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The in virtue of relation, its logical behaviour, and why supervenience was never going to do this job

22 min

Socrates and his singleton share their necessary truths but not their natures, and what real definition puts in modality's place

22 min

Naturalness as objective structure, and whether reality has a privileged description

20 min

Existential, essential, rigid, and generic varieties, and why modal definitions misfire

18 min

What makes a truth true, and why negative existentials strain maximalism

20 min

The statue and the clay share every part yet appear to differ in their modal properties

21 min

Putting form back into the object: embodiment, structural parts, and the constitution problem dissolved rather than answered

22 min

The claim that a whole just is its parts taken together, in strong, weak, and moderate forms

20 min

Worlds without atoms, and the price of letting any collection at all have a fusion

20 min

The case that the cosmos is the one fundamental object and every part of it derivative

22 min

Whether sorites cases show loose language or fuzzy objects, and Evans's case against the latter

22 min

Internal versus external questions, quantifier variance, and whether ontological disputes are real

22 min

Best system Humeanism, necessitation between universals, and dispositional essentialist rivals

26 min

Finks and masks against the conditional analysis, and whether powers are irreducibly modal

20 min

The Aristotelian apparatus the analytic mainstream mostly dropped, restated in terms a powers theorist can already recognise

26 min

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

The gardener who failed to water the plants, and why counting absences as causes lets in far too many of them

20 min

Causal models as the tool for reading token causation off a network, and the cases that still break it

26 min

Worms and stages disagree about which thing a name picks out at a given moment

21 min

Special relativity leaves no privileged present, and the moves presentists have made in response

22 min

A-theories that keep the whole block, and Fine's proposal that reality itself is fragmented

22 min

Why the grandfather paradox is not a contradiction, and what a loop with no origin would cost

22 min

Whether 'knows' shifts with the speaker's context, with the subject's stakes, or not at all

24 min

Treating knowledge as primitive, defining evidence from it, and the margin-for-error argument that no condition is luminous

26 min

A reason that is both reflectively accessible and factive, offered against the demand to choose between internalism and externalism

25 min

Why knowledge is worth more than mere true belief, and why reliability alone cannot say so

21 min

Probability axioms as coherence constraints, and the rules for revising credences

28 min

Deriving the probability axioms from accuracy alone, with no bets and no bookie in sight

27 min

Why a white shoe appears to confirm that all ravens are black, and what grue breaks

24 min

If believing is having a high enough credence, rational belief is not closed under conjunction. Something has to give

22 min

What conditionalization says when the new information is about which person, or which time, you are

25 min

Evidence about the reliability of your own reasoning, and whether the levels can come apart

24 min

A short proof that if every truth can be known, then every truth already is known

23 min

How anyone comes to know what is possible or necessary, with no experience of it

22 min

Choices whose outcomes you cannot assess until after you have made them, and what that does to expected utility

19 min

Norms governing what to look into rather than what to believe, and the tension between the two

21 min

Full proofs for propositional logic and the Henkin construction for first-order logic

30 min

Two corollaries of completeness, and the limits they place on first-order description

22 min

Recursive functions, the halting problem, and the proof that first-order validity has no decision procedure

26 min

Gentzen's LK and LJ, the structural rules, and the Hauptsatz that makes proof search possible

28 min

Arithmetization, the fixed-point lemma, and what the theorems do and do not show

32 min

Tarski's theorem, the hierarchy it forces, and Kripke's fixed-point alternative

28 min

Reading the box as "is provable in PA", and the modal system that turns out to be exactly right

30 min

Structures that satisfy every truth of arithmetic and contain numbers larger than every number

26 min

How the models of a theory can be counted, classified, and in rare cases pinned down

30 min

Quantifying over properties, the categoricity it buys, and the metatheory it destroys

24 min

Finding the weakest axioms that prove a theorem, by proving the axioms from the theorem

28 min

Proving that a modal formula is valid on exactly the frames with a given property

20 min

What happens when quantifiers meet the box: constant versus variable domains, and the necessity of identity

26 min

The Lewis systems below K, neighbourhood semantics, and impossible worlds

24 min

Dropping excluded middle, the BHK reading of the connectives, and monotone Kripke models

24 min

Proofs as programs: the isomorphism between natural deduction and the typed lambda calculus, and what normalization turns out to be

28 min

Dropping weakening, contraction, or exchange, and what linear logic and the Lambek calculus buy by doing it

