<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
    <channel>
        <title>Metaphysics Feed</title>
        <link>https://reference-global.com/journal/UPJM</link>
        <description>Reference Global RSS Feed for Metaphysics</description>
        <lastBuildDate>Mon, 26 Oct 2026 12:32:00 GMT</lastBuildDate>
        <docs>https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html</docs>
        <generator>https://github.com/jpmonette/feed</generator>
        <image>
            <title>Metaphysics Feed</title>
            <url>https://sciendo-parsed.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/ubiquity/68406cffda18af458e768471/cover-image.png</url>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/journal/UPJM</link>
        </image>
        <copyright>All rights reserved 2026, Ubiquity Press</copyright>
        <atom:link href="https://reference-global.com/2/rss/journal/UPJM" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Comments on Overfitting and Heuristics]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.302</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.302</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[In the second half of Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy, Timothy Williamson defends intensionalism, the view that necessarily equivalent propositions are identical, against objections in the area of the ‘problem of logical omniscience’. His defense relies on proposed psychological heuristics for making and interpreting attitude ascriptions and on the notion of having an attitude towards a proposition under a guise. These comments raise three questions about this apparatus. First, Williamson says almost nothing systematic about guises, even though they bear the weight of his account of cognitive achievement in mathematics and metaphysics. Second, he specifies no relationship between having an attitude under a guise and having it simpliciter, with the result that his theory makes no predictions about the truth of even ordinary attitude reports. Third, his objections to contextualism assume a connection between semantics and psychological processing that his own view appears to deny. In a final section, I argue that Williamson’s own commitments about guises and communication supply the materials for a contextualist semantics of attitude reports, that his reasons for rejecting contextualism do not withstand scrutiny, and that there are good reasons, given his other commitments, to endorse this form of contextualism.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Metaphysics of Social Powers: Introduction to the Special Collection]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.358</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.358</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Since the 1970s, the metaphysics of dispositions and causal powers has been a flourishing field, providing accounts of the identity of properties, modality, laws of nature, and causation. In parallel, social ontology is undergoing a “power turn,” seeking to move beyond frameworks built around collective intentionality to capture the variety of power dynamics that structure the social world. This collection brings these two traditions into dialogue through three original contributions. Joel Cox examines a tension internal to Aristotle’s system: if only substances can bear active powers and social entities such as cities or families do not figure among his examples of substance, how can Aristotle nevertheless appear to ascribe such powers to them? Tobias Hansson Wahlberg tackles the puzzle of retroactive institutional declarations in Searle’s framework, proposing an account in terms of modal mere Cambridge change. Finally, Theodore Locke defends the existence of a social modality irreducible to metaphysical modality, grounded in the distribution of social powers, with implications for understanding a form of modal injustice.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[What Is Strength?]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.267</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.267</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[We argue that physical strength is best understood, in philosophical terms, as the general agentive ability to exercise difficult physical effort. We develop this claim by examining the historically developed and paradigmatic test of overall strength: the sport of Strongman/woman. We identify the understanding of strength embedded in this sport and show how contemporary philosophical accounts of agentive ability capture its main features. Finally, we argue that Strongman/woman competitions are already well designed for assessing strength. By balancing the trade-offs involved in quantitative measurement, they provide a robust interdisciplinary tool for strength assessment.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Varieties of Social Necessity]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.247</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.247</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Some have argued that certain claims about the natural world, e.g., the laws of nature, are not metaphysically necessary, but they are necessary in some more restricted, natural sense. In this paper, I give preliminary arguments for the existence of social necessities, i.e., claims about social reality that are necessary. I then argue that many social necessities are not metaphysically necessary and cannot be explained in terms of metaphysical necessity. Thus, there is a kind of modality distinct from metaphysical modality, i.e., social modality. In turn, this has important methodological upshots. Questions about what is socially possible are best raised and resolved from the perspective and interests of social inquirers trying to understand historical and causal specificities of the actual world. Moreover, the arguments I give raise pressing questions about modal injustice, i.e., how a person or group can be harmed in virtue of what social possibilities exist for them.