A. R. J. Fisher

In the social world, our lives are informed, impacted, and controlled by time. Behind this grand saying there is the phenomenon of making time. More precisely, there are acts and processes, largely conventional and oftentimes institutional, that create temporal fiat objects (TFOs for short). A TFO is an abstract entity set with temporal boundaries, much like a national park is a creatable spatial fiat object with spatial boundaries. In this paper, I construct an ontology of TFOs and argue that it is explanatorily useful for understanding how TFOs are created and maintained (often at the hands of those in power) and for solving justice issues that arise from TFOs generated in morally problematic ways. The explanatory utility of the theory provides one reason to believe that the theory is true. A comprehensive social metaphysics should make room for such temporal entities in the social world.

This volume contains the complete correspondence of two of the leading analytic philosophers of the late twentieth century, David Armstrong and David Lewis. Comprising some 345 letters, including letters to and from third parties, this correspondence is at once a deep philosophical resource shedding new light on the philosophical development of two of the great late twentieth-century philosophers, and a record of the development of a philosophical friendship. The letters are valuable, not only for the light they shed on the background to many of Armstrong’s and Lewis’ major publications, but also for what they show us about the practice of philosophy. The correspondence is a window into both the philosophical content of two leading thinkers’ minds and an exemplar of how philosophy of the highest level can be done.

This volume contains the complete correspondence of two of the leading analytic philosophers of the late twentieth century, David Armstrong and David Lewis. Comprising some 345 letters, including letters to and from third parties, this correspondence is at once a deep philosophical resource shedding new light on the philosophical development of two of the great late twentieth-century philosophers, and a record of the development of a philosophical friendship. The letters are valuable, not only for the light they shed on the background to many of Armstrong's and Lewis' major publications, but also for what they show us about the practice of philosophy. The correspondence is a window into both the philosophical content of two leading thinkers' minds and an exemplar of how philosophy of the highest level can be done.

This chapter by Fisher continues the theme of the relation between Armstrong and Lewis, only Fisher casts the net far wider. He begins by arguing that there were at least two different lines of influence from early twentieth-century behaviourism to the identity theory: one through logical positivism and the other through ordinary language philosophy, the latter involving Place and Smart, and Lewis and Armstrong. It was Armstrong and Lewis who were to have a profound influence on subsequent developments in analytic philosophy, both methodologically and in metaphysics, and it is for this reason that Fisher devotes the rest of his chapter to tracing the origins of their theories of mind and the manner in which the emphases and methodologies deployed in developing their respective theories became the hallmarks of their wider impact on analytic philosophy.

This chapter is on Williams’s influence on later philosophers and his impact on the revival of analytic metaphysics. The chapter begins with how he taught certain students at Harvard University, such as Roderick Chisholm, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and David Lewis. Most of the discussion centres on Lewis, as Lewis was influenced the most by Williams. It is argued that Lewis absorbed Williams’s belief in metaphysics and such doctrines as Humeanism and four-dimensionalism. Williams’s influence on philosophers in Australia such as D.M. Armstrong and Keith Campbell is then covered, showing how Armstrong, in particular, gravitated towards many of Williams’s positions: metaphysical realism, metaphysical naturalism, empirical metaphysics, to name a few. Lastly, this chapter gives an account of Williams’s view on how to take the ontological turn and how it impacted Lewis and Armstrong, concluding that Williams played a key role not only in the survival but also the revival of metaphysics in the twentieth century.

This chapter explores Williams’s empirical realism against the backdrop of William James and American New Realists such as Williams’s advisor Ralph Perry. Debates about the nature of perception as understood by philosophers in the early twentieth century are discussed and Williams’s direct realism as one theory of perception is examined. Furthermore, Williams’s use of induction and parsimony to argue for metaphysical theses such as metaphysical realism is explained, thereby revealing his methodological commitment to the empirical method. His critique of logical positivism is canvassed along with exposition of his realist alternative, which involves a discussion of his realist theories of meaning, analyticity, and the a priori. These realist theories involve a commitment to the existence of universals. Finally, his empirical conception of metaphysics is presented with a discussion of his account of the distinction between ontology and cosmology.

