Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Volume 64, Issue 2, March 2002

Scala and the Spinning Spheres

I have argued that contemporary humeans face a trilemma: either (i) give up temporal parts, (ii) deny the humean supervenience of causal relations, or (iii) deny the possibility of there being a difference between rotating and nonrotating homogeneous spheres. Mark Scala (“Homogeneous Simples”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 64, 2002) describes an interesting class of seemingly possible objects, spinning and stationary simples; and argues their possibility undermines my argument. I argue that it does not. And I conclude with a more general assessment of the status of objections to humeanism from the possibility of homogeneous objects in motion.