•  1391
    On a widely shared assumption, our mental states supervene on our microphysical properties – that is, microphysical supervenience is true. When this thesis is combined with the apparent truism that human persons have proper parts, a grave difficulty arises: what prevents some of these proper parts from being themselves thinkers as well? How can I know that I am a human person and not a smaller thinker enclosed in a human person? Most solutions to this puzzle make radical, if not absurd, claims. …Read more
  •  1272
    The Deflationary Theory of Ontological Dependence
    Philosophical Quarterly 68 (272): 481-502. 2018.
    When an entity ontologically depends on another entity, the former ‘presupposes’ or ‘requires’ the latter in some metaphysical sense. This paper defends a novel view, Dependence Deflationism, according to which ontological dependence is what I call an aggregative cluster concept: a concept which can be understood, but not fully analysed, as a ‘weighted total’ of constructive and modal relations. The view has several benefits: it accounts for clear cases of ontological dependence as well as the s…Read more
  •  876
    Grounding and the argument from explanatoriness
    Philosophical Studies 174 (12): 2927-2952. 2017.
    In recent years, metaphysics has undergone what some describe as a revolution: it has become standard to understand a vast array of questions as questions about grounding, a metaphysical notion of determination. Why should we believe in grounding, though? Supporters of the revolution often gesture at what I call the Argument from Explanatoriness: the notion of grounding is somehow indispensable to a metaphysical type of explanation. I challenge this argument and along the way develop a “reaction…Read more
  •  848
    What is Wrong with Self-Grounding?
    Erkenntnis 83 (6): 1157-1180. 2018.
    Many philosophers embrace grounding, supposedly a central notion of metaphysics. Grounding is widely assumed to be irreflexive, but recently a number of authors have questioned this assumption: according to them, it is at least possible that some facts ground themselves. The primary purpose of this paper is to problematize the notion of self-grounding through the theoretical roles usually assigned to grounding. The literature typically characterizes grounding as at least playing two central theo…Read more
  •  823
    Four Questions of Iterated Grounding
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (2): 341-364. 2019.
    The Question of Iterated Grounding (QIG) asks what grounds the grounding facts. Although the question received a lot of attention in the past few years, it is usually discussed independently of another important issue: the connection between metaphysical explanation and the relation or relations that supposedly “back” it. I will show that once we get clear on the distinction between metaphysical explanation and the relation(s) backing it, we can distinguish no fewer than four questions lumped un…Read more
  •  797
    Metaphysically explanatory unification
    Philosophical Studies 177 (6): 1659-1683. 2020.
    This paper develops and motivates a unification theory of metaphysical explanation, or as I will call it, Metaphysical Unificationism. The theory’s main inspiration is the unification account of scientific explanation, according to which explanatoriness is a holistic feature of theories that derive a large number of explananda from a meager set of explanantia, using a small number of argument patterns. In developing Metaphysical Unificationism, I will point out that it has a number of interestin…Read more
  •  762
    How to be an uncompromising revisionary ontologist
    Synthese 198 (3): 2129-2152. 2019.
    Revisionary ontologies seem to go against our common sense convictions about which material objects exist. These views face the so-called Problem of Reasonableness: they have to explain why reasonable people don’t seem to accept the true ontology. Most approaches to this problem treat the mismatch between the ontological truth and ordinary belief as superficial or not even real. By contrast, I propose what I call the “uncompromising solution”. First, I argue that our beliefs about material objec…Read more
  •  708
    Constitution and Dependence
    Journal of Philosophy 117 (3): 150-177. 2020.
    Constitution is the relation that holds between an object and what it is made of: statues are constituted by the lumps of matter they coincide with; flags, one may think, are constituted by colored pieces of cloth; and perhaps human persons are constituted by biological organisms. Constitution is often thought to be a
  •  596
    Diachronic Self-Making
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (2): 349-362. 2020.
