Carlo Rossi

The notion of exact location has frequently been regarded in the contemporary debate as a fundamental and primitive relation. One of the controversial principles that has been thought to govern this relationship is Functionality. Functionality is a principle according to which no object can have more than one exact location. Contemporary theories of location have either assumed Functionality as an axiom or as a principle entailed by one of their locational definitions. In this paper, I examine the extant arguments in the literature in favour of Functionality, only to conclude that they do not suffice to secure its truth. Functionality, as some have wrongly argued, is not a metaphysically neutral principle that governs exact location for it imposes serious constraints on a number of views on the metaphysics of material things. Therefore, more caution is required when it comes to its acceptance.

ABSTRACT Permissivism is a view about ontological questions which holds that such questions for the most part can all be trivially answered. Understood in this way, Permissivism seems to be entailed, or at least motivated by, an important number of ontological and metaontological views, ranging from Mereological Universalism and Material Plenitude to ontologies which draw prominently on some notion of fundamentality, and Deflationism. By and large, permissivist-inspired arguments have had as their ontological target material objects, but little to none is found within the ontological debate about properties. Our aim in this paper is to address this omission by providing a thorough assessment of one notable effort in this direction formulated by Jonathan Schaffer, which defends the existence of universal properties by way of trivial inferences. We argue that such inferences fail to secure the existence of universal properties in a trivial manner. Together with offering an extended discussion of Schaffer’s permissivist inferences, we also explore alternative ways in which the said inferences can be amended, although in each case with a restricted scope.

Este trabajo presenta la defensa de Plantinga de la compatibilidad de la existencia de Dios y la existencia del mal basada en la libertad de la voluntad. El ateo sostiene que una entidad omnipotente, omnisciente y perfectamente buena no podría permitir la existencia de mal en el mundo. Si existe el mal, entonces o bien la entidad en cuestión no es perfectamente buena, o no es omnipotente, o no es omnisciente. Plantinga responde el desafío planteado al teísmo por la existencia del mal destacando que no hay incoherencia en la suposición de que existen tanto Dios como el mal si es que se concede: que Dios no puede actualizar cualquier mundo posible, y la posibilidad de que las personas diferentes de Dios sufran de depravación transmundana. La solución de Plantinga es discutida, considerando las principales reacciones que ha provocado en la literatura filosófica.

Schaffer offers us in the last section of “On What Grounds What” (2009) an applied illustration of his allegedly Aristotelian metaontological position. According to this illustration, Schaffer’s metaontological position, supplemented with a few Aristotelian theses about substance and grounding, would converge in a view remarkably similar to his priority monism (Philosophical Studies, 145, 131–148, 2009b; Philosophical Review, 119, 31–76, 2010a), the view that there is one single fundamental substance. In this paper, I will argue against Schaffer’s suggestion that priority monism represents a viable development of Aristotelian metaphysics. In particular, I will hold that the most plausible version of Schaffer’s priority monism by Aristotelian standards fails to satisfy basic Aristotelian tenets about dependence, composition, change, and persistence, and suggest that this is evidence that Aristotelians are more at home with a pluralism rather than a monism about substance.