An elegant universe
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An elegant universe Claudio Calosi1
Received: 3 July 2014 / Accepted: 16 October 2015 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract David Lewis famously endorsed Unrestricted Composition. His defense of such a controversial principle builds on the alleged innocence of mereology. This innocence defense has come under different attacks in the last decades. In this paper I pursue another line of defense, that stems from some early remarks by van Inwagen. I argue that Unrestricted Composition leads to a better metaphysics. In particular I provide new arguments for the following claims: Unrestricted Composition entails extensionality of composition, functionality of location and four-dimensionalism in the metaphysics of persistence. Its endorsement yields an impressively coherent and powerful metaphysical picture. This picture shows a universe that might not be innocent but it is certainly elegant. Keywords Unrestricted composition · Extensionality · Functionality · Four-dimensionalism
1 Introduction: metaphysics and innocence David Lewis endorsed Unrestricted Composition1 —and the full strength of classical mereology along with that- in a number of places, most notably in Lewis (1986, 1991). Unrestricted Composition is extremely controversial in that it entails a commitment 1 At a first approximation the principle says that any non-empty collection of entities has a mereological fusion. The official formulation is the one in (9). Arguments in favor of Unrestricted Composition can be found in Rea (1998), Sider (2001) and Van Cleve (2008). Different critiques of the arguments are in Koslicki (2003), Simons (2006), Elder (2008).
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Claudio Calosi [email protected] University of Neuchatel, Institute of Philosophy, Espace Louis-Agassiz 1, 2000 Neuchatel, Switzerland
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Synthese
to all sorts of mereological fusions: on top of seas, birds and flowers there is an object made exactly of the left wing of that hummingbird over there, the stem of this daisy over here and three molecules of water from the Dead Sea. The number and variety, if not the metaphysical monstrosity, of such objects have been met with bewilderment. Lewis’ own response to such bewilderment is well known, and focuses on the innocence of mereology. The general idea builds upon the thesis known as Composition as Identity. It goes roughly as follows. Composition is very much like identity in many respects. The monstrous mereological fusions we talked about earlier do not involve any further ontological commitments than those you were already willing to make all along. You already accepted wings, stems and molecules of water. The commitment to their fusion is not a further commitment, for that fusion is in some relevant sense,2 identical to those things considered collectively. Now, this is ontological innocence at its best. A monstrous universe is an innocent universe. There are several passages in Lewis (1991) in which he spells out in more details what he means by this thesis. Here are some of the most vivid: [A fusion] is nothing
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