Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Relations

  • John Bigelow’s Lucretian Defense of Presentism, Part I, Set-Up

    What follows in two parts is a critique of John Bigelow's Presentism and Properties. This installment is Part One. Bigelow begins by telling us that he is a presentist: "nothing exists which is not present." (35) He goes on to say that this was believed by everyone, including philosophers, until the 19th century. But this…

  • Mark Sainsbury on Intentional Relations

    Following A. N. Prior, Sainsbury sets up the problem of intentionality as follows: We are faced with a paradox: some intentional states are relational and some are not. But all intentional states are the same kind of thing, and things of the same kind are either all relational or all non-relational.  (Intentional Relations, 327) Cast…

  • Some Questions about Thinking, Relations, and Relational Expressions

    Bill, you said by email earlier that the sentence “Jake is thinking of Zeus” would be true if Jake was indeed thinking of Zeus. BV: That's what I said, although I would put 'is' where you have 'was.' Is what I said  a shocking thing to say? I have questions for you about the terms…

  • Relations and Nonexistents

     Consider the following two sentences:  a) Lions are smaller than dragons.b) Mice are smaller than elephants. From this datanic base a puzzle emerges.  1) The data sentences are both true.2) 'Smaller than' has the same sense in both (a) and (b).3) In both (a) and (b), 'smaller than' has the same reference: it refers to…

  • External Relations and Bare Particularism

    K. V. writes, I am a first year Jesuit novice of the USA Midwest province. I'm from Cincinnati, OH. I have interests in philosophy. I know Thomism well. My hope is to do metaphysics and philosophical logic within the analytic tradition.    I saw that you wrote a paper on external relations and Bradley's Regress.…

  • Working Draft: The Case Against Facts

    Comments appreciated if you are en rapport with the subject matter.   The Case Against Facts   Arianna Betti, Against Facts, The MIT Press, 2015, pp. 296 + xxvii   If Buridan's contribution to the bestiarum philosophorum was the ass, and David Armstrong's the ostrich, Arianna Betti's is the hedgehog bristling with spines. The hedgehog…

  • Worship, Reference, and Existence: An Aporetic Triad

    Each of the following three propositions strikes me as very reasonably maintained.  But they cannot all be true. A. Worship Entails Reference:  If S worships x, then S refers to x.B. Reference Entails Existence: If S refers to x, then x exists.C. Worship Does Not Entail Existence: It is not the case that if S…

  • Caesar Is No More: The Aporetics of Reference to the Past

    Here is London Ed's most recent version of his argument in his own words except for one word I added in brackets: 1. There is no such thing as Caesar any more. 2. The predicate 'there is no such thing as — any more' is satisfied by Caesar. 3. If a relation obtains [between] x…

  • Metaphysical Grounding and the Euthyphro Dilemma

    The locus classicus of the Euthyphro Dilemma (if you want to call it that) is Stephanus 9-10 in the early Platonic dialog, Euthyphro. This aporetic dialog is about the nature of piety, and Socrates, as usual, is in quest of a definition. Euthyphro proposes three definitions, with each of which Socrates has no trouble finding…

  • The Problems of Order and Unity and Their Difference

    Last Thursday, Steven N. and I had a very enjoyable three-hour conversation with ASU philosophy emeritus Ted Guleserian on Tempe's Mill Avenue.  We covered a lot of ground, but the most focused part of the discussion concerned the subject matter of this post.  If I understood Guleserian correctly, he was questioning whether there is any…

  • The Reference Relation: Internal or External?

    What is (linguistic) reference?  Is it a relation?  Edward the Ockhamist assumes that it is and issues the following request:  "To clarify, could I ask both you and Bill whether you think the reference relation is ‘internal’ or ‘external’?" Here is an inconsistent tetrad: 1. 'Frodo' refers to Frodo2. 'Frodo' exists while Frodo does not. 3. Reference…

  • A Common Misunderstanding of So-Called Cambridge Changes

    There are philosophers who think that 'Cambridge' changes and real changes are mutually exclusive. Thus they think that if a change is Cambridge, then it is not real. This is a mistake. Real changes are a  proper subset of Cambridge changes. Consider an example. Hillary gets wind of some tomcat behavior on the part of…

  • Presentism and Existence-Entailing Relations: An Aporetic Tetrad

    It is plausibly maintained that all relations are existence-entailing. To illustrate from the dyadic case: if R relates a and b, then both a and b exist.   A relation cannot hold unless the things between which or among which it holds all exist.  A weaker, and hence even more plausible, claim is that all relations…