Unpublished Papers

I contrast my own variety of non-realist Hylomorphism with two varieties of realist Hylomorphism, those of Aristotle and Kit Fine.

Frege’s diatribes against psychologism have often been taken to imply that he thought that logic and thought have nothing to do with each other. I argue against this interpretation and attribute to Frege a view on which the two are tightly connected. The connection, however, derives not from logic’s being founded on the empirical laws of thought but rather from thought’s depending constitutively on the application to it of logic. I call this view ‘psycho-logicism.’

In this paper, I try to understand what Buridan means when he suggests that “every proposition, by its very form, signifies or asserts itself to be true.” I show how one way of construing this claim – that every proposition is in fact a conjunction one conjunct of which asserts the truth of the whole conjunction – does lead to a resolution of the Liar paradox, as Buridan says, and moreover is not vulnerable to the criticism on the basis of which Buridan came to reject this view. However, I go on to argue that the view causes Truth-Teller worries when applied to non-Liar propositions.

A critique of Mark Kaplan’s attempt to solve the problem of old evidence by restricting the principle of when something is evidence explicitly to cases in which we are less than certain of it.

Mostly a look at some of the logical confusions generated by Katz’s own attempt to use logic to express his historical claims.