•  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.
  •  64
    Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics
    Oxford University Press UK. 2016.
    Many significant problems in metaphysics are tied to ontological questions, but ontology and its relation to larger questions in metaphysics give rise to a series of puzzles that suggest that we don't fully understand what ontology is supposed to do, nor what ambitions metaphysics can have for finding out about what the world is like. Thomas Hofweber aims to solve these puzzles about ontology and consequently to make progress on four metaphysical debates tied to ontology: the philosophy of arith…Read more
  •  177
    Inexpressible properties and propositions
    In Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Oxford University Press. pp. 155-206. 2005.
    Everyone working on metaphysical questions about properties or propositions knows the reaction that many non-philosophers, even nonmetaphysicians, have to such questions. Even though they agree that Fido is a dog and thus has the property (or feature or characteristic) of being a dog, it seems weird, suspicious, or confused to them to now ask what that thing, the property of being a dog, is. The same reservations do not carry over to asking what this thing, Fido, is. There is a substantial and l…Read more
  •  123
    In “Tense and Reality”, Kit Fine () proposed a novel way to think about realism about tense in the metaphysics of time. In particular, he explored two non-standard forms of realism about tense, arguing that they are to be preferred over standard forms of realism. In the process of defending his own preferred view, fragmentalism, he proposed a fragmentalist interpretation of the special theory of relativity, which will be our focus in this paper. After presenting Fine's position, we will raise a …Read more
  •  152
    Schiffer’s New Theory of Propositions (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1). 2006.
    Every fifteen years or so Stephen Schiffer writes a state of the art book on the philosophy of language, with special emphasis on belief ascriptions, meaning, and propositions. The latest is his terrific new book The Things we Mean. It is again full of ideas, insights, arguments, expositions, and theories. For us, however, who believe that that-clauses are first and foremost clauses, not referring expressions, and that they thus do not refer to propositions or anything else, The Things we Mean b…Read more
  •  35
    Précis of Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (2): 463-465. 2017.