Content area
Full Text
Articles
An ancestor of this paper is forthcoming in Spanish as 'Sobre la expresión "propiedades particularizadas?": Tropos modificadores y tropos módulo', (translated by E. Zerbudis) in E. Zerbudis (ed.), Poderes Causales, Tropos, y Otras Criaturas Extrañas: Estudios de Metafísica Analítica (Buenos Aires: Título). For discussion I wish to thank audiences at the 2014 meeting of the North Carolina Philosophical Society, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the Programa de Pós-graduação Lógica e Metafísica, Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Instituto de Filosofía, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile; the Tercer Coloquio de Metafísica Analítica, 2012, Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Segundo Congreso Latinoamericano de Filosofía Analítica, 2012, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the second annual Houston Baptist University Philosophy Conference, 2012. For helpful comments I especially thank several anonymous referees as well as Anthony Adrian, José Tomás Alvarado, Dong An, Richard Cross, Tobias Flattery, John Forcey, Sophie Gibb, John Heil, Rob Koons, Michael Loux, E. J. Lowe, Alex Oliver, Timothy Pickavance, Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, Jeff Snapper, Peter van Inwagen, and Ezequiel Zerbudis.
Questions concerning the existence and nature of properties remain the subject of vigorous and far-reaching debate. The most general disagreement concerns whether properties exist at all (for recent overviews, see Edwards 2014 and Koons and Pickavance 2015). Austere nominalists hold that, strictly speaking, there are no properties but only primitively charactered objects; there are spherical objects--billiard balls and the like--but no sphericity (or sphericities) per se (for discussion, see Loux 2006 and Carroll and Markosian 2010). Other philosophers hold that properties exist in some sense or other but disagree on what properties are like--on the kind of entity that plays the role(s) of property (see Edwards 2014; Koons and Pickavance 2015; Lewis 1983; Oliver 1996; and Swoyer 1999). Among those positing unconstructed, fundamental properties, an important dispute concerns whether properties are universals (see Armstrong 1980a, 1980b, 1989, 1997; Moreland 2001, 2013; and van Inwagen 2004) or tropes (see Campbell 1990; Ehring 2011; Maurin 2002; Molnar 2003; and Williams 1953).
Realists posit universals, which are shareable, or 'repeatable' properties. A universal is shareable in that it can characterize several wholly distinct objects at once. For example, on realism, it is possible that two distinct spheres exist simultaneously, such that the...