By Alexander Dunn; approved for the Divison in May 2012

Theories of metaphysical nihilism claim that there are no (or nearly no) objects with parts: no chairs, houses, mountains, and perhaps even no people. The philosophers who make these claims have trouble explaining why we nonetheless believe there are such things. The only successful explanation is compatible both with nihilism and with metaphysical universalism. Universalism claims that for every set of things, there is something else made up of those things; this thesis is intuitively more plausible than nihilism. But if we assume that universalism is true, and if we do not presuppose four-dimensionalism, we have to choose between two unintuitive versions of universalism: one that posits a plurality of co-located (entirely overlapping) objects, or one that denies that things can change their parts.