Objects, Misc

Edited by Daniel Z. Korman (University of California, Santa Barbara)
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  1. Art and Objects: A Manifesto.Said Mikki - manuscript
    We develop a series of theses on the philosophical aesthetics of design art. A sketch of an outline of a theory of objects is drawn from within a naturalistic worldview, that of abstract materialism and the general, still ongoing, quest to build a comprehensive philosophy of nature encompassing not only the physical world, but also culture, art, and politics.
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  2. Shepherd's Accounts of Space and Time.David Landy - forthcoming - Mind.
    There is an apparent tension in Shepherd’s accounts of space and time. Firstly, Shepherd explicitly claims that we know that the space and time of the unperceived world exist because they cause our phenomenal experience of them. Secondly, Shepherd emphasizes that empty space and time do not have the power to effect any change in the world. My proposal is that for Shepherd time has exactly one causal power: to provide for the continued existence of self-same or changing objects. Because (...)
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  3. Metaphysics First or Language First: The Notion of a Single Object.Friederike Moltmann - forthcoming - In Richard Gaskin (ed.), The Question of Idealism.
    This paper argues that the notion of a single object or 'being one' does not require worldly or perceived conditions of integrity and even less so concept-relative atomicity. It generally is based on conditions of integrity of some sort, but not strictly so. It rather is imposed by the use of count categories in natural language and thus makes a case for linguistic idealism.
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  4. Acts and Morals.Ori Simchen - 2023 - Metaphysics 6 (1):45-59.
    Smith shoots Jones intentionally but kills Jones unintentionally. How can a single act be both intentional and unintentional? Fine's theory of embodiment construes the compatibility of intentional shooting with unintentional killing through a pluralist framework of qua objects that distinguishes the act qua being a shooting from the act qua being a killing as two distinct qua objects. I compare this pluralist account with a more traditional monist take on qua modification according to which there is only one item there, (...)
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  5. Explaining Why There is Something Rather than Nothing.Andrew Brenner - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (4):1831-1847.
    It is sometimes supposed that, in principle, we cannot offer an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing. I argue that this supposition is a mistake, and stems from a needlessly myopic conception of the form explanations can legitimately take. After making this more general point, I proceed to offer a speculative suggestion regarding one sort of explanation which can in principle serve as an answer to the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” The suggestion is (...)
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  6. How to be a Mereological Anti-Realist.Andrew Brenner - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 10:83-119.
    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 (...)
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  7. The ontology of words: Realism, nominalism, and eliminativism.J. T. M. Miller - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (7):e12691.
    What are words? What makes two token words tokens of the same word-type? Are words abstract entities, or are they (merely) collections of tokens? The ontology of words tries to provide answers to these, and related questions. This article provides an overview of some of the most prominent views proposed in the literature, with a particular focus on the debate between type-realist, nominalist, and eliminativist ontologies of words.
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  8. Nominalizations: The Case of Nominalizations of Modal Predicates.Friederike Moltmann - 2020 - In Lisa Matthewson, Cécile Meier, Hotze Rullman & Thomas Ede Zimmermann (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Semantics. Wiley.
    Nominalizations of modal predicates have received little, if any, attention in the semantic or philosophical literature. This paper will argue that nominalizations of modal predicates require recognizing a novel ontological category of modal objects and it will outline a new semantics of modals based on modal objects.
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  9. 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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  10. Ontological Dependence, Spatial Location, and Part Structure.Friederike Moltmann - 2019 - In Roberta Ferrario, Stefano Borgo, Laure Vieu & Claudio Masolo (eds.), Festschrift for Nicola Guarino. Amsterdam: IOS Publications.
    This paper discusses attributively limited concrete objects such as disturbances (holes, folds, scratches etc), tropes, and attitudinal objects, which lack the sort of spatial location or part structures expected of them as concrete objects. The paper proposes an account in terms of (quasi-Fregean) abstraction, which has so far been applied only to abstract objects.
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  11. Composition as pattern.Steve Petersen - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (5):1119-1139.
    I argue for patternism, a new answer to the question of when some objects compose a whole. None of the standard principles of composition comfortably capture our natural judgments, such as that my cat exists and my table exists, but there is nothing wholly composed of them. Patternism holds, very roughly, that some things compose a whole whenever together they form a “real pattern”. Plausibly we are inclined to acknowledge the existence of my cat and my table but not of (...)
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  12. Money and mental contents.Sarah Vooys & David G. Dick - 2019 - Synthese 198 (4):3443-3458.
    It can be hard to see where money fits in the world. Money seems both real and imaginary, since it has obvious causal powers, but is also, just as obviously, something humans have just made up. Recent philosophical accounts of money have declared it to be real, but for very different reasons. John Searle and Francesco Guala disagree over whether money is just whatever acts like money, or just whatever people believe to be money. In developing their accounts of institutions (...)
