Brian Weatherson, Endurantism, Parasites and Vague Names

What more can I say?!

Brian Weatherson, Endurantism, Parasites and Vague Names

What more can I say?!

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.

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.

I just found out (via Pekka Väyrynen) that Ethics is available online. The latest edition prints the proceedings of the Moore conference at Georgia State last year, and the papers look very interesting. I didn’t previously know that Ethics was online, so I didn’t report on this on the papers blog when it appeared. So for all the people out there who only know about journals because I report them, this edition now exists.

Thanks to Pekka for the tip on this.

The philosophy papers blog is up. I misread the reports last night. In fact there were only two new journals, Bioethics and the AJP.

This is a first – I’ve got two things in one issue of a journal. The latest AJP has a little note on one of the (many) difficulties epistemicism has with vague names, and my review of Sorensen’s Vagueness and Contradiction is also there.

Many journals seem to have appeared yesterday, but it’s still sort of the middle of the night so I won’t try reporting on them all now. (–So why were you up at all? –Super 12 Final. Sport from the home part of the world is always on at wacky times over here.)

This is a first – I’ve got two things in one issue of a journal. The latest AJP has a little note on one of the (many) difficulties epistemicism has with vague names, and my review of Sorensen’s Vagueness and Contradiction is also there.

Many journals seem to have appeared yesterday, but it’s still sort of the middle of the night so I won’t try reporting on them all now. (–So why were you up at all? –Super 12 Final. Sport from the home part of the world is always on at wacky times over here.)

I updated by reply to Patrick Greenough’s Mind article on vagueness. The current version owes quite a bit to conversations with Matti Eklund, and more than a bit to Cian Dorr‘s excellent paper Vagueness without Ignorance. I’m not sure I haven’t infringed on any copyrights between the amount I’ve borrowed from the two of them. Anyway, the paper makes a little more sense now than it did. The ‘arguments’ are at least arranged in some kind of order, in the previous draft they sort of fell on top of each other.

I updated by reply to Patrick Greenough’s Mind article on vagueness. The current version owes quite a bit to conversations with Matti Eklund, and more than a bit to Cian Dorr‘s excellent paper Vagueness without Ignorance. I’m not sure I haven’t infringed on any copyrights between the amount I’ve borrowed from the two of them. Anyway, the paper makes a little more sense now than it did. The ‘arguments’ are at least arranged in some kind of order, in the previous draft they sort of fell on top of each other.