About this topic
Summary Metaphysical questions often seem intractable, so it is unsurprising that there is no consensus about the best way to engage in metaphysical inquiry. What is the role of conceptual analysis? To what degree are the answers independent from ordinary intuitions-- or are we only engaged in codifying such intuitions? Are there quasi-scientific criteria of theory choice to which we can appeal as providing reason to hold one view over another (such as simplicity, elegance, and explanatory unification)? Methodological questions like these are covered in this category.
Key works Carnap 1950 Quine 1953
Introductions Thomasson 2012
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Contents
530 found
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  1. Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics (Cambridge Elements in Metaphysics).Phil Corkum - manuscript
    Neo-Aristotelian metaphysics comprises the topics in contemporary metaphysics which bear similarity to the interests, commitments, positions and general approaches found in Aristotle. Despite the current interest in these topics, there is no monograph length general introduction to the methodology and themes of neo-Aristotelian metaphysics. One underdiscussed question concerns demarcation: what unifies the topics that fall under the heading of neo-Aristotelianism? Contemporary metaphysicians who might be classified as ‘neo-Aristotelians’ tend towards positions reminiscent of Aristotle’s metaphysics—such as sympathy with grounding, substance ontology, (...)
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  2. Processing Criticism And Spontaneity.Ron C. de Weijze - manuscript
    If Social Constructionism does not prefer monistic Postmodernism over dualistic Modernism, it should include, next to living expressions and spontaneous gestures, criticism into its process model, occurring as independent confirmation and implying coordinated reflection between the knowing organism and its sensed environment.
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  3. What is Conservatism? [REVIEW]Louis deRosset - manuscript
    In Objects: Nothing Out of the Ordinary, Daniel Z. Korman defends a view he calls conservatism. Conservatives hold that there are ordinary objects, but no extraordinary objects. But Korman never explicitly characterizes what would qualify an object as ordinary in the relevant sense. We have some paradigm cases of ordinary objects, including tables, dogs, and trees; and we have some paradigm cases of extraordinary objects of sorts familiar from the philosophical literature. Here I attempt to fill this gap, surveying a (...)
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  4. An inconsistency in the (supposed) prohibitions of philosophy.Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscript
    In different papers, David Liggins and Chris Daly tell philosophers what they should not do. There is no sign of them withdrawing any of these prohibitions, but I show that they fail to be consistent when asserting them. The inconsistency concerns when a philosopher should defer to the empirical findings of science.
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  5. A Case Study on Computational Hermeneutics: E. J. Lowe’s Modal Ontological Argument.David Fuenmayor & Christoph Benzmueller - manuscript
    Computers may help us to better understand (not just verify) arguments. In this article we defend this claim by showcasing the application of a new, computer-assisted interpretive method to an exemplary natural-language ar- gument with strong ties to metaphysics and religion: E. J. Lowe’s modern variant of St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God. Our new method, which we call computational hermeneutics, has been particularly conceived for use in interactive-automated proof assistants. It aims at shedding light on the (...)
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  6. James Ladyman und Don Ross. Every Thing Must Go - Metaphysics Naturalized (2007) [Rezension].Johannes Heinle - manuscript
    Eine Rezension des Buches "Every Thing Must Go - Metaphysics Naturalized" von James Ladyman und Don Ross.
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  7. Keeping Up Appearances: A Reducer's Guide.David Manley - manuscript
    Metaphysicians with reductive theories of reality like to say how those theories account for ordinary usage and belief. A typical strategy is to offer theoretical sentences, often called ‘paraphrases’, to serve in place of various sentences that occur in ordinary talk. But how should we measure success in this endeavor? Those of us who undertake it usually have a vague set of theoretical desiderata in mind, but we rarely discuss them in detail. My purpose in this paper is to say (...)
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  8. The Secret Science of Synchronicity Paper.Thomas McGrath - manuscript
    Several metaphysical/philosophical concepts are developed as tools by which we may further understand the essence, structure, and events/symbols of “Complex” Synchronicity, and how these differ from “Chain of Events” Synchronicity. The first tool is the concept of Astronomical vs Cultural time. This tool is to be the basis of distinguishing Simple from Complex Synchronicity as Complex Synchronicities are chunks of time that have several coincidences in common with each other. We will also look at the nature of the perspective of (...)
