About this topic
Summary Eliminative conceptions of material objects are those that eliminate a wide range of ordinary objects. Eliminativism is motivated by a variety of puzzles that arise for ordinary objects, involving vagueness, arbitrariness, overdetermination, persistence, and identity. Eliminativism comes in different forms. One is mereological nihilism, according to which there are no composite objects—which is not to deny that there are “atoms arranged baseballwise”, “atoms arranged humanwise”, and so forth. Other forms of eliminativism are more liberal about which composites there are, but deny that any of those composites belong to such familiar kinds as baseball, human, etc.. Still others make exceptions for a certain range of familiar kinds, more notably persons and other organisms. Some defend a related, but importantly different view, according to which there are quantifiers that are more fundamental than the ordinary English quantifiers, and that these quantifiers do no range over ordinary objects.
Key works For defenses of mereological nihilism, see Hossack 2000 and Horgan & Potrč 2000. For defenses of "composite-friendly" eliminativism, see Unger 1979 and Heller 1990. For defenses of eliminativism that make an exception for organisms, see Van Inwagen 1990Hoffman & Rosenkrantz 1996, and Merricks 2001. For defenses of the view that ordinary objects are not in the domain of the most fundamental quantifiers, see Cameron 2010 and Dasgupta 2009.
Introductions Unger 1979; Unger 1980; Merricks 2001; Van Inwagen 1990; Cameron 2010.
Related

Contents
86 found
Order:
1 — 50 / 86
  1. What is Conservatism? [REVIEW]Louis deRosset - manuscript
    In Objects: Nothing Out of the Ordinary, Daniel Z. Korman defends a view he calls conservatism. Conservatives hold that there are ordinary objects, but no extraordinary objects. But Korman never explicitly characterizes what would qualify an object as ordinary in the relevant sense. We have some paradigm cases of ordinary objects, including tables, dogs, and trees; and we have some paradigm cases of extraordinary objects of sorts familiar from the philosophical literature. Here I attempt to fill this gap, surveying a (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. Why Care About What There Is?Daniel Z. Korman - forthcoming - Mind.
    There’s the question of what there is, and then there’s the question of what ultimately exists. Many contend that, once we have this distinction clearly in mind, we can see that there is no sensible debate to be had about whether there are such things as properties or tables or numbers, and that the only ontological question worth debating is whether such things are ultimate (in one or another sense). I argue that this is a mistake. Taking debates about ordinary (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  3. Sense Perception and Mereological Nihilism.Andrew Brenner - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):68-83.
    In the debate over the existence of composite objects, it is sometimes suggested that perceptual evidence justifies belief in composite objects. But it is almost never suggested that we are perceptually justified in believing in composite objects on the basis of the fact that the phenomenology of our perceptual experiences enables us to discriminate between situations where there are composite objects and situations where there are merely simples arranged composite object-wise. But while the thought that the phenomenology of our perceptual (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  4. Sentences Apparently About Composite Objects: True Even Without Composite Objects.Savvas Ioannou - 2023 - Metaphysica International Journal for Ontology and Metaphysics (2):1-21.
    A compositional nihilist believes that the only objects that exist are simples. However, a non-nihilist believes in the existence of composite objects and challenges the nihilist to explain why there are true sentences about chairs, tables, etc., if composite objects do not exist. Different nihilist views have been suggested to explain this (the paraphrase strategy and the truthmaker theory), but I believe that they are unsuccessful (either they do not successfully paraphrase every sentence apparently about composite objects, or they are (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  5. Lawful Persistence.David Builes & Trevor Teitel - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):5-30.
    The central aim of this paper is to use a particular view about how the laws of nature govern the evolution of our universe in order to develop and evaluate the two main competing options in the metaphysics of persistence, namely endurantism and perdurantism. We begin by motivating the view that our laws of nature dictate not only qualitative facts about the future, but also which objects will instantiate which qualitative properties. We then show that both traditional doctrines in the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  6. Les théories méréologiques du faisceau.Baptiste Le Bihan - 2022 - In Dominique Berlioz, Filipe Drapeau Contim & François Loth (eds.), Métaphysique et ontologie. Paris: Vrin. pp. 211-224.
