90:3 July 2007
Lesser Kinds 

Advisory Editors: Roberto Casati, Institut Nicod, Paris and Achille Varzi, Columbia, NY

Metaphysicians tend to deal with large categories – substance, universals – and oversize issues-the nature of being, existence, necessity, causation. But there is plenty of room at the bottom for lesser categories and entities. Small or undersize problems can be interesting entry points for deep metaphysical enquiries. What is a sound? Do holes exist? Are events fact-like or object-like? Do shadows have a causal structure? What is the nature of the boundary that separates water from air – is it water, is it air? By looking into such questions, this issue of the Monist plans to explore the thesis that metaphysical concerns can be domain-specific without ceasing to be metaphysical in an important sense.

Table of Contents:

Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi

Foreword

Hud Hudson

Lesser Kinds Quartet

Kristie Miller

Immaterial Beings

Andrew Wake, Joshua Spencer, and Gregory Fowler

Holes as Regions of Spacetime

Antony Galton

On the Paradoxical Nature of Surfaces: Ontology at the Physics/Geometry Interface

Jérôme Dokic

Two Ontologies of Sound

Casey O’Callaghan

Echoes

István Aranyosi

Shadows of Constitution

Roy Sorensen

The Vanishing Point

Alvin I. Goldman

A Program for “Naturalizing” Metaphysics, with Application to the Ontology of Events