Intermediate index

Three answers to how two red things share one property: realism, nominalism, tropes

16 min

Whether a thing is anything over and above its properties, and what a substratum would do

14 min

The entities that causal and truthmaking talk quantifies over, and how finely they should be individuated

15 min

No difference of one kind without a difference of another, and why that is weaker than dependence

15 min

Being wholly present at each moment versus having a different temporal part at each

15 min

Psychological, biological, and narrative criteria, and how fission cases break each one

16 min

McTaggart's argument, and what presentism, eternalism, and the growing block each keep

18 min

Regularity, counterfactual, probabilistic, and interventionist accounts tested against preemption

17 min

The consequence argument, and whether compatibilism answers it or changes the subject

18 min

Using worlds to analyse de re and de dicto claims, and the cost of transworld identity

16 min

Lewis's concrete worlds against abstract surrogates, and what each charges for actuality

22 min

Kripke's case that a thing could not have come from different material, and the necessary a posteriori it depends on

20 min

Axioms for parthood, and the special composition question that nihilism and universalism answer

17 min

Justified true belief that falls short, and the patches that were tried

14 min

Three structures for justified belief: bedrock, web, or endless chain, each taking one horn of the trilemma

16 min

Whether what justifies you has to be something you can reflect on

14 min

Justification from truth-conducive processes, or from good intellectual character

16 min

Two modal conditions on knowledge, and the cases that pull them apart

17 min

Whether knowledge survives known entailment, and the price of saying no

16 min

Knowledge whose justification does not rest on experience, and whether any exists

15 min

Truth by meaning alone, and Quine's argument that the notion runs in a circle

16 min

Hume's argument that past regularities give no reason to expect future ones

15 min

Belief as a matter of degree, and updating those degrees on new evidence

18 min

When to trust what others tell you, and what to do when an equal disagrees

16 min

The wrongs done to someone specifically as a giver or a subject of knowledge

17 min

The formal grammar of the language, stated recursively, and why recursion is the right tool

12 min

Two different relations that beginners run together, and the notation that keeps them apart

12 min

Showing that a small set of connectives can express every truth function

13 min

Enumerating every binary truth function, and showing that the Sheffer stroke and the Peirce arrow are each complete alone

15 min

Introduction and elimination rules, conditional proof, and reductio

18 min

A decision procedure that searches for a countermodel and reports failure as proof

14 min

Hilbert-style proof, why it is painful to use, and the theorem that makes it usable

18 min

Quantifiers, variable binding, scope, and multiply quantified sentences

20 min

Adding the identity predicate, numerical claims, and Russell's analysis of 'the'

15 min

Membership, functions, relations, and cardinality, at the depth metatheory needs

16 min

The Kolmogorov axioms read as a generalisation of the truth table, with Cox's derivation of them from constraints on plausible reasoning

18 min

What the two metatheorems claim, before anyone tries to prove them

12 min

The box and diamond, frames, models, and the accessibility relation

22 min

Each system's characteristic axiom and the frame condition it corresponds to

24 min

Whether 'the present King of France is bald' is false or neither true nor false

15 min

Kripke's modal and epistemic arguments against descriptivism and the causal picture that replaced it

17 min

Water is H2O, the standard metre, and how rigid designation splits necessity from apriority

15 min

Carnap's idea of meaning as a function from worlds to extensions, and where it runs out

15 min

Why Lois can believe Superman flies without believing Clark Kent flies, if she can

16 min

Using a recursive theory of truth for a language as a theory of meaning for it

17 min

Non-natural meaning, the conversational maxims, and the tests that sort implicature from content

16 min

Wittgenstein on what it is to follow a rule and why a language only one person could understand is incoherent

16 min

Quine's field linguist, 'gavagai', and the claim that there is no fact of the matter about translation

16 min

Davidson's interpreter, who must assign beliefs and meanings together, and the principle that lets them

15 min

How a meaning can be conventional without anyone having agreed to it

15 min

What 'Vulcan' and 'Sherlock Holmes' contribute to a sentence if they name nothing

15 min

Reading soundness and completeness as claims about the fit between proof and truth

14 min

Substitutional, modal, and model-based accounts of what it is for a conclusion to follow

16 min

How an English argument gets a form, and whether there is one correct way to formalise it

14 min

Sentences, statements, or propositions: what logic's validities are about

12 min

Carnap's principle of tolerance and Quine's regress argument against truth by convention

15 min

Quine's charge that a rival logician has only changed the subject, and how the rival replies

15 min

Prior's rogue connective, Belnap's conservativeness reply, and Dummett's demand for harmony

16 min

Four versions of the greatest happiness principle, and the demandingness and experience machine replies

18 min

The universal law and humanity formulations, and why Kant grounds duty in autonomy

20 min

Aristotle's function argument, eudaimonia as activity, and the mean between excess and deficiency

18 min

A deontology with several irreducible duties and no ranking, and what happens when two of them collide

15 min

What no one could reasonably reject, and how that differs from bargaining for mutual advantage

19 min

Why an ethics built on relationship and dependence rejects the impartial standpoint

13 min

Whether moral claims report facts, express attitudes, or systematically fail to be true at all

20 min

Hume's gap, Moore's open question argument, and whether naturalism can cross either

15 min

Disagreement across cultures does not by itself show that rightness varies with them

14 min

The belief-desire model, motivational internalism, and the amoralist who judges without caring

18 min

Whether a reason must connect to something already in the agent's motivational set

17 min

Two ways of splitting mind from matter, and the pressure that causal closure puts on both

15 min

Analysing mental talk into behavioural dispositions, and why belief and desire cannot be separated for that purpose

14 min

Identifying pain with a brain state, and the retreat from type identity to token identity

