Downloadable Papers
All Available Papers
This is a list of all the paper drafts available from this webpage in alphabetical order. Brief descriptions of each paper are available below this list.
A Consistent Reading of Sylvan's Box. Philosophical Quarterly 2007 67.229: 667-673. Draft.
Balls and All, in Kleinschmidt, S. (ed) 2014. Mereology and Location. Oxford University Press. Draft.
Categories and Ontological Dependence, The Monist 2011 94.2: 277-300. Penultimate draft.
Causal Counterfactuals and Impossible Worlds, in Beebee, H., Hitchcock, C. and Price, H. (eds) 2017. Making a Difference. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 14-72. penultimate draft.
*NEW* Charitable Matching and Moral Credit. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming. Penultimate draft.
Classes, Worlds and Hypergunk, The Monist 2004 87.3:3-21. Penultimate draft.
Chance and Necessity, Philosophical Perspectives 2016 30.1: 294-308. Penultimate draft.
Comments on John Divers’s “On the Significance of the Question of the Function of Modal Judgment”, in Hale, B. and Hoffman, A. (eds) 2010. Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 220-226. Draft.
Conditionals and Curry, Philosophical Studies 2016 173.10: 2629-2647. Draft.
*NEW* Conditionals, Supposition and Euthyphro. Inquiry, forthcoming. Penultimate Draft.
Consequentialism and Side Constraints, Journal of Moral Philosophy 2009 6.1: 5-22. Penultimate draft.
Contemporary Metaphysicians and Their Traditions, Philosophical Topics 2007 35.1&2: 1-18. Draft.
*NEW* Counterpossibles, Consequence and Context. Inquiry, forthcoming. Penultimate draft.
Creationism and Cardinality. With Alexander Sandgren. Analysis 2014 74.4: 615-629. Draft.
*NEW* Creeped Out. With Sara Bernstein. Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind. forthcoming. Draft.
Cosmic Loops, in Bliss, R. and Priest, G. 2018. Reality and Its Structure: Essays in Fundamentality. Oxford: Oxford University Press 91-106. Draft.
Disposition Impossible, with C.S. Jenkins, Noûs 2012 46.4: 732-753. Draft.
Epistemic Dispositions, with R.A. Briggs. Logos & Episteme 201 3.4: 629-636. Draft.
Fearing Spouses in Aristotle's Ta Oikonomica, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18.1: 1-8. Draft.
Fictionalist Attitudes about Fictional Matters, in Kalderon, M. (ed.) Fictionalist Approaches to Metaphysics. OUP, Oxford. This is a penultimate draft.
Finite Quantities, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Draft.
*NEW* Grounding, Explanation, and the Tasks of Metaphysics. To appear in Segal, A. and Stang, N. (eds) Systematic Metaphysics: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Penultimate Draft.
Hale's Dilemma, unpublished elsewhere.
*NEW* Hyperintensionality (with Francesco Berto). Stqnford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Hyperintensional Metaphysics. Philosophical Studies 2014 171.1: 149-160. Draft.
Imaginative Resistance and Modal Knowledge, Res Philosophica 97.4: 661-685. Penultimate version.
Impossible Fiction Part I: Lessons for Fiction, Philosophy Compass 16.2: 1-12 Penultimate version.
Impossible Fiction Part II: Lessons for Language, Mind and Epistemology, Philosophy Compass 16.2: 1-10. Penultimate version.
Impossibility and Impossible Worlds, in Bueno, O. and Shalkowski, S. (eds). 2021. The Routledge Handbook of Modality. Routledge, New York. Draft.
Individuals Enough For Classes, unpublished elsewhere.
Infinity in Metaphysics, in Le Poidevin, R., Simons, P,, McGonigal, A. and Cameron, R. (eds) 2009 The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics. London: Routledge, pp 430-439. Penultimate Version.
Infinite Barbarians, Ratio. Draft.
Is Fertility Virtuous in its Own Right? British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50.2: 265-282. Final version.
Is Stalnaker Inconsistent About Indicative Conditionals? Unpublished elsewhere. Draft.
It's a Kind of Magic: Lewis, Magic and Properties, Synthese. Draft.
*NEW* Lessons from Infinite Clowns. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. forthcoming, draft.
Lewis on Williamson: Evidence, Knowledge and Vagueness, manuscript
Lewis's Philosophical Method, in Loewer, B. and Schaffer, J. Blackwell Companion to Lewis. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. Draft.
*NEW* Marriage and its Limits, forthcoming in Inquiry. Penultimate version.
