Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Aporetics

  • The Bundle Theory and the Identity of Indiscernibles

    I have been defending the bundle-of-universals theory of concrete particulars (BT) against various weak objections over a series of posts, here,  here, here, and here. Now I consider a very powerful objection, one that many will consider decisive.  The objection can be cast in the mold of modus tollendo tollens:  If BT is true, then…

  • A Closer Look at Material Composition and Modal Discernibility Arguments

    (For David Brightly, whom I hope either to convince or argue to a standoff.) Suppose God creates ex nihilo a bunch of TinkerToy pieces at time t suitable for assembly into various (toy) artifacts such as a house and a fort.  A unique classical mereological sum — call it 'TTS' — comes into existence 'automatically'…

  • Varzi, Sums, and Wholes

    Achille C. Varzi, "The Extensionality of Parthood and Composition," The Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2008), p. 109: Suppose we have a house made of Tinkertoy pieces.  Then the house qualifies as a sum of those pieces: each piece is part of the house and each part of the house overlaps at least one of the pieces .…

  • Four-Dimensionalism to the Rescue?

    Let us return to that impressive product of porcine ingenuity, Brick House.  Brick House, whose completion by the Wise Pig occurred on Friday, is composed entirely of the 10,000 Tuesday Bricks.  I grant that there is a sum, call it 'Brick Sum,' that is the classical mereological sum of the Tuesday Bricks.  Brick Sum is…

  • Van Inwagen on Arbitrary Undetached Parts

    In order to get clear about Dion-Theon and related identity puzzles we need to get clear about the Doctrine of Arbitrary Undetached Parts (DAUP) and see what bearing it has on the puzzles. Peter van Inwagen provides the following statement of DAUP: For every material object M, if R is the region of space occupied…

  • Van Inwagen Contra Lewis on Composition as Identity

    Modifying an example employed by Donald Baxter and David Lewis, suppose I own a parcel of land A consisting of exactly two adjoining lots B and C. It would be an insane boast were I to claim to own three parcels of land, B, C, and A. That would be 'double-counting': I count A as…

  • Mereological Innocence and Composition as Identity

    This is the third in a series.  Part I, Part II.  What follows is a 10th example of eliminativist/reductivist ambiguity. One of the axioms of mereology is Unrestricted Composition.  Here is David Lewis' formulation (Parts of Classes, Basil Blackwell 1991, p. 74): Unrestricted Composition: Whenever there are some things, then there exists a fusion of…

  • Fist and Hand, Statue and Lump: The Aporetics of Composition

    1. Some maintain that a hand, and that same hand made into a fist, are identical. And there are those who would say the same about a piece of bronze and the statue made out of it, namely, that they are identical at every time at which both exist. This is not an unreasonable thing to say.…

  • The Aporetics of Artifacts: Puzzling Over Van Inwagen’s Denial of Artifacts

    This post is a sequel to Van Inwagen on the Ship of Theseus.  Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings (Cornell UP, 1990), p. 31, writes:  The question 'In virtue of what do these n blocks compose this house of blocks?' is a question about n + 1 objects, one of them radically different from the others.…

  • Van Inwagen on the Ship of Theseus

    Peter van Inwagen's Material Beings (Cornell UP, 1990) is a very strange book, but he is a brilliant man, so one can expect to learn something from it. A central claim is that artifacts such as tables and chairs and ships do not exist. One can appreciate  that if there are no ships then the…

  • Sets and the Number of Objects: An Antilogism

    Commenter Jan, the Polish physicist, gave me the idea for the following post. An antilogism is an aporetic triad, an array of exactly three propositions which are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent.  For every antilogism, there are three corresponding syllogisms, where a syllogism is a deductive argument with exactly two premises and one conclusion.  Here is…

  • Presentism and Existence-Entailing Relations: An Aporetic Tetrad

    It is plausibly maintained that all relations are existence-entailing. To illustrate from the dyadic case: if R relates a and b, then both a and b exist.   A relation cannot hold unless the things between which or among which it holds all exist.  A weaker, and hence even more plausible, claim is that all relations…

  • Frondizi on the Philosophical Attitude

    Risieri Fondizi's What is Value? An Introduction to Axiology, tr. S. Lipp (Open Court, 1963) has stood up well since its English debut over forty five years ago. What follows is a noteworthy metaphilosophical observation of Frondizi's: The philosophical attitude is basically problematic. He who is not capable of grasping the sense of problems and who…

  • A Modal Aporetic Tetrad

    Here is a four-limbed aporetic polyad: 1. The merely possible is not actual. 2. To be actual is to exist. 3. To exist is to be. 4. The merely possible is not nothing. Each limb is plausible, but they cannot all be true.  The first three limbs, taken together, entail the negation of the fourth.  Indeed,…

  • The Aporetics of Divine Simplicity

    Thomist27 e-mails:  Thank you first of all for a spectacular blog. I discovered Maverick Philosopher a few years ago and have been reading it regularly ever since. Through your blog, I learned that you wrote the SEP's article on divine simplicity, among similar things; I think, then, that you are qualified to answer my questions. …