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Summary The topics of simples and gunk concern the composition of material objects -- in particular, their smallest parts. An object is gunky if and only if all its parts have proper parts. A mereological simple is an object that has no proper parts. Clearly no object can be gunky and have a mereological simple as a part, though there is a question whether some objects might have some gunky parts and some non-gunky parts. A further question concerns the nature of, or necessary and sufficient conditions for being, a mereological simple. Some say mereological simples must be unextended objects, while others offer criteria that at least allow for extended simples.
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  1. Quantum Holism: Reconciling Extended Simples with Supersubstantivalism.Gaeun Kim - manuscript
    I argue that the extended simples picture (ESP) is compatible with supersubstantivalism under the quantum holism model, and that reevaluating our limits on the ways an object may be located by fusing the two ontologies can benefit our understanding of modern physics. I first illustrate the explanatory utility of extended simples, using examples of superposition and entanglement. Second, I advocate the use of supersubstantivalism as a way to understand the interface between objects and spacetime, and argue that the ESP suitably (...)
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  2. Quasi-supplementation, plenitudinous coincidentalism, and gunk.Cody Gilmore - forthcoming - In Robert Garcia (ed.), Substance: New Essays. Philosophia Verlag.
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  3. Cardinal Composition.Lisa Vogt & Jonas Werner - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-23.
    The thesis of Weak Unrestricted Composition says that every pair of objects has a fusion. This thesis has been argued by Contessa and Smith to be compatible with the world being junky and hence to evade an argument against the necessity of Strong Unrestricted Composition proposed by Bohn. However, neither Weak Unrestricted Composition alone nor the different variants of it that have been proposed in the literature can provide us with a satisfying answer to the special composition question, or so (...)
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  4. A Case Against Simple-Mindedness: Śrīgupta on Mental Mereology.Allison Aitken - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    There’s a common line of reasoning which supposes that the phenomenal unity of conscious experience is grounded in a mind-like simple subject. To the contrary, Mādhyamika Buddhist philosophers like Śrīgupta (seventh–eighth century) argue that any kind of mental simple is incoherent and thus metaphysically impossible. Lacking any unifying principle, the phenomenal unity of conscious experience is instead an unfounded illusion. In this paper, I present an analysis of Śrīgupta’s "neither-one-nor-many argument" against mental simples and show how his line of reasoning (...)
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  5. Dao as a Unified Composition or Plurality: A Nihilism Perspective.Rafal Banka - 2023 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 22 (3):1-15.
    This article departs from a mereological conceptualization of the Daoist metaphysi- cal system in the Daodejing 道德經. I discuss what parthood status applies to dao 道. Whereas it is quite intuitive that you 有—the region of concrete objects—has parthood relationships and compositions (entities made from parts), the other, undif- ferentiated region, dao, poses a considerable problem. This problem can be charac- terized in the following way: (a) dao cannot be characterized as a particular com- position, which entails that it does (...)
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  6. Against Purity.Jonathan Barker - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    A fundamental fact is “pure” just in case it has no grounded entities—ex. Tokyo, President Biden, the River Nile, {Socrates}, etc.—among its constituents. Purity is the thesis that every fundamental fact is pure. I argue that Purity is false. My argument begins with a familiar conditional: if Purity is true, then there are no fundamental “grounding facts” or facts about what grounds what. This conditional is accepted by virtually all of Purity’s defenders. However, I argue that it is also the (...)
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  7. The Eucharist according to Gunk-relational Ontology.Damiano Migliorini - 2023 - Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift 74 (3):315-330.
    The rational explanation of the Eucharist is at the centre of a revived debate in philosophical theology. After describing gunk-relational ontology, I show how it allows us to understand transubstantiation differently than other traditional and contemporary accounts, from which it draws a few points but combining them in a new way. In gunk-relational ontology every substance is its own relations, which constitute a gunky fundamental reality. The liturgical celebration of the Last Supper therefore creates a new relational situation for the (...)
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  8. Parts and Wholes.Meg Wallace - 2023 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Elements in Metaphysics).
