•  818
    Against Parthood
    Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 8. 2013.
    Mereological nihilism says that there do not exist (in the fundamental sense) any objects with proper parts. A reason to accept it is that we can thereby eliminate 'part' from fundamental ideology. Many purported reasons to reject it - based on common sense, perception, and the possibility of gunk, for example - are weak. A more powerful reason is that composite objects seem needed for spacetime physics; but sets suffice instead.
  •  718
    Four- Dimensionalism defends the thesis that the material world is composed of temporal as well as spatial parts. This defense includes a novel account of persistence over time, new arguments in favour of the four-dimensional ontology, and responses to the challenges four- dimensionalism faces." "Theodore Sider pays particular attention to the philosophy of time, including a strong series of arguments against presentism, the thesis that only the present is real. Arguments offered in favour of fo…Read more
  •  562
    Ontological realism
    In David Chalmers, David Manley & Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, Oxford University Press. pp. 384--423. 2009.
    In , Peter van Inwagen asked a good question. (Asking the right question is often the hardest part.) He asked: what do you have to do to some objects to get them to compose something---to bring into existence some further thing made up of those objects? Glue them together or what?1 Some said that you don’t have to do anything.2 No matter what you do to the objects, they’ll always compose something further, no matter how they are arranged. Thus we learned of the fusion of the coins in our pockets…Read more
  •  562
    Four Dimensionalism
    Philosophical Review 106 (2): 197-231. 1997.
    Persistence through time is like extension through space. A road has spatial parts in the subregions of the region of space it occupies; likewise, an object that exists in time has temporal parts in the various subregions of the total region of time it occupies. This view — known variously as four dimensionalism, the doctrine of temporal parts, and the theory that objects “perdure” — is opposed to “three dimensionalism”, the doctrine that things “endure”, or are “wholly present”.1 I will attempt…Read more
  •  539
    Reductive theories of modality
    In Michael J. Loux & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, Oxford University Press. pp. 180-208. 2003.
    Logic begins but does not end with the study of truth and falsity. Within truth there are the modes of truth, ways of being true: necessary truth and contingent truth. When a proposition is true, we may ask whether it could have been false. If so, then it is contingently true. If not, then it is necessarily true; it must be true; it could not have been false. Falsity has modes as well: a false proposition that could not have been true is impossible or necessarily false; one that could have been …Read more
  •  537
    All the World’s a Stage
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (3). 1996.
    Some philosophers believe that everyday objects are 4-dimensional spacetime worms, that a person (for example) persists through time by having temporal parts, or stages, at each moment of her existence. None of these stages is identical to the person herself; rather, she is the aggregate of all her temporal parts.1 Others accept “three dimensionalism”, rejecting stages in favor of the notion that persons “endure”, or are “wholly present” throughout their lives.2 I aim to defend an apparently rad…Read more
  •  514
    Parthood
    Philosophical Review 116 (1): 51-91. 2007.
    There will be a few themes. One to get us going: expansion versus contraction. About an object, o, and the region, R, of space(time) in which o is exactly located,1 we may ask: i) must there exist expansions of o: objects in filled superregions2 of R? ii) must there exist contractions of o: objects in filled subregions of..
  •  502
    Criteria of personal identity and the limits of conceptual analysis
    Philosophical Perspectives 15 189-209. 2001.
    When is there no fact of the matter about a metaphysical question? When multiple candidate meanings are equally eligible, in David Lewis's sense, and fit equally well with ordinary usage. Thus given certain ontological schemes, there is no fact of the matter whether the criterion of personal identity over time is physical or psychological. But given other ontological schemes there is a fact of the matter; and there is a fact of the matter about which ontological scheme is correct.
  •  499
    Contemporary debates in metaphysics (edited book)
    Blackwell. 2008.
    This anthology introduces advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students to today's debates in metaphysics. The book consists of essays by contemporary metaphysicians, and all but one appear here for the first time. For each of nine topics, there are two essays, one "pro-" and one "con-".
  •  492
    Hell and Vagueness
    Faith and Philosophy 19 (1): 58--68. 2002.
    A certain conception of Hell is inconsistent with God's traditional attributes. My argument is novel in focusing on considerations involving vagueness. God is in charge of the selection procedure, so the selection procedure must be just; any just procedure will have borderline cases; but according to the traditional conception, the afterlife is binary and has no borderline cases.
