Permissive Conceptions of Material Objects
Edited by Daniel Z. Korman (University of California at Santa Barbara)
About this topic
Summary | Permissivist conceptions of material objects are those that permit a wide variety of macroscopic objects that, despite being right before our eyes, we do not ordinarily take to exist. For instance, according to universalism, for any given plurality of objects, there is an object that is the sum of those objects. Accordingly, there is a partly metal and partly fleshy object that is the sum of your nose and the Eiffel Tower. According to another form of permissivism (sometimes called “the doctrine of plenitude”), every modal profile that can be instantiated in a region consistently with the empirical facts is instantiated in that region. So for instance, when there is a car in a garage, there is also an “incar”, which is necessarily inside the garage and which will cease to exist if the car leaves the garage. There are two primary motivations for permissivism. The first is that admitting ordinary objects but not extraordinary objects will be intolerably arbitrary. The second is that one who accepts that some pluralities but not others compose a further object will be forced to one or another untenable view about vagueness. |
Key works | For defenses of universalism, see Rea 1998, Sider 1997, and Hudson 2001. For defenses of the doctrine of plenitude, see Sosa 1999 and Bennett 2004. |
Introductions | van Cleve 1986; Sider 1997; Rea 1998; Korman 2010; Korman 2010. |
Show all references
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)
- Eliminative Conceptions of Material Objects (81)
- Material Objects, Misc (137)
Jobs in this area
Lecturer or Teaching Assistant Profressor
Lecturer or Lecturer (Doctoral Schedule)
Lecturer
Jobs from PhilJobs
63 found
Order:
1 filter applied
|
Off-campus access
Using PhilPapers from home?
Create an account to enable off-campus access through your institution's proxy server. Monitor this page
Be alerted of all new items appearing on this page. Choose how you want to monitor it:
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 |