Putting Metaphysics First: Essays on Metaphysics and Epistemology

2015

Bergamo’s conference on the metaphysics of properties and relations was one of the most attractive conferences that recently took place in Italy. When we first looked at the program some nine months ago, few things if anything could have contained our enthusiasm: Not only did it confirm that properties and relations keep exerting large interest at all levels of the discipline, but it brought together some among the most reputed scholars and promised to bring about novel issues as well as thought-provoking proposals. We immediately set up a team of RIFAJ-editors whose competences could have most nearly approximate the covered topics. Ilaria Canavotto considered Kevin Mulligan’s defence of the thesis that connectives are more fundamental than predicates and his attempt to make a weak and a strong form of realism about the semantic value of connectives (which he calls ‘connectors’) compatible. She also outlined Fabrice Correia’s proposal of exploiting the notion of generic identity in ...

2015

Nominalism, which has its origins in the Middle Ages and continues into the Twenty-First Century, is the doctrine that there are no universals. This book is unique in bringing together essays on the history of nominalism and essays that present a systematic discussion of nominalism. It introduces the reader to the distinction between particulars and universals, to the difficulties posed by this distinction, and to the main motivations for the rejection of universals. It also describes the main varieties of nominalism about properties and provides tools to understand how they developed in the history of Western Philosophy. All essays are new and are written by experts on the topic, and they advance the discussion about nominalism to a new level.

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1981

classic tradition in first philosophy, descending from Plato and Aristotle, A and recently reaffirmed by D. M. Armstrong,' proposes two equally essential, yet mutually exclusive, categories of reality: Substances (or Particulars), which are particular and concrete, and Properties (and Relations), which are universal and abstract Material bodies are the most familiar examples of Concrete Particulars, and their characteristics, conceived of as repeatable entities common to many different objects, are paradigms of Abstract Universals. Particular being's distinguishing mark is that it is exhausted in the one embodiment, or occasion, or example. For the realm of space, this restricts particulars to a single location at any one time. Particulars thus seem to enjoy a relatively unproblematic mode of being.

2014

A historical survey of realist and nominalist views of universals.

Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2020

This article aims to build a bridge between two areas of philosophical research: the structure of kinds and metaphysical modality. Our central thesis is that kinds typically involve super-explanatory properties, and that these properties are therefore metaphysically essential to natural kinds. Philosophers of science who work on kinds tend to emphasize their complexity, and are generally resistant to any suggestion that they have essences. The complexities are real enough, but they should not be allowed to obscure the way that kinds are typically unified by certain core properties. We show how this unifying role offers a natural account of why certain properties are metaphysically essential to kinds.

2012

Dialogue, 1974

Metascience: A Journal for history, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1999

E ven people who like philosophy often don't like metaphysics. Ontology in particular, with its arcane discussions of universals and particulars, is frequently cited as a paradigm of desiccated Scholasticism. I don't foresee the day when works on universals top the best-seller list, but I do think that updated versions of many traditional views in ontology can be more responsive to the real world and more interesting than is often supposed. To keep the discussion manageable, I will focus on properties or universals.

2016

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2009

Nominalism is usually formulated as the thesis that only concrete entities exist or that no abstract entities exist. But where, as here, the interest is primarily in philosophy of mathematics, one can bypass the tangled question of how, exactly, the general abstract/concrete distinction is to be understood by taking nominalism simply as the thesis that there are no distinctively mathematical objects: no numbers, sets, functions, groups, and so on. As to the nature of such objects (if there are any), it can be said that it has come to be fairly widely agreed, under the influence of Frege and others, that they are very different both from paradigmatically physical objects (bricks, stones) and from paradigmatically mental ones (minds, ideas). Modern nominalism emerged in the 1930s as a response to the view of Frege and others that numbers, sets, functions, groups, and so on belong to a “third realm.”

Journal of Arts and Humanities, 2019

Semanticism, often using the problem of persistence as its flagship, had argued that metaphysics disputes are merely verbal and can be resolved by appeal to ordinary language. Hence, metaphysics is not a substantive discipline. This position threatens the importance of metaphysics as the basis of all rational activities. This paper identified the absurdity and inconsistencies in semanticism. This is with the aim of showing that metaphysics is a substantive branch of philosophy. The paper made use of relevant texts. Data collected from these texts were subjected to close reading. The paper used the methods of conceptual analysis, critical analysis and philosophical argumentation to acheive its objective. The paper concludes that, contrary to the position of Semanticism, there is no sufficient evidence that metaphysical disputes are mere verbal disputes, as Semanticism fails to show that ordinary language can resolve metaphysical disputes. Subsequently, metaphysics is a substantive br...

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2006

Several prominent attacks on the objects offolk ontology' argue that these would be omittedfrom a scientific ontology, or would be 'rivals' of scientific objects for their claims to be effkacious, occupy space, be composed of parts, or possess a range ofother properties. I examine causal redundancy and overdetermination arguments, 'nothing over and above' appeals, and arguments based on problems with collocation and with property additivity. I argue that these share a common problem: applying conjunctive principles to cases in which the claims conjoined are not analytically independent. This unified diagnosis provides a way ofdefending ordinary objects against these common objections, while alsoyielding warnings about certain uses of general conjunctive principles. Several prominent arguments against accepting the objects of 'folk onto? logy', such macroscopic objects as tables and chairs, sticks and stones, rely on the idea that they would in some sense be redundant, would not be among the objects posited by a scientific ontology, or would be rivals of those objects for their claims to be efficacious, occupy space, be composed of parts, or possess a range of other properties. The purpose of this paper is to examine these arguments, and to provide a unified diagnosis of where they go wrong. I shall initially focus on causal redundancy arguments in some detail, since the problems with these arguments will turn out to be typical, and to help unravel the problems behind 'nothing over and above' appeals, worries about collocation, and arguments based on problems with property additivity. The results, if correct, will not only provide a defence of ordinary objects against such arguments, but will also yield some important warnings about accepting unrestricted conjunctive principles in metaphysics. I. THE OVERDETERMINATION ARGUMENT The basic strategy of the causal redundancy argument is to show that all the causal work allegedly done by macroscopic inanimate objects may be accounted for by the causal powers collectively contributed by their