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1827Parts: a study in ontologyOxford University Press. 1987.Although the relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, this is the first full-length study of this key concept. Showing that mereology, or the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology, Simons surveys and critiques previous theories--especially the standard extensional view--and proposes a new account that encompasses both temporal and modal considerations. Simons's revised theory not only allows him to offer fresh solutions to long-standing problems,…Read more
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1526Truth-MakersPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 44 (3): 287-321. 1984.A realist theory of truth for a class of sentences holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar, we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The core of our theory is the account of truthmaki…Read more
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1220Particulars in particular clothing: Three trope theories of substancePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (3): 553-575. 1994.
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832What’s wrong with contemporary philosophy?Topoi 25 (1-2): 63-67. 2006.Philosophy in the West divides into three parts: Analytic Philosophy (AP), Continental Philosophy (CP), and History of Philosophy (HP). But all three parts are in a bad way. AP is sceptical about the claim that philosophy can be a science, and hence is uninterested in the real world. CP is never pursued in a properly theoretical way, and its practice is tailor-made for particular political and ethical conclusions. HP is mostly developed on a regionalist basis: what is studied is determined by th…Read more
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656Plural reference and set theoryIn Barry Smith (ed.), Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, Philosophia Verlag. pp. 199--260. 1982.
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526Derrida degree: A question of honourThe Times 9 (May 9). 1992.A letter to The Times of London, May 9, 1992 protesting the Cambridge University proposal to award an honorary degree to M. Jacques Derrida.
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482Bocheński and balance: System and history in analytic philosophyStudies in East European Thought 55 (4): 281-297. 2003.Using the work of Józef Bocheski as apositive example, this paper sets out the casefor a balanced use of historical knowledge indoing analytic philosophy. Between the twoextremes of relativizing historicism, whichdenies absolute truth, and arrogant scientism,which denies any constructive role for thehistory of ideas in philosophy, lies a viamedia in which historical reflection onconcepts and their history is placed at theservice of the system of cognitive philosophy.Knowledge of the history of p…Read more
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472Truth-MakersSwiss Philosophical Preprints. 2009.During the realist revival in the early years of this century, philosophers of various persuasions were concerned to investigate the ontology of truth. That is, whether or not they viewed truth as a correspondence, they were interested in the extent to which one needed to assume the existence of entities serving some role in accounting for the truth of sentences. Certain of these entities, such as the Sätze an sich of Bolzano, the Gedanken of Frege, or the propositions of Russell and Moore, were…Read more
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407The Formalisation of Husserl’s Theory of Wholes and PartsIn Barry Smith (ed.), Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, Philosophia. pp. 111-159. 1982.
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384Moments as Truth MakersIn Werner Leinfellner (ed.), Language and Ontology, Hölder-pichler-tempsky. pp. 159-161. 1982.Russell wrote in 1918 in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism: When I speak of a fact ... I mean the kind of thing that makes a proposition true or false. If I say 'It is raining', what I say is true in a certain condition of weather and is false in other conditions of the weather. The condition of weather that makes my statement true (or false as the case may be), is what I should call a 'fact'. If I say, 'Socrates is dead', my statement will be true owing to a certain physiological occurrence wh…Read more
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318Numbers and ManifoldsIn Barry Smith (ed.), Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, Philosophia. pp. 160-197. 1982.
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317I—Peter Simons: Relations and TruthmakingAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84 (1): 199-213. 2010.The metaphysics of relations is still in its infancy. We use the idea of truthmaking to gain purchase on this metaphysics. Assuming a modest supervenience conception of truthmaking, where true relational predications require multiply dependent truthmakers, these are indispensable relations. Though some such relations are required, none are needed for internal relatedness, nor for several other kinds of relational predication. Discerning the metaphysically basic kinds of relations is fraught with…Read more
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305Real wholes, real parts: Mereology without algebraJournal of Philosophy 103 (12): 597-613. 2006.
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244Vectors and Beyond: Geometric Algebra and its Philosophical SignificanceDialectica 63 (4): 381-395. 2009.
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233Identity through time and trope bundlesTopoi 19 (2): 147-155. 2000.This paper brings together two theories that I have propounded separately elsewhere. The first is the view that concrete individuals are constituted completely by tropes, that they are trope bundles. The second and more recently developed theory is that of the two major categories of concrete individuals, continuants and occurrents, the latter are ontologically more basic than the former and that continuants are to be viewed as invariants among occurrents under equivalence relations. The latter …Read more
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229Barry Smith and His Influence On (Not Only, But Mainly My) PhilosophyCosmos + Taxis 4 (4): 38-41. 2017.Autobiographical survey of interactions between the author and Barry Smith, especially as concerns the background and influence of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy and work on the relevance of Adolf Reinach, Roman Ingarden and other Central-European thinkers to contemporary analytic philosophy.
