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16Mereological endurantism and being a whole at a time: reply to CostaInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9): 2874-2883. 2024.Damiano Costa has recently offered a novel mereological definition of endurantism based on the idea that for an object to be wholly present at a time is for it to be a whole at that time. In this paper, I argue that Costa’s is not a definition of endurantism, since the idea that every object is a whole at every time it exists can be accepted by endurantists and perdurantists alike.
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58Fragmentalism: Putting All the Pieces TogetherAustralasian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.According to perspectival realism, reality is (at least partially) constituted by “purely perspectival” facts, that is, facts that appear to describe reality only from a given “perspective”. Fragmentalism is a form of perspectival realism that maintains both that no perspective is privileged and that perspectival facts constitute reality absolutely. Assuming that reality is sufficiently variegated, fragmentalism entails that reality is absolutely constituted by incompatible facts. Given that inc…Read more
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58Neppur si muove! Reply to Correia and RosenkranzAnalysis 83 (3): 493-499. 2023.Correia and Rosenkranz have recently argued in Analysis (2020, 2022) that tense realism (understood as the view that there is a real difference between past, present and future) entails realism about temporal passage (and thus the idea that there is some change in which time is the present time). I argue that their argument is either unsound or question-begging.
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67Somewhere Together: Location, Parsimony and MultilocationErkenntnis 88 (2): 675-691. 2021.Most of the theories of location on the market appear to be ideologically parsimonious at least in the sense that they take as primitive just one locative notion and define all the other locative notions in terms of it. Recently, however, the possibility of some exotic metaphysical scenarios involving gunky mixtures and extended simple regions of space has been argued to pose a significant threat to parsimonious theories of locations. The aim of this paper is to show that a theory taking as prim…Read more
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42Don’t Stop Believing: Fragmentalism and the Problem of Tensed Belief ExplosionPhilosophical Quarterly 74 (3): 1007-1015. 2024.Giovanni Merlo has argued that a currently popular way to interpret Kit Fine's fragmentalism about tensed facts (which he calls ‘unstructured fragmentalism’) is threatened by the problem of ‘tensed belief explosion’. I argue that such an explosion of belief poses no problem to unstructured fragmentalists.
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317How the Block GrowsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 59 (4): 377-389. 2022.I argue that the growing-block theory of time and truthmaker maximalism jointly entail that some truthmakers undergo mereological change as time passes. Central to my argument is a grounding-based account of what I call the “purely incremental” nature of the growing-block theory of time. As I will show, the argument presented in this paper suggests that growing-block theorists endorsing truthmaker maximalism have reasons to take composition to be restricted and the “block” of reality to literall…Read more
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53Universalism doesn’t entail extensionalismAnalysis 82 (2): 246-255. 2022.In the literature on mereology it is often accepted that mereological universalism entails extensionalism. More precisely, many accept that, if parthood is assumed to be a partial order, the thesis that every plurality of entities has a mereological fusion entails the thesis that different composite entities have different proper parts. Central to this idea is the principle known as ‘Weak Supplementation’ which many take to impose an important constraint on the relation of proper parthood. In th…Read more
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539Open future, supervaluationism and the growing-block theory: a stage-theoretical accountSynthese 199 (5-6): 14249-14266. 2021.I present a ‘stage-theoretical’ interpretation of the supervaluationist semantics for the growing-block theory of time according to which the ‘nodes’ on the branching tree of historical possibilities are taken to be possible stages of the growth of the growing-block. As I will argue, the resulting interpretation (i) is very intuitive, (ii) can easily ward off an objection to supervaluationist treatments of the growing-block theory presented by Fabrice Correia and Sven Rosenkranz, and (iii) is al…Read more
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100Composition as Identity and the Innocence of MereologyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (1): 128-143. 2021.According to the thesis known as ‘Composition as Identity’ (‘CAI’), every entity is identical to the parts it fuses. Many authors in the literature acknowledge that, in spite of its controversial character, one attractive virtue of CAI is its apparent ability to give a straightforward account of the innocence of mereology. In this paper I will present a simple argument according to which CAI entails that no composite entity can be said to be ontologically innocent in the relevant sense. After ha…Read more
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459Grounds, Roots and AbyssesThought: A Journal of Philosophy 5 (1): 41-52. 2016.The aim of this study is to address the “Grounding Grounding Problem,” that is, the question as to what, if anything, grounds facts about grounding. I aim to show that, if a seemingly plausible principle of modal recombination between fundamental facts and the principle customarily called “Entailment” are assumed, it is possible to prove not only that grounding facts featuring fundamental, contingent grounds are derivative but also that either they are partially grounded in the grounds they feat…Read more
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477Two notions of fusion and the landscape of extensionalityPhilosophical Studies 178 (10): 3443-3463. 2021.There are two main ways in which the notion of mereological fusion is usually defined in the current literature in mereology which have been labelled ‘Leśniewski fusion’ and ‘Goodman fusion’. It is well-known that, with Minimal Mereology as the background theory, every Leśniewski fusion also qualifies as a Goodman fusion. However, the converse does not hold unless stronger mereological principles are assumed. In this paper I will discuss how the gap between the two notions can be filled, focussi…Read more
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252There are no fundamental factsAnalysis 81 (1): 32-39. 2021.I present an argument proving that there are no fundamental facts, which is similar to an argument recently presented by Mark Jago for truthmaker maximalism. I suggest that this argument gives us at least some prima facie, defeasible reason to believe that there are no fundamental facts.
