We are living in times where there is considerable debate over what sex and gender are and who gets to be of what sex and what gender. These are questions that impact people’s lives greatly, some more than others. They are metaphysical questions, but they also concern what principles we should be guided by when allocating resources, services, and protections to people with potentially different needs. There are also methodological questions in the vicinity. In this essay, I draw on my (...) work in Categories We Live By (2018) to suggest a certain approach to navigating some of these thorny issues. I call this approach “ontic descent”. (shrink)

It is standardly held that Aristotle denies that artifacts are substances. There is no consensus on why this is so, and proposals include taking artifacts to lack autonomy, to be merely accidental unities, and to be impermanent. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle holds that artifacts are substances. However, where natural substances are absolutely fundamental, artifacts are merely relatively fundamental—like any substance, an artifact can ground such nonsubstances as its qualities; but artifacts are themselves partly grounded in natural substances. (...) Many contemporary metaphysicians view authorial intentions or communal recognition as an essential feature of most artifactual kinds. Drawing on Aristotle’s own examples of artifactual definitions, I note that there is little reason to ascribe this view to Aristotle. So Aristotle has the resources to hold that it is possible that there are kinds with both artifactual and non-artifactual members. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine two different kinds of production processes, mass production and collaborative production. While both production processes intuitively seem like collective actions, the established views about collective action fail to treat them as collective action due to the common issue: the lack of shared intention. As an alternative, I propose the artifactual view of action, according to which collective action is possible even when there is no shared intention among agents. Motivated by Evnine’s (2016) view about action, (...) the artifactual view of action claims that we can have other people’s actions as matter out of which we create our own action. I argue that the artifactual account of action can successfully explain mass production as collective action. Furthermore, it provides a way for the intention-dependent views about artifacts to better understand how mass-produced artifacts come into existence. (shrink)

In recent papers, Philip Swenson (2016) has argued that presentism is incompatible with the conjunction of libertarianism and divine foreknowledge, and Michael Rea (2006) has argued that presentism is incompatible with the conjunction of libertarianism and bivalence. In this paper, I respond to Swenson’s and Rea’s arguments. In each case, I develop a parody argument that seeks to show that actualism -- the view that everything is actual -- is inconsistent with the conjunction of (in the case of Rea) libertarianism (...) and bivalence and the conjunction of (in the case of Swenson) libertarianism and divine foreknowledge. Seeing how these parody arguments using actualism go wrong helps us see how the arguments using presentism go wrong. I conclude that we have not yet been provided with a sound argument that presentism is inconsistent with the conjunction of libertarianism and bivalence or that presentism is inconsistent with the conjunction of libertarianism and divine foreknowledge. (shrink)

Smith shoots Jones intentionally but kills Jones unintentionally. How can a single act be both intentional and unintentional? Fine's theory of embodiment construes the compatibility of intentional shooting with unintentional killing through a pluralist framework of qua objects that distinguishes the act qua being a shooting from the act qua being a killing as two distinct qua objects. I compare this pluralist account with a more traditional monist take on qua modification according to which there is only one item there, (...) a single act which is intentional qua being a shooting and unintentional qua being a killing. According to the latter monist view, to be intentional is to bear a relation to a qua property. I argue that consideration of our moral practices from a participant standpoint gives the monist view a clear advantage over its pluralist rival. I end by sketching a monist alternative superior to both. (shrink)

This article reassesses Suárez’s claim that real essences are intrinsically logically possible. (Henceforth, this claim is referred to as ‘ILP.’) Most scholars have understood ILP as asserting the independence of logical possibility from God’s power; on their view, it in fact asserts that real essences in themselves explain logical possibility. As a result, the claim is in tension with Suárez’s other thesis that real essences are nothing in themselves. Scholars have taken two main approaches to assessing this tension. Some, like (...) John Doyle and Norman Wells, argue that Suárez contradicts himself. There is no way for real essences both to be intrinsically logically possible and also to be nothing. More recently, however, scholars have jumped to Suárez’s defense. They argue that he avoids contradiction because they claim that he accepts some further radical thesis which allows him to remove the tension. But these scholars still accept the claim that ILP asserts that real essences explain logical possibility. This article contests this basic interpretation. I will argue that ILP is not a thesis about the explanation or ground of logical possibility. First, it abstracts from notions of actual existence; as a result, it cannot be a claim about ontological explanation. Second, in order to conceive of logical possibility, intellectual operation is necessary; thus, it is not the sort of property which can have an ontological explanation in the usual sense. Third and finally, insofar as logical possibility can be explained, Suárez turns out to explain it through God’s power. (shrink)