Coincidence Puzzles

Abstract

This chapter presents and discusses a general schema that subsumes a variety of puzzles having to do with the modal behaviour of material objects, some new and some familiar. These puzzles involve ‘Robustness’ premises according to which certain objects of a given kind are counterfactually robust in certain respects; ‘Non-coincidence’ premises according to which distinct objects of that kind are incapable of coinciding, and ‘Non-distinctness’ premises that rule out the scenarios in which actually distinct objects could have been identical; these jointly entail an absurd conclusion.