I'm interested in most of the topics in metaphysics, though I have worked more on some areas than others.
Modality: My book, Topics in the Philosophy of Possible Worlds is, as its name suggests, largely about the metaphysics of necessity and possibility, and of possible worlds. (Though some of it was philosophical logic, and some of it philosophy of mathematics, some of it was on general questions of philosophical methodology…) I’m still interested in the metaphysics of modality.
Hyperintensional Metaphysics: I've written a series of papers on impossible worlds and their applications in philosophy. I have also done some more general work on exploring topics in metaphysics where the distinctions we need to draw are more fine-grained than those we get if we treat necessary equivalence as identity. Thinking about impossible cases as well as possible ones can illuminate counterpossible conditionals, but also dispositions, dependence, and maybe topics like causation and chance. Thinking about impossibilities can help us in other areas of philosophy as well: I have several papers on impossible fictions, for example.
Other topics I've recently written on include dispositions, space, time, objects, events, vagueness, properties and relations, parts and wholes, states of affairs, infinite regresses, grounding, and social ontology.
I have two main areas of interest in the philosophy of science. For a long time been interested in the issue of what criteria we should use in theory choice, in the sciences and beyond. Publications in this area include my “Quantitative Parsimony”, “Is Fertility Virtuous in its Own Right?”, “Who’s Afraid of Infinite Regresses?”, it plays an important role in "Finite Quantities", and "The Dangers of Pragmatic Virtue". I am now writing a monograph on theoretical virtues which brings together some of my past thinking and deals with some new virtues as well. Armed with the ideas from the monograph, I will write some papers about the roles of theoretical virtues in particular disciplines.
The second area of interest is in the metaphysics of science: how to understand the commitments about the world that many scientific theories seem to take on, at least implicitly. In recent years I have published papers on objective chance, dispositions, causation, explanation, and the structure of quantities posited by physics.
I also have published on Stoic physical theories, and on the philosophy of history, both of which continue to be interests of mine.
I have a continuing interest in philosophical methods. Some of this involves applying the above work on theoretical virtues to understanding philosophical debates, but I've worked on several other topics as well. These include discussions of the "Canberra Plan" for philosophical analysis; armchair methods in philosophy; and the role of traditions and the history of philosophy in metaphysics. I have also written general papers about philosophical method in metaphysics, and on David Lewis's philosophical methods.
This research interest of mine overlaps both with my work on theoretical virtues, and my work on philosophical methodology. As well as the epistemology of beliefs gained through theorising, I am interested in the epistemology of possibility and necessity, and knowledge gained through conceptual analysis and imagination. I've written on a few other epistemological topics over the years too, including testimony, the potential for appealing to dispositions in an analysis of knowledge, epistemic instrumentalism versus realism, and moral epistemology.
My book David Lewis has been published by Acumen Publishing in the UK in their “Philosophy Now” series, by McGill-Queen's University Press in North America, and as of 2011 by Routledge.
Lewis’s work is a continuing source of inspiration: as an exemplar, a source of philosophical problems, and a source of interesting and provocative suggested solutions to those problems.I’m sure I’ll continue to try to work out where he was right and where he was wrong, and where his views can be improved upon.
A recent project of mine has been excavating philosophical themes in historical Zoroastrian texts, and bringing the philosophical issues raised into contact with contemporary analytic philosophy. While the Zoroastrian religion is very old, many of the central religious texts were composed or collated in the third century CE onwards, with a particularly interesting cluster of texts composed in the ninth and tenth centuries. I talk in some more depth about some of the areas where Zoroastrian thought might be interesting to a contemporary philosophical audience in Zoroastrianism and Contemporary Philosophy (Cambridge University Press). That work is open access, i.e. free to read and download electronically.
A long running interest of mine has been how fictionalism would work in different areas. My Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Modal Fictionalism is one example (along with a few papers on modal fictionalism), and work on moral fictionalism with Greg Restall and Caroline West is another. Graham Oppy and I have a plan to co-write a book which will be a general introduction to fictionalism, its varieties, virtues and vices.
I’m interested in all sorts of topics in philosophy. In the past I've published on Philosophy of Language, Philosophical Logic, Meta-ethics, Ancient Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Ethics, and some other areas. And I'm working on drafts of papers on a number of other topics. I got into philosophy because I was interested in philosophy, not just a few sub-areas. Given how much questions in one area bear on questions in others, I think it is well worth paying attention to debates in a lot of areas of philosophy, not just one particular backyard.
