Topics Existence

Question Does the word "universe" denote a really existing thing, or is it just a kind generic term for all the things that exist? In other words: Is "universe" like the word "team" (because teams do not really exist, but only the individuals that make up a team can be said to really exist)?

Accepted:
November 5, 2005

Comments

Teams, surely, cannot exist without individuals to play on them, but it isn't obvious to me, anyway, that teams don't "really" exist. It was the same team that won the World Series in 2004 as had last wonit in 1918, so there has to be something more to a team than just acollection of players. Teams can gain and lose players, change locations and ownership, even change names, and yet it can be the same team.

The question you are asking can perhaps be clarified if we introduce the idea of a fusion, which is a notion from merology, the logic of parts and wholes. Suppose we have a bunch of objects, say, a shoe, a tennis ball, and a neutron star. The fusion of these objects is, by definition, simply the "sum" of these three objects. It's tempting to say that it is the object whose only parts are the shoe, the ball, and the star, but that's not quite right, because the parts of the shoe are also parts of the fusion. Moreover, the scattered thing consisting of half the tennis ball and the sole of the shoe is also a part of the fusion. (The sum of any parts of the original objects is part of the sum.) The right thing to say is that the fusion is the scattered thing every part of which "overlaps" at least one of the original objects. Some people find fusions to be really bizarre kinds of things, so bizarre that they deny that there are any fusions. But let's not worry about that question right now.

What I just argued, in part, is that a team cannot be identified with the fusion of its players at a single time. I didn't argue that a team isn't the fusion of all the players over time, though it will quickly become apparent if you try to work that idea out that it would need refinement. (Players move from team to team, all the more so since the rise of free agency, at least in American professional sports.) My own view is that this view won't work, in the end, either, but there are plenty of philosophers who like that kind of idea.

Your question could be put as: Is the universe just the fusion of everything that has, does, and will exist? Or is there something "above and beyond" all those things which is the universe? I'm not myself sure what's really at stake here. What makes me worry about the idea that teams (let alone people and aninals) are just fusions is their identity over time. But I'm not sure what point there would be in talking about whether we still have the same universe now that there was, say, 5 billion years ago. There's just the one universe, and that's kind of it.