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Aristotle&rsquo;s Plural Power Problem]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.216</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.216</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[While Aristotle counts many things as members of the category of substances that seem intuitively to be substances, one wonders whether Aristotle is right not to include social entities like families, city-states, or mobs, in any of his explications of substances. According to Aristotle, the persons who are in a social entity bear active powers, but he is silent on whether the social entity itself can. In this paper, I examine whether Aristotle rightly and intentionally does not include social entities in his list of things that are substances and can thus have active powers. I argue that either communities are substances in virtue of their status as bearers of powers or Aristotle is wrong that only substances are the bearers of powers. To make this argument, I begin with a primer on Aristotle&rsquo;s discussion of active powers, followed by an account of how Aristotle regards social entities in the Politics. Next, I discuss one contemporary view on the ontology of social entities with an eye for how this account shapes our understanding of the actions and powers of social entities. Putting these pieces together, the paper will articulate Aristotle&rsquo;s plural power problem, which will require defenders of Aristotle to pick a horn of the dilemma to make Aristotle&rsquo;s views compatible with a more accurate understanding of social entities.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Multidimensional Properties: Primitivism vs Reductionism]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.189</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.189</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[The focus of this paper is on the metaphysical nature of multidimensional properties, properties like virtue, beauty, or health which can be had in different ways and to different degrees. Do such properties form their own sui generis kind, as existing discussions seem to suggest, or can we rather reductively account for them, relying on notions which may already be present in our ontology or ideology? In this paper, I will introduce a reductionist account of multidimensional properties, making a partial case for Reductionism.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Is There Backward Generation in the Institutional Realm?]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.230</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.230</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Over the last decade it has been pointed out by several philosophers that not all Status Function Declarations are synchronic: some such declarations are directed toward the absolute past. Such Status Function Declarations are perplexing if one is an ontic realist with respect to institutional properties and states of affairs. If successful, such Status Function Declarations seem to change the absolute past; at the very least, they seem to involve some form of absolute backward generation. Both consequences look problematic: the notions that the absolute past can change and that there is absolute backward generation are both regularly accused of being contradictory or entailing implausible metaphysics. In this paper, I argue that both issues can be avoided if the &lsquo;results&rsquo; of absolutely backward-directed declarations are analysed in terms of mere Cambridge changes realised in B-time. A key upshot of the account is that &lsquo;institutional properties&rsquo; are neither identifiable nor perfectly correlated with enablements and constraints, contrary to what is sometimes argued in the literature.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Reply to Jon Erling Litland]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.211</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.211</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[I consider an alternative to Litland&rsquo;s proposal for defining the logical operations, one that&nbsp;does not require that a logical operation be defined by certain rules in addition to certain&nbsp;conditions.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Reply to Gideon Rosen&rsquo;s &lsquo;The Modal Status of Generative Principles&rsquo;]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.210</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.210</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Reply to Gideon Rosen&rsquo;s paper.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Reply to Timothy Williamson]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.209</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.209</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Timothy Williamson&rsquo;s is a fascinating and challenging paper and I am afraid that in my short response I cannot do full justice to much of what he says. What I would like to do is to deal with four central issues raised by his paper. The first concerns the question of how to characterize the two theses that he finds in &lsquo;Essence and Modality&rsquo; (henceforth referred to as E&amp;M); the second is whether or how the use of functional expressions might lead us into mistakenly accepting certain essentialist judgements; the third is whether the error he finds in these cases might extend to the kinds of case considered in E&amp;M; and the fourth is whether, on the basis of essentialist considerations, philosophers have reacted with undue haste in rejecting the intensional paradigm.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Reply to Barbara Vetter]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.212</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.212</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[I follow Vetter in considering how the special modalities, such as metaphysical and nomological necessity, might be related to the ordinary expression of modal claims.