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  9. Unstructured Metaphysics.Matt Schuler - manuscript
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  10. Goethe.Valtteri Viljanen - manuscript
    The entry on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) for the Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon, edited by Karolina Hübner and Justin Steinberg. This is the second (August 2022) draft; please do not quote, but comments are very welcome.
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  11. Naturalism without a subject: Huw Price's pragmatism.Brandon Beasley - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Huw Price has developed versions of naturalism and anti-representationalism to create a distinctive brand of pragmatism. ‘Subject naturalism’ focuses on what science says about human beings and the function of our linguistic practices, as opposed to orthodox contemporary naturalism’s privileging of the ontology of the natural sciences. Price’s anti-representationalism rejects the view that what makes utterances contentful is their representing reality. Together, they are to help us avoid metaphysical ‘placement problems’: how e.g. mind, meaning, and morality fit into the natural (...)
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  12. Linceo e la presbiopia ontologica. Considerazioni sul nominalismo di Achille Varzi.Francesco F. Calemi - forthcoming - Isonomía. Revista de Teoría y Filosofía Del Derecho.
    According to Varzi's nominalism properties are typical examples of ontological hallucinations. In this brief paper I'll focus on an interesting argument that Varzi puts forward against the Realists’ tenet according to which predicates have properties as ontological correlates. I’ll argue that even if Varzi's argument is not convincing, the metalinguistic nominalism he espouses has sufficient resources to meet the realists' challenge concerning the phenomenon of predication. Furthermore, I'll make some methodological remarks about the relationship holding between the «dot quote» analysis (...)
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  13. Philosophy's Past: Cognitive Values and the History of Philosophy.Phil Corkum - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    Recent authors hold that the role of historical scholarship within contemporary philosophical practice is to question current assumptions, to expose vestiges or to calibrate intuitions. On these views, historical scholarship is dispensable, since these roles can be achieved by nonhistorical methods. And the value of historical scholarship is contingent, since the need for the role depends on the presence of questionable assumptions, vestiges or comparable intuitions. In this paper I draw an analogy between scientific and philosophical practice, in order to (...)
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  14. Advice for Eleatics.Sam Cowling - forthcoming - In Chris Daly (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods.
    Eleaticism ties ontology to causality by denying the impossibility of causally inert entities. This paper examines some challenges regarding the proper formulation and general plausibility of Eleaticism. After suggesting how Eleatics ought to respond to these challenges, I consider the prospects for extending Eleaticism from ontology to ideology by requiring all primitive ideology to be causal in nature. Surprisingly enough, the resulting view delivers an eternalist and possibilist metaphysical picture in the neighborhood of Lewisian modal realism.
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  15. Meta-Philosophy) Death of Philosophy Part 2.Ulrich de Balbian - forthcoming - Oxford: Academic Publishers.
    1 1 Ulrich de Balbian Meta-Philosophy Research Center (Meta-Philosophy) Death of Philosophy Part 2 PART 2 Philosophy subject-matter page2 Different approaches to doing philosophy (Methods) page 164 Metaphysics, Ontology, Epistemology page.
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  16. Philosophizing is Theorizing.Ulrich de Balbian - forthcoming - Oxford: Academic Publishers.
    These words are about philosophy, the doing of philosophy and what philosophers do and what they think they do, so it is in fact meta-philosophical descriptions. They are intended as general statements about these things, generalizations, hypotheses, a model and pointers to a possible framework for a theory about what the doing of philosophy is like, what the process/es of philosophizing are like and what the processes of theorizing are like. The philosophical ‘methods’ that are referred to and described are (...)
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  17. What Quine (and Carnap) might say about contemporary metaphysics of time.Natalja Deng - forthcoming - In Frederique Janssen-Lauret (ed.), Quine, Structure, and Ontology. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter explores some of the relations between Quine’s and Carnap’s metaontological stances on the one hand, and contemporary work in the metaphysics of time, on the other. Contemporary metaphysics of time, like analytic metaphysics in general, grew out of the revival of the discipline that Quine’s critique of the logical empiricists (such as Carnap) made possible. At the same time, the metaphysics of time has, in some respects, strayed far from its Quinean roots. This chapter examines some likely Quinean (...)
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  18. Mooreanism in Metaphysics from Mooreanism in Physics.Nina Emery - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue that the way the world appears to be plays an important role in standard scientific practice, and that therefore the way the world appears to be ought to play a similar role in metaphysics as well. I then show how the argument bears on a specific first-order debate in metaphysics—the debate over whether there are composite objects. This debate is often thought to be a paradigm case of a metaphysical debate that is largely insulated from scientific considerations, and (...)