    This paper develops the Diachronic Self-Making View, the view that we are the non-accidentally best candidate referents of our ‘I’-beliefs. A formulation and defence of DSV is followed by an overview of its treatment of familiar puzzle cases about personal identity. The rest of the paper focuses on a challenge to DSV, the Puzzle of Inconstant ‘I’-beliefs: the view appears to force on us inconsistent verdicts about personal identity in cases that we would naturally describe as changes in one’s de…Read more
  •  504
    Deflationary Nominalism and Puzzle Avoidance
    Philosophia Mathematica 27 (1): 88-104. 2019.
    In a series of works, Jody Azzouni has defended deflationary nominalism, the view that certain sentences quantifying over mathematical objects are literally true, although such objects do not exist. One alleged attraction of this view is that it avoids various philosophical puzzles about mathematical objects. I argue that this thought is misguided. I first develop an ontologically neutral counterpart of Field’s reliability challenge and argue that deflationary nominalism offers no distinctive an…Read more
  •  445
    What do we want to know when we ask the Simple Question?
    Philosophical Quarterly 64 (255): 254-266. 2014.
    The Simple Question (SQ) asks: “What are the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions any x must satisfy in order for it to be true that x is a simple?” The main motivation for asking SQ stems from the hope that it could teach us important lessons for material-object ontology. It is universally accepted that a proper answer to it has to be finite, complete and devoid of mereological expressions. This paper argues that we should stop treating SQ as the central question to be asked about simple…Read more
  •  407
    Modality
    In Michael J. Raven (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaphysical Grounding, Routledge. pp. 348-360. 2020.
    A survey of the connection between grounding and modality, in particular supervenience. The survey explores three possible connections between grounding and supervenience: (1) supervenience can be analyzed in terms of grounding, (2) grounded facts supervene on their grounds, and (3) grounding and supervenience overlap in their theoretical roles.
  •  397
    Self-made People
    Mind 125 (500): 1071-1099. 2016.
    The Problem of Overlappers is a puzzle about what makes it the case, and how we can know, that we have the parts we intuitively think we have. In this paper, I develop and motivate an overlooked solution to this puzzle. According to what I call the self-making view it is within our power to decide what we refer to with the personal pronoun ‘I’, so the truth of most of our beliefs about our parts is ensured by the very mechanism of self-reference. Other than providing an elegant solution to the P…Read more
  •  351
    The myth of the myth of supervenience
    Philosophical Studies 176 (8): 1967-1989. 2019.
    Supervenience is necessary co-variation between two sets of entities. In the good old days, supervenience was considered a useful philosophical tool with a wide range of applications in the philosophy of mind, metaethics, epistemology, and elsewhere. In recent years, however, supervenience has fallen out of favor, giving place to grounding, realization, and other, more metaphysically “meaty”, notions. The emerging consensus is that there are principled reasons for which explanatory theses cannot…Read more
  •  219
    Varieties of Grounding Skepticism
    The Monist 106 (3): 301-316. 2023.
    Abstract:Skepticism about grounding is the view that ground-theoretic concepts shouldn’t be used in meta­physical theorizing. Possible reasons for adopting this attitude are numerous: perhaps grounding is unintelligible; or perhaps it’s never instantiated; or perhaps it’s just too heterogeneous to be theor­­­­­etically useful. Unfortunately, as currently pursued the debate between grounding enthusiasts and skeptics is insufficiently structured. This paper’s purpose is to impose a measure of conc…Read more
  •  204
    An explanatory idealist theory of grounding
    Noûs 56 (3): 530-553. 2022.
    How is grounding related to metaphysical explanation? The standard view is that the former somehow “backs”, “undergirds” or “underlies” the latter. This view fits into a general picture of explanation, according to which explanations in general hold in virtue of a certain elite group of “explanatory relations” or “determinative relations” that back them. This paper turns the standard view on its head: grounding doesn't “back” metaphysical explanation but is in an important sense downstream from …Read more
  •  169
    What is priority monism?
    Philosophical Studies 178 (9): 2873-2893. 2020.