15 min

Defining mental states by their causal role, and the octopus case that made type identity look parochial

17 min

How a state can be about something that does not exist, and what fixes which thing it is about

17 min

Treating belief and desire as the posits of a theory, and the argument that the theory is false

18 min

Thinking as symbol manipulation, the systematicity argument for a language of thought, and the connectionist reply

20 min

Searle's claim that symbol manipulation never yields understanding, and the replies that locate understanding elsewhere

14 min

Sense data, adverbialism, intentionalism, and naive realism, judged by what they say about the good case and the bad

19 min

A colour scientist who knows every physical fact and still learns something on leaving the black and white room

16 min

Running from what we can coherently imagine to what is metaphysically possible, and where that step can be blocked

18 min

Two thought experiments showing that environment and community, not the head alone, fix what a thought is about

23 min

What separates an action from a mere bodily movement, and why the answer keeps coming back to what caused it

18 min

Locke's memory criterion, Butler's charge that it presupposes the identity it was meant to define, and Reid's officer who both is and is not the boy

18 min

To be is to be the value of a bound variable, and what that test does and does not settle

16 min

Reading commitment off what has to exist for a sentence to be true, rather than off what it quantifies over

17 min

Whether being divides into kinds, or applies in one single sense to everything there is

14 min

Four ways of drawing the line, by causal power, location, mind dependence, and abstraction

15 min

Whether the divisions we sort things into are found or made, and what a kind would have to be to be found

17 min

The indispensability argument for numbers, and the nominalist strategies for doing without them

18 min

Meinong on objects that bear properties without existing, and Russell's objections to them

17 min

When some things compose a further thing, and the nihilist and universalist answers

18 min

Substance and accident in the Categories, and Husserl's dependence relations between regions

19 min

Questions asked inside a framework against questions asked about it, and Quine's reply

24 min

Van Inwagen's five theses, thin and thick conceptions of being, and what the orthodoxy commits you to

15 min

Korman on whether our belief in tables and statues but not in trout-turkeys can survive its origins

16 min

Ladyman and Ross's case against neo-scholastic metaphysics and the principle of naturalistic closure

15 min

Lewis's cost-benefit method in metaphysics and the worry that it cannot pick a winner

15 min

Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau derive the state from an agreement made out of a stateless condition, and disagree about what that condition is like

16 min

Choosing principles behind a screen that hides your talents, class, and conception of the good

18 min

The argument that justice depends on how holdings arose, so any fixed pattern can be kept only by blocking voluntary transfers

14 min

Sen and Nussbaum measure advantage by what people are able to do and be rather than by resources or satisfaction

20 min

What separates the four once you sort them by their commitments on property, equality, and inherited practice

15 min

Labour that confronts the worker as alien, class defined by relation to productive resources, and beliefs that serve an existing order

16 min

Whether majority rule is defended by the quality of its outcomes or by the equal standing it expresses

14 min

Freedom as the absence of arbitrary power rather than the absence of actual interference

20 min

Backward-looking desert against forward-looking deterrence, and the separate question of who may inflict either

17 min

Public lawbreaking that accepts the penalty, and the conditions offered for when it is justified

12 min

The puzzle of putting up with what you judge to be wrong, and where a neutral state draws the line

13 min

The four-principle framework that clinical ethics actually runs on, and what it does when two of the principles conflict

16 min

Thomson's violinist, Marquis's future-like-ours argument, and why the dispute splits between what the fetus is and what it may demand

20 min

How autonomy arguments and slippery slope worries are pressed against each other once the acts and omissions line is in place

17 min

Singer's case from equal consideration of interests, Regan's case from inherent value, and the argument from marginal cases

16 min

Where the capital case turns on desert, irreversible error, and whether proportionality has an upper limit

18 min

The murderer at the door, Kant's absolutism about truthfulness, and Ross's answer that duties can be overridden without being cancelled

14 min

Singer's drowning child, the demandingness objection, and whether easy rescue at a distance is charity or obligation

18 min

Mill's harm principle applied to expression, and whether offence, incitement, or silencing can extend the limit

16 min

The conditions for going to war and for fighting well, and the traditional doctrine that soldiers on both sides fight as equals

22 min

Whether ecosystems and species have value apart from any use we make of them, and what follows for how we treat them

18 min

Three arguments from the existence of the universe: Kalam from a temporal beginning, Leibniz from contingency, Aquinas from an ordered causal series

18 min

From biological order to the narrow constants of physics, and the multiverse and observer-selection replies

16 min

Anselm's inference from a concept, Descartes' perfection version, Kant's objection that existence adds nothing, and Plantinga's modal reformulation

17 min

The claim that binding obligations need a commanding will, met by the Euthyphro dilemma and by secular accounts of moral facts

15 min

Whether the reports of people who take themselves to have encountered God are evidence, and what the diversity of those reports does to the argument

17 min

Pascal's wager, James's will to believe, and the question whether the consequences of holding a belief can be reasons for holding it

16 min

The logical and evidential versions of the argument from suffering, and what each of them requires a response to accomplish

18 min

The free will defence, the soul-making theodicy, the privation view, and skeptical theism, assessed against what each version of the problem requires

19 min

Whether the properties classical theism ascribes to God can all be held at once, and what the standard puzzles about omnipotence, immutability, and divine freedom actually establish

16 min

Whether testimony could ever make it reasonable to believe a law of nature was broken, and what such an event would show even if it were established

15 min

Two incompatible pictures of survival, the identity problem that both face, and whether eternal punishment can be reconciled with perfect goodness

18 min

Projection theories, the cognitive science of religion, and what actually follows for the truth of a belief from an account of why people hold it

18 min