ABOUT MICHAELA MCSWEENEY

I'm an assistant professor of philosophy at Boston University. My work is mainly in metaphysics, the philosophy of logic, and epistemology (mostly, epistemology of metaphysics and logic). It also sometimes touches on issues in the philosophy of science. More recently, I have also started working on the philosophy of mental illness/social/political/feminist philosophy.

 

PUBLICATIONS

Workspace

Journal of the American Philosophical Association. forthcoming.

Many philosophers take purportedly logical cases of ground (such as a true disjunction being grounded in its true disjunct(s)) to be obvious cases, and indeed such cases have been used to motivate the existence of and importance of ground. I argue against this. I do so by motivating two kinds of semantic determination relations. Intuitions of logical ground track these semantic relations. Moreover, our knowledge of semantics for (e.g.) first order logic can explain why we have such intuitions. And, I argue, neither semantic relation can be a species of ground, even on a quite broad conception of what ground is. Hence, without a positive argument for taking so-called ‘logical ground’ to be something distinct from a semantic determination relation, we should cease treating logical cases as cases of ground.

COURSES & SEMINARS

INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY

PHILOSOPHY OF SPORT

PUZZLES AND PARADOXES

METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY

GRADUATE AND UPPER-LEVEL UNDERGRADUATE SEMINARS IN VARIOUS TOPICS IN METAPHYSICS, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOGIC.

©2020 Michaela McSweeney