    The Odd Universe Argument aims to show that from four intuitive assumptions about parts and wholes, we can conclude a priori that there is an odd number of things in the universe. This Element is an opinionated survey of philosophical issues involving parthood, composition, identity, and counting, guided by an investigation into where this argument has gone awry. We first walk through some general methodology, basic mereology, and plural logic. Next, we explore questions about the nature of composition and decomposition. (...)
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  9. God Under All: Divine Simplicity, Omni-Parthood, and the Problem of Principality in Islamic Philosophy.Joshua Kelleher - 2022 - Essays in Philosophy.
    In this paper, I defend an unconventional mereological framework involving the doctrine of divine simplicity, to surmount a significant yet neglected dilemma resulting from that long-standing view of God as absolutely, and uniquely, simple. This framework establishes God as literally a part of everything—an “omni-part.” Although consequential for the many prominent religious traditions featuring divine simplicity, my analysis focuses on potential implications for an important formative issue in medieval Islamic philosophy. This problem of principality, with regards to metaphysical primacy and (...)
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  10. Space, time and parsimony.Daniel Nolan - 2022 - Noûs 57 (4):763-783.
    This paper argues that all of the standard theories about the divisions of space and time can benefit from, and may need to rely on, parsimony considerations. More specifically, whether spacetime is discrete, gunky or pointy, there are wildly unparsimonious rivals to standard accounts that need to be resisted by proponents of those accounts, and only parsimony considerations offer a natural way of doing that resisting. Furthermore, quantitative parsimony considerations appear to be needed in many of these cases.
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  11. Ontological Collectivism.Raul Saucedo - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):233-269.
    I give shape to a neglected debate in metaphysics, the debate over the ontological priority between individuality and collectivity. I distinguish the debate from more familiar ones in the recent literature and articulate what I call ontological collectivism, the view that collectivity is prior to individuality. I defend the in-principle intelligibility of the view from forceful general objections and argue that not only is it coherent but also of significant interest to the literature: it allows for overlooked alternatives on a (...)
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  12. Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism.Jonas Werner - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-16.
    This paper develops the metaphysical hypothesis that there are irreducibly collective pluralities, pluralities of objects that do not have a singular object among them. A way to formulate this hypothesis using plural quantification will be proposed and the coherence of irreducibly collective existence will be defended. Furthermore, irreducibly collective existence will be shown to allow for bottomless scenarios that do not involve things standing in relations of parthood. This will create logical space for an anti-atomistic form of mereological nihilism.
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  13. Salience and metaphysical explanation.Phil Corkum - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10771-10792.
    Metaphysical explanations, unlike many other kinds of explanation, are standardly thought to be insensitive to our epistemic situation and so are not evaluable by cognitive values such as salience. I consider a case study that challenges this view. Some properties are distributed over an extension. For example, the property of being polka-dotted red on white, when instantiated, is distributed over a surface. Similar properties have been put to work in a variety of explanatory tasks in recent metaphysics, including: providing an (...)
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  14. Deep gunk and deep junk.Daniel Giberman - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):5645-5667.
    All parts of mereologically ‘gunky’ entities have proper parts. All parts relevant to mereologically ‘junky’ entities *are* proper parts. This essay explores the application of gunk and junk beyond the standard category of material object. One such application yields what is here dubbed ‘deep’ gunk and junk: a material entity x all of whose intrinsic elements from any fundamental ontological category C either have proper parts from C that also are intrinsic elements of x, or are proper parts of entities (...)
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  15. Whitehead’s principle.Ben Blumson & Manikaran Singh - 2020 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (2):115-27.
    According to Whitehead’s rectified principle, two individuals are connected just in case there is something self-connected which overlaps both of them, and every part of which overlaps one of them. Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi have offered a counterexample to the principle, consisting of an individual which has no self-connected parts. But since atoms are self-connected, Casati and Varzi’s counterexample presupposes the possibility of gunk or, in other words, things which have no atoms as parts. So one may still wonder (...)
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  16. Infinitesimal Gunk.Lu Chen - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 49 (5):981-1004.
