Achille C. Varzi

There is a basic distinction, in the realm of spatial boundaries, between bona fide boundaries on the one hand, and fiat boundaries on the other. The former are just the physical boundaries of old. The latter are exemplified especially by boundaries induced through human demarcation, for example in the geographic domain. The classical problems connected with the notions of adjacency, contact, separation and division can be resolved in an intuitive way by recognizing this two-sorted ontology of boundaries. Bona fide boundaries yield a notion of contact that is effectively modeled by classical topology; the analogue of contact involving fiat boundaries calls, however, for a different account, based on the intuition that fiat boundaries do not support the open/closed distinction on which classical topology is based. In the presence of this two-sorted ontology it then transpires that mereotopology—topology erected on a mereological basis—is more than a trivial formal variant of classical point-set topology.

Dear Harriet Monroe:—Your recent issue of Poetry is quite interesting. The first poem of that young Italian chap is very good, the rest—unsuccessful. You are certainly the clearinghouse for a lot of mediocre stuff—so you should be: very democratic—keep up the good work. Yours,Williams This is William Carlos Williams writing to the editor of Poetry magazine on March 12, 1918.1 We know who the young Italian chap is: Emanuel Carnevali, age twenty, who had just made his debut in Monroe’s magazine with a six-page group of poems, “The Splendid Commonplace.”2 Less clear, perhaps, is what Williams means by “the rest” —the “unsuccessful,” “mediocre stuff.” “The Splendid Commonplace” consists of six...

Classical propositional logic can be characterized, indirectly, by means of a complementary formal system whose theorems are exactly those formulas that are not classical tautologies, i.e., contradictions and truth-functional contingencies. Since a formula is contingent if and only if its negation is also contingent, the system in question is paraconsistent. Hence classical propositional logic itself admits of a paraconsistent characterization, albeit “in the negative”. More generally, any decidable logic with a syntactically incomplete proof theory allows for a paraconsistent characterization of its set of theorems. This, we note, has important bearing on the very nature of paraconsistency as standardly characterized.

Standard lore has it that a proper name, or a definite description on its de re reading, is a temporally rigid designator. It picks out the same entity at every time at which it picks out an entity at all. If the entity in question is an enduring continuant then we know what this means, though we are also stuck with a host of metaphysical puzzles concerning endurance itself. If the entity in question is a perdurant then the rigidity claim is trivial, though one is left wondering how it is that different speakers ever manage to pick out one and the same entity when a host of suitable, overlapping candidates are available. But what if the entity in question is neither a continuant nor a perdurant? What if the things we talk about in ordinary language are time‐bound entities that cannot truly be said to persist through time, or stage sequences whose unity resides exclusively in our minds ‐ like the “wave” at the stadium or the characters of a cartoon? In such cases the rigidi‐ ty claim can't be right and a counterpart‐theoretic semantics seems required. Is that bad? I say it isn't. And it had better not be, if that turns out to be the best metaphysical option we have.

We tend to talk about parts in the same way in which we talk about whole objects. Yet a part is not something to be included in an inventory of the world over and above the whole to which it belongs, and a whole is not something to be included in an inventory over and above its own parts. This paper is an attempt to clarify a way of dealing with this tension which may be labeled the Minimalist View: an element in the field of a part‐whole relation is to be included in an inventory of the world if, and only if, it does not overlap any other element that is itself included in the inventory. As it turns out, a clarification of this view involves both a defense of mereological extensionality and an account of the topological distinction between detached and undetached parts.

The so-called ‘argument from vagueness’ is among the most powerful and innovative arguments offered in support of the view that objects are four-dimensional perdurants. The argument is defective – I submit – and in a number of ways that are worth looking into. But each ‘defect’, each gap in the argument, corresponds to a model of change that is independently problematic and that can hardly be built into the common-sense picture of the world. So once all the gaps of the argument are filled in, the three-dimensionalist is left with the burden of a response that cannot rely on a passive plea for common sense. The argument is not a threat to common sense as such; it is a threat to the three-dimensionalist faithfulness to common sense.

Much recent work aimed at extending model-theoretic semantics has been formulated in response to specific needs, and little effort has been made in the direction of a truly "general" generalization. This work is an attempt to overcome these limitations. The unifying view is that semantics must account for the main relationships between languages and models in a uniform fashion, regardless of the specific conditions that may be imposed upon either notion. And the upshot is a general framework within which a large variety of semantic theories naturally fall and from which the semantics of a wide class of logics can be obtained as special cases. ;The presentation is organized in two parts. In the first, a suitably general notion of a language is introduced along with a correspondingly general notion of a model, allowing for the possibility that the interpretation of some expressions be incomplete or inconsistent. The notion of a valuation is then systematically characterized by exploiting the idea that the value of an expression on a given model is always a function of the values it takes on the various ways of filling in the gaps and/or weeding out the gluts in the model. This account is shown to be grounded on some fundamental properties of the lattice of all admissible models, and may be viewed as a generalization of the method of super-valuations. ;The second part investigates the major properties of the resulting semantic apparatus. In particular, it is shown that the notion of logical validity as applied to single expressions is rather standard, and in fact reduces to the corresponding classical notion when this is available. Thus, gaps and gluts can be explained away as local phenomena that do not metastasize throughout the framework. However, with regard to the more comprehensive relation of entailment between expressions, the general picture is more intricate, as the notion of argument validity appears to escape the control of recursively specifiable systems. To shed light on this picture, a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed framework is offered in the concluding part

The theory according to which most ordinary objects are mere “entia successiva”—sequences of distinct mereological aggregates, whose unity resides exclusively in our minds—is a variant of the standard, three-dimensional conception of objects. For the aggregates are, at bottom, endurants, i.e., entities that persist through time by being fully present at any time at which they exist. In this paper I compare this theory with the so-called “stage view”, according to which ordinary objects—indeed, all objects—are sequences of momentary entities that cannot truly be said to persist through time. Both theories face a number of intuitive difficulties but the stage view, I argue, has a lot more to offer in return.

