•  68
    Aristotle on the Individuation of Syllogisms
    Ancient Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Discussion of the Aristotelian syllogistic over the last sixty years has arguably centered on the question whether syllogisms are inferences or implications. But the significance of this debate at times has been taken to concern whether the syllogistic is a logic or a theory, and how it ought to be represented by modern systems. Largely missing from this discussion has been a study of the few passages in the Prior Analytics where Aristotle provides explicit guidance on how to individuate syllogi…Read more
  •  107
    A Mereological Reading of the Dictum de Omni et Nullo
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. forthcoming.
    When Aristotle introduces the perfect moods, he refers back to the dictum de omni et nullo, a semantic condition for universal affirmations and negations. There recently has been renewed interest in the question whether the dictum validates the assertoric syllogistic. I rehearse evidence that Aristotle provides a mereological semantics for universal affirmations and negations, and note that this semantics entails a nonstandard reading of the dictum, under which the dictum, in the presence of a m…Read more
  •  278
    Aristotle on Artifactual Substances
    Metaphysics 6 (1): 24-36. 2023.
    It is standardly held that Aristotle denies that artifacts are substances. There is no consensus on why this is so, and proposals include taking artifacts to lack autonomy, to be merely accidental unities, and to be impermanent. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle holds that artifacts are substances. However, where natural substances are absolutely fundamental, artifacts are merely relatively fundamental—like any substance, an artifact can ground such nonsubstances as its qualities; but artifa…Read more
  •  303
    Philosophy's Past: Cognitive Values and the History of Philosophy
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1-22. forthcoming.
    Recent authors hold that the role of historical scholarship within contemporary philosophical practice is to question current assumptions, to expose vestiges or to calibrate intuitions. On these views, historical scholarship is dispensable, since these roles can be achieved by nonhistorical methods. And the value of historical scholarship is contingent, since the need for the role depends on the presence of questionable assumptions, vestiges or comparable intuitions. In this paper I draw an anal…Read more
  •  431
    Is 'Cause' Ambiguous?
    Philosophical Studies 179 2945-71. 2022.
    Causal pluralists hold that that there is not just one determinate kind of causation. Some causal pluralists hold that ‘cause’ is ambiguous among these different kinds. For example, Hall (2004) argues that ‘cause’ is ambiguous between two causal relations, which he labels dependence and production. The view that ‘cause’ is ambiguous, however, wrongly predicts zeugmatic conjunction reduction, and wrongly predicts the behaviour of ellipsis in causal discourse. So ‘cause’ is not ambiguous. If we ar…Read more
  •  773
    Salience and metaphysical explanation
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 10771-10792. 2021.
    Metaphysical explanations, unlike many other kinds of explanation, are standardly thought to be insensitive to our epistemic situation and so are not evaluable by cognitive values such as salience. I consider a case study that challenges this view. Some properties are distributed over an extension. For example, the property of being polka-dotted red on white, when instantiated, is distributed over a surface. Similar properties have been put to work in a variety of explanatory tasks in recent met…Read more
  •  254
    Ancient
    In Michael J. Raven (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Metaphysical Grounding, . pp. 20-32. 2020.
    Is there grounding in ancient philosophy? To ask a related but different question: is grounding a useful tool for the scholar of ancient philosophy? These questions are difficult, and my goal in this paper is not so much to give definitive answers as to clarify the questions. I hope to direct the student of contemporary metaphysics towards passages where it may be fruitful to look for historical precedent. But I also hope to offer the student of ancient philosophy some guidance on when drawing o…Read more
  •  245
    This
    Ancient Philosophy Today 1 (1): 38-63. 2019.
    The expression tode ti, commonly translated as ‘a this’, plays a key role in Aristotle’s metaphysics. Drawing lightly on theories of demonstratives in contemporary linguistics, I discuss the expres...
  •  282
    Empty Negations and Existential Import in Aristotle
    Apeiron 51 (2): 201-219. 2018.
    Aristotle draws what are, by our lights, two unusual relationships between predication and existence. First, true universal affirmations carry existential import. If ‘All humans are mortal’ is true, for example, then at least one human exists. And secondly, although affirmations with empty terms in subject position are all false, empty negations are all true: if ‘Socrates’ lacks a referent, then both ‘Socrates is well’ and ‘Socrates is ill’ are false but both ‘Socrates is not well’ and ‘Socrates…Read more
  •  9
    Generality and Logical Constancy
    Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 71 (4): 753-768. 2015.
    Logical truths are paradigmatically topic-neutral. I argue that topic-neutrality is ambiguous between two conceptions. Under one conception, a truth is topic-neutral if it is characterized by its abstraction from all semantic content whatsoever; according to another conception, a truth is topic-neutral if it is abstracted from the specific identities of things. I’ll discuss the significance of this distinction for Peacocke’s criterion for logical constancy drawn in terms of a priori knowability …Read more
  •  231
    Substance and Independence in Aristotle
    In B. Schnieder, A. Steinberg & M. Hoeltje (eds.), Varieties of Dependence: Ontological Dependence, Supervenience, and Response-Dependence, Basic Philosophical Concepts Series, Philosophia Verlag. pp. 36-67. 2013.
