Online research in philosophy

Possible worlds are maximal possibilities. But what kind of thing is a maximal possibility? Not a maximal individual: there are maximal possibilities that are not maximal individuals, because each maximal individual could have any one of several maximal properties. And not a maximal property: there are maximal possibilities that are not maximal properties, because each maximal property could be had by any one of many possible maximal individuals. So if you like your worlds concrete, you should say that they are (...) maximal facts, and if you like your worlds abstract, you should say that they are maximal propositions. (shrink)

If reality is temporary, then reality changes, and if reality changes, the past has explanatory work to do, and it cannot do that work unless it is no longer real. This tells against the Moving Now Theory, the Growing Block Theory, and any form of Presentism that attempts to understand the past in terms of the present, including Tensed Properties Presentism and Tensed Facts Presentism. It tells in favor of a form Presentism that allows us to appeal to unreal past (...) facts. I suggest that Priorian Presentism, conjoined with a certain way of understanding the role played by tense operators, is one such view. (shrink)

The possibility of Junk is the possibility that something exists and everything is a proper part. Just as we might imagine that there are no simples—that everything has a proper part, all the way down—we might imagine that there are no caps—that everything is a proper part, all the way up. It is not obvious that this apparent possibility can be accommodated within a Lewisian modal framework. For Lewis, every possibility involves the existence of a possible world, and a possible (...) world is just is a maximal sum, and so a cap. But the Lewisian can accommodate Junk, if she wishes, by allowing parts of possible worlds to represent complete possibilities. (shrink)

Three plausible views—Presentism, Truthmaking, and Independence—form an inconsistent triad. By Presentism, all being is present being. By Truthmaking, all truth supervenes on, and is explained in terms of, being. By Independence, some past truths do not supervene on, or are not explained in terms of, present being. We survey and assess some responses to this.

Presentists say that only the present is real.1 Saying that might seem like a pretty good way of accounting for what is special about the present, but it might also seem like a pretty bad way of accounting for anything about the past. To begin with, presentists face an ontological challenge. To say that only the present is real is, in part, to say that only presently existing things exist, that existence is present existence. The ontological challenge is to account (...) for merely past things like Socrates or Hunter S. Thompson, things that were but are no more. This challenge has been widely discussed in the recent literature, where many of the stock characters of late twentieth-century analytic metaphysics—noncommittal paraphrase, property bundles, uninstantiated haecceities, quasi-truth, and so on—have been called upon to play their stock roles in various.. (shrink)

We describe the earliest occurrences of the Liar Paradox in the Arabic tradition. e early Mutakallimūn claim the Liar Sentence is both true and false; they also associate the Liar with problems concerning plural subjects, which is somewhat puzzling. Abharī (1200-1265) ascribes an unsatisfiable truth condition to the Liar Sentence—as he puts it, its being true is the conjunction of its being true and false—and so concludes that the sentence is not true. Tūsī (1201-1274) argues that self-referential sentences, like the (...) Liar, are not truth-apt, and defends this claim by appealing to a correspondence theory of truth. Translations of the texts are provided as an appendix. (shrink)

In my dissertation, I tried to make sense of the view that the facts that constitute reality—the facts about what there is, and what properties things instantiate—are temporary facts.