(LCI) = Loux, Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction
(LCR) = Loux, Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings
(E) = Evnine, Making Objects and Events
Week One: Puzzles about Identity and Time
- Week One: A Puzzle about Identity
Weeks Two-Three: Universals
- Week Two: Realism
- Chapter One (LCI)
- Loux, ‘The Problem of Universals’ (LCR)
- Russell, ‘The World of Universals’ (LCR)
- Price, ‘Universals and Resemblances’ (LCR)
- Armstrong, ‘Universals as Attributes’ (LCR)
- Week Three: Nominalism
- Chapter Two (LCI)
- Quine, ‘On What There Is’ (LCR)
- Williams, ‘The Elements of Being’ (LCR)
Weeks Four-Six: Particulars
- Week Four: Particulars and Predication
- Chapter Three (LCI)
- Loux, ‘The Ontological Structure of Concrete Particulars’ (LCR)
- Black, ‘The Identity of Indiscernibles’ (LCR)
- Allaire, ‘Bare Particulars’ (LCR)
- Week Five: Bundles
- Van Cleve, ‘Three Versions of the Bundle Theory’
- Casullo, ‘A Fourth Version of the Bundle Theory'
- Week Six: Particular Substances
- Van Cleve, 'The Moon and Sixpence,' in Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, ed. Hawthorne, T. Sider, and D. Zimmerman (Blackwell, 2008), 321-40.
- Wolterstorff, ‘Bergmann’s Constituent Ontology,’ Nous 4 (1970), 109-134
- Loux, ‘What is Constituent Ontology?’ in L. Novak et al. edd., Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic, 43-57
Weeks Seven-Eight: Modality and Possible Worlds
- Week Seven: Possible Worlds
- Chapter Five (LCI)
- Loux, ‘Modality and Possible Worlds’ (LCR)
- Lewis, ‘Possible Worlds’ (LCR)
- Week Eight: Actualism
- Plantinga, ‘Actualism and Possible Worlds’ (LCR)
- Lewis, ‘Counterparts or Double Lives’ (LCR)
- Kripke, ‘Identity and Necessity’ (LCR)
Week Nine: Mid-semester Break
Weeks Ten-Thirteen: Identity through Time
- Week Ten: Time
- Chapter Seven (LCI)
- Loux, ‘Time: The A-Theory and the B-Theory’ (LCR)
- McTaggart, ‘Time’ (LCR)
- Broad, ‘Ostensible Temporality’ (LCR)
- Prior, ‘The Notion of the Present’ (LCR)
- Mellor, ‘The Need for Tense’ (LCR)
- Week Eleven: Persistence
- Chapter Eight (LCI)
- Heller, ‘Temporal Parts of Four-Dimensional Objects’ (LCR)
- Merricks, ‘Endurance and Indiscernibility’ (LCR)
- Week Twelve: Substance and Life
- Shields, “The Dialectic of Life,” Synthese 185 (2012), 103-124
Weeks Thirteen-Sixteen: Constitution, Hylomorphism, and Identity
- Week Thirteen: The Metaphysics of Hylomorphism
- (E), Chs. One and Two
- N.b. No meeting on 13 April
- (E), Chs. One and Two
- Week Fourteen: Artefacts
- (E), Chs. Three and Four
- Week Fifteen: Living Systems
- (E), Ch. Five
- Week Sixteen: A Final Sailing of the Ship of Theseus