Peter van Inwagen

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Peter van Inwagen is John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He previously taught at Syracuse University for many years and earned his PhD from the University of Rochester under the direction of Richard Taylor and Keith Lehrer. He is one of the leading figures in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of action. It is largely due to his work (An Essay on Free Will: Oxford University Press, 1983) that incompatiblism (libertarianism) about free will is once again respectable in mainstream analytical philosophy.

He argued, in his book Material Beings, that the only composite material objects are living organisms, and thus that the only material objects are elementary particles, cells, and the multicellular organisms made up of cells. Every material object is made up ultimately of elementary particles, in this view, and the only things that can be composed by elementary particles are living organisms. Such everyday objects as tables, chairs, cars, buildings, and clouds do not really exist; they appear to exist because there are elementary particles arranged in the relevant ways. For example, where there appears to be a chair, there is, instead of a single material object, a vast number of electrons, photons, and other elementary particles moving about rapidly, as well as a great deal of empty space in between the particles. These particles do not compose a single object, any more than a swarm of bees is a single object. Like a swarm of bees, the particles maintain a more or less stable arrangement for a while, which might give you the impression of a single object, just as it would if the individual bees were too small for you to see, and there were sufficiently many of them. An individual bee, by contrast, has parts that are unified in the right way to constitute a single object (namely, a bee). Likewise, an elementary particle among the countless trillions swarming about where we see a chair is internally unified, since it has no parts. Hence, elementary particles and living organisms are the only material objects there are.