Bill Brewer Inaugural: Natural Continuants

Part of the Arts & Humanities Festival 2013: Being | Human
Presented by the Department of Philosophy

This event is free and open to all but booking is required.

I present, motivate, and defend an account of ordinary material objects that makes a significant distinction between Natural Continuants, whose unity at and over time is entirely natural and independent of our concepts and activities, and Artificial Continuants that are metaphysically grounded on these by various modes of conceptual abstraction, including spatial and temporal partition, collection, and approximation. The individual animals, plants, and material lumps that we encounter in perception are naturally unified substances that provide a metaphysical foundation for our subsequent conceptual articulation of the world that we find around us into more dependent persisting things of various kinds. Failure to respect the distinction between Natural and Artificial Continuants is a source of widespread philosophical confusion. I illustrate how this account solves certain familiar metaphysical puzzles.

Biography:
Professor Bill Brewer read Maths and Philosophy at Oxford, where he also received the B. Phil and the D. Phil in Philosophy, working with P. F. Strawson, David Pears, Jennifer Hornsby, and John Campbell. He was a Senior Scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, a Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, a Tutorial Fellow and University Lecturer at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and, most recently, a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Warwick. He has also held visiting positions at Brown, Hamburg, and UC Berkeley.
He joined King’s College, London, in September 2012 as the Susan Stebbing Professor of Philosophy.

He works in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology, and is the author of two monographs, Perception and Reason (OUP, 1999) and Perception and its Objects (OUP, 2011), as well as many papers in journals and collections. His current major research project concerns the parts and persistence of macroscopic material objects. In particular, he is interested in arguing for a simple endurantism from the premise that such objects are the mind-independent direct objects of perception. A central focus of the argument concerns the role of material objects as the unified explanatory grounds of the order and nature of our actual and counterfactual perceptual experience of them.