Maximising, Satisficing and Context, with C.S. Jenkins. Noûs 44.3: 451-468. Draft.
Liberalism and Mental Mediation, with Caroline West. This is an expanded version of the paper that appeared in the 2004 Journal of Value Inquiry 38.2: 186-202.
Metaphysical Language, Ordinary Language and Peter van Inwagen's Material Beings. Humana.mente 2010 13: 220-226
Method in Analytic Metaphysics, in Cappelen, H. Gendler, T.S., Hawthorne, J. (eds). 2016. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 159-178. Draft.
Methodological Naturalism in Metaethics, in McPherson, T. and Plunkett, D. (eds) 2017. The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. Routledge, New York, pp 659-673. Penultimate draft.
Modality, in Shand J. (ed) 2007. Central Issues in Philosophy. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp 95-106. Draft version.
Modal Fictionalism , an entry in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Moral Fictionalism, with Greg Restall and Caroline West. This is an expanded version of the paper that appeared in the 2005 Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83.3: 307-329.
Naturalised Modal Epistemology, in Fischer, R. and Leon, F. (eds.). 2017. Modal Epistemology After Rationalism. Synthese Library Series, Springer, Dordrecht, pp 7-27.
Noncausal Dispositions, in Noûs, 2012 46.4: 732-753. Penultimate draft.
Non-Factivity About Knowledge, A Defensive Move, in the 2008 The Reasoner 2.11: 6-7. The paper link is to the whole issue, which is available free online.
*NEW* On the Plurality of Parts of Classes. Dialectica. Penultimate Draft.
Personification and Impossible Fictions, in British Journal of Aesthetics 2015. 55.1: 57-69. Draft.
Platitudes and Metaphysics, in Braddon-Mitchell, D, and Nola, R. (eds) Naturalism and Analysis. MIT Press, Cambridge MA
Possible Worlds Semantics. Draft. Final version is in Russell, G. and Fara, D.G. (eds). 2012. The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Routledge, London. pp 242-252
Properties and Paradox in Graham Priest's Towards Non-Being, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2008 76.1: 191-198. Penultimate Draft.
Quantitative Parsimony. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1997 48.2: 329-343. Final version.
Reflections on Routley's Ultralogic Program. Australasian Journal of Logic. 2018 15.2: 407-430
Review of Aaron Cotnoir's and Achille Varzi's Mereology. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Selfless Desires, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2006 73.3: 665-679. Draft.
*NEW* Send in the Clowns. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. forthcoming, draft.
Stoic Gunk, Phronesis 2006 51.2: 162-183. Penultimate draft.
*NEW* Space, Time and Parsimony. Noûs, forthcoming, draft.
Stoic Trichotomies, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 2016 51: 207-230. Draft.
Temporary Marriage in Brake, E. (ed). After Marriage: Rethinking Marital Relationships. Oxford University Press, New York. pp 180-203. Draft.
The A Posteriori Armchair. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93.2: 211-231. Draft
The Extent of Metaphysical Necessity. Philosophical Perspectives 25.1: 313-339. Draft.
The Possibilities of History, Journal for the Philosophy of History 10.3: 441-456
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Abstract Metaphysics. in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. Draft
The Varieties of Flirtatious Experience, 2008. Not published elsewhere.
Truthmakers and Predication. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics.
Utility Monsters for the Fission Age, with R.A. Briggs. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. Draft.
*NEW* What Would Lewis Do?, forthcoming in Beebee, H. and Fisher, A.R.J. (eds) Perspectives on the Philosophy of David K. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Penultimate version.
Vagueness, Multiplicity and Parts, Noûs. 2006 40.4: 716-737. Penultimate draft.
What Would Teleological Causation Be?, with John Hawthorne, in Hawthorne, J. 2006. Metaphysical Essays. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 265-284.
Why Historians (and Everyone Else) Should Care About Counterfactuals, Philosophical Studies. Draft
Why Take Our Word For It, with Ishani Maitra, draft.
*NEW* Zurvanist Supersubstantivalism. Asian Journal of Philosophy. Draft.
Forthcoming Papers
*NEW* Counterpossibles, Consequence and Context. Inquiry, forthcoming. Penultimate draft.
What is the connection between valid inference and true conditionals? Many conditional logics require that when A is a logical consequence of B, "if B then A" is true. Taking counterlogical conditionals seriously leads to systems that permit counterexamples to that general rule. However, this leaves those of us who endorse non-trivial accounts of counterpossible conditionals to explain what the connection between conditionals and consequence is. The explanation of the connection also answers a common line of objection to non-trivial counterpossibles, which is based on a transition from valid arguments to the corresponding conditionals. It also contributes to the wider project of illuminating the connections between contexts of utterance, on the one hand, and the truth-conditions of conditionals uttered in those contexts, on the other.
