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Material through and through

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Abstract

Materialists about human persons think that we are material through and through—wholly material beings. Those who endorse materialism more widely think that everything is material through and through. But what is it to be wholly material? In this article, I answer that question. I identify and defend a definition or analysis of ‘wholly material’.

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Notes

  1. I will freely deploy property-talk. I invite nominalist readers to supply whatever paraphrases are necessary to understand or affirm what I say without objectionable commitment. I’ll mostly stick to talk of offering a “definition”, rather than an “analysis” since, as we’ll see, there may be a stipulative aspect to my project.

  2. Alert readers will recognize this way of putting things from Peter van Inwagen’s work. See his (2008) for more extensive discussion of proper definition and for defense of the Chisholm Rule.

  3. In this connection, see van Inwagen (1990): 17. “A thing is a material object if it occupies space and endures through time and can move about in space (literally move about, unlike a shadow or a wave or a reflection) and has a surface and has a mass and is made of certain stuff or stuffs. Or, at any rate, to the extent that one was reluctant to say of something that it had various of these features, that that extent one would be reluctant to describe it as a material object. Few philosophers would be perfectly happy about calling a quark or a proton or even a large organic molecule a material object, for one has to be very careful in ascribing any of the features in the above list to such things: and talk about the surfaces of submicroscopic objects, or about the stuffs they are made of tends to verge on nonsense.”

  4. The literature is deep and wide. Ney (2008) offers very helpful survey and criticism. For even more thorough coverage, see Stoljar (2010, 2015).

  5. It is natural to suppose that only objects (as opposed to, say, properties) can satisfy ‘x is wholly material’. For more on what this category might come to see Rettler and Bailey (2017).

  6. This is most obvious in the cases of supervenience and grounding definitions of physicalism, of which more below. Suppose that the mental lives of immaterial thinking spirits are not grounded in their physical goings-on, and that they may vary in their mental lives without variation in the goings-on of physical things. Then the grounding of everything in the physical would fail, as would the supervenience of the mental on the physical.

  7. I have in mind philosophers like Lynne Rudder Baker, Kevin Corcoran, Hud Hudson, Nancey Murphy, Trenton Merricks, and Peter van Inwagen.

  8. See, for example, Jackson (1999) and subsequent literature.

  9. Wilson (2006).

  10. For ease of presentation, I’ll put the cases in the first person singular: imagine these as little speeches given by the subject of each case.

  11. On Simple Soul and one case for the view, see Bailey (2014a).

  12. On Entangled Soul and whether souls could be in space or time, see Bailey et al. (2011), §4.

  13. On Union, see Bailey (2015a), §4.2.

  14. I discuss a number of issues relevant to Thinking Parts in Bailey (2014a, b, 2016a).

  15. Chisholm (1978); see also Quinn (1997).

  16. I discuss and defend Organism and related views in Bailey (2015b, 2016b, 2017).

  17. Markosian (2000), §3. See §4–8 for other styles of definition (and objections to each).

  18. Markosian (2000): 390ff. I’ve put the replies in my own terms.

  19. Montero (2006) and Nagasawa (2012).

  20. Montero (2013).

  21. Dasgupta (2015).

  22. My advice here also supplies the physicalist with an easy rejoinder to arguments purporting to show that free will and supervenience theses are incompatible. The physicalist may freely jettison those theses without thereby giving up on physicalism altogether. See Bailey (forthcoming) for more discussion of this strategy and application to recent literature.

  23. See Bailey and Wilkins (2018) for discussion and citations.

  24. Most notably Koslicki (2008).

  25. Marmodoro (2013).

  26. I’m supposing that, on this kind of hylomorphism, no form itself satisfies Wholly material.

  27. The shock factor may be further mitigated by reflecting on other cases of alleged supervenience failure. Montero (2013) offers this example: “… if the properties, entities and laws of chemistry did not supervene on the properties, entities and laws of physics, we might need an extra law that guarantees that every time that, say, a certain quantum configuration occurs, a certain event occurs at the chemical level… what is the argument that such linking laws, in and of themselves, are incompatible with physicalism?” Montero is exactly correct, I think. The failure of chemical phenomena to metaphysically supervene on physical phenomena would not be evidence against the truth of physicalism. It would, instead, be evidence that physicalism does not entail a metaphysical supervenience thesis at all.

  28. I’ve focused in this section on supervenience theses. But similar remarks apply to grounding theses too. Another upshot of this article’s main line of reasoning, then, is that it is possible that we are wholly material beings even if the mental is not grounded in the physical.

  29. Schneider (2012, 2013); I’ll focus on the arguments as presented in (2012), which are a little more closely connected to my present purposes. For illuminating discussion of Schneider and, in particular, a very helpful argument that materialistic versions of animalism are compatible with property dualism, see Yang (2015).

    Schneider is not the first to argue that property dualism entails substance dualism. See also Francescotti (2000) and especially (2001), in which he argues that on any suitable definition of ‘physical particular’, property dualism implies that the subjects of mental properties are not themselves physical particulars. My rebuttal to Francescotti is this: I’ve found a suitable definition of ‘physical particular’ (though I favor ‘wholly material’) that does not have this untoward consequence.

  30. This classification originates in Wolterstorff (1970). For extremely helpful discussion, see also van Inwagen (2011). I argue against bare particular views in Bailey (2012).

  31. Schneider (2012): 65.

  32. See van Inwagen (2004, 2007) for a fine example of a relational ontology in action. It is striking that Schneider does not even mention (much less argue against) the relational alternatives to the bundle and bare particular views. This oversight is perhaps best explained (but not excused) by the near-hegemony that constituent views have enjoyed in recent years—at least amongst metaphysicians who work on substance.

  33. Notice that the intramural details don’t matter here. On any relational view (according to which properties are, say, classes of possible objects, Platonic exemplars, unsaturated assertibles, or something else besides), our mental properties are not parts of us, and so the view that no mental property is a physical property does not support the view that we are less than wholly material.

  34. van Inwagen (2007): 211–212.

  35. Schneider (2012): 67.

  36. Schneider (2012): 67.

  37. My model assumes that the psycho-physical laws are not themselves concrete particulars; and this is well and good. For as I’m thinking of things, such laws are propositions—prime candidates for an abstract office if ever such there were.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful discussion and critique of ancestors of this article and its central ideas, I thank a dozen or so anonymous journal referees, Abel Ang, Alex Arnold, Robert Audi, Nathan Ballantyne, Zach Barnett, Paddy Blanchette, Jeff Brower, Amber Carpenter, Sebastian Cortes, Cheryl Cosslett, Daniel Fogal, Scott Hagaman, Hud Hudson, Shieva Kleinschmidt, David Mark Kovacs, Allison Love, Neil Mehta, Ng Sai Ying, Sherice Ngaserin, Laurie Paul, Al Plantinga, Tim Pickavance, Alex Pruss, Josh Ramussen, Mike Rea, Brad Rettler, Jeff Russell, Amy Seymour, Eric Schliesser, Manraaj Singh, Alex Skiles, Meghan Sullivan, Cathy Sutton, Leopold Stubenberg, Allison Krile Thornton, Patrick Todd, Peter van Inwagen, Matt Walker, Josh Wong, Patrick Wu, Eric Yang, Randy Yeo, and Dean Zimmerman.

Funding

Funding was provided by Yale-NUS College (SG) (Grant No. R-607-000-305-115).

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    Andrew M. Bailey

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Bailey, A.M. Material through and through. Philos Stud 177, 2431–2450 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01318-9

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