Category: Metaphysics
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There's not much new that one can currently do to add to the variety of possible time travel metaphysics explored in literature. Try-to-improve-stuff-make-other-stuff-much-worse is a pretty reliable trope by this point. Stephen King's 11/22/63 (in addition to being a great novel) is still philosophically interesting though. What 11/22/63 makes distressingly clear is that in King's…
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(Cross-posted at M-Phi) It is no news to anyone that the concept of consistency is a hotly debated topic in philosophy of logic and epistemology (as well as elsewhere). Indeed, a number of philosophers throughout history have defended the view that consistency, in particular in the form of the principle of non-contradiction (PNC), is the…
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Nice NDPR review here by Riccardo Pozzo of Maurizio Ferraris' Goodbye Kant!: What Still Stands of the Critique of Pure Reason. According to Pozzo, the book is actually a best-seller in Italy, which is pretty cool. There's also this very funny passage (have to read it through to the end): For Ferraris, given that "ontology includes…
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There's been a good bit conversation recently about the merits and demerits of "public philosophy" and, as someone who considers herself committed to public philosophy (whatever that is). I'm always happy to stumble across a piece of remarkably insightful philosophical work in the public realm. Case in point: Robin James (Philosophy, UNC-Charlotte) posted a really…
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John Divers' Possible Worlds has a nice discussion of the worry that counterpart theory doesn't adequately justify the extent to which we are ego-concerned with our own possibilities. If the possible Humphrey that won the election is a distinct creature in a universe not spatially connected to ours, what does that matter to the actual…
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Tonight I was fondly recalling Michael Hand and Jonathan Kvanvig's old paper on Tennant's solution to Fitch's Paradox (it's a beautiful read) and a weird thought occured to me. Hand and Kvanvig argue that Tennant's solution would be analogous to a set theorist responding to Russell's Paradox by proposing naive set theory with Frege's comprehension…
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While glancing through Graham Priest's new book I came across a place where he said something to the effect that what distinguished existing from non-existing things was whether or not the thing in question was causally efficacious. Following up on Mark Lance's suggestion that we should be most skeptical when a philosopher suggests something taken…
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If I could go back in time and change the Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy anthology in one way, I would make sure that it included an essay on rules bloat. Nearly every role playing game suffers from this. At the outset the impetus is to present something that is easy for new players and…
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This summer I'm trying to get a little bit up to speed on modality issues by doing an independent study with some students.* I've started looking ahead to Williamson's recent magnum opus and this little bit of the preface weirded me out: Since cosmological theories in physics are naturally understood as embodying no restriction of…
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My co-writer* Joshua Heller is currently working on a project connections between vagueness literature, literature on semantic underdetermination, and new work on metaphysical indeterminacy.** One thing we're both interested in exploring the next few weeks is the extent to which Evans' argument against ontic vagueness applies to either semantic underdetermination or metaphysical indeterminacy. But I'm…
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