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Van Inwagen's New Clothes*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

John Bigelow
John Bigelow
Affiliation:
Monash University
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Extract

No idea sounds so silly that no ancient Greek fervently defended it. I hope we do not lose sight of the value there is in studying the Greeks. Yet it is even better to do as they did and not just to study what they said.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , Spring 1994 , pp. 297 - 304
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1994

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References

Notes

1 Van Inwagen refers to Black, Max, “The Elusiveness of Sets,” Review of Metaphysics, 24 (1971): 614–36Google Scholar, and Morton, Adam, “Complex Individuals and Multigrade Relations,” Nous, 9 (1975): 309–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I urge the significance also of Boolos, George, “To Be Is to Be the Value of a Variable (Or to Be Some Values of Some Variables),” Journal of Philosophy, 81 (1984): 430–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Halmos, Paul, Naïve Set Theory (London and New York: Van Nostrand, 1960).Google Scholar

3 Nihilism in van Inwagen's sense is the denial of the existence of composite objects other than living organisms. Peter Unger calls himself a Nihilist because he denies the existence of shirts and trousers and shoes—and indeed of any of the things referred to by count nouns in a natural language—but that is not quite the same thing as a denial of the existence of all composite objects. Unger allows that there may be composite objects for which we have no names. Van Inwagen denies this. See Unger, Peter, “There Are No Ordinary Things,” Synthese, 41 (1979): 117– 4, and 'Scepticism and Nihilism,” Nous, 14 (1980): 517–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Universalism is championed by Lewis, David, for instance, in On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986)Google Scholar. The most influential exponent is probably Quine, W. V. O. in Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; but the foundations were laid mainly by Goodman, Nelson, The Structure of Appearance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

4 I first heard Lewis's refutation of van Inwagen during iscussion after a paper presented by van Inwagen in Princeton in 1983. Related arguments appear in Lewis, David, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 212–13.Google Scholar