This chapter is a detailed treatment of Williams’s metaphysics of time. He is a four-dimensionalist. On this view, reality is fundamentally tenseless and events are timelessly strung out in a four-dimensional manifold, standing in B-theoretic earlier than/later than relations to each other. The past, present, and future are all equally real. Time is just another dimension or mode of extent like the three dimensions of space. He calls the theory ‘the pure manifold theory’. Williams’s motivations for the pure manifold theory are canvassed, along with his criticism of competing theories of time such as presentism and the growing block theory. This chapter corrects misinterpretations of Williams’s metaphysics of time, especially his position on time travel and the passage of time, arguing that he did believe that time travel is metaphysically possible and that the passage of time is explained in terms of the B-theoretic distribution of content throughout the manifold.

This chapter gives an introductory characterisation of the history of metaphysics throughout the twentieth century. Metaphysics was a respectable area of philosophy in the early twentieth century, but fell into disrepute, and finally revived in the late twentieth century. The anti-metaphysics trends in the mid-twentieth century are understood as revolutions aimed at stopping certain modes of inquiry such as metaphysics. The revival of metaphysics is interpreted as a reaction to these revolutionary movements, with a return to old metaphysical questions that were widely studied before the anti-metaphysical revolutions erupted. This chapter also contains a detailed account of Williams’s biographical career, as well as a statement of the methodology used in this book and its main thesis. The main thesis is that Williams played a key role in the survival and revival of metaphysics in the analytic tradition.

This chapter is the concluding chapter that briefly summarises the central thesis of the book. The thesis is that Donald Williams was a crucial and important figure in the mid-twentieth century who advocated for metaphysics, during a time when it was unpopular. Logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy, and the later Wittgenstein, it is argued, ought to be understood as revolutionary movements that tried to squash metaphysics and reduce the significance of philosophical thought in the traditional sense. The revival of metaphysics in the analytic tradition, partly at the hands of Williams, is to be understood as a response to these revolutions that reverts to traditional and big questions in philosophy.

This chapter is an examination of Williams’s account of substance or concrete objects. On his view, a concrete object is a mereological sum of tropes concurring in the same spatiotemporal region. It is argued that Williams’s account of concrete objects involves refined commitments to mereology. A concurrent sum of tropes is maximally concrete and trope-parts of objects occupy the exact region of the object such that a concurrent sum embraces its abstract parts. Although the notion of embracing is not transitive, it is argued that Williams is not committed to multiple modes of composition. He is able to maintain the view that there is only one mode of composition, which is governed by the principles of classical extensional mereology. The topic of essentialism about concrete objects is also examined. It is argued that he is an essentialist with respect to the universals expressed by tropes in a trope-bundle, but that he is an anti-essentialist with respect to the trope-parts of the object.

This chapter is about Williams’s concept of an abstract particular (or trope) and how he arrived at the notion of a trope through a certain theory of what an abstract entity is and of what abstraction is. Even though an entity is abstract it does not follow that it is universal. An entity can be abstract and particular (i.e., not universal). A trope is an abstract particular nature. Various influences from past philosophers, such as E.B. McGilvary and G.F. Stout, on his concept of tropes are covered, along with an explanation of how tropes build a parsimonious one-category ontology. Williams’s account of the distinction between abstract and concrete is presented as well as the distinction between abstractive and partitive analysis, which underpins how an object can be analysed in two different ways, namely, into its abstract and concrete parts.

