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On substantial independence: a reply to Patrick Toner

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Abstract

Patrick Toner has recently criticized accounts of substance provided by Kit Fine, E. J. Lowe, and the author, accounts which say (to a first approximation) that substances cannot depend on things other than their own parts. On Toner’s analysis, the inclusion of this “parts exception” results in a disjunctive definition of substance rather than a unified account. In this paper (speaking only for myself, but in a way that would, I believe, support the other authors that Toner discusses), I first make clear what Toner’s criticism is, and then I respond to it. Including the “parts exception” is not the adding of a second condition but instead the creation of a new single condition. Since it is not the adding of a condition, the result is not disjunctive. Therefore, the objection fails.

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Notes

  1. Relevant publications, not all of which are cited by Toner, include Kit Fine (1995), Lowe (1994a, b, 1998, Chapters 6–7), and Michael Gorman (2006a, b). Toner focuses more on what I say in Gorman (2006a), where I propose a revision to Lowe’s theory, than on what I say in Gorman (2006b); there is no space here to discuss the precise relationship between these two papers, but since they agree on the points relevant to Toner’s paper, it does not matter for present purposes.

  2. A further task would be the articulation of other necessary conditions, if there are any (I, for one, believe that there are), but such concerns will not be relevant here.

  3. Again, this is an approximation: perhaps we should say, for example, “of every particular.”

References

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Anne-Marie Gorman, Michael Staron, and Patrick Toner for comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Correspondence to Michael Gorman.

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Gorman, M. On substantial independence: a reply to Patrick Toner. Philos Stud 159, 293–297 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9708-3

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