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CHAIR'S STATEMENT FACULTY GRADUATE STUDENTS COLLOQUIUM CALENDAR UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM GRADUATE PROGRAM GRADUATE PLACEMENT MASTER SCHEDULE UNDERGRADUATE BULLETIN GRADUATE BULLETIN ACADEMIC CALENDARS USC LIBRARIES CAS COMPUTING & IT USC COMPUTER SERVICES ABOUT COLUMBIA SC RESTRICTED ACCESS: Faculty | Graduate Students Search USC   THIS SITE		COLLOQUIA & CONFERENCES METAPHYSICAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST ORDINARY OBJECTS   Amie Thomasson Department of Philosophy University of Miami   November 6, 2003 Thursday, 4:00pm-6:00pm Close/Hipp Building (BA), Room 464   Over the last hundred years, many philosophers have argued that we should deny the existence of such things as tables and chairs, sticks and stones, and other common-sense "ordinary" objects, since accepting them would violate independently plausible metaphysical principles or crucial theoretical demands of metaphysics. Here I will focus on two such recent arguments — the causal redundancy argument and the argument from composition — and attempt to diagnose where these arguments go wrong. I will also suggest that the problems with these arguments are typical, with similar problems lying behind "nothing over and above" appeals and arguments from parsimony. Examining the underlying problems with these arguments will put us on the road to a different approach to answering metaphysical questions — one that will also help make it clear why we should accept that there are ordinary objects.
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