    In this paper, I advance an original view of the structure of space called Infinitesimal Gunk. This view says that every region of space can be further divided and some regions have infinitesimal size, where infinitesimals are understood in the framework of Robinson’s nonstandard analysis. This view, I argue, provides a novel reply to the inconsistency arguments proposed by Arntzenius and Russell, which have troubled a more familiar gunky approach. Moreover, it has important advantages over the alternative views these authors (...)
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  17. Between Atomism and Superatomism.T. Scott Dixon - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 49 (6):1215-1241.
    There are at least three vaguely atomistic principles that have come up in the literature, two explicitly and one implicitly. First, standard atomism is the claim that everything is composed of atoms, and is very often how atomism is characterized in the literature. Second, superatomism is the claim that parthood is well-founded, which implies that every proper parthood chain terminates, and has been discussed as a stronger alternative to standard atomism. Third, there is a principle that lies between these two (...)
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  18. What it takes to be hunky.Daniel Giberman - 2020 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (1):51-57.
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  19. What is priority monism?David Mark Kovacs - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (9):2873-2893.
    In a series papers, Jonathan Schaffer defended priority monism, the thesis that the cosmos is the only fundamental material object, on which all other objects depend. A primitive notion of dependence plays a crucial role in Schaffer’s argu- ments for priority monism. The goal of this paper is to scrutinize this notion and also to shed new light on what is at stake in the debate. I present three familiar arguments for priority monism and point out that each relies on (...)
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  20. Anaxagoras, the Thoroughgoing Infinitist: The Relation between his Teachings on Multitude and on Heterogeneity.Miloš Arsenijević, Saša Popović & Miloš Vuletić - 2019 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 15 (1):35-70.
    In the analysis of Anaxagoras’ physics in view of the relation between his teachings on multitude and heterogeneity, two central questions emerge: 1) How can the structure of the universe considered purely mereo-topologically help us explain that at the first cosmic stage no qualitative difference is manifest in spite of the fact that the entire qualitative heterogeneity is supposedly already present there? 2) How can heterogeneity become manifest at the second stage, resulting from the noûs intervention, if according to fragment (...)
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  21. Gunk Mountains: A puzzle.Sharon E. Berry - 2019 - Analysis 79 (1):3-10.
    This note points out a conflict between some common intuitions about metaphysical possibility. On the one hand, it is appealing to deny that there are robust counterfactuals about how various physically impossible substances would interact with the matter that exists at our world. On the other hand, our intuitions about how concepts like MOUNTAIN apply at other metaphysically possible worlds seem to presuppose facts about ‘solidity’ which cash out in terms of these counterfactuals. I consider several simple attempts to resolve (...)
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  22. Weak Location.Antony Eagle - 2019 - Dialectica 73 (1-2):149-181.
    Recently, many philosophers have been interested in using locative relations to clarify and pursue debates in the metaphysics of material objects. Most begin with the relation of exact location. But what if we begin instead with the relation known as weak location – the relation an object x bears to any region not completely bereft of x? I explore some of the consequences of pursuing this route for issues including coincidence, extended simples, and endurance, with an eye to evaluating the (...)
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  23. What is an Extended Simple Region?Zachary Goodsell, Michael Duncan & Kristie Miller - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (3):649-659.
    The notion of an extended simple region (henceforth ESR) has recently been marshalled in the service of arguments for a variety of conclusions. Exactly how to understand the idea of extendedness as it applies to simple regions, however, has been largely ignored, or, perhaps better, assumed. In this paper we first (§1) outline what we take to be the standard way that philosophers are thinking about extendedness, namely as an intrinsic property of regions. We then introduce an alternative picture (§2), (...)
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  24. No universalism without gunk? Composition as identity and the universality of identity.Manuel Lechthaler - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 18):4441-4452.
    Philosophers disagree whether composition as identity entails mereological universalism. Bricker :264–294, 2016) has recently considered an argument which concludes that composition as identity supports universalism. The key step in this argument is the thesis that any objects are identical to some object, which Bricker justifies with the principle of the universality of identity. I will spell out this principle in more detail and argue that it has an unexpected consequence. If the universality of identity holds, then composition as identity not (...)
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  25. How to Make a Gunky Spritz.Roberto Loss - 2019 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 8 (4):250-259.