*NEW* Creeped Out. With Sara Bernstein. Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind. forthcoming. Draft.
This paper examines both creepiness and the distinctive reaction had to creepiness, being “creeped out.” The paper defends a response-dependent account of creepiness in terms of this distinctive reaction, contrasting our preferred account to others that might be offered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the value of detecting creepiness.
*NEW* Charitable Matching and Moral Credit. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming. Penultimate draft.
*NEW* On the Plurality of Parts of Classes. Dialectica. Penultimate Draft.
*NEW* Conditionals, Supposition and Euthyphro. Inquiry, forthcoming. Penultimate Draft.
*NEW* Grounding, Explanation, and the Tasks of Metaphysics. To appear in Segal, A. and Stang, N. (eds) Systematic Metaphysics: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Penultimate Draft.
*NEW* Marriage and its Limits, forthcoming in Inquiry. Penultimate version.
Marriages come in a very wide variety: if the reports of anthropologists and historians are to be believed, an extraordinarily wide variety. This includes some of the more unusual forms, including marriage to the dead; to the gods; and even to plants. This does suggest that few proposed marriage relationships would require 'redefining marriage': but on the other hand, it makes giving a general theory of marriage challenging. So one issue we should face is how accepting we should be of the reports: to what extent reported 'marriages' really are marriages. This paper defends the view that almost all of these reported marriages are in fact marriages, and suggests some theoretical approaches that may be generous enough to account for this.
*NEW* Send in the Clowns. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. forthcoming, draft.
Thought experiments are common where infinitely many entities acting in concert give rise to strange results. Some of these cases, however, can be generalized to yield almost omnipotent systems from limited materials. This paper discusses one of these cases, bringing out one aspect of what seems so troubling about "New Zeno" cases.
*NEW* Lessons from Infinite Clowns. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. forthcoming, draft.
A response to Lieberman and Magidor, and Hawthorne, about the infinite clowns cases from Send In The Clowns.
*NEW* Space, Time and Parsimony. Noûs, forthcoming, draft.
This paper argues that all of the standard theories about the divisions of space and time can benefit from, and may need to rely on, parsimony considerations. More specifically, whether spacetime is discrete, gunky or pointy, there are wildly unparsimonious rivals to standard accounts that need to be resisted by proponents of those accounts, and only parsimony considerations offer a natural way of doing that resisting. Furthermore, quantitative parsimony considerations appear to be needed in many of these cases.
Draft Papers
At present, I can offer:
Individuals Enough For Classes
This paper is substantially unchanged from a version produced on the 7th of June 2000. The content overlaps significantly with chapter 7 of my 2002 book: it is a representation of many of the same ideas, shorn of the context of possible worlds. References originally to my PhD thesis have been updated to references to Nolan 2002. Some formatting changes have been made, some typos corrected, some of the more tangled sentences smoothed, and my institutional affiliation has been updated.
This paper is not really a draft - it's complete, but will probably only appear here because of the overlap with my published chapter. This version was published online on 19 February 2004.
Lewis on Williamson: Evidence, Knowledge and Vagueness, manuscript (28 November 2018)
In May 1999, David Lewis sent Timothy Williamson an intriguing letter about knowledge and vagueness. This paper has a brief discussion of Lewis on evidence, and a longer discussion of a distinctive theory of vagueness Lewis puts forward in this letter, one rather different from standard forms of supervaluationism. Lewis's theory enables him to provide distinctive responses to the challenges to supervaluationism famously offered in chapter 5 of Timothy Williamson's 1994 book Vagueness. However these responses bring out a number of very surprising features of Lewis's own view.
The letter itself is available on the blog of The Age of Metaphysical Revolution Project, University of Manchester.
Why Take Our Word For It, with Ishani Maitra.
The central question in the epistemology of testimony is how we come know things from others' testimony. We offer a partial answer to this question, according to which hearers come to know things they are told by recognizing that tellers are staking their reputations as testifiers on their testimony. We argue that our view accommodates some intuitions about the role that interpersonal relationships play in testimony, while avoiding the problems that arise for other views that attempt to make the same accommodations (e.g., the assurance views of testimony). (August 2006)
Shorter Notes
In this section I will include short notes which I think make a contribution to the philosophical discussion but that have not been published elsewhere.
