Metaphysics

Advanced

Graduate level. Metatheory, technical variants, and disputes that are still open, with the primary literature named rather than gestured at.

Grounding and Metaphysical ExplanationPlanned
The in virtue of relation, its logical behaviour, and why supervenience was never going to do this job
22 min
Essence Is Not ModalityPlanned
Socrates and his singleton share their necessary truths but not their natures, and what real definition puts in modality's place
22 min
Fundamentality and StructurePlanned
Naturalness as objective structure, and whether reality has a privileged description
20 min
Ontological DependencePlanned
Existential, essential, rigid, and generic varieties, and why modal definitions misfire
18 min
Truthmaker TheoryPlanned
What makes a truth true, and why negative existentials strain maximalism
20 min
The Problem of Material ConstitutionPlanned
The statue and the clay share every part yet appear to differ in their modal properties
21 min
Neo-Aristotelian HylomorphismPlanned
Putting form back into the object: embodiment, structural parts, and the constitution problem dissolved rather than answered
22 min
Composition as IdentityPlanned
The claim that a whole just is its parts taken together, in strong, weak, and moderate forms
20 min
Gunk, Atomless Mereology, and Unrestricted CompositionPlanned
Worlds without atoms, and the price of letting any collection at all have a fusion
20 min
Priority MonismPlanned
The case that the cosmos is the one fundamental object and every part of it derivative
22 min
Vagueness and Ontic IndeterminacyPlanned
Whether sorites cases show loose language or fuzzy objects, and Evans's case against the latter
22 min
Metaontology and Carnapian DeflationismPlanned
Internal versus external questions, quantifier variance, and whether ontological disputes are real
22 min
Laws of NaturePlanned
Best system Humeanism, necessitation between universals, and dispositional essentialist rivals
26 min
Powers and DispositionsPlanned
Finks and masks against the conditional analysis, and whether powers are irreducibly modal
20 min
Act, Potency, and the Four CausesPlanned
The Aristotelian apparatus the analytic mainstream mostly dropped, restated in terms a powers theorist can already recognise
26 min
Essence, Existence, and the Real DistinctionPlanned
Whether what a thing is and that it is are two principles in the thing or one, and what follows for anything whose existence is not owed to something else
24 min
Absence Causation and OmissionsPlanned
The gardener who failed to water the plants, and why counting absences as causes lets in far too many of them
20 min
Structural Equations and Actual CausationPlanned
Causal models as the tool for reading token causation off a network, and the cases that still break it
26 min
Four-Dimensionalism and Stage TheoryPlanned
Worms and stages disagree about which thing a name picks out at a given moment
21 min
Presentism and RelativityPlanned
Special relativity leaves no privileged present, and the moves presentists have made in response
22 min
The Moving Spotlight and FragmentalismPlanned
A-theories that keep the whole block, and Fine's proposal that reality itself is fragmented
22 min
Time Travel and Causal LoopsPlanned
Why the grandfather paradox is not a contradiction, and what a loop with no origin would cost
22 min