Monographs
2025 Zoroastrianism and Contemporary Philosophy. Cambridge Elements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2005 David Lewis. Acumen Publishing, Chesham. Also published by McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal & Kingston, in 2005. Republished in 2014 by Routledge Press, New York.
2002 Topics in the Philosophy of Possible Worlds. Routledge Press, New York. Paperback edition published 2011.
Articles and Book Chapters
forthcoming "Crosscultural Social Ontology: The Case of Navies" in Kappes, Y. Passinsky, A. De Rizzo, J. and Schnieder, B. (eds) Facets of Reality. Berlin: De Gruyter
forthcoming "The Stoics on Time" in Bailey, D. (ed). The Oxford Handbook of Stoicism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
forthcoming "Counterpossibles, Consequence and Context". Inquiry.
forthcoming "Creeped Out" (with Sara Bernstein). Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind.
forthcoming "Conditionals, Supposition, and Euthyphro". Inquiry.
forthcoming "Grounding, Explanation, and the Tasks of Metaphysics" in Segal, A. and Stang, N. Systematic Metaphysics: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2025 "Lessons from Infinite Clowns". Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 14: 280=286
2025 "Send in the Clowns". Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 14: 215-221
2024 "Marriage and its Limits". Inquiry 67.10: 4131-4166
2024 "Charitable Matching and Moral Credit". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 180: 687-696
2023 "Space, Time and Parsimony". Noûs 57.4: 763-783
2023 "Zurvanist Supersubstantivalism". Asian Journal of Philosophy 2.38: 1-19
2023 "On the Plurality of Parts of Classes". Dialectica 72.2: 123-133
2022 "What Would Lewis Do?" in Beebee, H. and Fisher, A.R.J. (eds) Perspectives on the Philosophy of David K. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 230-239
2021 "Impossible Fictions Part I: Lessons for Fiction". Philosophy Compass 16.2: 1-12
2021 "Impossible Fictions Part II: Lessons for Mind, Language and Epistemology". Philosophy Compass 16.2: 1-10
2021 "Hyperintensionality" (with Francesco Berto). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
2021 "Impossibility and Impossible Worlds" in Bueno, O. and Shalkowski, S. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Modality. New York: Routledge. pp 40-48
2020 "It's a Kind of Magic: Lewis, Magic and Properties". Synthese 197.11: 4717-4741
2020 "Imaginative Resistance and Modal Knowledge". Res Philosophica 97.4: 661-685
2019 "Infinite Barbarians". Ratio 32.3: 173-181
2018 "Reflections on Routley's Ultralogic Program". Australasian Journal of Logic 15.2: 407-430
2018 "Cosmic Loops" in Bliss, R. and Priest, G. (eds) Reality and Its Structure: Essays in Fundamentality. Oxford University Press, Oxford. pp 91-106
2017 "Methodological Naturalism in Metaethics" in McPherson, T. and Plunkett, D. (eds) The Routledge Companion to Metaethics. Routledge, New York.