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223Trouble Up at t’Ontological Mill: An Inconclusive DialogCosmos + Taxis 4 (4): 64-66. 2017.Grenon and Smith (2004) propose a framework for the ontology of things in space and time involving and invoking the distinction between continuants and occurrents, which has become a key element of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). The terminology of SNAP (from “snapshot:” state of a continuant at a time) and SPAN (how an occurrent develops over an interval or timespan) occurs in that paper’s title. While any commonsense ontology will have a place for both continuants and occurrents, there is much ro…Read more
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221Ramsey, Particulars, and UniversalsTheoria 57 (3): 150-161. 1991.My subject is the arguments brought by Ramsey in his paper “ Universals ” ’ against the generally held distinction between particulars and universals. This paper is provocative, suggestive, and radical, and it is humbling to reflect that its author was just 22 years old when it was published in Mind. As so often with Ramsey, the paper is superficially very easy to follow and hardly requires any introduction other than the imperative, “Read it through”, but underneath the surface are many assumpt…Read more
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214VérifacteursEtudes de Philosophie 9 104-138. 2008-2011.French translation of "Truth-Makers" (1984). A realist theory of truth for a class of sentence holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The co…Read more
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192Extended SimplesThe Monist 87 (3): 371-384. 2004.I argue that the assumptions that physically basic things are either mereologically atomic, or that they are continuous and there are no atoms, both face difficult conceptual problems. Both views tend to presuppose a largely unquestioned assumption, that things have parts corresponding to the geometric parts of the regions they occupy. To avoid these problems I propose a third view, that physically simple things occupy a finite volume without themselves having parts. This view is examined enough…Read more
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181Higher-order quantification and ontological commitmentDialectica 51 (4). 1997.George Boolos's employment of plurals to give an ontologically innocent interpretation of monadic higher‐order quantification continues and extends a minority tradition in thinking about quantification and ontological commitment. An especially prominent member of that tradition is Stanislaw Leśniewski, and shall first draw attention to this work and its relation to that of Boolos. Secondly I shall stand up briefly for plurals as logically respectable expressions, while noting their limitations i…Read more
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164Continuants and occurrents, IAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 74 (1). 2000.[Peter Simons] Commonsense ontology contains both continuants and occurrents, but are continuants necessary? I argue that they are neither occurrents nor easily replaceable by them. The worst problem for continuants is the question in virtue of what a given continuant exists at a given time. For such truthmakers we must have recourse to occurrents, those vital to the continuant at that time. Continuants are, like abstract objects, invariants under equivalences over occurrents. But they are not a…Read more
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161The universeRatio 16 (3). 2003.It is often said by philosophers that the term ‘the universe’ is illegitimate, whether because the notion of ‘all things’ is incoherent, or inconsistent, or cannot even be meaningfully expressed. The reasons may be drawn from metaphysics, or logic, or the philosophy of language, or the philosophy of mathematics. In this essay I argue that the term is legitimate, withstanding all criticisms, and that there is a single best meaning for it, which is that it is a semantically plural term standing eq…Read more
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153Farewell to substance: A differentiated leave-takingRatio 11 (3). 1998.For most of the history of metaphysics, the subject has been dominated by the concept of substance. There is an everyday commonsense notion of substance which is perfectly harmless and which I shall defend against attempts to remove it or revise it away. But I deny that substance has to be construed as a primitive even in everyday terms. Borrowing Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, I press the legitimate claims of revisionary metaphysics and argue that there …Read more
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144Bolzano on CollectionsGrazer Philosophische Studien 53 (1): 87-108. 1997.Bolzano's theory of collections (Inbegriffe) has usually been taken as a rudimentary set theory. More recently, Frank Krickel has claimed it is a mereology. I find both interpretations wanting. Bolzano's theory is, as I show, extremely broad in scope; it is in fact a general theory of collective entities, including the concrete wholes of mereology, classes-as-many, and many empirical collections. By extending Bolzano's ideas to embrace the three factors of kind, components and mode of combinatio…Read more
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135The Four Phases of PhilosophyThe Monist 83 (1): 68-88. 2000.From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day, philosophy in Austria has progressed through four phases. Theparticularities of the first three of these phases have prompted a number of commentators rightly to distinguish a characteristic Austrian, as distinct from German, way of doing philosophy. The main figure of the second phase was Franz Brentano, and his distinctive theory of the four-phase cycle of philosophical development is outlined, and critically compared to other vi…Read more
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134Logic and Common NounsAnalysis 38 (4). 1978.Common nouns enter into modern predicate logic only as parts of predicates, While in lesniewski's 'ontology' they are classified together with proper nouns as 'names'. A system of natural deduction rules is presented which sharply separates proper from common nouns, Within which lesniewski's calculus is contained as a logic solely of common nouns, Together with copula, Identity predicate, Definite article, And quantifiers 'any', 'every', 'some' and 'no'. The fragment developed is closer to the n…Read more
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