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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Worlds Without End: A Platonist Theory Of Fiction, Patrick Grafton-Cardwell
Worlds Without End: A Platonist Theory Of Fiction, Patrick Grafton-Cardwell
Doctoral Dissertations
I first ask what it is to make up a story. In order to answer that question, I give existence and identity conditions for stories. I argue that a story exists whenever there is some narrative content that has intentionally been made accessible. I argue that stories are abstract types, individuated by the conditions that must be met by something in order to be a properly formed token of the type. However, I also argue that the truth of our story identity attributions---sentences like, "Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings is the same story as JRR Tolkien's Lord of the …
Meaning And Modality, Jesse Fitts
Meaning And Modality, Jesse Fitts
Doctoral Dissertations
I intended to write four papers whose topics faintly concerned separate issues in meaning and modality. As it turned out, chapters 1-3 all roughly concern the same topic: propositions. While I argue for two different theses in chapters 1 and 2, I try to understand the changing propositions literature in both. In addition to arguing for the respective theses in chapters 1 and 2, accounting for this change is a parallel goal for the chapters taken together. Chapter 3 examines particular propositional roles---the objects of the attitudes and the objects of credence. Finally, chapter 4 changes the subject to the …
The Path To Supersubstantivalism, Joshua D. Moulton
The Path To Supersubstantivalism, Joshua D. Moulton
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation is divided into two parts. In the first part I defend substantivalism. I do this by offering, in chapter 1, a counterpart-theoretic defense of substantivalism from Leibniz’ shift arguments. Then, in chapter 2, I defend substantivalism from the hole argument and argue, against the consensus, that the question of haecceitism is irrelevant to substantivalism in the context of general relativity. In the second part of the dissertation I defend supersubstantivalism. I do this by offering, in chapter 3, an argument against dualistic substantivalism. The argument appeals to plausible principles of modal plenitude to show that the dualist is …