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  1. Dispositions and Ethics.Rani Lill Anjum, Svein Anders Noer Lie & Stephen Mumford - manuscript
    What is the connection between dispositions and ethics? Some might think very little and those who are interested in dispositions tend to be metaphysicians whose interests are far from value. However, we argue in this paper that dispositions and dispositionality are central to ethics, indeed a precondition. Ethics rests on a number of notions that are either dispositional in nature or involve real dispositions or powers at work. We argue for a dispositional account of value that offers an alternative to (...)
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  2. Counterparts, Determinism, and the Hole Argument.Franciszek Cudek - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    The hole argument concludes that substantivalism about spacetime entails the radical indeterminism of the general theory of relativity (GR). In this paper, I amend and defend a response to the hole argument first proposed by Butterfield (1989) that relies on the idea of counterpart substantivalism. My amendment clarifies and develops the metaphysical presuppositions of counterpart substantivalism and its relation to various definitions of determinism. My defence consists of two claims. First, contra Weatherall (2018) and others: the hole argument is not (...)
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  3. Leibniz and the Status of Possible Worlds in advance.Seth A. Jones - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophical Research.
    The dispute over the exact nature and status of possible worlds in Leibniz’s philosophy has proven difficult to resolve. The standard view, that there is one unique actual world and that possible worlds exist solely as ideas within God’s understanding, sits in tension with important metaphysical and theological components of Leibniz’s system. For example, Leibniz takes possible individuals to have some “essence or reality” in themselves and to strive for existence, which allows him to ground counterfactual claims and to overcome (...)
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  4. Modality and Essence in Contemporary Metaphysics.Kathrin Koslicki - forthcoming - In Yitzhak Melamed & Samuel Newlands (eds.), Modality: A Conceptual History. Oxford, UK:
    Essentialists hold that at least a certain range of entities can be meaningfully said to have natures, essences, or essential features independently of how these entities are described, conceptualized or otherwise placed with respect to our specifically human interests, purposes or activities. Modalists about essence, on the one hand, take the position that the essential truths are a subset of the necessary truths and the essential properties of entities are included among their necessary properties. Non-modalists about essence, on the other (...)
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  5. Contemporary (Analytic Tradition).Robert Michels - forthcoming - In Kathrin Koslicki & Michael J. Raven (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy. Routledge.
    This paper provides an overview of the history of the notion of essence in 20th century analytic philosophy, focusing on views held by influential analytic philosophers who discussed, or relied on essence or cognate notions in their works. It in particular covers Russell and Moore’s different approaches to essence before and after breaking with British idealism, the (pre- and post-)logical positivists’ critique of metaphysics and rejection of essence (Wittgenstein, Carnap, Schlick, Stebbing), the tendency to loosen the notion of logical necessity (...)
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  6. An open problem for the metaphysics of constitutive standards.Yohan Molina - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
    Jeremy Fix, in ‘Two Sorts of Constitutivism’ (2021), makes a case for the possibility of contingent essential properties to account for the metaphysical status of constitutive standards of things. In this brief note, I will present an open problem affecting Fix's conception, namely, the explanation of the membership of particulars to a genus, which is necessary to identify particulars subject to standards.
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  7. Relevance as difference-making: a generalized theory of relevance and its applications.Gerhard Schurz - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-38.
    In this paper a generalized account of relevance as difference-making is developed. It is argued that relevance should not be considered as a particular relation, but as a (higher-order) property of instances of arbitrary relations: namely the property that variations of the relata of the relation instance make a difference for its truth. This generalized account of relevance can be fruitfully applied in many domains, such as (i) logical reasoning with applications to explanation, confirmation, verisimilitude, is-ought inference, (ii) probabilistic reasoning (...)
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  8. Leibniz on Innocent Individual Concepts and Metaphysical Contingency.Juan Garcia Torres - 2024 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 41 (1):73-94.
    Leibniz claims that for every possible substance S there is an individual concept that includes predicates describing everything that will ever happen to S, if S existed. Many commentators have thought that this leads Leibniz to think that all properties are had essentially, and thus that it is not metaphysically possible for substances to be otherwise than the way their individual concept has them as being. I argue against this common way of reading Leibniz’s views on the metaphysics of modality. (...)
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  9. Is L.A. Paul’s Essentialism Really Deeper than Lewis’s?Cristina Nencha - 2024 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 20 (1):31-54.
