Category: Wholes and Parts
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Mereological Nihilism
I put to William the following question: Are you prepared to assert the following? It is never the case that whenever there are some things, there is a whole with those things as parts. Equivalently: For any xs, if the xs are two or more, there is no y such that the xs compose y.…
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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…
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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.…
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Peter van Inwagen, Artifacts, and Moorean Rebuttals
Two commenters in an earlier van Inwagen thread, the illustrious William the Nominalist and the noble Philoponus of Terravita, have raised Moore-style objections to an implication of PvI's claim that "every physical thing is either a living organism or a simple" (MB 98), namely, the implication that "there are no tables or chairs or any…
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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.…