The Varieties of Flirtatious Experience
This paper is a response to Carrie Jenkins's "The Philosophy of Flirting", offering a rival account of what it is for someone to flirt. The above is a slightly modified version uploaded in 2008 - for those wanting to look at the originally uploaded 2006 version, for example to check a reference or to see if I have surreptitiously changed anything, the original can be found here.
Is Stalnaker Inconsistent About Indicative Conditionals?
Short answer: yes. Longer answer: Stalnaker's formal system is not consistent with some of his motivating remarks. I don't think this is a mere glitch: of the four most obvious ways to bring them into harmony, two are fairly radical revisions and two leave the theory looking a little ad hoc.
In a 1995 piece in Analysis, Bob Hale argued that modal fictionalism faced a dilemma. Hale does not successfully show that there is any problem with either horn of this dilemma.
This piece was originally written as a sub-entry for my Stanford Encyclopedia Entry "Modal Fictionalism" in 1999, but the editors rightfully thought it was too argumentative. So now it's an argumentative piece in its own right, instead.
Review of Aaron Cotnoir's and Achille Varzi's Mereology. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Papers That Have Appeared
Note: many of these papers are late drafts, and some contain material not in the versions published in journals. When citing these papers, it is probably a good idea to refer to the version that appeared in the journal, unless of course you want to cite parts of the material that are not in the journal version.
A Consistent Reading of Sylvan's Box. Philosophical Quarterly 2007 67.229: 667-673. Draft.
I argue that Graham Priest's story 'Sylvan's Box' has an attractive consistent reading. Priest's hope that this story can be used as an example of a non-trivial 'essentially inconsistent' story is thus threatened. I then make some observations about the role 'Sylvan's Box' might play in a theory of unreliable narrators.
Balls and All in Kleinschmidt, S. (ed) Mereology and Location. Oxford University Press. Draft.
This paper describes a plausible view of the nature of physical objects, their mereological connections to each other, and their relation to spacetime. As well as being parsimonious, the view provides a plausible context for defending all of the following:
(1) A theory that objects endure through time (and do not have temporal parts, as normally conceived) can coherently claim that material objects are identical to space-time regions they occupy.
(2) None of the family of mereological connections (part-whole, overlap etc.) need be taken as primitive.
(3) Claims entirely in the language of quantifiers, identity and mereology can be semantically vague without any "vagueness in existence".
It is thus an example showing that the there are more options for the metaphysics of objects, spacetime and mereology than many metaphysicians ordinarily assume.
Categories and Ontological Dependence, The Monist 94.2: 277-300. Penultimate Draft.
Part of a general theory of grounding or ontological dependence should address questions about the ontological dependence relationships between categories. This paper discusses some options for what answers might look like, and illustrates one kind of option with a particular example: the thesis that ordinary objects are events.
Causal Counterfactuals and Impossible Worlds, in Beebee, H. Hitchcock, C. and Price, H. (eds). 2017. Making a Difference. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 14-72. Penultimate draft.
Chance and Necessity, Philosophical Perspectives 2016 30.1: 294-308. Penultimate draft.
Penultimate Draft: the final version is in The Monist 2004 87.3: 3-21
Many people have wanted to construe possible worlds as set-theoretic objects of one sort or another. A common feature of many of these theories is that they imply that no world contains more than a set of possible objects nor more than a set of properties possessed by those objects. A.P. Hazen has defended this consequence as being positively desirable, relying on a principle about what sorts of cases we should be able to have “genuine modal intuitions” about, and an argument that any such case can be represented set-theoretically. This paper produces a specification of a certain sort of unlimited divisibility which meets Hazen’s strictures about what we may expect to have represented by a possible world, is independently plausible as a metaphysical possibility, and, if accepted as a genuine metaphysical possibility, demonstrates that many theories of possible worlds as set-theoretic objects are inadequate.
Comments on John Divers’s “On the Significance of the Question of the Function of Modal Judgment”, in Hale, B. and Hoffman, A. (eds) Modality. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Draft.
This is a response to an interesting paper by John Divers about what modal judgements are for. His paper is not currently available online.
Conditionals and Curry, Philosophical Studies 2016. 173.10: 2629-2647. Draft.
Consequentialism and Side Constraints, Journal of Moral Philosophy 2009 6.1: 5-22. Draft.
Theories according to which pursuit of the good should be limited by absolute side-constraints on action face a serious intuitive cost when it comes to considering high-stakes cases. Five options for such theories in the face of this problem are examined and found wanting.
Contemporary Metaphysicians and Their Traditions. Philosophical Topics 35.1&2: 1-18. Draft.
