Items in this collection are the scholarly output of the Department of Philosophy faculty, staff, and students, either alone or as co-authors, and which may or may not have been published in an alternate format. Items may contain more than one file type.

Recent Submissions

  • Are all names of the Absolute synonymous? 

    Gupta, Bina, 1947-; Wilcox, William C. (University of Hawaii Press, 1983)
    In one way different names of the Absolute may be synonymous,and in another way not synonymous. Using Frege's terminology, words may have the same reference but different "senses." Just as "Morning Star" and "Evening Star" ...
  • "Tat tvam asi": An Important Identity Statement or a Mere Tautology 

    Gupta, Bina, 1947-; Wilcox, William C. (University of Hawaii Press, 1984)
    Before one can reasonably investigate the question of whether two things are identical, it stands to reason that one must have a clear understanding not only of what counts as a thing but, even more importantly, of what ...
  • Robustness and Conceptual Analysis in Evolutionary Game Theory 

    Ernst, Zachary (University of Chicago Press, 2005)
    A variety of robustness objections have been made against evolutionary game theory. One of these objections alleges that the games used in the underlying model are too arbitrary and oversimplified to generate a robust ...
  • Epistemic Conditions for Collective Action 

    Chant, Sara Rachel; Ernst, Zachary (Oxford University Press, 2008)
    Writers on collective action are in broad agreement that in order for a group of agents to form a collective intention, the members of that group must have beliefs about the beliefs of the other members. But in spite of ...
  • Perception, True Opinion and Knowledge in Plato's Theaetetus 

    Bondeson, William B., 1938- (Brill, 1969)
    Several years ago Mr. J. Xenakis proposed an interpretation of some aspects of the passage in the Theaetetus in which the thesis that is oc'LaO-?aLq receives its final refutation (184B4- 186El2). Although I agree in the ...
  • Aristotle on Responsibility for one's character and the possibility of character change 

    Bondeson, William B., 1938- (Brill, 1974)
    Aristotle's discussion of the voluntary and the involuntary occurs in Book III, chapters 1 through 5, of the Nicomachean Ethics. He is concerned to assess the conditions under which a) an action and b) a state of character ...
  • Some Problems about Being and Predication in Plato's Sophist 242-249 

    Bondeson, William B., 1938- (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976)
    One of the central tasks which Plato sets for himself in the Sophist is to say what being is. In doing this he makes a variety of philosophical moves. The first is to show that non-being in a very restricted sense of the ...
  • Lynch on the value of truth 

    McGrath, Matthew (2005)
    Few of us will deny that if a person believes something false, then she is wrong or mistaken, and that if a person believes something true, she is right. If someone believes that p, and <p> is true, then she is right about ...
  • Pragmatic Encroachment 

    Fantl, Jeremy; McGrath, Matthew (2009)
    In his classic (1953) article, Richard Rudner claims that "in accepting a hypothesis the scientist must make the decision that the evidence is sufficiently strong or that the probability is sufficiently high to warrant the ...
  • Propositions 

    McGrath, Matthew (Metaphysics Research Lab, 2007)
    This encyclopedia article explores the basics of what philosophers mean by the word 'proposition.' The term 'proposition' has a broad use in contemporary philosophy. It is used to refer to some or all of the following: the ...
  • Critical Study of John Hawthorne, Knowledge and Lotteries and Jason Stanley, Knowledge and Practical Interests 

    Fantl, Jeremy; McGrath, Matthew (2009)
    In two important recent books, John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley each argue that non-evidential factors, such as the cost of being wrong and salience of possible error, have a place in epistemological theorizing. This point ...
  • Rea on Universalism 

    McGrath, Matthew (2001)
    Universalism is the thesis that, for any (material) things at any time, there is something they compose at that time. In McGrath (1998), I argued that, contrary Peter van Inwagen (1990), Universalism is compatible with ...
  • Deflationism and the Normativity of Truth 

    McGrath, Matthew (1998)
    Deflationist theories of truth, some critics have argued, fail to account for the normativity of truth. This is one of the more promising, if also more elusive, objections to deflationism. Here I will consider and answer ...
  • No objects, no problem? 

    McGrath, Matthew (2005)
    One familiar form of argument for rejecting entities of a certain kind is that, by rejecting them, we avoid certain difficult problems associated with them. Such problem-avoidance arguments backfire if the problems cited ...
  • Four-Dimensionalism and the Puzzles of Coincidence 

    McGrath, Matthew (2005)
    Often cited in defense of four-dimensionalism about the persistence of material objects is its treatment of the so-called puzzles of coincidence. These puzzles include the statue/lump, the ship of Theseus, Tibbles the cat, ...
  • Conciliatory Metaontology and the Vindication of Common Sense 

    McGrath, Matthew (2000)
    Any self-respecting ontologist worries on occasion, “are the disputes I engage in and spend my career thinking about verbal?” Conciliatory metaontologists answer in the affirmative, at least for many of the ontological ...
  • Memory and Epistemic Conservatism 

    McGrath, Matthew (2007)
    We are all conservatives, at least when it comes to belief retention. We are forgetful, of course, but we typically do not abandon our beliefs unless we have special reasons to do so. Whichever view one takes of the ...
  • On Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology 

    Fantl, Jeremy; McGrath, Matthew (2007)
    We argue, contrary to epistemological orthodoxy, that knowledge is not purely epistemic—that knowledge is not simply a matter of truth-related factors (evidence, reliability, etc.). We do this by arguing for a pragmatic ...
  • The Vicissitudes of Common-Sense Virtue Ethics, Part II: The Heuristic Use of Common Sense 

    Kultgen, John H. (Kluwer, 1998)
    In the first part of this study, I compared the ways in which Aristotle and Michael Slote utilize common sense, meaning the opinions and intuitions of the majority of people or some reference group among them. Both ...
  • The Vicissitudes of Common-Sense Virtue Ethics, Part I: From Aristotle to Slote 

    Kultgen, John H. (Kluwer, 1998)
    In a treatise on methods of applied ethics, Abraham Edel, Elizabeth Flower, and Finbarr O'Connor distinguish between three traditional families of terms, “the family of right and wrong, duty and moral law, rights and ...

View more