"THE STRUCTURE AND UNITY OF OBJECTS" Anna Marmodoro, University of Oxford (Respondent: Arif Ahmed) Friday 17th March, 17:30-19:00. Trinity College, The Old College Office, Cambridge. The Old College Office is just at the Great Gate, opposite the porters’ lodge/ ABSTRACT In this talk I assume as my starting point an ontology which comprises as its building blocks the ‘sparse’ fundamental properties in nature, as defined by David Lewis: e.g. mass, spin, charge; only that on my view – but not on Lewis’s – such properties are instances of physical powers, essentially defined by the type of change they (or their possessors) can bring about in the world. Here I investigate the question of how such building blocks combine into complex entities. Some metaphysicians hold that the only way the building blocks of reality combine (whether they are power tropes, or something different) is into aggregates, where the elements are related to each other (for instance by spatio-temporal relations), but remain many in number. Metaphysicians of this persuasion dispute that there are substances in the world, i.e. entities that are complex and yet one; for them, all there is are the fundamental constituents of reality. This is known in the literature as the Humean/Lewisean view of the world as a mosaic of particular facts. I belong to the Aristotelian/Armstrongian rather than the Humean/Lewisean camp. I hold that there are substances in the world, which are not ‘given’ among the fundamental elements of reality, but rather constituted by them. The question I will address in this paper is how such unified and yet complex substances come about, metaphysically, and what the relation between the constituted substance and its constituents is. I will also give reasons for my choice of camp. ------------------------- Anna Marmodoro is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University and a Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Her research interests span metaphysics and philosophy of mind, as well as classical and medieval philosophy. She is the recent author of "Everything in Everything. Anaxagoras Metaphysics" (OUP 2017), and "Aristotle on Perceiving Objects" (OUP, 2014).
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