23 found
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  1. “Tropes in Space.Daniel Giberman - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (2):453-472.
    Tropes are particular features of concrete objects. Properties—the extensions of predicates—are primitive resemblance classes of tropes. Friends of tropes have been criticized for failing to answer three questions. First, are there fundamental items other than tropes? Second, what criteria determine whether some tropes are all and only the features of some one object? Third, can trope classes be formed adequately using only primitive resemblance? Trading on the spatiotemporal status of tropes, this essay offers new responses to each of these questions. (...)
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  2. Against zero-dimensional material objects (and other bare particulars).Daniel Giberman - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (2):305-321.
    A modus tollens against zero-dimensional material objects is presented from the premises (i) that if there are zero-dimensional material objects then there are bare particulars, and (ii) that there are no bare particulars. The argument for the first premise proceeds by elimination. First, bare particular theory and bundle theory are motivated as the most appealing theories of property exemplification. It is then argued that the bundle theorist’s Ockhamism ought to lead her to reject spatiotemporally located zero-dimensional property instances. Finally, it (...)
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  3. Ostrich tropes.Daniel Giberman - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-25.
    According to the cluster of theories in the metaphysics of properties known as ‘trope’ theories, properties are collections of particular qualitative instances. Though increasingly influential, the cluster is sufficiently diverse for there to be little agreement as to the prospects of its members. The present essay articulates and defends a conception of tropes as primitively qualitatively complex, somewhat in the vein of Quinean nominalist objects. After clarifying the relationships among tropes, properties, property exemplification, and property conferral, the essay discusses the (...)
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  4. 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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  5.  69
    Supertropestantivalism.Daniel Giberman - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 71 (4):pqaa080.
    According to the identity version of spacetime supersubstantivalism, material objects are numerically identical to spacetime regions. While the view has been commended for its parsimony and concordance with physics, it has not properly been assessed in light of the metaphysics of properties. The present essay fills this void by discerning several subspecies of identity supersubstantivalism, corresponding to various property ontologies. Finding them all wanting, the essay develops and defends a novel brand of supersubstantivalism based on the trope ontology. On this (...)
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  6.  76
    Plurdurance.Daniel Giberman - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    Like most theories in first order metaphysics, theories of persistence generally aim at metaphysically necessary truth. Consequently, those that accept proper temporal parts of material entities are maximally competitive only when they accord with the full range of metaphysically possible temporal mereological structures. Consider, for example, a structure in which every element is a proper temporal part of some others. The present essay argues that temporal junk plausibly is possible and that perdurantism, the thesis that material entities persist by having (...)
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  7. 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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  8. A reason for the non-specialist to care about the metaphysics of properties and persistence.Daniel Giberman - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (2):162-177.
    We have compelling extra-philosophical reasons for caring about identity, parthood, and location. For example, we desire ceteris paribus that nothing every part of which is very near to our location be very near to the location of something dangerous, evil, or otherwise unpleasant. This essay argues that such considerations are relevant to certain first-order metaphysical debates, namely, the debates over immanent universals and tropes and endurantism and perdurantism, respectively. As a consequence, even the non-specialist has a reason to care about (...)
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  9.  92
    Indiscernibility Does Not Distinguish Particularity.Daniel Giberman - 2016 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 5 (4):249-256.
    According to the indiscernibility characterization of the distinction between particulars and universals, only and all the former have possible numerically distinct indiscernible intrinsic qualitative duplicates. It is argued here that both the sufficiency and the necessity directions are defective and that indiscernibility thus does not distinguish particularity. Against sufficiency: universals may lack intrinsic qualitative character and thus be trivially indiscernible from one another. Against necessity: pluralities of duplicate-less entities are at once duplicate-less and particular.
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  10. Junky Non-Worlds.Daniel Giberman - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (2):437-443.
    A mereological structure is junky if and only if each of its elements is a proper part of some other. The young literature on junk has focused on junky worlds and whether they are counterexamples to unrestricted composition. The present note defends the possibility of junky structures that are not worlds. This possibility complicates a recent attempt in the literature to render junk consistent with a weakened form of unrestricted composition. The upshot is that junky non-worlds threaten the weakened form (...)
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  11.  57
    Whole multiple location and universals.Daniel Giberman - 2021 - Analytic Philosophy 63 (4):245-258.
    According to the broadly Aristotelian distinction between universals and particulars, all and only the former are capable of whole multiple location. The present essay defends this distinction against four putative counterexamples. The first two, extended simple material objects and enduring time-traveling self-meeters, putatively are wholly multiply locatable, but not universals. The second two, unique properties of point-sized entities and Platonic (i.e., not spatiotemporally located) universals, putatively are universals, but not wholly multiply locatable. The defensive strategy is to resist certain presuppositions (...)
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  12.  75
    Property dualists shouldn't be nominalists about properties.Daniel Giberman & David Mark Kovacs - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Substance dualism is the view that there are two fundamentally different kinds of substances: physical and mental. By contrast, according to property dualism there is only one kind of substance (physical) but two fundamentally different kinds of properties: physical and mental. Property nominalism is the view that there are neither repeatable nor non-repeatable fundamentally predicable entities (i.e. neither universals nor tropes) and that things being a certain way or being related in a certain way must ultimately be accounted for in (...)
