I’m off to Bellingham next week for the 5th annual “Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference”:http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~markosia/BSPC5/BSPC5.htm. Sadly not all of the papers are freely available online, but I thought I’d link to a very interesting one that I just read and is available.

It is “Gabriel Uzquiano’s”:http://www.ling.rochester.edu/~uzquiano/ fine paper “The Price of Universality”:http://www.ling.rochester.edu/~uzquiano/Universal1.pdf. Gabriel noticed that if we accept some things that metaphysicians standardly accept about mereology, and some things mathematicians standardly accept about set theory, and unrestricted quantification, then we get a paradox. The paradox is that we can deduce from these assumptions that the size of the universe must be an accessible cardinal and that it must be an inaccessible cardinal, so there’s some hard going here, but it seems to me like a very interesting problem to worry about.

I was going to try and write something substantive on Gabriel’s paper but I noticed half-way through writing it up that the idea I had contained a fatal technical error, so I’ll spare you my ignorance.