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This book offers answers to the following questions. What does reality encompass? Is reality exclusively physical? Or does reality include non‐physical — mental, and perhaps ‘abstract’ — aspects? What is it to be physical or mental — or to be an abstract entity? What are the elements of being, reality’s building blocks? How is the manifest image we inherit from our culture and refine in the special sciences related to the scientific image as we have it in fundamental physics? Can physics be understood as providing a ‘theory of everything’, or do the various sciences make up a hierarchy corresponding to autonomous levels of reality? Is our conscious human perspective on the universe in the universe or at its limits? What, if anything, makes ordinary truths, truths of the special sciences, and truths of mathematics true? And what is it for an assertion or judgment to be ‘made true’? Answers to these questions are framed in terms of a comprehensive ontology of substances and properties inspired by Descartes, Locke, their successors, and their more recent exemplars. Substances are simple, lacking parts that are themselves substances. Properties are modes (tropes), particular ways particular substances are, not universals. Arrangements of propertied substances serve as truthmakers for all the truths that have truthmakers. The deep story about the nature of these truthmakers is addressed by fundamental physics.

Objects of Metaphor offers a philosophical account of the phenomenon of metaphor which is radically different from others in the literature. Yet for all its difference, the underlying rationale of the account is genuinely ecumenical. If one adopts its perspective, one should be able to understand the substantial correctness of many other accounts, while at the same time seeing why they are not in the end completely correct. The origins of the account lie in an examination of the conception of predication. Unreflectively thought of as a task accomplished by words, it is argued that predication, or something very much like it, can also be accomplished by non-word objects (‘objects’ here include events, states of affairs, situations, actions and the like). Liberated in this way from words, predication becomes one central element in the account of metaphor. The other element is the move from language to objects which, adapting an idea of Quine’s, is thought of as the limiting case of semantic descent. Whilst the Objects of Metaphor account presents other accounts in a new light, its main importance lies in what it says about metaphor itself. Powerful and flexible enough to cope with the syntactic complexity typical of genuine metaphor, it offers novel conceptions of both the relationship between simile and metaphor and the notion of dead metaphor. Additionally, it shows why metaphor is a robust theoretic kind, related to other tropes such as synecdoche and metonymy, but not to be confused with tropes generally, or with the figurative and non-literal.

While many alchemists were intelligent and well-intentioned thinkers, their experiments are usually regarded as failed wizardry rather than scientific investigation. The alchemists' extreme goals faded with the rise of scientific pursuits. It has been rarely noted, however, that the birth of atomic science coincided with an efflorescence of occultism and alchemical tropes that attached deep significance to questions about the nature of matter and energy. This book explores this brief revival of scientific interest in alchemy and its surprising connections to the emerging subatomic sciences of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It shows that a resurfacing of occult circles and alchemical tropes had a traceable impact upon the science of the day. It reveals unexpected interactions between science and the occult, such as the Alchemical Society in London (1912-1915), the research program of “clairvoyant chemistry”, and the attempts of academic chemists, inspired by the alchemy revival, to transmute the elements — even to make gold. The author's research uncovers the surprising story of how this alchemical revival influenced, and was in turn profoundly shaped by, conceptions of matter emerging from the new science of radioactivity. Examining scientists' publications, correspondence, talks, and laboratory notebooks as well as the writings of occultists, alchemical tomes, and science fiction stories, the book argues that as modern nuclear physics was born, the trajectories of science and occultism — usually seen as antithetical — briefly converged.

The main goal of this work is to provide a metaphysical account of properties and of how they are related to concrete particulars. On the broadest level, this work is a defense of tropes and of trope bundle theory as the best accounts of properties and objects, respectively, and, second, a defense of a specific brand of trope nominalism, Natural Class Trope Nominalism. Each of these tasks is pursued separately, with the first Part of this work acting as a general introduction and defense of tropes and trope bundle theory, and the second Part acting as the more specific defense of Natural Class Trope Nominalism. In Part 1 it is argued that there are tropes. Part 1 also provides an outline of what tropes can do for us metaphysically, while remaining neutral between different theories of tropes. Included in Part 1 are an account of the universal–particular distinction, an argument for the existence of tropes based on the phenomenon of moving properties, the development of a trope bundle theory of objects and a trope-based solution to the problems of mental causations. The second Part presents a fuller picture of what a trope is by way of Natural Class Trope Nominalism, according to which a trope's nature is determined by membership in natural classes of tropes. In addition, in Part 2 a defense is developed of Natural Class Trope Nominalism against what have been thought to be fatal objections to this view, a defense grounded in property counterpart theory without modal realism.