    « Pourquoi les choses tiennent-elles ensemble ? » (Traité d'ontologie, 2009, p. 237). Cette citation me sert de départ à une réflexion sur la nature des relations liantes souvent appelées relations de comprésence à la suite de Russell, ces bundling relations qui nouent les propriétés ensembles pour constituer les objets ordinaires (tables, chaises, individus biologiques) selon la théorie du faisceau. De même que Frédéric Nef, je suis séduit par les nombreuses vertus philosophiques de ces relations liantes. Ma contribution ne portera (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  7. Eliminativism and Evolutionary Debunking.Jeffrey N. Bagwell - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8:496-522.
    Eliminativists sometimes invoke evolutionary debunking arguments against ordinary object beliefs, either to help them establish object skepticism or to soften the appeal of commonsense ontology. I argue that object debunkers face a self-defeat problem: their conclusion undermines the scientific support for one of their premises, because evolutionary biology depends on our object beliefs. Using work on reductionism and multiple realizability from the philosophy of science, I argue that it will not suffice for an eliminativist debunker to simply appeal to some (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  8. An epistemological problem for minimalist views about composition.Dean Da Vee - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):9649-9668.
    Some philosophers accept what I call minimalist views about composition. They either deny that composition ever occurs, or they only allow that composition occurs when some things are taken up into a life. While minimalists often take their views to be somewhat revisionary, they usually want to distinguish their views from truly radical views such as the view that there is no external world at all. They often do this by noting that, although they don’t believe that there are tables, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. Intuitions about Objects: From Teleology to Elimination.David Mark Kovacs - 2021 - Mind 130 (517):199-213.
    In a series of recent papers, David Rose and Jonathan Schaffer use a number of experiments to show that folk intuitions about composition and persistence are driven by pre-scientific teleological tendencies. They argue that these intuitions are fit for debunking and that the playing field for competing accounts of composition and persistence should therefore be considered even: no view draws more support from folk intuitions than its rivals, and the choice between them should be made exclusively on the basis of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  10. What are empirical consequences? On dispensability and composite objects.Alex LeBrun - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):13201-13223.
    Philosophers sometimes give arguments that presuppose the following principle: two theories can fail to be empirically equivalent on the sole basis that they present different “thick” metaphysical pictures of the world. Recently, a version of this principle has been invoked to respond to the argument that composite objects are dispensable to our best scientific theories. This response claims that our empirical evidence distinguishes between ordinary and composite-free theories, and it empirically favors the ordinary ones. In this paper, I ask whether (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  11. Why Composition Matters.Andrew M. Bailey & Andrew Brenner - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (8):934-949.
    Many say that ontological disputes are defective because they are unimportant or without substance. In this paper, we defend ontological disputes from the charge, with a special focus on disputes over the existence of composite objects. Disputes over the existence of composite objects, we argue, have a number of substantive implications across a variety of topics in metaphysics, science, philosophical theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Since the disputes over the existence of composite objects have these substantive implications, they are (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  12. Debunking Arguments and Metaphysical Laws.Jonathan Barker - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (7):1829-1855.
    I argue that one’s views about which “metaphysical laws” obtain—including laws about what is identical with what, about what is reducible to what, and about what grounds what—can be used to deflect or neutralize the threat posed by a debunking explanation. I use a well-known debunking argument in the metaphysics of material objects as a case study. Then, after defending the proposed strategy from the charge of question-begging, I close by showing how the proposed strategy can be used by certain (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  13. Is it identity all the way down? From supersubstantivalism to composition as identity and back again.Michael J. Duncan & Kristie Miller - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1.
    We argue that, insofar as one accepts either supersubstantivalism or strong composition as identity for the usual reasons, one has (defeasible) reasons to accept the other as well. Thus, all else being equal, one ought to find the package that combines both views—the Identity Package—more attractive than any rival package that includes one, but not the other, of either supersubstantivalism or composition as identity.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  14. Why compositional nihilism dissolves puzzles.Holly Kantin - 2020 - Synthese 197 (10):4319-4340.
    One of the main motivations for compositional nihilism, the view that there are no composite material objects, concerns the many puzzles and problems associated with them. Nihilists claim that eliminating composites provides a unified solution to a slew of varied, difficult problems. However, numerous philosophers have questioned whether this is really so. While nihilists clearly avoid the usual, composite-featuring formulations of the puzzles, the concern is that the commitments that generate the problems are not eliminated along with composites. If this (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  15. How to be an uncompromising revisionary ontologist.David Mark Kovacs - 2019 - Synthese 198 (3):2129-2152.
