Mereological Nihilism
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Recent papers in Mereological Nihilism
Mereological nihilism is the philosophical position that there are no items that have parts. If there are no items with parts then the only items that exist are partless fundamental particles, such as the true atoms (also called... more
Mereological atomism is the thesis that everything is ultimately composed of atomic parts, i.e., parts lacking proper parts. Standardly, this thesis is characterized by an axiom that says, more simply, that everything has atomic parts.... more
It is customary practice to define ‘x is composed of the ys’ as ‘x is a sum of the ys and the ys are pairwise disjoint (i.e., no two of them have any parts in common)’. This predicate has played a central role in the debate on the special... more
Mereological nihilism is the thesis that composition never occurs. Some philosophers have thought that science gives us compelling evidence against nihilism. In this article I respond to this concern. An initial challenge for nihilism... more
Gabriele Contessa has recently introduced and defended a view he calls ‘non-eliminative nihilism’. Non-eliminative nihilism (NEN, henceforth) is the conjunction of mereological nihilism and non-eliminativism about ordinary objects.... more
Nihilists cannot make their position square with common sense simply by paraphrasing away the apparent ontological commitments in ordinary language. I argue for this claim by analogy. Paraphrase atheism says there is no God, but tries to... more
In this paper I explore the possibility of spatially extended mereological simples, i.e. of objects which have no proper parts and occupy an area of space which consists of more than one point of space. Various metaphysicians have... more
Mereological nihilists hold that composition never occurs, so that nothing is ever a proper part of anything else. Substance dualists generally hold that we are each identical with an immaterial soul. In this paper I argue that every... more
Mereological nihilism is the thesis that composite objects -- objects with proper parts -- do not exist. Nihilists generally paraphrase talk of composite objects F into talk of there being "xs arranged F-wise" (for example, while... more
"Ted Sider argues that nihilism about objects is incompatible with the metaphysical possibility of gunk and takes this point to show that nihilism is flawed. I shall describe one kind of nihilism able to answer this objection. I believe... more
In this paper I address two important objections to the theory called ‘(Strong) Composition as Identity’ (‘CAI’): the ‘wall-bricks-and-atoms problem’ (‘WaBrA problem’), and the claim that CAI entails mereological nihilism. I aim to argue... more
Eliminativists sometimes invoke evolutionary debunking arguments against ordinary object beliefs, either to help them establish object skepticism or to soften the appeal of commonsense ontology. I argue that object debunkers face a... more
Mereological nihilism (henceforth just "nihilism") is the thesis that composition never occurs. Nihilism has often been defended on the basis of its theoretical simplicity, including its ontological simplicity and its ideological... more
Philosophers sometimes give arguments that presuppose the following principle: two theories can fail to be empirically equivalent on the sole basis that they present different "thick" metaphysical pictures of the world.... more
In this paper I address two important objections to the theory called '(Strong) Composition as Identity' ('CAI'): the 'wall-bricks-and-atoms problem' ('WaBrA problem'), and the claim that CAI entails mereological nihilism. I aim to argue... more
According to Composition is Identity, a whole is literally identical to the plurality of its parts. According to Mereological Nihilism, nothing has proper parts. In this note, it is argued that Composition is Identity can be shown to... more
The main idea of this thesis is multi-descriptional physicalism. According to it, only physical entities are elements of our ontology, and there are different ways to describe them. Higher-level vocabularies (e.g., mental, neurological,... more
According to Craig Callender (in his paper 'Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics'), it's the case that “mainstream analytic metaphysics has moved further away from scientific concerns at the same time that philosophy of science has... more
Myers, Andrew (April 13th, 2013). Presentation of "The Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles and Particular Individuals Nihilism" at the 2013 Graduate Philosophy Conference at Gonzaga University.