Derrick Armstrong

Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. _Dispositions: A Debate_ is an extended dialogue between three distinguished philosophers - D.M. Armstrong, C.B. Martin and U.T. Place - on the many problems associated with dispositions, which reveals their own distinctive accounts of the nature of dispositions. These are then linked to other issues such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation.

This paper presents a philosophical response to the problem first articulated by Parmenides of the relationship between truth and appearance. The essay draws upon Heidegger's retrieval of aletheia as unconcealment to consider an epistemic interpretation of Parmenidean monism in which becoming occurs through disclosure and reality can be understood as having an underlying unity whilst understanding of that unity is historically and experientially disclosed.

The article develops and extends the theory of Glenn Kessler (Frege, Mill and the foundations of arithmetic, Journal of Philosophy 77, 1980) that a (cardinal) number is a relation between a heap and a unit-making property that structures the heap. For example, the relation between some swan body mass and "being a swan on the lake" could be 4.