26 min

Rejecting explosion, the variable sharing constraint, and dialetheism

22 min

Łukasiewicz three-valued logic, the Kleene schemes, and the logic of paradox

22 min

Supervaluationism, degree theories, epistemicism, and the problem of higher-order vagueness

26 min

Indicative against subjunctive, the Stalnaker-Lewis semantics, Adams' thesis, and why probability cannot be a conditional's meaning

28 min

Validity fails to preserve certainty you never had, so the real question is how much uncertainty a valid inference can accumulate

26 min

The attempt to make confirmation a matter of logical form alone, the parameter it needed, and the result that universal laws end up confirmed to degree zero

28 min

Quantifying without existence assumptions, and the positive, negative, and neutral variants

18 min

Three applied modal families, their characteristic axioms, and their characteristic paradoxes

26 min

Tarski's analysis of consequence, the permutation invariance criterion, and the case for logical pluralism

26 min

The logic of demonstratives, direct reference, and the two levels of indexical meaning

22 min

Kaplan's ban on operators that shift context, and the languages that seem to break it

22 min

Primary and secondary intensions, Stalnaker's diagonal, and Chalmers's bid to restore the link between meaning and apriority

25 min

Pierre, London, and Londres, and why the puzzle is not Frege's puzzle in disguise

20 min

Evans's Madagascar case, descriptive names, the qua problem, and causal descriptivism

22 min

Russellian propositions, what holds their parts together, and the act-type theories of Soames and Hanks

24 min

Distinctions finer than necessary equivalence, Fine's exact verification, and Yablo on subject matter

25 min

Treating English as a formal language with the typed lambda calculus doing the composition

26 min

'Most', conservativity, and why determiners denote relations between sets

22 min

Davidson's hidden event argument, adverb dropping, and the neo-Davidsonian thematic roles

22 min

'Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it', E-type pronouns, Kamp's DRT, and meaning as context change

26 min

Hamblin sets, partitions of logical space, Rooth on focus, and propositions that raise issues as well as settle them

25 min

Stalnaker's model of assertion as shrinking a context set, and Lewis's rule of accommodation

22 min

Why presuppositions survive negation and questions, Karttunen's filters, Heim's satisfaction theory, and Schlenker's local contexts

26 min

Cappelen and Lepore against Recanati and Travis, and Stanley's binding argument for covert variables

25 min

Modal bases, ordering sources, and the restrictor analysis of 'if'

24 min

'Might' claims, retraction, Yalcin's domain semantics, and MacFarlane's relativism about truth

26 min

Whether two people can disagree about what is tasty without either being wrong, and metalinguistic negotiation

22 min

Sperber and Wilson's single principle, explicature, and Horn's two-principle reduction of the maxims

22 min

Chierchia, Fox, and Spector's covert exhaustification operator, embedded implicatures, and free choice

26 min

Potts's multidimensional semantics, appositives, 'damn', and content that is not at issue

23 min

Where a slur's derogation lives: content, presupposition, expressive meaning, or a social prohibition

24 min

Langton and Hornsby on illocutionary disablement and McGowan on covert exercitives

23 min

'Ducks lay eggs', 'mosquitoes carry malaria', Leslie's default generalisations, and generic essentialism

23 min

Coded speech, Saul's figleaves, Khoo on code words, and Stanley on undermining propaganda

23 min

Derrida's reading of Austin, the claim that every sign can be cited out of context, and the quarrel collected in Limited Inc

26 min

Davidson's denial of metaphorical meaning against Stern's context-dependent content and Camp's perspectives

22 min

Malapropisms, prior and passing theories, and Davidson's claim that there is no such thing as a language

20 min

The difference between saying what an expression means and saying what makes it mean that

22 min

Plus, quus, the sceptical paradox about meaning, and why dispositions do not answer it

26 min

Using Löwenheim-Skolem to argue that reference is radically indeterminate, and the 'just more theory' reply

26 min

Lewis's answer to Putnam: meaning fixed by the best interpretation, where natural properties are easier to mean

24 min

The manifestation and acquisition arguments against truth-conditional meaning, and the case against bivalence

26 min

Brandom's account of meaning as inferential role, deontic scorekeeping, and logic as making inference explicit

26 min

Rejection as a primitive speech act, Schroeder's Being For, Gibbard's hyperplans, and the negation problem

26 min

Horwich's acceptance properties and whether a deflationist about truth can say what fixes meaning

22 min

Chomsky's case against public languages and reference, and Pietroski's conjunctivist semantics

