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A Puzzle About Material Constitution and How to Solve It: Enriching Constitution Views in Metaphysics
Download2007
Two Intuitions and a Puzzle “Constitution” may be a philosophical term of art, but the idea of one thing’s being materially constituted by another thing (or other things) is one that ordinary folk are perfectly familiar with. When we talk explicitly of something’s being made up of, being made of,...
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2005
This paper concerns a fundamental dispute in ontology between the “Foundational Ontologist”, who believes that there is only one correct way of characterizing what there is, and the ontological “Skeptic”, who believes that there are viable alternative characterizations of what there is. I examine...
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2003
Introduction: How do the familiar concrete objects of common-sense –houses, trees, people, cars and the like-- persist through time? According to the position known as ‘four-dimensionalism’ or ‘the doctrine of temporal parts’, ordinary concrete objects persist through time by perduring, i.e., by...
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2007
This paper provides a detailed examination of Kit Fine’s sizeable contribution to the development of a neo-Aristotelian alternative to standard mereology; I focus especially on the theory of ‘rigid’ and ‘variable embodiments’, as defended in Fine 1999. Section 2 briefly describes the system I...