    In its simplest form, a Spritz is an aperitif made with (sparkling) water and (white) wine. A ‘gunky Spritz’, as I will call it, is a Spritz in which the water and the wine are mixed through and through, so that every proper part of the Spritz has a proper part containing both water and wine. In the literature on the notion of location the possibility of mixtures like a gunky Spritz has been thought of as either threatening seemingly intuitive (...)
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  26. The Simplicity of the Simple Approach to Personal Identity.Andrea Sauchelli - 2019 - In Luca Bellotti, Luca Gili, Giacomo Turbanti & Enrico Moriconi (eds.), Third Pisa Colloquium in Logic, Language and Epistemology. Pisa, Province of Pisa, Italy: pp. 347-358.
    I provide a simple solution to the problem of determining the characterising feature(s) of the simple approach to personal identity, sometimes also called the simple view: instead of focusing on claims regarding the analysability, reducibility, or triviality of the concepts used in simple theories of personal identity, I propose instead a metaphysical criterion to define this approach. In particular, I claim that the simple approach is (best seen as) that family of theories according to which personal identity is a relation (...)
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  27. Indefinitely Descending Ground.Einar Duenger Bohn - 2018 - In Ricki Bliss & Graham Priest (eds.), Reality and its Structure. Oxford University Press. pp. 167-181.
    In this paper I argue against grounding being necessarily well-founded, and provide some reasons to think it's actually not well-founded.
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  28. On Stage with Gunk.Daniel Giberman - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2):228-238.
    ABSTRACTA structure is temporally gunky just in case all of its temporal parts have proper temporal parts. Joshua Stuchlik [2003] objects to the stage theory of persistence from temporal gunk by ar...
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  29. Enduring Through Gunk.Matt Leonard - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (4):753-771.
    According to one of the more popular endurantist packages on the market, a package I will call multilocational endurantism, enduring objects are exactly located at multiple instantaneous regions of spacetime. However, for all we know, the world might turn out to be spatiotemporally gunky and spatiotemporal gunk entails that this package is false. The goal of this paper is to sketch a view which retains the spirit of multilocational endurantism while also recognizing the possibility of certain types of objects which (...)
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  30. Troubles with Trinitarian (Relational) Theism: Trinity and Gunk.Damiano Migliorini - 2018 - In Damiano Migliorini & Daniele Bertini (eds.), Relations. Ontology and Philosophy of Religion. Milano, Italy: Mimesis International. pp. 181-200.
    The paper is the summary of a wider work, a research program. The hypothesis is that if Fundamental Ontology is apophatic – that is, if it has the same dialectical nature (relationality-substantiality) as the Trinity – we can accept that Trinity is also apophatic. The apophatic-relational explanation may sound odd, but it is the most honest one, because it does not hide the problems under the carpet. What emerges is a coherent form of Trinitarian Theism – since there is correspondence (...)
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  31. Mereological Nihilism and Puzzles about Material Objects.Bradley Rettler - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (4):842-868.
    Mereological nihilism is the view that no objects have proper parts. Despite how counter‐intuitive it is, it is taken quite seriously, largely because it solves a number of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects – or so its proponents claim. In this article, I show that for every puzzle that mereological nihilism solves, there is a similar puzzle that (a) it doesn’t solve, and (b) every other solution to the original puzzle does solve. Since the solutions to the new (...)
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  32. Fundamentality and Ontological Minimality.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2018 - In Ricki Bliss & Graham Priest (eds.), Reality and its Structure. Oxford University Press. pp. 237-253.
    In this chapter, a generic definition of fundamentality as an ontological minimality thesis is sought and its applicability examined. Most discussions of fundamentality are focused on a mereological understanding of the hierarchical structure of reality, which may be combined with an atomistic, object-oriented metaphysics. But recent work in structuralism, for instance, calls for an alternative understanding and it is not immediately clear that the conception of fundamentality at work in structuralism is commensurable with the mereological conception. However, it is proposed (...)
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  33. MaxCon extended simples and the dispositionalist ontology of laws.Travis Dumsday - 2017 - Synthese 194 (5).
