Crawford (Tim) Elder, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, critically discusses and replies to the alternatives in his new book Familiar Objects and Their Shadows (Cambridge University Press, 2011). There’s the ontological relativist, who denies that ordinary objects exist independently of human minds, and the explosivist, who readily agrees there are ordinary objects, but who also thinks there are many extraordinary objects – for example, trout-turkeys, which start out as a trout and then at a later stage in life are turkeys. There’s also the exdurantist, who thinks objects are just chains of temporal stages; the causal exclusionist, who claims that ordinary objects don’t in fact satisfy our best criteria for existence; the composition skeptic, who says there are (for example) no dogs, just a bunch of atoms arranged dogwise, and, finally the universal mereologist, who thinks any parts compose a sum – including the sum of your dog, your bed and the Eiffel Tower. In his tightly argued book, Professor Elder takes on these opponents of the view that ordinary objects exist much as we think they do and that they, along with their parts, are pretty much all that does exist.

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