154. Justin Mooney | Phases of Objects

When a lump of clay becomes a statue, does one thing get a new job, or does a brand-new thing come into being?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestJustin Mooney is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at College of the Holy Cross, and his work has focused on metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and more.Check out his recent book, "Phases of Objects"!https://academic.oup.com/book/62226https://a.co/d/0eL5AfF92. Book SummaryPhases of Objects by Justin Mooney (Oxford University Press, 2026) is a work of analytic metaphysics defending a controversial view Mooney calls “phasalism”: the thesis that material objects are not permanent members of their kinds but can survive changes from one kind to another, so long as such changes violate no generic requirements on identity and persistence that hold for all material objects regardless of kind. This directly opposes what Mooney takes to be contemporary orthodoxy—”substantialism,” the widely-held and usually unexamined assumption that objects belong to their kinds permanently and essentially. His entry point is the classic puzzle of the statue and the lump of clay: whereas most solutions treat the statue and the clay as either identical or as two coincident objects, Mooney argues they are one and the same object, with the lump merely coming to “be” a statue in the same way a human person comes to be an adult by maturing. Being a statue, on his view, is a phase the clay passes through, not a new substance.The book builds this position out into a general metaphysics of material objects across five chapters. After laying methodological and metaphysical groundwork and distinguishing phase sortal changes (where the object before and after are numerically identical) from substance sortal changes (where they are distinct), Mooney proposes a phasalist criterion of identity—a broadly spatiotemporal account of persistence conditions—and tests it against a range of cases. He then deploys phasalism against the standard coincidence puzzles that motivate rival theories, arguing it handles sortal changes, gradual material turnover, undetached parts, and fission and fusion cases. A further chapter tackles “sameness relations,” where he defends the surprising pairings of identity without sameness and sameness without identity, showing how his framework accommodates our ordinary talk about objects being “the same” in various respects.The final chapter turns to what phasalism means for persons. Mooney argues his metaphysics pairs most naturally with animalism—the view that each of us is identical to a human organism, with personhood itself being a phase sortal property the animal comes to instantiate once sufficiently psychologically developed. From his general spatiotemporal criterion he derives a criterion of identity for human persons and applies it to the hard cases at the edges of a life: fertilization, the early embryo, twinning, and the fetus at the beginning, and persistent vegetative states, death, and decomposition at the end, closing with brain-transplant thought experiments. Throughout, Mooney is explicit that his aim is a partial defense—developing phasalism, drawing out its virtues, and rebutting objections—rather than a knockdown argument that it should be preferred to every rival, positioning the view as a serious and unjustly neglected competitor in the metaphysics of material objects.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:53 - Background to book06:25 - Sortals10:56 - Radical change13:04 - Methodology18:46 - Deflationary views25:42 - Substantialist views34:12 - Path to phasalism39:16 - Pluralism44:42 - Criterion of identity49:20 - Spatiotemporal continuity54:21 - Counterexample?1:00:52 - Another case1:06:39 - Advantage of substantialism?1:08:10 - Fission1:12:35 - Sameness relations1:18:58 - Relative identity1:21:40 - Christian theology1:25:37 - Main takeaway1:26:27 - Value of philosophy1:29:13 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe