There is a general orthodoxy in linguistics that all languages are equal. Only in the past 10-15 years have linguists started critiquing this claim. In this thesis I critically examine structural interpretations of the ...

Isaac Newton condemned the use of hypotheses with his (in)famous methodological statement, Hypotheses non fingo, and yet employed hypotheses explicitly in every edition of the Principia. Some commentators have argued that ...

“I think, therefore I am” (Cogito, ergo sum) suggests a “naïve” interpretation whereby anyone who argues as follows is certain of their existence. I think. Therefore, I am. Curiously, the famous line doesn’t appear in ...

Composition as Identity is the view that an object is identical to its parts taken collectively. I elaborate and defend a theory based on this idea: composition is a kind of identity. Since this claim is best presented ...

Presentism, the position that only present objects exist, is taken as the commonsense view of time, capturing our everyday temporal beliefs. However, presentism is also faced by a number of well-known objections. One of ...

George Turnbull (1698-1748) is one of the figures of the Scottish Enlightenment who has been largely overlooked. In this thesis I give the first detailed analysis of his major writings by focusing on a set of principles ...

John McDowell's work presents stimulating arguments on a broad variety of issues. In this thesis I shall look at three: his response to Dummett's manifestation argument (the argument that our understanding of truth must ...

In recent decades the debate over the metaethical conclusion from the theory of evolution has intensified. Michael Ruse’s epistemological argument has been taken up by Richard Joyce, Guy Kahane and Sharon Street and ...

This thesis is an attempt to investigate the relation between the views of Wittgenstein as presented by Kripke (Kripke’s Wittgenstein) and Donald Davidson on meaning and linguistic understanding. Kripke’s Wittgenstein, via ...

In this study, I discuss the role of mathematics in Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy. Bacon was one of the important figures of early modern philosophy and has been accepted as one of the frontier philosophers of modern ...