This is a methodology paper. How do we contemporary metaphysicians interact with metaphysical traditions, and how should we?
Cosmic Loops, in Bliss, R. and Priest, G. Reality and Its Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Draft.
Creationism and Cardinality. With Alexander Sandgren. Penultimate Draft. Final version in Analysis 2014 74.4 615-629
Creationism about fictional entities requires a principle connecting what fictions say exist with which fictional entities really exist. The most natural way of spelling out such a principle yields inconsistent verdicts about how many fictional entities are generated by certain inconsistent fictions. Avoiding inconsistency without compromising the attractions of creationism will not be easy.
Disposition Impossible, with C.S. Jenkins. Noûs 2012 46.4: 732-753. Draft.
We argue that it is a non-trivial matter whether a given object is disposed to F in circumstances C, even when F is impossible, or C is an impossible circumstance.
Epistemic Dispositions, with Rachael Briggs. Logos & Episteme 3.4: 629-636. Draft.
We reply to recent papers by John Turri and Ben Bronner, who criticise the dispositionalised Nozickian tracking account we discuss in "Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know". We argue that the account we suggested can handle the problems raised by Turri and Bronner, but that this teaches general lessons for theories of epistemic dispositions: that epistemic dispositions are to some extent extrinsic, that they can concern non-existence, and that paying attention to contrast matters.
Fearing Spouses in Aristotle's Ta Oikonomica, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18.1:1-8
One of the surviving chapters of the Oikonomica attributed to Aristotle contains one unusual piece of advice: that spouses should fear each other. What could be going on?
Fictionalist Attitudes about Fictional Matters, in Kalderon, M. (ed.) Fictionalist Approaches to Metaphysics. OUP, Oxford. Draft.
Many non-realist theories face problems of embedding sentences which they treat non-realistically:the “Frege-Geach” problems. Fictionalism does better than many alternatives to realism (e.g. non-cognitivism) in handling the behavior of truth-functional connectives, conditionals, inference, and so on. But fictionalists do face a problem of embedding in propositional attitude contexts: just as someone with a fictionalist attitude towards a certain body of claims will want to talk as if those claims were true, a community of fictionalists will find it convenient for a variety of purposes to talk as if their colleagues literally believe some of the relevant body of claims, to discuss the desires and intentions of ones colleagues as if they they believed the claims, etc. But a fictionalism about a certain subject matter (mathematics, morality, unobservable scientific entities, etc.) is not in general a fictionalism that applies to one’s colleagues’ psychological states. This paper argues for the need for an extended fiction which allows fictionalists to talk as if they have attitudes towards those propositions they wish to treat fictionally (other than the psychological attitudes they literally have towards these propositions, such as disbelief). The paper then demonstrates how to extend a basic fiction to construct an extended fiction which allows for these fictional attitude attributions.
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In his introduction to the volume this paper appears in, Mark Kalderon claims that I draw upon David Lewis's account of fiction as opposed to Kendall Walton's in this paper. I don't see that myself, I have to admit - as far as I can tell, the technique in this paper works equally well for a variety of fictionalist approaches, and doesn't draw on any in particular.
Finite Quantities, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Draft.
How could physics provide us with evidence that physical quantities were discrete rather than continuous? This paper discusses these questions in general, and also examines a much discussed special case: namely, can physics provide evidence whether spatio-temporal quantities are discrete?
Hyperintensional Metaphysics. Draft. Final version in Philosophical Studies 2014 171.1 149-160
Metaphysics should take advantage of hyperintensional resources: drawing distinctions between necessary equivalents. We should think that this can improve our metaphysics of the non-representational world, and not just for our theories of representation.
Imaginative Resistance and Modal Knowledge, Res Philosophica 97.4: 661-685. Penultimate version.
Impossible Fiction Part I: Lessons for Fiction, in Philosophy Compass 16.2: 1-12. Penultimate version.
Impossible fictions are valuable evidence both for a theory of fiction and for theories of meaning, mind and epistemology. This article focuses on what we can learn about fiction from reflecting on impossible fictions. First, different kinds of impossible fiction are considered, and the question of how much fiction is impossible is addressed. What impossible fiction contributes to our understanding of "truth in fiction" and the logic of fiction will be examined. Finally, our understanding of unreliable narrators and unreliable narration in fiction needs to accommodate stories that, on the face of it, cannot possibly be true.
Impossible Fiction Part II: Lessons for Language, Mind and Epistemology, in Philosophy Compass 16.2: 1-10. Penultimate version.
