Overview

What sorts of material objects are there? Many philosophers opt for surprising answers to this question that seem deeply at odds with how we ordinarily think about the material world. Some embrace radically eliminative views, on which there are far fewer objects than we ordinarily take there to be, while others go in for radically permissive views on which there are legions of extraordinary objects that somehow escape our notice, despite being highly visible and right before our eyes. In this book, Daniel Z. Korman defends our ordinary, intuitive judgments about which objects there are. The book responds to a wide variety of arguments that have driven people away from the intuitive view: arbitrariness arguments, debunking arguments, overdetermination arguments, arguments from vagueness and material constitution, and the problem of the many. It also criticizes attempts to show that permissive and eliminative views are, despite appearances, entirely compatible with our ordinary beliefs and intuitions.

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9780198732532

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Reviews

This book is highly recommended. This is because it engages with a wide range of contemporary literature on the topics it deals with, and because it gives such a good overview of the different positions and arguments involved. On top of this, it is very engagingly written. Korman has a knack for presenting complex positions and arguments clearly and directly. The book will be very useful to those who may not already be passionate about one or another of these positions but wants to get some of idea of what is going on in one large corner of contemporary analytic metaphysics. And it will be really invaluable to anyone already in this corner. * Simon J. Evnine, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *

This book is highly recommended. This is because it engages with a wide range of contemporary literature on the topics it deals with, and because it gives such a good overview of the different positions and arguments involved. On top of this, it is very engagingly written. Korman has a knack for presenting complex positions and arguments clearly and directly. The book will be very useful to those who may not already be passionate about one or another of these positions but wants to get some of idea of what is going on in one large corner of contemporary analytic metaphysics. And it will be really invaluable to anyone already in this corner. Simon J. Evnine, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Author Information

Daniel Z. Korman is an associate professor in the philosophy department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is co-editor of Metaphysics: An Anthology (with Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa) and maintains the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on ordinary objects. While much of his research has focused on the metaphysics of material objects, other research interests include the philosophy of perception, debunking arguments, the nature and status of intuition, Locke on substratum, and scientific essentialism. Korman's work has appeared in such journals as Noûs, The Journal of Philosophy, Philosophers' Imprint, Philosophical Studies, and Oxford Studies in Metaphysics.

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