Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Conciliatory nihilists (as I’ll call them) aim to reconcile their mereological nihilism with the truth of ordinary talk ostensibly about composite objects. Some propose to interpret utterances of sentences such as “There is a table” as instances of disguised plural quantification over appropriately arranged simples. Others concede that there are composite objects, but deny that they really exist in the metaphysically relevant sense. I argue that such approaches are self-defeating. Conciliatory nihilists should either abandon their conciliatory inclinations or abandon their nihilism.