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  19. Plumbing metaphysical explanatory depth.Nicholas Emmerson - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-22.
    Recent years have seen increasing interest in interventionist analyses of metaphysical explanation. One area where interventionism traditionally shines, is in providing an account of explanatory depth; the sense in which explanation comes in degrees. However, the literature on metaphysical explanation has left the notion depth almost entirely unexplored. In this paper I shall attempt to rectify this oversight by motivating an interventionist analysis of metaphysical explanatory depth (MED), in terms of the range of interventions under which a metaphysically explanatory generalization (...)
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  20. Higher-order logic as metaphysics.Jeremy Goodman - forthcoming - In Peter Fritz & Jones Nicholas (eds.), Higher-Order Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter offers an opinionated introduction to higher-order formal languages with an eye towards their applications in metaphysics. A simply relationally typed higher-order language is introduced in four stages: starting with first-order logic, adding first-order predicate abstraction, generalizing to higher-order predicate abstraction, and finally adding higher-order quantification. It is argued that both β-conversion and Universal Instantiation are valid on the intended interpretation of this language. Given these two principles, it is then shown how we can use pure higher-order logic to (...)
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  21. Learning from the Past to the Future in Metaphysics.Jani Hakkarainen - forthcoming - In Jani Sinokki & Eero Kaila (eds.), Acta Philosophica Fennica XCVIII. Helsinki: Finnish Philosophical Society.
  22. Formal Ontology.Jani Hakkarainen & Markku Keinänen - forthcoming - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Formal ontology as a main branch of metaphysics investigates categories of being. In the formal ontological approach to metaphysics, these ontological categories are analysed by ontological forms. This analysis, which we illustrate by some category systems, provides a tool to assess the clarity, exactness and intelligibility of different category systems or formal ontologies. We discuss critically different accounts of ontological form in the literature. Of ontological form, we propose a character- neutral relational account. In this metatheory, ontological forms of entities (...)
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  23. What Analytic Metaphysics Can Do For Scientific Metaphysics.Chanwoo Lee - forthcoming - Ratio.
    The apparent chasm between two camps in metaphysics, analytic metaphysics and scientific metaphysics, is well recognized. I argue that the relationship between them is not necessarily a rivalry; a division of labour that resembles the relationship between pure mathematics and science is possible. As a case study, I look into the metaphysical underdetermination argument for ontic structural realism, a well-known position in scientific metaphysics, together with an argument for the position in analytic metaphysics known as ontological nihilism. I argue that (...)
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  24. Review of The Metaphysics of Relations, Edited by Marmodoro & Yates, OUP, 2015. [REVIEW]Fraser MacBride - forthcoming - Philosophy.
    In this review I take to task the related views of E.J. Lowe, John Heil and Peter Simons according to which relations don't exist because they're dispensable qua truth-makers. I argue that this view is methodologically unstable because we also have reason to believe that relations exist because our best mathematical and scientific theories say so, i.e. quantify over them.
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  25. Grounding, Explanation, and the Tasks of Metaphysics.Daniel Nolan - forthcoming - In Aaron Segal & Nick Stang (eds.), Systematic Metaphysics: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Thinking about metaphysical problems in terms of grounding has its uses, but those uses are limited. This paper argues against attempts to see issues of grounding as having a central and organising role in metaphysical inquiry. After arguing that grounding does some useful work, this paper will argue that grounding is neither the central tool for understanding explanation in metaphysics, nor defines the subject matter of metaphysics. Instead, grounding tracks only some of the metaphysical explanations we should be looking for, (...)
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  26. Ontological Commitment and Quantifiers.T. Parent - forthcoming - In Ricki Bliss & James Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics. New York: Routledge.
    This is a slightly opinionated review of three main factions in metaontology: Quineans, Carnapians, and Meinongians. Emphasis is given to the last camp, as the metaontological aspect of Meinongianism has been underappreciated. The final section then offers some general remarks about the legitimacy of ontology, touching on ideas I have developed in other publications.
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  27. The Problem of Thomistic Parts.James Dominic Rooney - forthcoming - Dialectica.