Impossible fictions have lessons to teach us about linguistic representation, about mental content and concepts, and about uses of conceivability in epistemology. An adequate theory of impossible fictions may require theories of meaning that can distinguish between different impossibilities; a theory of conceptual truth that allows us to make useful sense of a variety of conceptual falsehoods; and a theory of our understanding of necessity and possibility that permits impossibilities to be conceived. After discussing these questions, strategies for resisting the picture of impossible fictions presented here and in Part I are discussed. Perhaps apparently impossible fictions describe possibilities after all; or perhaps impossible fictions are all trivial; or perhaps some apparently intelligible impossible fictions are unintelligible after all.
Impossibility and Impossible Worlds, in Bueno, O. and Shalkowski, S. (eds). 2021. The Routledge Handbook of Modality. Routledge, New York. Draft.
Infinite Barbarians, Ratio. Draft.
Infinity in Metaphysics, in Le Poidevin, R., Simons, P,, McGonigal, A. and Cameron, R. (eds) 2009 The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics. London: Routledge, pp 430-439. Penultimate Version.
Is Fertility Virtuous in its Own Right? British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50.2: 265-282. Final version.
Fertility (or fruitfulness or fecundity) is often listed among the virtues which are desirable for scientific theories to possess. In this paper I discuss the several species of theoretical virtues called 'fertility', and argue that in each case the desirability of 'fertility' can be explicated in terms of other, more fundamental theoretical virtues.
It's a Kind of Magic: Lewis, Magic and Properties. Synthese. Draft.
Lewis's Philosophical Method, in Loewer, B. and Schaffer, J. Blackwell Companion to Lewis. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.
Maximising, Satisficing and Context, coauthored with C.S. Jenkins, in Noûs. Draft
We explore and defend the position that consequentialists should be contextualists about how good enough an alternative has to be to count as permitted. According to the view defended, in some contexts only the best counts as good enough, in other contexts a lesser standard governs the use of expressions like "morally permitted", "morally right", and the like.
Liberalism and Mental Mediation, with Caroline West
This is a fuller-length draft of the paper that appeared in the Journal of Value Inquiry. This version has a lot more footnotes, and an extra section on pornography. We would prefer that citations be to the version published in the JVI, except if anyone wants to cite bits of this fuller paper that do not appear there.
Metaphysical Language, Ordinary Language and Peter van Inwagen's Material Beings. Humana.mente 13: 220-226
This paper discusses Peter van Inwagen's proposal that while we say truly in the metaphysics classroom that there are no non-living composite objects, we do say truly in ordinary contexts that there are tables, cars, mountains, etc. I argue that van Inwagen's theory gives no solution to paradoxes of composition as phrased in the language of ordinary contexts, and suggest that supplementing his theory with an account of the ordinary paradoxes threatens to damage the epistemic underpinnings of his claims in the metaphysics classroom.
Method in Anaytic Metaphysics, in Cappelen, H. Gendler, T.S., Hawthorne, J. (eds). 2016. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 159-178. Draft.
Methodological Naturalism in Metaethics, in McPherson, T. and Plunkett, D. (eds) 2017. The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. Routledge, New York, pp 659-673.
Methodological naturalism arises as a topic in metaethics in two ways. One is the issue of whether we should be methodological naturalists when doing our moral theorising, and another is whether we should take a naturalistic approach to metaethics itself. Interestingly, these can come apart, and some naturalist programs in metaethics justify a non-scientific approach to our moral theorising. This paper discusses the range of approaches that fall under the general umbrella of methodological naturalism, and how naturalists view the role of science in ethics and metaethics. It discusses how naturalism interacts with the use of intuitions, using conceptual analysis, and reflective equilibrium methods. Finally, it discusses some ways using scientific investigation can make distinctive contributions to ethics and metaethics.
Modality, in Shand J. (ed) 2007. Central Issues in Philosophy. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp 95-106. Draft version.
Moral Fictionalism (with Greg Restall and Caroline West)
Portions of this paper will appear as our Australasian Journal of Philosophy article "Moral Fictionalism Versus The Rest". But this is the full, unexpergated version - it contains a general introduction to fictionalism lacking in the published variant.
Naturalised Modal Epistemology in Fischer, R. and Leon, F. (eds.) 2017. Modal Epistemology After Rationalism. Synthese Library Series, Springer, Dordrecht, pp 7-27.
Noncausal Dispositions. Noûs. Penultimate Draft.
Some theories of dispositions tie dispositions quite closely to causation. This paper argues that many dispositional claims are not closely tied to causation in this way, and that causation and dispositionality are not as closely bound up as some theories suggest.
