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25A Conversation on GroundingThe Monist 106 (3): 317-325. 2023.Concerning a conversation about grounding between Philo, a quizzical maverick, and Cleanthes, a studious devotee of the very latest trends in metaphysics. Whereas Cleanthes enthuses about grounding, Philo counsels methodological caution and greater immersion in actual scientific practice.
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71Explanation Good, Grounding BadThe Monist 106 (3): 270-286. 2023.Grounding is not required for explanation in metaphysics, and, more generally, in philosophy. An account independent of grounding is available. Grounding claims do not provide the explanations that they are alleged to. The case for displacing supervenience in favour of grounding is mistaken. Grounding is a zombie idea: it staggers on in philosophical culture despite being thoroughly discredited.
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108Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual BehaviourPhilosophical Quarterly 57 (228): 498-501. 2007.
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15Review of MacBride (2018)Dialectica 74 (3). 2020.Fraser MacBride, On the Genealogy of Universals: The Metaphysical Origins of Analytic Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
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35Review of *The Metaphysics within Physics* by Tim Maudlin (review)Analysis 69 (2): 374-375. 2009.
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113T‐PhilosophyMetaphilosophy 53 (2-3): 185-198. 2022.Metaphilosophy, Volume 53, Issue 2-3, Page 185-198, April 2022.
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41Why Reduction is UnderratedHistory of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 22 (1): 121-136. 2019.The key idea behind reduction is a simple and familiar one: it’s that there’s more to things than meets the eye. Surprisingly, this simple idea provides the resources to block a number of notable anti-reductionist arguments: Mackie’s argument from queerness against objective moral values, Kripke’s Humphrey objection and its recent variants, and Jubien’s objection from irrelevance against Lewisian modal realism. What is wrong with each of these arguments is that they suppose that what is to be re…Read more
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53What Kind of Creatures Are We?, by Noam Chomsky: New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, pp. xxiv + 167, £13.95Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (2): 413-414. 2017.
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31Agnosticism and the Balance of EvidenceIn Mirosław Szatkowski (ed.), Ontology of Theistic Beliefs: Meta-Ontological Perspectives, De Gruyter. pp. 1-18. 2018.
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31Why Only Us? Language and EvolutionAnalysis 78 (2): 381-383. 2018.Why Only Us? Language and Evolution By BerwickRobert C. and ChomskyNoamMassachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015. 224 pp. £17.95 paper.
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46Why Only Us? Language and Evolution By Robert C. Berwick and Noam ChomskyAnalysis. forthcoming.© The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...This is a clear and extremely stimulating book in which the authors present a series of innovative, even unorthodox, views on the relation between language and biology. It treats the study of language, a…Read more
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43TropesProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94 (1): 253-262. 1994.Chris Daly; Tropes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 253–262, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/94.1.253.
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27Truth and being: E.J. Lowe and A. Rami : Truth and truth-making. Acumen Publishing Limited, Stocksfield, 2009, x + 262 pp, £18.00 PBMetascience 19 (3): 417-420. 2010.
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16D.M. Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (4): 640. 1998.
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71Modality and acquaintance with propertiesThe Monist 81 (1): 44--68. 1998.What is required for you to know what a certain property is? And what is required for you to have the concept of that property? Hume held that a person who has never tasted a pineapple cannot know what the property tasting like a pineapple is. He also thought that this person cannot have the corresponding concept. A subsequent tradition in empiricism generalises these claims at least to all the so-called "secondary qualities." I will argue that this tradition is mistaken. I will argue that there…Read more
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256Fictionalism and the attitudesPhilosophical Studies 139 (3). 2008.This paper distinguishes revolutionary fictionalism from other forms of fictionalism and also from other philosophical views. The paper takes fictionalism about mathematical objects and fictionalism about scientific unobservables as illustrations. The paper evaluates arguments that purport to show that this form of fictionalism is incoherent on the grounds that there is no tenable distinction between believing a sentence and taking the fictionalist's distinctive attitude to that sentence. The ar…Read more
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39The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2015.The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods contains twenty-six original and substantive papers examining a wide selection of philosophical methods. Drawing upon an international range of leading contributors, this Handbook will help shape future debates about how philosophy should be done. Topics explored include philosophical disagreement, thought experiments, intuitions, rational reflection, conceptual analysis, explanation, parsimony, and experimental philosophy. Written in a clear and ac…Read more
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1806Moral Error Theory and the Problem of EvilEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 1 (2). 2009.Moral error theory claims that no moral sentence is (nonvacuously) true. Atheism claims that the existence of evil in the world is incompatible with, or makes improbable, the existence of God. Is moral error theory compatible with atheism? This paper defends the thesis that it is compatible against criticisms by Nicholas Sturgeon
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1083Is ontological revisionism uncharitable?Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (3): 405-425. 2016.Some philosophers deny the existence of composite material objects. Other philosophers hold that whenever there are some things, they compose something. The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize an objection to these revisionary views: the objection that nihilism and universalism are both unacceptably uncharitable because each of them implies that a great deal of what we ordinarily believe is false. Our main business is to show how nihilism and universalism can be defended against the objection…Read more
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74An Introduction to Philosophical MethodsBroadview Press. 2010.An Introduction to Philosophical Methods is the first book to survey the various methods that philosophers use to support their views. Rigorous yet accessible, the book introduces and illustrates the methodological considerations that are involved in current philosophical debates. Where there is controversy, the book presents the case for each side, but highlights where the key difficulties with them lie. While eminently student-friendly, the book makes an important contribution to the debate re…Read more
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279Scepticism about GroundingIn Fabrice Correia & Benjamin Schnieder (eds.), Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality, Cambridge University Press. pp. 81. 2012.
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141Nominalism, Trivialist Platonism and Benacerraf's dilemmaAnalysis 74 (2): 224-231. 2014.In his stimulating new book The Construction of Logical Space , Agustín Rayo offers a new account of mathematics, which he calls ‘Trivialist Platonism’. In this article, we take issue with Rayo’s case for Trivialist Platonism and his claim that the view overcomes Benacerraf’s dilemma. Our conclusion is that Rayo has not shown that Trivialist Platonism has any advantage over nominalism
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168Dorr on the language of ontologyPhilosophical Studies 173 (12): 3301-3315. 2016.In the ‘ordinary business of life’, everyone makes claims about what there is. For instance, we say things like: ‘There are some beautiful chairs in my favourite furniture shop’. Within the context of philosophical debate, some philosophers also make claims about what there is. For instance, some ontologists claim that there are chairs; other ontologists claim that there are no chairs. What is the relation between ontologists’ philosophical claims about what there is and ordinary claims about wh…Read more
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249Do object-dependent properties threaten physicalism?Journal of Philosophy 107 (11): 610-614. 2010.Thomas Hofweber argues that the thesis of direct reference is incompatible with physicalism, the claim that the nonphysical supervenes on the physical. According to Hofweber, direct reference implies that some physical objects have object-dependent properties, such as being Jones’s brother, which depend on particular objects for their existence and identity. Hofweber contends that if some physical objects have object-dependent properties, then Local-Local Supervenience (the physicalist doctrine …Read more
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mathematics |