An Open Memo to Men

No abstract available for this article.     

No Simples,No Gunk,No Nothing

Mereological realism holds that the world has a mereological structure – i.e. a distribution of mereological properties and relations. In this article, I defend Eleaticism about properties, according to which there are no causally inert non‐logical properties. I then present an Eleatic argument for mereological anti‐realism, which denies the existence of both mereological composites and mereological simples. After defending Eleaticism and mereological anti‐realism, I argue that mereological anti‐realism is preferable to mereological nihilism. I then conclude by examining the thesis that composition is identity and noting its consequences for the question of mereological structure.     

No,We Cannot

Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini argues that we can believe the error theory. In this reply, I explain why I still think we cannot.     

Hear No Evil,See No Evil,Think No Evil: Ethics and the Appeal to Experience

This essay distinguishes three types of appeals to experience in ethics, identifies problems with appealing to experience, and argues that appeals to experience must be open to critical assessment, if experientially-based arguments are to be useful. Unless competing and potentially irreconcilable experiences can be assessed and adjudicated, experientially-based arguments will be problematic. The paper recommends thinking of the appeal to experience as a kind of story telling to be evaluated as other stories are.     

No Outside,No Inside: Duality,Reality and Vasubandhu's Illusory Elephant

Some of the basic terminology of Yogācāra philosophy needs reevaluation. Whereas commentaries almost universally gloss the term dvaya (‘duality’) with some version of the phrase grāhya grāhaka ca (lit. ‘grasped and grasper’, but usually translated as ‘subject and object’), in fact this gloss is absent from the earliest strata. The term and its gloss are derived from separate streams of Yogācāra reasoning—one from discussions of linguistic conceptualization and the other from discussions of perception. Once we see that these two are distinct, it becomes clear that the commentarial literature asserts their identity in order to philosophically unify Yogācāra thought. One upshot of this is that even in this later assertion ‘duality’ refers not to the distinction between internal and external reality (as in ‘textbook’ Yogācāra), but to the falsely projected distinction between mental subjects and mental objects.     

不吵不成相识

去年,初次访华,为所遭遇到的激烈争吵而震惊。可是,那对中国人来说却是不可或缺的……那还是中学二年级时候的事。当时,我业余爱好无线电,用每月的零花钱买了一些收音机零件,攒了一台真空管式的短波收音机。组装好,一试就烧了,后来几次返修,但信号始终微弱。可是,就是这台灵敏度极差的收音机,仍有一个台的广播可以清晰地收到,这就是中国北京广播电台功能强大的对日日语广播。这个节目我每晚必听。用自己攒的收音机能收听国外的广播,真叫人高兴。从此,我成为一名同中国结下不解之缘的青年。高中时代,我搜求与中国有关的书来读,孔子的《论语》…     

No creation, no revelation

There is a strong claim that the world’s createdness, if true, cannot be known but through revelation. In this paper we try to dismiss this claim by arguing that creation cannot be merely a revealed truth (revelabile tantum), since it is on the contrary the very preamble to any genuine revelation. Ontologically, no revelation can happen in a self-existent world. No creation, no revelation. Epistemically, no revelation is to be admitted but on the assumption that the world depends, for its existence and operation, on a supernatural agent. No admittance of creative power, no justified identification of any revelatory activity.     

Skepticism,Contextualism, and Discrimination*

The skeptic says that “knowledge” is an absolute term, whereas the contextualist says that ‘knowledge” is a relationally absolute term. Which is the better hypothesis about “knowledge”? And what implications do these hypotheses about “knowledge” have for knowledge? I argue that the skeptic has the better hypothesis about “knowledge”, but that both hypotheses about “knowledge” have deeply anti‐skeptical implications for knowledge, since both presuppose our capacity for epistemically salient discrimination.     

Metaphor,Idiom, and Pretense*

Imaginative and creative capacities seem to be at the heart of both games of make‐believe and figurative uses of language. But how exactly might cases of metaphor or idiom involve make‐believe? In this paper, I argue against the pretense‐based accounts of Walton (1990, 1993) , Hills (1997) , and Egan (this journal, 2008) that pretense plays no role in the interpretation of metaphor or idiom; instead, more general capacities for manipulating concepts (which are also called on within the use of pretense) do the real explanatory work. This result has consequences for both our understanding of metaphor and idiom as well as for the use of figurative language by fictionalists in ontology.