Platitudes and Metaphysics in Braddon-Mitchell, D, and Nola, R. (eds) Naturalism and Analysis. MIT Press, Cambridge MA.
In this paper I discuss what "Canberra Planners" have been doing with platitudes, and how doing that sort of thing can assist in fundamental metaphysics.
Personification and Impossible Fictions, British Journal of Aesthetics 2015. 55.1: 57-69. Draft.
Impossible Fictions are more pervasive than you might have thought: many uses of the trope of personification, e.g. to suggest that Death rides across the countryside or Duty has a stern voice, generate fictions that describe metaphysical impossibilities. This has consequences for our general theory of representation and our theory of truth in fiction.
Possible Worlds Semantics. Draft. Final version is in Russell, G. and Fara, D.G. (eds). 2012. The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Routledge, London. pp 242-252
Properties and Paradox in Graham Priest's Towards Non-Being, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2008. 76.1: 191-198
This paper appeared in a book symposium on Graham Priest's Towards Non-Being.
Quantitative Parsimony. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1997 48.2: 329-343. Final version.
In this paper, I motivate the view that Quantitative Parsimony is a theoretical virtue: that is, we should be concerned not only to minimise the number of kinds of entities postulated by our theories (i.e. maximise Qualitative Parsimony), but we should also minimise the number of entities postulated which fall under those kinds. In order to motivate this view, I consider two cases from the history of science: the postulation of the neutrino and the proposal of Avagadro’s hypothesis. I also consider two issues concerning how a principle of Quantitative Parsimony should be framed.
Reflections on Routley's Ultralogic Program. Australasian Journal of Logic. 15.2: 407-430
In this paper, I take up three tasks in turn. The first is to set out what Routley thought we should demand of an all-purpose universal logic, and some of his reasons for those demands. The second is to sketch Routley's own response to those demands. The third is to explore how else we could satisfy some of the theoretical demands Routley identified, if we are not to follow him in endorsing Routleyan Ultralogic as a foundational logic. As part of this third project, I articulate what seems to me a preferable way of going to respond to the challenges Routley correctly identifies: and while I doubt what I will have to say would have convinced Routley himself, I will try to show that the approach I prefer has several advantages over Routley's.
Selfless Desires, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2006. 73.3: 665-679
David Lewis’s unified theory of the contents of de se and de dicto attitudes faces a problem. Whether or not it is adequate for representing beliefs, it misrepresents the content of many of our desires, which rank possible outcomes in which the agent with the desire does not exist. These desires are shown to play a role in the rational explanation of action, and recognising them is important in our understanding of ourselves.
Stoic Gunk, Phronesis 2006 51.2: 162-183. Draft.
The surviving sources on the Stoic theory of division reveal that the Stoics, particularly Chrysippus, believed that bodies, places and times were such that all of their parts themselves had proper parts. That is, bodies, places and times were composed of gunk. This realisation helps solve some long-standing puzzles about the Stoic theory of mixture and the Stoic attitude to the present. This is a penultimate draft.
Stoic Trichotomies, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 51: 207-230. Draft.
Temporary Marriage in Brake, E. (ed). After Marriage: Rethinking Marital Relationships. Oxford University Press, New York. pp 180-203. Draft.
The A Posteriori Armchair. Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Draft.
A lot of good philosophy is done in the armchair, but is nevertheless a posteriori. This paper defends that claim, after clarifying what is meant by “armchair” here. Among the a posteriori activities done in the armchair are assembling and evaluating commonplaces; formulating theoretical alternatives; and integrating well-known past a posteriori discoveries. The activity that will receive the most discussion, however, is the application of theoretical virtues to choose philosophical theories: the paper argues that much of this is properly seen as a posteriori.
The Extent of Metaphysical Necessity. Philosophical Perspectives 25.1: 313-339. Penultimate Draft.
A lot of philosophers engage in debates about what claims are “metaphysically necessary”, and a lot more assume with little argument that some classes of claims have the status of “metaphysical necessity”. I think we can usefully replace questions about metaphysical necessity with five other questions which each capture some of what people may have had in mind when talking about metaphysical necessity. This paper explains these five other questions, and then discusses the question “how much of metaphysics is metaphysically necessary?”, and each of its five replacements.
The Possibilities of History, Journal for the Philosophy of History 10.3: 441-456. Draft.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Abstract Metaphysics. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. Draft.
