87: 3 July 2004
Simples 

Advisory Editor: Hud Hudson, Western Washington University

Much recent work in metaphysics has been focused on identifying the conditions under which a plurality of objects can be said to compose some further object. Comparatively little attention has been directed, on the other hand, to the issue of whether any parts of such composite objects might themselves be partless. Are there, or could there be, absolute simples? And what would such simples have to be like? Or might we be living in a world in which it is turtles all the way down, a world made up of objects all of whose parts have further parts, or of what David Lewis has termed 'atomless gunk'? Answers to these questions promise to advance not only our understanding of the metaphysics of material objects but also many other disputes in contemporary metaphysics -- including disputes over the foundations of set theory and mereology and controversies in the philosophy of physics, for example concerning whether spacetime is discrete or continuous.

Table of Contents:

Classes, Worlds and Hypergunk

Daniel Nolan

Hypergunk

Allen Hazen

Chopping Up Gunk

John Hawthorne and Brian Weatherson

Grit or Gunk: Implications of the Banach-Tarski Paradox

Peter Forrest

Extended Simples: A Third Way Between Atoms and Gunk

Peter Simons

Borderline Simple or Extremely Simple?

Katherine Hawley

Simples, Stuff, and Simple People

Ned Markosian

Plurals and Simples

Gabriel Uzquiano