Beyond Necessity

Summa 1-6 Summa 7-10 Summa 14-18 Summa 19-21 Summa 22-24 Summa 25-26 Summa 36-38 Summa 39-43 Summa 44-49

Bill Vallicella cites here the Scottish enlightenment philosopher Thomas Reid, saying that Reid already understood that when one thinks of ...

Are there intentional objects? Well, are there carentional objects? Let me explain. Suppose we are house hunting, but reject the following...

I just noticed an argument by Bill Vallicella that is a perfect example of the ‘metaphysical reasoning’ that I commented on earlier. He wri...

Just out. A version of Aristotle' Physics in the Logic Museum. Fully indexed with Bekker numbers and other references so that (unlike o...

David Brightly asks whether we can avoid Meinong quite so easily. Meinong draws a distinction between being and existing. Thus some things ...

In yesterday’s post I argued that not only is the inference (*) Vallicella is discussing a non-existent thing, therefore something is non-e...

In my previous post I gave four criteria for distinguishing ‘queer’ from ‘straight’ terms. The most important of these was the last one: a ...

More objections at Valicella's place . Let's summarise where we are. In the two posts here and here , I gave three criteria for dis...

Vallicella has been picking up on some of the issues discussed here over the last week. His aim to highlight what he thinks is a fundament...

Before I go on to discuss what distinguishes ‘queer’ terms from ‘straight’ ones, I should add a third characteristic of queer terms to the t...

At this stage, I should discuss Peter Lupu’s objections (mostly in the extended comment on Vallicella’s blog here ) to the nominalist progra...

Yesterday I discussed an apparent problem for the Brentano thesis (that every categorical sentence of the form ‘some A is a B’ is convertib...

As discussed yesterday , a 'Brentano equivalence' holds when we can convert existential sentences of the form 'an A-B exists...

Sadly, Bill finally had enough of my comments on intentionality. I'm not sure exactly what underlies it, but I suspect it is my persist...

Reading Valicella’s discussion of Twardowski’s ‘solution’ to the paradox of intentionality brought to mind my old translation of Ockham’s ...

Given that (*) Tom worships Zeus is true, which of the following, if any, are true? (1) Tom’s worship is object-directed (2) Tom’s worship i...

Researching ways in which I might write a useful and interesting and improving article on Ockham for the Daily Mail , I found this excellent...

Peter Adamson from King's College London emailed me to let me know about his series of podcasts here . It currently covers only the pre-...

Peter Lupu makes the following objection to my claim that there are no substantive theses of metaphysics. Claims such as “there are no univ...