Eliminative Conceptions of Material Objects
Edited by Daniel Z. Korman (University of California at Santa Barbara)
About this topic
Summary | Eliminative conceptions of material objects are those that eliminate a wide range of ordinary objects. Eliminativism is motivated by a variety of puzzles that arise for ordinary objects, involving vagueness, arbitrariness, overdetermination, persistence, and identity. Eliminativism comes in different forms. One is mereological nihilism, according to which there are no composite objects—which is not to deny that there are “atoms arranged baseballwise”, “atoms arranged humanwise”, and so forth. Other forms of eliminativism are more liberal about which composites there are, but deny that any of those composites belong to such familiar kinds as baseball, human, etc.. Still others make exceptions for a certain range of familiar kinds, more notably persons and other organisms. Some defend a related, but importantly different view, according to which there are quantifiers that are more fundamental than the ordinary English quantifiers, and that these quantifiers do no range over ordinary objects. |
Key works | For defenses of mereological nihilism, see Hossack 2000 and Horgan & Potrč 2000. For defenses of "composite-friendly" eliminativism, see Unger 1979 and Heller 1990. For defenses of eliminativism that make an exception for organisms, see van Inwagen 1990, Hoffman & Rosenkrantz 1996, and Merricks 2001. For defenses of the view that ordinary objects are not in the domain of the most fundamental quantifiers, see Cameron 2010 and Dasgupta 2009. |
Introductions | Unger 1979; Unger 1980; Merricks 2001; van Inwagen 1990; Cameron 2010. |
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Related categories
Siblings:
- Artifacts (234)
- Coincident Objects (169)
- Composition as Identity (119)
- Contingent Identity (75)
- Hylomorphism (10)
- Material Constitution (302)
- Mereological Universalism (136)
- Mereological Nihilism (165)
- Monism (109)
- Problem of the Many (62)
- Stuff (143)
- Three- and Four-Dimensionalism (419)
- Vague Objects (108)
- Permissive Conceptions of Material Objects (63)
- Material Objects, Misc (137)
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Editorial team
General Editors:
David Bourget (Western Ontario) David Chalmers (ANU, NYU) Area Editors: David Bourget Gwen Bradford Berit Brogaard Margaret Cameron David Chalmers James Chase Rafael De Clercq Ezio Di Nucci Barry Hallen Hans Halvorson Jonathan Ichikawa Michelle Kosch Øystein Linnebo JeeLoo Liu Paul Livingston Brandon Look Manolo Martínez Matthew McGrath Michiru Nagatsu Susana Nuccetelli Giuseppe Primiero Jack Alan Reynolds Darrell P. Rowbottom Aleksandra Samonek Constantine Sandis Howard Sankey Jonathan Schaffer Thomas Senor Robin Smith Daniel Star Jussi Suikkanen Lynne Tirrell Aness Kim Webster Other editors Contact us Learn more about PhilPapers |