    Revisionary ontologies seem to go against our common sense convictions about which material objects exist. These views face the so-called Problem of Reasonableness: they have to explain why reasonable people don’t seem to accept the true ontology. Most approaches to this problem treat the mismatch between the ontological truth and ordinary belief as superficial or not even real. By contrast, I propose what I call the “uncompromising solution”. First, I argue that our beliefs about material objects were influenced by evolutionary (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  16. The No Self View and the Meaning of Life.Baptiste Le Bihan - 2019 - Philosophy East and West 69 (2):419-438.
    Several philosophers, both in Buddhist and Western philosophy, claim that the self does not exist. The no-self view may, at first glance, appear to be a reason to believe that life is meaningless. In the present article, I argue indirectly in favor of the no-self view by showing that it does not entail that life is meaningless. I then examine Buddhism and argue, further, that the no-self view may even be construed as partially grounding an account of the meaning of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  17. One’s an Illusion: Organisms, Reference, and Non-Eliminative Nihilism.Joseph Long - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (2):459-475.
    Gabriele Contessa has recently introduced and defended a view he calls ‘non-eliminative nihilism’. Non-eliminative nihilism is the conjunction of mereological nihilism and non-eliminativism about ordinary objects. Mereological nihilism is the thesis that composite objects do not exist, where something is a composite object just in case it has proper parts. Eliminativism about ordinary objects denies that ordinary objects exist. Eliminativism thus implies, for example, that there are no galaxies, planets, stars, ships, tables, books, organisms, cells, molecules, or atoms. Non-eliminativism is (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  18. Daniel Z. Korman, Objects: Nothing Out of the Ordinary[REVIEW]Asya Passinsky - 2019 - Philosophical Review 128 (2):241-245.
    This is a review of Korman's book. I focus on the argument from counterexamples in favor of conservatism, the debunking response to this argument, and the arbitrariness arguments against conservatism.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19. Eliminativism, objects, and persons - The virtues of non-existence.Jiri Benovsky - 2018 - New York: Routledge.
    In this book, Jiri Benovsky defends the view that he doesn't exist. In this book, he also defends the view that this book itself doesn't exist. But this did not prevent him to write the book, and although in Benovsky's view you don't exist either, this does not prevent you to read it. Benovsky defends a brand of non-exceptionalist eliminativism. Some eliminativists, typically focusing on ordinary material objects such as chairs and hammers, make exceptions, for instance for blue whales (that (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  20. Science and the special composition question.Andrew Brenner - 2018 - Synthese 195 (2):657-678.
    Mereological nihilism is the thesis that composition never occurs. Some philosophers have thought that science gives us compelling evidence against nihilism. In this article I respond to this concern. An initial challenge for nihilism stems from the fact that composition is such a ubiquitous feature of scientific theories. In response I motivate a restricted form of scientific anti-realism with respect to those components of scientific theories which make reference to composition. A second scientifically based worry for nihilism is that certain (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  21. A Language for Ontological Nihilism.Catharine Diehl - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5:971-996.
    According to ontological nihilism there are, fundamentally, no individuals. Both natural languages and standard predicate logic, however, appear to be committed to a picture of the world as containing individual objects. This leads to what I call the \emph{expressibility challenge} for ontological nihilism: what language can the ontological nihilist use to express her account of how matters fundamentally stand? One promising suggestion is for the nihilist to use a form of \emph{predicate functorese}, a language developed by Quine. This proposal faces (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  22. Ontology without Borders. [REVIEW]Daniel Z. Korman - 2018 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
    A review of Jody Azzouni's "Ontology without Borders". Azzouni defends "ontological projectivism", a variety of ontological nihilism according to which "ontological borders" are not "worldly". I raise some questions about the view and about his master argument for it.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  23. Mereological Nihilism and Puzzles about Material Objects.Bradley Rettler - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (4):842-868.
    Mereological nihilism is the view that no objects have proper parts. Despite how counter‐intuitive it is, it is taken quite seriously, largely because it solves a number of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects – or so its proponents claim. In this article, I show that for every puzzle that mereological nihilism solves, there is a similar puzzle that (a) it doesn’t solve, and (b) every other solution to the original puzzle does solve. Since the solutions to the new (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  24. Mereological Nihilism and Personal Ontology.Andrew Brenner - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (268).
