How to be a Mereological Anti-Realist

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 10:83-119 (2022)
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Abstract

Peter van Inwagen's "special composition question" asks, more or less, "what must some objects be like in order for them to compose another object?" In this paper I develop and defend a theistic anti-realist response to the special composition question, according to which God decides when composition occurs. While I do not endorse this theistic mereological anti-realism, I think that it is worth developing. I argue that this theistic mereological anti-realism is preferable to extant non-theistic variants of mereological anti-realism, and that theistic mereological anti-realism receives some motivation from several other sources.

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Andrew Brenner
Hong Kong Baptist University

Citations of this work

Sense Perception and Mereological Nihilism.Andrew Brenner - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):68-83.

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