Social Choice and Defeasible Reasoning

I’m the author of the article on “Defeasible Reasoning” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In revising my entry this month, I came across a fascinating idea proposed in 1991 by Sten Lindström (in an article first published in Theoria in 2022). As I argue in my article, the best approach to formalizing a defeasibleContinue reading “Social Choice and Defeasible Reasoning”

Persistence of Material Parts Through Substantial Change

Here’s a problem that I’ve wrestled with for years: do the material parts (not just at the level of prime matter) of a substance survive through substantial change? For example, suppose a bit of watery fluid is extracted from my eye and placed on a microscope slide. Call the bit of watery stuff W. WhenContinue reading “Persistence of Material Parts Through Substantial Change”