Abstract
What counts as a physical object? We think first of bodies, but the notion of a body is both too vague and too narrow. It is too vague in that we are not told how separate and cohesive and well rounded a thing has to be in order to qualify as a body. And it is too narrow, since for ontological purposes any consideration of separateness and cohesiveness and well-roundedness is beside the point. Rather let us understand a physical object, for a while, simply as the aggregate material content of any portion of space-time, however ragged and discontinuous.
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Notes
‘Individuality and Physics’, The Listener, October 10, 1963. It is the Einstein-Bose effect.
Logische Syntax der Sprache, pp. 11, 40.
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© 1976 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
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Quine, W. (1976). Whither Physical Objects?. In: Cohen, R.S., Feyerabend, P.K., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1451-9_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1451-9_29
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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