Composition as Identity

Composition as Identity: Part 1

Many of us think that ordinary objects – such as tables and chairs – exist. We also think that ordinary objects have parts: my chair has a seat and some legs as parts, for example. But once we are committed to the (seemingly innocuous) thesis that ordinary objects are composed of parts, we then open ourselves up to a whole host of philosophical problems, most of which center on what exactly the...

Compositional Pluralism and Composition as Identity 1

The point of this paper is to assess to what extent compositional pluralism and composition as identity can from a coherent package of views. Since I think there are good arguments for compositional pluralism and I feel the intuition that gives some support to composition as identity, I am motivated to determine this. But regardless of whether you feel attraction to either of these two views, i...

Two defenses of Composition as Identity

Composition as Identity , Mereological Essentialism , and Counterpart Theory

*Thanks to David Lewis, Michael C. Rea, and two anonymous referees for very helpful comments. 1Lewis, Parts of Classes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 81-87. Other defenders include David Armstrong (Cf. A World of States of Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 12) and Donald Baxter (Cf. ‘Identity in the Loose and Popular Sense’, Mind 97 (1988), pp. 575-582); E.J. Lowe ...

How Composition Could be Identity

The paper argues that, as far as logic and abstract metaphysics go, the claim that composition is identity could be true, despite wellmotivated arguments against the coherence of the claim. The key to answering the arguments is to reject a principle of universal substitutivity of “identical” plural expressions while retaining Leibniz’ Law, that identicals have the same properties, relations, an...