    L.A. Paul calls “deep” the kind of essentialism according to which the essential properties of objects are determined independently of the context. Deep essentialism opposes “shallow essentialism”, of which David Lewis is said to be a prominent advocate. Paul argues that standard forms of deep essentialism face a range of issues (mainly based on an interpretation of Quinean skepticism) that shallow essentialism does not. However, Paul claims, shallow essentialism eliminates the very heart of what motivates essentialism, so it is better (...)
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  10. A Simplified Variant of Gödel’s Ontological Argument.Christoph Benzmüller - 2023 - In Vestrucci Andrea (ed.), Beyond Babel: Religion and Linguistic Pluralism. Springer Verlag. pp. 271-286.
    A simplified variant of Gödel’s ontological argument is presented. The simplified argument is valid already in basic modal logics K or KT, it does not suffer from modal collapse, and it avoids the rather complex predicates of essence (Ess.) and necessary existence (NE) as used by Gödel. The variant presented has been obtained as a side result of a series of theory simplification experiments conducted in interaction with a modern proof assistant system. The starting point for these experiments was the (...)
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  11. Robert Balfour and William Chalmers on the Essence, Existence and Aptness of Accidents.Alexander Broadie - 2023 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 21 (2):173-187.
    Two seventeeth-century Scottish Catholic philosophers, Robert Balfour and William Chalmers, are introduced and their accounts of the metaphysics of the Eucharist are discussed. Their ideas are largely in terms of the Aristotelian concepts of substance, accident and inherence, with special attention paid to the idea that the essence of an accident is not its actual inherence (that is, its act of inhering) in a substance but its aptness for inherence in a substance. Balfour appears to accept this (Thomist) doctrine. But (...)
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  12. Logical Forms: Validity and Variety of Formalizations.Georg Brun - 2023 - Logic and Logical Philosophy 32:341-361.
    Formalizations in first-order logic are standardly used to represent logical forms of sentences and to show the validity of ordinary-language arguments. Since every sentence admits of a variety of formalizations, a challenge arises: why should one valid formalization suffice to show validity even if there are other, invalid, formalizations? This paper suggests an explanation with reference to criteria of adequacy which ensure that formalizations are related in a hierarchy of more or less specific formalizations. This proposal is then compared with (...)
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  13. Plenitude, Coincidence, and Humility.Maegan Fairchild - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):59-77.
    Fairchild (2019) advertised the humility of material plenitude, arguing that despite the profligate ontology of coincident objects it entails, the best version of plenitude is one that takes no stand on a range of nearby questions about modality and coincidence. Roughly, the thought is that plenitude says only that there are coincident objects corresponding to every consistent pattern of essential and accidental properties. Plenitude says (or should say) nothing about which patterns those might be, and so should be compatible with (...)
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  14. On Aristotelian Essence.Hossein Khodadadi - 2023 - Revista Controvérsia 19 (3):55-67.
    The concept of essence holds a pivotal role in unraveling Aristotle’s metaphysical framework. In his exploration of Metaphysics, Aristotle delves into the quest for fundamental being, positing that the primary substance is essentially synonymous with essence. This paper examines the criteria for essence, drawing from both the Categories and Metaphysics Z. Two distinct perspectives on essentialism, namely individual essentialism, aligned with the contemporary modal account of essence, and kind essentialism, are scrutinized. Through a critical analysis, this paper contends that both (...)
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  15. Leibniz on Possibilia, Creation, and the Reality of Essences.Peter Myrdal, Arto Repo & Valtteri Viljanen - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23 (17).
    This paper reconsiders Leibniz’s conception of the nature of possible things and offers a novel interpretation of the actualization of possible substances. This requires analyzing a largely neglected notion, the reality of individual essences. Thus far scholars have tended to construe essences as representational items in God’s intellect. We acknowledge that finite essences have being in the divine intellect but insist that they are also grounded in the infinite essence of God, as limitations of it. Indeed, we show that it (...)
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  16. Essentialist Arguments for Discernibility are Unsound.Antoine Taillard - 2023 - Acta Analytica 39 (1):57-77.
    It is common to argue that something x is distinct from something y by pointing out that x and y do not share all their essential properties. I show that arguments of this type are unsound. This unsoundness is rooted in the fact that sentences of the form ‘x is essentially F’ are ambiguous. Under one reading, the sentence says of x that it has a property of a unique and special kind. Interpreted in that way, the sentence is false, (...)
