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38Metaphysics: East and West (edited book)Springer Nature. 2024.The basic concepts we use to frame metaphysical discussions – our tools of metaphysics – profoundly influence how those discussions proceed. Much recent work in anglophone metaphysics has centred on a set of hyperintensional such tools: grounding, dependence, fundamentality, and essence. This topical collection will provide new perspectives on these debates by bringing them into contact with Asian metaphysical traditions.
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18This is metaphysics: an introductionWiley-Blackwell. 2020.A lot of people want to know what makes a life worth living. Some people think that a person's life is worth living if and only if that person experiences a greater amount of pleasure than pain throughout the course of her life, and that a life is better or worse to the extent that the balance of pleasure over pain is higher or lower. But I think that the theory that a person's life is worth living if and only if that person experiences throughout her life a greater amount of pleasure than pain,…Read more
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25Me and My Imaginary Friend: Critical Study of Virtual Subjects, Fugitive SelvesAnalysis 82 (3): 526-536. 2022.Jonardon Ganeri’s recent book – henceforth, ‘Virtual Subjects’ – is an intriguing introduction to some aspects of the philosophical thought of Fernando Pessoa
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32Author meets critics: Matti Eklund’s choosing normative conceptsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (5): 475-488. 2020.
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29A Reply to Andrew BrennerPhilosophy East and West 70 (2): 557-565. 2020.In "Abhidharma Metaphysics and the Two Truths", I argued that a version of ontological pluralism—the view that there are different modes of being—is a philosophically satisfactory account of the doctrine of two truths as found in Abhidharma metaphysics, and that it is superior to accounts in the secondary literature.1 According to my account, the doctrine of two truths is best construed as a view that distinguishes between conventional and ultimate reality, the former of which is enjoyed by pers…Read more
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65Abhidharma Metaphysics and the Two TruthsPhilosophy East and West 69 (2): 439-463. 2019.The distinction between "the two truths" was initially developed to resolve seeming contradictions in the Buddha's teachings.1 The Buddha teaches that persons should act compassionately, that persons will be reincarnated, and that persons do not exist. The first two lessons seem inconsistent with the third. Consistency could be restored by distinguishing kinds of truth: the first and second lessons are conventionally true, but it is conventionally but not ultimately true that persons exist.2In a…Read more
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411Modal Realism with OverlapAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (1): 137-152. 2004.In this paper, I formulate, elucidate, and defend a version of modal realism with overlap, the view that objects are literally present at more than one possible world. The version that I defend has several interesting features: (i) it is committed to an ontological distinction between regions of spacetime and material objects; (ii) it is committed to compositional pluralism, which is the doctrine that there is more than one fundamental part-whole relation; and (iii) it is the modal analogue of e…Read more
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303The principle of sufficient reason and necessitarianismAnalysis 79 (2): 230-236. 2019.Peter van Inwagen presented a powerful argument against the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which I henceforth abbreviate as ‘PSR’. For decades, the consensus was that this argument successfully refuted PSR. However, now a growing consensus holds that van Inwagen’s argument is fatally flawed, at least when ‘sufficient reason’ is understood in terms of ground, for on this understanding, an ineliminable premiss of van Inwagen’s argument is demonstrably false and cannot be repaired. I will argue th…Read more
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34Freedom and idealism in Mary Whiton CalkinsBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (3): 573-592. 2019.This paper explores Calkins’ absolute idealism and its ramifications for libertarian free will. Calkins’ metaphysics is a version of absolute idealism, according to which the absolute is a person who has everything else as either a part or an aspect. Three different arguments for the conclusion that Calkins’ metaphysics is incompatible with libertarian freewill are formulated and critically assessed. Finally, I assess the extent to which these arguments are independent of each other.
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98Teleological Suspensions In Fear and TremblingPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (2): 425-451. 2018.I focus here on the teleological suspension of the ethical as it appears in Fear and Trembling. A common reading of Fear and Trembling is that it explores whether there are religious reasons for action that settle that one must do an action even when all the moral reasons for action tell against doing it. This interpretation has been contested. But I defend it by showing how the explicit teleological suspension of the ethical mirrors implicit teleological suspensions of the epistemological and p…Read more
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93Hare, Caspar. On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. 144. $30.95 (review)Ethics 122 (2): 403-410. 2012.
