![]() Sider defends 1) by appealing to the fact that since nihilism is a metaphysical thesis, it must be true or false of necessity. This argument is interesting because all it turns upon is whether or not gunk is even possible, not whether or not the actual world is a gunky one. Therefore, nihilism is necessarily false.If gunk is metaphysically possible, then nihilism is not necessarily true.Nihilism is either necessarily true, or necessarily false.Many, such as Ted Sider (1993) have argued that even the possibility of gunk undermines another position, that of mereological nihilism. Under a Whiteheadian conception of spacetime, points, lines, planes, and other less-than-three-dimensional objects are constructed out of a method of "extensive abstraction", in which points, lines, and planes are identified with infinitely converging abstract sets of nested extended regions. Whitehead argues that there are no point regions of space and that every region of space has some three-dimensional extension. Whitehead in his seminal work Process and Reality. Possibly the most influential formulation of a theory of gunky spacetime comes from A. Recent mathematical work in the topology of spacetime by scholars such as Peter Roeper and Frank Arntzenius have reopened the question of whether a gunky spacetime is a feasible framework for doing physics. Despite having been a relatively common position in metaphysics, after Cantor's discovery of the distinction between denumerable and non-denumerable infinite cardinalities, and mathematical work by Adolf Grünbaum, gunk theory was no longer seen as a necessary alternative to a topology of space made out of points. In other words, motion is possible because time is gunky. ![]() Every interval of time can be divided into smaller and smaller intervals, without ever terminating in some privileged set of durationless instants. Aristotle's solution to Zeno's paradoxes involves the idea that time is not made out of durationless instants, but ever smaller temporal intervals. ![]() Zeno argued that if there were such things as discrete instants of time, then objects can never move through time. Elements of gunk thought are present in Zeno's famous paradoxes of plurality. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, and later in the writings of David Lewis. However, the first contemporary mentionings of gunk is found in the writings of A. See also Hud Hudson (2007).Īrguably, discussions of material gunk run all the way back to at least Aristotle and possibly as far back as Anaxagoras, and include such thinkers as William of Ockham, René Descartes, and Alfred Tarski. Zimmerman defends the possibility of atomless gunk (1996b). The term was first used by David Lewis in his work Parts of Classes (1991). (The term receptacles was coined by Richard Cartwright (Cartwright 1975).) It seems reasonable to assume that if space is gunky, a receptacle is gunky and then a material object is possibly gunky. The composition of space and the composition of material objects are related by receptacles-regions of space that could harbour a material object. Gunk has also played an important role in the history of topology in recent debates concerning change, contact, and the structure of physical space. But, as Sider argues, because gunk is both conceivable and possible, nihilism is false, or at best a contingent truth. If nihilism is necessarily true, then gunk is impossible. Sider's argument also applies to a simpler view than van Inwagen's: mereological nihilism, the view that only material simples exist. Gunk is an important test case for accounts of the composition of material objects: for instance, Ted Sider has challenged Peter van Inwagen's account of composition because it is inconsistent with the possibility of gunk. (See also Whitehead's point-free geometry.) By usual accounts of gunk, such as Alfred Tarski's in 1929, three-dimensional gunky objects also do not have other degenerate parts shaped like one-dimensional curves or two-dimensional surfaces. If point-sized objects are always simple, then a gunky object does not have any point-sized parts. Because parthood is transitive, any part of gunk is itself gunk. That is, a gunky object is not made of indivisible atoms or simples. In mereology, an area of philosophical logic, the term gunk applies to any whole whose parts all have further proper parts. ( February 2008) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations.
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