Things: Papers on Objects, Events, and Properties

Things is a collection of twelve essays by Stephen Yablo on metaphysics. He examines a range of first-order topics, including identity, coincidence, essence, causation, and properties. Some first-order debates are not worth pursuing, he argues: there is nothing at issue in them. Several of the papers explore the metaontology of abstract objects, and more generally of objects that are 'preconceived', their principal features being settled already by their job-descriptions. He rejects standard forms of fictionalism, opting ultimately for a view that puts presupposition in the role normally played by pretense. Almost all of Yablo's published work on these topics is collected here, along with the previously unpublished 'Carving Content at the Joints'.

Stephen Yablo is Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology