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154Identity, individuality, and unityPhilosophy 78 (3): 321-336. 2003.Locke notoriously included number amongst the primary qualities of bodies and was roundly criticized for doing so by Berkeley. Frege echoed some of Berkeley's criticisms in attacking the idea that ‘Number is a property of external things’, while defending his own view that number is a property of concepts. In the present paper, Locke's view is defended against the objections of Berkeley and Frege, and Frege's alternative view of number is criticized. More precisely, it is argued that numbers are…Read more
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150Reviews seeing dark things: The philosophy of shadows by Roy Sorensen oxford university press, 2008. 310 pp. £25.99 (review)Philosophy 84 (4): 615-619. 2009.
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144Truth and Truth-MakingMcgill-Queen's University Press. 2008.Truth depends in some sense on reality. But it is a rather delicate matter to spell this intuition out in a plausible and precise way. According to the theory of truth-making this intuition implies that either every truth or at least every truth of a certain class of truths has a so-called truth-maker, an entity whose existence accounts for truth. This book aims to provide several ways of assessing the correctness of this controversial claim. This book presents a detailed introduction to the the…Read more
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141Reply to Bird on a posteriori essentialismAnalysis 68 (4): 345-347. 2008.In Lowe (2007), I queried the validity of the following inference-schema: This issue is an important one, because it seems to be something like this schema that is relied upon by those philosophers who seek to establish a posteriori truths about the essences of particular entities – notably, particular chemical substances, such as water and gold – by appeal to a combination of empirical information about those entities and certain (alleged) essential truths of a general and a priori character. A…Read more
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138Taking into account significant developments in the metaphysical thinking of E. J. Lowe over the past 20 years, _More Kinds of Being:A Further Study of Individuation, Identity, and the Logic of Sortal Terms_ presents a thorough reworking and expansion of the 1989 edition of _Kinds of Being_ Brings many of the original ideas and arguments put forth in _Kinds of Being_ thoroughly up to date in light of new developments Features a thorough reworking and expansion of the earlier work, rather than ju…Read more
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138Entity, identity and unityErkenntnis 48 (2-3): 191-208. 1998.I propose a fourfold categorisation of entities according to whether or not they possess determinate identity-conditions and whether or not they are determinately countable. Some entities – which I call ‘individual objects’ – have both determinate identity and determinate countability: for example, persons and animals. In the case of entities of a kind K belonging to this category, we are in principle always entitled to expect there to be determinate answers to such questions as ‘Is x the same K…Read more
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136Form without matterRatio 11 (3). 1998.Three different concepts of matter are identified: matter as what a thing is immediately made of, matter as stuff of a certain kind, and matter in the (dubious) sense of material ‘substratum’. The doctrine of hylomorphism, which regards every individual concrete thing as being ‘combination’ of matter and form, is challenged. Instead it is urged that we do well to identify an individual concrete thing with its own particular ‘substantial form’. The notions of form and matter, far from being corre…Read more
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131Personal agency: the metaphysics of mind and actionOxford University Press. 2008.This theory accords to volitions the status of basic mental actions, maintaining that these are spontaneous exercises of the will--a "two-way" power which ...
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127Indeterminist free willPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (3). 2005.The aim of the paper is to prove the consistency of libertarianism. We examine the example of Jane, who deliberates at length over whether to vacation in Colorado (C) or Hawaii (H), weighing the costs and benefits, consulting travel brochures, etc. Underlying phenomenological deliberation is an indeterministic neural process in which nonactual motor neural states n(C) and n(H) corresponding to alternatives C and H remain physically possible up until the moment of decision. The neurophysiological…Read more
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126Two Notions of Being: Entity and EssenceRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 62 23-48. 2008.
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120Notes on philosophy, probability and mathematics. FP Ramsey (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (2): 300-301. 1997.
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117LockeRoutledge. 1993.John Locke was one of the towering philosophers of the Enlightenment and arguably the greatest English philosopher. Many assumptions we now take for granted, about liberty, knowledge and government, come from Locke and his most influential works, _An Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ and _Two Treatises of Government_. In this superb introduction to Locke's thought, E.J. Lowe covers all the major aspects of his philosophy. Whilst sensitive to the seventeenth-century background to Locke's thou…Read more
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116Reviews : S. G. Shanker (ed.), Philosophy in Britain Today Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1986; £18.95; 315 pp (review)History of the Human Sciences 1 (1): 132-134. 1988.
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114There are no easy problems of consciousnessJournal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3): 266-71. 1995.This paper challenges David Chalmers' proposed division of the problems of consciousness into the `easy' ones and the `hard' one, the former allegedly being susceptible to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms and the latter supposedly turning on the fact that experiential `qualia' resist any sort of functional definition. Such a division, it is argued, rests upon a misrepresention of the nature of human cognition and experience and their intimate interrelationship, thereby …Read more
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114Substantial change and spatiotemporal coincidenceRatio 16 (2). 2003.Substantial change occurs when a persisting object of some kind either begins or ceases to exist. Typically, this happens when one or more persisting objects of another kind or kinds are subjected to appropriate varieties of qualitative or relational change, as when the particles composing a lump of bronze are rearranged so as to create a statue. However, such transformations also seem to result, very often, in cases of spatiotemporal coincidence, in which two numerically distinct objects of dif…Read more
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113Locke: Compatibilist event-causalist or libertarian substance-causalist? (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (3). 2004.Towards the end of Chapter XXI of Book II of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke remarks, with all the appearance of sincerity and genuine modesty, that.
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Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Physical Science |