Paradox

142 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PARADOXtation on the grounds that arbitrary undetached body partsdo not exist.Actually van Inwagen goes much further. He denies thatthere are any nonliving complex things. He believes that thereare only organisms and simple, indivisible things. There arebabies but there are no baby carriages. Carriages are nonlivingcomplex things. If they existed, we would fall into absurdities.Suppose Plato and Socrates each have a carriage and systematicallyswap each component. Does Socrates wind up withPlato’s carriage and Plato with Socrates’? Van Inwagen regardsour tendency to give conflicting answers as evidence thatcomplex material things are incoherent.Van Inwagen does not go around correcting mothers whosay that there are carriages. Just as astronomers see little harmin talking of sunrise (even though they believe the sun doesnot rise), van Inwagen sees little harm in talking of carriages(even though he thinks they are impossible).Nihilists make no exception for organisms. Peter Unger(1980) argues that there are no men; there are only particlesarranged in a manly way. Unger enforces this point with the“problem of the many.” From microphysics, we know thateach object is a cloud of particles. Each cloud lacks a determinateboundary between the particles that are part of the cloudand the particles that are part of the cloud’s environment. Sincethere are many equally good candidates for being “the cloud,”either they are all clouds or none are clouds. Unger thinks it ismore absurd that there are many clouds (as opposed to onecloud) and so concludes that there are no clouds.Parmenides and Zeno are even more severe than Unger.They deny the possibility that there could be a plurality ofsimple things. According to Parmenides, there is exactly onesimple thing.