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  13. The Lump Sum: A Theory of Modal Parts.Meg Wallace - 2019 - Philosophical Papers 48 (3):403-435.
    A lump theorist claims that ordinary objects are spread out across possible worlds, much like many of us think that tables are spread out across space. We are not wholly located in any one particular world, the lump theorist claims, just as we are not wholly spatially located where one’s hand is. We are modally spread out, a trans-world mereological sum of world-bound parts. We are lump sums of modal parts. And so are all other ordinary objects. In this paper, (...)
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  14. Transcendental Idealism Without Tears.Nicholas Stang - 2017 - In K. Pearce & T. Goldschmidt (eds.), Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics. Oxford University Press. pp. 82-103.
    This essay is an attempt to explain Kantian transcendental idealism to contemporary metaphysicians and make clear its relevance to contemporary debates in what is now called ‘meta-metaphysics.’ It is not primarily an exegetical essay, but an attempt to translate some Kantian ideas into a contemporary idiom.
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  15. Aristote chez les Helvètes: Douze essais de métaphysique helvétique.Olivier Massin & Anne Meylan (eds.) - 2014 - Ithaque.
    À l’origine de la philosophie comme des sciences, il y a, selon Aristote, « l’étonnement de ce que les choses sont ce qu’elles sont ». Nul doute qu’Aristote aurait trouvé en Suisse maints sujets d’étonnement. Qu’est-ce qu’une vache ? Qu’est-ce qu’une montagne ? Qu’est-ce que le Röstigraben ? Qu’est-ce qu’une fondue ? Qu’est-ce qu’un trou dans l’emmental ? Qu’est-ce que l’argent ? Qu’est-ce qu’une banque ? Qu’est-ce qu’une confédération ? Qu’est-ce qu’une horloge ? Qui est Roger Federer ? Qu’est-ce qu’est (...)
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  16. Object-Dependence.Avram Hiller - 2013 - Essays in Philosophy 14 (1):33-55.
    There has been much work on ontological dependence in recent literature. However, relatively little of it has been dedicated to the ways in which individual physical objects may depend on other distinct, non-overlapping objects. This paper gives several examples of such object-dependence and distinguishes between different types of it. The paper also introduces and refines the notion of an n-tet. N-tets (typically) occur when there are object-dependence relations between n objects. I claim that the identity (or, rather, what I call (...)
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  17. Toward an algorithmic metaphysics.Steve Petersen - 2013 - In David L. Dowe (ed.), Algorithmic Probability and Friends. Bayesian Prediction and Artificial Intelligence: Papers From the Ray Solomonoff 85th Memorial Conference, Melbourne, Vic, Australia, November 30 -- December 2, 2011. Springer. pp. 306-317.
    There are writers in both metaphysics and algorithmic information theory (AIT) who seem to think that the latter could provide a formal theory of the former. This paper is intended as a step in that direction. It demonstrates how AIT might be used to define basic metaphysical notions such as *object* and *property* for a simple, idealized world. The extent to which these definitions capture intuitions about the metaphysics of the simple world, times the extent to which we think the (...)
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  18. Fictionalia as Modal Artifacts.Jeffrey Goodman - 2010 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 80 (1):21-46.
    Th ere is much controversy surrounding the nature of the relation between fictional individuals and possible individuals. Some have argued that no fictional individual is a possible individual; others have argued that (some) fictional individuals just are (merely) possible individuals. In this paper, I off er further grounds for believing the theory of fictional individuals defended by Amie Thomasson,viz., Artifactualism, by arguing that her view best allows one to make sense of this puzzling relation. More specifically, when we realize that (...)
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  19. The Metaphysics of Resemblance.Ghislain Guigon - 2009 - Dissertation, University of Geneva
    The topic of this study is the resemblance of individuals. The underlying contention of this dissertation is that the resemblance of individuals is a taxing and challenging philosophical topic. Two main claims are defended in this study to support this contention. The first of these claims is that resemblance is not a binary relation but a monadic multigrade property. The second of these claims is that the metaphysics of resemblance and the metaphysics of properties are distinct, although not independent, philosophical (...)
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  20. Thing and object.Kristie Miller - 2008 - Acta Analytica 23 (1):69-89.
    There is a fundamental ontological difference between two kinds of entity: things and objects. Unlike things, objects are not identical to any fusion of particulars. Unlike things, objects do not have mereological parts. While things are ontologically innocent, objects are not. Objects are meaty. I defend the distinction between things and objects, and provide an account of the nature of objects.
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  21. Resembling Particulars: What Nominalism?Matteo Morganti - 2007 - Metaphysica 8 (2):165-178.
    This paper examines a recent proposal for reviving so-called resemblance nominalism. It is argued that, although consistent, it naturally leads to trope theory upon examination for reasons having to do with the appeal of neutrality as regards certain non-trivial ontological theses.
