 How might the existence pluralist and the existence nihilist reply to such an exclusion argument? Starting with the existence pluralist, she might try to deny 4 by denying that the world exists. This might seem an unlikely reply, though there are those who endorse principles of restricted composition that entail that the world does not exist. For instance, van Inwagen 1990 holds that composition only occurs when the result is a life, and the world is (presumably) not a life—a consequence van Inwagen himself (2002: 127) later notes and  embraces.[21]  Lowe (2012: 93-5) is more directly skeptical about “the cosmos” that monists invoke (though see Tallant 2015 (3103-06) for a reply to Lowe, based on Schaffer’s 2009b proposed identification of the cosmos with the spacetime manifold).