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Essences, Heuristics, and Metaphysical Illusions]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.195</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.195</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[The paper is a critique of Kit Fine&rsquo;s central argument in &lsquo;Essence and Modality&rsquo; for the hyperintensionality of essence-attributing operators, from the premise that it is essential to Socrates that he is Socrates but not that he belongs to {Socrates}. Similar arguments can be given about what is essential to natural numbers, but are provably unsound. The proof of unsoundness exploits the category of singular terms with a compositionally complex semantics that are nevertheless directly referential, such as &lsquo;7 + 1&rsquo;; they must not be confused with definite descriptions. The proof depends on the standard logic of identity, not on any intensionalist assumption. The errors in our pre-theoretic essentialists judgments are explained by our reliance on an efficient but fallible heuristic. The analogous premises of Fine&rsquo;s argument are generated by the same heuristic and so are untrustworthy. More generally, it is suggested, hyperintensionalist theorizing is guilty of overfitting dodgy data. The paper also notes a strand of Fine&rsquo;s original article that restricts its claims to the intelligibility rather than truth of hyperintensional essentialism; its intelligibility is not contested.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Modal Status of Generative Principles]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.194</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.194</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This contribution to a symposium marking the 30th anniversary of Kit Fine&rsquo;s &ldquo;Essence and Modality&rdquo; raises a general question for essentialist theories of modality: What sort of proposition can figure in the essence of a property? Several versions of Fine&rsquo;s preferred &ldquo;definitional&rdquo; conception are explored. The main aim is to find a version of the theory that can secure the necessity of generative principles &mdash; e.g., the principles according to which complex entities are generated from simples &mdash; without opening the door to opening the door to bogus principles that would prove the existence of gods and angels.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Essence and Ordinary Modality]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.193</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.193</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Fine&rsquo;s &ldquo;Essence and Modality&rdquo; has prompted a revival of Aristotelian approaches to metaphysical modality. But what does it have to say about more ordinary modal facts: that this car can doo 100 mph, while that one can&rsquo;t; that I must sneeze now; or that a particular vase can break? I consider two strategies, borrowed from Fine&rsquo;s &ldquo;Varieties of Necessity&rdquo;: relativization and restriction. I argue that the most commonly assumed way for the essentialist to deal with ordinary modality, the relativization strategy, is problematic. I then offer a version of the restriction strategy as an interesting avenue to pursue, one which requires some reinterpretation of the essentialist view of metaphysical modality but which is quite close to the spirit of &ldquo;Essence and Modality&rdquo;.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Real, Immediate, Multiple: Towards a Theory of Definition]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.190</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.190</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[In &lsquo;Senses of Essence&rsquo; Kit Fine tentatively proposed that one could take the notion of real definition as basic and define essence in terms of it. Building on Litland 2023 this paper begins to develop an account where the notion of full, immediate real definition is taken as basic. We then sketch how one can provide non-circular definitions of the logical operations and sketch how one can define various essentialist operations.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Can&rsquo;t Software Malfunction?]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.165</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.165</guid>
            <pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Digital artifacts often fail to perform as expected. It has recently been argued that this should not be analyzed as software malfunctioning. Rather, every case that is not the result of hardware failures would be due to design errors. This claim, which hinges on the notion of &lsquo;implementation&rsquo;, highlights a potential fundamental difference between software and other technical artifacts. It also implies that software engineers have more extensive responsibilities than creators of other artifacts. After reconstructing the argument, we show that it rests on two presuppositions regarding the nature of software and the activities of its creators, which we call &lsquo;complete control&rsquo; and &lsquo;self-containedness&rsquo;. Software is taken to be a self-contained unit through which the software engineer exerts complete control over a machine&rsquo;s behavior. These two presuppositions as well as the usage of implementation and strong claims regarding responsibility can be found throughout the literature on software engineering. Still, we argue that the presuppositions are untenable in light of current practices. For one thing, software engineers cannot exert complete control because software has become too complex for any technique to reliably locate every fault in it. For another, the creation and running of software are nowadays heavily mediated processes involving many agential activities. As a result, the performance of digital artifacts may vary, often in undesirable ways, without either hardware failures or design errors. This undermines the conclusion that software cannot malfunction, while also revealing the complications in developing a metaphysical account of software that fits contemporary practices.