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Paraphrase Strategies in MetaphysicsPhilosophy Compass 9 (8): 570-582. 2014.Philosophers often aim to demonstrate that the things we ordinarily think and say can be reconciled with our considered beliefs about the world. To this end, many philosophers try to paraphrase ordinary language claims by finding equivalent sentences that are less misleading. For instance, though we know that there is no British family that is the average one, we want to say that the average British family has 1.8 children, and we might do that by paraphrasing this claim as: there are nearly twi…Read more
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The Only Way To BeNoûs 53 (3): 593-612. 2017.
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The Indeterminacy of the Distinction between Objects and Ways of BeingErkenntnis 87 (6): 2923-2941. 2022.Few if any distinctions are more easily recognisable and assented to than that between _objects_, that is, things which are some ways, and that which they are, that is, _ways for objects to be_ (‘ways of being’ for short). In this paper I present an argument designed to show that this distinction is indeterminate in the sense that the truth-conditions of predicational sentences leave open what should count as an object and a way of being. The bulk of the argument is inspired by the celebrated pe…Read more
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”Ostrich Nominalism’ or ”Mirage Realism’?Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (4): 433-439. 1980.In "nominalism and realism" armstrong carefully demolishes various nominalist responses to plato's "one over many" problem but simply dismissed the quinean response as "ostrich nominalism". The paper argues that plato's problem is pseudo. So to ignore it is not to behave like an ostrich. Rather to adopt realism because of this problem that isn't there is to be a "mirage realist." there are some good reasons that lead armstrong to realism but he is largely a mirage realist. Quine does not ignore …Read more
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Ontological Pluralism and Notational VarianceOxford Studies in Metaphysics 12 58-72. 2021.Ontological pluralism is the view that there are different ways to exist. It is a position with deep roots in the history of philosophy, and in which there has been a recent resurgence of interest. In contemporary presentations, it is stated in terms of fundamental languages: as the view that such languages contain more than one quantifier. For example, one ranging over abstract objects, and another over concrete ones. A natural worry, however, is that the languages proposed by the pluralist are…Read more
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Subject Matter: A Modest ProposalPhilosophical Quarterly 71 (3): 605-622. 2021.The notion of subject matter is a key concern of contemporary philosophy of language and logic. A central task for a theory of subject matter is to characterise the notion of sentential subject matter, that is, to assign to each sentence of a given language a subject matter that may count as its subject matter. In this paper, we elaborate upon David Lewis’ account of subject matter. Lewis’ proposal is simple and elegant but lacks a satisfactory characterisation of sentential subject matter. Draw…Read more
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Causation by Absence: Omission ImpossiblePhilosophia 48 (2): 625-641. 2020.
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I bet you'll solve Goodman's RiddlePhilosophical Quarterly 65 (259): 254-267. 2015.
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A puzzle about ontologyNoûs 39 (2). 2005.Ontology is the philosophical discipline that tries to find out what there is: what entities make up reality, what is the stuff the world is made from? Thus, ontology is part of metaphysics, and in fact it seems to be about half of all of metaphysics. It tries to establish what (kinds of) things there are, the other half tries to find out what the (general) properties of these things are and what (general) relations they have to each other. Settling questions in ontology would bring with it majo…Read more
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Metaphysics: An IntroductionRoutledge. 2014.Metaphysics: An Introduction combines comprehensive coverage of the core elements of metaphysics with contemporary and lively debates within the subject. It provides a rigorous and yet accessible overview of a rich array of topics , connecting the abstract nature of metaphysics with the real world. Topics covered include: Basic logic for metaphysics An introduction to ontologyobjects Material objects Critiques of metaphysics Free Will Time Modality Persistence Causation Social ontology: the meta…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Metaontology |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Language |