| 16154 | Aristotle gave up his earlier notion of individuals, because it relied on universals [Aristotle, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: In 'Metaphysics' Aristotle abandons the notion of an individual which he had relied on in the 'Categories', since it presupposes that there are general things, that there are universals. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (Categories [c.331 BCE]) by Michael Frede - Individuals in Aristotle Intro | |
| A reaction: Ah, very illuminating. So all the way through we have a concept of individuals, first relying on universals, and then relying on hylomorphism? I suppose a bundle theory of individuals would need universals. |
| 16158 | Form and matter may not make up a concrete particular, because there are also accidents like weight [Aristotle, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: The concrete, particular object actually is a composite not just of matter and form, but also a large number of accidents, like size, weight, colour. So we should not assume that the composite of matter and form is identified with the concrete particular. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (Metaphysics [c.324 BCE], partic) by Michael Frede - Substance in Aristotle's 'Metaphysics' p.74 | |
| A reaction: That gives a nice well-rounded picture of how we should understand a physical object, to fit it into the rest of our conceptual scheme, and the way we think about it. |
| 12499 | Bodies distinctively have cohesion of parts, and power to communicate motion [Locke] |
| Full Idea: The primary ideas we have peculiar to body are the cohesion of solid, and consequently separable parts, and a power of communicating motion by impulse. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.23.17) | |
| A reaction: Defining bodies by motion seems unusual. I would be more inclined to mention inertia and solidity before impulse to move things. Depends on your physics I suppose, and Locke was writing only a year or two after Newton's book. |
| 5533 | Objects in themselves are not known to us at all [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Objects in themselves are not known to us at all. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B045/A30) | |
| A reaction: It is the phrase "at all" which is interesting. It suggests that Kant is in no way a representative realist, though it is hard to place him within the labels of phenomenalism/idealism/anti-realism. |
| 21449 | The a priori concept of objects in general is the ground of experience [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Concepts of objects in general lie at the ground of all experiential cognition as a priori conditions. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B126/A93) | |
| A reaction: Does Kant have an a priori insight that process philosophy, or philosophy based entirely on relations, are wrong? |
| 14732 | A perceived physical object is events grouped around a centre [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The physical object, as inferred from perception, is a group of events arranged about a centre. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Analysis of Matter [1927], 23) | |
| A reaction: At least I like the active aspect of this definition. You then have to explain what an event is, without mentioning objects. You'd better no mention properties either, since they will probably depend on the dreaded objects. |
| 6473 | Physical things are series of appearances whose matter obeys physical laws [Russell] |
| Full Idea: We may lay down the following definition: Physical things are those series of appearances whose matter obeys the laws of physics. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics [1914], §XI) | |
| A reaction: We will then have to define the laws of physic without making any reference to 'physical things'. There is an obvious suspicion of circularity somewhere here. I find it very odd to define objects just in terms of their appearances. |
| 23466 | Objects are the substance of the world [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: Objects make up the substance of the world. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], 2.021) | |
| A reaction: He doesn't say here that the objects are physical, and may be including Frege's abstract objects. His concept of substance seems more like Spinoza than Aristotle. |
| 8498 | Treating scattered sensations as single objects simplifies our understanding of experience [Quine] |
| Full Idea: By bringing together scattered sense events and treating them as perceptions of one object, we reduce the complexity of our stream of experience to a manageable conceptual simplicity. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.17) | |
| A reaction: If, however, our consideration of tricky cases, such as vague objects, or fast-changing objects, or spatially coinciding objects made it all seem too complex, then Quine's argument would be grounds for abandoning objects. See Merricks. |
| 9018 | A physical object is the four-dimensional material content of a portion of space-time [Quine] |
