The Metaphysics of Relations by Anna Marmodoro, David Yates
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Overview: It is uncontroversial that there are true relational predications—‘Abelard loves Eloise’, ‘Simmias is taller than Socrates’, ‘smoking causes cancer’, etc. But do any such truths involve the relata instantiating irreducibly polyadic properties, or external relations? Or can we explain relational truths solely in terms of monadic, non-relational properties—are all relations internal? According to a tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle, and continued by medieval philosophers, polyadic properties are metaphysically dubious. In non-symmetric relations such as the amatory relation, a property would have to inhere in two things at once—lover and beloved—but characterize each differently, and this puzzled the ancients. More recent work on non-symmetric relations highlights difficulties with their directionality. Such problems offer clear motivation for attempting to reduce relations to monadic properties. By contrast, in modern structuralist ontologies, there seem to be at least some external relations, for the common feature of such ontologies is that relational structure is fundamental. In some forms of ontic structural realism, fundamental physical reality is exhaustively relational. This book contains chapters by leading metaphysicians, tackling both traditional and contemporary aspects of the metaphysics of relations. It explores topics as diverse as: ancient and medieval reasons for scepticism about polyadic properties; recent attempts to reduce causal and spatiotemporal relations; recent work on the directionality of relational properties; powers ontologies and their associated problems; whether the most promising interpretations of quantum mechanics posit a fundamentally relational world; and whether the very idea of such a world is coherent.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Faith, Beliefs & Philosophy
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