    Thomas Aquinas embraces a controversial claim about the way in which parts of a substance depend on the substance’s substantial form. On his metaphysics, a ‘substantial form’ is not merely a relation among already existing things, in virtue of which (for example) the arrangement or configuration of those things would count as a substance. The substantial form is rather responsible for the identity or nature of the parts of the substance such a form constitutes. Aquinas’ controversial claim can be roughly (...)
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  28. Cognitive Science for the Revisionary Metaphysician.David Rose - forthcoming - In Alvin Goldman & Brian P. McLaughlin (eds.), Cognitive Science and Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.
    Many philosophers insist that the revisionary metaphysician—i.e., the metaphysician who offers a metaphysical theory which conflicts with folk intuitions—bears a special burden to explain why certain folk intuitions are mistaken. I show how evidence from cognitive science can help revisionist discharge this explanatory burden. Focusing on composition and persistence, I argue that empirical evidence indicates that the folk operate with a promiscuous teleomentalist view of composition and persistence. The folk view, I argue, deserves to be debunked. In this way, I (...)
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  29. Explanation and explanationism in science and metaphysics.Juha Saatsi - forthcoming - In Matthew Slater & Zanja Yudell (eds.), Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: New Essays. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter examines the status of inference to the best explanation in naturalistic metaphysics. The methodology of inference to the best explanation in metaphysics is studied from the perspective of contemporary views on scientific explanation and explanatory inferences in the history and philosophy of science. This reveals serious shortcomings in prevalent attempts to vindicate metaphysical "explanationism" by reference to similarities between science and naturalistic metaphysics. This critique is brought out by considering a common gambit of methodological unity: (1) Both metaphysics (...)
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  30. Understanding with epistemic possibilities: The epistemic aim and value of metaphysics.Ylwa Sjölin Wirling - forthcoming - Argumenta.
    According to a recent proposal, the epistemic aim of metaphysics as a discipline is to chart the different viable theories of metaphysical objects of inquiry (e.g. causation, persistence). This paper elaborates on and seeks to improve on that proposal in two related ways. First, drawing on an analogy with how-possibly explanation in science, I argue that we can usefully understand this aim of metaphysics as the charting of epistemically possible answers to metaphysical questions. Second, I argue that in order to (...)
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  31. Substantive Social Metaphysics.Elanor Taylor - forthcoming - Philosophers Imprint.
    Social metaphysics is a source of important philosophical and moral insight. Furthermore, much social metaphysics appears to be substantive. However, some have recently argued that standard views of metaphysics cannot accommodate substantive social metaphysics. In this paper I offer a new diagnosis of this problem and defend a new solution, showing that this problem is an illuminating lens through which to examine the nature and boundaries of metaphysics. This case instantiates a broad, common pattern generated by attempts to align distinctions (...)
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  32. Resisting the Epistemic Argument for Compatibilism.Patrick Todd & Brian Rabern - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-25.
    In this paper, we clarify, unpack, and ultimately resist what is perhaps the most prominent argument for the compatibility of free will and determinism: the epistemic argument for compatibilism. We focus on one such argument as articulated by David Lewis: (i) we know we are free, (ii) for all we know everything is predetermined, (iii) if we know we are free but for all we know everything is predetermined, then for all we know we are free but everything is predetermined, (...)
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  33. Compatibilism as Non-Ideal Theory: A Manifesto.Robert H. Wallace - forthcoming - In David Shoemaker, Santiago Amaya & Manuel Vargas (eds.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Vol. 8. Oxford University Press.
    This paper articulates and responds to a challenge to contemporary compatibilist views of free will. Despite the popularity and appeal of compatibilist theories, many are left with lingering doubts about compatibilism. This paper explains this doubt in terms of the absurdity challenge: because a compatibilist accepts that they do not have causal access to all the actual sufficient causal sources of their own agency, the compatibilist can find their own agency absurd. By taking a cue from political philosophy, this paper (...)
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  34. Against Methodological Continuity and Metaphysical Knowledge.Simon Allzén - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (1):1-20.
    The main purpose of this paper is to refute the metaphysicians ‘methodological continuation’ argument supporting epistemic realism in metaphysics. This argument aims to show that scientific realists have to accept that metaphysics is as rationally justified as science given that they both employ inference to the best explanation, i.e. that metaphysics and science are methodologically continuous. I argue that the reasons given by scientific realists as to why inference to the best explanation is reliable in science do not constitute a (...)
