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Edward N. Zalta

American philosopher (born 1952)

Field	Value
name	Edward N. Zalta
image	Edward N. Zalta. 7199285.jpg
alt	Photograph of Zalta speaking at Wikimania 2015.
caption	Zalta speaking at the Wikimania 2015
birth_name	Edward Nouri Zalta
birth_date
region	Western philosophy
era	Contemporary philosophy
institutions
education
thesis_title	An Introduction to a Theory of Abstract Objects
thesis_url	https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/2187/
thesis_year	1981
doctoral_advisor	Terence Parsons
main_interests	Metaphysics
school_tradition
notable_ideas	Abstract object theory, exemplifying and encoding a property as two modes of predication, Platonized naturalism, computational metaphysics

Edward Nouri Zalta Zalta has taught courses at Stanford University, Rice University, the University of Salzburg, and the University of Auckland. Zalta is also the Principal Editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Research

Zalta's most notable philosophical position is descended from the positions of Alexius Meinong and Ernst Mally, who suggested that there are many non-existent objects. On Zalta's account, some objects (the ordinary concrete ones around us, like tables and chairs) exemplify properties, while others (abstract objects like numbers, and what others would call "non-existent objects", like the round square, and the mountain made entirely of gold) merely encode them.

While the objects that exemplify properties are discovered through traditional empirical means, a simple set of axioms allows us to know about objects that encode properties. For every set of properties, there is exactly one object that encodes exactly that set of properties and no others. This allows for a formalized ontology.

References

Works cited

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References

Tennant, Neil. (August 21, 2013). "Logicism and Neologicism". The Metaphysics Research Lab.
[http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~mr30/papers/EbertRossbergPurpose.pdf st-andrews.ac.uk] {{webarchive. link. (December 24, 2006 .)
Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, [http://www.bris.ac.uk/structuralism/media/zalta-slides.pdf "A Logically Coherent Ante Rem Structuralism "], "Ontological Dependence Workshop, University of Bristol, February 2011.
Linsky, B., and Zalta, E., 1995, "Naturalized Platonism vs. Platonized Naturalism", ''[[The Journal of Philosophy]]'', '''92'''(10): 525–555.
(2009). "An Introduction to a Theory of Abstract Objects (1981)". ScholarWorks@[[UMass Amherst]].
"Editorial Information". The Metaphysics Research Lab.

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