Heraclitus against the Naïve Paratactic Metaphysics of Mere Things

A Metaphysics of Ordinary Things and Why We Need It

Mainstream metaphysicians today take little ontological interest in the world as we interact with it. They interpret the variety of things in the world as variety only of concepts applied to things that are basically of the same sort—e.g., sums of particles or temporal parts of particles. I challenge this approach by formulating and defending for a contrasting line of thought. Using what I call...

A Metaphysics of Ordinary Things and Why We Need It

Metaphysics has enjoyed a vigorous revival in the last few decades. Even so, there has been little ontological interest in the things that we interact with everyday—trees, tables, other people.1 It is not that metaphysicians ignore ordinary things altogether. Indeed, they are happy to say that sentences like ‘The daffodils are out early this year’ or ‘My computer crashed again’ are true. But th...

In the Footsteps of Heraclitus

Methodology is epistemology: the way of studying a phenomenon depends on the view of that phenomenon. In attempting to avoid anthropomorphism endowing or attributing human form and especially feelings and abilities to animals we have developed a particular mode of finding out which we term science. In this mode we feel it is appropriate to be 'objective' that is to remove our own feelings, thou...

How Should We Revise the Paratactic Theory?

That is to say, the surface form of indirect speech is itself paratactic and requires only the insertion of a period (‘a tiny orthographic change ... without semantic significance’, as Davidson put it) to be made explicit. If SF is true, then the ‘that’ of ‘says that’ is, grammatically speaking, a demonstrative, and the utterance to which it refers is just the reporter’s utterance of the words ...

Overcoming of Metaphysics: Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant's Thought and the Problem of Metaphysics