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  17. Spinoza on the Essences of Singular Things.Sebastian Bender - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    Essences play a central role in Spinoza’s philosophy, not only in his metaphysics, but also in his philosophy of mind, his theory of affects, and his political philosophy. Despite their importance, however, it is surprisingly difficult to determine what exactly essences are for Spinoza. On a widespread reading, the essence of X is nothing but the concept of X. This paper argues against this identification of essences and concepts. Spinozistic concepts are maximally inclusive: the concept of X contains everything that (...)
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  18. A note on psychological continuity theories of identity and neurointerventions.Sebastian Jon Holmen - 2022 - Journal of Medical Ethics 48 (10):742-745.
    An important concern sometimes voiced in the neuroethical literature is that swift and radical changes to the parts of a person’s mental life essential for sustaining his/her numerical identity can result in the person ceasing to exist—in other words, that these changes may disrupt psychological continuity. Taking neurointerventions used for rehabilitative purposes as a point of departure, this short paper argues that the same radical alterations of criminal offenders’ psychological features which under certain conditions would result in a disruption of (...)
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  19. Spinoza on Mind, Body, and Numerical Identity.John Morrison - 2022 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind. pp. 293-336.
    Spinoza claims that a person’s mind and body are one and the same. But he also claims that minds think and do not move, whereas bodies move and do not think. How can we reconcile these claims? I believe that Spinoza is building on a traditional view about identity over time. According to this view, identity over time is linked to essence, so that a thing that is now resting is identical to a thing that was previously moving, provided that (...)
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  20. Can Essentiality of Origin Save Meritocracy From The Luck Objection?Toby Napoletano - 2022 - Philosophia 51 (2):883-895.
    Rawls famously argued against meritocratic conceptions of distributive justice on the grounds that the accumulation of merit is an unavoidably lucky process, both because of differences in early environment, and innate talents. Thomas Mulligan (2018a) has recently provided a novel defense of meritocracy against the “luck objection”, arguing that both sources of luck would be mostly eliminated in a meritocracy. While a system of fair equality of opportunity ensures that differences in social class or early environment do not lead to (...)
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  21. Machine learning and essentialism.Kristina Šekrst & Sandro Skansi - 2022 - Zagadnienia Filozoficzne W Nauce 73:171-196.
    Machine learning and essentialism have been connected in the past by various researchers, in order to state that the main paradigm in machine learning processes is equivalent to choosing the “essential” attributes for the machine to search for. Our goal in this paper is to show that there are connections between machine learning and essentialism, but only for some kinds of machine learning, and often not including deep learning methods. Similarity-based approaches, more connected to the overall prototype theory, spanning from (...)
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  22. Dispositional realism without dispositional essences.Matthew Tugby - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-27.
    Dispositional realism, as we shall use the term, is a non-reductive, anti-Humean approach to dispositions which says that natural properties confer certain dispositions as a matter of metaphysical necessity. A strong form of dispositional realism is known as pan-dispositionalism, which is typically interpreted as the view that all natural properties are identical with, or essentially dependent on, dispositions. One of the most serious problems facing pan-dispositionalism is the conceivability objection, and the solution commonly offered by essentialists employs the so-called redescription (...)
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  23. The Modalities of Essence and Ground.Jonas Werner - 2022 - Frankfurt (Main): Vittorio Klostermann.
    It is not a coincidence that every red rose is coloured. No rose can be red without being coloured. A red rose is coloured in virtue of its being red, its being coloured is metaphysically explained by its being red. This is, at least in part, underwritten by what it is for the rose to be coloured, by the nature – or essence – of its being coloured. If this is right, then questions concerning possibility and necessity, questions concerning metaphysical (...)
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  24. Asymmetry cannot solve the circularity/regress problem of property structuralism.Ralf Busse - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10685-10720.
    Strong dispositional monism, the position that all fundamental physical properties consist in dispositional relations to other properties, is naturally construed as property structuralism. J. Lowe’s circularity/regress objection constitutes a serious challenge to SDM that questions the possibility of a purely relational determination of all property essences. The supervenience thesis of A. Bird’s graph-theoretic asymmetry reply to CRO can be rigorously proved. Yet the reply fails metaphysically, because it reveals neither a metaphysical determination of identities on a purely relational basis nor (...)