Abstract. As a general theory of reasoning—and as a general theory of what holds true under every possible circumstance—logic is supposed to be ontologically neutral. It ought to have nothing to do with questions concerning what there is, or whether there is anything at all. It is for this reason that traditional Aristotelian logic, with its tacit existential presuppositions, was eventually deemed inadequate as a canon of pure logic. And it is for this reason that modern quantification theory, too, with its residue of existentially loaded theorems and patterns of inference, has been claimed to suffer from a defect of logical purity. The law of non-contradiction rules out certain circumstances as impossible—circumstances in which a statement is both true and false, or perhaps circumstances where something both is and is not the case. Is this to be regarded as a further ontological bias?

Quine’s desert is generally contrasted with Meinong’s jungle, as a sober ontological alternative to the exuberant luxuriance that comes with the latter. Here I focus instead on the desert as a sober metaphysical alternative to the Aristotelian garden, with its tidily organized varieties of flora and fauna neatly governed by fundamental laws that reflect the essence of things and the way they can be, or the way they must be. In the desert there are no “natural joints”; all the boundaries we find are lines we have drawn, artificial fencings that merely reflect of our own demarcations, our classifications, our desperate need to ward off the flux and meet an excusable but ungrounded demand for order and stability. The desert returns a picture of reality that is radically anti-realist. And yet the picture does not amount to a form of irrealism. The desert is out there and is what it is regardless of how we feel. And it is not completely structureless. It’s just that the structure it has is very thin and does not correspond to the sort of structure that so-called metaphysical realists—and scientific realists alike—tend to attribute to it.

In ‘Something to Do with Vagueness ...’, Linda Burns defends an analogy between the informational and the borderline-case variety of vagueness. She argues that the latter is in fact less extraordinary and less disastrous than people in the tradition of Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright have told us. However, her account involves presuppositions that cannot be taken for granted. Here we take a closer look at some of these presuppositions and argue that they may—when left unguarded—undermine much of Burns’ general account.

In ‘Something to Do with Vagueness ...’, Linda Burns defends an analogy between the informational and the borderline-case variety of vagueness. She argues that the latter is in fact less extraordinary and less disastrous than people in the tradition of Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright have told us. However, her account involves presuppositions that cannot be taken for granted. Here is to take a closer look at some of these presuppositions and argue hat they may--when left unguarded--undermine much of Burns’ general account.

Some philosophers have gone a long way towards a clarification and a defense of the view that there is genuine (worldly) indeterminacy of identity. Among his reasons for taking this view seriously is the contention that extant formulations of the alternative conception, according to which all indeterminacy lies in the semantics of our language (or in the system of concepts embodied in our language), are not fitted for dealing with a host of identity puzzles. I this paper I take issue with that contention and argue that the semantic conception, if charitably construed, can meet such challenges.

How many championships have the Lakers won? Fourteen, if one counts those won in Minneapolis; nine, otherwise. Which is the correct answer? Is it even obvious that there is a correct answer? One is tempted to identify a team with its players. But teams, like ordinary objects, seem to survive gradual turnover of their parts. Suppose players from the Lakers are gradually replaced, one by one, over the years. We have the intuition that the team persists through this change, even after none of the original players remain. Suppose too that these original players wind up playing for the Celtics. Lakers fans face an awkward question: for whom should they root? On the one hand, they have the team currently playing in L.A.—a team that has continued gradually through the years, who wear the same uniforms, but now can’t make the playoffs. On the other hand, there are the beloved Lakers starting five (responsible for all those championships) now playing together in the hated Boston garden—a team which looks (despite wearing those hated Celtics jerseys) and plays just like the Lakers of old. What’s a loyal fan to do?

La metafisica è quel ramo della filosofia che ha come oggetto la realtà considerata nei suoi aspetti più fondamentali e generali. L’origine del termine (letteralmente: ‘dopo’ o ‘oltre la fisica’) risale agli editori delle opere di Aristotele nel I secolo a.C., che lo usarono per classificare gli scritti dedicati a quest’argomento e ritenuti, appunto, posteriori a quelli dedicati alla fisica. L’essere si dice in molti modi, scriveva Aristotele in quelle pagine, e a questa molteplicità di significati corrispondono domini d’interesse specifici. La matematica, per esempio, si occupa dell’essere sotto il profilo quantitativo, la fisica sotto il profilo naturale. La metafisica (che Aristotele chiamava ‘sapienza’ o ‘filosofia prima’) si occupa invece dell’essere nel suo complesso, considerato sotto il profilo generalissimo della sua esistenza: l’essere in quanto essere.