•  10
    Thomasson on Easy Arguments
    In Miguel Garcia-Godinez (ed.), Thomasson on Ontology, Springer Verlag. pp. 39-60. 2023.
    In Ontology Made Easy and elsewhere Amie Thomasson has made a proposal about the significance of easy arguments for metaphysics. Easy arguments are apparently trivial inferences from premises that seem philosophically innocent to conclusions that seem to be philosophically substantial. In this paper my focus will be on well-know easy arguments for the existence of numbers, properties, and composite objects. I critically investigate Thomasson’s proposal about how to understand easy arguments and …Read more
  •  30
    Inescapable Concepts
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    It seems to be impossible to draw metaphysical conclusions about the world merely from our concepts or our language alone. After all, our concepts alone only concern how we aim to represent the world, not how the world in fact is. In this paper I argue that this is mistaken. We can sometimes draw substantial metaphysical conclusions simply from thinking about how we represent the world. But by themselves such conclusions can be flawed if the concepts from which they are drawn are themselves flaw…Read more
  •  17
    Refocusing Frege’s Other Puzzle: A Response to Snyder, Samuels, and Shapiro
    Philosophia Mathematica 31 (2): 216-235. 2023.
    In their recent article ‘Resolving Frege’s other Puzzle’ Eric Snyder, Richard Samuels, and Stewart Shapiro defend a semantic type-shifting solution to Frege’s other Puzzle and criticize my own cognitive type-shifting solution. In this article I respond to their criticism and in turn point to several problems with their preferred solution. In particular, I argue that they conflate semantic function and semantic value, and that their proposal is neither based on general semantic type-shifting prin…Read more
  •  39
    The Case Against Higher-Order Metaphysics
    Metaphysics 5 (1): 29-50. forthcoming.
    Although higher-order metaphysics seems prima facie to be a promising new approach to metaphysics, it is nonetheless based on a mistake. This mistake is tied to a misuse of formal languages in metaphysics in general, not just to the use of higher-order rather than lower-order languages. I hope to highlight the mistake by discussing a popular recent example of higher- order metaphysics: the argument that reality is not structured using reasoning inspired by the Russell-Myhill paradox. A key issue…Read more
  •  15
    Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
    Do human beings have a special and distinguished place in reality? In Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality Thomas Hofweber contends that they do. We are special since there is an intimate connection between our human minds and reality itself. This book defends a form of idealism which holds that our human minds constrain, but do not construct, reality as the totality of facts. Reality as the totality of facts is thus not independent of our minds, and our minds play a metaphysically sp…Read more
  •  246
    The case against higher-order metaphysics
    Metaphysics 1 (5): 29-50. 2022.
    Although higher-order metaphysics seems prima facie to be a promising new approach to metaphysics, it is nonetheless based on a mistake. This mistake is tied to a misuse of formal languages in metaphysics in general, not just to the use of higher-order rather than lower-order languages. I hope to highlight the mistake by discussing a popular recent example of higher- order metaphysics: the argument that reality is not structured using reasoning inspired by the Russell-Myhill paradox. A key issue…Read more
  •  69
    Jody Azzouni, Deflating Existential Consequence: A Case for Nominalism (review)
    Philosophical Review 116 (3): 465-467. 2007.
    As the title says, this is a book review of Azzouni’s book. I complain that Azzouni proposes an answer to a question, but it is unclear what question he is trying to answer
  •  98
    The unrevisability of logic
    Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1): 251-274. 2021.
    Can it ever be rational to revise one's own logic by one's own lights? In this paper I argue that logic is never rationally revisable, even if one's own logic gives rise to paradoxes and allows one to derive any conclusion whatsoever. Instead of revising logic, we need to revise a certain widely held position in the philosophy of logic, one tied to the standard conception of validity and to the alleged monotonicity of deductive reasoning. I develop the alternative conception of validity and of d…Read more
  •  20
    Conceptions of Truth (review)
    Philosophical Review 114 (1): 136-139. 2005.
  •  12
    A Subject with No Object: Strategies for Nominalistic Interpretation of Mathematics
    Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 62 (3): 723-727. 2001.
  •  70
    Making Things Up
    Philosophical Review 128 (2): 237-240. 2019.
  •  2
    A Subject with No Object: Strategies for Nominalistic Interpretation of Mathematics
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3): 723-726. 2001.
    Nominalists, who believe that everything there is is concrete and nothing is abstract, seem to have a problem with mathematics. Mathematics says that there are lots of prime numbers, and prime numbers don’t seem to be concrete. What should a nominalist do with mathematics? In the last few decades several programs in the philosophy of mathematics have been formulated which are, more or less explicitly, accounts of what a nominalist can say about mathematics. These programs, and the criticism of t…Read more
  •  226
    Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality
    Mind 128 (511): 699-734. 2019.
