research
My recent research has been focusing on the metaphysics of properties and relations, which, fundamental as it is, led me to study further phenomena both in metaphysics and in intersections with language, logic, science, mind, and meta-ethics. My PhD dissertation provides a new account of fundamentality/naturalness of relations. See a description of it below. I have published one of the chapters of my dissertation, which is listed further below. And I am currently preparing the next chapters for publication too. See works in progress for some of them.
Besides my dissertation topic, I have been studying other problems I expect to contribute to in the future. These involve laws and counterfactuals, higher-order logic and quantification, and ontological categories and metaphysical explanation.
dissertation
I am sympathetic to David Lewis' view that naturalness/fundamentality explains a lot (namely, similarity, dissimilarity, intrinsicality, duplication, causation, laws of nature, meaning, and thought). Indeed, I think the list can be extended (e.g. to essence, change, categories, category mistakes, modes of being, metaphysical dialetheism). But to do so, we need to disentangle the notion of naturalness from Lewis' own specific metaphysical commitments. Moreover, the structure of naturalness must be richer. For starters, naturalness is not a monadic singular property of monadic properties (some of which happen to be properties of tuples). Naturalness is better construed as a relation between categories and relations; moreover, not less surprisingly, naturalness must be somehow attributable to positions (or ‘slots’) of relations.
publications
- In Essence and Naturalness, I briefly introduce some aspects of
the theory of naturalness that I have been developing, and I show
how it can improve analyses of essence in terms of standard
necessity. In a way, the paper suggests that the ultimate lessons
from Kit Fine's famous essentialist claims involving singleton
{Socrates} concern our conception of relations (or naturalness
thereof), not essence.
Here's the Philosophical Quarterly page, with abstract etc.
work in progress
I list here brief descriptions of some papers I am working on. Please email me if you have any interest.
- A paper on naturalness and relations.
- A paper on naturalness and categories.
- A paper on symmetry objections to positionalism.
- Another paper on positionalism.
- A paper on laws of nature and non-supervenience arguments.