Jonathan Schaffer's papers

My papers so far cluster around three main topics: causation, knowledge, and ontology. I have arranged the papers by topic, and then roughly by the order in which they were written. Comments are very much welcomed!

Papers listed without a link may be available on request. Unpublished papers are subject to change. I have tried to indicate when the posted version is not yet finalized. For final publication information, please refer to my CV.

Caveat lector: I change my mind a lot—though usually only between papers!

Causation (also counterfactuals, laws, and chance)

• Trumping Preemption
• Overlappings: Probability-Raising without Causation
• Causation by Disconnection
• Causes as Probability-Raisers of Processes
• Causation, Influence, and Effluence
• Review of Dowe's Physical Causation
• The Metaphysics of Causation [Stanford Encyclopedia]
• Principled Chances
• Overdetermining Causes
• Causation the Black Hole
• Causes Need Not be Physically Connected to their Effects
• Counterfactuals, Causal Independence, and Conceptual Circularity
• Contrastive Causation
• Causation and the Laws of Nature: Reductionism [penultimate draft]
• Deterministic Chance?
• Review of Dowe and Noordhof's Cause and Chance
• Causal Contextualisms: Contrast, Default, and Model

Knowledge (mainly skepticism, perception, and contextualism)

• Knowledge, Relevant Alternatives, and Missed Clues
• Perceptual Knowledge Derailed
• Skepticism, Contextualism, and Discrimination
• Contrastive Knowledge
• From Contextualism to Contrastivism
• What Shifts? Thresholds, Standards, or Alternatives?
• Knowing the Answer
• Closure, Contrast, and Answer
• The Irrelevance of the Subject
• The Contrast-Sensitivity of Knowledge Ascriptions [penultimate draft]
• Knowledge in the Image of Assertion [penultimate draft]
• Knowing the Answer Redux: Replies to Brogaard and Kallestrup [penultimate draft]
• Epistemic Debasement
• Covert Variables in Taste Claims and Epistemic Modals

Ontology (including properties, fundamentality, and monism)

• The Individuation of Tropes
• The Problem of Free Mass: Must Properties Cluster?
• Is There a Fundamental Level?
• Two Conceptions of Sparse Properties
• Of Ghostly and Mechanical Events
• Quiddistic Knowledge
• Monism: The Priority of the Whole [draft Dec 16, 2006]
• From Nihilism to Monism
• Monism [Stanford Encyclopedia]
• The Least Discerning and Most Promiscuous Truthmaker [draft Dec 4, 2006]
• For (Priority) Monism: Reply to Sider [draft Nov 26, 2006]
• Spacetime the One Substance [draft Nov 7, 2007]
• Review of Hüttemann's What's Wrong with Microphysicalism?
• On What Grounds What [penultimate draft]
• Truth and Fundamentality: On Merricks's Truth and Ontology [penultimate draft]
• Truthmaker Commitments [penultimate draft]
• The Internal Relatedness of All Things [draft May 30, 2008]