hello
my name is max weiss. I'm a lecturer in philosophy at boston university.
my research interests involve logic, metaphysics, and history of philosophy.
i wrote my dissertation about wittgenstein's tractatus. what, according to that book, would be the nature of logic? the project includes an exact analysis of the expressive power of wittgenstein's system. i contend that so understood, logical relationships could be witnessed by symbolic patterns iff the number of objects is countable.
in metaphysics, i've been trying to understand the fundamental structure of a trichotomy of objects, relations and facts. for example, it's natural to suppose that a fact consists of some objects 'held together' by a relation. presumably, the same objects can be held together by the same relation in different 'ways'. but what does that mean? can objects so be held together 'in an order', or in such a way that one object 'occurs multiple times'? i'm inclined to think that these apparently intuitive notions of order, and of multiplicity, of occurrences of objects in a fact are not fundamental. apparent intuitions to the contrary arise from a natural tendency to project onto the system of objects, relations and facts what are only features of their representation by names, predicates and sentences.
i also maintain some historical interests in early modern philosophy, particularly in the development of the modern conception of the self. i've been working for some time on an interpretation of spinoza's attempted proof that the human mind is an idea of an object which actually exists. i'm also quite curious what exactly was the problem hume found in his conclusions about the self. but that question might be too hard.