nucleation

LIT-1016: Material Beings

2 min read

Properties2
StatusUnavailable — filed 2026-10-13 from its Crossref record, not read. Registered at the owner's request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for QUESTION-009 and QUESTION-035. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unavailable until it is read, not on merit. Looked for on 2026-10-13, none found: OpenAlex reports it closed, with no open-access or repository location; Semantic Scholar has no record of the DOI; Crossref links only De Gruyter's Cornell University Press Archive, which is paid; Project MUSE (book 49506) marks it restricted; it is not on Cornell University Press's Cornell Open list; a web search found only catalogue, retail and lending records, and one unofficial PDF host, which was not used.
Tagsmereology, metaphysics, individuation

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Peter van Inwagen (1990), Cornell University Press — DOI-10.7591/9781501713033

Key takeaways

Filed, not read. Known here by what it is standardly cited for.

  • The Special Composition Question. When do some things compose something? The book names it and sorts the possible answers: never, always, or under some restricted condition.
  • Its answer, organicism. Some things compose something if and only if their activity constitutes a life (or there is only one of them). There are organisms and simples arranged tablewise, but no tables.
  • It is standardly cited as the source of the question and as the main restricted answer.

Standing in the record

Filed for QUESTION-009, when a pattern of coordination constitutes an additional agent, which is a special-composition question for agents. The survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus found that corpus asking the same question and setting the literature aside in a clause (MOM-LIT-015).

It is a rival to the record’s answer. The record makes a combined form one system only relative to a stated target (CLAIM-152, CLAIM-157), while van Inwagen gives a target-free condition, life. A reading should say whether his “activity constitutes a life” can be stated as a condition on dynamics, and so compared with the gap criterion, and how he answers the vagueness argument against restricted composition (Lewis 1986, Sider 2001; not filed). QUESTION-035 is the other question it bears on.

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