  •  474
    This is an introduction to metaphysics for students and non-philosophers. (Philosophers: it's supposed to be the kind of book you can give to your friends and family, when they ask what you do for a living.) Contents: personal identity, fatalism, time, God, why not nothing?, free will, constitution, universals, necessity and possibility, what is metaphysics? (There is a second edition, which adds chapters on meta-metaphysics and the metaphysics of ethics.)
  •  451
    Writing the Book of the World
    Oxford University Press. 2011.
    In order to perfectly describe the world, it is not enough to speak truly. One must also use the right concepts - including the right logical concepts. One must use concepts that "carve at the joints", that give the world's "structure". There is an objectively correct way to "write the book of the world". Much of metaphysics, as traditionally conceived, is about the fundamental nature of reality; in the present terms, this is about the world's structure. Metametaphysics - inquiry into the s…Read more
  •  447
    Van Inwagen and the Possibility of Gunk
    Analysis 53 (4). 1993.
    We often speak of an object being composed of various other objects. We say that the deck is composed of the cards, that a road is the sum total of its sections, that a house is composed of its walls, ceilings, floors, doors, etc. Suppose we have some material objects. Here is a philosophical question: what conditions must obtain for those objects to compose something? In his recent book Material Beings, Peter van Inwagen addresses this question, which he calls the ‘special composition question’…Read more
  •  432
    "Bare particulars"
    Philosophical Perspectives 20 (1). 2006.
    One often hears a complaint about “bare particulars”. This complaint has bugged me for years. I know it bugs others too, but no one seems to have vented in print, so that is what I propose to do. (I hope also to say a few constructive things along the way.) The complaint is aimed at the substratum theory, which says that particulars are, in a certain sense, separate from their universals. If universals and particulars are separate, connected to each other only by a relation of instantiation, the…Read more
  •  430
    Travelling in A- and B- Time
    The Monist 88 (3): 329-335. 2005.
    Some say that presentism precludes time travel into the past since it implies that the past does not exist, but this is a bad argument. Presentism says that only currently existing entities exist, and that the only properties and relations those entities instantiate are those that they currently instantiate. This does in a sense imply that the past does not exist. But if that precluded time travel into the past, it would also preclude the one-second-per-second “time travel” into the future that …Read more
  •  411
    Time travel, coincidences, and counterfactuals
    Philosophical Studies 110 (2). 2002.
    In no possible world does a time traveler succeed in killing herearlier self before she ever enters a time machine. So if many,many time travelers went back in time trying to kill theirunprotected former selves, the time travelers would fail inmany strange, coincidental ways, slipping on bananapeels, killing the wrong victim, and so on. Such cases producedoubts about time travel. How could ``coincidences'' beguaranteed to happen? And wouldn't the certainty of coincidentalfailure imply that time …Read more
  •  407
    Presentism and ontological commitment
    Journal of Philosophy 96 (7): 325-347. 1999.
    Presentism is the doctrine that only the present is real. Since ordinary talk and thought are full of quantification over non-present objects, presentists are in a familiar predicament: in their unreflective moments they apparently commit themselves to far more than their ontological scruples allow. A familiar response is to begin a project of paraphrase. Truths appearing to quantify over problematic entities are shown, on analysis, to not involve quantification over those entities after all. Bu…Read more
  •  400
    Against monism
    Analysis 67 (1). 2007.
    Jonathan Schaffer distinguishes two sorts of monism. Existence monists say that only one object exists: The World. Priority monists admit the existence of The World’s parts, but say that their features are derivative from the properties of The World. Both have trouble explaining the features of statespace, the set of possibilities available to The World.
  •  399
    In defense of global supervenience
    with R. Cranston Paull
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (4): 833-53. 1992.
    Nonreductive materialism is the dominant position in the philosophy of mind. The global supervenience of the mental on the physical has been thought by some to capture the central idea of nonreductive materialism: that mental properties are ultimately dependent on, but irreducible to, physical properties. But Jaegwon Kim has argued that global psychophysical supervenience does not provide the materialist with the desired dependence of the mental on the physical, and in general that global superv…Read more
  •  393
    Hirsch’s attack on ontologese
    Noûs 48 (3): 565-572. 2014.
