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  1. Object-Oriented Ontology and Materialism.Martín Orensanz - 2024 - Mεtascience: Scientific General Discourse 3:268-287.
    According to Object-Oriented Ontology, matter does not exist. Here I will challenge that idea, by advancing some arguments that aim to establish that mat-ter can be conceptualized both as a sensual object as well as a real object. I will also argue that matter is not fictional, and that the word “matter” can be under-stood as a term that is grammatically singular but referentially plural. This being so, matter itself is a plurality of things, each of which has some kind (...)
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  2. Zabarella on Prime Matter and Extension.Berman Chan - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (5):2405-2422.
    The 16th and 17th centuries witnessed a philosophical shift that would help pave the way for modern science, a shift from metaphysical theories of material objects to other views embracing only the empirically-accessible parts of material things. One much-debated topic in the course of this shift was regarding prime matter. The late scholastic Jacobus Zabarella (1533-1589) arrived upon his views about prime matter via his version of the regressus method, a program for a sort of scientific reasoning. In his De (...)
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  3. How to Solve the Puzzle of Dion and Theon Without Losing Your Head.Chad Carmichael - 2020 - Mind 129 (513):205-224.
    The ancient puzzle of Dion and Theon has given rise to a surprising array of apparently implausible views. For example, in order to solve the puzzle, several philosophers have been led to deny the existence of their own feet, others have denied that objects can gain and lose parts, and large numbers of philosophers have embraced the thesis that distinct objects can occupy the same space, having all their material parts in common. In this paper, I argue for an alternative (...)
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  4. Constitution and Dependence.David Mark Kovacs - 2020 - Journal of Philosophy 117 (3):150-177.
    Constitution is the relation that holds between an object and what it is made of: statues are constituted by the lumps of matter they coincide with; flags, one may think, are constituted by colored pieces of cloth; and perhaps human persons are constituted by biological organisms. Constitution is often thought to be a.
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  5. An Alternative Model for Understanding Anaxagoras’ Mixture.David Torrijos-Castrillejo - 2019 - Philosophisches Jahrbuch 126:7-26.
    For Anaxagoras, both before the beginning of the world and in the present, “all is together” and “everything is in everything.” Various modern interpretations abound regarding the identity of this “mixture.” It has been explained as an aggregation of particles or as a continuous “fusion” of different sorts of ingredients. However—even though they are not usually recognized as a distinct group—there are a number of other scholars who, without seemingly knowing each other, have offered a different interpreta- tion: Anaxagoras’ mixture (...)
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  6. The Right Stuff.Ned Markosian - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (4):665-687.
    This paper argues for including stuff in one's ontology. The distinction between things and stuff is first clarified, and then three different ontologies of the physical universe are spelled out: a pure thing ontology, a pure stuff ontology, and a mixed ontology of both things and stuff. Eleven different reasons for including stuff in one's ontology are given. Then five objections to positing stuff are considered and rejected.
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  7. Qu'est-ce qu'une fondue ? [What is a fondue?].Alain de Libera & Olivier Massin - 2014 - In Olivier Massin & Anne Meylan (eds.), Aristote chez les Helvètes: Douze essais de métaphysique helvétique. Ithaque.
    We review the history of the philosophy of fondue since Aristotle so as to arrive at the formulation of the paradox of Swiss fondue. Either the wine and the cheese cease to exist (Buridan), but then the fondue is not really a mixture of wine and cheese. Or the wine and the cheese continue to exist. If they do, then either they continue to exist in different places (the chemists), but then a fondue can never be perfectly homogenous (it is (...)
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  8. L'étoffe du sensible [Sensible Stuffs].Olivier Massin - 2014 - In Jean-Marie Chevalier & Benoît Gaultier (eds.), Connaître: Questions d’épistémologie contemporaine. Paris: Editions d'Ithaque. pp. 201-230.
    The proper sensible criterion of sensory individuation holds that senses are individuated by the special kind of sensibles on which they exclusively bear about (colors for sight, sounds for hearing, etc.). H. P. Grice objected to the proper sensibles criterion that it cannot account for the phenomenal difference between feeling and seeing shapes or other common sensibles. That paper advances a novel answer to Grice's objection. Admittedly, the upholder of the proper sensible criterion must bind the proper sensibles –i.e. colors– (...)
