Tuomas E. Tahko

My research concerns the metaphysics of science: natural kinds, laws of nature, essence, and modality, and what these notions can tell us about the unity of the sciences. My current work develops sparse essentialism — the view that the essentialist truths about familiar kinds such as gold, water, and proteins rest on a parsimonious base of fundamental kinds and their essential properties, with essence prior to modality. I take metaphysics and its epistemology to be intertwined: scientific knowledge is part and parcel of the epistemology of metaphysics, though it cannot replace it. A monograph on sparse essentialism is in progress. Broader research interests include specific issues in the philosophy of science (physics, chemistry, biology), epistemology, philosophical logic, philosophy of computation, philosophy of mind, and the history of philosophy.

I am open to discussing potential PhD supervision in all my areas of interest.

Leadership & Service

• Head of School of Arts, University of Bristol 2024– Five departments, c. 1,500 students.
• Member, AI Leadership Group, University of Bristol 2025–
• Faculty Research Director (Arts), University of Bristol 2022–24
• Head of Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol 2022–23
• Elected Member of Senate, University of Bristol 2021–24
• Editor, Cambridge Elements in Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press) 2020–25 Edited the first 32 titles in the series.
• Principal Investigator, ERC Consolidator Grant MetaScience (No 771509) 2018–23 €2.0M; led a team of five postdoctoral researchers and a PhD student on the metaphysical unity of science.

Books

Selected Publications

The complete list is on PhilPapers.

Essence & Modality

• 2025 Quantum Holism and Essential Dispositions (with Christina Conroy & Donnchadh Ó Conaill). In Krause & Becker Arenhart (eds.), Individuals and Non-Individuals in Quantum Theory, Springer (Synthese Library). doipdf
• 2024 Laws of Metaphysics for Essentialists. Argumenta. doipdf
• 2023 Possibility Precedes Actuality. Erkenntnis. doipdf
• 2023 The Modal Basis of Scientific Modelling. Synthese. doipdf
• 2018 The Epistemology of Essence. In Carruth, Gibb & Heil (eds.), Ontology, Modality, Mind, Oxford University Press. doipdf
• 2017 Empirically-Informed Modal Rationalism. In Fischer & Leon (eds.), Modal Epistemology After Rationalism, Springer. doipdf
• 2012 Counterfactuals and Modal Epistemology. Grazer Philosophische Studien. doipdf

Natural Kinds & Laws of Nature

• 2026 Natural Kind Fundamentalism. Philosophical Studies (early view). doipdf
• 2026 Unifying Kinds without Hylemorphism. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume. doipdf
• 2025 Unification Principles for Biochemical Kinds (with Francesca Bellazzi). In García-Encinas & Martínez-Manrique (eds.), Special Objects, Springer (Synthese Library). doipdf
• 2022 Natural Kinds, Mind-Independence, and Unification Principles. Synthese. doipdf
• 2020 Where Do You Get Your Protein? Or: Biochemical Realization. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (Editor's Choice). doipdf
• 2019 Bundle Theory with Kinds (with Markku Keinänen). The Philosophical Quarterly. doipdf
• 2015 Natural Kind Essentialism Revisited. Mind. doipdf
• 2015 The Modal Status of Laws: In Defence of a Hybrid View. The Philosophical Quarterly. doipdf

Fundamentality & Dependence

• 2025 Ontological Dependence (with E. J. Lowe). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision; first published 2005). linkpdf
• 2023 Fundamentality. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision; first published 2018). linkpdf
• 2020 Structure. In Raven (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaphysical Grounding, Routledge. doipdf
• 2018 Fundamentality and Ontological Minimality. In Bliss & Priest (eds.), Reality and its Structure, Oxford University Press. doipdf
• 2014 Boring Infinite Descent. Metaphilosophy. doipdf
• 2013 Truth-Grounding and Transitivity. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy. doipdf

Methodology of Metaphysics

• 2020 A Priori or A Posteriori? In Bliss & Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics, Routledge. doipdf
• 2018 Meta-metaphysics. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. linkpdf
• 2017 Moderately Naturalistic Metaphysics (with Matteo Morganti). Synthese. doipdf
• 2013 Metaphysics as the First Philosophy. In Feser (ed.), Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics, Palgrave Macmillan. doipdf
• 2012 In Defence of Aristotelian Metaphysics. In Tahko (ed.), Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics, Cambridge University Press. doipdf

Philosophical Logic

• 2021 A Survey of Logical Realism. Synthese. doipdf
• 2014 The Metaphysical Interpretation of Logical Truth. In Rush, P. (ed.), Metaphysics of Logic: Logical Realism, Logical Anti-Realism and All Things In Between, Cambridge University Press. doipdf
• 2009 The Law of Non-Contradiction as a Metaphysical Principle. The Australasian Journal of Logic. doipdf

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