Implicit in much contemporary philosophy is a Picture Theory of language according to which we can ‘read off’ features of the world from features of our ways of talking about the world. Predicates applying truthfully to objects, for instance, are taken to name properties of those objects possessed by every object to which the predicates apply. Such a principle might be thought to follow from a more general ‘truth‐making’ requirement (truths require truth‐makers) together with the idea that truth‐makers entail truths. I argue that truth‐making is not entailment and that the Picture Theory should be jettisoned and replaced by an attitude of ontological seriousness. Freed of constraints imposed by the Picture Theory, we are in a position to see our way through metaphysical difficulties associated with contemporary philosophy of mind. Following Locke (and C. B. Martin), I endorse a conception of properties as modes (or tropes): ways particular objects are. Modes are simultaneously qualities and powers: powerful qualities. Application of this thesis to familiar issues in the philosophy of mind yields surprising results.

This is a literary history that examines British writing about the East—centred on India but radiating as far as Egypt and the Pacific—in the colonial and postcolonial period. It takes as its subject “the East” that was real to the British imagination, largely the creation of writers who described and told stories about it, descriptions and stories coloured by the experience of empire and its aftermath. The book discusses the work of writers such as Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, and Orwell, but also covers less-well-known literary authors, including Anglo-Indian romance writing, the reports and memoirs of administrators, and travel writing from Auden and Isherwood in China to Redmond O'Hanlon in Borneo. It produces a history of this writing by looking at a series of “figures” or tropes of representation through which successive writers sought to represent the East and the British experience of it—tropes such as exploring the hinterland, going native, and the figure of rule itself. The book raises issues of identity and representation; power and knowledge; and, centrally, the question of how to represent other people.

Figuratively Speaking (1986) examines figures of speech that concern meaning—irony, hyperbole, understatement, similes, metaphors, and others—to show how they work and to explain their attraction. Building on the ideas of Paul Grice and Amos Tversky, this work shows how figurative language derives its power from its insistence that the reader participate in the text, looking beyond the literal meaning of the figurative language to the meanings that are implied. With examples ranging from Shakespeare, John Donne, and Jane Austen to e.e. cummings, Bessie Smith, and Monty Python, this work shows that the intellectual and aesthetic force of figurative language is not derived from inherent magical power, but instead from the opportunity it provides for unlimited elaboration in the hands of those gifted in its use. A distinctive feature of this work is that it presents a modern restatement of the view, first put forward by Aristotle, that metaphors are to be treated as elliptical similes. In a generalized form, this restatement of the Aristotelian view treats both metaphors and similes (and a number of other tropes) as figurative comparisons. The book then offers a detailed defense of this “comparativist” view of metaphors in response to the almost universal rejection of it by eminent philosophers. This new edition has extended the notion of figurative comparisons to cover synecdoche. It also ventures into new territory by considering two genres, fables and satires.

According to the theoretical accounts which survive in the rhetorical handbooks of antiquity, allegory is extended metaphor, or an extended series of metaphors; and both allegory and metaphor are linguistic ‘tropes’: their purpose is essentially ornamental. The distance posited here between meaning on the one hand and the form of its expression on the other has come under decisive attack in the work of 20th century theorists, who have argued for the central role of metaphor in the construction of meaning. But how far in fact do the rhetorical handbooks represent the scope and subtlety of ancient thought on the matter? The papers presented here address this question from a variety of theoretical perspectives; they examine the origin and meaning of the term ‘metaphor’, set ancient against modern theories of language, and theory against practice. The inclusion of papers devoted to allegory in the writing and exegesis of antiquity provides, in the first place, another way of testing the adequacy of ancient rhetorical theory; but it also extends the debate into areas of the literary life of antiquity which have been unjustly sidelined or neglected.