The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 10th from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Rani Rachavelpula (Columbia).

Title: Generating gunk

Abstract: An object is gunky iff all its parts have proper parts. Since Anaxagoras, philosophers have appealed to the existence of gunk to support a range of metaphysical views. These discussions raise questions about the composition of gunk: How is gunk generated? How do we get gunk? Obviously, gunk cannot be composed of atoms. Otherwise, we have admitted objects into our ontology (i.e. atoms) with no proper parts. This has led to the widespread belief that gunk cannot be generated. It must be given. In this talk we prove this claim to be false. Though gunk cannot be generated by atoms, it can nevertheless be generated by some fundamental parts. We apply Weyl’s Equidistribution Theorem to produce a mereological model of a universe which is gunky yet generated by a single element. This dispels other misconceptions about gunk and provides a new perspective on debates about metaphysical fundamentality.