    Extended simples are physical objects that, while spatially extended, possess no actual proper parts. The theory that physical reality bottoms out at extended simples is one of the principal competing views concerning the fundamental composition of matter, the others being atomism and the theory of gunk. Among advocates of extended simples, Markosian’s ‘MaxCon’ version of the theory has justly achieved particular prominence. On the assumption of causal realism, I argue here that the reality of MaxCon simples would entail the reality (...)
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  34. What is an Ersatz Part?Kristie Miller & Johann Hariman - 2017 - New Content is Available for Grazer Philosophische Studien 94 (4):524-551.
    This paper develops four proposals for explicating the notion of an ersatz part. It then evaluates each proposal with respect to a number of jobs for which ersatz parts are posited. We argue that each of the four notions of ersatz parthood do better with respect to some jobs, and worse with respect to others. Thus, we think, it’s horses for courses: which notion of ersatz part one chooses will be sensitive to which metaphysical project one is pursuing.
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  35. What is an Ersatz Part?Kristie Miller & Johann Hariman - 2017 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 94 (4):524-551.
    _ Source: _Page Count 28 This paper develops four proposals for explicating the notion of an ersatz part. It then evaluates each proposal with respect to a number of jobs for which ersatz parts are posited. We argue that each of the four notions of ersatz parthood do better with respect to some jobs, and worse with respect to others. Thus, we think, it’s horses for courses: which notion of ersatz part one chooses will be sensitive to which metaphysical project (...)
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  36. Atomism and Composition.Gabriel Uzquiano - 2017 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (4):232-240.
    Atomism is the thesis that every object is composed of atoms. This principle is generally regimented by means of an atomicity axiom according to which every object has atomic parts. But there appears to be a sense that something is amiss with atomistic mereology. We look at three concerns, which, while importantly different, involve infinite descending chains of proper parts and have led some to question standard formalizations of atomism and composition in mereology.
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  37. Eliminativism and gunk.Jiri Benovsky - 2016 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy (1):59-66.
    Eliminativism about macroscopic material objects claims that we do not need to include tables in our ontology, and that any job – practical or theoretical – they have to do can be done by 'atoms arranged tablewise'. This way of introducing eliminativism faces the worry that if there are no 'atoms', that is, if there are no simples and the world is 'gunky', there are no suitable entities to be 'arranged tablewise'. In this article, I discuss various strategies the eliminativist (...)
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  38. Mereological monism and Humean supervenience.Andrea Borghini & Giorgio Lando - 2016 - Synthese 197 (11):4745-4765.
    According to Lewis, mereology is the general and exhaustive theory of ontological composition, and every contingent feature of the world supervenes upon some fundamental properties instantiated by minimal entities. A profound analogy can be drawn between these two basic contentions of his metaphysics, namely that both can be intended as a denial of emergentism. In this essay, we study the relationships between Humean supervenience and two philosophical spin-offs of mereological monism: the possibility of gunk and the thesis of composition as (...)
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  39. Monism and Gunk.Jacek Brzozowski - 2016 - In Mark Jago (ed.), Reality Making. Oxford University Press. pp. 57-74.
  40. Mereology.Paul R. Daniels - 2016 - Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy.
    This peer reviewed reference article is an annotated online bibliography on mereology with 80+ entries. It's aim is to provide a selective and balanced guide to the subject. It contains thematic headings with commentaries. The reader should come away cognizant of what the most influential work in mereology are. Topics highlighted herein include, but are not limited to: the history of mereology, classical extensional mereology and its challenges, parthood, connections with location relations, mereological simples and gunk, composition as identity, as (...)
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  41. Defending Priority Views from the Gunk/junk Argument.Naoaki Kitamura - 2016 - Philosophia 44 (1):155-165.
    Recently, Jonathan Tallant has argued that we should reject priority views, which hold that some objects are fundamental and others are dependent. Tallant’s argument relies on two proposed mereological possibilities: a gunky world, where everything has a proper part, and a junky world, where everything is a proper part. In this paper, I criticise Tallant’s argument and argue that neither of these possibilities threaten priority views per se; at most, they threaten only particular forms of priority views that contain a (...)
