Abstract
A number of prominent metaphysicians have recently defended the idea of material plenitude: wherever there is one material object, there is in fact a great multitude of them, all coincident and sharing many properties, but differing in which of these properties they have essentially and which accidentally. The main goal of this paper is to put on the agenda an important theoretical decision that plenitudinists face, regarding whether their plenitude is egalitarian or elitist, depending on whether or not they take all objects that coincide at a certain location to be in some sense ontologically on a par. Many current proponents of plenitude tend toward egalitarianism. But current proponents often also point to an Aristotelian tradition they claim to carry on; indeed, the view is sometimes referred to as “neo-Aristotelian plenitude.” By examining some of the historical protagonists of Aristotelian plenitude, however, I show that they defended rather an elitist form of plenitude, wherein a single coincident is ontologically privileged in every occupied region. In the final section of the paper, I also try to articulate the basic motivation for each outlook, by way of initiating discussion of which view plenitudinists should believe.
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Notes
For the sake of simplicity, we may imagine a scenario where the Statue of Liberty was created by a god ex nihilo and destroyed ad nihilum a day later, so that the Statue and the copper it is made of are perfectly coincident both in space and in time. This gives us a philosophically “cleaner” case than the one messy actuality offers.
Another standard reason has to do with slow replacement scenarios. Suppose every night I secretly replace a fistful of copper from the Statue of Liberty with some other copper, and after many nights have all the original copper, which I use to build an enormous statue of the backward E in my (also enormous) backyard. Intuitively, it is not the case that the Statue of Liberty is now in my backyard and looks like an existential quantifier. It is still on Liberty Island and still looks like Lady Liberty. But the lump of copper is in my backyard and does look like the existential quantifier. Ergo, they are two – even though we have not supposed that either has gone out of existence.
One issue is that some properties that coincidents do share (e.g., determinable properties) cannot vary in the distribution of essentiality and accidentally over them independently of the variation across other properties (e.g., maximally determinate properties) – see Bennett 2004: 357-8 and Leslie 2011: 279. And there are other complicated cases, such as Fairchild’s (2019) “bad eggs” cases. See Fairchild’s paper for an attempt to provide a stable and principled formulation of plenitude.
Strictly speaking, another live view here is that neither the Statue of Liberty nor the lump of clay exist, say because only mereological simples exist (and neither of these is such), as per mereological nihilism (as in Rosen and Dorr 2002 and Sider 2013). However, the dialectic around material plenitude is not – not immediately, at any rate – restricted to composites, and a plenitudinist could very well hold that there is a great multitude of coincident mereological simples in every region occupied by one. So nihilism is not directly pertinent to the dialectic (unless one is a plenitudinist only about composites), and is relevant here only because of a distracting feature of the example (i.e., the fact that the Statue of Liberty is a composite).
The basic story is this. If there is only one object in L, and assuming for simplicity that the Statue of Liberty and the lump of copper coincide perfectly not just in space but also in time (see Footnote 1), then there are three possibilities. One is that the Statue of Liberty does not exist, and only the relevant lump of copper exists in L; but this is too eliminativist. A second possibility is that it is the lump of copper that does not exist in L, which seems plainly false. The third possibility is that the Statue of Liberty and the lump of copper are contingently identical. On this view, although there is a possible world where the Statue of Liberty goes out of existence but the lump of copper does not, all this shows is that in that world the Statue of Liberty is not identical to the lump of copper; but in our world they are identical. However, this idea, of contingent identity, is notoriously paradoxical: if Phosphorus is Hesperus, we can see how there could be a world where the description “the evening star” did not apply to anything even though the description “the morning star” did, but it is harder to make sense of there being a world where Phosphorus exists but Hesperus does not. After all, if they are in fact identical then for Hesperus to exist just is for Phosphorus to exist. The only way the Statue of Liberty and the copper lump could be identical, then, is if objects had their identity and persistence conditions only relative to a description, but this makes the existence of objects unacceptably language-dependent and entrains a variety of technical problems (see Fine 2003).
To say that we do not know of such restrictions in Aristotle is not to say that there should not be some restrictions. Unless Aristotle can somehow distance his accidental forms from what we call accidental properties, placing no restriction the formation of accidental unities will lead Aristotle into trouble in cases of the kind Fairchild (2019) calls “bad eggs,” such as the property of being Joe’s single favorite object or the property of being an x that is identical to Aristotle and sitting. Socrates is contingently Joe’s single favorite object, but there could not be a distinct object that is essentially Joe’s single favorite object, for then there would be two objects each of which is Joe’s single favorite. This shows that the property of being Joe’s single favorite object must be excluded from the domain of properties on which plenitude operates (see Fairchild 2019 for discussion). Aristotle does not discuss his “accidental unities” at this level of granularity, though.
Brentano himself did not identify as a nominalist, but this is because he was working with the Medieval understanding of “nominalism” as the rejection of three kinds of universals: not only Plato-style ante rem universals and Aristotle-style in re universals (both of which Brentano did reject) but also Boethius-style post rem universals, that is, universal concepts that apply simultaneously to different particulars (with this Brentano had no problem).
Somewhat oddly, Brentano calls objects such as seated-Socrates and wise-Socrates “accidents.” Evidently, he wishes to preserve the substance/accident terminology, albeit transformed: within his nominalistic framework, accidents are not properties, but objects. Accordingly, “accident and substance are things in the same sense” (Brentano 1933: 48).
The supplementation axiom is the idea that if x is a proper part of y then there must be a z such that (i) z is a proper part of y and (ii) z does not overlap x (read: if a part is a proper part it must be supplemented by another proper part).
We may therefore distinguish three kinds of D-egalitarian plenums: a loose D-egalitarian plenum is one where every pair of coincidents are mutually independent; a dense D-egalitarian plenum is one where every pair of coincidents are bilaterally dependent; a mixed D-egalitarian plenum is one where some pairs are mutually independent and some are bilaterally dependent.
More precisely, Schaffer notes that on one conception elite properties (i) ensure that objects instantiating them will resemble and (ii) are causally efficacious. But the resemblance-making role of elite properties will have no analogue for us in the case of material objects and (ii) assuming nomic subsumption causal efficacy implies figuring in laws.
It should be noted, at the same time, that Hawthorne allows that “what counts as junk from then purview of dynamics might not count as junk from some other perspective” (2006b: 111). So his quality/junk distinction is not immediately intended to assign ontological privilege. Still, it may plausibly lead to ontological privilege when coupled with certain assumptions about the connection between physical laws and ontological elite status.
It remains something of a mystery to me why contemporary metaphysicians have been so amenable to eliteness-within-plenitude for properties but not for objects.
For comments on a previous draft, I would like to thank two anonymous referees for Philosophical Studies.
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Kriegel, U. Egalitarian vs. Elitist Plenitude. Philos Stud 179, 3055–3070 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01815-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01815-4