Stephen Yablo has argued for metaontological antirealism: he believes that the sentences claiming or denying the existence of numbers (or other abstract entities or mereological sums) are inapt for truth valuation, because the reference failure of a numerical singular term (or a singular term for an abstract entity or a mereological sum) would not produce a truth value gap in any sentence containing that term. At the same time, Yablo believes that nothing similar applies to singular terms that aim to (...) refer to an entity whose existence or non-existence is a factual matter, e.g. ‘the king of France’: the failure of the presupposition that there is a unique French king makes some sentences with the term ‘the king of France’, in particular “The king of France is bald”, gappy. In this paper I will show that the sentence “The king of France is bald” must be false, and not gappy, according to Yablo’s own criteria and that, furthermore, the presupposition that the term ‘the king of France’ refers presents a fail-safe mechanism in the same way Yablo thinks abstract presuppositions do—this undermines his argument for metaontological antirealism. (shrink)

In sixteenth century the great plague ravaged the city of Bordeaux, with the death toll of fourteen thousand. Michel de Montaigne witnessed many deaths and upsetting scenes. In this paper, I shall investigate how his experiences during epidemic affected his thoughts on death in the Essais.

Humeanism about laws has been famously accused of the explanatory circularity by David Armstrong and Tim Maudlin, since the Humean laws hold in virtue of their instances and, at the same time, scientifically explain those very instances. Barry Loewer argued that the circularity challenge rests on an equivocation: in his view, once the metaphysical explanation is properly distinguished from the scientific explanation, the circularity vanishes. However, Marc Lange restored the circularity by appealing to his transitivity principle, which connects the two (...) types of explanation. Lange’s transitivity principle has been widely discussed and criticised in the literature. In view of counterexamples, Lange refi ned both the principle, by taking into account the contrastive nature of explanation, and the requirement of prohibition on self-explanation. Recently, Michael Hicks has developed a new strategy for defending Humeanism about laws from the refined circularity challenge, critically appealing to the contrastive nature of both explanations and meta-explanations. We will argue that his strategy fails. (shrink)

It is shown how the temporal-modal system of events TM (axiomatized in Appendix) allows for the avoidance of the logical determinism without the rejection of the principle of bivalence. The point is that the temporal and the modal parts of TM are so inter-related that modalities are in-the-real-world-inherent modalities independently of whether they concern actual or only possible events. Though formulated in a tenseless language, whose interpretation does not require the assumption of tense facts at the basic level of reality, (...) TM implies an objective, observer-independent difference between tenses based only on the way in which modalities are distributed along the time continuum. The conclusion is that the arrow of time is an intra-model characteristic of any model of TM that describes the non-deterministic real world up to a certain point of its history, while the flow of time is an inter-model characteristic of the continuous transition between these models. (shrink)

In his latest book Aboutness, Stephen Yablo has proposed a new ‘easy road’ nominalist strategy: instead of engaging in the hard work of paraphrasing a scientific theory which presupposes numbers in a nominalistically acceptable way, nominalists are, according to Yablo, entitled to accept the theory as true, while rejecting the existence of numbers, if from the theory’s content the presupposition that there are numbers can be subtracted away, yielding thus a number-free content remainder. Perfect extricability, i.e. extricability in every possible (...) world, of the presupposition that there are numbers from any content apparently involving them is, in Yablo’s view, sufficient to make the existence of numbers moot. In this paper I will argue that perfect extricability fails as a criterion of ontological mootness. (shrink)

In his latest book Aboutness, Stephen Yablo has proposed a new ‘easy road’ nominalist strategy: instead of engaging in the hard work of paraphrasing a scientific theory which presupposes numbers in a nominalistically acceptable way, nominalists are, according to Yablo, entitled to accept the theory as true, while rejecting the existence of numbers, if from the theory’s content the presupposition that there are numbers can be subtracted away, yielding thus a number-free content remainder. Perfect extricability, i.e. extricability in every possible (...) world, of the presupposition that there are numbers from any content apparently involving them is, in Yablo’s view, sufficient to make the existence of numbers moot. In this paper I will argue that perfect extricability fails as a criterion of ontological mootness. (shrink)

Review of Tuomas E. Tahko, An Introduction to Metametaphysics, 258 pp.