| Full Idea: We might think of a physical object as simply the whole four-dimensional material content, however sporadic and heterogeneous, of some portion of space-time. If it is firm and coherent internally, we call it a body. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Philosophy of Logic [1970], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: An early articulation of one of the two standard views of objects in recent philosophy. I think I prefer the Quinean view, but I am still looking into that one... |
| 1628 | If physical objects are a myth, they are useful for making sense of experience [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Two Dogmas of Empiricism [1953], p.44) |
| 8464 | Physical objects in space-time are just events or processes, no matter how disconnected [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Physical objects, conceived four-dimensionally in space-time, are not to be distinguished from events or concrete processes. Each comprises simply the content, however heterogeneous, of a portion of space-time, however disconnected and gerrymandered. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §36) | |
| A reaction: I very much like the suggestion that objects should be thought of as 'processes', but I dislike the idea that they can be gerrymandered. This is a refusal to cut nature at the joints (Idea 7953), which I find very counterintuitive. |
| 7924 | The notion of a physical object is by far the most useful one for science [Quine] |
| Full Idea: In a contest of sheer systematic utility to science, the notion of physical object still leads the field. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §48) | |
| A reaction: A delightful circumlocution from someone who seems terrified to assert that there just are objects. Not that I object to Quine's caution. It would be disturbing if his researches had revealed that we could manage without objects. But compare Idea 6124. |
| 2351 | Aristotle says an object (e.g. a lamp) has identity if its parts stay together when it is moved [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The parts of a lamp stay together when it is moved (which is one of Aristotle's criteria for objecthood). | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Representation and Reality [1988], §7 p.110) | |
| A reaction: Metaphysics 1052a26 (just after the cross-reference) says a thing may be unified 'if its movement is single'. |
| 10541 | Concrete objects such as sounds and smells may not be possible objects of ostension [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: We cannot simply distinguish concrete objects as objects of ostension, if it literally involves a pointing gesture, as this would exclude a colourless gas, a sound or a smell. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Frege Philosophy of Language (2nd ed) [1973], Ch.14) | |
| A reaction: He shifts to verbal ostension as a result, since we can talk of 'this smell'. On p.491 he suggests that affecting our senses is a sufficient condition to be concrete, but not a necessary one. |
| 17556 | Material objects are in space and time, move, have a surface and mass, and are made of some stuff [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: A thing is a material object if it occupies space and endures through time and can move about in space (literally move, unlike a shadow or wave or reflection) and has a surface and has a mass and is made of a certain stuff or stuffs. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 01) | |
| A reaction: It is not at all clear what electrons (which must count for him as 'simples') are made of. |
| 8264 | Maybe table-shaped particles exist, but not tables [Inwagen, by Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Van Ingwagen holds that although table-shaped collections of particles exist, tables do not. | |
| From: report of Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], Ch.13) by E.J. Lowe - The Possibility of Metaphysics 2.3 | |
| A reaction: I find this idea appealing. See the ideas of Trenton Merricks. When you get down to micro-level, it is hard to individuate a table among the force fields, and hard to distinguish a table from a smashed or burnt table. An ontology without objects? |
| 8515 | Tropes are basic particulars, so concrete particulars are collections of co-located tropes [Campbell,K] |
| Full Idea: If tropes are basic particulars, then concrete particulars count as dependent realities. They are collections of co-located tropes, depending on these tropes as a fleet does upon its component ships. | |
| From: Keith Campbell (The Metaphysic of Abstract Particulars [1981], §2) | |
| A reaction: If I sail my yacht through a fleet, do I become part of it? Presumably trope theory could avoid a bundle view of objects. A bare substratum could be a magnet which attracts tropes. |
| 8519 | Bundles must be unique, so the Identity of Indiscernibles is a necessity - which it isn't! [Campbell,K] |
| Full Idea: Each individual is distinct from each other individual, so the bundle account of objects requires each bundle to be different from every other bundle. So the Identity of Indiscernibles must be a necessary truth, which, unfortunately, it is not. | |
| From: Keith Campbell (The Metaphysic of Abstract Particulars [1981], §5) | |
| A reaction: Clearly the Identity of Indiscernibles is not a necessary truth (consider just two identical spheres). Location and time must enter into it. Could we not add a further individuation requirement to the necessary existence of a bundle? (Quinton) |
