First published Thu Jan 11, 2001; substantive revision Mon Jan 25, 2021 According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independent of how humans or other inquiring agents take it to be. The objects the world contains, together with their properties and the relations they enter into, fix the world’s nature and these objects [together with the properties they have and the relations they en

First published Tue Feb 13, 2001; substantive revision Tue May 25, 2021 Physicalism is, in slogan form, the thesis that everything is physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general i

The distinction between a type and its tokens is a useful metaphysical distinction. In §1 it is explained what it is, and what it is not. Its importance and wide applicability in linguistics, philosophy, science and everyday life are briefly surveyed in §2. Whether types are universals is discussed in §3. §4 discusses some other suggestions for what types are, both generally and specifically. Is a

First published Thu Sep 17, 2009; substantive revision Thu Apr 27, 2023 According to David Hume, the impossible cannot be conceived. Moritz Schlick claimed that the logically impossible, such as an explicit inconsistency, is simply unthinkable. Yet Hegel complained that it is “one of the fundamental prejudices of logic as hitherto understood” that “the contradictory cannot be imagined or thought”