•  746
    What’s Eleatic about the Eleatic Principle?
    Archai: Revista de Estudos Sobre as Origens Do Pensamento Ocidental 31 (3): 1-37. 2021.
    In contemporary metaphysics, the Eleatic Principle (EP) is a causal criterion for reality. Articulating the EP with precision is notoriously difficult. The criterion purportedly originates in Plato’s Sophist, when the Eleatic Visitor articulates the EP at 247d-e in the famous Battle of the Gods and the Giants. There, the Visitor proposes modifying the ontologies of both the Giants (who are materialists) and the Gods (who are friends of the many forms), using a version of the EP according to whic…Read more
  •  701
    At Varro LL VI.56 and SE M 8.275-276, we find reports of the Stoic view that children and articulate non-rational animals such as parrots cannot genuinely speak. Absent from these testimonia is the peculiar case of the superficiality of the actor’s speech, which appears in one edition of the unstable text of PHerc 307.9 containing fragments of Chrysippus’ Logical Investigations. Commentators who include this edition of the text in their discussions of the Stoic theory of speech do not offer a un…Read more
  •  611
    What the forms are not: Plato on conceptualism in Parmenides 132b–c
    Philosophical Studies 177 (2): 353-368. 2020.
    Conceptualism—the view that universals are mental entities without an external, independent, or substantial reality—has enjoyed popularity at various points throughout the history of philosophy. While Plato’s Theory of Forms is not a conceptualist theory of universals, we find at Parmenides 132b–c the startling conceptualist suggestion from a young Socrates that each Form might be a noēma, or a mental entity. This suggestion and Parmenides’ cryptic objections to it have been overshadowed by thei…Read more
  •  72
    Parmenides' Grand Deduction: A Logical Reconstruction of the Way of Truth by Michael V. Wedin (review)
    with Matt Evans
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 53 (4): 775-776. 2015.
    Over the past few decades there has been a rebellion brewing in the world of Parmenides scholarship. Most of the things you probably think you know about the man have come under serious and sustained attack. No longer is it safe to accept on trust the view—which G. E. L. Owen so forcefully defended in his 1960 paper “Eleatic Questions”—that according to Parmenides there exists only one thing, ungenerated, indestructible, unchanging, indivisible, and spherical. Nor is it safe to assume that he ha…Read more