    In a series papers, Jonathan Schaffer defended priority monism, the thesis that the cosmos is the only fundamental material object, on which all other objects depend. A primitive notion of dependence plays a crucial role in Schaffer’s argu- ments for priority monism. The goal of this paper is to scrutinize this notion and also to shed new light on what is at stake in the debate. I present three familiar arguments for priority monism and point out that each relies on a connecting principle that t…Read more
  •  108
    In a series of recent papers, David Rose and Jonathan Schaffer use a number of experiments to show that folk intuitions about composition and persistence are driven by pre-scientific teleological tendencies. They argue that these intuitions are fit for debunking and that the playing field for competing accounts of composition and persistence should therefore be considered even: no view draws more support from folk intuitions than its rivals, and the choice between them should be made exclusively…Read more
  •  107
    The Question of Iterated Causation
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (2): 454-473. 2021.
    This paper is about what I call the Question of Iterated Causation (QIC): for any instance of causation in which c1…ck cause effect e, what are the causes of c1…ck’s causing of e? In short: what causes instances of causation or, as I will refer to these instances, the “causal goings‐on”? A natural response (which I call “dismissivism”) is that this is a bad question because causal goings‐on aren’t apt to be caused. After rebutting several versions of dismissivism, I consider the view that QIC, t…Read more
  •  98
    According to Humeanism about the laws, the laws of nature are nothing over and above certain kinds of regularities about particular facts. Humeanism has often been accused of circularity: according to scientific practice laws often explain their instances, but on the Humean view they also reduce to the mosaic, which includes those instances. In this paper I formulate the circularity problem in a way that avoids a number of controversial assumptions routinely taken for granted in the literature, …Read more
  •  85
    Self-Making and Subpeople
    Journal of Philosophy 119 (9): 461-488. 2022.
    On many currently popular ontologies of material objects, we share our place with numerous shorter-lived things that came into existence after we did or will go out of existence before we will. Subpeople are intrinsically indistinguishable from possible people, and as several authors pointed out, this raises grave ethical concerns: it threatens to make any sacrifice for long-term goals impermissible, as well as to undermine our standard practices of punishment, reward, grief, and utility calcula…Read more
  •  49
    The Phenomenal Self, by Barry Dainton (review)
    Mind 120 (480): 1242-1247. 2011.
  •  42
    Thomas Hofweber: Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 114 (11): 623-628. 2017.
  •  40
    There Is No Distinctively Semantic Circularity Objection to Humean Laws
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (4): 270-281. 2021.
    Humeans identify the laws of nature with universal generalizations that systematize rather than govern the particular matters of fact. Humeanism is frequently accused of circularity: laws explain their instances, but Humean laws are, in turn, grounded by those instances. Unfortunately, this argument trades on controversial assumptions about grounding and explanation that Humeans routinely reject. However, recently an ostensibly semantic circularity objection has been offered, which seeks to avoi…Read more
  •  28
    Pregnant Thinkers
    Philosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.
    Do pregnant mothers have fetuses as parts? According to the “parthood view” they do, while according to the “containment view” they don’t. This paper raises a novel puzzle about pregnancy: if mothers have their fetuses as parts, then wherever there is a pregnant mother, there is also a smaller thinking being that has every part of the mother except for those that overlap with the fetus. This problem resembles a familiar overpopulation puzzle from the personal identity literature, known as the “T…Read more
  •  24
    Property dualists shouldn't be nominalists about properties
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Substance dualism is the view that there are two fundamentally different kinds of substances: physical and mental. By contrast, according to property dualism there is only one kind of substance (physical) but two fundamentally different kinds of properties: physical and mental. Property nominalism is the view that there are neither repeatable nor non-repeatable fundamentally predicable entities (i.e. neither universals nor tropes) and that things being a certain way or being related in a certain…Read more
  •  20
    The Argument from Vagueness for Universalism contends that any non-arbitrary restriction on composition must be vague, but that vague composition leads to unacceptable count indeterminacy. One common response to the argument is that borderline cases of composition don’t necessarily lead to count indeterminacy because a determinately existing thing may be a borderline case of a presently existing concrete composite object. We can collectively refer to such views as versions of the Status Response…Read more
  • David Rose (ed.): Experimental Metaphysics (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 15. 2017.