Philosophers Have Poked at Holes for Decades, and They Still Can't Agree If They Exist
Holes (1996-2025)
Holes seem as real as cookies: we see them, count them, and blame them for leaks. Yet they are made of nothing, which makes their perception, identity, and parts deeply puzzling. This Stanford Encyclopedia entry surveys the metaphysical minefield, from paraphrasing holes away to treating them as spacetime regions or negative parts of objects, and asks whether holes are genuine entities or just useful fictions.
A hole, after all, is something. This is nothing at all.
- andai
Excerpt:
a. Holes are ontologically parasitic: they are always in something and cannot exist in isolation. (‘There is no such thing as a hole by itself’, Tucholsky 1931: 100; ‘Take away the thing, and the hole goes too’, Heath 1967: 524). This is why there cannot exist a world consisting only of holes (Coggins 2010: 71).
b. Holes are fillable. You don’t necessarily destroy a hole by filling it up (except perhaps when the filling is homogeneous with the hole-lining); you don’t create a new hole by removing the filling.
c. Holes are locationally gracious. When you fill or put something in a hole, the hole does not squeeze to the side; it shares its location with its guest (and if the guest has a hole, you get two co-located entities of the same kind).
- fwlr
A lovely surprise to see this here; this was my favorite text for explaining “what is philosophy” to people.
- jcmontx
I could have gone my whole life without thinking this