-
253Personal identity and time travelPhilosophical Studies 52 (3). 1987.Memory theories of personal identity are subject to the difficulty that distinct simultaneous person stages may both stand in the memory relation to an earlier person stage. Apparently, Such theories entail that these two duplicate person stages are stages of the same person, A claim argued to be "obviously false". In this paper, I argue that the characteristics of these duplication cases usually cited to support this claim do not provide adequate evidence to make it cogent
-
197Why Parfit did not go far enoughPhilosophical Studies 165 (1): 133-149. 2013.Parfit has argued for the revolutionary thesis that personal identity does not matter in ordinary survival, only the R-relation does. “Reconciliationists,” such as Lewis, have tried to stop this revolution, arguing that both personal identity and the R-relation matter. The disagreement has been between those who hold that only the R-relation matters and those who hold that, in addition, personal identity matters. But there is a third option. I argue that Parfit is right that personal identity do…Read more
-
141Part-whole physicalism and mental causationSynthese 136 (3): 359-388. 2003.A well-known ``overdetermination''argument aims to show that the possibility of mental causes of physical events in a causally closed physical world and the possibility of causally relevant mental properties are both problematic. In the first part of this paper, I extend an identity reply that has been given to the first problem to a property-instance account of causal relata. In the second, I argue that mental types are composed of physical types and, as a consequence, both mental and physical …Read more
-
137Causation and persistence: a theory of causationOxford University Press. 1997.Ehring shows the inadequacy of received theories of causation, and, introducing conceptual devices of his own, provides a wholly new account of causation as the persistence over time of individual properties, or "tropes.".
-
135Temporal parts and bundle theoryPhilosophical Studies 104 (2). 2001.In this paper, I try to make a bundle theory of objects consistentwith a temporal parts theory of object persistence. To that end,I propose that such bundles are made up of tropes includingthe co-instantiation relation.
-
127Personal identity and the r-relation: Reconciliation through cohabitationAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (3): 337-346. 1995.This Article does not have an abstract
-
117Tropes: Properties, Objects, and Mental CausationOxford University Press. 2011.Properties and objects are everywhere, but remain a philosophical mystery. Douglas Ehring argues that the idea of tropes--properties and relations understood as particulars--provides the best foundation for a metaphysical account of properties and objects. He develops and defends a new theory of trope nominalism.
-
108Property counterparts and natural class trope nominalismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (3). 2004.'Natural class' trope nominalism makes a trope's being of a certain sort--its nature--a matter of its membership in a certain natural class of actual tropes. It has been objected that on this theory had even a single member of the class of red tropes not existed, for example, then the type 'being red' would not have been instantiated and nothing would have been red. I argue that natural class trope nominalism can avoid this implication by way of counterpart theory as applied to properties.
-
108Simultaneous Causation and Causal ChainsAnalysis 45 (2). 1985.A standard objection to the thesis that all causation is simultaneous causation is that this claim rules out temporally extended causal chains. Defenders of universal simultaneous causation have suggested two replies: deny the supposed incompatibility between simultaneous causation and causal chains or deny the existence of causal chains. In this paper, I argue that neither type of defense of universal causation against this objection is plausible
-
99Probabilistic causality and preemptionBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 35 (1): 55-57. 1984.
-
99
-
90Motion, causation, and the causal theory of identityAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 69 (2). 1991.This Article does not have an abstract
-
89
-
84The causal argument against natural class trope nominalismPhilosophical Studies 107 (2). 2002.In this paper, I consider an objection to ``natural class''trope nominalism, the view that a trope's nature isdetermined by its membership in a natural class of tropes.The objection is that natural class trope nominalismis inconsistent with causes' being efficacious invirtue of having tropes of a certain type. I arguethat if natural class trope nominalism is combinedwith property counterpart theory, then this objectioncan be rebutted.
-
77
-
76Spatial relations between universalsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 80 (1). 2002.This Article does not have an abstract
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Physical Science |