•  41
    Quine's Philosophy: An Introduction (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1): 386-388. 2023.
    W. V. Quine is a curious case. Despite being among the most influential analytic philosophers of the 20th century, card-carrying proponents of Quinean doctrines are hard to find these days. But Quine is far from obsolete. His negative arguments are part of a positive vision for philosophy that is still powerful, attractive, and worth engaging with. Appreciating this, however, requires dodging considerable obstacles. Quine-novices thus need some guidance. And Gary Kemp's excellent Quine: An Intro…Read more
  •  43
    Carnap and the a priori
    European Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    What are Carnap's views on the epistemology of mathematics? Did he believe in a priori justification, and if so, what is his account of it? One might think that such questions are misguided, since in the 1930s Carnap came to reject traditional epistemology as a confused mixture of logic and psychology. But things are not that simple. Drawing on recent work by Richardson and Uebel, I will show that Carnap's mature metaphilosophy leaves room for two distinct notions of a priori justification: one …Read more
  •  102
    Would Carnap have tolerated modern metaphysics?
    The Monist 106 (3): 326-341. 2023.
    It is well known that Carnap, early in his philosophical career, took most of metaphysics to consist of meaningless pseudostatements. In contrast to this meaning-theoretic critique of metaphysics, we develop what we take to be Carnap’s later value-based critique. We argue that this later critique is forceful against several central contemporary metaphysical debates, its origin in the principle of tolerance notwithstanding.
  •  59
    Carnap's philosophy of mathematics
    Philosophy Compass 17 (11). 2022.
    For several decades, Carnap's philosophy of mathematics used to be either dismissed or ignored. It was perceived as a form of linguistic conventionalism and thus taken to rely on the bankrupt notion of truth by convention. However, recent scholarship has revealed a more subtle picture. It has been forcefully argued that Carnap is not a linguistic conventionalist in any straightforward sense, and that supposedly decisive objections against his position target a straw man. This raises two question…Read more
  •  28
    Carnap and Beth on the Limits of Tolerance
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (4). 2021.
    Rudolf Carnap’s principle of tolerance states that there is no need to justify the adoption of a logic by philosophical means. Carnap uses the freedom provided by this principle in his philosophy of mathematics: he wants to capture the idea that mathematical truth is a matter of linguistic rules by relying on a strong metalanguage with infinitary inference rules. In this paper, I give a new interpretation of an argument by E. W. Beth, which shows that the principle of tolerance does not suffice …Read more
  •  279
    Does Semantic Deflationism Entail Meta-Ontological Deflationism?
    Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1): 99-119. 2021.
    Deflationary positions have been defended in many areas of philosophy. Most prominent are semantic deflationism about truth and reference, and meta-ontological deflationism, according to which existence has no deep nature and the standard neo-Quinean approach to ontology is misguided. Although both kinds of views have generated much discussion, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the question of how they relate to each other. Are they independent, is it advisable to hold them all at o…Read more
  •  53
    Easy Ontology, quantification, and realism
    Synthese 198 (7): 6281-6295. 2019.
    Amie Thomasson has defended a view called Easy Ontology, according to which most ontological questions can be answered straightforwardly using conceptual truths and empirical knowledge. Furthermore, she claims that this deflationary meta-ontology does not commit her to any form of anti-realism. In this paper I identify a problem with Thomasson’s account of quantification, according to which everything we quantify over falls under a sortal. Thomasson’s defence of the easiness of answering ontolog…Read more
  •  85
    Conceptualizing Kant’s Mereology
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6. 2019.
    In the Resolution of the Second Antinomy of the first Critique and the Dynamics chapter of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Sciences, Kant presents his critical views on mereology, the study of parts and wholes. He endorses an unusual position: Matter is said to be infinitely divisible without being infinitely divided. It would be mistaken to think that matter consists of infinitely many parts—rather, parts “exist only in the representation of them, hence in the dividing”. This view, acco…Read more
  •  105
    Metasemantics, intentions and circularity
    Synthese 195 (4): 1667-1679. 2018.
    According to intentionalism, a demonstrative d refers to an object o only if the speaker intends d to refer to o. Intentionalism is a popular view in metasemantics, but Gauker has recently argued that it is circular. We defend intentionalism against this objection, by showing that Gauker’s argument rests on a misconstrual of the aim of metasemantics. We then introduce two related, but distinct circularity objections: the worry that intentionalism is uninformative, and the problem of intentional …Read more