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  9. Mass Nouns and Plurals.Peter Lasersohn - 2011 - In Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning. De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 2.
    Survey of issues pertaining to the semantics of mass and plural nouns.
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  10. Any Sum of Parts which are Water is Water.Henry Laycock - 2011 - Humana Mente 4 (19):41-55.
    Mereological entities often seem to violate ‘ordinary’ ideas of what a concrete object can be like, behaving more like sets than like Aristotelian substances. However, the mereological notions of ‘part’, ‘composition’, and ‘sum’ or ‘fusion’ appear to find concrete realisation in the actual semantics of mass nouns. Quine notes that ‘any sum of parts which are water is water’; and the wine from a single barrel can be distributed around the globe without affecting its identity. Is there here, as some (...)
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  11. Essential stuff.Kristie Miller - 2008 - Ratio 21 (1):55–63.
    Here is a common view. There exist things, and there exists stuff, where roughly, ‘thing’ is a count noun, and ‘stuff’ is a mass noun. Syntactically, ‘thing’ functions as a singular referring term that takes ‘a’ and ‘every’ and is subject to pluralisation, while ‘stuff’ functions as a plural referring term that takes ‘some’ and is not subject to pluralisation. Hence there exists a thing, and some stuff. Usual versions of the common view endorse two principles about portions of stuff. (...)
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  12. 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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  13. Review of Henry Laycock, Words Without Objects: Semantics, Ontology, and Logic for Non-Singularity. [REVIEW]Kathrin Koslicki - 2007 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (1):160-163.
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  14. Variables, generality and existence.Henry Laycock - 2006 - In Paolo Valore (ed.), Topics on General and Formal Ontology. Polimetrica International Scientific Publisher. pp. 27.
    So-called mass nouns, however precisely they are defined, are in any case a subset of non-count nouns. Count nouns are either singular or plural; to be non-count is hence to be neither singular nor plural. This is not, as such, a metaphysically significant contrast: 'pieces of furniture' is plural whereas 'furniture' itself is non-count. This contrast is simply between 'the many / few' and 'the much / little' - between counting and measuring. However not all non-count nouns are, like 'furniture', (...)
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  15. (1 other version)Words without objects: semantics, ontology, and logic for non-singularity.Henry Laycock - 2006 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    A picture of the world as chiefly one of discrete objects, distributed in space and time, has sometimes seemed compelling. It is however one of the main targets of Henry Laycock's book; for it is seriously incomplete. The picture, he argues, leaves no space for "stuff" like air and water. With discrete objects, we may always ask "how many?," but with stuff the question has to be "how much?" Laycock's fascinating exploration also addresses key logical and linguistic questions about the (...)
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  16. Mass nouns, Count nouns and Non-count nouns.Henry Laycock - 2005 - In Keith Brown (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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  17. Simples, Stuff, and Simple People.Ned Markosian - 2004 - The Monist 87 (3):405-428.
    Here is a question about mereological simples that I raised in a recent paper.
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  18. 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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  19. 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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  20. The chemistry of substances and the philosophy of mass terms.J. Brakel - 1986 - Synthese 69 (3):291 - 324.
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  21. Predication and matter.George Bealer - 1975 - Synthese 31 (3-4):493 - 508.
    First, given criteria for identifying universals and particulars, it is shown that stuffs appear to qualify as neither. Second, the standard solutions to the logico-linguistic problem of mass terms are examined and evidence is presented in favor of the view that mass terms are straightforward singular terms and, relatedly, that stuffs indeed belong to a metaphysical category distinct from the categories of universal and particular. Finally, a new theory of the copula is offered: 'The cue is cold', 'The cube is (...)
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  22. A Fourth View Concerning Persistence.Gregory Fowler - manuscript
    (Updated 5/23/24) This unpublished paper, which readers should feel free to cite, is posted primarily for the historical record. In recent work that has, deservedly, received some attention, Paul R. Daniels presents and defends a non-standard theory of persistence that he dubs transdurantism, according to which persisting objects are temporally extended simples. This is exactly what I do in work dating back to Spring 2004. (This work includes this version of this paper, as well as later version that was presented (...)
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