| 11116 | Being a physical object is our most fundamental category [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Being a physical object (as opposed to being a horse or a statue) really is our most fundamental category for dealing with the external world. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 2) | |
| A reaction: This raises the interesting question of why any categories should be considered to be more 'fundamental' than others. I can only think that we perceive something to be an object fractionally before we (usually) manage to identify it. |
| 7685 | An object is a predication subject, distinguished by a distinctive combination of properties [Jacquette] |
| Full Idea: To be an object is to be a predication subject, and to be this as opposed to that particular object, whether existent or not, is to have a distinctive combination of properties. | |
| From: Dale Jacquette (Ontology [2002], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: The last part depends on Leibniz's Law. The difficulty is that two objects may only be distinguishable by being in different places, and location doesn't look like a property. Cf. Idea 5055. |
| 7008 | Trope theorists usually see objects as 'bundles' of tropes [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers identifying themselves as trope theorists have, by and large, accepted some form of the 'bundle theory' of objects: an object is a bundle of compresent tropes. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This view eliminates anything called 'matter' or 'substance' or a 'bare particular'. I think I agree with Heil that this doesn't give a coherent picture, as properties seem to be 'of' something, and bundles always raise the question of what unites them. |
| 7018 | Objects are substances, which are objects considered as the bearer of properties [Heil] |
| Full Idea: I think of objects as substances, and a substance is an object considered as a bearer of properties. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 04.2) | |
| A reaction: This is an area of philosophy I always find disconcerting, where an account of how we should see objects seems to have no connection at all to what physicists report about objects. 'Considered as' seems to make substances entirely conventional. |
| 10272 | The notion of 'object' is at least partially structural and mathematical [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: The very notion of 'object' is at least partially structural and mathematical. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Philosophy of Mathematics [1997], 8.1) | |
| A reaction: [In the context, Shapiro clearly has physical objects in mind] This view seems to fit with Russell's 'relational' view of the physical world, though Russell rejected structuralism in mathematics. I take abstraction to be part of perception. |
| 8267 | Perhaps concrete objects are entities which are in space-time and subject to causality [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: An obvious suggestion is that concrete objects are denizens of space-time, and hence subject to causality, though Hale objects that languages are plausibly abstract and yet undergo change and so presumably exist in time. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (The Possibility of Metaphysics [1998], 2.10) | |
| A reaction: The identity-conditions for a language are pretty loose. Choosing a counterexample from the mental life of human beings begs a billion questions. I can't think of a problem case beyond the world of human culture. |
| 8265 | Our commitment to the existence of objects should depend on their explanatory value [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Whether objects of a given kind should be thought actually to exist should, in general, be taken to turn on considerations of whether an inclusion of such objects in one's ontology has explanatory value. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (The Possibility of Metaphysics [1998], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: Blatantly fictional objects, such as fairies, might have wonderful explanatory value (they place dewdrops on flowers). Our ontological commitments cannot be decided one at a time, because consistency of the whole picture is the key value. |
| 8275 | Objects are entities with full identity-conditions, but there are entities other than objects [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: I distinguish objects as those entities - whether abstract or concrete, universal or particular - which possess fully determinate identity-conditions, but there are, or may be, entities other than objects. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (The Possibility of Metaphysics [1998], 7) | |
| A reaction: A wave on the sea is a candidate for being an entity but not an object. The distinction is probably not quite common usage, but it strikes as one which philosophers should universally adopt. Lots of entities, and some of them are objects. |
| 16130 | To be an object at all requires identity-conditions [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The only metaphysically defensible notion of an object is precisely that of an entity which possesses determinate identity-conditions. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (The Possibility of Metaphysics [1998], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: I think he includes abstract objects in this. I suspect this view of muddling epistemology and ontology. Or overemphasising our conventions, rather than reality. |
