E. J. Lowe

(1950 - 2014)

Recently, Terry Horgan and Matjaž Potrč have defended the thesis of ‘existence monism’, according to which the whole cosmos is the only concrete object. Their arguments appeal largely to considerations concerning vagueness. Crucially, they claim that ontological vagueness is impossible, and one key assumption in their defence of this claim is that vagueness always involves ‘sorites-susceptibility’. I aim to challenge both the claim and this assumption. As a consequence, I seek to undermine their defence of existence monism and support a common-sense pluralist ontology of ‘ordinary objects’ as being fully consistent with a thoroughgoing metaphysical realism.

Three different concepts of matter are identified: matter as what a thing is immediately made of, matter as stuff of a certain kind, and matter in the (dubious) sense of material ‘substratum’. The doctrine of hylomorphism, which regards every individual concrete thing as being ‘combination’ of matter and form, is challenged. Instead it is urged that we do well to identify an individual concrete thing with its own particular ‘substantial form’. The notions of form and matter, far from being correlative, are relatively independent. There is nothing absurd in the notion of form without matter. Matter provides neither a principle of individuation nor a criterion of identity for individual concrete things: their form alone provides both. Finally, a substance ontology which admits also the existence of particular qualities, or tropes, is to be preferred both to a substance ontology which denies the existence of tropes and to a pure trope ontology.