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74Powerful Particulars: Review Essay on John Heil’s From an Ontological Point of View (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (2): 466--479. 2006.John Heil’s new book 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, he is unduly modest about his own contribution to the development and application of this novel metaphysical system. A full examination of the position t…Read more
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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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56The Mind Matters: Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum WorldPhilosophical Books 34 (1): 33-34. 1993.
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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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54Locke, Martin and substance (contributions to metaphysics)Philosophical Quarterly 50 (201): 498--514. 2000.
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345The Four-Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural ScienceClarendon Press. 2006.E. J. Lowe, a prominent figure in contemporary metaphysics, sets out and defends his theory of what there is. His four-category ontology is a metaphysical system which recognizes four fundamental categories of beings: substantial and non-substantial particulars and substantial and non-substantial universals. Lowe argues that this system has an explanatory power which is unrivalled by more parsimonious theories and that this counts decisively in its favour. He shows that it provides a powerful ex…Read more
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242Ontological 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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275What are we? A study in personal ontology • by Eric T. OlsonAnalysis 69 (2): 388-390. 2009.In the Second Meditation, Descartes famously asks at one point, ‘But what then am I?’ – to which his immediate answer is ‘A thing that thinks.’ It is this question, or rather the plural version of it, that Eric Olson examines in this excellent book. He thinks that it is – today, at least – a rather neglected question. He points out that it is wrong to confuse the question with the much more frequently examined question of what personal identity consists in. In fact, he thinks that possible answe…Read more
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195Abstraction, 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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41Truthmaking as Essential DependenceIn Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.), Metaphysics and Truthmakers, Ontos Verlag. pp. 237-259. 2007.
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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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76Review of John Hawthorne, Metaphysical Essays (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (1). 2007.
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103Another dubious counter-example to conditional transitivityAnalysis 70 (2): 286-289. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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207Subjects of ExperienceCambridge University Press. 1996.In this innovative study of the relationship between persons and their bodies, E. J. Lowe demonstrates the inadequacy of physicalism, even in its mildest, non-reductionist guises, as a basis for a scientifically and philosophically acceptable account of human beings as subjects of experience, thought and action. He defends a substantival theory of the self as an enduring and irreducible entity - a theory which is unashamedly committed to a distinctly non-Cartesian dualism of self and body. Takin…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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Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Physical Science |