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30Against 'Against "Against Vague Existence"'Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 11 278-288. 2018.Alessandro Torza argues that Ted Sider’s Lewisian argument against vague existence is insufficient to rule out the possibility of what he calls ‘super-vague existence’, that is the idea that existence is higher-order vague, for all orders. In this chapter it is argued that the possibility of super-vague existence is ineffective against the conclusion of Sider’s argument since super-vague existence cannot be consistently claimed to be a kind of linguistic vagueness. Torza’s idea of super-vague ex…Read more
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712Composition, identity and plural ontologySynthese 198 (10): 9193-9210. 2020.According to ‘Strong Composition as Identity’, if an entity is composed of a plurality of entities, it is identical to them. As it has been argued in the literature, SCAI appears to give rise to some serious problems which seem to suggest that SCAI-theorists should take their plural quantifier to be governed by some ‘weak’ plural comprehension principle and, thus, ‘exclude’ some kinds of pluralities from their plural ontology. The aim of this paper is to argue that, contrary to what may appear a…Read more
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40Correction to: On atomic composition as identitySynthese 198 (Suppl 18): 4543-4543. 2020.and in Sect. 5 should be reformulated as follows.
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384How to Make a Gunky SpritzThought: A Journal of Philosophy 8 (4): 250-259. 2019.In its simplest form, a Spritz is an aperitif made with (sparkling) water and (white) wine. A ‘gunky Spritz’, as I will call it, is a Spritz in which the water and the wine are mixed through and through, so that every proper part of the Spritz has a proper part containing both water and wine. In the literature on the notion of location the possibility of mixtures like a gunky Spritz has been thought of as either threatening seemingly intuitive locative principles, or as requiring the position of…Read more
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776On atomic composition as identitySynthese 198 (Suppl 18): 4519-4542. 2019.In this paper I address two important objections to the theory called ‘ Composition as Identity’ : the ‘wall-bricks-and-atoms problem’, and the claim that CAI entails mereological nihilism. I aim to argue that the best version of CAI capable of addressing both problems is the theory I will call ‘Atomic Composition as Identity’ which consists in taking the plural quantifier to range only over proper pluralities of mereological atoms and every non-atomic entity to be identical to the plurality of …Read more
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504No ground for doomsdayInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (9-10): 1136-1156. 2019.ABSTRACTThe ability of providing an adequate supervenience base for tensed truths may seem to be one of the main theoretical advantages of both the growing-block and the moving-spotlight theory of time over presentism. However, in this paper I will argue that some propositions appear to be as problematic for growing-block theorists as past-directed propositions are for presentists, namely propositions stating that nothing will be the case in the future. Furthermore, I will show that the moving-s…Read more
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910Fine’s Trilemma and the Reality of Tensed FactsThought: A Journal of Philosophy 7 (3): 209-217. 2018.Fine (2005, 2006) has presented a ‘trilemma’ concerning the tense-realist idea that reality is constituted by tensed facts. According to Fine, there are only three ways out of the trilemma, consisting in what he takes to be the three main families of tense-realism: ‘presentism’, ‘(external) relativism’, and ‘fragmentalism’. Importantly, although Fine characterises tense-realism as the thesis that reality is constituted (at least in part) by tensed facts, he explicitly claims that tense realists …Read more
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731Against 'Against 'Against Vague Existence''In Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 11, Oxford University Press. pp. 278-287. 2018.Alessandro Torza argues that Ted Sider’s Lewisian argument against vague existence is insufficient to rule out the possibility of what he calls ‘super-vague existence’, that is the idea that existence is higher-order vague, for all orders. In this chapter it is argued that the possibility of super-vague existence is ineffective against the conclusion of Sider’s argument since super-vague existence cannot be consistently claimed to be a kind of linguistic vagueness. Torza’s idea of super-vague ex…Read more
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659Fine’s McTaggart: ReloadedManuscrito: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 40 (1): 209-239. 2017.In this paper I will present three arguments (based on the notions of constitution, metaphysical reality, and truth, respectively) with the aim of shedding some new light on the structure of Fine’s (2005, 2006) ‘McTaggartian’ arguments against the reality of tense. Along the way, I will also (i) draw a novel map of the main realist positions about tense, (ii) unearth a previously unnoticed but potentially interesting form of external relativism (which I will label ‘hyper-presentism’) and (iii) s…Read more
