Abstract

People, and perhaps certain other living things, really exist; but chairs, rocks, and all other inanimate, composite material substances do not exist. Or so Trenton Merricks tells us in Objects and Persons. This view, though striking and strange, is not entirely new: Peter van Inwagen has defended it, and it represents a natural development of ideas that come to us from Aristotle through David Wiggins and others. However, Merricks offers us an entirely new strategy for defending the view, a strategy based on certain ideas about causality. It is relatively easy to find reasons for repudiating chairs and rocks. What is difficult is defending the asymmetry between real living things and alleged nonliving things. Merricks advances an interesting and forceful argument for this asymmetry, one with which anyone working on material constitution will have to grapple.