2 " The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one we thought quite innocent "-Philosophical Investigations, § 308

It is a commonplace of modal metaphysics that belief in possible worlds not only burdens one with a large ontology but also raises metaphysical problems concerning their existence and identity conditions and epistemological problems concerning the justification of one’s belief in them. In this paper, we challenge this commonplace and show that belief in possible worlds doesn’t necessarily burde...

The goals of this paper are two-fold: I wish to clarify the Aristotelian conception of the law of non-contradiction as a metaphysical rather than a semantic or logical principle, and to defend the truth of the principle in this sense. First I will explain what it in fact means that the law of non-contradiction is a metaphysical principle. The core idea is that the law of non-contradiction is a ...

40 Lake—Philosophical Problems in Medicine and Psychiatry This is the third in a 4-part series on philosophical problems in medicine and integrative medicine. The article reviews basic questions pertaining to the evidence base in science and medicine in general. Most conventional and non-conventional medical approaches are used without compelling evidence for their postulated mechanisms of acti...

A striking feature of the traditional armchair method of philosophy is the use of imaginary examples: for instance, of Gettier cases as counterexamples to the justified true belief analysis of knowledge. The use of such examples is often thought to involve some sort of a priori rational intuition, which crude rationalists regard as a virtue and crude empiricists as a vice. It is argued here tha...

BEFORE discussing the role and significance of comparative philosophy for the study of Islamic philosophy, it is necessary to define exactly what we mean by comparative philosophy, for only too often today facile comparisons are made between Oriental metaphysical doctrines of a sacred nature and secular modern philosophies without the least consideration for the basic difference in the nature o...

A wave of recent work in metaphysics seeks to undermine the anti-reductionist, functionalist consensus of the past few decades in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. That consensus apparently legitimated a focus on what systems do, without necessarily and always requiring attention to the details of how systems are constituted. The new metaphysical challenge contends that many states and ...

Heidegger’s Destruktion of the metaphysical tradition leads him to the view that all Western metaphysical systems make foundational claims best understood as ‘ontotheological’. Metaphysics establishes the conceptual parameters of intelligibility by ontologically grounding and theologically legitimating our changing historical sense of what is. By Žrst elucidating and then problematizing Heidegg...