Thanks to Savitt, and Amie Thomasson for sharing syllabi with me, and to Karen Bennett, Matti Eklund and Steve Yablo for posting syllabi online: Karen Bennett: http://www.princeton.edu/~kbennett/metasyllabus05.htm Matti Eklund: http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/me72/ontologysyll.pdf Steve Yablo: http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/501.html Abstracts from The Philosopher’s Index, except when indicated p...

We investigate the properties of Yablo sentences and formulas in theories of truth. Questions concerning provability of Yablo sentences in various truth systems, their provable equivalence, and their equivalence to the statements of their own untruth are discussed and answered.

This paper discusses “inclusionism” in the context of David Lewis’s modal realism (and in the context of parasitic accounts of modality such as John Divers’s agnosticism about possible worlds). This is the doctrine that everything is a world. I argue that this doctrine would be beneficial to Divers-style agnosticism; that it suggests a reconfiguration of the concept of actuality in modal realis...

Author’s response to critical essays by Brian Weatherson, Alex Byrne, and Stephen Yablo on Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2

We investigate what happens when ‘truth’ is replaced with ‘provability’ in Yablo’s paradox. By diagonalization, appropriate sequences of sentences can be constructed. Such sequences contain no sentence decided by the background consistent and sufficiently strong arithmetical theory. If the provability predicate satisfies the derivability conditions, each such sentence is provably equivalent to ...

We use two logical resources, namely, the notion of recursively defined function and the Benardete-Yablo paradox, together with some inherent features of causality and time, as usually conceived, to derive two results: that no ungrounded causal chain exists and that time has a beginning.

Doubts about a maxim like Hume’s have a variety of historical sources. Some date back as far as Descartes’s claim that, since he can conceive himself in a purely mental condition, his essence is only to think. “How does it follow,” Arnauld asks, “from the fact that he is aware of nothing else belonging to his essence, that nothing else does in fact belong to it?” Others are as recent as the dis...