2017 "Causal Counterfactuals and Impossible Worlds" in Beebee, H., Hitchcock, C. and Price, H. (eds) Making a Difference. Oxford University Press, Oxford. pp 14-32
2017 "Does the World Contain States of Affairs? Yes" in Barnes, E. (ed) Current Controversies in Metaphysics. New York: Routledge. pp 81-91
2017 "Naturalised Modal Epistemology" in Fischer, R. and Leon, F. (eds.) Modal Epistemology After Rationalism. Dordrecht: Synthese Library Series, Springer. pp 7-28
2016 "Chance and Necessity". Philosophical Perspectives 30.1: 294-308
2016 "Stoic Trichotomies". Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 51: 207-230
2016 "The Possibilities of History". Journal of the Philosophy of History 10.3: 441-456
2016 "Conditionals and Curry". Philosophical Studies 173.10: 2629-2647
2016 “Method in Analytic Metaphysics” in Cappelen, H. Gendler, T.S., Hawthorne, J. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology. Oxford University Press, Oxford. pp 159-176
2015 "Lewis's Philosophical Method" in Loewer, B. and Schaffer, J. (eds) Blackwell Companion to David Lewis. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. pp 25-39
2015 "Temporary Marriage" in Brake, E. (ed) After Marriage. Oxford University Press, Oxford pp 180-203
2015 "Utility Monsters for the Fission Age" (with R.A. Briggs). Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. 96.3: 307-441
2015 "Noncausal Dispositions". Noûs 49.3: 425-439
2015 "Personification and Impossible Fictions". British Journal of Aesthetics 55.1: 57-69
2015 "The A Posteriori Armchair". Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93.2: 211-231
2015 "Lewis's Philosophical Method" in Loewer, B. and Schaffer, J. (eds) A Companion to David Lewis. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford pp 25-39
2015 "The Unrealistic Effectiveness of Abstract Metaphysics". Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 9: 61-88
2014 "The Question of Moral Ontology". Philosophical Perspectives 28: 201-221
2014 "The Dangers of Pragmatic Virtue". Inquiry 57.5-6: 623-644
2014 "Creationism and Cardinality" (with Alexander Sandgren). Analysis 74.4: 615-629
2014 "Hyperintensional Metaphysics". Philosophical Studies 171.1: 149-160
2014 "Balls and All" in Kleinschmidt, S. (ed) Mereology and Location. Oxford University Press, Oxford. pp 91-116.
2013 "Why Historians (and Everyone Else) Should Care About Counterfactuals". Philosophical Studies 163.2: 317-33
2013 "Impossible Worlds". Philosophy Compass 8.4: 360-372
2012 "Epistemic Dispositions" (with R.A. Briggs). Logos & Episteme 3.4: 629-636
2012 "Disposition Impossible" (with C.S. Jenkins). Noûs 46.4: 732-753
2012 "Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know" (with R.A. Briggs). Analysis 72.2: 314-16
2012 "Possible Worlds Semantics" in Fara, D.G. and Russell, G. (eds) The Routledge Companion to The Philosophy of Language. Routledge. pp 242-252
2011 "The Extent of Metaphysical Necessity". Philosophical Perspectives 25.1: 313-339
2011 "Categories and Ontological Dependence". The Monist 94.2: 277-300
2010 "Metaphysics: 5 Questions" in Asbjorn Steglich-Peterson (ed) Metaphysics: 5 Questions. Automatic Press. pp 63-73
2010 "Metaphysical Language, Ordinary Language, and Peter van Inwagen's Material Beings". Humana.mente. 13: 239-248
2010 "Maximising, Satisficing and Context". (with C.S. Jenkins). Noûs. 44.3: 451-468
2010 "Response to John Divers" in Hale, B. and Hoffman, A. (eds). Modality. Oxford University Press, Oxford: 220-226
2010 "Fearing Spouses in Aristotle’s Ta Oikonomika". British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18.1: 1-8
2009 "Modality" in Shand, J. (ed) Central Issues in Philosophy. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester. pp 95-106
2009 “Infinity and Metaphysics” in Le Poidevin, R., Simons, P., McGonigal, A. and Cameron, R. (eds) The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics. Routledge, London. pp 430-439
2009 "Platitudes and Metaphysics" in Braddon-Mitchell, D. and Nola, R. (eds) Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism. MIT Press, Cambridge MA pp 267-300
2009 "Consequentialism and Side Constraints". Journal of Moral Philosophy 6.1: 5-22
2008 "Properties and Paradox in Graham Priest's Towards Non-Being". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76.1: 191-198
2008 "Non-Factivity About Knowledge: A Defensive Move". The Reasoner 2.11: 6-7
2008 "Truthmakers and Predication". Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 4: 171-191
2008 "Backwards Explanation" (with C.S. Jenkins). Philosophical Studies 140.1: 103-115
2008 "Liar-Like Paradox and Object-Language Features" (with C.S. Jenkins). American Philosophical Quarterly 45.1: 67-73
2008 "Finite Quantities". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108.1: 23-42
2007 "A Consistent Reading of Sylvan's Box". Philosophical Quarterly. 67.229: 667-673
2007 "Contemporary Metaphysicians and Their Traditions". Philosophical Topics. 35.1&2: 1-18
2007 "A Consistent Reading of Sylvan's Box". Philosophical Quarterly. 67.229: 667-673
2006 "Vagueness, Multiplicity and Parts". Noûs. 40.4: 716-737
2006 "Selfless Desires". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 73.3: 665-679
2006 "Stoic Gunk". Phronesis. 51.2: 162-183
2006 "What Would Teleological Causation Be?" (with John Hawthorne) in Hawthorne, John. Metaphysical Essays. OUP, Oxford, pp 265-283.
