What is time? We suggest we have failed to answer this question in the way it needs to be answered. We go on to offer an answer: time is the great enabler, it makes causation and change possible. We explain what that means, and demonstrate it by applying it to a range of cases.
In ‘Constructing Moral Equality’ (2022) I argued that we can productively think of the human as a social, rather than a natural, kind; and furthermore, that being constructed as human entails being constructed as a moral equal. In this paper I argue that I was wrong (at least in part). Armed with a more nuanced social metaphysical framework, I explore the possibility that while one of the mechanisms through which the human is constructed confers a formal equality of status on all members of the kind, other mechanisms simultaneously constitute some people as inferior.
It is generally accepted that agency requires materiality, since action must originate somewhere. In group agents, this implies that they are agential material objects rather than hovering, mind-like entities (Hess 2025). I argue that the material existence of group agents can be best explained by a Baker-style constitution relation (2000) between a group and its members, which is strictly non-mereological. First, I argue against Collins (2023) that her mereological account of group agents cannot successfully explain the relation between a group and its members because it fails to meet the non-transitivity desiderata of group agents. I subsequently show how this critique can be generalized to all mereological proposals (Hawley 2017; Hansson Wahlberg 2014). Secondly, I argue that the existing constitution accounts of group agents either fail to identify the correct material object from which the action of a group originates (Epstein 2015; Hindriks 2013; Uzquiano 2004) or account for it through mereological views of constitution (Harris 2020), which run into the same aforementioned problem. I conclude that a strictly non-mereological constitution account of the material existence of group agents is the most explanatorily successful since it is the only proposal that can meet the non-transitivity desideratum of group agents.
Beginning from Rudolf Carnap’s well known thesis that ontological commitment is internal to linguistic frameworks, I argue that this view can be considerably enriched by exploring the varied, and sometimes complex, relations between frameworks. In this paper, I set out the basic features of these relations between frameworks – a relativity of frameworks. Those features are illustrated by showing how they apply to two of the most debated issues in metaphysics and their related semantics: the status of fictional objects and the analysis of true negative existence statements.
Ontological nihilism is a philosophical position that denies the existence of anything. The central concept of this position is nothingness. The origins of ontological nihilism can be found in the Old Testament, in the book of Genesis: God created the world from nothing. I argue that ontological nihilism is contradictory and cannot be true. I will try to prove that nothingness is a fiction and that being is everywhere, because nothingness does not exist. The fictional concept of nothingness arises when existence is separated from being. Then existence is nothing because it arises and disappears. But disappearing does not mean becoming nothing, and arising does not mean arising from nothing. Being contains arising, becoming, and disappearing, which do not exist separately from it. When we say that “God created the world out of nothing,” we mean that God existed before the world and created it out of nothing, that is, out of non-being. Now, let us consider the rephrased biblical statement: “God-being creates being out of non-being.” This statement is contradictory. God, as the very equivalent of being, can only create being from being, that is, from what is, and not from what is not, that is, from non-being.
