A prevailing view among many contemporary philosophers is that properties and propositions are best described in a highly fine-grained manner, treating them as made of constituents. A popular version of this idea, the structuralist view, says that properties or propositions with different constituents are distinct. Such a theory has been often entertained in several areas of philosophy of language and metaphysics. However, some have argued that the structuralist view leads to contradictions in specific logical systems. This is linked to what is known as the Russell–Myhill paradox.
My dissertation investigates a new framework that keeps the structuralist view but avoids the contradiction. The approach is based on the following key insight: instead of assuming that all structured properties and propositions exist all at once, I imagine them being constructed in steps. At each step (or “stage”), we can only rely on the things already available, and we build new ones from those. I show that this stage-by-stage construction prevents the paradox from arising, opening up fruitful applications for the study of metaphysical dependence, fundamentality, and granularity.
Jacopo successfully defended his thesis on 13 March 2026.
Trial lecture
Designated topic: Do abstract objects exist?
Evaluation committee
- Professor Gabriel Uzquiano, University of Southern California
- Associate Professor Luca Incurvati, University of Amsterdam
- Associate Professor Karen Crowther, University of Oslo (committe administrator)
Chair of the defence
- Professor Ingrid Falkum, University of Oslo
Supervisors
- Professor Øystein Linnebo, University of Oslo