Platonic Heaven

Here.

Here.

A paper of mine entitled “Frege’s Context Principle: An Interpretation” has been accepted for publication in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. In the paper I present a new interpretation of Frege’s context principle according to which it applies primarily to singular terms for abstract objects but not necessarily to singular terms for ordinary objects. For details see here.

A paper of mine entitled “What Are Numbers?” has been accepted for publication in Synthese. It argues for a conception of numbers as ‘adverbial entities’—more specifically, ways or manners in which things exist.. For details see here.

A paper of mine entitled “A Strengthening of the Caesar Problem” has been accepted for publication in Erkenntnis. The paper argues against the neo-Fregean view that abstract concepts like direction and number can be defined in terms of equivalence relations by presenting a strengthened version of the so-called Caesar objection. For details see here.

Here. A preprint is available here.

As announced earlier, some of us at Western are reading Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics (ed. Sider, Hawthorne and Zimmerman, Blackwell, 2008) this summer.

Our first meeting was last Wednesday, and we discussed the two articles of Chapter 1 on abstract entities. The first article by Chris Swoyer was a very basic introduction to the problem of abstract entities, so there’s not much to say about it.

In the second article, Cian Dorr defends nominalism by adopting a paraphrase strategy that analyzes ontologically problematic sentences like

(1) There are four prime numbers between 1 and 10

as counterfactual sentences like

(2) If the axioms of number theory were true, then it would be the case that (1).

This is not a satisfactory paraphrase, however. To see why, let’s call the axioms of number theory PA. According to the nominalist, PA isn’t true literally but should be understood as saying the following:

(3) If the axioms of number theory were true, then PA would be true.

But since ‘PA‘ is a name for the axioms of number theory, (3) is a plain tautology—’If PA were true, then PA would be true’—whereas PA is anything but a tautology. So PA can’t be analyzed as (3).

Hence Dorr’s suggested nominalist paraphrase strategy fails.

I just received the following note from Mike, a student who took an intro philosophy class from me this spring:

I just want to start by saying that your PHIL 105 class was one of the most interesting courses I have ever taken in my life. Unfortunately I will be graduating this weekend and so I won’t be able to take any more courses offered by you or anyone else in the Philosophy department, however I am still extremely interested in reading the theories concerning the types of issues we covered in class. So I was wondering if you could help to guide my search with some suggestions. As I will be working in the corporate world soon and have some faint aspirations for a life in politics I am mainly interested in issues similar to disobedience and ethics of assistance though arguments concerning religion also interest me greatly. Basically if you could tell me of some authors or some argument you think I might find of interest I would greatly appreciate it and also if you would be so kind as to answer some of my question or play devil’s advocate to my points and counter points in the future I would also greatly appreciate it. I hope to hear from you soon, and that you have a great summer.

I thought I could get some help from the readers of this blog. Any suggestions for books about civil disobedience, ethics of assistance, or any other similar ethical issues?

And I’m sorry to lose such an outstanding student as Mike to the corporate world…

The spring semester has come to an end at WIU (except for finals and a lot of grading, that is).

I am planning to start a new reading project immediately after this finals week. Some of the regular members of the philosophy reading group here at Western will join me for an intense, hot summer of philosophical debate.

The book we’ll read is Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, ed. Ted Sider, John Hawthorne, and Dean Zimmerman, Blackwell, 2008.

We’ll proceed at a leisurely pace and read one article a week. I’ll try to post a brief review of each article we read, as I did before.

Do not value either your children or your life or anything else more than goodness, in order that when you arrive in Hades you may have all this as your defense before the rulers there.

Quoted from Crito (54b), trans. G. M. A. Grube.