    Mereological nihilists hold that composition never occurs, so that nothing is ever a proper part of anything else. Substance dualists generally hold that we are each identical with an immaterial soul. In this paper, I argue that every popular objection to substance dualism has a parallel objection to composition. This thesis has some interesting implications. First, many of those who reject composition, but accept substance dualism, or who reject substance dualism and accept composition, have some explaining to do. Secondly, one (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  25. Eliminativism and gunk.Jiri Benovsky - 2016 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy (1):59-66.
    Eliminativism about macroscopic material objects claims that we do not need to include tables in our ontology, and that any job – practical or theoretical – they have to do can be done by 'atoms arranged tablewise'. This way of introducing eliminativism faces the worry that if there are no 'atoms', that is, if there are no simples and the world is 'gunky', there are no suitable entities to be 'arranged tablewise'. In this article, I discuss various strategies the eliminativist (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  26. Is ontological revisionism uncharitable?Chris Daly & David Liggins - 2016 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (3):405-425.
    Some philosophers deny the existence of composite material objects. Other philosophers hold that whenever there are some things, they compose something. The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize an objection to these revisionary views: the objection that nihilism and universalism are both unacceptably uncharitable because each of them implies that a great deal of what we ordinarily believe is false. Our main business is to show how nihilism and universalism can be defended against the objection. A secondary point is (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  27. Super-Relationism: Combining Eliminativism about Objects and Relationism about Spacetime.Baptiste Le Bihan - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (8):2151-2172.
    I will introduce and motivate eliminativist super-relationism. This is the conjunction of relationism about spacetime and eliminativism about material objects. According to the view, the universe is a big collection of spatio-temporal relations and natural properties, and no substance (material or spatio-temporal) exists in it. The view is original since eliminativism about material objects, when understood as including not only ordinary objects like tables or chairs but also physical particles, is generally taken to imply substantivalism about spacetime: if properties are (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  28. Thinking Animals and the Thinking Parts Problem.Joshua L. Watson - 2016 - Philosophical Quarterly 66 (263):323-340.
    There is a thinking animal in your chair and you are the only thinking thing in your chair; therefore, you are an animal. So goes the main argument for animalism, the Thinking Animal Argument. But notice that there are many other things that might do our thinking: heads, brains, upper halves, left-hand complements, right-hand complements, and any other object that has our brain as a part. The abundance of candidates for the things that do our thinking is known as the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  29. Why paraphrase nihilism fails.Shane Maxwell Wilkins - 2016 - Synthese 193 (8):2619--2632.
    Nihilists cannot square their position with common sense simply by paraphrasing away apparent ontological commitments in ordinary language. I argue for this claim by analogy. Paraphrase atheism says there is no God, but tries to square the truth of atheism with ordinary religious sentences by paraphrasing away apparent ontological commitments. Obviously, paraphrase does not reconcile atheism with ordinary language about God. I discuss two different reasons that paraphrase can fail and suggest that both reasons afflict paraphrase nihilism. Hence, paraphrase nihilism (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  30. ‘Nothing over and above’ or ‘nothing’?Jiri Benovsky - 2015 - Polish Journal of Philosophy 9 (2):7-17.
    In this article, I am interested in an issue concerning eliminativism about ordinary objects that can be put as the claim that the eliminativist is guilty of postulating the existence of something (atoms arranged tablewise), but not of something that is identical to it (the table). But, as we will see, this turns out to be a problem for everybody except the eliminativist. Indeed, this issue highlights a more general problem about the relationship between an entity and the parts the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  31. Embodied mind sparsism.Stuart Clint Dowland - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 173 (7):1853-1872.
    If we are physical things with parts, then accounts of what we are and accounts of when composition occurs have important implications for one another. Defenders of restricted composition tend to endorse a sparse ontology in taking an eliminativist stance toward composite objects that are not organisms, while claiming that we are organisms. However, these arguments do not entail that we are organisms, for they rely on the premise that we are organisms. Thus, sparsist reasoning need not be paired with (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  32. No Composition, No Problem: Ordinary Objects as Arrangements.Jonah P. B. Goldwater - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (2):367-379.
