I will discuss the following. (i) Assuming there to be true contractions, are these in the world, or in our language/conceptual schemes? And what exactly does this distinction amount to anyway? (ii) Assuming that it is the latter, can the contradictions be avoided by simply revising our language/conceptual schema in a suitable way?

Many metaphysicians take basic material reality to be homogeneous—e.g., to be nothing but particles and sums of particles. I shall present an alternative that takes basic ontology to include ordinary things—people, crab grass, helicopters. I'll motivate the alternative (called 'the Constitution View') with an example concerning the conditions under which things go out of existence. Constitution is a ubiquitous relation of unity, but not identity. Nor is the constitution relation itself a mereological relation.

Since many philosophers (but not I) look at the material world through the lens of mereology, I'll discuss the inadequacy of classical mereology as a way to understand ordinary things. I define 'parts' in a way that applies to ordinary things. Ordinary parts of ordinary things are not mereological parts. Mereological sums, and only mereological sums, have mereological parts. Even though constitution is not a mereological relation, there is a role for sums in the Constitution View: sums, though not ordinary objects, are ultimate constituters.

I begin with the tautology that it was Plato who wrote the authentically Platonic dialogues. I then ask why Plato, after writing a number of memorable dialogues in elenctic form, largely abandoned the elenchus. I identify limitations in the elenctic form that Plato himself highlights. I then point to methodological shifts in Plato's later dialogues that seem to address those limitations. The resulting picture of philosophical analysis in later Plato may offer a more promising model of analysis than the elenchus. It may also help us think about the prospects for philosophical analysis today.

Why does Kant, in his Metaphysics of Morals, describe property as 'noumenal possession' (possessio noumenon)? And what does this tell us about Kantian noumena more generally? Kant's Metaphysics of Morals' derivation of property begins from the thought that while possession (holding) is adequately understood phenomenally—possession is a matter of fact, accessible to the senses—property—things to which someone has exclusive rights of use and control, regardless of present possession—can only be understood 'noumenally.' To say this, I argue, is to say that property must be located in a system of concepts and principles that determine and govern objects that can only be grasped intellectually—that are, in other words, intelligible things-in-themselves, or noumena. Kant's derivation of property rights is precisely such an effort: he locates things, qua property, in the system of ideal juridical law, whose concepts and principles form one branch of the system of freedom, governed by the moral law. This system is not a system of phenomena, but of noumena.

Noticing this, I argue in this paper, leads to noticing that many more objects than we might have supposed are noumenal for Kant. To say an object is noumenal is to say that it is what it is (and is what we know it to be) in virtue features that are not accessible to the senses—that it does not 'appear' as the thing it is, but can only be grasped, as the thing it is, intelligibly. God, the immortal soul, the free will, and the 'thing-in-itself' that gives rise, in the first Critique, to appearances are familiar Kantian noumenal objects. But so, on my account, are contracts, tenants, wills, state constitutions, legislators, corporations, money, households, marriages, and promises, among other things.

I see three related benefits to pursuing this account. The first is to counter the widespread view that Kantian noumena are few and far between and not much a part of our everyday lives (save, perhaps, for the vexing noumenal free will). A view of noumena as shadowy, rarified entities contributes to the ease with which it is claimed that noumena are things about which we can know and experience nothing Ð a claim that tends to stall further clear thinking about them. (This claim, which is widely made, is I argue based not only on a misconstrual of noumena, but also of Kantian 'knowledge' and 'experience.')

Locke's seminal account of what constitutes a person's identity over time is often taken, both by scholars and by contemporary neo-Lockeans, as distinctively modern. This tends to reinforce the common view that Aristotle and other ancient thinkers do not—perhaps even could not—have anything like Locke's conception of the person or self. I propose to challenge both views: first, that Locke's account of personal identity is distinctively modern; and second, that Aristotle does not have anything like Locke's account. My challenge rests on locating Locke's views in the historical context in which he was working, one in which the anti-Cartesian and fundamentally Stoic and Aristotelian views of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth figure prominently. Seeing this allows us to see the way in which both Aristotle and Locke are committed to the existence of irreducibly first-personal phenomena, phenomena which are however more practical and deliberative than the primarily theoretical and speculative phenomena characteristic of more Cartesian conceptions of first-person privilege.