Andrew Cullison

I really want to find time to read Trenton Merrick’s new book Truth and Ontology. It looks really interesting. There are a wide range of metaphysical theses that are rejected because they are alleged to be incompatible with any kind of truth maker principle (or Truth Supervenes on Being Principle). Presentism is example of one [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy by Andrew Cullison
1 Comment »

Jonathan Ichikawa justed posted about the lengthy journal review process here.I feel his pain. Today (and, I kid you not, it really is today) a journal has had one of my papers for exactly one year.

Filed under: philosophy by Andrew Cullison
No Comments »

In a recent post, I led up to the problem sentence for Nominalism. (3) Red resembles Orange more than Square-ness. The task for nominalism is to find an acceptable paraphrase for (3). (3) seems true, so whatever the paraphrase we come up with - it better be true too. We left off with (3**) as [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy by Andrew Cullison
4 Comments »

One version of nominalism holds that properties just are sets of things. There is no abstract universal red-ness. There just is a set of red things. The problem is that ordinary sentences of English look like they are talking about something that could only be something like a universal. There is no talk of sets. [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy by Andrew Cullison
2 Comments »

When I teach personal identity in Intro and Metaphysics, I often have a student suggest that what it takes to have the same person across time is for the persons to have the same DNA structure. A good response to this has always been to point out that identical twins have the same DNA structure, [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy by Andrew Cullison
4 Comments »

A common view in philosophy is that counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents are all vacuously true. But I’m very worried about that view. There are several counterfactuals with impossible antecedents that seem false. Here are some examples. Counterfactuals involving Metaphyical ClaimsConsider Metaphysical Nihilism, the thesis that there are no composite objects (just simples). According to [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy by Andrew Cullison
No Comments »

For the past few years, Leiter has put up a post so people can announce new tenure-track hires in the comments thread. It’s kind of interesting to see who hires who. Here’s the permanent link. I imagine that most people who read this also read Leiter, but just in case you haven’t seen it yet [...]

Filed under: philosophy by Andrew Cullison
No Comments »

This starts off as what purports to be a discussion of the misuse of the expression “begging the question”… Half way through the article, it stops being serious and gets pretty funny. But it’s worth noting that before the article goes humorous, the author gives an example of a valid modus tollens as begging the [...]

Filed under: epistemology, philosophy by Andrew Cullison
1 Comment »

A lot of materialists will admit that there are some kinds of entities that are a little more difficult to make sense of within a materialist ontology. For example - propositions. Here’s an argument for immaterialism that I encountered that seems to be aimed at materialists who would accept the existence of propositions. I’ve encountered [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy by Andrew Cullison
2 Comments »

Great! I had a perfectly good example involving amoral judgements that almost ALL of my students could relate to - downloading music without paying for it. When we get to ethics in my intro classes, I like to briefly discuss the following version of non-cognitivism. NG1 - All moral judgements are merely expressions of a [...]

Filed under: philosophy by Andrew Cullison
1 Comment »