-
51Van Inwagen et la possibilité du gunkRÉPHA, revue étudiante de philosophie analytique 4 83-88. 2011.
-
87The New Collapse Argument against Quantifier VarianceThe Monist 106 (3): 342-361. 2023.Quantifier variantists accept multiple alternative ontological languages in which quantifiers obey the usual inference rules despite having different meanings. But collapse arguments seem to show that these quantifiers would be provably equivalent to one another. Cian Dorr has pushed this discussion forward by formulating the collapse argument in terms of an algebra of meanings that are common amongst the languages. I attempt to show that quantifier variantists can respond. But an important dist…Read more
-
13TimeIn Susan Schneider (ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, Wiley. 2016.In this chapter the author examines the idea of time's motion, or flow, more carefully, by comparing it to the motion of ordinary objects. Ordinary objects move with respect to time. So if time itself moves, it must move with respect to some other sort of time. But what would that other time be? Most motion takes place with respect to the familiar timeline, but time itself moves with respect to another timeline, hypertime. Hypertime is supposed to be a sort of time. Hypertime must move with resp…Read more
-
413In defense of global superveniencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (4): 833-53. 1992.Nonreductive materialism is the dominant position in the philosophy of mind. The global supervenience of the mental on the physical has been thought by some to capture the central idea of nonreductive materialism: that mental properties are ultimately dependent on, but irreducible to, physical properties. But Jaegwon Kim has argued that global psychophysical supervenience does not provide the materialist with the desired dependence of the mental on the physical, and in general that global superv…Read more
-
244Kripke’s RevengePhilosophical Studies 128 (3): 669-682. 2006.Kripke's objections to descriptivism may be modified to apply to Scott Soames's pragmatic account from his book Beyond Rigidity. Further, intuitions about argument-validity threaten any theory in the vicinity of Soames's.
-
327Dasgupta's DetonationPhilosophical Perspectives 36 (1): 292-304. 2022.Shamik Dasgupta has argued that realists about natural properties (and laws, grounding, etc.) cannot account for their epistemic value. For "properties are cheap": in addition to natural properties and any value the realist might attach to them, there are also "shmatural" properties (standing to natural properties like charge and mass as Goodman's grue and bleen stand to green and blue) and a corresponding "shmvalue" of theorizing in terms of them. Dasgupta's challenge is one of objectivity…Read more
-
85The Tools of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of ScienceOxford University Press. 2020.Metaphysics is sensitive to the conceptual tools we choose to articulate metaphysical problems. Those tools are a lens through which we view metaphysical problems; the same problems look different when we change the lens. There has recently been a shift to "postmodal" conceptual tools: concepts of ground, essence, and fundamentality. This shift transforms the debate over structuralism in the metaphysics of science and philosophy of mathematics. Structuralist theses say that patterns are "pr…Read more
-
353Ground groundedPhilosophical Studies 177 (3): 747-767. 2020.Most facts of grounding involve nonfundamental concepts, and thus must themselves be grounded. But how? The leading approaches—due to Bennett, deRosset, and Dagupta—are subject to objections. The way forward is to deny a presupposition common to the leading approaches, that there must be some simple formula governing how grounding facts are grounded. Everyone agrees that facts about cities might be grounded in some complex way about which we know little; we should say the same about the facts of…Read more
-
171Asymmetric Personal IdentityJournal of the American Philosophical Association 4 (2): 127-146. 2018.Personal identity is not always symmetric: even if I will not be a later person, the later person may have been me. What makes this possible is that the relations that are criterial of personal identity---such as memory and anticipation---are asymmetric and "count in favor of personal identity from one side only". Asymmetric personal identity can be accommodated by temporal counterpart theory but not by Lewisian overlapping aggregates of person stages. The question of uncertainty in cases of …Read more
-
111Ross Cameron’s The Moving SpotlightAnalysis 77 (4): 788-799. 2017.According to Ross Cameron's version of the moving spotlight theory of time, (1) Past and future entities exist; (2) the properties and relations they have are those they have now; but nevertheless (3) there are no fundamental past- or future-tensed facts; instead, tensed facts are made true by fundamental facts about the possession of temporal distributional properties and facts about how old things are. I argue that the account isn't sufficiently distinct from the B-theory to fit the usual A-…Read more
-