25 min

Revising what our words mean on purpose: ameliorative analysis, topic continuity, and the implementation problem

24 min

Van Heijenoort's contrast between Frege's universalism and the model-theoretic view, and what each makes of metalogic

22 min

The charge that model-theoretic consequence gets the extension of validity right only by luck

26 min

How completeness lets a formal notion be proved coextensive with intuitive validity

22 min

Logical constants as the isomorphism-invariant operations, McGee's theorem, and Feferman's objections

25 min

Why no logic stronger than first-order logic keeps both compactness and Löwenheim-Skolem, and what that is supposed to prove

25 min

Non-normal valuations that respect every classical rule, and the bilateral and open-ended repairs

24 min

Prawitz validity, canonical proofs, and Dummett's fundamental assumption as a theory of what connectives mean

26 min

Whether classical negation can be harmonious: stability, general elimination rules, and multiple conclusions

25 min

Dummett on the justification of deduction, rule-circularity, and Boghossian's blind reasoning

24 min

Harman's challenge that logic says nothing about reasoning, and MacFarlane's bridge principles

25 min

Williamson and Priest on choosing a logic the way one chooses a scientific theory

24 min

Kripke's argument, developed by Padró, that some logical rules cannot be adopted by anyone who lacks them

22 min

Beall and Restall's generalised Tarski thesis, the collapse argument against pluralism, and Russell's logical nihilism

24 min

Shapiro and Cook on formal systems as models of natural-language consequence rather than descriptions of it

20 min

Securing infinitary mathematics by finitary consistency proofs, Tait's analysis of finitism, and partial realisations

24 min

Gentzen's consistency proof for arithmetic by transfinite induction up to epsilon-naught, and what it secures

26 min

Gupta and Belnap on truth as a circular concept defined by revision sequences

25 min

Why every consistent theory of the liar seems to generate a new liar in its own vocabulary

24 min

Strict-tolerant logic, validity Curry, and keeping classical logic by giving up cut or contraction

26 min

Why an attitude-expressing semantics struggles in unasserted contexts, and what quasi-realism claims to earn back

26 min

The objection that a causal semantics for moral words makes two communities talk past each other rather than disagree

24 min

Everyone agrees the moral cannot vary without the natural varying. The dispute is over who gets to explain that

23 min

Analysing value as reasons for attitudes, and the demon who gives you a reason to admire the wrong thing

22 min

Moral truth as the output of a procedure, and the split over which procedure and why it binds

24 min

Deriving normative authority from what agency already is, and the reply that one could always settle for being a shmagent

27 min

Where the operator attaches in 'if you intend the end, take the means', and why bootstrapping turns on the answer

25 min

The claim that a consideration counting in favour here can count against there, and what that leaves of moral principles

23 min

Why a constraint forbids an act that would prevent more acts of the very same kind

24 min

How luck in results, circumstances, and constitution collides with the control principle

20 min

Whether summing benefits across people ignores that each person's life is their own, and what limited aggregation offers instead

24 min

The small improvement argument, and the case for a fourth comparative relation beyond better, worse, and equal

22 min

The total view, the repugnant conclusion, and the person-affecting intuitions that every proposed escape route gives up

27 min

Whether an evolutionary story about our moral beliefs undercuts their claim to track anything, and what a third factor would have to do

22 min

How to act without knowing which moral theory is correct, and whether two theories' verdicts can be put on one scale at all

23 min

Why explaining every cognitive function can leave the question of experience untouched

22 min

Denying that phenomenal properties exist, and explaining instead why we are so sure they do

22 min

Making a state conscious by being represented by another state, and the trouble raised by states with no target

20 min

Two empirical theories assessed philosophically: what each measures, and whether either addresses experience or only its correlates

24 min

Reducing what an experience is like to what it represents, with transparency for it and spectrum inversion against

22 min

Reversing the usual order of explanation: content derived from experience rather than experience from content

22 min

Whether thinking a thought has a felt character of its own, or only the sensory imagery that accompanies it

20 min

Disjunctivism about perceptual experience, the causal argument against it, and the screening-off worry

22 min

Putting experience at the bottom to avoid emergence, then facing the question of how small subjects make a large one

21 min

Physics describes structure and leaves the intrinsic nature of matter open, and consciousness is offered as the filler

20 min

Naturalizing content through indication and biological function, and the misrepresentation cases every version has to survive