Chapter 5 is a study of Williams’s theory of universals. Since he endorses a one-category trope ontology, he is committed to explaining universality in terms of tropes. The trope-theoretic solution to the problem of universals and of predication is presented. This solution introduces the notion that a trope manifests its kind. The notion of ‘manifests’ is a primitive concept. It is further shown that universality is a matter of counting tropes in a distinct way from counting tropes as tropes. Reference to universals or kinds in language has to do with relaxing the identity conditions for abstract nouns. Perfectly resembling tropes, then, on this relaxation, are treated as one entity—a universal. An identity theory of universals is arrived at, where a trope functions like a universal such that the trope just is the universal. Thus, the relation between a kind and a trope of that kind is that of identity. The theory explains what we mean by the word ‘universal’ or ‘kind’. Williams’s theory of universals is finally defended against charges that the notion of manifestation is mysterious.

The thesis of this book is that Williams played a key role in the development and revival of analytic metaphysics. This book begins with an account of Williams' approach to philosophy given the rise of realism in the early twentieth century, with a focus on his use of induction and parsimony to argue for metaphysical theses such as metaphysical realism and metaphysical naturalism. It explains his critique of logical positivism and his defence of an empirical conception of metaphysics, which in turn reveals how he took himself to be standing up to rising anti-metaphysical trends. This book then expounds—within the framework of his empirical metaphysics—his one-category trope ontology and its origins, arguing that his systematisation of the concept of an abstract particular (or trope) is his most novel contribution to analytic ontology. This book further presents an original interpretation of his account of concrete objects and abstract universals, engaging with current debates in the metaphysics of properties—sometimes defending Williams, sometimes correcting misinterpretations, sometimes critically reassessing his views. This book also explains his defence of the four-dimensional manifold theory of time and his objections to competing theories such as the growing block theory and presentism (incorporating recently posthumously published work in The Elements and Patterns of Being, ed. A.R.J. Fisher, 2018), with up-to-date references to the latest work in the metaphysics of time. Lastly, this book analyses Williams's influence on later philosophers such as Lewis and Armstrong (and others in Australia), drawing from correspondence between Williams, Lewis, and Armstrong, and evaluates his place in the history of analytic philosophy, concluding that he played a key role in the development and revival of analytic metaphysics.

David Lewis objected to theories that posit necessary connections between distinct entities and to theories that involve a magical grasping of their primitives. In On the Plurality of Worlds, Lewis objected to nondescript ersatzism on these grounds (and thus branded it as ‘magical’). The literature contains several reconstructions of Lewis’ critique of nondescript ersatzism but none of these interpretations adequately address his main argument because they fail to see that Lewis’ critique is based on broader methodological considerations. I argue that a closer look at his methodology reveals the broader objection he presented against nondescript ersatzism. This objection, I further argue, remains a challenge for the ersatzer who posits structure-less entities as possible worlds.

David Lewis is widely known for maintaining the bizarre thesis known as genuine modal realism (hereafter, modal realism). He argued for modal realism on grounds of serviceability in On the Plurality of Worlds. However, earlier in Counterfactuals, he proposed a different kind of argument: from talk of ways things might be to possible worlds. In this paper, I examine the evolution of the latter argument in Lewis’s thought and evaluate its place in his overall case for modal realism, especially in light of the alternative theory of modality known as magical ersatzism. I argue that Lewis turns the argument on its head in his critique of magical ersatzism, but that his later commitment to Ramseyan humility subjects him to a similar criticism. Therefore, the argument is, ultimately, a poisoned pawn for Lewis.

In this chapter, we introduce the perennial and sometimes sprawling topic of properties, with a brief historical sketch from Ancient to Modern philosophy throughout various cultures and traditions. We argue that the importance of properties can be shown by explaining what explanatory work they can do in philosophical theorising across many areas of philosophy. The chapters in this volume do just that in their specific ways. We also outline the structure of the volume and summarise each Part, first describing the larger context of each Part and then the upshot of each chapter.

