“Philosophy cannot become scientifically healthy without an immense technical vocabulary. We can hardly imagine our greatgrandsons turning over the leaves of this dictionary without amusement over the paucity of words with which their grandsires attempted to handle metaphysics and logic. Long before that day, it will have become indispensably requisite, too, that each of these terms should be c...

It is commonplace to formalize propositions involving essential properties of objects in a language containing modal operators and quantifiers. Assuming David Lewis’s counterpart theory as semantic framework for quantified logic, I will show that certain statements discussed the metaphysics modality de re, such sufficiency condition properties, cannot be faithfully formalized. A natural modific...

Freedom and moral responsibility have one foot in the practical realm of human affairs and the other in the esoteric realm of fundamental metaphysics—or so we believe. This has been denied, especially in the metaphysics-bashing era occupying the first two-thirds or so of the twentieth century, traces of which linger in the present day. But the reasons for this denial seem to us quite implausibl...

This study lays out an overview of the main developments related to teaching and expounding logic at Philosophy Department Peking University, between early years Republic year 1927, when university was temporarily dissolved reorganized into Provisional Unified University Peking. The objective here is interconnect various (some not directly related) in curricula that covered logic. It describes ...

Abstract Since the last decades of twentieth and beginning twenty-first century, use metaphysics by philosophers when approaching conceptual problems in biology has increased. Some call this tendency philosophy ‘Metaphysics Biology’ (Guay Pradeu Synthese 1–20, 2017). In paper, I aim at characterizing Metaphysics Biology paying attention to diverse ways addressing biology. will claim that there ...

In this paper I will argue that if physics is to become a coherent metaphysics of nature it needs an “interpretation”. As I understand it, an interpretation of a physical theory amounts to offering (1) a precise formulation of its ontological claims and (2) a clear account of how such claims are related to the world of our experience. Notably, metaphysics enters importantly in both tasks: in (1...

This paper argues that there is value in a systematic philosophical approach to relations and surveys some of the major issues in the philosophy of relations. Rather than siding with relational ontology over substantivist ontology, however, the paper argues that the best philosophical approaches are causal theories of relation in which both relations and entities take their rise from an ontolog...

The present paper discusses different approaches to metaphysics and defends a specific, non-deflationary approach that nevertheless qualifies as scientifically-grounded and, consequently, as acceptable from the naturalistic viewpoint. By critically assessing some recent work on science and metaphysics, we argue that such a sophisticated form of naturalism, which preserves the autonomy of metaph...

We divide analytic metaphysics into naturalistic and non-naturalistic metaphysics. The latter we define as any philosophical theory that makes some ontological claim (as opposed to conceptual claim), where that ontological claim has no observable consequences. We discuss further features of non-naturalistic metaphysics, including its methodology of appealing to intuition, and we explain the way...