Karen Bennett

Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. OSM offers a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philsophy of mind and philosophy of science. Besides independent essays, volumes will often contain a critical essay on a recent book, or a symposium that allows participants to respond to one another's criticisms and questions. Anyone who wants to know what's happening in metaphysics can start here.

Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. OSM offers a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. Besides independent essays, volumes will often contain a critical essay on a recent book, or a symposium that allows participants to respond to one another's criticisms and questions. Anyone who wants to know what's happening in metaphysics can start here.

Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. OSM offers a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philsophy of mind and philosophy of science. Besides independent essays, volumes will often contain a critical essay on a recent book, or a symposium that allows participants to respond to one another's criticisms and questions. Anyone who wants to know what's happening in metaphysics can start here.

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is dedicated to the timely publication of new work in metaphysics, broadly construed. These volumes provide a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. They offer a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighboring fields, such as philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. This book is the 13th volume in the series. It is divided into three parts. Part I concerns parts and pluralities. It begins with Peter van Inwagen’s proposed paraphrase techniques to help nihilists handle certain challenging sentences. In chapter two, Simon Thunder defends manyism: the view that each composite object is simply its many parts. The third chapter presents Joshua Spencer’s puzzle that affects prominent answers to the Special Composition Question. Part II looks at causation, counterfactuals, and essence. It opens with chapter four, where Bradford Skow categorizes varieties of causal relevance and compares them to varieties of relevance found in other domains. In chapter five, John Hawthorne and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri propose a novel translation scheme from the language of quantified model logic into the language of counterpart theory. In chapter six, Sungil Han argues against the definitional model of essence. Topics in Part III include persistence, time, and change. Chapter seven, by Kristie Miller and Caroline West, contends that the normative argument against perdurantism fails. In chapter eight, Martin Pickup proposes a new solution to the problem of change: situationalism. Then, in the final chapter of the volume, Alexander Kaiserman articulates a novel tense logic and uses it to argue that past alteration is possible.

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is dedicated to the timely publication of new work in metaphysics, broadly construed. These volumes provide a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. They offer a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. This book is the eighth volume in the series. It contains essays by Cian Dorr and John Hawthorne, Maya Eddon, Shamik Dasgupta, Bill Dunaway, Cody Gilmore, Ted Sider, Aaron Cotnoir, Katherine Hawley, Frabrice Correia and Sven Rosencrantz, David Braddon-Mitchell, and Ross Cameron.

Thomas Hofweber's Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics is ambitious, thought-provoking, and a good read. It expands upon a project he's developed in several previous papers—a project that seamlessly weaves together both metaphysics and metametaphysics. The book is as much about methodology as it is about the substantive conclusions he draws about what there is. As a consequence, it is a long book that covers a lot of ground. Since I cannot do justice to all of it, I hope my fellow symposiasts will take up parts of the book that I neglect. There is a lot of good stuff in there.

Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14850 [email protected] are motorcycles made of? Presumably the answer is something like ‘wheels, pistons, fuel lines …’ or perhaps ‘metal, leather, plastic …’. Whatever precisely the parts of a motorcycle are, surely they are all material. Kathrin Koslicki disagrees. She has recently argued that ordinary material objects like motorcycles not only have material proper parts, but also have formal proper parts. On her view, an accurate list of the proper parts of a motorcycle must include something like motorcyclehood in addition to the sorts of things just listed. Although she remains neutral about what exactly such a formal part is, she is explicit about what it does. The formal part of an object dictates structure; it dictates how the material parts must be arranged. It is ‘a kind of recipe for how to build wholes of that particular kind’. Koslicki claims that this recipe or structure is itself a proper part of every motorcycle. That is what she calls the Neo-Aristotelian Thesis. A strange claim! So let us examine Koslicki’s argument for it. She begins by asking us to consider a case in which an artist shapes a single lump of clay L, thereby creating a statue S. The argument then proceeds as follows : The argument for the Neo-Aristotelian Thesis:1.It is possible to make an object S from a single preexisting material ingredient L. 2.L is a proper part of S. 3.Weak Supplementation: anything that has a proper part has at least two non-overlapping proper parts. 4.S has a proper part Q that does not overlap L. 5.S has no material proper parts other than L 6.Q is a proper part, but not a material proper part, of S 7.S has ….

I argue that it is intuitive and useful to think about composition in the light of the familiar functionalist distinction between role and occupant. This involves factoring the standard notion of parthood into two related notions: being a parthood slot and occupying a parthood slot. One thing is part of another just in case it fills one of that thing's parthood slots. This move opens room to rethink mereology in various ways, and, in particular, to see the mereological structure of a composite as potentially outreaching the individual entities that are its parts. I sketch one formal system that allows things to have individual entities as parts multiple times over. This is particularly useful to David Armstrong, given Lewis's charge that his structural universals must do exactly that. I close by reflecting upon the nature and point of formal mereology.