    On the grounds that there are no mereological composites, mereological nihilists deny that ordinary objects exist. Even if nihilism is true, however, I argue that tables and chairs exist anyway: for I deny that ordinary objects are the mereological sums the nihilist rejects. Instead, I argue, ordinary objects have a different nature; they are arrangements, not composites. My argument runs as follows. First, I defend realism about ordinary objects by showing that there is something that plays the role of ordinary (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  33. Objects: Nothing Out of the Ordinary.Daniel Z. Korman - 2015 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press UK. Edited by Dana Zemack.
    One of the central questions of material-object metaphysics is which highly visible objects there are right before our eyes. Daniel Z. Korman defends a conservative view, according to which our ordinary, natural judgments about which objects there are are more or less correct. He begins with an overview of the arguments that have led people away from the conservative view, into revisionary views according to which there are far more objects than we ordinarily take there to be or far fewer. (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   104 citations  
  34. No Physical Particles for a Dispositional Monist?Baptiste Le Bihan - 2015 - Philosophical Papers 44 (2):207-232.
    Dispositional monists believe that all properties are essentially causal. Recently, an overdetermination argument has been proposed by Trenton Merricks to support nihilism about ordinary objects. I argue that this argument can be extended to target both nihilism about ordinary objects and nihilism about physical particles when dispositional monism is assumed. It implies that a philosopher who both endorses dispositional monism and takes seriously the overdetermination argument should not believe in the existence of physical particles. I end up by discussing possible (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (8 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  35. Objects and Pseudo-Objects Ontological Deserts and Jungles from Brentano to Carnap.Bruno Leclercq, Sébastien Richard & Denis Seron (eds.) - 2015 - Boston: de Gruyter.
    Which entities should be accepted as part of the furniture of the world, and which not? What are pseudo-objects, if they are not properly objects? This collection explores the answers given to these questions by some key philosophers throughout the 20th century. It brings together essays by leading scholars on a subject of central importance to both metaphysics and the history of philosophy.".
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  36. One's a Crowd: Mereological Nihilism without Ordinary‐Object Eliminativism.Gabriele Contessa - 2014 - Analytic Philosophy 55 (2):199-221.
    Mereological nihilism is the thesis that there are no composite objects—i.e. objects with proper material parts. One of the main advantages of mereological nihilism is that it allows its supporters to avoid a number of notorious philosophical puzzles. However, it seems to offer this advantage only at the expense of certain widespread and deeply entrenched beliefs. In particular, it is usually assumed that mereological nihilism entails eliminativism about ordinary objects—i.e. the counterintuitive thesis that there are no such things as tables, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  37. Debunking Perceptual Beliefs about Ordinary Objects.Daniel Z. Korman - 2014 - Philosophers' Imprint 14.
    Debunking arguments are arguments that aim to undermine some range of beliefs by showing that those beliefs are not appropriately connected to their subject matter. Arguments of this sort rear their heads in a wide variety of domains, threatening beliefs about morality, mathematics, logic, color, and the existence of God. Perceptual beliefs about ordinary objects, however, are widely thought to be invulnerable to such arguments. I will show that this is a mistake. I articulate a debunking argument that purports to (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  38. Parts as counterparts.Aaron Cotnoir - 2013 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (3):228-241.
    Mereological nihilists are faced with a difficult challenge: explaining ordinary talk about material objects. Popular paraphrase strategies involve plurals, arrangements of particles, or fictions. In this paper, a new paraphrase strategy is put forward that has distinct advantages over its rivals: it is compatible with gunk and emergent properties of macro-objects. The only assumption is a commitment to a liberal view of the nature of simples; the nihilist must be willing to accept the possibility of heterogeneous extended simples. The author (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  39. Fundamental Quantification and the Language of the Ontology Room.Daniel Z. Korman - 2013 - Noûs 49 (2):298-321.
    Nihilism is the thesis that no composite objects exist. Some ontologists have advocated abandoning nihilism in favor of deep nihilism, the thesis that composites do not existO, where to existO is to be in the domain of the most fundamental quantifier. By shifting from an existential to an existentialO thesis, the deep nihilist seems to secure all the benefits of a composite-free ontology without running afoul of ordinary belief in the existence of composites. I argue that, while there are well-known (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   31 citations  
  40. Why a Gunk World is Compatible with Nihilism about Objects.Baptiste Le Bihan - 2013 - Studia Philosophica Estonica 6 (1):1-14.
