Gabriel Oak Rabin

Ground offers the hope of vindicating and illuminating a classic philosophical idea: the layered conception, according to which reality is structured by relations of dependence, with physical phenomena on the bottom, and upon which chemical, then biological, and finally psychological and other phenomena reside. However, ground can only make good on this promise if it is appropriately formally behaved. The paradigm of good formal behavior can be found in the currently dominant grounding orthodoxy, which holds that ground is transitive, anti-symmetric, irreflexive, and foundational. However, heretics have recently challenged the orthodoxy. This paper examines ground’s ability to vindicate the layered conception upon various relaxations of the orthodox assumptions. It is argued that highly unorthodox views of ground can still vindicate the layered conception and that, in some ways, the heretical views enable ground to better serve as a guide to reality’s layering than do orthodox views...

According to Frank Jackson's famous knowledge argument, Mary, a brilliant neuroscientist raised in a black and white room and bestowed with complete physical knowledge, cannot know certain truths about phenomenal experience. This claim about knowledge, in turn, implies that physicalism is false. I argue that the knowledge argument founders on a dilemma. Either (i) Mary cannot know the relevant experiential truths because of trivial obstacles that have no bearing on the truth of physicalism or (ii) once the obstacles have been removed, Mary can know the relevant truths. If we give Mary the epistemological capabilities necessary to draw metaphysical conclusions about physicalism, she will, while trapped in the black and white room, be able to know every truth about phenomenal experience. Keywords Concepts Á Concept possession Á Conceptual mastery Á Knowledge argument Á Phenomenal concept Á Physicalism Á Phenomenal concept strategy Á Dualism Á Modal rationalism Á Consciousness Á Phenomenal experience

In 'Just what is full-blooded platonism?' Greg Restall outlines several objections to Mark Balaguer's theory of full-blooded platonism. I reply to these objections by explicating the semantic framework for the reference of mathematical terms that full-blooded platonism requires. Expanding upon these replies, I then explain how the full-blooded platonist, in light of the explicated semantic framework, should treat mathematical terms and statements in order to avoid certain pitfalls.