I teach courses in a wide range of subject areas in philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, formal logic, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and ancient philosophy. At Oxford, I have taught the following modules:
- General Philosophy
- Introduction to Logic
- Knowledge and Reality
- The Philosophy of Logic and Language
- Philosophical Logic
- Plato, Republic (in translation)
- Plato, Republic (in Greek)
In Spring 2024, I gave a course of lectures for undergraduates and graduate students in Philosophy at Oxford:
The Metaphysics of PropertiesThis lecture course provides a comprehensive introduction to the metaphysics of properties. It should be of value to students preparing for Knowledge and Reality and to those otherwise interested in exploring this central metaphysical topic. All are welcome.
Lecture 1. The Relation RegressBradley’s regress of relations has exercised an outsized influence on metaphysics, logic, and the philosophy of language, as witnessed by the number and variety of views it has inspired. To take but a few examples, the regress has been used in arguments for the existence of God, dialetheism and the failure of the transitivity of identity, and a holistic theory of meaning. Bradley himself took the regress to motivate monism. This lecture presents the regress and explores a number of contemporary solutions to it.
Lecture 2. Immanent/Transcendent, Universal/ParticularTwo questions are central to the metaphysics of properties. Are properties immanent or transcendent? And are they universal or particular? This lecture introduces the relevant notions and the ensuing debates.
Immanent/Transcendent. A property is immanent if and only if it is wholly present where its bearer is. By contrast, a property is transcendent if and only if it is not located in space and time. The first half of this lecture raises problems and challenges for both the views that properties are immanent and that they are transcendent. In the process, it covers a range of topics related to the metaphysics of properties, including the semantics of predicates, the metaphysics of causation, and ontological naturalism.
Universal/Particular. The intuitive distinction between properties, on the one hand, and objects like ourselves, tables, and chairs, on the other, has traditionally been characterised as the distinction between universals and particulars. The second half of the lecture examines three prominent accounts of the universal-particular distinction originating in Plato and Aristotle, before introducing trope theory, or the view that all properties are particular.
Lecture 3. Theories of ObjectsThis lecture considers the metaphysics of properties in light of the relation in which properties stand to their bearers. According to substratum theory and bundle theory, properties are constituents of their bearers. The difference between the two theories lies in the fact that on the former, but not the latter, there is something to an object other than its properties. This lecture presents both theories and raises problems and challenges for them. The lecture concludes by comparing these theories to a third theory of objects, Aristotelian substance theory, on which it is denied that objects have a decomposition into simpler constituents. Instead, the notion of an object is taken as primitive.
Lecture 4. The Property ParadoxThis lecture presents Russell’s paradox for sets and its property-theoretic analogue. Comparisons between the two paradoxes and their respective implications for set theory and property theory are drawn. Several solutions to the property paradox are presented and explored in detail, including a solution inspired by the emerging approach to metaphysics known as ‘higher-order metaphysics’.