245Might Theory X Be a Theory of Diminishing Marginal Value?Analysis 51 (4). 1991.Act Utilitarianisms divide into Total and Average versions. Total versions seem to imply Parfit’s “Repugnant Conclusion”. Average versions are proposed in part to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, but these are subject to “Mere Addition” arguments as detailed by Hudson in “The Diminishing Marginal Value of Happy People”. Thus, various intermediate versions of utilitarianism, such as the one investigated by Hurka in “Value and Population Size”, take on interest. But Hudson argues that such compromi…Read more
-
104In Defense of Global SuperveniencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (4): 833-854Nonreductive materialism is the dominant position in the philosophy of mind. The global supervenience of the mental on the physical has been thought by some to capture the central idea of nonreductive materialism: that mental properties are ultimately dependent on, but irreducible to, physical properties. But Jaegwon Kim has argued that global psychophysical supervenience does not provide the materialist with the desired dependence of the mental on the physical, and in general that global superv…Read more
-
261Monism and statespace structureRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 62 129-150. 2008.Exotic ontologies are all the rage. Distant from common sense and often science as well, views like mereological essentialism, nihilism, and fourdimensionalism appeal to our desire to avoid arbitrariness, anthropocentrism, and metaphysical conundrums.1 Such views are defensible only if they are materially adequate, only if they can “reconstruct” the world of common sense and science. (No disrespect to the heroic metaphysicians of antiquity, but this world is not just an illusion.) In the world o…Read more
-
435Travelling in A- and B- TimeThe Monist 88 (3): 329-335. 2005.Some say that presentism precludes time travel into the past since it implies that the past does not exist, but this is a bad argument. Presentism says that only currently existing entities exist, and that the only properties and relations those entities instantiate are those that they currently instantiate. This does in a sense imply that the past does not exist. But if that precluded time travel into the past, it would also preclude the one-second-per-second “time travel” into the future that …Read more
-
587Four DimensionalismPhilosophical Review 106 (2): 197-231. 1997.Persistence through time is like extension through space. A road has spatial parts in the subregions of the region of space it occupies; likewise, an object that exists in time has temporal parts in the various subregions of the total region of time it occupies. This view — known variously as four dimensionalism, the doctrine of temporal parts, and the theory that objects “perdure” — is opposed to “three dimensionalism”, the doctrine that things “endure”, or are “wholly present”.1 I will attempt…Read more
-
260Summary of Writing the Book of the WorldAnalysis 73 (4): 713-715. 2013.Summary of my book, Writing the Book of the World, for a symposium. The book defends realism about structure, the view that there is a privileged way to describe the world.
-
221Review of Trenton Merricks, Objects and Persons (review)Mind 113 (449). 2001.Many otherwise reasonable philosophers are impatient with ontology. These philosophers will probably have little time for Objects and Persons, which claims that while there do exist “atoms arranged statuewise”, there do not exist statues; while there do exist atoms arranged tablewise and atoms arranged chairwise, there exist no tables and chairs. Though I join these philosophers, at the end of the day, in rejecting Merricks’s claims, that day is long, whereas they want a quick verdict. But why? …Read more
-
240Against vague existencePhilosophical Studies 114 (1-2). 2003.In my book Four-dimensionalism (chapter 4, section 9), I argued that fourdimensionalism – the doctrine of temporal parts – follows from several other premises, chief among which is the premise that existence is never vague. Kathrin Koslicki (preceding article) claims that the argument fails since its crucial premise is unsupported, and is dialectically inappropriate to assume in the context of arguing for four-dimensionalism. Since the relationship between four-dimensionalism and the non-vaguene…Read more
-
417Presentism and ontological commitmentJournal of Philosophy 96 (7): 325-347. 1999.Presentism is the doctrine that only the present is real. Since ordinary talk and thought are full of quantification over non-present objects, presentists are in a familiar predicament: in their unreflective moments they apparently commit themselves to far more than their ontological scruples allow. A familiar response is to begin a project of paraphrase. Truths appearing to quantify over problematic entities are shown, on analysis, to not involve quantification over those entities after all. Bu…Read more
-
341The Stage View and Temporary IntrinsicsAnalysis 60 (1). 2000.According to four dimensionalism, the material world is divided into momentary stages. In a four-dimensional world, which objects are the ordinary things, the things we normally name and quantify over? Aggregates of stages, according to most four-dimensionalists, but according to stage theorists (or exdurantists), ordinary objects are instead to be identified with the stages themselves. (A temporal counterpart theoretic account of de re temporal predication is then given.) This paper argue…Read more
