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  1. 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 (...)
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  • Life in the Interstices: Systems Biology and Process Thought.Joseph E. Earley - 2014 - In Spyridon A. Koutroufinis (ed.), Life and Process: Towards a New Biophilosophy. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 157-170.
    When a group of processes achieves such closure that a set of states of affairs recurs continually, then the effect of that coherence on the world differs from what would occur in the absence of that closure. Such altered effectiveness is an attribute of the system as a whole, and would have consequences. This indicates that the network of processes, as a unit, has ontological significance. Whenever a network of processes generates continual return to a limited set of states of (...)
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  • Chemical "substances" that are not "chemical substances".Sr Joseph E. Earley - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (5):841-852.
    The main scientific problems of chemical bonding were solved half a century ago, but adequate philosophical understanding of chemical combination is yet to be achieved. Chemists routinely use important terms ("element," "atom," "molecule," "substance") with more than one meaning. This can lead to misunderstandings. Eliminativists claim that what seems to be a baseball breaking a window is merely the action of "atoms, acting in concert." They argue that statues, baseballs, and similar macroscopic things "do not exist." When macroscopic objects like (...)
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  • On the Reality and Causal Efficacy of Familiar Objects.Crawford L. Elder - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (3):737-749.
    What caused the event we report by saying “the window shattered”? Was it the baseball, which crashed into the window? Causal exclusionists say: many, many microparticles collectively caused that event—microparticles located where common sense supposes the baseball was. Unitary large objects such as baseballs cause nothing; indeed, by Alexander’s dictum, there are no such objects. This paper argues that the false claim about causal efficacy is instead the one that attributes it to the many microparticles. Causation obtains just where there (...)
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  • Chemical “Substances” That Are Not “Chemical Substances”.Sr Earley - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (5):841-852.
    The main scientific problems of chemical bonding were solved half a century ago, but adequate philosophical understanding of chemical combination is yet to be achieved. Chemists routinely use important terms with more than one meaning. This can lead to misunderstandings. Eliminativists claim that what seems to be a baseball breaking a window is merely the action of “atoms, acting in concert.” They argue that statues, baseballs, and similar macroscopic things “do not exist.” When macroscopic objects like baseballs move, exceedingly large (...)
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  • Another Argument for Animalism: The Argument from Causal Powers.Jimmy Alfonso Licon - 2012 - Prolegomena 11 (2):169-180.