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Kit Fine’s logic of essence and his reduction of modality crucially rely on a principle called the ‘monotonicity of essence’. This principle says that for all pluralities, xx and yy, if some xx belong to some yy, then if it is essential to xx that p, it is also essential to yy that p. I argue that on the constitutive notion of essence, this principle is false. In particular, I show that this principle is false because it says that some propositions are essential to yy even though those propositions are only about some of its members. I then consider a modification to the principle appealing to consequential essence and argue that such a modification is inconsistent with a central desideratum of Fine’s approach to metaphysics: what I call his neutrality condition.

Under Review

A collective essence is the essence of two or more individuals. It is not merely the union of the essence of one individual (Socrates) and the essence of another (the Eiffel Tower). It includes further properties, belonging to neither individually. The appeal to collective essence is central to Kit Fine’s reduction of metaphysical necessity to essence. In this paper, I argue that there are no collective essences.  My argument proceeds from two claims: essence always bears on identity, and identity is always one-one.

The doctrine of divine simplicity says that God is not composed of parts (physical or metaphysical). Modal collapse arguments aim to show that the necessary co-existence of God and creation follows from the doctrine. As noted by Christopher Tomaszewski, R. T. Mullins’s version of this argument assumes that a crucial term occurring within it is rigid, leaving the argument invalid or question begging. I examine a recent attempt by Mullins to repair his argument and defend the rigidity of its crucial term. Mullins assumes a test for discerning rigidity on which he and Tomaszewski agree. I argue that this test is false and then provide a new test. My test bodes ill for all future modal collapse argument.

In Progress

Ontological permissivists affirm that in addition to Socrates there is another object, call it ‘adult-Socrates’, which came into existence on Socrates’s eighteenth birthday and overlaps with him from then on. On the day after his eighteenth birthday, when Socrates thinks ‘yesterday was the beginning of my eighteenth year of existence’, he is unable to tell whether it is he who is thinking the true belief or adult-Socrates who is thinking the false. David Mark Kovacs calls this ‘the problem of overlappers’.

I argue that Socrates has a real definition which entails that he is a more magnetic referent than adult-Socrates. Hence, Socrates has the true thoughts rather than the false ones. Moreover, he can know this in the same way he can know that ‘green’ picks out green rather than grue.

I show that my view delivers results similar to those given by Kovacs’s conventionalism about personal identity and is superior insofar as it also shows that Socrates lacks as parts an electron in a distant corner of the universe that no one in his linguistic community has thought about.

Origin essentialism is the view that certain individuals have their actual origins in every possible world in which they exist. Kripke said he could give a ‘proof’ for origin essentialism (he included the scare quotes). On the standard interpretation, Kripke’s proof presupposed the sufficiency of origins. Applied to a particular case, this says that necessarily, it is sufficient for identity with a table, Allen, that one wholly originates from a particular block of wood, Brian from which Allen actually originated.

So stated, the sufficiency of origins is false. Nevertheless, proponents of origin essentialism believe there is a series of qualifications we can make that would give us a true principle. The question of origin essentialism has mostly turned on whether such qualifications are plausible or on whether there is an alternative principle with fewer qualifications.

In this paper, I will not provide another series of qualification to a sufficiency of origins principle. Instead, I will argue that on a plausible account of the nature of composite material objects, it follows that there must be some true, qualified sufficiency of origins principle. Hence, origin essentialism is true.

In this article, we argue for the consistency of Molinism and the dependence response to the problem of theological fatalism. Molinism requires that our free actions depend on God’s knowledge of our actions. The dependence response requires that God’s knowledge of our free actions depends on those actions. To square this circle, we propose a contrastive version of the dependence response and a new theory of contrastive generic explanation. We turn, then, to consider arguments for the inconsistency of Molinism and the dependence response, one from Nevin Climenhaga and Daniel Rubio and another appealing to the existence of explanatory loops. We argue that Climenhaga and Rubio’s crucial principle, which we call a principle of ‘no modal coincidences’, is false and unmotivated. We then show that any contrastive disambiguation of the explanatory loop objection involves a false link in the chain given our theory of contrastive explanation.

David Hume argued that anyone with evidence like ours for the natural laws cannot rationally believe on the basis of testimonial evidence that a miracle has occurred. Bayesians generally agree that Hume was correct in his analysis of single witness testimony but incorrect insofar as he took his conclusion to apply generally, even in the case of multiple independent witnesses. Nevertheless, since the independence assumption is rarely satisfied, the conjunction of these claims ensures that only rare and powerful forms of testimony can ever provide us with a justified belief based on testimonial evidence that a miracle has occurred.

This conclusion assumes that Hume’s argument to the low prior probability of a miracle’s occurrence from the uniformity of nature succeeds. In this article, I show that existing Bayesian reconstructions of Hume’s argument from the uniformity of nature fail. Moreover, I show that an attempt to repair Hume’s argument by appealing to the high intrinsic probability of miracle-excluding natural laws entails that a single witness’s testimony can establish a miracle.