    Eli Hirsch has argued in many places that non-commonsensical ontological claims just couldn't be true, since there is strong metasemantic pressure to charitably interpret natural language---correct interpretations must, unless all else is highly unequal, count a sentence (especially a perceptual sentence) as true if ordinary speakers regard it as being obviously true. In previous work I replied that ontologists can stipulatively introduce a new language, "Ontologese", that is exempt from this p…Read more
  •  356
    The ersatz pluriverse
    Journal of Philosophy 99 (6): 279-315. 2002.
    While many are impressed with the utility of possible worlds in linguistics and philosophy, few can accept the modal realism of David Lewis, who regards possible worlds as sui generis entities of a kind with the concrete world we inhabit.1 Not all uses of possible worlds require exotic ontology. Consider, for instance, the use of Kripke models to establish formal results in modal logic. These models contain sets often regarded for heuristic reasons as sets of “possible worlds”. But the “worlds” …Read more
  •  339
    Locations
    Philosophical Topics 30 (1): 53-76. 2002.
    Think of “locations” very abstractly, as positions in a space, any space. Temporal locations are positions in time; spatial locations are positions in (physical) space; particulars are locations in quality space. Should we reify locations? Are locations entities? Spatiotemporal relation- alists say there are no such things as spatiotemporal locations; the fundamental spatial and temporal facts involve no locations as objects, only the instantiation of spatial and temporal relations. The denial o…Read more
  •  332
    Ground grounded
    Philosophical Studies 177 (3): 747-767. 2020.
    Most facts of grounding involve nonfundamental concepts, and thus must themselves be grounded. But how? The leading approaches—due to Bennett, deRosset, and Dagupta—are subject to objections. The way forward is to deny a presupposition common to the leading approaches, that there must be some simple formula governing how grounding facts are grounded. Everyone agrees that facts about cities might be grounded in some complex way about which we know little; we should say the same about the facts of…Read more
  •  326
    Maximality and Intrinsic Properties
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (2). 2001.
    A property, F, is maximal iff, roughly, large parts of an F are not themselves Fs.' Maximality makes trouble for a recent analysis of intrinsicality by Rae Langton and David Lewis
  •  325
    The Stage View and Temporary Intrinsics
    Analysis 60 (1). 2000.
    According to four dimensionalism, the material world is divided into momentary stages. In a four-dimensional world, which objects are the ordinary things, the things we normally name and quantify over? Aggregates of stages, according to most four-dimensionalists, but according to stage theorists (or exdurantists), ordinary objects are instead to be identified with the stages themselves. (A temporal counterpart theoretic account of de re temporal predication is then given.) This paper argue…Read more
  •  310
    Temporal Parts
    In Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Blackwell. pp. 241--262. 2007.
    An introduction to temporal parts theory. Most of us believe in spatial parts: hands are spatial parts of people, an electron is a spatial part of a hydrogen atom, the earth is a spatial part of the solar system. Why are these parts "spatial" parts? Because they are spatially smaller: the hand is spatially smaller than the person, the electron is spatially smaller than the atom, the earth is spatially smaller than the solar system. Temporal parts, then, are parts that are temporally smalle…Read more
  •  307
    Dasgupta's Detonation
    Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1): 292-304. 2022.
    Shamik Dasgupta has argued that realists about natural properties (and laws, grounding, etc.) cannot account for their epistemic value. For "properties are cheap": in addition to natural properties and any value the realist might attach to them, there are also "shmatural" properties (standing to natural properties like charge and mass as Goodman's grue and bleen stand to green and blue) and a corresponding "shmvalue" of theorizing in terms of them. Dasgupta's challenge is one of objectivity…Read more
  •  287
    Symposium on Writing the Book of the World
    Analysis 73 (4): 751-770. 2013.
    This is a symposium on my book, Writing the Book of the World, containing a precis from me, criticisms from Contessa, Merricks, and Schaffer, and replies by me.
  •  266
    Intrinsic properties
    Philosophical Studies 83 (1). 1996.
    An intrinsic property, as David Lewis puts it, is a property "which things have in virtue of the way they themselves are", as opposed to an extrinsic property, which things have "in virtue of their relations or lack of relations to other things".1 Having long hair is an intrinsic property; having a long-haired brother is not. Intuitive as this notion is (and valuable in doing philosophy, I might add), it seems to resist analysis. Analysis, that is, to “quasi-logical” notions such as necessity, s…Read more
  •  257
    Summary of Writing the Book of the World
    Analysis 73 (4): 713-715. 2013.
    Summary of my book, Writing the Book of the World, for a symposium. The book defends realism about structure, the view that there is a privileged way to describe the world.