Logic Matters 2008-03-23

Absolute Generality 21: Parsons on metaphysical realism

It is a pleasure, as always, to turn to a paper by Charles Parsons (a long time ago, his "Frege's Theory of Numbers" was one of the papers that grabbed me when I very first started philosophy and it helped get me really enthused by Frege's project). Nice too, in a volume of overlong papers that 'The Problem of Absolute Universality' sticks to a reasonable length.In his first section, Parsons quickly reviews a few reasons for supposing that sometimes, at any rate, we aim to make claims that do involve absolutely general quantification -- offering the usual sort of cases. For example, there are logical examples like Everything is self identical (which surely is indeed intended to be about everything.) And there are more humdrum examples like There are no unicorns. (If we suppose 'there are' ranges only over some ...

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