Problem Of Material Constitution Research Articles

Ordinary Parts and Their Complements: Together They Rise, Together They Fall

A recent solution to the Body-Minus problem, which is a problem of material constitution, claims that ordinary proper parts (such as left feet) exist, but the complements of these objects (such as left-foot complements) do not exist. In this paper, I examine a defense of this solution from the worry of arbitrariness and from its ineffectiveness against a revised version of the problem that focuses on the head, and I show that this defense fails.

Theseus, Incorporated: Philosophy of Mind, Material Constitution, and the Ontology of the Criminal Law

Recent attacks on corporate criminal liability employ reductionistic reasoning familiar to the exclusion problem of mental causation and eliminative solutions to the problem of material constitution. Recent defenses of non-reductive physicalism and other solutions to the problem of material constitution, however, offer a way for the criminal law to make sense of corporate properties that are multiply realizable in the actions of a corporation’s employees. The criminal law is an appropriate vehicle for correcting replacement-of-employees-survivable, reasons-responsive teleological structures that contribute to the commission of crimes by a corporation’s employees. Group psychology has good claim to be a legitimate special science, and the criminal law presupposes higher-order entities and rejects the sort of exclusion principle that would put different-level entities in competition. However, corporate criminal liability should be subject to a good-faith-compliance (“bad apple”) defense that would preclude corporate punishment if a corporation can show that its policies, custom, climate, and culture did not contribute to a crime. Various objections to corporate criminal liability, rooted in various theories of punishment, can be resisted. The criminal law can act against corporate existence, liberty, property, and reputation just as it can act against these interests of individuals. The teleology of a corporate culture can be deterred, embody moral norms, instantiate virtues and vices, and receive communication just as can the mind of a conscious human being. Corporations with changing culture have the functional equivalent of emotions like remorse. Corporate culture lies downstream of presumably-free human actions in a way analogous to the way character traits for which most libertarians would allow individuals to be responsible lie downstream of presumably-free earlier actions. The genuine existence of corporations and corporate actions, while consistent with corporate rights or corporate “personhood,” does not require them in all contexts and for all purposes. Theories of corporate law such as the nexus of contracts and shareholder-, director-, or stakeholder-primacy, while relevant to the distribution of control and/or benefits within a corporation and the extent to which such law should be mandatory or simply a default rule, do not undermine the justification for corporate punishment here.

The Essence of Essence

Despite its appeal and popularity, the view that membership in a natural kind is essential to an individual is unsupported by the logic of essences and has no compelling reflective support. While the view has strong intuitive and empirical support this is insufficient to establish it. There are advantages to abandoning the view that kind membership is essential to individuals. One of these advantages is that it allows for a reconfiguring of the problem of material constitution in a way that removes much of the paradox.

Thomas versus Tibbles

In his recent book, Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus, Christopher Brown has argued that the metaphysics of St. Thomas is preferable to contemporary analytic views because it can solve the problem of material constitution (PMC) without requiring us to relinquish any of the common-sense beliefs that generate that problem. In this critical study, I show that in the case of both substances and aggregates, Browns Aquinas endorses views that are extremely implausible. Consequently, even if it is granted that the solutions to the PMC fall right out of his views, it is still not clear that this gives us reason to prefer his ontology to its competitors. I also consider Brown's take on the status of the human being after death. I do four things in responding to Patrick Toner's incisive critique of my Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus (AST). First, I further motivate Aquinas's position that Socrates exists in the post-mortem and ante-resurrection state by noting that Socrates' situation is at least analogous to other states of affairs that would certainly count as atypical (although not impossible). Secondly, I offer a revised Thomistic account of artefact identity through time in light ofToner's objections to Aquinas's restrictive view. Unlike the restrictive view, this revised account is compatible with common-sense intuitions. Thirdly, I show how my defense of Aquinas's substance metaphysic in AST is useful for the purpose of constructing defeators for certain kinds of arguments for reductionism. Fourthly, I defend Aquinas's views on the unity of substance against Toner's suggestion that they are implausible on the grounds that they are in conflict with certain so-called scientifically informed common-sense beliefs.

Meta-Ontology and Accidental Unity

My wife and I and our three children may stand in various relations: being a family, being a basketball team, and so on. I show that Frege's doctrine of existence, when coupled with this simple point, easily solves the problem of material constitution and blocks the overdetermination argument for eliminativism. It does all this work while providing a plausible and clear reductionistic account of material objects. These seem to be very good reasons for accepting Frege's doctrine of existence.

The SameP-Relation as a Response to Critics of Baker's Theory of Constitution

According to the so-called “standard account” regarding the problem of material constitution, a statue and a lump of clay that makes it up are not identical. The usual objection is that this view yields many objects in the same place at the same time. Lynne Rudder Baker's theory of constitution is a recent and sophisticated version of the standard account. She argues that the aforementioned objection can be answered by defining a relation of being the same P as (sameP). In this paper I shall examine consequences of her response and show that sameP has wrong formal properties, as a result of which this solution cannot be accepted.

The Problem of Material Constitution

There are various puzzles that set our intuitions about composition and identity against one another. Four that are particularly well known are the Growing Argument (also known as the Paradox of Increase), the Ship of Theseus Puzzle, the Body-minus Argument (usually presented by way of Peter Geach's story about Tibbles the cat), and Allan Gibbard's puzzle about Lumpl and Goliath (a piece of clay and a statue, respectively). Such puzzles have received a great deal of attention in the literature over the past thirty years, and there is an impressive and growing variety of solutions available for each of them. Surprisingly, however, no one has really discussed how all of the different puzzles, and their solutions, are interrelated. On the surface, they seem to raise different problems; but clearly the puzzles are related somehow. They raise similar questions and generate similar sets of possible solutions. But, as yet, nothing has been said about how far the similarities extend.