Inheriting Harmony

Supersubstantivalism has been recently discussed – and defended – both in metaphysics – for example, Morganti 2011, Dumsday 2016, Giberman forthcoming, and in philosophy of physics – for example, Lehmkuhl 2018. One of the most powerful considerations in favour of supersubstantivalism is the argument from harmony. In a recent paper Leonard (2021) provides a new take on such an argument. Leonard takes supersubstantivalism to be roughly the view that material objects are identical to the spacetime regions at which they are exactly located.1 I will mostly follow this characterization, but I will return to it briefly in §5. The argument from harmony is approximately the following. There is a certain harmony between material objects and their locations. Necessarily, if material object x is located at a spherical region, x is spherical. Necessarily, if material object x is located at region r, any part of x is located at a part of r. Leonard calls the former ‘G-Harmony’ for ‘geometrical harmony’ and the latter ‘P-Harmony’ for ‘parthood harmony’. Supsersubstantivalists, so the argument goes, have a straightforward explanation of both G-Harmony and P-Harmony. By contrast, dualists – those who hold that material objects are distinct from their locations – do not have such an explanation and should regard harmony principles as unexplained coincidences. In this paper I put forward a theory, which I shall call the ‘Inheritance Theory’, that provides a straightforward explanation of both G-Harmony and P-Harmony on behalf of dualists.