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  22. Mass nouns, Count nouns and Non-count nouns.Henry Laycock - 2005 - In Alex Barber (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier.
    I present a high-level account of the semantical distinction between count nouns and non-count nouns. The basic idea is that count nouns are semantically either singular or plural and non-count nouns are neither.
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  23. Dissolution of the Nature-Technology Dichotomy? Perspectives on Nanotechnology From the Viewpoint of an Everyday Understanding of Nature.Gregor Schiemann - 2004 - In Baird D. (ed.), Discovering the Nanoscale. IOS.
    The topic of this contribution is the tension between the everyday dichotomy of nature and technology and the nanotechnological understanding of the world. It is essential to nanotechnology that nature and technology not be categorically opposed as the manmade and the non-manmade, but rather regarded as parts of a structurally identical whole. After the introduction, I will address three points: In a brief first section I will formulate a few questions and a thesis about the nanotechnological developments that can be (...)
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  24. Hume's Reality: A Lesson in Causality.Stefanie Rocknak - 2003 - In Proceedings Metaphysics 2003 Second World Conference. Rome, Metropolitan City of Rome, Italy:
    In Book I, III §9 of the Treatise, Hume makes the claim that “[all general] belief arises only from causation” (T 107). Following, he makes the even stronger claim that all general beliefs are to be thought of as beliefs in reality, and thus, all belief in reality is dependent on pre-established beliefs in both specific causal relations and the causal relation in general (T 108). In the first part of this paper, I explain Hume’s motivation behind both claims, while (...)
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  25. Idealism, Intentionality, and Nonexistent Objects.Gordon Knight - 2001 - Journal of Philosophical Research 26:43-52.
    Idealist philosophers have traditionally tried to defend their views by appealing to the claim that nonmental reality is inconceivable. A standard response to this inconceivability claim is to try to show that it is only plausible if one blurs the fundamental distinction between consciousness and its object. I try to rehabilitate the idealistic argument by presenting an alternative formulation of the idealist’s basic inconceivability claim. Rather than suggesting that all objects are inconceivable apart from consciousness, I suggest that it is (...)
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  26. The semantics of mass-predicates.Kathrin Koslicki - 1999 - Noûs 33 (1):46-91.
    Along with many other languages, English has a relatively straightforward grammatical distinction between mass-occurrences of nouns and their countoccurrences. As the mass-count distinction, in my view, is best drawn between occurrences of expressions, rather than expressions themselves, it becomes important that there be some rule-governed way of classifying a given noun-occurrence into mass or count. The project of classifying noun-occurrences is the topic of Section II of this paper. Section III, the remainder of the paper, concerns the semantic differences between (...)
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  27. Different structures for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real kinds: One mama, more milk, and many mice.Paul Bloom - 1998 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1):66-67.
    Although our concepts of “Mama,” “milk,” and “mice” have much in common, the suggestion that they are identical in structure in the mind of the prelinguistic child is mistaken. Even infants think about objects as different from substances and appreciate the distinction between kinds (e.g., mice) and individuals (e.g., Mama). Such cognitive capacities exist in other animals as well, and have important adaptive consequences.
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  28. The primacy of place: An investigation in Brentanian ontology.Barry Smith - 1989 - Topoi 8 (1):43-51.
    What follows is an investigation of the ontology of Franz Brentano with special reference to Brentano's later and superficially somewhat peculiar doctrine to the effect that the substances of the material world are three dimensional places. Taken as a whole, Brentano's philosophy is marked by three, not obviously compatible, trait. In the first place, his work is rooted in the metaphysics of Aristotle, above all in Aristotle's substance/accident ontology and in the Aristotelian theory of categories. In the second place, Brentano (...)
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  29. Heidegger On The Limits Of Science.David A. Kolb - 1983 - Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 14 (January):50-64.
    How Heidegger criticizes and "locates" science, and some problems with what he is trying to do.
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  30. On Informative Objects.Niel Bezrookove - manuscript
    A series of notes elaborating on some of the concepts of ”Seepage in Objects: A Primer,” a previous paper. The meaning of an object in terms of being informative is discussed, contrasted to Aristotlian and Russellian views on objects, and lastly the concept of meaninglessness is briefly touched upon.
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  31. Contextualizing Objects.David L. Thompson - manuscript
    Four philosophers, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Dennett, and Hegel, who hold for the most part radically different philosophies, all agree on rejecting the notion of atomic entities, of “things-in-themselves,” and insist that objects only make sense – can only be what they are -- in a context.
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  32. Origins of Objectivity.David L. Thompson - manuscript
    Tomasello offers an evolutionary, palaeoanthropological account of the human origin of objects and objectivity. Husserl gives a phenomenological account of the constitution of objects by intersubjectivity. Comparing the two, I claim that Tomasello’s “naturalized” approach closely parallels Husserl’s transcendental approach.
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