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  13. Bent Not Broken: Why Exemplification Simpliciter Remains a Problem for Eternalist Endurantism.Daniel Giberman - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (5):947-966.
    One premise in David Lewis’s well-known argument from temporary intrinsic properties in favor of temporal parts is the intuition that material objects exemplify such properties simpliciter, that is, without qualification. The argument has spawned a large critical literature, with commentators questioning the simpliciter premise’s motivation, content, dialectical force, and status as an intuition. The present essay has two chief goals: to provide a novel framework for clarifying Lewis’s simpliciter premise and to explain how the resulting clarification upends a wide range (...)
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  14. T-Gunk and Exact Occupation.Daniel Giberman - 2012 - American Philosophical Quarterly 49 (2):165-174.
    An object is T-gunky just in case all its parts (i) have proper parts and (ii) are of non-zero measure in every spatial dimension. I show that a recent argument due to Hud Hudson—though not intended as a threat to gunk—bears on the possibility of T-gunky material objects in non-gunky space. I then show that the friend of T-gunk can circumvent Hudson’s argument without abandoning pointy space or standard mereology. What is needed is a novel conception of the relation of (...)
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  15.  99
    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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  16.  87
    Moving parts: a new indexical treatment of context-shifting predication.Daniel Giberman - 2016 - Synthese 193 (1):95-124.
    A context-shifting example involves a putatively non-ambiguous, non-elliptical, non-indexical declarative sentence, some distinct utterances of which differ in truth value despite sameness of place, time, surrounding objects, and other physical factors. Charles Travis has spawned a large literature by arguing that such examples undermine compositional truth-conditional semantics. After explaining how prior responses to Travis’s examples fail in the metaphysical details, the present essay develops a new approach that treats a wide range of subject terms as disguised indexicals sensitive to mereological (...)
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  17. Passing Through: Why Intrinsic‐to‐a‐Time Endurantism Should Not Persist.Daniel Giberman - 2014 - Analytic Philosophy 55 (1):89-101.
    According to the traditional way of understanding debates in the metaphysics of persistence, perdurantists hold that persisting material objects have temporal proper parts while endurantists hold that they do not. Several theorists recently have suggested in opposition to this traditional picture that endurantism be understood as the thesis that the identity of a persisting object x is intrinsic to each of the times at which x is present. It is argued here that unless this non-traditional version of endurantism entails a (...)
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  18.  79
    Panprotopsychism Instantiated.Daniel Giberman - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (2):238-258.
    The problem of many-over-one asks how it can be thatmanyproperties are ever instantiated byoneobject. A putative solution might, for example, claim that the properties are appropriately bundled, or somehow tied to a bare particular. In this essay, the author argues that, surprisingly, an extant candidate solution to this problem is at the same time an independently developed candidate solution to the mind-body problem. Specifically, what is argued here to be the best version of the relata-specific bundle theory—the thesis that each (...)
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  19. Who they are and what de se: Burge on quasi-memory.Daniel Giberman - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 144 (2):297 - 311.
    Tyler Burge has recently argued that quasi-memory-based psychological reductionist accounts of diachronic personal identity are deeply problematic. According to Burge, these accounts either fail to include appropriately de se elements or presuppose facts about diachronic personal identity—facts of the very kind that the accounts are supposed to explain. Neither of these objections is compelling. The first is based in confusion about the version of reductionism to which it putatively applies. The second loses its force when we recognize that reductionism is (...)
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  20.  95
    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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  21.  16
    Concrete particulars: a metaphysics of spatiotemporal entities.Daniel Giberman - 2024 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    This book presents a novel metaphysics of concrete entities. The author uses the theory developed to address three major topics in the metaphysics of concreta: fundamentality, persistence over time, and phenomenal consciousness. The book provides a new theory of what "bundles" particular property instances, or tropes, into material property bearers. The theory is based on two new ideas. The first is that the primitive nature of one sui generis monadic property called markedness bears on the bundling of other properties' tropes. (...)
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  22.  86
    Is Mereology a Guide to Conceivability?Daniel Giberman - 2015 - Mind 124 (493):121-146.
    Zombies are unconscious objects with conscious physical micro-duplicates. If zombies are possible then physicalism is false. It has been argued that zombies are possible if conceivable for an agent with ideal rationality. At any rate, they are possible only if so conceivable. This essay uses a mereological constraint to highlight the fine-grained differences between actually conscious physical objects and certain of their actually consciousness-incapable proper parts. These mereological considerations form the basis of an argument by dilemma that zombies are inconceivable. (...)
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  23.  3
    Universality and particularity.Daniel Giberman - 2024 - In A. R. J. Fisher & Anna-Sofia Maurin (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Properties. London: Routledge.
    The task of distinguishing universals from particulars is difficult twice over. It faces a host of first order challenges, since first order proposals about the distinction (e.g. only universals are instantiable, or only universals can be multi-located) tend to be threatened by counterexamples. But it also faces formidable methodological challenges, such as how to decide whether the distinction ought to be exclusive and exhaustive. After discussing the relationships between the distinction and several pairs of pre-philosophical notions, this chapter aims to (...)
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