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Ideas of Alan Sidelle, by Text

[American, fl. 2002, Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.]

1989 Necessity, Essence and Individuation
p.282 Necessary a posteriori is conventional for necessity and nonmodal for a posteriority [Sider]
Ch.1 p.1 We seem to base necessities on thought experiments and imagination
Ch.1 p.1 A priori knowledge is entirely of analytic truths
Ch.1 p.11 Causal reference seems to get directly at the object, thus leaving its nature open
Ch.1 p.12 Empiricism explores necessities and concept-limits by imagining negations of truths
Ch.1 p.14 That water is essentially H2O in some way concerns how we use 'water'
Ch.1 p.17 Metaphysics is clarifying how we speak and think (and possibly improving it)
Ch.2 p.25 The necessary a posteriori is statements either of identity or of essence
Ch.2 p.26 Clearly, essential predications express necessary properties
Ch.2 p.37 That the essence of water is its microstructure is a convention, not a discovery
Ch.3 p.65 A thing doesn't need transworld identity prior to rigid reference - that could be a convention of the reference
Ch.3 p.73 Evaluation of de dicto modalities does not depend on the identity of its objects
Ch.3 p.77 The individuals and kinds involved in modality are also a matter of convention
Ch.4 p.89 Contradictoriness limits what is possible and what is imaginable
Ch.4 p.95 Can anything in science reveal the necessity of what it discovers?
Ch.4 p.100 To know empirical necessities, we need empirical facts, plus conventions about which are necessary
Ch.4 p.115 There doesn't seem to be anything in the actual world that can determine modal facts
Ch.4 p.126 Being a deepest explanatory feature is an actual, not a modal property
Ch.5 p.163 Because some entities overlap, reference must have analytic individuation principles
Ch.6 p.190 Causal reference presupposes essentialism if it refers to modally extended entities
Ch.6 p.200 We aren't clear about 'same stuff as this', so a principle of individuation is needed to identify it
Ch.6 n11 p.178 'Dthat' operates to make a singular term into a rigid term