putnam has called for a renewal of philosophy by invoking the names of Wittgenstein and Dewey, both strong critics of traditional metaphysics. in the light of his own attacks on various forms of metaphysics (e.g. metaphysical realism, the fact/ value distinction), one question that arises is this: what is the fate of metaphysics in putnam’s vision of philosophy? The present paper explores this ...

This paper argues for a metaphysics of relations based on a characterization of quantum entanglement in terms of non-separability, thereby regarding entanglement as a sort of holism. By contrast to a radical metaphysics of relations, the position set out in this paper recognizes things that stand in the relations, but claims that, as far as the relations are concerned, there is no need for thes...

The paper argues that metaphysics depends upon science when it comes to claims about the constitution of the real world. That thesis is illustrated by considering the examples of global supervenience, the tenseless vs. the tensed theory of time and existence, events vs. substances, and relations vs. intrinsic properties. An argument is sketched out for a metaphysics of a fourdimensional block u...

George Boole (1815–1864) is rightly known as a logician, the author of an algebra logic, even if he did not conceive it quite in same way we know it. The calculus on classes and propositions, that set out to be equivalent, were at core his logic. After more than twenty centuries where logic was associated analysis language, handled for first time with mathematical symbols. However, Boole’s one ...

The emergence of S. L. Frank’s philosophy cannot be understood without clarifying his attitude to Immanuel Kant. Following the early representatives theory cognition time who undertook understand Kant in order go beyond him (W. Windelband) and their warning against turning Kant’s into a dogma allowing for diverse interpretations (P. Natorp), Frank saw not as critic “destroyer” metaphysics, but ...

In this paper, we develop a formalization of a metaphysics of structures and provide new applications to geometry and to metaphysics. We adopt the theory of set-theoretical structures formulated in da Costa and French [15] and in da Costa and Rodrigues [16]. The applications are made in the context of extending the proposal advanced in Caulton and Butterfield [11] to a higher-order metaphysics.

We reason that if there are nurnbers, they are abstract and therefore acausal. The question thus arises as to how we have knowledge of these objects. My thesis consists of three parts, each of which explores a response to this question. Charles Parsons has argued that we know about the numbers because we can apprehend (or "intuit") some abstract objects such as expression-types which form a mod...

Folk theories—untutored people’s (often implicit) theories about various features of the world—have been fashionable objects of inquiry in psychology for almost two decades now (e.g., Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994), and more recently they have been of interest in experimental philosophy (Nichols 2004). Folk theories of psychology, physics, biology, and ethics have all come under investigation. Fol...