2005 "Moral Fictionalism Versus The Rest" (with Greg Restall and Caroline West). Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 83.3: 307-329
2005 "Fictionalist Attitudes About Fictional Matters" in Kalderon, Mark (ed) Fictionalist Approaches to Metaphysics, OUP, Oxford: 204-233
2004 "Liberalism and Mental Mediation" (with Caroline West). Journal of Value Inquiry 38.2: 186-202
2004 "Classes, Worlds and Hypergunk". The Monist 87.3: 3-21
2003 "Defending a Possible-Worlds Account of Indicative Conditionals". Philosophical Studies 116.3: 215-69
This paper can be found here.
2002 "Modal Fictionalism ", an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Main Entry plus three sub-entries. Revised in 2007, 2011, 2016 and 2020.
2001 "What's Wrong With Infinite Regresses?" Metaphilosophy 32.5: 523-538
1999 "Is Fertility Virtuous in its Own Right?" British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50: 265-282
1997 "Impossible Worlds: A Modest Approach". Notre Dame Journal for Formal Logic 38.4: 535-572
This paper can be found for free here, thanks to Project Euclid.
1997 "Three Problems for 'Strong' Modal Fictionalism". Philosophical Studies 87.3: 259-275
This paper can be found here.
1997 "Quantitative Parsimony". British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48.3: 329-343
1996 "Recombination Unbound". Philosophical Studies 84.2-3: 239-262
1996 "Reflexive Fictionalisms" (with John O'Leary-Hawthorne). Analysis 56.1: 26-32
Shorter Pieces
2019 "Intensionality and Hyperintensionality" in Crane, T. (ed.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Routledge, London.
2013 “Intension and Extension” in Pashler, H. (ed) The Encyclopedia of the Mind. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, pp 424-427
2012 "Moral Fictionalism" in Craig, E. (ed) Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Routledge, London.
2010 "The Canberra Plan" in Oppy, G., Trakakis, N., Burns, L., Gardner S. and Leigh, F. (eds.) Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand. Monash EPress, Melbourne, pp 98-100
2009 "David Lewis" in A Companion to Metaphysics, 2nd edition. Blackwell, Oxford, pp 370-2
2006 "David Lewis" in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd edition. Detroit: Macmillan Reference.
Book Reviews
forthcoming Review of David Lewis's Philosophical Manuscripts, edited by Frederique Janssen-Lauret and Fraser MacBride. Mind.
2023 Review of Aaron Cotnoir's and Achille Varzi's Mereology. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
2015 Review of Mark Jago's The Impossible: An Essay on Hyperintensionality. Mind 124.496: 1299-1302
2007 Review of Joseph Melia's Modality. Mind 116.461: 187-190
2004 Review of Charles Chihara’s The Worlds of Possibility: Modal Realism and the Semantics of Modal Logic. Studia Logica 76.3: 443-446
2003 Review of Preyer, G. and Siebelt, F. (eds) Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David Lewis. Philosophical Review 112.2: 263-266
2001 Review of Concha Martinez, Uxia Rivas and Luis Villegas-Forero (eds) Truth in Perspective: Recent Issues in Logic, Representation and Ontology. Studia Logica, 68.3: 404-407
1999 Review of Michael Tooley’s Time, Tense and Causation. Erkenntnis 50: 141-148
1998 Review of Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Diana Raffman and Nicholas Asher (eds) Modality, Morality and Belief: Essays in Honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus. Philosophical Quarterly 191: 253-255
Published Abstracts of Presented Papers
2017 "Reflections on Routley's Ultralogic Program". Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 23.3: 353
1999 “An Uneasy Marriage”. Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 5: 490
1997 “A Debate on Hypergunk” (with A.P. Hazen). Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 3: 365
1996 “Expressive Completeness Without Possible Worlds: The Hazen Cases”. Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 2: 116
Page created 28 July 2008. Last updated 26/07/2025