Hey, philosophy professors. If you've come to this page because you've found that a student has plagiarized one of the papers below, drop me a note, philarete at gmail dot com. I'm curious as to how widely these papers are being plagiarized.

Hey, philosophy students. Don't plagiarize these papers. For that matter, don't plagiarize at all. It's better to fail honestly than to cheat and get an A. Besides, you'll probably get caught. One student that I know of has been caught already.

Metaphysics

• Artifacts, Matter, and Persistence -- I argue that artifacts are strictly identical with the masses of matter that constitute them.
• Mereological Nihilism and the Limits of Paraphrase -- I argue that the mereological nihilist, one who denies that composition ever occurs, must resort to an ontology of sets in order to paraphrase away apparent reference to composite objects in everyday speech.
• Essentialism and the Grandfather Paradox -- I argue that essentialism of origins implies that David Lewis's proposed solution to one of the paradoxes of time travel does not always work.
• Williams on Personal Identity -- I argue that Bernard Williams' famous thought experiments on personal identity are not as decisive as some have thought.
• Varia -- shorter papers, primarily expository, many written in preparation for a qualifying exam in metaphysics. I hope these papers will provide a good introduction to many of the important issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics.
  • Causation -- J. L. Mackie's and David Lewis's theories of causation.
  • Chisholm's Argument Against Temporal Parts
  • Events -- Donald Davidson's and Jaegwon Kim's disagreement on the nature of events.
  • Free Will and Determinism -- Peter van Inwagen's argument against compatibilism, and Keith Lehrer's argument against the possibility of a compatibilist analysis.
  • Laws of Nature -- What is the distinction between laws of nature and mere accidental regularities?
  • Nominalism -- D. M. Armstrong's arguments against various sorts of nominalism.
  • An Argument Against Immanent Universals -- A problem concerning additive properties, such as mass, for theories of immanent universals.
  • Persistence Through Time -- Under what conditions does a succession of object-stages constitute a single, persisting material object?
  • Personal Identity -- The Lockean theory and its critics.
  • Possible Worlds -- Philosophers talk about them a lot, but what exactly are they?
  • Same Place/Same Time -- Can two material objects occupy the same place at the same time?
  • Temporal Parts and Causation -- Judith Jarvis Thomson's argument against temporal parts.
  • Is Time Real? -- McTaggart's argument that time is unreal, and questions concerning the "flow" of time.
  • Transworld Identity -- Or as it should be called, the problem of de re possibility.
  • Van Inwagen on Composition 1 -- A problem for Peter van Inwagen's theory of composition.
  • Van Inwagen on Composition 2 -- The genesis of the above paper "Mereological Nihilism and the Possibility of Paraphrase."
  • I Gave My Love an Emerose -- A short poem.

History of Philosophy

• Baconian Induction and Latent Schematisms
• Descartes' Body and the Non-Deceitful Nature of God
• Locke on Our Knowledge of Substances
• Spinoza's Finite Modes: Explained or Explained Away?
• Hume on the Continuity and Independence of the Objects of Perception
• Kant's First Analogy and the Schema of Substance

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