| 16232 | An object is 'natural' if its stages are linked by certain non-supervenient relations [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that our distinction between natural and unnatural (gerrymandered) objects corresponds to a distinction between series of stages which are and are not linked by certain non-supervenient relations. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 16213 for the nature of these 'relations'. I don't understand how an abstraction (as I take it) like a relation can unify a physical object. A trout-turkey is unified by a relation of some sort. Hawley defends Stage Theory. |
| 6124 | I say that most of the objects of folk ontology do not exist [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: I argue against the existence of most of the objects alleged to exist by what we might call 'folk ontology'. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1) | |
| A reaction: This is the programme for Merricks's heroic book, denying (quite plausibly) the need for large objects in our ontology. It seems that ontology must multiply its entities prodigiously, or else be austere in the extreme. Is there no middle way? |
| 6134 | Is swimming pool water an object, composed of its mass or parts? [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Some - such as those who endorse unrestricted composition or those who believe in a kind of entity called 'a mass' - say that 'the water in the swimming pool' refers to a big material object. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: A well-chosen example to support his thesis that large objects don't (strictly) exist. We certainly must not say (in Quine fashion) that we must accept the ontology of our phrases. I cut nature at the joints, and I say a pool is an obvious joint. |
| 10782 | The modern concept of an object is rooted in quantificational logic [Linnebo] |
| Full Idea: Our modern general concept of an object is given content only in connection with modern quantificational logic. | |
| From: Øystein Linnebo (Plural Quantification Exposed [2003], §2) | |
| A reaction: [He mentions Frege, Carnap, Quine and Dummett] This is the first thing to tell beginners in modern analytical metaphysics. The word 'object' is very confusing. I think I prefer 'entity'. |
| 14952 | Things are constructs for tracking patterns (and not linguistic, because animals do it) [Ladyman/Ross] |
| Full Idea: Individual things are constructs built for second-best tracking of real patterns. They are not necessarily linguistic constructions, since some non-human animals almost certainly cognitively construct them. | |
| From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: Delighted to see animals making an appearance. Fans of language-based metaphysics please note. If they are fictional constructs, why do they do such a good job of tracking? What generates the 'superficial' appearance that there are objects? |
| 14485 | Ordinary objects may be not indispensable, but they are nearly unavoidable [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: I do not argue that ordinary objects are indispensable, but rather that they are (nearly) unavoidable. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 09) | |
| A reaction: Disappointing, given the blurb and title of the book, but put in those terms it will be hard to disagree. Clearly ordinary objects figure in the most useful way for us to talk. I wonder whether we have a clear ontology of 'simples' in which they vanish. |
| 14487 | The simple existence conditions for objects are established by our practices, and are met [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: The existence conditions for ordinary objects are established by our practices, and they are quite minimal, so it is rather obvious that they are fulfilled, and so there are such things. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 09.3) | |
| A reaction: This is one of her main arguments. The same argument would have worked for witches or ghosts in certain cultures. |
| 23772 | If objects are property bundles, the properties need combining powers [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: If objects are bundles of properties …they must be robust enough to enter into building relations with one another such that they can form objects. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 01.5) | |
| A reaction: A very nice point. The Humean bundle view of objects just seems to take properties to be 'impressions' or verbal predicates, but they must have causal powers to be a grounding for ontology. |
| 22627 | Compound objects are processes, insofar as change is essential to them [Ingthorsson] |
| Full Idea: Compound objects are to be considered processes, if by ‘process’ we mean any entity for which change is essential for its continued existence. | |
| From: R.D. Ingthorsson (A Powerful Particulars View of Causation [2021], 7) | |
| A reaction: This doesn't seem to matter much, except to challenge those who say that reality consists of processes, and therefore not of substances. |