On the Varieties of Abstract Objects

Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (4):809-823 (2019)
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Abstract

I reconcile the spatiotemporal location of repeatable artworks and impure sets with the non-location of natural numbers despite all three being varieties of abstract objects. This is possible because, while the identity conditions for all three can be given by abstraction principles, in the former two cases spatiotemporal location is a congruence for the equivalence relation featuring in the relevant principle, whereas in the latter it is not. I then generalize this to other ‘physical’ properties like shape, mass, and causal powers.

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James E. Davies
University of Toronto, Mississauga

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References found in this work

The Paradoxes of Time Travel.David K. Lewis - 1976 - American Philosophical Quarterly 13 (2):145-152.
Parts of Classes.David K. Lewis - 1991 - Mind 100 (3):394-397.

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