How to be a Mereological Anti-Realist

Peter van Inwagen’s “special composition question” asks, more or less, “what must some objects be like in order for them to compose another object?” The chapter develops and defends (though falls short of fully endorsing) a theistic anti-realist response to the special composition question, according to which God decides when composition occurs. It is argued that this form of theistic mereological anti-realism is preferable to extant non-theistic variants of mereological anti-realism, and that theistic mereological anti-realism receives some motivation from several other sources (e.g., theistic mereological anti-realism provides some novel resources for responding to the problem of evil).