Saikeerthi Rachavelpula

Commentators have recently shown that Kant’s view of moral examples is more complex than what appears in the Groundwork. Throughout his works, Kant presents explicit reasons for and against the use of moral examples. Reconciling these opposing attitudes has proven difficult. Lacking a satisfactory account of how Kant thinks we should engage with and learn from moral examples, the difficulty has remained. In this paper, I construct and defend an account that resolves the prima facie inconsistency by viewing moral examples as analogous to scientific models, thus leading to ‘new’ and plausible perspectives on recent debates in Kant scholarship.

An object is gunky in virtue of how it decomposes. In particular, an object is _gunky_ if and only if all its parts have proper parts. Since Anaxagoras, philosophers have appealed to the existence of gunk to support a range of metaphysical views. These discussions raise questions about the composition of gunk: How is gunk generated? How do we get gunk? Obviously, gunk cannot be composed of atoms. Otherwise, we have admitted objects into our ontology (i.e. atoms) with no proper parts. This has led to the widespread belief that gunk cannot be generated. It must be given. In this paper, we prove this to be false. Though gunk cannot be generated by atoms, we show that it can nevertheless be generated by some fundamental entities. We apply Weyl’s Equidistribution Theorem to produce a model of a universe which is gunky yet generated by a single entity. This dispels other misconceptions about gunk and provides a new perspective on debates about metaphysical fundamentality.