    Ted Sider argues that nihilism about objects is incompatible with the metaphysical possibility of gunk and takes this point to show that nihilism is flawed. I shall describe one kind of nihilism able to answer this objection. I believe that most of the things we usually encounter do not exist. That is, I take talk of macroscopic objects and macroscopic properties to refer to sets of fundamental properties, which are invoked as a matter of linguistic convention. This view is a (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (9 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  41. Eliminativism, interventionism and the Overdetermination Argument.Eric Yang - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 164 (2):321-340.
    In trying to establish the view that there are no non-living macrophysical objects, Trenton Merricks has produced an influential argument—the Overdetermination Argument—against the causal efficacy of composite objects. A serious problem for the Overdetermination Argument is the ambiguity in the notion of overdetermination that is being employed, which is due to the fact that Merricks does not provide any theory of causation to support his claims. Once we adopt a plausible theory of causation, viz. interventionism, problems with the Overdetermination will (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  42. Underdetermination as a Path to Structural Realism.Katherine Brading & Alexander Skiles - 2012 - In Elaine Landry & Dean Rickles (eds.), Structural Realism: Structure, Object, and Causality. Springer.
  43. Familiar Objects and Their Shadows, by Crawford Elder.D. L. Goswick - 2012 - Mind 121 (481):176-181.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  44. Familiar Objects and Their Shadows. By Crawford L. Elder. (Cambridge UP, 2011. Pp. xi + 210. Price £50.00, $85.00 h/b.).Nathan Wildman - 2012 - Philosophical Quarterly 62 (246):195-197.
  45. Familiar Objects and their Shadows. [REVIEW]Daniel Z. Korman - 2011 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
  46. Ordinary objects.Daniel Z. Korman - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    An encyclopedia entry which covers various revisionary conceptions of which macroscopic objects there are, and the puzzles and arguments that motivate these conceptions: sorites arguments, the argument from vagueness, the puzzles of material constitution, arguments against indeterminate identity, arguments from arbitrariness, debunking arguments, the overdetermination argument, and the problem of the many.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   41 citations  
  47. How to have a radically minimal ontology.Ross P. Cameron - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 151 (2):249 - 264.
    In this paper I further elucidate and defend a metaontological position that allows you to have a minimal ontology without embracing an error-theory of ordinary talk. On this view 'there are Fs' can be strictly and literally true without bringing an ontological commitment to Fs. Instead of a sentence S committing you to the things that must be amongst the values of the variables if it is true, I argue that S commits you to the things that must exist as (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   110 citations  
  48. Quantifier Variance and Realism: Essays in Metaontology.Eli Hirsch - 2010 - New York, US: Oxford University Press.
    A sense of unity -- Basic objects : a reply to Xu -- Objectivity without objects -- The vagueness of identity -- Quantifier variance and realism -- Against revisionary ontology -- Comments on Theodore Sider's four dimensionalism -- Sosa's existential relativism -- Physical-object ontology, verbal disputes, and common sense -- Ontological arguments : interpretive charity and quantifier variance -- Language, ontology, and structure -- Ontology and alternative languages.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   68 citations  
  49. Strange Kinds, Familiar Kinds, and the Charge of Arbitrariness.Daniel Z. Korman - 2010 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics:119-144.
    Particularists in material-object metaphysics hold that our intuitive judgments about which kinds of things there are and are not are largely correct. One common argument against particularism is the argument from arbitrariness, which turns on the claim that there is no ontologically significant difference between certain of the familiar kinds that we intuitively judge to exist (snowballs, islands, statues, solar systems) and certain of the strange kinds that we intuitively judge not to exist (snowdiscalls, incars, gollyswoggles, the fusion of the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  50. Parts and wholes.Kris McDaniel - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (5):412-425.
    Philosophical questions concerning parts and wholes have received a tremendous amount of the attention of contemporary analytic metaphysicians. In what follows, I discuss some of the central questions. The questions to be discussed are: how general is parthood? Are there different kinds of parthood or ways to be a part? Can two things be composed of the same parts? When does composition occur? Can material objects gain or lose parts? What is the logical form of the parthood relation enjoyed by (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
1 — 50 / 86