    Although idealism was widely defended in the history of philosophy, it is nowadays almost universally considered a non-starter. This holds in particular for a strong form of idealism, which asserts that not just minds or the mental in general, but our human minds in particular are metaphysically central to reality. Such a view seems to be excessively anthropocentric and contrary to what we by now know about our place in the universe. Nonetheless, there is reason to think that such a strong form …Read more
  •  63
    Rayo’s The Construction of Logical Space
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (4): 442-454. 2014.
    I wonder which one in a series of characters Agustín Rayo really is, with an emphasis on objective correctness and semantics.
  •  725
    How to endure
    Philosophical Quarterly 61 (242). 2011.
    The terms `endurance' and `perdurance' are commonly thought to denote distinct ways for an object to persist, but it is surprisingly hard to say what these are. The common approach, defining them in terms of temporal parts, is mistaken, because it does not lead to two coherent philosophical alternatives: endurance so understood becomes conceptually incoherent, while perdurance becomes not just true but a conceptual truth. Instead, we propose a different way to articulate the distinction, in term…Read more
  •  1
    Are There Ineffable Aspects of Reality?
    Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 10. 2017.
  •  38
    Replies to Eklund and Uzquiano
    Analysis 78 (2): 315-334. 2018.
    My thanks to Matti Eklund and Gabriel Uzquiano for their thoughtful and challenging critical essays. In these replies I hope to respond to what I took to be their main points. The focus of their essays is different for the most part, but there is overlap in their discussion of the ineffable. I will thus largely reply to their essays separately, with the exception of the discussion of the ineffable, where I will reply to their points jointly. Let’s start, alphabetically, with Eklund.
  •  65
    Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics
    Analysis 78 (2): 289-291. 2018.
    Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics By HofweberThomasOxford University Press, 2016. xvi + 366 pp. £50.00
  •  69
    Amie L. Thomasson: Ontology Made Easy
    Journal of Philosophy 114 (9): 498-502. 2017.
  •  43
    Dickie's Epistemic Theory of Reference
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (3): 725-730. 2017.
  •  23
    Replies to Bennett, Rayo, and Sattig
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (2): 488-504. 2017.
  •  8
    Number Determiners, Numbers, and Arithmetic
    Philosophical Review 114 (2): 179-225. 2005.
  •  293
    A puzzle about ontology
    Noûs 39 (2). 2005.
    Ontology is the philosophical discipline that tries to find out what there is: what entities make up reality, what is the stuff the world is made from? Thus, ontology is part of metaphysics, and in fact it seems to be about half of all of metaphysics. It tries to establish what (kinds of) things there are, the other half tries to find out what the (general) properties of these things are and what (general) relations they have to each other. Settling questions in ontology would bring with it majo…Read more
  •  106
    Ontology and objectivity
    Dissertation, Stanford University. 1999.
    Ontology is the study of what there is, what kinds of things make up reality. Ontology seems to be a very difficult, rather speculative discipline. However, it is trivial to conclude that there are properties, propositions and numbers, starting from only necessarily true or analytic premises. This gives rise to a puzzle about how hard ontological questions are, and relates to a puzzle about how important they are. And it produces the ontologyobjectivity dilemma: either (certain) ontological ques…Read more
  •  26
    Intellectual Humility and the Limits of Conceptual Representation
    Res Philosophica 93 (3): 553-565. 2016.
    This paper investigates the connection of intellectual humility to a somewhat neglected form of a limitation of human knowledge—a limitation in which facts or truths we human beings can in principle represent conceptually. I consider some arguments for such a limitation, and argue that, under standard assumptions, the sub-algebra hypothesis is the best hypothesis about how the facts we can represent relate to the ones that we can not. This hypothesis has a consequence for intellectual humility i…Read more
  •  56
    Encuneral noun phrases
    with Jeff Pelletier
    The semantics of noun phrases (NPs) is of crucial importance for both philosophy and linguistics. Throughout much of the history of the debate about the semantics of noun phrases there has been an implicit assumption about how they are to be understood. Basically, it is the assumption that NPs come only in two kinds. In this paper we would like to make that assumption explicit and discuss it and its status in the semantics of natural language. We will have a look at how the assumption is to be u…Read more
  •  82
    Cardinality Arguments Against Regular Probability Measures
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (2): 166-175. 2014.
    Cardinality arguments against regular probability measures aim to show that no matter which ordered field ℍ we select as the measures for probability, we can find some event space F of sufficiently large cardinality such that there can be no regular probability measure from F into ℍ. In particular, taking ℍ to be hyperreal numbers won't help to guarantee that probability measures can always be regular. I argue that such cardinality arguments fail, since they rely on the wrong conception of the r…Read more