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482Essential vs. Accidental PropertiesStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2013.The distinction between essential versus accidental properties has been characterized in various ways, but it is currently most commonly understood in modal terms: an essential property of an object is a property that it must have, while an accidental property of an object is one that it happens to have but that it could lack. Let’s call this the basic modal characterization, where a modal characterization of a notion is one that explains the notion in terms of necessity/possibility. In the char…Read more
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74Modal ParadoxIn Jonathan Berg (ed.), Naming, Necessity and More: Explorations in the Philosophical Work of Saul Kripke, Palgrave. pp. 54-80. 2014.
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Review of Laurence BonJour's In Defense of Pure Reason (Cambridge UP 1998) (review)European Journal of Philosophy 8 (1): 130-133. 2000.
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78ReferenceIn Gillian Russell Delia Graff Fara (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language, Routledge. pp. 189-198. 2012.
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141Everything but the kitchen sink: how (not) to give a plenitudinarian solution to the paradox of flexible origin essentialismPhilosophical Studies 179 (1): 133-161. 2021.I explore options for a plenitudinarian solution to the Paradox of Flexible Origin Essentialism, taking as my unlikely starting point the views of Sarah-Jane Leslie, who holds that if plenitudinarianism is true, then there is in fact no paradox to be solved, only the illusion of one. The first three sections are expository: Sect. 1 on plenitudinarianism, Sect. 2 on the paradox, and Sect. 3 on Leslie’s views about how plenitudinarianism bears on the paradox. In Sect. 4, I reject the contention th…Read more
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257Some Highs and Lows of Hylomorphism: On a Paradox about Property AbstractionPhilosophical Studies 177 (6): 1549-1563. 2020.We defend hylomorphism against Maegan Fairchild’s purported proof of its inconsistency. We provide a deduction of a contradiction from SH+, which is the combination of “simple hylomorphism” and an innocuous premise. We show that the deduction, reminiscent of Russell’s Paradox, is proof-theoretically valid in classical higher-order logic and invokes an impredicatively defined property. We provide a proof that SH+ is nevertheless consistent in a free higher-order logic. It is shown that the unrest…Read more
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244Possibilities and the arguments for origin essentialismMind 107 (428): 729-750. 1998.In this paper, I examine the case that has been made for origin essentialism and find it wanting. I focus on the arguments of Nathan Salmon and Graeme Forbes. Like most origin essentialists, Salmon and Forbes have been concerned to respect the intuition that slight variation in the origin of an artifact or organism is possible. But, I argue, both of their arguments fail to respect this intuition. Salmon's argument depends on a sufficiency principle for cross-world identity, which should be rejec…Read more
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173Internalism, (Super)fragile Reasons, and the Conditional FallacyPhilosophical Papers 32 (2): 171-184. 2003.Abstract David Sobel (2001) objects to Bernard Williams's internalism, the view that an agent has a reason to perform an action only if she has some motive that will be served by performing that action. Sobel is an unusual challenger in that he endorses neo-Humean subjectivism, ?the view that it is the agent's subjective motivational set that makes it the case that an agent does or does not have a reason to φ? (219). Sobel's objection in fact arises from this very commitment. Internalism, he say…Read more
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205Does the new route reach its destination?Mind 115 (458): 367-374. 2006.A New Route to the Necessity of Origin’, Guy Rohrbaugh and Louis deRossett argue for the Necessity of Origin in a way that they believe avoids use of any kind of transworld constitutional sufficiency principle. In this discussion, we respond that either their arguments do imply a sufficiency principle, or else they entirely fail to establish the Necessity of Origin.
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94A Puzzle About KindsPhilosophical Perspectives 32 (1): 352-364. 2018.Philosophical Perspectives, EarlyView.
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119(In the Fiction/Myth) the Number Seventeen Crosses the RubiconSouthwest Philosophy Review 19 (1): 125-134. 2003.
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1Skepticism About de Re Modality: Three Papers on EssentialismDissertation, Princeton University. 1999.This is a three paper dissertation. ;for paper 1. Quine held that quantifying into modal contexts is illegitimate. It is sometimes thought that if he is right about this, then essentialist claims make no sense. Perhaps as a consequence of this thought together with the current prominence of essentialist views, there have been two good fairly recent attacks on Quine's argument against quantifying into modal contexts: Neale's revival of Smullyan's points and Kaplan's paper "Opacity". I first argue…Read more
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