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128Normative Accounts of FundamentalityPhilosophical Issues 27 (1): 167-183. 2017.I describe a number of views in which metaphysical fundamentality is accounted for in normative terms. After describing many different ways this key idea could be developed, I turn to developing the idea in one specific way. After all, the more detailed the proposal, the easier it is to assess whether it works. The rough idea is that what it is for a property to be fundamental is for it to be prima facie obligatory to theorize in terms of that property.
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85Existence: Essays in OntologyAnalysis 78 (1): 150-159. 2018.© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] wonderful collection of most of van Inwagen’s recent essays on topics in fundamental ontology is certainly to be welcomed.1 Many of the essays are focused on articulating and arguing for van Inwagen’s preferred meta-ontology, which he calls neo-Quineanism. In addition to these essays, Existence also contains essays on the el…Read more
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46An object is a simple if and only if it has no proper parts. An object is gunk if and only if every proper part of that object itself has a proper part. In my dissertation, I address the following questions. The concepts of simples and gunk presuppose the concept of parthood. What is the status of this concept? his question itself divides into the following: does the concept of parthood have universal applicability, so that, just as every object is self-identical, every object has parts? Finally…Read more
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102Trenton Merricks' Truth and Ontology (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (1): 203-211. 2011.This is my contribution to an author-meets-critics session on Truth and Ontology.
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37Review of D.M. Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (8). 2005.
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68The Fragmentation of BeingOxford University Press. 2017.Kris McDaniel argues that there are different ways in which things exist. For instance, past things don't exist in the same way as present things. Numbers don't exist in the same way as physical objects; nor do holes, which are real, but less real than what they are in. McDaniel's theory of being illuminates a wide range of metaphysical topics.
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288No paradox of multi-locationAnalysis 63 (4): 309-311. 2003.This is a defense of endurantism against an alleged paradox.
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264Extended simples and qualitative heterogeneityPhilosophical Quarterly 59 (235): 325-331. 2009.The problem of qualitative heterogeneity is to explain how an extended simple can enjoy qualitative variation across its spatial or temporal axes, given that it lacks both spatial and temporal parts. I discuss how friends of extended simples should address the problem of qualitative heterogeneity. I present a series of arguments designed to show that rather than appealing to fundamental distributional properties one should appeal to tiny and short-lived tropes. Along the way, issues relevant to …Read more
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253Composition as Identity Does Not Entail UniversalismErkenntnis 73 (1): 97-100. 2010.A short paper proving what the title says.
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363Against composition as identityAnalysis 68 (2): 128-133. 2008.I argue that composition as identity is incompatible with the possibility of emergent properties (as characterized in the paper) and so should be rejected.
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280Structure-makingAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (2): 251-274. 2009.Friends of states of affairs and structural universals appeal to a relation, structure-making, that is allegedly a kind of composition relation: structure-making ?builds? facts out of particulars and universals, and ?builds? structural universals out of unstructured universals. D. M. Armstrong, an eminent champion of structures, endorses two interesting theses concerning composition. First, that structure-making is a composition relation. Second, that it is not the only (fundamental) composition…Read more
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122John M. E. MctaggartStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2010.This is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy comprehensive article on J.M.E. MacTaggart, with special focus on his methodology for philosophy, his metaphysical system, and his ethics.
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411Degrees of BeingPhilosophers' Imprint 13. 2013.Let us agree that everything that there is exists, and that to be, to be real, and to exist are one and the same. Does everything that there is exist to the same degree? Or do some things exist more than others? Are there gradations of being? I argue that some entities exist more than others. Moreover, many of the notions in play in contemporary metaphysical discourse, such as fundamentality, perfect naturalness, and grounding ought to be cashed out in terms of degree of existence
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357A Return to the Analogy of BeingPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (3). 2010.Recently, I’ve championed the doctrine that fundamentally different sorts of things exist in fundamentally different ways.1 On this view, what it is for an entity to be can differ across ontological categories.2 Although historically this doctrine was very popular, and several important challenges to this doctrine have been dealt with, I suspect that contemporary metaphysicians will continue to treat this view with suspicion until it is made clearer when one is warranted in positing different mo…Read more
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Syracuse UniversityProfessor
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University of Notre DameDepartment of PhilosophyWilliam J. and Dorothy K. O'Neill Professor of Philosophy
Syracuse, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
20th Century Philosophy |