The Metaphysics of Everyday Life
An Essay in Practical Realism

Lynne Rudder Baker presents a unique account of the material world: the Constitution View.

Lynne Rudder Baker (Author)

9780521120296, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 24 September 2009

272 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.4 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Baker's book is a valuable contribution to contemporary work in metaphysics. It will be widely discussed, and it will remain a key source of ideas, insights, and arguments for many years to come.' Stephen Schwartz, Ithaca College

Lynne Rudder Baker presents and defends a unique account of the material world: the Constitution View. In contrast to leading metaphysical views that take everyday things to be either non-existent or reducible to micro-objects, the Constitution View construes familiar things as irreducible parts of reality. Although they are ultimately constituted by microphysical particles, everyday objects are neither identical to, nor reducible to, the aggregates of microphysical particles that constitute them. The result is genuine ontological diversity: people, bacteria, donkeys, mountains and microscopes are fundamentally different kinds of things - all constituted by, but not identical to, aggregates of particles. Baker supports her account with discussions of non-reductive causation, vagueness, mereology, artefacts, three-dimensionalism, ontological novelty, ontological levels and emergence. The upshot is a unified ontological theory of the entire material world that irreducibly contains people, as well as non-human living things and inanimate objects.

Introduction
1. Beginning with the middle
Part I. Everyday Things: 2. The reality of ordinary things
3. Artifacts
4. Human persons
Part II. The Everyday World: 5. Commonsense causation
6. Metaphysical vagueness
7. Time
Part III. Metaphysical Underpinnings: 8. Constitution revisited
9. Mereology and constitution
10. Three-dimensionalism defended
11. Five ontological issues.

Subject Areas: Philosophy: metaphysics & ontology [HPJ], Philosophy [HP]