David Lewis is typically interpreted as a class nominalist. One consequence of class nominalism, which he embraced, is that the reduction of ordered pairs, triples, etc to unordered sets of sets is conventional. The reaction by his Australian counterparts D.M. Armstrong and Peter Forrest was that Lewis was not being ontologically serious. This chapter evaluates this debate over serious ontology. It is argued that in one sense Lewis is ontologically serious, but that his additional commitment to structuralism about classes should push him to adopt a trope-theoretic account of naturalness, which opens up another way to respond to the charge of not doing serious ontology. This conclusion is supported by certain remarks he makes in his correspondence, thus revealing how his thinking about properties appears to have evolved from property-egalitarianism to a sparse theory of tropes.

In Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy, C.D. Broad advanced a distinctive ontology of things and processes. He argues that neither things nor processes are reduced to each other but instead are reduced to some further kind of entity: “absolute process.” This paper will present Broad's theory of absolute processes and argue that they are best understood as tropes by developing a version of Donald C. Williams's trope ontology. This process ontology of tropes is then defended against objections in the contemporary metaphysics literature.

In the early twentieth century, many philosophers in America thought that time should be taken seriously in one way or another. George P. Adams (1882-1961) argued that the past, present and future are all real but only the present is actual. I call this theory ‘actualist eternalism’. In this paper, I articulate his novel brand of eternalism as one piece of his metaphysical system and I explain how he argued for the view in light of the best explanations of temporal experience and the present. I argue that his exploitation of analogies between time and modality offer some lessons for current debates about time such as the importance of providing a temporal epistemology. I also extract what I call the temporal boundary problem and argue that it gives rise to an unaddressed challenge for presentists and growing block theorists.

This chapter by Fisher continues the theme of the relation between Armstrong and Lewis, only Fisher casts the net far wider. He begins by arguing that there were at least two different lines of influence from early twentieth-century behaviourism to the identity theory: one through logical positivism and the other through ordinary language philosophy, the latter involving Place and Smart, and Lewis and Armstrong. It was Armstrong and Lewis who were to have a profound influence on subsequent developments in analytic philosophy, both methodologically and in metaphysics, and it is for this reason that Fisher devotes the rest of his chapter to tracing the origins of their theories of mind and the manner in which the emphases and methodologies deployed in developing their respective theories became the hallmarks of their wider impact on analytic philosophy.

This chapter explores the philosophical development of Alexander’s empiricism, interest in experimental psychology, and its connection to realism and its subsequent rise in the early twentieth century. His early interests are most notably his rejection of British idealism and an empiricist tendency derived in part from classical empiricism and empirical developments in psychology. It is argued that Alexander arrives at realism through his work on psychology, thus revealing that the rise of realism has some psychological origins. His philosophical method is also analysed in detail and it is shown that many of his arguments should be understood as following this method and that many objections to his arguments for realism and against his theory of perception can be resisted when this method is taken into consideration.

Samuel Alexander was an important figure in the rise of realism in the early twentieth century. Alongside Moore and Russell he forwarded the cause of realism in England with a systematic exposition of a realist metaphysics in his magnum opus Space, Time and Deity (1920). This volume is a collection of essays on Alexander’s philosophy, ranging from his metaphysics of spacetime, theory of categories, epistemology and account of perception, naturalism, and interpretations of reactions by R.G. Collingwood and John Anderson.

In the ontology of music the Aristotelian theory of musical works is the view that musical works are immanent universals. The Aristotelian theory (hereafter Musical Aristotelianism) is an attractive and serviceable hypothesis. However, it is overlooked as a genuine competitor to the more well-known theories of Musical Platonism and nominalism. Worse still, there is no detailed account in the literature of the nature of the universals that the Aristotelian identifies musical works with. In this paper, I argue that the best version of Musical Aristotelianism identifies musical works with structural universals. I first motivate the view by outlining its explanatory benefits. I then argue that Musical Aristotelianism is preferable to Musical Platonism and present a novel account of musical works as structural universals by developing D. M. Armstrong’s theory of structural universals. I discuss the consequences of Musical Aristotelianism with respect to on-going issues in debates about musical works and defend the view against an influential objection, concluding that Musical Aristotelianism is a genuine competitor in debates about the nature of musical works.