The basic form of the exclusion problem is by now very, very familiar. 2 Start with the claim that the physical realm is causally complete: every physical thing that happens has a sufficient physical cause. Add in the claim that the mental and the physical are distinct. Toss in some claims about overdetermination, give it a stir, and voilá—suddenly it looks as though the mental never causes anything, at least nothing physical. As it is often put, the physical does all the work, and there is nothing left for the mental to do.

David Lewis famously takes mereology ‘to be perfectly understood, unproblematic, and certain". In this chapter, the author proceeds by articulating four theses that Lewis holds about composition. Three of them are familiar; Lewis himself explicitly articulates and relies upon them. The fourth remains implicit, but it is nonetheless important. The four theses include: composition is unique (the same things cannot have two different fusions); composition is unrestricted (any two things whatsoever have a fusion); composition is ontologically innocent (composed entities do not "count" beyond their parts); and composition is unmysterious (it is not problematic to treat it as primitive, and can function in demystifying explanations). The author devotes a section to each thesis: explaining what it says, pointing to the texts that illustrate that Lewis believes it, and explaining why Lewis believes it. Lewis uses the label ‘uniqueness’ and explicitly endorses the thesis.

The paper is an extended discussion of what I call the ‘dismissive attitude’ towards metaphysical questions. It has three parts. In the first part, I distinguish three quite different versions of dismissivism. I also argue that there is little reason to think that any of these positions is correct about the discipline of metaphysics as a whole; it is entirely possible that some metaphysical disputes should be dismissed and others should not be. Doing metametaphysics properly requires doing metaphysics first. I then put two particular disputes on the table to be examined in the rest of the paper: the dispute over whether composite objects exist, and the dispute about whether distinct objects can be colocated. In the second part of the paper, I argue against the claim that these disputes are purely verbal disputes. In the third part of the paper, I present a new version of dismissivism, and argue that it is probably the correct view about the two disputes in question. They are not verbal disputes, and the discussion about them to date has not remotely been a waste of time. At this stage, however, our evidence has run out. I argue that neither side of either dispute is simpler than the other, and that the same objections in fact arise against both sides. (For example, the compositional nihilist does not in fact escape the problem of the many, and the one-thinger does not in fact escape the grounding problem.).

Actualists routinely characterize their view by means of the slogan, “Everything is actual.” They say that there aren’t any things that exist but do not actually exist—there aren’t any “mere possibilia.” If there are any things that deserve the label ‘possible world’, they are just actually existing entities of some kind—maximally consistent sets of sentences, or maximal uninstantiated properties, or maximal possible states of affairs, or something along those lines. Possibilists, in contrast, do think that there are mere possibilia, that there are things that are not actual. They think that more exists than what actually exists. All I have done so far, though, is rephrase the slogan in various ways. To say that everything is actual is precisely to say that there are no things that do not actually exist, which is precisely to say that there are no mere possibilia, and which is also precisely to say that we cannot sep- arately quantify over what exists and what is actual. These claims all amount to the same thing. But what is that, exactly? What on earth does it mean to say that everything is actual, that there are no mere possibilia, and so on? What does the actualist slogan really come to? I think the literature is far from clear on this point, and that people work themselves into unnecessary muddles because of it. Indeed, certain confusions that I shall discuss in the first half of this article seem to be on the rise. It is high time to lay out the issues and the choice points as clearly as possible. There are two primary choices to be made; there are two axes along which versions of actualism can vary. One choice has to do with how to treat claims about things that merely could exist. The other choice has to do with the modal status of the view and of how we should think about the “actual” in actualism. I make no claim that the positions I will eventually endorse are star- tlingly new. I think that most people will agree with the decisions I make at both choice points and will in fact find some bits of this essay obvious. But not everyone agrees with my decisions, and it has been my experience that people differ remarkably about which bits they find obvious—a fact I find rather telling. My goal, then, is to show that the two axes are there and to clarify the consequences of the choices.

A lot of people believe that distinct objects can occupy precisely the same place for the entire time during which they exist. Such people have to provide an answer to the 'grounding problem' – they have to explain how such things, alike in so many ways, nonetheless manage to fall under different sortals, or have different modal properties. I argue in detail that they cannot say that there is anything in virtue of which spatio-temporally coincident things have those properties. However, I also argue that this may not be as bad as it looks, and that there is a way to make sense of the claim that such properties are primitive.