Publications and Work in Progress

(last updated: July 14, 2024)

Publications


Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles


2024 'Quine on Explication', Inquiry 67(6), 2043-2072, 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
 This entry considers the philosophical subject called metaphysics. There have been many conceptions of
metaphysics, and metaphysics has faced severe criticism throughout the history of philosophy and continues to
do so. Besides discussing some major trends in analytic metaphysics - understood as 'metaphysics done by
 analytic philosophers' - we consider some of the criticisms and possible responses.




2024 'Aristotle, Term Logic, and QUARC', in: George Englebretsen (ed.), New Directions in Term Logic, London:
College Publications (77pp)
 Aristotle counts as the founder of formal logic. The logic he develops dominated until Frege and others
introduced a new logic. This new logic is taken to be more powerful and better capable of capturing inference
patterns. The new logic differs from Aristotelian logic in significant respects. It has been argued by Fred
Sommers and Hanoch Ben-Yami that the new logic is not well equipped as a logic of natural language, and that a
logic closer to Aristotle's is better suited for this task. Each of them developed their own formalism - Sommers in
form of term logic, Ben-Yami in form of his Quantified Argument Calculus (QUARC). I discuss Aristotle's logic -
a term logic - and attempt a comparison between Aristotelian logic and (i) the new logic, (ii) Sommers' term
logic, and (iii) Ben-Yami's QUARC. I consider differences between the systems, and show how they are related to
and diverge from the new logic.



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