Hello Dr. Vallicella, greetings from Germany!

I have been revisiting your paper "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75.  One of the most intriguing arguments you give against the opponent of modes of being/existence is the argument at the end against Peter van Inwagen's semantic claim that 'exist(s)' is univocal in sense and the corresponding ontological claim that there are no modes of being/existence. On p. 67 you present the following aporetic pentad and argue that it is best solved by the rejection of (5).  

1. The house exists.
2. The bricks exist.
3. The house is composed of the bricks, all of them, and of nothing else and is therefore not something distinct from them or  in addition to them.
4. Since the bricks can exist without the house but the house cannot exist without the bricks, the house is distinct from the bricks.
5. “Exist(s)” is univocal in (1) and (2), and there are no modes of existence.

The house doesn't exist apart from the bricks arranged house-wise, and yet if we reject mereological nihilism,  there must be something not identical to the bricks that makes up the house. Did I broadly capture the idea?

BV:  Broadly, yes. The five propositions are individually plausible to a very high degree, and yet they are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. So we have a problem if we wish to uphold the law of non-contradiction. And we certainly want to hold onto said law if at all possible. One way to solve the problem is by rejecting the least plausible proposition. That, I claim, is (5). Van Inwagen would instead reject (1) and (4).  He and I will accept (2) and (3)  as the most plausible of the five propositions.  Of course, you have to understand that this is a 'toy example,' so to speak. After all, each brick is an artifact so that, if the house does not exist because it is an artifact, as per van Inwagen's teaching, then neither do the bricks. In the spirit of the 'toy example,' think of the bricks as atoms in the etymological sense: as really indivisible or non-partite. 

What (3) says is that the house is not something 'over and above' its parts. It is not an entity in addition to them. So if the house is composed of 50,000 bricks, then there are 50,000 entities in the place where the bricks are, not 50,001.  The house just is the bricks. (Mereology is ontologically innocent.) To appreciate the plausibility of this, suppose that the Wise Pig has just finished building his brick house, and you say to him, "I see all the bricks, Mr. Pig, but where is the house?" He will respond, "You, sir, are committing the fallacy of hypostatization: the house just is the bricks; it is not something 'above and beyond it.'"

As for (4), I think it is obviously true.  While I grant that the house is not something 'over and above' the bricks, it is also not just the bricks, but the house-wise arrangement of the bricks, an arrangement that is not nothing, but something real that makes the house distinct from the bricks. 

And so I reject (5) and say that, while house and bricks both exist, they exist in different ways.  By my lights, this is more intellectually palatable than the strange doctrine that there are no artifacts.  

I want to propose a way to strengthen the argument however. Despite your qualms with it, I see the appeal of mereological nihilism for artifacts, since it's questionable whether the "house" as distinct from the bricks is really needed here, or whether it can be eliminated for the mere arrangement of bricks.

BV:  It seems to me that the house must be distinct from the bricks for the simple reason that the bricks can exist without constituting a house, whereas the house cannot exist without the bricks.  A pile of bricks does not make a house. I would also insist that the house-wise arrangement of the bricks is not nothing. It is not nothing because it makes the difference between bricks that can shelter the pig and bricks that cannot.  The house is of course a dependent entity in that it depends for its existence on the bricks, but it does so without being identical to the bricks. That is why I say that the house exists in a different way than the constituent bricks, contrary to van Inwagen's claim that there are no ways or modes of existence. 

As long as there is no telos the house would have that can't be identified with the mere arrangement of bricks, the question is valid. Obviously if we look at something complex and goal directed like the immune system, the reduction here to the mere arrangement of the most basic particles sounds almost preposterous.

BV: Granted, the bricks taken collectively do not have an in-built telos or a nisus towards actualization; nevertheless, the house cannot be reductively identified with the bricks. The bricks can survive the demolition of the house, and at any time t at which the bricks form a house, the bricks might not have formed a house at t. The house is doubly contingent: it is contingent on the bricks and it is contingent on their proper arrangement. Or so it seems to me.

The question thus doesn't seem to arise when we're concerned with biological entities and their complex actions. Mereological nihilism for animals is not a view worth discussing and van Inwagen explicitly rejects it, instead opting for a kind of non-reductionism while still holding onto a view he identifies as materialism ("A Materialist Ontology of Human Persons" 2007). What I dispute, given your initial argument above, however is the compatibility of this position with his rejection of modes of being. If your aporia is correct and the opponent would have to embrace mereological nihilism for artifacts, doesn't that expand into the biological realm as well? It seems so, at least I don't see why it should be invalid [should not so expand.]

BV: I'm not sure I follow you here.  Van Inwagen is clearly not a nihilist with respect to organisms. (I am not a nihilist with respect to artifacts or organisms.) Are you asking whether his non-reductionism with respect to organisms commits him to the MOB doctrine? (MOB = modes of being.)

So let's reformulate your pentad:

1. The dog exists.
2. The atoms exist (atom designating a fundamental, simple physical and no relevant scientific theory)
3. The dog is composed of its atoms, all of them and of nothing else and is therefore not something distinct from them or in addition to them.
4. Since the atoms can exist without the dog,  but the dog can't exist without the atoms, the dog is distinct from its atoms.
5. “Exist(s)” is univocal in (1) and (2), and there are no modes of existence.

What do you think? If your argument can be reformulated this way we either show that non-reductionism and a rejection of modes of beings are contrarians [logical contraries? or logical contradictories?], so that one must be false. Or the interlocutor is forced to adopt an additional thesis that is at best questionable within a materialist/post-Cartesian ontology, e.g. that the particles are only virtually present in the human, but I doubt van Inwagen has any space in his theory for such positions of Aristotelians like David Oderberg.

Thanks for your time.

BV: I take it you are asking whether van Inwagen's views about living things commit him to the acceptance of modes of being/existence.  To answer that question I would have to pull Material Beings from the shelf and devote hours to re-reading the relevant portions, and for that I do not have time at present.