Counting Composites
By Jonathan Payton (Calgary, Philosophy)
Date: Thursday April 2, 2020
Time: 1640-1800
Zoom link: This is an online event. All are welcome. If you would like to listen to the talk please click on the following link when the event is due to begin: https://zoom.us/j/556133950.
Abstract: According to the thesis ‘Composition Entails Identity’ (CEI), a whole is identical to all its parts taken together. CEI seems to imply that things can outnumber themselves, i.e., that there can be more things in a collection than there are. For instance, if two objects, a and b, compose a third object, c, then by CEI, (I) a and b are both many things and one, and (ii) they’re both two things and three. I solve this problem by distinguishing two kinds of number ascriptions – which I dub ‘cardinality ascriptions’ and ‘ipseity ascriptions’ – and hence two ways for some objects to be n things. While no collection can possess two or more distinct cardinalities – and so cannot, in that sense, outnumber itself – a single collection can possess two or more distinct ipseities.
About the speaker: Jonathan Payton received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and he is currently SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. He specializes in and the philosophy of action, drawing heavily on research in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. He has published in journals such as Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Synthese, Canadian Journal of Philosophy and Erkenntnis. In addition, he has a book under contract with Cambridge University Press entitled ‘Negative Actions and the Metaphysics of Agency’.