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  35. The Pragmatist Challenge: Pragmatist Metaphysics for Philosophy of Science.H. K. Andersen & Sandra D. Mitchell (eds.) - 2023 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    This volume offers a collection of in-depth explorations of pragmatism as a framework for discussions in philosophy of science and metaphysics. Each chapter involves explicit reflection on what it means to be pragmatist, and how to use pragmatism as a guiding framework in addressing topics such as realism, unification, fundamentality, truth, laws, reduction, and more. -/- .
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  36. Brief Essay on the Nature and Method of Metaphysics.Andres Ayala - 2023 - The Incarnate Word 10 (1):47-86.
    This paper is an attempt to clarify, from a Thomistic point of view, the nature and method of metaphysics. I argue that metaphysics' object is created being, not God, even if God enters metaphysics as efficient cause of metaphysic's object. Also, that metaphysics is a science, insofar as a particular kind of coherent reasoning process, going from the many to understand a certain oneness, and then from that oneness to reinterpret the many. Moreover, that, in this particular process of reasoning, (...)
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  37. Theoretical virtues and the methodological analogy between science and metaphysics.Andrew Brenner - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-19.
    Metaphysicians often claim that some metaphysical theory should (or shouldn’t) be believed because it exhibits (or fails to exhibit) theoretical virtues such as simplicity. Metaphysicians also sometimes claim that the legitimacy of these sorts of appeals to theoretical virtues are vindicated by the similar appeals to theoretical virtues which scientists make in scientific theory choice. One objection to this methodological move is to claim that the metaphysician misdescribes the role that theoretical virtues play within science. In this paper I defend (...)
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  38. "Deflecting Ockham's Razor: A Medieval Debate on Ontological Commitment".Susan Brower-Toland - 2023 - Mind 133:fzad007.
    William of Ockham (d. 1347) is well known for his commitment to parsimony and for his so-called ‘razor’ principle. But little is known about attempts among his own contemporaries to deflect his use of the razor. In this paper, I explore one such attempt. In particular, I consider a clever challenge that Ockham’s younger contemporary, Walter Chatton (d. 1343) deploys against the razor. The challenge involves a kind of dilemma for Ockham. Depending on how Ockham responds to this dilemma, his (...)
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  39. Nonideal Social Ontology: The Power View.Åsa Burman - 2023 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    This book argues for the use of nonideal theory in social ontology. The central claim is that a paradigm shift is underway in contemporary social ontology, from ideal to nonideal, and that this shift should be fully followed through. To develop and defend this central claim, the first step is to show that the key questions and central dividing lines within contemporary social ontology can be fruitfully reconstructed as a clash between two worlds, referred to as ideal and nonideal social (...)
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  40. On metaphysics’ independence from truthmaking. Or, Why Humean Supervenience is Compatible with the Growing Block Universe.Aldo Filomeno - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (4):1467-1480.
    This paper aims to support the claim that analytic metaphysics should be more cautious regarding the constraints that truthmaking considerations impose on metaphysical theories. To this end, I reply to Briggs and Forbes (2017), whoargue that certain truthmaking commitments are incurred by a Humean metaphysics and by the Growing-Block theory. First, I argue that Humean Supervenience does not need to endorse a standard version of truthmaker maximalism. This undermines Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion that Humean Supervenience and the Growing-Block theory are (...)
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  41. Seek the Joints! Avoid the Gruesome! Fidelity as an Epistemic Value.Peter Finocchiaro - 2023 - Episteme 20 (2):393-409.
    A belief is valuable when it “gets it right”. This “getting it right” is often understood solely as a matter of truth. But there is a second sense of “getting it right” worth exploring. According to this second sense, a belief “gets it right” when its concepts accurately match the way the world is objectively organized – that is, when its concepts are joint-carving, or have fidelity. In this paper, I explore the relationship between fidelity and epistemic value. While many (...)
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  42. A trilemma for naturalized metaphysics.Rasmus Jaksland - 2023 - Ratio 36 (1):1-10.
    Radical naturalized metaphysics wants to argue (1) that metaphysics without sufficient epistemic warrant should not be pursued, (2) that the traditional methods of metaphysics cannot provide epistemic warrant, (3) that metaphysics using these methods must therefore be discontinued, and (4) that naturalized metaphysics should be pursued instead since (5) such science-based metaphysics succeeds in establishing justified conclusions about ultimate reality. This paper argues that to defend (5), naturalized metaphysics must rely on methods similar to those criticized in (2). If naturalized (...)
