July 22, 2015
"Mereological Idealism"
I've posted a new draft on my writings page, "Mereological Idealism." This paper is expected to appear in a collection of essays on idealism in contemporary metaphysics that Tyron Goldschmidt and I are editing for Oxford University Press....
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November 20, 2008
What Is Composition?
I am currently doing research for a term paper in which I will argue that composition requires a 'principle of unity'. That is (to a first approximation), that given some objects, the xs, there cannot be any y which has all and only the xs as parts unless there is some feature of the world which bestows some degree of unity or oneness on y. I hope to argue that this is a conceptual truth - that is, that it flows from what we mean by composition. I haven't finished reading up on the subject yet, so there may already...
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Topic(s):
Aristotle
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Familiar Objects
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Mereology
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Peter van Inwagen
,
Philosophy
,
Trenton Merricks
,
W.V.O. Quine
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November 15, 2008
Quote of the Day: Beer and Philosophy
"The claim that atoms arranged baseballwise fail to compose a baseball might be hard to swallow. But it goes down like draught Guinness compared to the claim that baseballs are simples." - Trenton Merricks, Objects and Persons, p. 63. Some context: so-called 'folk ontology' (i.e. 'commonsense' beliefs about what sorts of things there are, modified by just a bit of modern science) claims that there are a bunch of atoms bonded together in a spherical region which compose an object called a baseball. Merricks is arguing that, while all of those atoms exist, there does not exist, in addition to...
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October 14, 2008
Minimalist Ontology and Familiar Object Talk
I have just finished reading Mark Johnston's 1992 paper, "Constitution is Not Identity," reprinted in Michael Rea's
Material Constitution: A Reader. After arguing against a variety of theories of material constitution, Johnston claims that, with regard to our talk about familiar objects, "the distinction it embodies is acceptable as it stands and what is bogus is the conception of justifying our practice which requires that, for the distinction to be justified, the difference between an
F and its constituting matter must be a deep metaphysical difference secured by an extra ingredient of the
F." (Rea, p. 58) Johnston calls the person who holds this view 'the Minimalist'...
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April 11, 2008
Language and the Metaphysics of the Material World
Let me begin with a reminder: be sure to get your posts in for the 67th Philosophers' Carnival by tomorrow (Saturday) midnight (Eastern time), and remember that the theme is idealism. I've received many good posts already (probably more than I'll be able to include), but only a handful are idealism-themed. Having said that, let me begin my own idealism-themed post. In my paper "The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley" (which I never tire of linking to, because it is much better thought out, developed, and argued than the mostly half-baked stuff I post on this blog), I spend...
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