Kris McDaniel, Against Maxcon Simples

UMass Amherst has a pretty good recent record of turning out metaphysicians, and McDaniel is the next potential star coming off the assembly line. This paper is an argument against Ned Markosian’s view that a physical object is a simple iff it is spatio-temporally continuous and maximal. (That is, there is no larger region spatio-temporal region that contains the object and is entirely occupied.) This looks like a pretty wild view. Surely my television has parts – the screen, the box, the controls etc – even though it is spatio-temporally continuous. Or at least I think it’s continuous. Defining what this comes to in a quantum world is non-trivial I guess.

McDaniel has some more serious arguments against Markosian’s position. The arguments are quite detailed, so I won’t detail them all here. Some of the arguments involve complications involve relativity. Others involve getting clear on just how complicated constitution must be if Markosian’s view is right. And finally he notes that there’s a problem of spatial intrinsics for Markosian’s view, so Markosian must sometimes make ordinary predication relative to spatial location in the way that some endurantists make it relative to temporal location. All good stuff, and a worthwhile paper. I suspect when McDaniel gets to writing his positive papers, which will be defending a brutalist view of simples, the arguments will also be very good.