About

Gabriel Uzquiano is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He received his PhD from the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT in 1999. His academic career includes teaching positions at the University of Rochester, The Ohio State University, and Pembroke College at the University of Oxford, where he was a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy from 2006 to 2011. Since 2011, he has been a tenure-track faculty member at USC. His research specialties encompass philosophical logic, philosophy of logic and mathematics, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. Uzquiano has authored significant works including the book 'The Mereology of Classes' and co-authored 'Absolute Generality'. His scholarly contributions extend to numerous book chapters, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries, focusing on topics such as mereology, modality, quantification, and paradoxes in philosophy. He is actively involved in the academic community through teaching, research, and service, including serving as Deputy Director at USC Dornsife.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Programming language
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• A Framework for Location

  Journal of Philosophical Logic · 2025-11-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We develop a general framework for debates over location. The framework generates systematic explanations of core features of the interaction between location and part, and provides the toolkit to model locational formulations of endurance on which occupants are entirely located at each time at which they exist.

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• Sam Roberts. Pluralities as Nothing Over and Above. Journal of Philosophy, vol. CXIX (2022), no. 8, pp. 405–424.

  Bulletin of Symbolic Logic · 2024-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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• The Mereology of Classes

  2024 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Philosophy

  This Element is a systematic study of the question of whether classes are composed of further parts. Mereology is the theory of the relation of part to whole, and we will ask how that relation applies to classes. One reason the issue has received attention in the literature is the hope that a clear picture of the mereology of classes may provide further insights into the foundations of set theory. We will consider two main perspectives on the mereology of classes on which classes are indeed composed of further parts. They, however, disagree as to the identity of those parts. Each perspective admits more than one implementation, and one of the purposes of this work is to explain what is at stake with each choice.

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• Ramified structure

  Philosophical Studies · 2022-01-21

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Closed Structure

  Journal of Philosophical Logic · 2021 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Linguistics

  Abstract According to the structured theory of propositions, if two sentences express the same proposition, then they have the same syntactic structure, with corresponding syntactic constituents expressing the same entities. A number of philosophers have recently focused attention on a powerful argument against this theory, based on a result by Bertrand Russell, which shows that the theory of structured propositions is inconsistent in higher order-logic. This paper explores a response to this argument, which involves restricting the scope of the claim that propositions are structured, so that it does not hold for all propositions whatsoever, but only for those which are expressible using closed sentences of a given formal language. We call this restricted principle Closed Structure , and show that it is consistent in classical higher-order logic. As a schematic principle, the strength of Closed Structure is dependent on the chosen language. For its consistency to be philosophically significant, it also needs to be consistent in every extension of the language which the theorist of structured propositions is apt to accept. But, we go on to show, Closed Structure is in fact inconsistent in a very natural extension of the standard language of higher-order logic, which adds resources for plural talk of propositions. We conclude that this particular strategy of restricting the scope of the claim that propositions are structured is not a compelling response to the argument based on Russell’s result, though we note that for some applications, for instance to propositional attitudes, a restricted thesis in the vicinity may hold some promise.

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• Elusive Propositions

  Journal of Philosophical Logic · 2021-01-04 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Impredicativity and Paradox

  Thought A Journal of Philosophy · 2019-01-01 · 20 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Michael Dummett famously asked how the serpent of inconsistency entered Frege’s paradise. He himself blamed the impredicative nature of second-order quantification, while many others focused on the inflationary nature of the axiom. Axiom V is, after all, the denial of a higher-order generalization of Cantor’s theorem. Predicativists do not deny this, but they block the derivation of the relevant generalization in predicative fragments of second-order logic. Unfortunately, there is more than one higher-order generalization of Cantor’s theorem, and one of them remains a theorem in predicative fragments of higher-order logic. Our recommendation to predicativists is to respond that only one of them supports the cardinality gloss we associate with Cantor’s theorem and that it is, in fact, false. The other remains a theorem of predicative fragments of higher-order logic but its derivability seemsmore closely related to the Grelling’s paradox than to cardinality considerations.

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• Some Results on the Limits of Thought

  Journal of Philosophical Logic · 2018-01-31 · 31 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Quantification, Inference, and Ontology

  Analysis · 2018-02-27 · 14 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Thomas Hofweber has written a very rich book. In line with the conviction that ontology should be informed by linguistic considerations, he develops a systematic approach to central ontological questions as they arise in different regions of discourse. More generally, the book seeks to cast light upon the nature of ontology and its proper place in enquiry. His preferred methodology is not without consequence: it promises, for example, to solve what otherwise look like intractable philosophical puzzles raised by arithmetical practice and numerical discourse, and, likewise, his treatment of propositional discourse has ramifications for larger questions to do with the prospects of metaphysical enquiry generally. In what follows, I would like to comment on the general approach to ontology and to look at the special case of propositional discourse and its ramifications for metaphysics. At the heart of the book is the thesis that quantifiers are semantically underspecified. There is at least a distinction between an external and an internal reading of a quantifier. The external reading is tied to the representational role of the quantifier whereby the world is portrayed to come with a domain of objects over which the quantifier ranges. On the external reading, the truth conditions of a quantified sentence are given in terms of a condition on an external domain of individual objects: a sentence of the form ‘something is A’ is true if, and only if, some member of the external domain is in the extension of A. Other quantifiers are associated with different conditions on the external domain.

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• Groups: Toward a Theory of Plural Embodiment

  The Journal of Philosophy · 2018-01-01 · 44 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Groups are ubiquitous in our lives. But while some of them are highly structured and appear to support a shared intentionality and even a shared agency, others are much less cohesive and do not seem to demand much of their individual members. Queues, for example, seem to be, at a given time, nothing over and above some individuals as they exemplify a certain spatial arrangement. Indeed, the main aim of this paper is to develop the more general thought that at a given time, a group is nothing over and above some individual members as they exemplify a certain complex condition. The general conception of groups that emerges is able to accommodate a variety of constraints on a reasonable answer to the question of what are groups.

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Frequent coauthors

• Stewart Shapiro

  The Ohio State University

  3 shared

• John Hawthorne

  University of Southern California

  3 shared

• Ignacio Jané

  Universitat de Barcelona

  2 shared

• Andrew Bacon

  University of Southern California

  2 shared

• Larry Moss

  1 shared

• W. D. Ross

  1 shared

• Harvey Lederman

  1 shared

• Michael Detlefsen

  1 shared