abstract justice is one of the most important issues of human life, and also a prominent religious teaching which, when well-observed, could not only soothe most human sufferings, but also meet most human innate needs. however, to exercise justice involves both knowing its different aspects and, at the same time, explaining it from the religious point of view. the present paper attempts to expl...

Metaphysical explanations, unlike many other kinds of explanation, are standardly thought to be insensitive our epistemic situation and so not evaluable by cognitive values such as salience. I consider a case study that challenges this view. Some properties distributed over an extension. For example, the property being polka-dotted red on white, when instantiated, is surface. Similar have been ...

Formal mereology should be of interest to metaphysicians because it allows us, in a rigorous way, to determine the consequence relations between metaphysical theses and theories, many of which are of metaphysical interest. Take, for example, the many and various puzzles of constitution, and the metaphysical theories that have been advanced to solve them. Ideally, it should be possible to analys...

It has recently been suggested that a distinctive metaphysical relation — ‘Grounding’—is ultimately at issue in contexts in which some goings-on are said to hold ‘in virtue of’’, be (constitutively) ‘metaphysically dependent on’, or be ‘nothing over and above’ some others. Grounding is supposed to do good work (better than merely modal notions, in particular) in illuminating metaphysical depend...