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Self-Transforming Powers]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.143</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.143</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[I investigate the hitherto unexplored hypothesis that powers may be ontically vague, and offer an account of what powers would be like in such a case. The proposed account offers an innovative characterisation of powers as forces that transform themselves into their manifestations. It builds on, but also critiques, Neil E. Williams&rsquo;s (2019) recent theory of powers. I conclude by considering the general implications of my proposal for the metaphysics of causality.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Social Reality of Virtual Worlds]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.156</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.156</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[What is the ontological status of virtual worlds? The two prominent positions in the recent debate are David Chalmers&rsquo;s virtual digitalism and Neil McDonnell and Nathan Wildman&rsquo;s virtual fictionalism. In this paper, I argue that there are good reasons to be dissatisfied with both. To overcome their limitations, I propose a novel position, virtual socialism. Drawing on the &lsquo;two-dimensional&rsquo; approach to social ontology articulated by Brian Epstein, I suggest that virtual objects are social objects grounded in the states of a computer, but &lsquo;anchored&rsquo; by a variety of social and non-social factors. Virtual socialism, I suggest, makes the best sense of the messy relationship virtual reality bears to digital reality, as well as the fact that virtual reality can sometimes be inconsistent.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Animal Locomotion in Aristotle: Self-Motion and the Tripartite Scheme]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.155</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.155</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[In De Anima III 10, Aristotle proposes a notable tripartite scheme of animal self-locomotion. Though many note that the proximate source of the scheme is in Physics VIII 5 (Ferro 2022; Laks 2020; Polansky 2007; Rapp 2020a; Shields 2016), it is nevertheless surprising that Aristotle chooses a scheme of general locomotion from Physics, rather than choosing some of his specific work there on animal self-motion. Further, the two tripartite schemes don&rsquo;t line up very precisely. I defend a novel view on which the tripartite schemes are understood as non-fundamental, since their authority rests on a more basic Separability Thesis advanced in Physics VIII, which states that every self-mover has minimally two parts: an unmoved mover and a moved part. While the importance of the Separability Thesis has been frequently noted in the literature (e.g., Morison 2004; Waterlow 1982), its relationship to the tripartite schemes has not been explored. I argue that once the fundamentality of the Separability Thesis is recognized, the tripartite schemes can be understood as two different applications of it and Aristotle&rsquo;s theory of self-motion from Physics is therefore present, in a veiled way, even in De Anima III 10. Further and finally, the argument provides resources for offering a novel response to worries about the unity of self-movers.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Nature and Teleology in the De Anima: Context for Aristotelian Potentiality]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/met.150</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">/article/10.5334/met.150</guid>
            <pubDate>Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This paper investigates contemporary applications of the Aristotelian conception of potentiality in limit cases of life and death arising from developments in modern science in order to argue that in its current usage, the term is often so far from its Aristotelian context that its philosophical rigor and, hence, usefulness is undermined. By analyzing the account of the soul in Aristotle&rsquo;s De Anima, I argue for the necessity of a conception of nature that can contextualize the relevant sense of potentiality by giving a telos arising from the subject&rsquo;s nature, which orients that subject&rsquo;s potentiality. I argue that these contextualizing components of nature and teleology are necessary for using a philosophically rigorous sense of potentiality. I begin by surveying the current use of potentiality to delineate beginning and end-of-life cases in order to show that these various uses are not robust enough to offer answers to the challenging cases of life and death in a non ad hoc way. I then address John Lizza and Joel Feinberg&rsquo;s suggestions for making the concept of potentiality more robust, namely, a more specified framework of &lsquo;normal&rsquo; internal conditions and &lsquo;important&rsquo; external conditions to which the subject&rsquo;s potentialities can be referenced. I argue that the insufficiency of the current uses of potentiality is more specifically due to a lack of an Aristotelian conception of a teleological nature that directs the subject&rsquo;s potentiality and further that this Aristotelian framework of the subject&rsquo;s nature can provide an answer to Feinberg and Lizza call for a context of normalcy of internal features and external environment in a more robust way. In the final section, I turn back to the problematic cases of life and death in order to highlight how, given a more specific and robust conception of a teleological nature, my account can offer three suggestions for applying the concept of potentiality.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
    </channel>
</rss>