Reviews

Well, I didn’t read all of them, but here are the highlights.

David Armstrong positively reviews Resemblance Nominalism – A Solution to the Problem of Universals by Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra. I have a memory of reading a brutally bad review of this book, which I was hoping to find somewhere to compare it to Armstrong’s positive review, but it doesn’t appear to be anywhere online. Or if it is I couldn’t find it with Google. I wonder if this is good evidence or just weak evidence that the review never existed. Anyone who remembers a similar review should let me know. Anyway, today’s news is that Armstrong liked Rodriguez-Pereyra’s book which is a non-trivial endorsement.

Ryan Wasserman reviewed Katherine Hawley’s How Things Persist. He thought Hawley was unfair in her characterisation of (non-stage-theorist) perdurantists. I think Hawley’s way of dividing up the territory into endurantists, perdurantists and stage theorists is misleading, because the dispute between the endurantist and the other two is metaphysical and the dispute between stage theorists and (what she calls) perdurantists is semantic, and metaphysical debates and semantic debates are not really very similar. (I may have said that somewhere before.) Anyway, Wasserman makes an odd claim, one a little too close to (4) above I think. He says that proper temporal parts of tennis balls are themselves tennis balls, because they fill most of the tennis ball functional role. This is a mistake, since it blocks one from making the most natural response to the problem of the many. So I think some of Wasserman’s criticisms of Hawley’s criticisms of what, as far as I can tell, is the correct view are misguided. Hawley has, I think, isolated some odd features of the correct view. Still, she hasn’t given us any reason to think the correct view is not, at the end of the day, correct.

Graham Nerlich ‘warmly recommends’ Ted Sider’s prize-winning Four Dimensionalism. He doesn’t quite agree with Ted about the relative plausibility of the nine arguments for perdurantism that Ted surveys, nor with the claim that the last three are entirely original (I suspect Ted didn’t cite Nerlich as much as some reviewer(s) thought he should) but he still thinks it is an excellent book overall.

I review Roy Sorensen’s Vagueness and Contradiction. The review is my usual mealy-mouthed it has some good features but why doesn’t the author agree more with my view how could they not see how clever and good it is kind of review. The book has some good features but I think Roy should agree with my view on more issues.

Jim Edwards reviews two new introductory(ish) books about Michael Dummett, and clearly prefers Bernard Weiss’s over Karen Green’s, largely because Weiss’s is more often just about Dummett. Green’s book does have the nice advantage of at least having a complete Dummett bibliography though.