I was reminded today of some insightful thoughts from the Maverick Philosopher: Liberty and security stand in a dialectical relation to each other in that (i) each requires the other to be what it is, and yet (ii) each is opposed to the other. … Ad (i). Liberty worth having is liberty capable of being… Read More »

I just finished a paper defending what philosopher Arthur Prior called the “Peircean” system of tense logic over against the rival “Ockhamist” system. You can download the paper here (100kB, PDF). I’ll be reading this paper at the group meeting of the Philosophy of Time Society at the Pacific APA conference in March. For some… Read More »

In Section 4 of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume makes a famous distinction between “matters of fact” and “relations of ideas” All the objects of human reason or enquiry fall naturally into two kinds, namely relations of ideas and matters of fact. The first kind include geometry, algebra, and arithmetic, and indeed every… Read More »

I just finished reading Barry Miller’s The Fullness of Being, a very stimulating book. Miller argues against Russell, Frege, Quine, et al. that existence can be predicated of individuals and develops an interesting metaphysical account of the relation between an individual and its existence. Anyway, at one point Miller argues for a sharp distinction between… Read More »

I’m not going to try to settle this question right now, but merely to point out some of the consequences of answering it with either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. Charles Peirce once said “The possible is necessarily general; and no amount of general specification can reduce a general class of possibilities to an individual… Read More »

A few posts back I suggested that there might be two senses of “exists”: (1) a “there is” sense that functions linguistically as a second-order predicate (i.e., it says of a concept or predicate expression that its extension is non-empty), and (2) an “is actual” sense that functions linguistically as a first-order predicate of individuals.… Read More »

In my previous post I contemplated the idea that actuality is the ontological delimiter of possibility (ODOP). That’s a mouthful, but what it means basically is that the reason why one thing is possible rather than another is because something that already exists precludes some things from happening and not others. Here’s a simple example:… Read More »

I’d like to take this idea out for a test drive. If actuality is the ontological delimiter of possibility (ODOP), what follows? Offhand, it conflicts with the idea that possibility is ontologically prior to actuality, an idea that might seem attractive given that the actual world is generally thought to be one of a vast… Read More »

The question may seem an odd one. If read as asking “Do there exist any objects that do not exist?” the answer is obviously No because the question presupposes a contradiction. But there is another way of reading the question that can be gotten at if we reflect on the relation between actuals, possibles that… Read More »

It is often claimed nowadays that “science”, by definition, can only invoke “natural” causes as explanations, where “natural” causes are restricted to entities or laws that will presumably find inclusion in a completed form of physics or to things that are either ontologically reducible to or strongly supervenient on such entities and laws. In short,… Read More »