26 min

Treating perception as controlled hypothesis testing, and asking what survives of representation under the free energy story

22 min

Otto's notebook, the parity principle, and the bloat objection that follows from taking it seriously

21 min

Kim's argument that a sufficient physical cause leaves no work for a mental one, unless overdetermination is accepted

24 min

The right mental cause producing the right movement the wrong way, and the worry that on this story nobody acts at all

22 min

Answering whether you believe it by looking at the world rather than at yourself, and what Moore's paradox shows about the asymmetry

21 min

Why experiences at a time come as one field, and what split-brain patients do to that claim

21 min

Deciding how far consciousness extends when the only evidence is behaviour and structural similarity

23 min

Whether ontological disputes are genuine disagreements or artifacts of how the parties speak

22 min

Deriving numbers and properties from trivial inferences, and the claim that the hard questions were never hard

22 min

Deriving arithmetic from Hume's principle, and the Caesar and bad company objections

26 min

Whether there are several ways of being, and whether rival ontologists mean one thing by 'there is'

24 min

Whether anyone can quantify over absolutely everything, and what indefinite extensibility would cost if not

26 min

Counting primitive notions as well as entities, and why the two economies pull against each other

20 min

Talking about some things without talking about a further thing they form, and what nominalism can buy with it

24 min

Asking the questions in a typed higher-order language instead of a first-order one, and watching several of them change shape

28 min

Ranking what there is by what holds in virtue of what, rather than listing it all flat

26 min

Sider's claim that quantification itself carves at the joints, and what makes a description natural

28 min

The ontology of things that seem to be defined by what is not there, and what they do to a clean mereology

22 min

Upper ontologies built for shared scientific data, and the continuant and occurrent split they turn on

22 min

Bennett's diagnosis that some disputes are substantive but unsettleable, through difference-minimising and burden-shifting

23 min

Chalmers on lightweight and heavyweight quantifiers and the method of elimination for verbal disputes

24 min

Two readings of the quantifier, the puzzle about ontology, and internalism about arithmetic

24 min

Yablo's claim that existence talk about numbers is often figurative, and why that makes ontology quizzical

23 min

Price's subject naturalism, global expressivism, and the case for asking what existence talk does

24 min

Thomasson's proposal that necessity claims express semantic rules rather than describe modal facts

22 min

Hawthorne, Cortens, and Turner on describing the world with no objects at all, using feature-placing and predicate functors

25 min

Azzouni's ontologically innocent quantifier and the ontological independence criterion for existence

23 min

Routley and Priest's modern Meinongianism, the characterisation principle, and objects that exist at impossible worlds

24 min

Williamson's claim that necessarily everything is necessarily something, and the merely possible as non-concrete

25 min

Rayo's compositionalism, trivialism about mathematics, and the construction of logical space

24 min

Linnebo's sufficiency of abstraction, reconceptualisation, and dynamic abstraction as a cure for bad company

25 min

Eklund's maximalism and the principle that every consistent kind of object there could be there is

23 min

Fine's argument that ontological claims are not existence claims and his reality operator

24 min

Schaffer's neo-Aristotelian view that existence questions are trivial and the real work is what grounds what

24 min

When two theories say the same thing: definitional and Morita equivalence and notational variants

25 min

Ladyman and Ross's rainforest realism, real patterns, and the claim that structure is all there is

25 min

Whether theoretical virtues can be truth-conducive in metaphysics, and Kriegel on aesthetic virtues

22 min

Whether equality corrects for disadvantage nobody chose or instead removes standing hierarchies between citizens

20 min

The demand that coercive law be justifiable in terms citizens holding different doctrines could accept

22 min

Whether a state may promote a conception of the good life, and what neutrality could mean if it may not

22 min

Three rival pictures of what democracy is for: reasoned exchange, tracking correct answers, and conflict that is never settled

22 min

Democracy decides questions by a vote of the people, and cannot decide by a vote who the people are

22 min

The rule of recognition against law as an interpretive practice, and what each says a judge does when the rules run out

26 min

The claim that no state is legitimate in the sense required for a general duty to obey, and that this changes less than it sounds

22 min

Whether duties of distributive justice stop at the border or reach everyone, and what shared institutions have to do with it

22 min

Arguments from freedom of movement set against a political community's claimed right to select who enters

20 min

Rival accounts built on surplus extraction, unfair terms of exchange, and taking advantage of vulnerability

22 min

What is gained and lost by theorising justice on the assumption that everyone complies and conditions are favourable

