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47What to Say When There Is Nothing to Talk aboutCritica 40 (120): 97-109. 2008.In Reference without Referents, Mark Sainsbury aims to provide an account of reference that honours the common-sense view that sentences containing empty names like "Vulcan" and "Santa Claus" are entirely intelligible, and that many such sentences -"Vulcan doesn't exist", "Many children believe that Santa Claus will give them presents at Christmas", etc.- are literally true. Sainsbury's account endorses the Davidsonian program in the theory of meaning, and combines this with a commitment to Nega…Read more
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21Boghossian, P., 1 Fine, A., 107 Grimm, SR, 171 Guleserian, T., 293Philosophical Studies 106 (306). 2001.
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13Why Realisms about Fiction Must (and Can) Accommodate Fictional PropertiesPhilosophies 8 (5): 82. 2023.The topic of fictional objects is a familiar one, the topic of fictional properties less so. But it deserves its own place in the philosophy of fiction, if only because fictional properties have such a prominent role to play in science fiction and fantasy. What, then, are fictional properties and how does their apparent unreality relate to the unreality of fictional objects? The present paper explores these questions in the light of familiar debates about the nature of fictional objects.
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3Mill's Philosophy of LanguageIn Christopher Macleod & Dale E. Miller (eds.), A Companion to Mill, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. 2016.The present chapter describes Mill's account of language and the wider goals that he sets for his account, such as its relation to logic and reasoning. While the main purpose of the chapter is expository, it also engages with the common perception among philosophers of language that Mill's views of language are outdated, apart, possibly, from his purely denotative account of proper names. By focusing on Mill's view of names as well as propositions, including his conflation of predication and ass…Read more
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8Russell’s Descriptions and Meinong’s AssumptionsIn Andrea Bottani & Richard Davies (eds.), Modes of Existence: Papers in Ontology and Philosophical Logic, Ontos Verlag. pp. 81-104. 2006.
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28The Problem of (Fully) Empty PredicatesAustralasian Philosophical Review 1 (2): 163-167. 2017.ABSTRACTIn our paper, we mount a novel argument, which trades on recent work by Roy Sorensen [2016], following work by Saul Kripke, against Yablo's preferred reading of if-thenism, which is an attempt to read problematically ontologically committing sentences in a way that does not carry such ontological commitments. Although our argument is directed at Yablo's proposed reading of if-thenism, if the argument is successful, other versions of if-thenism may be affected. After reviewing Sorensen's …Read more
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74A Critique of Yablo’s If-thenismPhilosophia Mathematica 31 (3): 360-371. 2023.Using ideas proposed in Aboutness and developed in ‘If-thenism’, Stephen Yablo has tried to improve on classical if-thenism in mathematics, a view initially put forward by Bertrand Russell in his Principles of Mathematics. Yablo’s stated goal is to provide a reading of a sentence like ‘The number of planets is eight’ with a sort of content on which it fails to imply ‘Numbers exist’. After presenting Yablo’s framework, our paper raises a problem with his view that has gone virtually unnoticed in …Read more
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16Robert Nola (25 June 1940 – 23 October 2022)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (1): 251-252. 2024.Robert Nola was born in Auckland, his father a Croatian fisherman who emigrated to New Zealand. Robert was the first in his New Zealand family to go to University, and after completing an undergrad...
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Creationism and the problem of indiscernible fictional objectsIn Stuart Brock & Anthony Everett (eds.), Fictional Objects, Oxford University Press. 2015.
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31A critical introduction to fictionalismBloomsbury Academic. 2018.A Critical Introduction to Fictionalism provides a clear and comprehensive understanding of an important alternative to realism. Drawing on questions from ethics, the philosophy of religion, art, mathematics, logic and science, this is a complete exploration of how fictionalism contrasts with other non-realist doctrines and motivates influential fictionalist treatments across a range of philosophical issues. Defending and criticizing influential as well as emerging fictionalist approaches, this …Read more
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288Quantum MolinismEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (3): 167-194. 2022.In this paper we consider the possibility of a Quantum Molinism : such a view applies an analogue of the Molinistic account of free will‘s compatibility with God’s foreknowledge to God’s knowledge of (supposedly) indeterministic events at a quantum level. W e ask how (and why) a providential God could care for and know about a world with this kind of indeterminacy. We consider various formulations of such a Quantum Molinism, and after rejecting a number of options arrive at one seemingly coheren…Read more
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32Fictionalism in Philosophy (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2019.There are things we routinely say that may strike us as literally false but that we are nonetheless reluctant to give up. This might be something mundane, like the way we talk about the sun setting in the west, or it could be something much deeper, like engaging in talk that is ostensibly about numbers despite believing that numbers do not literally exist. Rather than regard such behaviour as self-defeating, a "fictionalist" is someone who thinks that this kind of discourse is entirely appropria…Read more
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Realism and DialetheismIn Graham Priest, Jc Beall & Bradley P. Armour-Garb (eds.), The law of non-contradiction : new philosophical essays, Oxford University Press. 2004.
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37Non-directed postmortem sperm donation: some questionsJournal of Medical Ethics 47 (4): 261-262. 2021.In their recent ‘The ethical case for non-directed postmortem sperm donation’, Hodson and Parker outline and defend the concept of voluntary non-directed postmortem sperm donation, the idea that men should be able to register their desire to donate their sperm after death for use by strangers since this would offer a potential means of increasing the quantity and heterogeneity of donor sperm. In this response, we raise some concerns about their proposal, focusing in particular on the fact that c…Read more
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5Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob FregePhilosophical Studies (Dublin) 29 290-291. 1982.
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21William S. Hatcher. The logical foundations of mathematics. Foundations and philosophy of science and technology series. Pergamon Press, Oxford etc. 1982, x + 320 pp. - William S. Hatcher. Foundations of mathematics. W. B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, London, and Toronto, 1968, xiii + 327 pp (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 51 (2): 467-470. 1986.
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12Kit Fine. First-order modal theories I—sets. Noûs, vol. 15 , pp. 177–205. - Kit Fine. First-order modal theories. Studia logica, vol. 39 , pp. 159–202. - Kit Fine. First-order modal theories III—facts. Synthese, vol. 53 , pp. 43–122 (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 53 (4): 1262-1269. 1988.
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16Pretense and Pathology: Philosophical Fictionalism and its Applications, by Armour-Garb, Bradley and James Woodbridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. xii + 273, £22.99 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (3): 616-618. 2018.
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3Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics (review)Philosophical Studies (Dublin) 30 393-396. 1984.
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70Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures (review)Philosophical Quarterly 65 (261): 861-865. 2015.
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University of AucklandDepartment of Philosophy
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
General Philosophy of Science |