrazer Philosophische Studien 91 (1): 59-80. 2015.In his “Farewell to Substance: A Differentiated Leave-Taking”, Peter Simons reaches the provocative conclusion that the concept of substance, as it is employed by metaphysicians, has become obsolete, since in the end there may be nothing at all which answers to it. No harm is done, Simons allows, if we continue to retain an everyday notion of substance, as long as we are aware of the limitations of this practice: there is no reason in general to expect that what is salient from our specifically …Read more
Neuchâtel, Canton of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
PhilPapers Editorships
Essence and Essentialism |