    Individual substances are the ground of Aristotle’s ontology. Taking a liberal approach to existence, Aristotle accepts among existents entities in such categories other than substance as quality, quantity and relation; and, within each category, individuals and universals. As I will argue, individual substances are ontologically independent from all these other entities, while all other entities are ontologically dependent on individual substances. The association of substance with independence…Read more
  •  146
    Meta-conceivability
    Essays in Philosophy 13 (1): 12. 2012.
    In addition to conceiving of such imaginary scenarios as those involving philosophical zombies, we may conceive of such things being conceived. Call these higher order conceptions ‘meta-conceptions’. Sorensen (2006) holds that one can entertain a meta-conception without thereby conceiving of the embedded lower-order conception. So it seems that I can meta-conceive possibilities which I cannot conceive. If this is correct, then meta-conceptions provide a counter-example to the claim that possibil…Read more
  •  507
    Aristotle on Nonsubstantial Individuals
    Ancient Philosophy 29 (2): 289-310. 2009.
    As a first stab, call a property recurrent if it can be possessed by more than one object, and nonrecurrent if it can be possessed by at most one object. The question whether Aristotle holds that there are nonrecurrent properties has spawned a lively and ongoing debate among commentators over the last forty-five years. One source of textual evidence in the Categories, drawn on in this debate, is Aristotle’s claim that certain properties are inseparable from what they are in. Here the point of co…Read more
  •  759
    Aristotle on Ontological Dependence
    Phronesis 53 (1). 2008.
    Aristotle holds that individual substances are ontologically independent from nonsubstances and universal substances but that non-substances and universal substances are ontologically dependent on substances. There is then an asymmetry between individual substances and other kinds of beings with respect to ontological dependence. Under what could plausibly be called the standard interpretation, the ontological independence ascribed to individual substances and denied of non-substances and univer…Read more
  •  822
    Aristotle on Mathematical Truth
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (6): 1057-1076. 2012.
    Both literalism, the view that mathematical objects simply exist in the empirical world, and fictionalism, the view that mathematical objects do not exist but are rather harmless fictions, have been both ascribed to Aristotle. The ascription of literalism to Aristotle, however, commits Aristotle to the unattractive view that mathematics studies but a small fragment of the physical world; and there is evidence that Aristotle would deny the literalist position that mathematical objects are perceiv…Read more
  •  626
    Ontological Dependence and Grounding in Aristotle
    Oxford Handbooks Online in Philosophy 1. 2016.
    The relation of ontological dependence or grounding, expressed by the terminology of separation and priority in substance, plays a central role in Aristotle’s Categories, Metaphysics, De Anima and elsewhere. The article discusses three current interpretations of this terminology. These are drawn along the lines of, respectively, modal-existential ontological dependence, essential ontological dependence, and grounding or metaphysical explanation. I provide an opinionated introduction to the topic…Read more
  •  709
    Aristotle on Predication
    European Journal of Philosophy 23 (3): 793-813. 2015.
    A predicate logic typically has a heterogeneous semantic theory. Subjects and predicates have distinct semantic roles: subjects refer; predicates characterize. A sentence expresses a truth if the object to which the subject refers is correctly characterized by the predicate. Traditional term logic, by contrast, has a homogeneous theory: both subjects and predicates refer; and a sentence is true if the subject and predicate name one and the same thing. In this paper, I will examine evidence for a…Read more
  •  531
    Presentism, Truthmakers and Distributional Properties
    Synthese 191 (14): 3427-46. 2014.
    Presentists face a challenge from truthmaker theory: if you hold both that the only existing objects are presently existing and that truth supervenes on being, then you will be hard pressed to identify some existent on which a given true but traceless claim about the past supervenes. One reconciliation strategy, advocated by Cameron (2011), is to appeal to distributional properties so to serve as presently existing truthmakers for past truths. I argue that a presentist ought to deny that dist…Read more
  •  72
    Essays on Being (Review) (review)
    Journal of Hellenic Studies 130 285-86. 2010.
    This volume collects eight of Kahn’s articles from 1966 to 2004, with a 15-page introduction and a previously unpublished 12-page postscript to one article, concerning a variety of issues on Parmenides unrelated to the titular topic. Kahn’s work on the interpretation of being in Greek philosophy and literature is seminal, and it is most welcome to have these articles in one volume. It is partly because Kahn’s contribution is important, partly because the issue is thorny and partly because his th…Read more
  •  609
    Attention, Perception, and Thought in Aristotle
    Dialogue 49 (2): 199-222. 2010.
    In the first part of the paper, I’ll rehearse an argument that perceiving that we see and hear isn’t a special case of perception in Aristotle but is rather a necessary condition for any perception whatsoever: the turning of one’s attention to the affection of the sense organs. In the second part of the paper, I’ll consider the thesis that the activity of the active intellect is analogous to perceiving that we see and hear