Familiar Objects and their Shadows

Argues that sceptical metaphysicians employ shadows of familiar objects, while denying that the entities which cast those shadows really exist.

Crawford L. Elder (Author)

9781107003231, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 January 2011

222 pages
22.4 x 14.5 x 1.8 cm, 0.42 kg

"....Familiar Objects and their Shadows is an exciting and ambitious book, and Elder takes the best current arguments in the field and takes them forwards."
--George Lazaroiu, PhD, Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences

Most contemporary metaphysicians are sceptical about the reality of familiar objects such as dogs and trees, people and desks, cells and stars. They prefer an ontology of the spatially tiny or temporally tiny. Tiny microparticles 'dog-wise arranged' explain the appearance, they say, that there are dogs; microparticles obeying microphysics collectively cause anything that a baseball appears to cause; temporal stages collectively sustain the illusion of enduring objects that persist across changes. Crawford L. Elder argues that all such attempts to 'explain away' familiar objects project downwards, onto the tiny entities, structures and features of familiar objects themselves. He contends that sceptical metaphysicians are thus employing shadows of familiar objects, while denying that the entities which cast those shadows really exist. He argues that the shadows are indeed really there, because their sources - familiar objects - are mind-independently real.

Introduction
1. Two false friends of an ontology of familiar objects
2. Conventionalism as ontological relativism
3. Realism about material objects: persistence, persistence conditions, and natural kinds
4. Ontological preference for the temporally small
5. Ontological preference for microphysical causes
6. Ontological preference for the spatially small
7. A third false friend of familiar objects: universal mereological composition
8. Concluding Hegelian postscript
Appendix: 'mutually interfering' dimensions of difference
Reference.

Subject Areas: Philosophy: metaphysics & ontology [HPJ]