Crawford Elder

Professor Emeritus

My research has, for the past twenty years, centered on articulating an ontology capable of explaining the cognitive successes scored by ordinary people using common sense and familiar sciences—not just physics, but also, say, cell biology and population genetics and psychology and linguistics. Basically this has amounted to defending realism about a wide range of familiar objects.

Most recently I’ve been exercised by some issues in the philosophy of time. I think that in our ontology we should take seriously the common-sense idea that many material objects undergo alterations: one and the same material thing first has one accidental property, and later drops it for some contrary accidental property. But at the same time I think there are powerful reasons for preferring Eternalism over Presentism or any other view that endorses Passage. I’ve recently been exploring ways to reconcile these two apparently inconsistent positions.