Subverting a once widely held Quinean paradigm, there is growing consensus among philosophers of logic that higher-order quantifiers (which bind variables in the syntactic position predicates and sentences) are perfectly legitimate useful instrument logico-philosophical toolbox, while neither being reducible to nor fully explicable terms first-order singular term position). This article discuss...

The paper argues that, as far as logic and abstract metaphysics go, the claim that composition is identity could be true, despite wellmotivated arguments against the coherence of the claim. The key to answering the arguments is to reject a principle of universal substitutivity of “identical” plural expressions while retaining Leibniz’ Law, that identicals have the same properties, relations, an...

James Conant, a proponent of the ‘New American Wittgenstein’, has argued that the standard interpretation of Wittgenstein is wholly mistaken in respect of Wittgenstein’s critique of metaphysics and the attendant conception of nonsense. The standard interpretation, Conant holds, misascribes to Wittgenstein Carnapian views on the illegitimacy of metaphysical utterances, on logical syntax and gram...

Armstrong says of his theory of possibility that it is ‘reductionist’. Fraser MacBride has argued at great length that it fails to be reductionist because for some statements it fails to provide non-modal truth-conditions. I argue that MacBride misunderstands Armstrong’s theory because its aim is not to provide truth-conditions. This illustrates how great a gulf there is between semantics and m...