This paper discusses recent attempts to use essentialist arguments based on the work of Kripke and Putnam to ground causal necessity in the world. I argue in particular that a recent argument by Alexander Bird relies on controversial intuitions about the natures of substances which no Humean would accept. While a case can be made that essentialism reflects some assumptions within scientific pra...

From five plausible premises about ordinary objects it follows that ordinary objects are either functions, fictions or processes. Assuming that the function and fiction accounts of ordinary objects are not plausible, in this paper I develop and defend a (non-Whiteheadian) process account of ordinary objects. I first offer an extended deduction that argues for mereological essentialism for masse...

D. J. Chalmers, 406–421. New York: Oxford University Press. Rosenthal, D.M. 2002b. Persons, minds, and consciousness. In The Philosophy of Marjorie Grene, eds R.E. Auxier and L.E. Hahn, 199–220. Chicago, Illinois: Open Court. Rosenthal, D.M. 2004. Being conscious of ourselves. The Monist 87: 161–84. Rosenthal, D.M. 2005. Consciousness and Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Shoemaker, S. 1...

Feminism is the fire that melts, but does not destroy.

We conducted a study to see if there was any difference in the affective learning of students who used software tutors to learn programming concepts. We used two software tutors – on arithmetic expression evaluation and tracing selection statements for this study. Data was collected over five semesters with the arithmetic tutor and over four semesters with the selection tutor, yielding a sample...

Abstract Dispositional essentialism is the view that all or many fundamental properties are essentially dispositional, powers . The literature on dispositional essence of abundant. In contrast, question how to understand fundamentality has received scarce interest. Therefore, stands in need clarification. There four main conceptions fundamental, namely as which (i) metaphysically independent ; ...

Philippa Foot (2001), Rosalind Hursthouse (1999), and Michael Thompson (2008), along with other philosophers, have argued for a metaethical position, the natural goodness approach, that claims moral judgments are, or are on a par with, teleological claims made in the biological sciences. Specifically, an organism’s flourishing is characterized by how well they function as specified by the speci...

In this paper, I look at the argument for Dispositional Essentialism (DE) that has been put forward by A. Bird in his recent book Nature’s Metaphysics. Bird’s overall argument comes in two parts, one negative and one positive, which together are to establish DE as the best contender for a theory of properties and laws. I argue that, even if all their particular steps go through, both parts of t...