Since its inception, analytic philosophy has failed to attain dominance in Japan. However, the 21st century seen gain traction among Japanese philosophers. This paper, which examines status quo of Japan since 2000, consists two parts. The first part deals primarily with organizations—specifically, relevant associations, journals, conferences, universities, and publishers are illustrated. second...

Ulrich Meyer’s fascinating book The Nature of Time uses a novel development of Arthur Prior’s tense logic to argue for a ‘modal’ account of time. Meyer’s metaphysical view requires tense primitivism (the view that truths are irreducibly tensed) and so, in Quine’s turn of phrase, trades ontology for ideology. Meyer’s temporal metaphysics eschews ontological commitment to temporal instants throug...

It is a commonplace of modal metaphysics that belief in possible worlds not only burdens one with a large ontology but also raises metaphysical problems concerning their existence and identity conditions and epistemological problems concerning the justification of one’s belief in them. In this paper, we challenge this commonplace and show that belief in possible worlds doesn’t necessarily burde...

In a recent book (The Metaphysics within Physics), Tim Maudlin reconstructs metaphysics by taking inspiration from the gauge theories interpreted in the fiber bundle framework. I call his project the “fiber bundle metaphysics”. Primarily targeted not to Humean Supervenience, but to any metaphysics employing the relation of resemblance among objects (D. Lewis, D. Armstrong), Maudlin’s project is...

Recent work in philosophy could benefit from paying greater attention to empirical results from cognitive science involving judgments about the nature of our ordinary experience. This paper describes the way that experimental and theoretical results about the nature of ordinary judgments could—and should—inform certain sorts of enquiries in contemporary philosophy, using metaphysics as an exemp...

Recent work in philosophy could benefit from paying greater attention to empirical results from cognitive science involving judgments about the nature of our ordinary experience. This paper describes the way that experimental and theoretical results about the nature of ordinary judgments could—and should—inform certain sorts of enquiries in contemporary philosophy, using metaphysics as an exemp...

The goal of General Spatial Intelligence is to present a unified theory to support the various aspects of spatial experience, whether physical or cognitive. We acknowledge the fact that GIScience has to assume a particular worldview, resulting from specific positions regarding metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, mind, language, cognition and representation. Implicit positions regarding these d...

The paper considers the opposition between Humean metaphysics and the metaphysics of powers, focusing on laws, probabilities and causation. It argues that within Humean metaphysics, everything is a matter of contingency. Consequently, there is no deep metaphysical difference between a deterministic world and a world in which only probabilistic laws hold. This position is contrasted with the fou...

Almost fifty years later, Russell’s objections seem quite dated, dependent on a form of logical empiricism that has not weathered the intervening years well. The logic and metaphysics of possibility and necessity have proved to be a fruitful and rich area of investigation. Cosmology – the study of the universe as a whole – has matured and gained respectability. The notion of causation has taken...

“Philosophy cannot become scientifically healthy without an immense technical vocabulary. We can hardly imagine our great-grandsons 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 ...