Precis of Material Beings
Peter van Inwagen · Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · 1993
I present an ontology of the material world that is consistent with ten constraints, ten logical and metaphysical theses which I am strongly committed. These are (1) Identity should be understood in a classical or absolute, rather than a relative, sense; (2) Material things endure through time; they are neither four-dimensional entities extended in time nor three-dimensional cross-sections of such; (3) Principles of standard logic (such as the law of the excluded middle or the transitivity of identity) should be universally valid, or, at worst, should fail only in bizarre science-fiction cases that have never actually occurred; (4) Modal statements about individuals should not be understood counterpart-theoretically; (5) Matter is ultimately particulate; (6) Two objects cannot be composed of the same proper parts at the same time; (7) Subject-predicate sentences whose predicate is a mental predicate (such as 'is in pain' or 'is thinking about Vienna') can express truths only if their subject-term denotes a thinking thing; (8) There are thinking things, and at least some of them (ourselves) are living animals; (9) What there is cannot be a matter of stipulation or convention(10) Whether certain objects or a larger object depends on nothing besides their intrinsic properties and the spatial and causal relations that they bear one another. The ontology of the material world that is presented in this book is developed in the course of an-attempt answer the Composition Question: Under what conditions do things (make up, compose) a thing. (Certain things add to or make up or compose a given thing just in the case that all of them are parts of it, and no two of them have a common part, and each of its parts shares a part with one or more of them.) To answer the Special Composition Question (SCQ) is state, using only non-mereological language, when composition occurs. (SCQ is distinguished from the Composition Question: What is composition? This question would be answered by an analysis of composition, an analysis that was reductive in the sense that it made no use of mereological concepts. I do not attempt answer the General Composition Question. I am inclined think