Publications and Work in Progress

(last updated: June 2, 2023)

Publications


Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles


forthcoming 'Quine on Explication', Inquiry, doi: 10.1080/0020174X.2021.1982763
 The main goal of this paper is to work out Quine's account of explication. Quine does not provide a general
 account, but considers a paradigmatic example which does not fit other examples he claims to be explications.
 Besides working out Quine's account of explication and explaining this tension, I show how it connects to other
notions such as paraphrase and ontological commitment. Furthermore, I relate Quinean explication to Carnap's
conception and argue that Quinean explication is much narrower because its main purpose is to be a criterion of
theory choice. 


2021 'The Unbearable Circularity of Easy Ontology', Synthese 199(1-2), 3527-3556, doi: 10.1007/s11229-020-02946-z
 (open access)
 In this paper, I argue that Amie Thomasson’s Easy Ontology rests on a vicious circularity that is highly
damaging. Easy Ontology invokes the idea of application conditions that give rise to analytic entailments. Such
entailments can be used to answer ontological questions easily. I argue that the application conditions for basic
terms are only circularly specifiable showing that Thomasson misses her self-set goal of preventing such a
circularity. Using this circularity, I go on to show that Easy Ontology as a whole collapses.

2018 'Aristotle, Logic, and QUARC', History and Philosophy of Logic 39(4), 305-340, doi:
10.1080/01445340.2018.1467198
 The goal of this paper is to present a new reconstruction of Aristotle's assertoric logic as he develops it in
Prior Analytics, A 1-7. This reconstruction will be much closer to Aristotle's original text than other such
reconstructions brought forward up to now. To accomplish this, we will not use classical logic, but a novel
system developed by Ben-Yami (2004, 2014) called 'QUARC'. This system is apt for a more adequate
 reconstruction since it does not need first-order variables ('x', 'y', ...) on which the usual quantifiers act - a
feature also not to be found in Aristotle. Further, in the classical reconstructions, there is also the need for binary
connectives ('and', 'if ... then') that don't have a counterpart in Aristotle. QUARC, again, does not need them
either to represent the Aristotelian sentence types. However, the full QUARC is also not called for so that I
develop a subsystem thereof (QUARCAR) which closely resembles Aristotle's way of developing his logic. I show
that we can prove all of Aristotle's claims within this systems and, lastly, how it relates to classical logic.


Chapters


forthcoming 'Metaphysics', with Chris Daly, in: Marcus Rossberg (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Analytic Philosophy,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press



Others


2023 'Conference Report: The Fourth International Conference of the German Society for Philosophy of Science
(GWP.2022),  15-17 August, 2022', Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 37(1), 61-64, 2023, doi:
10.1515/krt-2022-0031 (open access)




Work in Progress