-
194Naturalness, intrinsicality, and duplicationDissertation, University of Massachusetts. 1993.This dissertation explores the concepts of naturalness, intrinsicality, and duplication. An intrinsic property is had by an object purely in virtue of the way that object is considered in itself. Duplicate objects are exactly similar, considered as they are in themselves. The perfectly natural properties are the most fundamental properties of the world, upon which the nature of the world depends. In this dissertation I develop a theory of intrinsicality, naturalness, and duplication and explore …Read more
-
418Time travel, coincidences, and counterfactualsPhilosophical Studies 110 (2). 2002.In no possible world does a time traveler succeed in killing herearlier self before she ever enters a time machine. So if many,many time travelers went back in time trying to kill theirunprotected former selves, the time travelers would fail inmany strange, coincidental ways, slipping on bananapeels, killing the wrong victim, and so on. Such cases producedoubts about time travel. How could ``coincidences'' beguaranteed to happen? And wouldn't the certainty of coincidentalfailure imply that time …Read more
-
271Intrinsic propertiesPhilosophical Studies 83 (1). 1996.An intrinsic property, as David Lewis puts it, is a property "which things have in virtue of the way they themselves are", as opposed to an extrinsic property, which things have "in virtue of their relations or lack of relations to other things".1 Having long hair is an intrinsic property; having a long-haired brother is not. Intuitive as this notion is (and valuable in doing philosophy, I might add), it seems to resist analysis. Analysis, that is, to “quasi-logical” notions such as necessity, s…Read more
-
112Simply possiblePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (3): 585-590. 2000.In the process of arguing against all theories of extended material objects made up of simples, Dean Zimmerman has recently argued against the compossibility of continuous closed and continuous open material objects. But it is surely undeniable that point-like material objects are possible; plausible principles of recombination and the principle of unrestricted composition then lead to the possibility Zimmerman rejects. Fortunately, Zimmerman’s arguments can be resisted: what appear to be implau…Read more
-
560Reductive theories of modalityIn Michael J. Loux & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), The Oxford handbook of metaphysics, Oxford University Press. pp. 180-208. 2003.Logic begins but does not end with the study of truth and falsity. Within truth there are the modes of truth, ways of being true: necessary truth and contingent truth. When a proposition is true, we may ask whether it could have been false. If so, then it is contingently true. If not, then it is necessarily true; it must be true; it could not have been false. Falsity has modes as well: a false proposition that could not have been true is impossible or necessarily false; one that could have been …Read more
-
218Consequences of collapseIn Donald Baxter & Aaron Cotnoir (eds.), Composition as Identity, Oxford University Press. pp. 211-221. 2014."Composition as identity" is the radical claim that the whole is identical to the parts - radical because it implies that a single object can be identical to many objects. Composition as identity, together with auxiliary assumptions, implies the principle of "collapse": an object is one of some things if and only it is part of the fusion of those things. Collapse has important implications: the comprehension principle of plural logic must be restricted, plural definite descriptions such as "…Read more
-
145The worlds of possibility (review)Philosophical Review 110 (1): 88-91. 2001.Possible worlds present a formidable challenge for the lover of desert landscapes. One cannot ignore their usefulness; they provide, as David Lewis puts it, “a philosophers’ paradise”.1 But to enter paradise possibilia must be fit into a believable ontology. Some follow Lewis and accept worlds at face value, but most prefer some other choice from the current menu. Part of Chihara’s book is a critical discussion of some of these menu options: Lewis’s modal realism, Alvin Plantinga’s abstract moda…Read more
-
192A new grandfather paradox?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (1): 139-144. 1997.In an article in Scientific American (March 1994, pp. 68–74) entitled “The Quantum Physics of Time Travel”, Oxford physicist David Deutsch and Oxford philosopher Michael Lockwood give a defense of the physical possibility of time travel based on the “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. This positive view of theirs is not my concern, however—I want to quarrel with their argument that time travel cannot be accommodated in any other way.1 The best way to spell out the traditional “gra…Read more
-
180On the Paradox of the QuestionAnalysis 57 (2). 1997.This paper argues that there is a genuine paradox in the vicinity of the story in Ned Markosian's paper "The Paradox of the Question".