20 min

Structural accounts of injustice, the racial contract as a rereading of contract theory, and the challenge to the public and private divide

24 min

When a group counts as an agent in its own right, and the aggregation paradox that makes group judgment more than a sum of votes

24 min

Whether pre-tax holdings are a baseline that taxation departs from, and what each answer implies about redistributive claims

22 min

Which goods should not be for sale, and whether the objection is to the terms of exchange or to what selling them expresses

22 min

Sentience, cognitive capacity, and relationship as rival criteria, and whether status comes in degrees or not at all

24 min

Parfit's result that an act can seem wrong while harming nobody, because a different act would have produced different people

22 min

Benatar's asymmetry between absent pain and absent pleasure, Savulescu's procreative beneficence, and the repugnant conclusion that squeezes both

24 min

Every way of ranking populations by size and welfare violates one of a small set of conditions that all look compulsory

28 min

Taurek's refusal to add the numbers up, and the views that let some claims compete while ruling others irrelevant

26 min

Maximising expected choiceworthiness as a decision rule, and the fanaticism that follows when one theory assigns unbounded stakes

26 min

Imposing a chance of harm on someone who is never in fact harmed, and whether contractualism should evaluate that before or after the outcome

26 min

Whether the therapy and enhancement line can bear weight, what heritable editing does to consent, and the objection that selection expresses a judgment about existing lives

26 min

What a quality-adjusted life year measures, why disability advocates object to it, and whether a lottery treats claimants more fairly than triage

26 min

McMahan's argument that liability to attack depends on responsibility for an unjust threat, which denies combatants on the two sides equal standing

28 min

Discounting future welfare, dividing responsibility for emissions already made, and the problem that no single act makes a detectable difference

26 min

Who answers for an automated decision, and what would have to be true of a system before it could be wronged rather than merely misused

24 min

Recasting the arguments as claims about how much likelier the evidence is on theism, which moves the whole dispute onto the prior and onto what fixes it

26 min

A supertask that yields a contradiction from apparently consistent parts, offered as a reason to deny that anything can have infinitely many causal antecedents

26 min

The argument turns entirely on the possibility premise, and parallel arguments for a maximally great island or a necessary nonexistence exploit that

22 min

The classical doctrine that God has no parts, no temporal location, and no states caused from outside, and the collapse and personhood objections it faces

22 min

Whether God is a being among beings with a very good set of properties, or is not that kind of thing at all, and why classical theists treat the first as a category mistake rather than a rival view

26 min

If God depends on nothing, numbers and properties cannot exist independently, and every way of making them depend on God threatens to presuppose them

26 min

If a thing once made would simply keep going on its own, conservation has nothing left to do, and the argument from an ordered causal series loses its terminus

24 min

If a past belief about your next act is already fixed, the act looks unavoidable, and Molinism, Ockhamism, and open theism each break the chain at a different link

24 min

Whether talk about God says anything at all: denial of positive description, analogical predication, and the verificationist charge of meaninglessness

22 min

Plantinga's case that belief in God can be rational without argument if it comes from a faculty working as designed, and the objection that any belief could claim this

21 min

Treating theism and naturalism as rival explanations of the same data, and the disputes over simplicity, scope, and gap-filling that follow

23 min

Not that suffering is pointless, but that its distribution tracks biological usefulness far more closely than theism would lead anyone to expect

24 min

Plantinga's claim that unguided evolution gives you no reason to trust your own faculties, which makes naturalism self-defeating rather than merely false

26 min

Rowe's inference from apparently pointless suffering, the CORNEA restriction on such inferences, and how theodicies enter as competing likelihoods

24 min

Granting that we cannot judge which goods God might be securing appears to also undercut ordinary moral reasoning and the evidence of our senses about the world

26 min

Evils that appear to ruin the life they fall on cannot be handled by a balance of goods, and there is a case that trying to justify them at all is the deeper mistake

24 min

Schellenberg's argument that a perfectly loving God would leave no one open to relationship yet unable to believe

20 min

If for every world God could create there is a better one, then whatever God creates, a better being could have done more

24 min

Set aside whether God exists and ask whether it would be better if God did, which some atheists answer yes and some theists answer no

22 min

Whether one tradition can be uniquely right, whether all are responses to a single reality, and what disagreement among informed believers does to either claim

22 min

Pantheism, panentheism, polytheism, deism, and traditions with no creator at all, and how the standard arguments fare when the target changes

20 min