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145Escape from epistemic islandAnalysis 72 (3): 498-506. 2012.It is argued that there are sentences and pairs of sentences, belonging to the family of ‘truth-tellers’ and ‘no–no sentences’, such that it is possible to prove (and, hence come to know) their truth-value. It is, therefore, concluded that the kind of pathological feature affecting some truth-tellers and no–no sentences is not due to the specific kind of circularity characterizing their truth-conditions and must, thus, depend on some other reason
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1100How to Change the Past in One-Dimensional TimePacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (1): 1-11. 2015.The possibility of changing the past by means of time-travel appears to depend on the possibility of distinguishing the past as it is ‘before’ and ‘after’ the time-travel. So far, all the metaphysical models that have been proposed to account for the possibility of past-changing time-travels operate this distinction by conceiving of time as multi-dimensional, and thus by significantly inflating our metaphysics of time. The aim of this article is to argue that there is an intuitive sense in which…Read more
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124Fatalism and the necessity of the present: Reply to CampbellAnalysis 70 (1): 76-78. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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481Indeterminate actuality and the open futureAnalysis 73 (2): 248-260. 2013.The aim of this article is to propose a novel supervaluationist theory of ‘actually’ in the open future. First, I will argue that any adequate theory of actuality in a branching setting must comply with three main desiderata. Second, I will prove that none of the actuality operators that have been proposed in the literature is up to the task. Finally, I will propose a novel theory of actuality in the open future combining one of the existing definitions of the actuality operator with a new defin…Read more
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656A Sudden Collapse to NihilismPhilosophical Quarterly 68 (271): 370-375. 2018.According to Composition is Identity, a whole is literally identical to the plurality of its parts. According to Mereological Nihilism, nothing has proper parts. In this note, it is argued that Composition is Identity can be shown to entail Mereological Nihilism in a much more simple and direct way than the one recently proposed by Claudio Calosi.
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146Free will and the necessity of the presentAnalysis 69 (1): 63-69. 2009.Joseph Keim Campbell has recently criticized Peter van Inwagen's Third Argument against compatibilism for its reliance on the existence of a remote past. In response, Anthony Brueckner has offered a new version of the Third Argument showing that determinism and free will are incompatible for all times t relative to which there is a past . In this paper I argue that although Brueckner's retooled argument fails to prove anything in favour of incompatibilism, its conclusion can be exploited to prov…Read more
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705Parts Ground the Whole and Are Identical to ItAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (3): 489-498. 2016.What is the relation between parts taken together and the whole that they compose? The recent literature appears to be dominated by two different answers to this question, which are normally thought of as being incompatible. According to the first, parts taken together are identical to the whole that they compose. According to the second, the whole is grounded in its parts. The aim of this paper is to make some theoretical room for the view according to which parts ground the whole they compose …Read more
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501Branching Time, Actuality and the Puzzle of Retrospective DeterminacyThought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (1): 16-25. 2012.The supervaluationist approach to branching time (‘SBT-theory’) appears to be threatened by the puzzle of retrospective determinacy: if yesterday I uttered the sentence ‘It will be sunny tomorrow’ and only in some worlds overlapping at the context of utterance it is sunny the next day, my utterance is to be assessed as neither true nor false even if today is indeed a sunny day. John MacFarlane (“Truth in the Garden of Forking Paths” 81) has recently criticized a promising solution to this puzzle…Read more
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739Grounding, Contingency and TransitivityRatio 30 (1): 1-14. 2017.Grounding contingentism is the doctrine according to which grounds are not guaranteed to necessitate what they ground. In this paper I will argue that the most plausible version of contingentism is incompatible with the idea that the grounding relation is transitive, unless either ‘priority monism’ or ‘contrastivism’ are assumed.
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Grounding |
Time |
Mereology |
Areas of Interest
1 more
Mereology |
Composition as Identity |
McTaggart's Argument |
The Passage of Time, Misc |
Fundamentality |
Truthmakers |