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31Identity, 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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1How Real Are Artefacts and Artefact Kinds?In M. Franssen, P. Kroes, Th Reydon & P. E. Vermaas (eds.), Artefact Kinds: Ontology and the Human-made World, Springer. pp. 17-26. 2014.
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Book Review (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 19 (3): 175-185. 1998.Book Review of Michael Resnik, Mathematics as a Science of Patterns.
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816Ontological DependenceStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2020.Ontological dependence is a relation—or, more accurately, a family of relations—between entities or beings. For there are various ways in which one being may be said to depend upon one or more other beings, in a sense of “depend” that is distinctly metaphysical in character and that may be contrasted, thus, with various causal senses of this word. More specifically, a being may be said to depend, in such a sense, upon one or more other beings for its existence or for its identity. Some varieties…Read more
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225Problem of the Many and the Vagueness of ConstitutionAnalysis 55 (3): 179-182. 1995.E. J. Lowe; The problem of the many and the vagueness of constitution, Analysis, Volume 55, Issue 3, 1 July 1995, Pages 179–182, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/
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61Naturalism, Theism, and Objects of ReasonPhilosophia Christi 15 (1): 35-45. 2013.It is argued that the dispute between philosophical naturalism and theism can, ultimately, only be rationally resolved in favor of theism, owing to certain internal inadequacies of philosophical naturalism that are commonly overlooked by both its friends and its foes. The criticisms of philosophical naturalism focus on certain questions concerning the ontological status of the objects of human reason and probe into the nature of human rationality and the conditions of its possibility. There is a…Read more
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50Real Selves: Persons as a Substantial KindRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 29 87-107. 1991.Are persons substances or modes? Two currently dominant views may be characterized as giving the following rival answers to this question. According to the first view, persons are just biological substances. According to the second, persons are psychological modes of substances which, as far as human beings are concerned, happen to be biological substances, but which could in principle be non-biological. There is, however, also a third possible answer, and this is that persons are psychological …Read more
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27A problem for a posteriori essentialism concerning natural kindsAnalysis 67 (4): 286-292. 2007.There is a widespread assumption that the classical work in philosophical semantics of Saul Kripke (1980) and Hilary Putnam (1975) has taught us that the essences of natural kinds of substances, such as water and gold, are discoverable only a posteriori by scientific investigation. It is such investigation, thus, that has supposedly revealed to us that it is an essential property of water that it is composed of H2O molecules. This is the way in which Scott Soames, in a recent paper, makes the po…Read more
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13Some Formal Ontological RelationsDialectica 58 (3): 297-316. 2004.Some formal ontological relations are identified, in the context of an account of ontological categorization. It is argued that neither formal ontological relations nor ontological categories should themselves be regarded as elements of being, but that this does not undermine the claim of formal ontology to be a purely objective science. It is also argued that some formal ontological relations, like some ontological categories, are more basic than others. A four‐category ontology is proposed, in…Read more
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1Notebook: NotebookPhilosophy 67 (260): 279-280. 1992.//static.cambridge.org/content/id/urn%3Acambridge.org%3Aid%3Aarticle%3AS0031819100039747/resource/name/firstPage-S0031819100039747a.jpg.
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There are no easy problems of consciousnessJournal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3): 266-271. 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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Self, agency and mental causationJournal of Consciousness Studies 6 (8-9): 225. 1999.A self or person does not appear to be identifiable with his or her organic body, nor with any part of it, such as the brain; and yet selves seem to be agents, capable of bringing about physical events as causal consequences of certain of their conscious mental states. How is this possible in a universe in which, it appears, every physical event has a sufficient cause which is wholly physical? The answer is that this is possible if a certain kind of naturalistic dualism is true, according to whi…Read more
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26Substantial Change and Spatiotemporal CoincidenceRatio 16 (2): 140-160. 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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35Miracles and Laws of Nature: E. J. LOWEReligious Studies 23 (2): 263-278. 1987.Hume's famous discussion of miracles in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is curious both on account of the arguments he does deploy and on account of the arguments he does not deploy, but might have been expected to. The first and second parts of this paper will be devoted to examining, respectively, these two objects of curiosity. The second part I regard as the more important, because I shall there try to show that the fact that Hume does not deploy an argument that he might have bee…Read more
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18Locke: Compatibilist Event‐Causalist or Libertarian Substance‐Causalist? (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (3): 688-701. 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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6The Determinists Have Run Out of Luck---For a Good ReasonPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (3): 745-748. 2008.
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