A dam M urray and J essica W ilson † * Special thanks to Karen Bennett and Dean Zimmerman for extensive comments which greatly improved this paper. Thanks also to Benj Hellie, Phil Kremer, Dan Rabinoff, Chris Tillman, and audience members at the University of North Carolina and the University of Miami, for helpful comments and questions, and to Brent Cromwell for assistance in constructing the fi gures.
In recent work, Peter Hanks and Scott Soames argue for the type view, according to which propositions are types whose tokens are acts, states, or events. Hanks and Soames think that one of the virtues of the type view is that it allows them to explain why propositions have semantic properties. But, in this paper, we argue that their explanations aren't satisfactory.
A popular view in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of language represents each singular proposition as ontologically dependent upon the individual (or individuals) it is directly about. 1 This entry examines the significance of that idea for debates in higher-order metaphysics concerning the modal status of propositional existence and nonexistence.
My project in this paper is to fill a gap in Spinoza's theory of metaphysical individuation. In a few brief passages of the Ethics, Spinoza manages to explain his views on the nature of composition and the part-whole relation, the metaphysical facts which ground the individuation of simple bodies and the extended individuals they compose, and the persistence of one and the same individual through time and mereological change. Yet Spinoza nowhere presents a corresponding account of the individuation of simple ideas, or the minds such ideas compose. While it is initially tempting to locate the details of such an account in Spinoza's views on the relation between the mental and physical domains, I argue here that such approaches fail, in conflicting with Spinoza's insistence that the mental and the physical are conceptually and explanatorily independent. By contrast, I show that for Spinoza, each idea essentially possesses the property of affirming the existence of its object, and that such properties are well-suited to serve as the principle of ideal individuation Spinoza never explicitly provided.
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