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  43. A Socratic Essentialist Defense of Non-Verbal Definitional Disputes.Kathrin Koslicki & Olivier Massin - 2023 - Ratio:1-15.
    In this paper, we argue that, in order to account for the apparently substantive nature of definitional disputes, a commitment to what we call ‘Socratic essentialism’ is needed. We defend Socratic essentialism against a prominent neo-Carnapian challenge according to which apparently substantive definitional disputes always in some way trace back to disagreements over how expressions belonging to a particular language or concepts belonging to a certain conceptual scheme are properly used. Socratic essentialism, we argue, is not threatened by the possibility (...)
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  44. Easy Ontology, Regress, and Holism.James Miller - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (5):1855-1868.
    In this paper, I distinguish between two possible versions of Amie Thomasson’s easy ontology project that differ in virtue of positing atomic or holistic application conditions, and evaluate the strengths of a holistic version over a non-holistic version. In particular, I argue that neither of the recently identified regress or circularity problems are troublesome for the supporter of easy ontology if they adopt a holistic account of application conditions. This is not intended to be a defence of easy ontology from (...)
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  45. Can We Identify the Theorem in Metaphysics 9, 1051a24-27 with Euclid’s Proposition 32? Geometric Deductions for the Discovery of Mathematical Knowledge.Francisco Miguel Ortiz Delgado - 2023 - Tópicos: Revista de Filosofía 33 (66):41-65.
    This paper has two specific goals. The first is to demonstrate that the theorem in MetaphysicsΘ 9, 1051a24-27 is not equiva-lent to Euclid’s Proposition 32 of book I (which contradicts some Aristotelian commentators, such as W. D. Ross, J. L. Heiberg, and T. L. Heith). Agreeing with Henry Mendell’s analysis, I ar-gue that the two theorems are not equivalent, but I offer different reasons for such divergence: I propose a pedagogical-philosoph-ical reason for the Aristotelian theorem being shorter than the Euclidean (...)
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  46. Edenic Idealism.Robert Smithson - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):16-33.
    ABSTRACT According to edenic idealism, our ordinary object terms refer to items in the manifest world—the world of primitive objects and properties presented in experience. I motivate edenic idealism as a response to scenarios where it is difficult to match the objects in experience with corresponding items in the external world. I argue that edenic idealism has important semantic advantages over realism: it is the most intuitive view of what we are actually talking about when we use terms for objects.
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  47. The (meta)metaphysics of science: the case of non-relativistic quantum mechanics.Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo & Jonas R. B. Arenhart - 2022 - Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy 63 (152):275-296.
    Traditionally, being a realist about something means believing in the independent existence of that something. In this line of thought, a scientific realist is someone who believes in the objective existence of the entities postulated by our best scientific theories. In metaphysical terms, what does that mean? In ontological terms, i.e., in terms of what exists, scientific realism can be understood as involving the adoption of a scientifically informed ontology. But according to some philosophers, a realistic attitude must go beyond (...)
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  48. Whence deep realism for Everettian quantum mechanics?Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo & Jonas R. Becker Arenhart - 2022 - Foundations of Physics 52 (6):121.
    ‘Shallow’ and ‘deep’ versions of scientific realism may be distinguished as follows: the shallow realist is satisfied with belief in the existence of the posits of our best scientific theories; by contrast, deep realists claim that realism can be legitimate only if such entities are described in metaphysical terms. We argue that this methodological discussion can be fruitfully applied in Everettian quantum mechanics, specifically on the debate concerning the existence of worlds and the recent dispute between Everettian actualism and quantum (...)
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  49. The epistemic value of metaphysics.Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo & Jonas R. Becker Arenhart - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):337.
    It is sometimes argued that, given its detachment from our current most successful science, analytic metaphysics has no epistemic value because it contributes nothing to our knowledge of reality. Relatedly, it is also argued that metaphysics properly constrained by science can avoid that problem. In this paper we argue, however, that given the current understanding of the relation between science and metaphysics, metaphysics allegedly constrained by science suffers the same fate as its unconstrained sister; that is, what is currently thought (...)
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  50. O/ontology.Luis M. Augusto - 2022 - Journal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 3 (3):1-2.
    The gulf between philosophical and formal ontology can and should be bridged. In this Editorial, I elaborate briefly on this subject.
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