Many contemporary metaphysicians think that for any two distinct things, it is always possible for them to coexist with one another. Leibniz gives a somewhat different answer: two distinct things are able to coexist with one another only when they are compossible. God cannot cre…
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A elaboração teológica do dogma trinitário implicou, no século IV, uma nova articulação entre as categorias ontológicas de «substância» e «relação» em Deus. A conceção de uma metafísica do mundo e da pessoa pensada a partir da Trindade permanece, porém, uma tarefa a realizar. Kl…
In this project, I explore the projects of the Indian Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna (c. 150-250 CE) and the process metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). Despite their very different historical contexts, I argue that both thinkers defend a process-relational metaphy…
El propósito originario de este trabajo tenía que ver con la idea directa que se traduce en el término acuñado por Platón: "ασωματος", “asómatos”, “incorpóreo”. El significado literal del término tanto en griego como en español parece ser muy claro y directo, en la medida en que…
This dissertation concerns two controversial aspects of Descartes’ philosophy. The first is the meaning of the distinction between the material and objective senses of the word “idea.” The second is an alleged tension between the Fifth Meditation ’s claim that the real natures a…
Though personal authenticity is an organizing ideal of late-modern Western societies, it also is a site of some of our most contentious disagreements, lacks coherence in many of its formulations, is not fully understood in all of its implications, and is often unidentified in it…
This dissertation examines the possible interchangeable connection between the medieval ontological relationship of essence/existence and the modern epistemological relationship of subject/object. Rather than investigating the many medieval and modern philosophers, this disserta…
With the meteoric rise of Aristotle in the intellectual life of thirteenth-century Europe, a series of proofs concerning the world's possible eternity took on new meaning. The recovery of various Aristotelian texts, an influx of commentaries from the Arab world, and rapid change…
My dissertation develops and defends a theory of how experience justifies perceptual beliefs. First, I situate the opposition, the coherentists, in the contemporary debate, and I do this partly by reference to their readings of Kant. According to the coherentists, perceptual bel…
It is a fundamental doctrine of the Abrahamic religions, following from the belief in God as the creator, that He is the primary cause of all natural phenomena. Some, however, have gone further, to claim that God is the only cause. Consequently, there are no genuine created, or …
The present essay includes six thematically connected papers on negation in the areas of the philosophy of logic, philosophical logic and metaphysics. Each of the chapters besides the first, which puts each the chapters to follow into context, highlights a central problem negati…
their rejection of classical anarchism, various postanarchist thinkers adopt a position of epistemological critique and reduce their metaphysics to a minimal conception of the self and broad, common knowledge statements about politics. Morality in the form of coercive rules or o…
The philosophical and scientific teaching in the universities of 17th century Scotland has frequently been dismissed as Aristotelian and reactionary. However, there must surely have been some development during the century for the universities to have achieved as much as they di…
Over the past few decades analyses of causation have proliferated in almost immeasurable abundance, and with two things in common; firstly, they make much of counterfactual dependence, and secondly, none of them successfully handle all the pre-emption cases. In this thesis, I fo…
Many of those artefacts with which we are so familiar – including, for example, works of music, photographs, novels, essays, films, television adverts, and graphic designs – share a common ontological nature. I argue in this thesis that they are all repeatable, and set out to pr…
In this dissertation I consider the merits of certain nominalist accounts of phenomena related to the character of ordinary objects. What these accounts have in common is the fact that none of them is an error theory about standard cases of predication and none of them deploys G…
The problem which spurred this thesis has three components. First, there are entities which we may call stuff--alluded to by uncountable nouns; these entities seem to have a duality for behaving like both (i) an object or a discrete middle size substance--which are supposed to b…
Object of the present dissertation is the reception of Aristotle's Metaphysics in the Kitab al-Sifa', Book of the Cure , by Avicenna (Ibn Sina, d. 1037 C.E.)--one of the greatest exponents of Arabic philosophy--with particular regard to the section entitled Ilahiyyat , [ Science…
This dissertation begins with the Islamic philosopher Avicenna, who transforms Aristotle’s conception of the efficient cause in the Metaphysics of his Shifa’. Its first goal is to examine the arguments which constitute Avicenna’s metaphysical account of agency. Its second goal i…