Objects and Properties New Perspectives

by Moran, Alex; Rossi, Carlo

• ISBN13: 9780198929642
• ISBN10: 0198929641
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780198929666
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2026-02-27
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

This edited volume features a range of essays from world-leading philosophers discussing the key philosophical concepts of 'object' and 'property'. Arguably, these are two of the most fundamental concepts in metaphysics. Nor is it hard to see why. If one of the central goals of metaphysics is to uncover what reality is like, in and of itself, then a natural starting point is the idea that reality involves two basic kinds of item: objects and properties. Notably, it seems hard to define one without the other: objects are things that have or instantiate properties; properties are the things that objects have, or that are instantiated by objects. Both concepts seem to be equally central to the volume's conceptual scheme--so much so that it is difficult to express truths about how things stand in the world without implicitly assuming the existence of these two ontological categories.

Objects and Properties: New Perspectives collects original chapters from analytic metaphysicians working on objects and properties to showcase state-of-the-art research and to highlight the diversity of current work in this area. The volume offers in-depth discussions of debates ranging from grounding and metaphysical explanation to reduction, truthmaking, pluralism versus monism about material objects, intrinsic versus extrinsic properties, the philosophy of colour, the mind-body problem, processual views of material objects, change, modality, persistence, and composition.

Author Biography

Alex Moran, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Philosophy Department, Bilkent University, and Research Associate, Philosophy, Stockholm University,Carlo Rossi, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Santiago

Alex Moran is Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Université de Fribourg and a Research Associate at Stockholm University. He has also held positions at Cambridge, Oxford, and Trinity College Dublin, and was recently a visiting scholar at Princeton University. He is the co-editor of Is Consciousness Everywhere?: Essays on Panpsychism (2022).

Carlo Rossi is an Associate Professor of the Philosophy Department at the Universidad de Santiago, Chile. Prior to this, he was an Assistant Professor of the Liberal Arts Faculty at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile, and a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy, Cambridge. His main area of research is metaphysics, particularly the metaphysics of material objects and other temporal entities, and intersecting areas in the philosophy of logic and language, philosophy of physics, and ancient philosophy.

Table of Contents

1. Things Are Seldom What They Seem: Causal Angst, John Heil2. Grounding, Reduction, and Analysis, Ralf M. Bader3. Particularism: Properties Do Not Exist: (Instead, the Real Predicables Are Types of Aspects of Particulars, Aspects Themselves Utterly Particular), Mark Johnston4. Modes, Disturbances, and Spatio- temporal Location, Friederike Moltmann5. Continuant Processes or Processual Continuants? Towards an Analytic Process Metaphysics, Anne Sophie Meincke6. Regress, Relation, and Explanation, Anna-Sofia Maurin7. Pluralism, Alternate Composition Cases, and Conditional Grounding, Alex Moran8. Identity, Locality, and Endurance, Carlo Rossi9. A Conventionalist's Apology, Alan Sidelle