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"My aim in this book is to defend the view that, when it comes to which highly visible objects there are right before our eyes, things are more or less the way they seem. There are tables, trees, trunks, dogs, and all manner of other ordinary objects, and there are no dog–trunk composites or other such extraordinary objects...Outsiders to the debates over the metaphysics of material objects will likely
find my view so obvious as to hardly be worth stating. Let alone defending. Let alone spending a whole book defending. Insiders, though, will likely find it astounding and almost certainly indefensible."
- Daniel Korman in Objects: Nothing Out of the Ordinary
Part of what’s cool (or annoying) about philosophy--particularly metaphysics--is that it can take the most ordinary of objects and unpack all kinds of mysteries about them.
I’ve never seen that done so well as in this video from V Sauce (who has over 24M subscribers), viewed over 13 million times:
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How do you make philosophy interesting? By doing a video like this, apparently. 13 million views is an unheard of amount for something that is pure philosophy, and even a little technical.
It's well worth watching, but let me give you some commentary and background.
One of the first puzzles he mentions involves whether some object, like a statue or an origami crane, is one or two objects. It’s a puzzle made famous by Allan Gibbard in his more technical paper, “Contingent Identity”.
My cheat code for this puzzle is that count depends on kind, and kind depends on kind conditions, so when the kind conditions change, the kind changes, so the number of things change. (This is similar to Amie Thomasson’s view that he mentions in the video, covered in Thomasson's book Ordinary Objects.)
I don’t think the constitution relation is as precise or as useful as the composition relation that he mentions in the video, but constitution certainly has a distinguished history within object theory. For more on the relation between composition and identity, check out this edited book on the topic by my friend A.J. Cotnoir, which you can see in the background of the video in the stack of books.
The way he illustrates incars and trogs is so well done, and you can see why the video medium captures the puzzle so well. While there are objects like islands and bikinis that are useful to us, his question gets at what principle allows for islands but not incars, or bikinis but not trogs. Is there a fact of the matter to the question of whether a two-piece is one or two pieces? (See my previous cheat code.) If you want to see a book-length defense of ordinary objects over things like incars and trogs, check out Daniel Korman’s book, quoted at the top of this piece.
When Mike talks about the vagueness problem for ordinary objects, where we remove a part of a chair one small part at a time until it’s clear there is no chair there, he’s illustrating what Peter Unger argues in his famous and aptly-titled paper, “There Are No Ordinary Things”, which he briefly shows on camera. (I took a graduate seminar on vagueness from Trenton Merricks, author of Objects and Persons, which he also shows and mentions.)
Once you see how each of these puzzles work, you might start seeing applications everywhere. In my graduate years, I was interested in how these puzzles applied to social objects like groups of people, committees, football teams, etc. There's a large crowd at the stadium. Now the game ends, and people start emptying out. At one point is there not a crowd in the stadium anymore, and more importantly, why that point?
It should go without saying that not every view he talks about is worth endorsing. Many of the views conflict with each other. When he starts trying to form his own meta-conclusions at the end, I hop off board. But it’s worth thinking about why a view is wrong, if you think it is, besides a response like, “Well, it’s just obvious”.
Until next time.
Jared
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P.S. If you thought the video was interesting too, I'd love to know why.
P.P.S. If you hated the video, I'd also love to know why.
This Week's Free Philosophy Resource:
Title: When Are Objects Parts?​
Author: Peter van Inwagen
Reading Level: Upper-level undergraduate
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