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Machine generated contents note: Grounding: an opinionated introduction / Fabrice Correia and Benjamin Schnieder; 1. Guide to ground / Kit Fine; 2. Scepticism about grounding / Chris Daly; 3. A clarification and defense of the notion of grounding / Paul Audi; 4. Grounding, transitivity, and contrastivity / Jonathan Schaffer; 5. Violations of the principle of sufficient reason (in Leibniz and Spinoza) / Michael Della Rocca; 6. Requirements on reality / Robbie Williams; 7. Varieties of ontological dependence / Kathrin Koslicki; 8. Asymmetrical dependence in individuation / E.J. Lowe; 9. Simple metaphysics and 'ontological dependence' / Jody Azzouni; 10. Truthmakers and dependence / David Liggins; 11. Expressivism about truth-making (review)In Fabrice Correia & Benjamin Schnieder (eds.), Metaphysical grounding: understanding the structure of reality, Cambridge University Press. 2012.
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17Autoaesthetics: Strategies of the Self after NietzscheHumanities Press. 1992.Combining a Nietzschean framework with close attention to a wide range of carefully selected literary texts, Autoaesthetics presents a case for Nietzche's centrality in contemporary aesthetic and literary studies. Based on Nietzche's own practice of combining poetry and philosophy by transcending ressentiment and approaching life to its fullest, Autoaesthetics engages in a heated but intricate debate through and with Nietzche's re-articulation of the self as a strategic (and impossible) aestheti…Read more
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1364Monism and Material ConstitutionPacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (1): 189-204. 2014.Are the sculpture and the mass of gold which permanently makes it up one object or two? In this article, we argue that the monist, who answers ‘one object’, cannot accommodate the asymmetry of material constitution. To say ‘the mass of gold materially constitutes the sculpture, whereas the sculpture does not materially constitute the mass of gold’, the monist must treat ‘materially constitutes’ as an Abelardian predicate, whose denotation is sensitive to the linguistic context in which it appear…Read more
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6246Being Positive About Negative FactsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (1): 117-138. 2012.Negative facts get a bad press. One reason for this is that it is not clear what negative facts are. We provide a theory of negative facts on which they are no stranger than positive atomic facts. We show that none of the usual arguments hold water against this account. Negative facts exist in the usual sense of existence and conform to an acceptable Eleatic principle. Furthermore, there are good reasons to want them around, including their roles in causation, chance-making and truth-making, and…Read more
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1114Irony and the dogma of force and senseAnalysis 75 (1): 9-16. 2015.Frege’s distinction between force and sense is a central pillar of modern thinking about meaning. This is the idea that a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One is the proposition P that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it. The other is S’s illocutionary force. The force/sense distinction is associated with another thesis, the embedding principle, that implies that the only content that embeds in compound sentences is propositional conte…Read more
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119Global ExpressivismIn Ricki Bliss & James Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics, Routledge. pp. 270-283. 2020.In this chapter I consider the prospects of globalizing expressivism. Expressivism is a position in the philosophy of language that questions the central role of representation in a theory of meaning or linguistic function. An expressivist about a domain D of discourse proposes that utterances of sentences in D should not be seen, at the level of analysis as representing how things are, but as expression of non-representational states. So, in the domain of value-utterances, the standard idea is …Read more
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515Cognitive Expressivism, Faultless Disagreement, and Absolute but Non-Objective TruthProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110 (2): 183-199. 2010.I offer a new theory of faultless disagreement, according to which truth is absolute (non-relative) but can still be non-objective. What's relative is truth-aptness: a sentence like ‘Vegemite is tasty’ (V) can be truth-accessible and bivalent in one context but not in another. Within a context in which V fails to be bivalent, we can affirm that there is no issue of truth or falsity about V, still disputants, affirming and denying V, were not at fault, since, in their context of assertion V was b…Read more
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696Material Objects and Essential Bundle TheoryPhilosophical Studies 175 (12): 2969-2986. 2018.In this paper we present a new metaphysical theory of material objects. On our theory, objects are bundles of property instances, where those properties give the nature or essence of that object. We call the theory essential bundle theory. Property possession is not analysed as bundle-membership, as in traditional bundle theories, since accidental properties are not included in the object’s bundle. We have a different story to tell about accidental property possession. This move reaps many benef…Read more
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2Freedom from Social SciencePhilosophie Et Culture: Actes du XVIIe Congrès Mondial de Philosophie 2 549-553. 1988.
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1The Mirror and the DaggerIn Steve Martinot (ed.), Maps and mirrors: topologies of art and politics, Northwestern University Press. pp. 83. 2001.
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2Leaving Things to Take their Chances: Cause and Disposition Grounded in ChanceIn Toby Handfield (ed.), Dispositions and causes, Clarendon Press ;. pp. 100-126. 2009.
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578There is a wide-spread belief amongst theorists of mind and language. This is that in order to understand the relation between language, thought, and reality we need a theory of meaning and content, that is, a normative, formal science of meaning, which is an extension and theoretical deepening of folk ideas about meaning. This book argues that this is false, offering an alternative idea: The form of a theory that illuminates the relation of language, thought, and reality is a theory of language…Read more
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1707Semantics without the distinction between sense and forceIn Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.), John Searle's Philosophy of Language: Force, Meaning and Mind, Cambridge University Press. pp. 190-210. 2007.At the heart of semantics in the 20th century is Frege’s distinction between sense and force. This is the idea that the content of a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One part, the sense, is the proposition that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it as its semantic interpretation. The second component is S’s illocutionary force. Illocutionary forces correspond to the three basic kinds of sentential speech acts: assertions, orders, and que…Read more
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103Renewing meaning: a speech-act theoretic approachClarendon Press. 2004.This book develops an alternative approach to sentence- and word-meaning, which I dub the speech-act theoretic approach, or STA. Instead of employing the syntactic and semantic forms of modern logic–principally, quantification theory–to construct semantic theories, STA employs speech-act structures. The structures it employs are those postulated by a novel theory of speech-acts. STA develops a compositional semantics in which surface grammar is integrated with semantic interpretation in a way no…Read more
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101Troubles with Horgan and Timmons' nondescriptivist cognitivismGrazer Philosophische Studien 63 (1): 235-255. 2002.Emotivist, or non-descriptivist metaethical theories hold that value-statements do not function by describing special value-facts, but are the mere expressions of naturalistically describable motivational states of (valuing) agents. Non-descriptivism has typically been combined with the claim that value-statements are non-cognitive: they are not the manifestations of genuine belief states. However, all the linguistic, logical and phenomenological evidence indicates that value-statements are cogn…Read more
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76The consequent-entailment problem foreven ifLinguistics and Philosophy 17 (3). 1994.A comprehensive theory ofeven if needs to account for consequent ‘entailing’even ifs and in particular those of theif-focused variety. This is where the theory ofeven if ceases to be neutral between conditional theories. I have argued thatif-focusedeven ifs,especially if andonly if can only be accounted for through the suppositional theory ofif. Furthermore, a particular interpretation of this theory — the conditional assertion theory — is needed to account foronly if and a type of metalinguisti…Read more
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95E-type pronouns, DRT, dynamic semantics and the quantifier/variable-binding modelLinguistics and Philosophy 20 (2): 195-228. 1997.
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