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  25. Defending Intrinsic Biological Essentialism.Michael Devitt - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (1):67-82.
    In “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism,” I went against the consensus in the philosophy of biology by arguing that a Linnaean taxon, including a species, has an essence that is, at least partly,...
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  26. The Bounds of Possibility: Puzzles of Modal Variation.Cian Dorr, John Hawthorne & Juhani Yli-Vakkuri - 2021 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by John Hawthorne & Juhani Yli-Vakkuri.
    In general, a given object could have been different in certain respects. For example, the Great Pyramid could have been somewhat shorter or taller; the Mona Lisa could have had a somewhat different pattern of colours; an ordinary table could have been made of a somewhat different quantity of wood. But there seem to be limits. It would be odd to suppose that the Great Pyramid could have been thimble-sized; that the Mona Lisa could have had the pattern of colours (...)
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  27. Two Sorts of Constitutivism.Jeremy David Fix - 2021 - Analytic Philosophy 62 (1):1-20.
    Some things, but only some things, are by nature subject to standards. Why? I explain and develop what I call nature-first constitutivism, which says that what something is determines what it should be. Nature is the basis of normativity. I explain this view in terms of a unique type of property which particulars of a genus can lack even though those properties partially determines the nature of the genus. Such properties partially describe the nature of a genus and are thereby (...)
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  28. Conceptualizing causal powers: activity, capacity, essence, necessitation.Ruth Porter Groff - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):9881-9896.
    Talk of powers is muddled. Building upon Powers and capacities in philosophy: The new aristotelianism, Routledge, London, 2012a, pp 207–227), I disambiguate four senses of the term: powers construed as activity, as capacity/potentiality, as essence and as necessity, respectively, in an attempt to clarify what it is that realists about causal powers take themselves to be realists about.
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  29. Semantic Theories, Linguistic Essences, and Knowledge of Meaning.Nick Haverkamp & Miguel Hoeltje - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14459-14490.
    This paper argues, first, that the information problem poses a foundational challenge to mainstream semantics. It proposes, second, to address this problem by drawing on notions from Kit Fine’s essentialist framework. More specifically, it claims that the information problem can be avoided by strengthening standard truth theories, employing an operator expressing the notion of a relative constitutive semantic requirement. As a result, the paper proposes to construe semantic theories as theories of semantic requirements, and semantic knowledge as knowledge of such (...)
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  30. On the essence of empty properties.Miloš Kosterec - 2021 - Synthese 198 (1):491-507.
    This paper deals with generalisations of modally based criteria for determining whether a given property is essential to an individual to the case of generic essences. These criteria usually presuppose extensionally individuated properties. The limitations of their generalisations are demonstrated using the case of the necessarily empty individual property and the necessarily empty individual office. I do not present a novel stance on the discussion of individual essences. The novelty of this paper lies in its claim that none of these (...)
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  31. Social kinds are essentially mind-dependent.Rebecca Mason - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):3975-3994.
    I defend a novel view of how social kinds (e.g., money, women, permanent residents) depend on our mental states. In particular, I argue that social kinds depend on our mental states in the following sense: it is essential to them that they exist (partially) because certain mental states exist. This analysis is meant to capture the very general way in which all social kinds depend on our mental states. However, my view is that particular social kinds also depend on our (...)
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  32. Overcoming the modal/amodal dichotomy of concepts.Christian Michel - 2021 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20 (4):655-677.
    The debate about the nature of the representational format of concepts seems to have reached an impasse. The debate faces two fundamental problems. Firstly, amodalists (i.e., those who argue that concepts are represented by amodal symbols) and modalists (i.e., those who see concepts as involving crucially representations including sensorimotor information) claim that the same empirical evidence is compatible with their views. Secondly, there is no shared understanding of what a modal or amodal format amounts to. Both camps recognize that the (...)
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  33. Essentializing Inferences.Katherine Ritchie - 2021 - Mind and Language 36 (4):570-591.
    Predicate nominals (e.g., “is a female”) seem to label or categorize their subjects, while their adjectival correlates (e.g., “is female”) merely attribute a property. Predicate nominals also elicit essentializing inferential judgments about inductive potential and stable explanatory membership. Data from psychology and semantics support that this distinction is robust and productive. I argue that while the difference between predicate nominals and predicate adjectives is elided by standard semantic theories, it ought not be. I then develop and defend a psychologically motivated (...)
