The main purpose of these distinction is to make conceptual room for so-called "qua objects" (aka cookie objects, accidential unities, aspects, roles). My work on essence and on truthmaking is part of a larger research project, which I have started with my thesis and which has occupied me ever since, on the typology of determination relations (many of which are nowadays lumped together under the generic label "grounding"): the determinate/determinable relation, ontological dependence, the token/type relation, exemplification, identity-dependence, causation, ontological explanation and foundation. It has convinced me of the existence of universals and of the falsity, indeed absurdity, of presentism. I prefer it to commitment and do not like cheating. I am a fan of it, think that it usefully regiments metaphysical inquiry and, with Armstrong, that it makes for (and perhaps is even required for) ontological honesty. Potentially contingent essences are helpful to understand the different connections between essence and existence and their implication for the fragmentation of being. Contingent Essence argues that we should take Fine's criticism of the so-called modal 'account' of essence a step further, conceive of essence as a-modal and allow at least for the conceivability of contingent essences.It also provides more plausible versions of - physical, mathematical and epistemic - structuralism than their relationalist counterpart. There is structure, however, and non-relational structure helps us understand incongruent counterparts, mixtures and lesser entities. Aristotle, the medievals and Leibniz were right and Russell was wrong. Fundamentally, There Are No Relations defends the claim that fundamentally / really / in fact, there are no relations.Together, we aim to distinguish different types of grounding regresses, their relation to cosmological arguments, explanation and to infinitism in epistemology. Catharine Diehl as post-doc and in Glasgow (co-I Stephan Leuenberger) Stephanie Rennick as a post-doc. It employs in Lucerne (PI Blum) David Furrer as PhD student and Dr. Being Without Foundations, a research project running for four years (September 2019 - August 2023) and generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, examines the consequences of there being no fundamental level ("turtles all the way down").Drafts are password-protected - please ask me or guess (the username is "philosophy"): I am pursuing the following research projects, in no particular order (details and outputs below).
appendices A and B in particular) - any comments very welcome. Recently, I have tried to integrate my research interests into the draft programme for an English-taught "blended learning" MA in philosophy, entitled " The Big Questions" (cf. Well, I am actually interested in (and sometimes also working on) just about everything. I am working mostly in metaphysics, but also have interests in the philosophies of logic, language and the mind, in epistemology, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of perception and the philosophy of law, as well as in early modern and early analytic philosophy, ancient and medieval philosophy, especially Aristotle, the philosophy of mathematics, Kant and German idealism, feminist and social philosophy.
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