Objects and Properties

This edited volume features a range of essays from world-leading philosophers discussing the key philosophical concepts of 'object' and 'property'. Arguably, these are two of the most fundamental concepts in metaphysics. Nor is it hard to see why. If one of the central goals of metaphysics is to uncover what reality is like, in and of itself, then a natural starting point is the idea that reality involves two basic kinds of item: objects and properties. Notably, it seems hard to define one without the other: objects are things that have or instantiate properties; properties are the things that objects have, or that are instantiated by objects. Both concepts seem to be equally central to the volume's conceptual scheme--so much so that it is difficult to express truths about how things stand in the world without implicitly assuming the existence of these two ontological categories.
Objects and Properties: New Perspectives collects original chapters from analytic metaphysicians working on objects and properties to showcase state-of-the-art research and to highlight the diversity of current work in this area. The volume offers in-depth discussions of debates ranging from grounding and metaphysical explanation to reduction, truthmaking, pluralism versus monism about material objects, intrinsic versus extrinsic properties, the philosophy of colour, the mind-body problem, processual views of material objects, change, modality, persistence, and composition.

Alex Moran is Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Université de Fribourg and a Research Associate at Stockholm University. He has also held positions at Cambridge, Oxford, and Trinity College Dublin, and was recently a visiting scholar at Princeton University. He is the co-editor of Is Consciousness Everywhere?: Essays on Panpsychism (2022).
Carlo Rossi is an Associate Professor of the Philosophy Department at the Universidad de Santiago, Chile. Prior to this, he was an Assistant Professor of the Liberal Arts Faculty at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile, and a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy, Cambridge. His main area of research is metaphysics, particularly the metaphysics of material objects and other temporal entities, and intersecting areas in the philosophy of logic and language, philosophy of physics, and ancient philosophy.