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248Locke on Real Essence and Water as a Natural Kind: A Qualified DefenceAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 (1): 1-19. 2011.‘Water is H2O’ is one of the most frequently cited sentences in analytic philosophy, thanks to the seminal work of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam in the 1970s on the semantics of natural kind terms. Both of these philosophers owe an intellectual debt to the empiricist metaphysics of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while disagreeing profoundly with Locke about the reality of natural kinds. Locke employs an intriguing example involving water to support his view that kinds (or ‘sp…Read more
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67Essentialism, Metaphysical Realism, and the Errors of ConceptualismPhilosophia Scientiae 12 9-33. 2008.Le réalisme métaphysique est la conception suivant laquelle la plupart des objets qui peuplent le monde existent indépendamment de notre pensée et possèdent une nature indépendante de la manière dont nous pouvons éventuellement la concevoir. A mon sens cette position engage à admettre une forme robuste d'essentialisme. Beaucoup des formes modernes de l'anti-réalisme tirent leurs origines d'une forme de conceptualisme, suivant laquelle toutes les vérités que nous puissions connaître au sujet des …Read more
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23Logical ArgumentIn Miroslaw Szatkowski (ed.), Ontological Proofs Today, Ontos Verlag. pp. 50--179. 2012.
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28Vagueness and MetaphysicsIn Giuseppina Ronzitti (ed.), Vagueness: A Guide, Springer Verlag. pp. 19--53. 2011.
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194A survey of metaphysicsOxford University Press. 2002.A systematic overview of modern metaphysics, A Survey of Metaphysics covers all of the most important topics in the field. It adopts the fairly traditional conception of metaphysics as a subject that deals with the deepest questions that can be raised concerning the fundamental structure of reality as a whole. The book is divided into six main sections that address the following themes: identity and change, necessity and essence, causation, agency and events, space and time, and universals and p…Read more
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1Sortal Terms and Natural Laws: An Essay on the Ontological Status of the Laws of NatureAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 17 (4): 253-260. 1980.
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710The rationality of metaphysicsSynthese 178 (1): 99-109. 2011.In this paper, it is argued that metaphysics, conceived as an inquiry into the ultimate nature of mind-independent reality, is a rationally indispensable intellectual discipline, with the a priori science of formal ontology at its heart. It is maintained that formal ontology, properly understood, is not a mere exercise in conceptual analysis, because its primary objective is a normative one, being nothing less than the attempt to grasp adequately the essences of things, both actual and possible,…Read more
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26A Defence SubstanceIn Alessandro Antonietti, Antonella Corradini & E. Jonathan Lowe (eds.), Psycho-Physical Dualism Today: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Lexington Books. pp. 167. 2008.
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166Routledge philosophy guidebook to Locke on human understandingRoutledge. 1995.Locke on Human Understanding, is a comprehensive introduction to John Locke's major work, Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Locke's Essay remains a key work in many philosophical fields, notably in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophies of mind and language. In addition, Locke is often referred to as the first English empiricist. Knowledge of this influential work and figure is essential to Enlightenment thought. E. J. Lowe's approach enables students to effectively study the Essay …Read more
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50Powerful Particulars:Review Essay on John Heils From an Ontological Point of View (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (2): 466-479. 2007.John Heil's new book (Heil 2003) is remarkable in many ways. In a concise, lucid and accessible manner, it develops a complete system of ontology with many strikingly original features and then applies that ontology to fundamental issues in the philosophy of mind, with illuminating results. Although Heil acknowledges his intellectual debts to C. B. Martin (p. viii), he is unduly modest about his own contribution to the development and application of this novel metaphysical system. A full examina…Read more
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323The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and TimeClarendon Press. 1998.Jonathan Lowe argues that metaphysics should be restored to a central position in philosophy, as the most fundamental form of inquiry, whose findings underpin those of all other disciplines. He portrays metaphysics as charting the possibilities of existence, by identifying the categories of being and the relations between them. He sets out his own original metaphysical system, within which he seeks to answer many of the deepest questions in philosophy. 'a very rich book... deserves to be read ca…Read more
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61Wright versus Lewis on the Transitivity of CounterfactualsAnalysis 44 (4). 1984.E. J. Lowe; Wright versus Lewis on the transitivity of counterfactuals, Analysis, Volume 44, Issue 4, 1 October 1984, Pages 180–183, https://doi.org/10.1093/ana.
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70Substance and SelfhoodPhilosophy 66 (255): 81-99. 1991.How could the self be a substance? There are various ways in which it could be, some familiar from the history of philosophy. I shall be rejecting these more familiar substantivalist approaches, but also the non-substantival theories traditionally opposed to them. I believe that the self is indeed a substance—in fact, that it is a simple or noncomposite substance—and, perhaps more remarkably still, that selves are, in a sense, self-creating substances. Of course, if one thinks of the notion of s…Read more
Areas of Specialization
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Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Physical Science |