Royal Institute of Philosophy Seminar

Title: “How to Construct a Power Graph”

Abstract: The topic of this paper is dispositional monism, which is a metaphysical theory about the nature of properties. I begin by arguing that dispositional monism - the ‘pure powers’ theory - is best understood as the view that properties are universals which are relationally constituted. This leads me to examine Alexander Bird’s recent work on dispositional monism, in which he uses graph theory to represent relational structures of power universals. I then argue for some important modifications to Bird’s graph-theoretic framework.