Crawford (Tim) Elder, “Familiar Objects and their Shadows” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
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What is the central puzzle about the existence of ordinary objects?
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Hello everyone and welcome to the New Books and Philosophy channel of the New Books Network. My name is Carrie Figdor, and I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise. In our bimonthly podcasts we interview philosophers about their ideas as expressed in their newly published books. My interview today is with Crawford or Tim Elder, whose new book is Familiar Objects and Their Shadows, just published by Cambridge University Press. Professor Elder is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. It might be a surprise to non metaphysicians to discover the extent to which it is questionable whether the familiar objects we see and interact with exist. And yet these familiar objects are in fact very strange.
For example, we tend to take for granted that the very same object could change all of its properties and all of its matter, and yet somehow remain the same object. But how can that be? By analogy, if I swap all the ingredients in a recipe with a bunch of other ingredients and then change all the steps, would it make sense to say that I followed the recipe? But if it doesn't make sense, then what should we say about the nature of ordinary objects? As Tim Elder shows, the alternatives are many. These include the ontological relativist who denies that ordinary objects exist independently of human minds, and the explosivist who readily agrees that there are ordinary objects, but who also thinks that there are many extraordinary objects, for example, trout turkeys, which start out as a trout and then at a later stage in life are turkeys.
There is also the exturandist who thinks objects are just chains of temporal stages. The way a ream of paper is nothing but a stack of sheets. The causal exclusionist who thinks ordinary objects don't in fact satisfy our best criteria for existence. The composition skeptic who says, for example, that there are no dogs is It's just a bunch of atoms arranged dog wise. And then finally there's the universal muriologist who thinks any parts compose a sum. The particles that make up your dog. Is one object. But the particles making up your dog and your bed and the Eiffel Tower are another object that is equally good. In his new book, Tim takes on these contemporary opponents of the view that ordinary objects exist much as we think they they do.
That they exist independently of us, and that they, along with the microparticles and other components that make them up, are pretty much all that does exist. In short, yes, Virginia, there really are dogs, but no, Virginia, you don't get the dogs for free. You have to fight for them. Let's turn to the interview. I have with me here Crawford Elder, usually known as Tim Elder from the University of Connecticut.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central puzzle about the existence of ordinary objects?
0:00–10:45
2
Why are everyday objects like dogs philosophically troublesome?
10:45–19:00
3
How do modal relativists and conventionalists challenge realist views of objects?
19:00–26:41
4
What is the debate over natural kinds and their criteria?
26:41–35:18
5
How does the causal‑exclusionist argue that only micro‑particles have causal power?
35:18–43:18
6
What does the explosivist claim about “extraordinary” objects like trout‑turkeys?
43:18–51:18
7
How does Hegel’s philosophy provide a backdrop for the realist position?
51:18–59:12
8
What are the key take‑aways and future directions from this discussion?
59:12–1:07:41
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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PJ DiPietro, "Sideways Selves Travesti and Jotería, "Struggles Across the Américas" (U Texas Press, 2025)