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  42. Composition.Daniel Z. Korman & Chad Carmichael - 2016 - Oxford Handbooks Online.
    When some objects are the parts of another object, they compose that object and that object is composite. This article is intended as an introduction to the central questions about composition and a highly selective overview of various answers to those questions. In §1, we review some formal features of parthood that are important for understanding the nature of composition. In §2, we consider some answers to the question: which pluralities of objects together compose something? As we will see, the (...)
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  43. Unextended Complexes.Martin Pickup - 2016 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 5 (3):257-264.
    Extended simples are fruitfully discussed in metaphysics. They are entities which are located in a complex region of space but do not themselves have parts. In this paper, I will discuss unextended complexes: entities which are not located at a complex region of space but do themselves have parts. In particular, I focus on one type of unextended complex: pointy complexes. Four areas are indicated where pointy complexes might prove philosophically useful. Unextended complexes are therefore philosophically fruitful, in much the (...)
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  44. Indefinite Divisibility.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (3):239-263.
    Some hold that the lesson of Russell’s paradox and its relatives is that mathematical reality does not form a ‘definite totality’ but rather is ‘indefinitely extensible’. There can always be more sets than there ever are. I argue that certain contact puzzles are analogous to Russell’s paradox this way: they similarly motivate a vision of physical reality as iteratively generated. In this picture, the divisions of the continuum into smaller parts are ‘potential’ rather than ‘actual’. Besides the intrinsic interest of (...)
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  45. Atoms, Gunk, and the Limits of ‘Composition’.Hsing-Chien Tsai & Achille C. Varzi - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (2):231-235.
    It is customary practice to define ‘x is composed of the ys’ as ‘x is a sum of the ys and the ys are pairwise disjoint ’. This predicate has played a central role in the debate on the special composition question and on related metaphysical issues concerning the mereological structure of objects. In this note we show that the customary characterization is nonetheless inadequate. We do so by constructing a mereological model where everything qualifies as composed of atoms even (...)
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  46. Mereology.Achille C. Varzi - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    An overview of contemporary part-whole theories, with reference to both their axiomatic developments and their philosophical underpinnings.
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  47. Atoms vs. Extended Simples: Towards a Dispositionalist Reconciliation.Travis Dumsday - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (4):1023-1033.
    There are four main theories concerning the ultimate constitution of matter: atomism version 1, atomism version 2, the theory of gunk, and the theory of extended simples. These four theories are usually seen as diametrically opposed. Here I take a stab at ecumenism, and argue that atomism version 1 and the theory of extended simples can be reconciled and rendered compatible by reference to the reality of dispositions.
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  48. A topological theory of fundamental concrete particulars.Daniel Giberman - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (10):2679-2704.
    Fundamental concrete particulars are needed to explain facts about non-fundamental concrete particulars. However, the former can only play this explanatory role if they are properly discernible from the latter. Extant theories of how to discern fundamental concreta primarily concern mereological structure. Those according to which fundamental concreta can bear, but not be, proper parts are motivated by the possibilities that all concreta bear proper parts and that some properties of wholes are not fixed by the properties of their proper parts. (...)
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  49. Anaxagoras’s Qualitative Gunk.Anna Marmodoro - 2015 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (3):402-422.
    Are there atoms in the constitution of things? Or is everything made of atomless ‘gunk’ whose proper parts have proper parts? Anaxagoras is the first gunk lover in the history of metaphysics. For him gunk is not only a theoretical possibility that cannot be ruled out in principle. Rather, it is a view that follows cogently from his metaphysical analysis of the physical world of our experience. What is distinctive about Anaxagoras’s take on gunk is not only what motives the (...)
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  50. No Simples, No Gunk, No Nothing.Sam Cowling - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (1):246-260.
    Mereological realism holds that the world has a mereological structure – i.e. a distribution of mereological properties and relations. In this article, I defend Eleaticism about properties, according to which there are no causally inert non-logical properties. I then present an Eleatic argument for mereological anti-realism, which denies the existence of both mereological composites and mereological simples. After defending Eleaticism and mereological anti-realism, I argue that mereological anti-realism is preferable to mereological nihilism. I then conclude by examining the thesis that (...)
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