Nel nostro universo, qualunque cosa, dalla più piccola particella alla più smisurata galassia, esiste in un qualche tempo e in un qualche luogo. Ma cosa significa esistere in un qualche tempo? Il fenomeno dell’esistenza temporale gioca un ruolo fondamentale nella comprensione dell’universo e di noi stessi quali creature temporali. Eppure è un fenomeno profondamente misterioso. L’esistenza temporale è da intendersi come una relazione? Che legami ha con l’esistenza dell’ontologia? L’esistenza temporale e la localizzazione spaziale sono due fenomeni essenzialmente differenti o (...) due istanze di un’unica relazione? Tutto ciò che esiste nel tempo esiste nel tempo nello stesso modo? Tutto ciò che è nel tempo è anche nello spazio? (shrink)

According to the thinking parts problem, any part sufficient for thought—e.g. a head—is a good candidate for being a thinker, and therefore being us. So we can’t assume that we—thinkers—are human beings rather than their proper parts. Many solutions to this problem have been proposed. However, I will show that the views currently on the market all face serious problems. I will then offer a new solution that avoids these problems. The thinking parts problem arises from considerations that seem to (...) be empirically substantiated. One virtue of my solution is that in addition to its theoretical apparatus it appeals to empirically substantiated considerations. (shrink)

Persons think. Bodies, time-slices of persons, and brains might also think. They have the necessary neural equipment. Thus, there seems to be more than one thinker in your chair. Critics assert that this is too many thinkers and that we should reject ontologies that allow more than one thinker in your chair. I argue that cases of multiple thinkers are innocuous and that there is not too much thinking. Rather, the thinking shared between, for example, persons and their bodies is (...) exactly what we should expect at the intersection of part sharing and the supervenience of the mental on the physical. I end by responding to the overcrowding objection, the personhood objection, the personal-pronoun reference problem and the epistemic objection. (shrink)

A property, F, is maximal i?, roughly, large parts of an F are not themselves Fs. Maximal properties are typically extrinsic, for their instantiation by x depends on what larger things x is part of. This makes trouble for a recent argument against microphysical superve- nience by Trenton Merricks. The argument assumes that conscious- ness is an intrinsic property, whereas consciousness is in fact maximal and extrinsic.

In this essay I explore the idea that the solution to some important problems of personal identity lies in the philosophy of language: more precisely in the nature of first-person reference. I will argue that the “linguistic solution” is at best partly successful.

This paper defends a version of strong conventionalism minus the ontological commitments of that view. It defends the claim that strictly speaking there are no persons, whilst explicating how to make sense of talk that is about (or purportedly about) persons, by appealing to features in common to conventionalist accounts of personal identity. This view has the many benefits of conventionalist accounts in being flexible enough to deal with problem cases, whilst also avoiding the various worries associated with the existence (...) of both persons and human animals occupying the same place at the same time to which conventionalist accounts are committed. (shrink)

Objects and Persons presents an original theory about what kinds of things exist. Trenton Merricks argues that there are no non-living inanimate macrophysical objects -- no statues or rocks or chairs or stars -- because they would have no causal role over and above the causal role of their microphysical parts. Humans do exist: we have non-redundant causal powers. Along the way, Merricks has interesting things to say about mental causation, free will, and various philosophical puzzles. Anyone working in metaphysics (...) will enjoy this lucid and provocative book. (shrink)

Being conscious is intrinsic. Suppose P, a conscious human being, “shrinks” by losing an atom from her left index finger. Suppose that at the very first instant at which P has lost that atom, the atoms that then compose her remain just as they were immediately before “the loss.” This implies—assuming MS for reductio—that, just as those atoms compose a conscious object after the loss, so they composed a conscious object before the loss. Name that latter object ‘the atom-complement’.

Virtually everyone agrees that, even after having presented the arguments for their positions, proponents of revisionary philosophical theories are required to provide some sort of account of the conflict between their theories and what the folk believe. I examine various strategies for answering the challenge from folk belief. The examination proceeds as a case study, whose focus is eliminativism about ordinary material objects. I critically assess eliminativist attempts to explain folk belief by appeal to paraphrase, experience, and intuition.

I defend coincidentalism (the view that some pluralities have more than one mereological fusion) and restricted composition (the view that some pluralities lack mereological fusions) against recent arguments due to Theodore Sider.

It is argued that those who accept the psychological criterion of personal identity, such as Parfit and Shoemaker, should accept what I call the 'series' view of a person, according to which a person is a unified aggregate of mental events and states. As well as defending this view against objections, I argue that it allows the psychological theorist to avoid the two lives objection which the 'animalist' theorists have raised against it, an objection which causes great difficulties for the (...) conception of a person that most psychological theorists favour, the constitution view. It is also argued that the series view allows that people can body swap and teleport, which the constitution view—which takes a person to be a physical object (but a distinct physical object from the human being)—has great trouble with. (shrink)

It is argued that those who accept the psychological criterion of personal identity, such as Parfit and Shoemaker, should accept what I call the ‘series’ view of a person, according to which a person is a unified aggregate of mental events and states. As well as defending this view against objections, I argue that it allows the psychological theorist to avoid the two lives objection which the ‘animalist’ theorists have raised against it, an objection which causes great difficulties for the (...) conception of a person that most psychological theorists favour, the constitution view. It is also argued that the series view allows that people can body swap and teleport, which the constitution view–which takes a person to be a physical object (but a distinct physical object from the human being)–has great trouble with. (shrink)

This unique anthology of new, contributed essays offers a range of perspectives on various aspects of ontic vagueness. It seeks to answer core questions pertaining to onticism, the view that vagueness exists in the world itself. The questions to be addressed include whether vague objects must have vague identity, and whether ontic vagueness has a distinctive logic, one that is not shared by semantic or epistemic vagueness. The essays in this volume explain the motivations behind onticism, such as the plausibility (...) of mereological vagueness and indeterminacy in quantum mechanics and they offer various arguments both for and against ontic vagueness; onticism is also compared with other, competing theories of vagueness such as semanticism, the view that vagueness exists only in our linguistic representation of the world. Gareth Evans’s influential paper of 1978, “Can There Be Vague Objects?” gave a simple but cogent argument against the coherence of ontic vagueness. Onticism was subsequently dismissed by many. However, in recent years, researchers have become aware of the logical gaps in Evans’s argument and this has triggered a new wave of interest in onticism. Onticism is now widely regarded as at least a coherent view. Reflecting this growing consensus, the present anthology for the first time puts together essays that are focused on onticism and its various facets and it fills in the lacuna in the literature on vagueness, a much-discussed subject in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Persistence in Time No person ever steps into the same river twice—or so goes the Heraclitean maxim. Obscure as it is, the maxim is often taken to express two ideas. The first is that everything always changes, and nothing remains perfectly similar to how it was just one instant before. The second is that nothing … Continue reading Persistence in Time →.

An encyclopedia entry which covers various revisionary conceptions of which macroscopic objects there are, and the puzzles and arguments that motivate these conceptions: sorites arguments, the argument from vagueness, the puzzles of material constitution, arguments against indeterminate identity, arguments from arbitrariness, debunking arguments, the overdetermination argument, and the problem of the many.

Material objects extend through space by having different spatial parts in different places. But how do they persist through time? According to some philosophers, things have temporal parts as well as spatial parts: accepting this is supposed to help us solve a whole bunch of metaphysical problems, and keep our philosophy in line with modern physics. Other philosophers disagree, arguing that neither metaphysics nor physics give us good reason to believe in temporal parts.