In Metaphysics A, Aristotle offers some objections to Plato’s theory of Forms to the effect that Plato’s Forms would not be explanatory in the right way, and seems to suggest that they might even make the explanatory project worse. One interesting historical puzzle is whether Aristotle can avoid these same objections to his own theory of universals. The concerns Aristotle raises are, I think, cousins of contemporary concerns about the usefulness and explanatoriness of abstract objects, some of which have recently been receiving attention in the philosophy of mathematics. After discussing Aristotle’s objections and their contemporary cousins, the paper discusses some of the main available lines of response to these sorts of challenges, before concluding with an examination of whether these responses could assist Plato or Aristotle in responding to these challenges.
Truthmakers and Predication, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics.
To what extent do true predications correspond to truthmakers in virtue of which those predications are true? One sort of predicate which is often thought to not be susceptible to an ontological treatment is a predicate for instantiation, or some corresponding predication (trope-similarity or set-membership, for example). This paper discusses this question, and argues that an "ontological" approach is possible here too: where this ontological approach goes beyond merely finding a truthmaker for claims about instantiation. Along the way a version of the problem of the regress of instantiation is posed and solved.
Utility Monsters for the Fission Age, with R.A. Briggs. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. Draft.
Vagueness, Multiplicity and Parts, Noûs. 2006 40.4: 716-737 This is a penultimate draft
There’s an argument around from so-called “linguistic theories of vagueness”, plus some relatively uncontroversial considerations, to powerful metaphysical conclusions. David Lewis employs this argument to support the mereological principle of unrestricted composition, and Theodore Sider employs a similar argument not just for unrestricted composition but also for the doctrine of temporal parts. This sort of argument could be generalised, to produce a lot of other less palatable metaphysical conclusions. However, arguments to Lewis's and Sider's conclusions on the basis of considerations about vagueness are uncompelling, even if we accept the crucial premises about vagueness. And a good thing too, since the generalised form of the argument would prove far too much.
What Would Lewis Do?, forthcoming in Beebee, H. and Fisher, A.R.J. (eds) Perspectives on the Philosophy of David K. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Penultimate version.
David Lewis rejected consequentialism in ethics. However, two aspects of his meta-ethical views do not sit naturally with this anti-consequentialism. Lewis endorses a conception of rationality where to be rational is to maximise value of a certain sort; it seems possible to be both rational and moral; and yet he rejects conceptions of moral action as acting to maximise moral value, and arguably suggests that maximising moral value is sometimes impermissible. The second tension arises from his meta-ethics is primarily an account of value, including moral value, and his story about moral motivation goes via a motivational connection to value. Yet his anti-consequentialism seems to commit him to rejecting a story of moral action entirely in terms of pursuit of moral value. This paper explores what a Lewisian's options are here. It also makes the case that, despite first appearances, Lewis is perhaps best interpreted as an agent-relative consequentialist.
What Would Teleological Causation Be?, with John Hawthorne, in Hawthorne, J. 2006. Metaphysical Essays. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 265-284.
In this paper we argue that the notion of fundamentally teleological causation is coherent and interesting, and suggest teleological causation is metaphysically possible. We also outline some sufficient conditions for a process to count as an example of teleological causation. This is a penultimate draft.
Why Historians (and Everyone Else) Should Care About Counterfactuals. Philosophical Studies 163.3: 317-335 (The published version is a revised form of this draft).
There are at least eight good reasons practicing historians should concern themselves with counterfactual claims. Furthermore, four of these reasons do not even require that we are able to tell which historical counterfactuals are true and which are false. This paper defends the claim that these reasons to be concerned with counterfactuals are good ones, and discusses how each can contribute to the practice of history.
*NEW* Zurvanist Supersubstantivalism. Asian Journal of Philosophy. Draft. Final version appeared in 2023 Asian Journal of Philosophy 2.38: 1-29
Zurvanism was an ancient variant of Zoroastrianism. According to Zurvanism, the great powers of good and evil, Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, were the sons of a greater god Zurvan, associated with time. According to Eudemus of Rhodes, some Persian thinkers, presumably Zurvanists, took there to be three great principles underlying the world: light, darkness, and greatest of all time (or perhaps, according to Eudemus, space). This paper explores what metaphysics might underlie these doctrines, and what contemporary options we have for making sense of a metaphysics where time is the ultimate principle. Among the options explored are the option that despite appearance many of the entities of the concrete world are identical to stretches of time, or are somehow aspects of stretches of time; that they include times as parts, or are included in times as parts; that they are somehow properties of time; or hylomorphic compounds of which time is the matter; that the world is somehow a mixture of time, light and dark; or that somehow the ends or teloi of everyday objects and processes are to be found among good, evil and time.
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