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6Identity, composition, and the simplicity of the selfIn Kevin Corcoran (ed.), Soul, body, and survival: essays on the metaphysics of human persons, Cornell University Press. 2001.
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110Serious endurantism and the strong unity of human personsIn Benedikt Schick, Edmund Runggaldier & Ludger Honnefelder (eds.), Unity and Time in Metaphysics, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 67. 2009.
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124Two Notions of Being: Entity and EssenceRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 62 23-48. 2008.
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130Personal 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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49'If 2 = 3, then 2 + 1 = 3 + 1': Reply to heylen and HorstenPhilosophical Quarterly 58 (232): 528-531. 2008.Jan Heylen and Leon Horsten object to my proposed analysis of ordinary-language conditionals by appealing to certain putative counter-examples. In this reply, I explain how, by ignoring my reading of the indicative/subjunctive distinction, their objection misses its target. I also criticize their underlying methodology.
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25Review of Frank Plumpton Ramsey and Maria Carla Galavotti: Notes on Philosophy, Probability and Mathematics (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (2): 300-301. 1997.
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237
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98The mind in natureInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (4). 2009.This Article does not have an abstract
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240Ontological Vagueness, Existence Monism and Metaphysical RealismMetaphysica 14 (2): 265-274. 2013.Recently, Terry Horgan and Matjaž Potrč have defended the thesis of ‘existence monism’, according to which the whole cosmos is the only concrete object. Their arguments appeal largely to considerations concerning vagueness. Crucially, they claim that ontological vagueness is impossible, and one key assumption in their defence of this claim is that vagueness always involves ‘sorites-susceptibility’. I aim to challenge both the claim and this assumption. As a consequence, I seek to undermine their…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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502What is the Source of Our Knowledge of Modal Truths?Mind 121 (484): 919-950. 2012.There is currently intense interest in the question of the source of our presumed knowledge of truths concerning what is, or is not, metaphysically possible or necessary. Some philosophers locate this source in our capacities to conceive or imagine various actual or non-actual states of affairs, but this approach is open to certain familiar and seemingly powerful objections. A different and ostensibly more promising approach has been developed by Timothy Williamson, according to which our capaci…Read more
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53Locke, Martin and substance (contributions to metaphysics)Philosophical Quarterly 50 (201): 498--514. 2000.
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192Abstraction, Properties, and Immanent RealismThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 2 195-205. 1999.Objects which philosophers have traditionally categorized as abstract are standardly referred to by complex noun phrases of certain canonical forms, such as ‘the set of Fs’, ‘the number of Fs’, ‘the proposition that P’, and ‘the property of being F’. It is no accident that such noun phrases are well-suited to appear in ‘Fregean’ identity-criteria, or ‘abstraction’ principles, for which Frege’s criterion of identity for cardinal numbers provides the paradigm. Notoriously, such principlesare apt t…Read more
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22The Determinists Have Run Out of Luck—For a Good ReasonPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (3): 745-748. 2008.
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132Entity, 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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76Review of John Hawthorne, Metaphysical Essays (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (1). 2007.
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261Reply to le poidevin and MellorMind 96 (384): 539-542. 1987.In ‘Time, Change and the “Indexical Fallacy”’,1 Robin Le Poidevin and D. H. Mellor criticize an earlier paper of mine2 both for failing to rebut an argument of McTaggart's and for failing to explain why time is the dimension of change. I consider that their criticisms miss the mark on both scores, partly through misrepresentation of my views and partly through defective argumentation
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91Some varieties of metaphysical dependenceIn Miguel Hoeltje, Benjamin Schnieder & Alex Steinberg (eds.), Varieties of Dependence: Ontological Dependence, Grounding, Supervenience, Response-Dependence, Philosophia. pp. 193-210. 2013.In this paper, I first of all define various kinds of ontological dependence, motivating these definitions by appeal to examples. My contention is that whenever we need, in metaphysics, to appeal to some notion of existential or identity-dependence, one or other of these definitions will serve our needs adequately, which one depending on the case in hand. Then I respond to some objections to one of these proposed definitions in particular, namely, my definition of (what I call) essential identit…Read more
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3DualismIn Brian McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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