Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of Potentiality: From Dispositions To Modality By Barbara Vetter, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

In recent years, there have been several books written about dispositions. Barbara Vetter’s Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality is another, but it is not just another. Vetter’s book stands out as an ambitious, original, and systematic attempt to develop a new account of metaphysical modality in terms of dispositional properties she calls ‘potentialities.’ According to Vetter, saying that something has a disposition, like fragility or flammability, is to say something about what it can do, such as break or burn. Dispositional concepts are members of a broader class of modal concepts, which also includes necessity, possibility, causation, laws, and essence. …

Pollock And Sturgeon On Defeaters, Albert Casullo

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Scott Sturgeon has recently challenged Pollock’s account of undercutting defeaters. The challenge involves three primary contentions: (1) the account is both too strong and too weak, (2) undercutting defeaters exercise their power to defeat only in conjunction with higher-order beliefs about the basis of the lower-order beliefs whose justification they target, and (3) since rebutting defeaters exercise their power to defeat in isolation, rebutting and undercutting defeaters work in fundamentally different ways. My goal is to reject each of these contentions. I maintain that (1) Sturgeon fails to show that Pollock’s account of undercutting defeaters is either too strong or …

Real Potential, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

There's a student in my philosophy class who has "real potential." I might express this thought in any of the following ways: "She is potentially a philosopher"; "She is a potential philosopher"; "She has the potential to be a philosopher." The first way uses a cognate of "potential" as an adverb to modify "is." The second ways uses "potential" as an adjective to modify "philosopher." However, the third way uses "potential" as a noun to refer to something that the student has. What kind of thing is this potential? One worry about even asking this question is that this nominalization …

Feminist Metaphysics: Can This Marriage Be Saved?, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Feminist metaphysics is simultaneously feminist theorizing and metaphysics. Part of feminist metaphysics concerns social ontology and considers such questions as, What is the nature of social kinds, such as genders? Feminist metaphysicians also consider whether gendered perspectives influence metaphysical theorizing; for example, have approaches to the nature of the self or free will been conducted from a masculinist perspective, and would a feminist perspective yield different theories? Some feminist metaphysicians develop metaphysical theories with the aim of furthering certain social goals, such as gender equality.

Despite these and other intriguing research projects, feminist metaphysics faces challenges from two flanks: one …