Actual Gunk, Colocation, and Preponderance: A Gunk Model with Predominants for Anaxagoras’s Ontology

Abstract

Marmodoro (2017. Everything in Everything: Anaxagoras’s Metaphysics . New York: Oup Usa) provides a gunk model for Anaxagoras’s ontology. All elements in the gunk model are some instantiated physical properties — opposites. She suggests regarding these opposites as qualitative gunk. The purpose of this paper is to refute the view that the gunk model for Anaxagoras’s ontology is incompatible with the preponderance principle, which allows certain kinds of opposites to be predominant in certain regions. In my opinion, the incompatibility comes from that Marmodoro confuses the mereological structure and spatial structure of opposites. To clear up this confusion, I elucidate two fundamental concepts pertaining to the gunk model — actual gunk and colocation, and invoke measure-theoretic extension to underpin them. With these resources, I propose a more refined condition for determining preponderance in certain regions, which leads to a gunk model with predominants.