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  34. Modal Paradox II: Essence and Coherence.Nathan Salmón - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (10):3237-3250.
    Paradoxes of nested modality, like Chisholm’s paradox, rely on S4 or something stronger as the propositional logic of metaphysical modality. Sarah-Jane Leslie’s objection to the resolution of Chisholm’s paradox by means of rejection of S4 modal logic is investigated. A modal notion of essence congenial to Leslie’s objection is clarified. An argument is presented in support of Leslie’s crucial but unsupported assertion that, on pain of inconsistency, an object’s essence is the same in every possible world. A fallacy in the (...)
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  35. The ground of ground, essence, and explanation.Michael Wallner - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 6):1257-1277.
    This paper is about the so-called meta-grounding question, i.e. the question of what grounds grounding facts of the sort ‘φ is grounded in Γ ’. An answer to this question is pressing since some plausible assumptions about grounding and fundamentality entail that grounding facts must be grounded. There are three different accounts on the market which each answer the meta-grounding question differently: Bennett’s and deRosset’s “Straight Forward Account” (SFA), Litland’s “Zero-Grounding Account” (ZGA), and “Grounding Essentialism” (GE). I argue that if (...)
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  36. In Defense of Platonic Essentialism About Numbers.Megan Wu - 2021 - Stance 14 (1):103-113.
    In defense of anti-essentialism, pragmatist Richard Rorty holds that we may think of all objects as if they were numbers. I find that Rorty’s metaphysics hinges on two rather weak arguments against the essences of numbers. In contrast, Plato’s metaphysics offers a plausible definition of essentiality by which numbers do have essential properties. Further, I argue that Rorty’s argumentative mistake is mischaracterizing Plato’s definition. I conclude that Plato’s definition of “essential” is a robust one which implies that many properties, beyond (...)
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  37. Dispositionality, categoricity, and where to find them.Lorenzo Azzano - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2949-2976.
    Discussions about dispositional and categorical properties have become commonplace in metaphysics. Unfortunately, dispositionality and categoricity are disputed notions: usual characterizations are piecemeal and not widely applicable, thus threatening to make agreements and disagreements on the matter merely verbal—and also making it arduous to map a logical space of positions about dispositional and categorical properties in which all parties can comfortably fit. This paper offers a prescription for this important difficulty, or at least an inkling thereof. This will be achieved by (...)
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  38. Meaning and Definition: Scepticism and Semantics in Twelfth‐Century Arabic Philosophy.Fedor Benevich - 2020 - Theoria 88 (1):72-108.
    The theory of essential definitions is a fundamental anti‐sceptic element of the Aristotelian‐Avicennian epistemology. In this theory, when we distinguish the genus and the specific differentia of a given essence we thereby acquire a scientific understanding of it. The aim of this article is to analyse systematically the sceptical reasons, arguments and conclusions against real definitions of three major authorities of twelfth‐century Arabic philosophy: Faḫr al‐Dīn al‐Rāzī, Šihāb al‐Dīn al‐Suhrawardī and Abū l‐Barakāt al‐Baġdādī. I focus on showing how their refutation (...)
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  39. Can Essence Provide Knowledge of Metaphysical Necessity? A Reply to Jago.Benjamin L. Curtis - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (3):931-933.
    In this paper I argue against Mark Jago’s recent suggestion that ordinary knowers can move from knowledge of essence to knowledge of metaphysical necessity.
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  40. Filosofía, análisis y juegos: el inútil intento de definir las cosas.Sebastián Briceño Domínguez - 2020 - Tópicos: Revista de Filosofía 59:121-151.
    According to McGinn, the aim of philosophy is to discover essences through conceptual analysis, and it qualifies as a game in Suits’ sense. However, everything in Suits’ definition of game seems to exclude from its scope McGinn’s definition of philosophy. Here I criticise McGinn’s definition and offer a more comprehensive one. Incidentally, this definition will allow us to include philosophy within the class of activities that do satisfy Suits’ definition of game.
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  41. Essence and Identity.Kathrin Koslicki - 2020 - In Mircea Dumitru (ed.), Metaphysics, Meaning and Modality: Themes from Kit Fine. Oxford, UK: pp. 113-140.
    This paper evaluates six contenders which might be invoked by essentialists in order to meet Quine’s challenge, viz., to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the crossworld identity of individuals: (i) an object’s qualitative character; (ii) matter; (iii) origins; (iv) haecceities or primitive non-qualitative thisness properties; (v) “world-indexed properties”; and (iv) individual forms. The first three candidates, I argue, fail to provide conditions that are both necessary and sufficient for the crossworld identity of individuals; the fourth and fifth criteria are (...)
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  42. Are Reference Rules Inessential to Meaning?Kirk Ludwig - 2020 - Metaphysics 3 (1):92-102.
    This article responds to a case-based argument by Mark Richard that rule of reference is not essential to meaning. It objects that the argument requires shifting between understanding the relevant term in the case, ‘marriage,’ as a determinable, in order to support one premise, and a determinate, in order to support another. On no univocal interpretation can both premises be made true.
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  43. Is Reference Essential to Meaning?Mark Richard - 2020 - Metaphysics 3 (1):68-80.
    Most linguists and philosophers will tell you that whatever meaning is, it determines the reference of names, the satisfaction conditions of nouns and verbs, the truth conditions of sentences; in linguist speak, meaning determines semantic value. So a change in semantic value implies a change in meaning. So the semantic value a meaning determines is essential to that meaning: holding contributions from context constant, if two words have different semantic values they cannot mean the same thing. If this is correct, (...)
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  44. On What (In General) Grounds What.Kevin Richardson - 2020 - Metaphysics 2 (1):73–87.
    A generic grounding claim is a grounding claim that isn’t about any particular entity or fact. For example, consider the claim: an act is right in virtue of maximizing happiness. One natural idea is that generic grounding claims state mere regularities of ground. So if an act is right in virtue of maximizing happiness, then every possible right act is right in virtue of maximizing happiness. The generic claim generalizes over particular grounding relations. In this essay, I argue that this (...)
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  45. The World Is a Necessary Being.Chad Vance - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (1):377-390.
    A standard conception of metaphysical modality accepts that Some de re modal claims are true, These should be understood in terms of a possible worlds semantics, and There is trans-world identity. For instance, it seems true that Humphrey could have won the election. In possible worlds speak, we say that there exists a possible world where Humphrey wins the election. Furthermore, had that possibility been actualized instead of this one, Humphrey—our Humphrey, the very same man—would still have existed. Here, I (...)
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  46. A Case for Modal Fragmentalism.Yiwen Zhan - 2020 - Philosophia 49 (3):1309-1328.
    The idea of fragmentalism has been proposed by Kit Fine as a non-standard view of tense realism. This paper examines a modal version of the view, called modal fragmentalism, which combines genuine realism and realism of modality. Modal fragmentalism has been recently discussed by Iaquinto. But unlike Iaquinto, who primarily focused on possibilities de re, in this paper, we focus on expressions of possibilities de dicto. We argue that the chief idea of modal realism should be that different worlds are (...)
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  47. 'On a Supposed Puzzle Concerning Modality and Existence'.Thomas Atkinson, Daniel J. Hill & Stephen K. McLeod - 2019 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 26 (3):446-473.
    Kit Fine has proposed a new solution to what he calls ‘a familiar puzzle’ concerning modality and existence. The puzzle concerns the argument from the alleged truths ‘It is necessary that Socrates is a man’ and ‘It is possible that Socrates does not exist’ to the apparent falsehood ‘It is possible that Socrates is a man and does not exist’. We discuss in detail Fine’s setting up of the ‘puzzle’ and his rejection, with which we concur, of two mooted solutions (...)
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  48. Metaphysical Constraints, Primitivism, and Reduction.Michael Bertrand - 2019 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (4):503-521.
    The argument from absence of analysis (AAA) infers primitivism about some x from the absence of a reductive analysis ofx. But philosophers use the word ‘primitive’ to mean many distinct things. I argue that there is a robust sense of ‘primitive’ present in the metaphysics literature that cannot be inferred via the AAA. Successfully demonstrating robust primitivism about somexrequires showing two things at once: that a reduction ofxis not possible and that an explanatorily deep characterization ofxis not available. In order (...)
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  49. On Essential Structures and Symmetries.Tomasz Bigaj - 2019 - In Bartłomiej Skowron (ed.), Contemporary Polish Ontology. De Gruyter. pp. 1-24.
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  50. Existence and Essence in Mulla Sadra’s Ontology.Muhammad Kamal - 2019 - Philosophy Study 9 (7).
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