Kathrin Koslicki offers an analysis of ordinary material objects, those material objects to which we take ourselves to be committed in ordinary, scientifically informed discourse. She focuses particularly on the question of how the parts of such objects are related to the wholes which they compose. Many philosophers today find themselves in the grip of an exceedingly deflationary conception of what it means to be an object. According to this conception, any plurality of objects, no matter how disparate or gerrymandered, itself composes an object, even if the objects in question fail to exhibit interesting similarities, internal unity, cohesion, or causal interaction amongst each other. This commitment to initially counterintuitive objects follows from the belief that no principled set of criteria is available by means of which to distinguish intuitively gerrymandered objects from commonsensical ones; the project of this book is to persuade the reader that systematic principles can be found by means of which composition can be restricted, and hence that we need not embrace this deflationary approach to the question of what it means to be an object. To this end, a more full-blooded neo-Aristotelian account of parthood and composition is developed according to which objects are structured wholes: it is integral to the existence and identity of an object, on this conception, that its parts exhibit a certain manner of arrangement. This structure-based conception of parthood and composition is explored in detail, along with some of its historical precursors as well as some of its contemporary competitors.

Kathrin Koslicki is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her interests are metaphysics, philosophy of language, and ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle.

Standard Mereology
Introduction	p. 3
The Standard Conception of Composition	p. 9
Introductory Remarks	p. 9
Standard Mereology	p. 10
The Basic Concepts of Standard Mereology	p. 11
The Basic Principles of Standard Mereology	p. 15
A Gradual Statement of the Theory	p. 17
The Application of Standard Mereology to Ordinary Material Objects	p. 20
Ordinary objects as Mereological Sums	p. 23
Introductory Remarks	p. 23
Thomson's Three-Dimensionalist Approach	p. 23
Lewis' Four-Dimensionalist Approach	p. 29
Support for Unrestricted Composition	p. 29
The Lewis/Sider Argument from Vagueness	p. 30
The Controversial Premise (P3)	p. 34
The Matter of Vague Existence	p. 37
The Composition-as-Identity Thesis	p. 40
Concluding Remarks	p. 43
Composition as Non-Identity	p. 45
Introductory Remarks	p. 45
The Suspect Strategy	p. 47
The Suspect Strategy and Leibniz's Law	p. 47
Contingent Identity	p. 47
Temporary Identity	p. 48
Indeterminate Identity	p. 51
The Suspect Strategy and Existence Principles: Non-Existent Objects	p. 52
The Suspect Strategy and Restricted Indiscernibility Principles	p. 54
Coincident Objects	p. 54
Relative Identity	p. 56
What's Wrong with the Suspect Strategy?	p. 58
The Purely Stipulative Response	p. 58
Gibbard's Appeal to Failures of Substitutivity	p. 61
Parsons' Appeal to the Paradoxes of Naive Set Theory	p. 65
Deutsch's Expansion Principle	p. 66
Concluding Remarks	p. 67
A Contemporary Structure-Based Mereology
A Different Kind of Whole	p. 71
Introductory Remarks	p. 71
Parting Ways with the Standard Conception	p. 72
Fine's "Aggregative Objection"	p. 72
Fine's "Monster Objection"	p. 73
Fine's Theory of Embodiments	p. 75
Rigid Embodiments	p. 76
Variable Embodiments	p. 78
Discussion	p. 82
The Proliferation of Sui Generis Relations	p. 82
The Superabundance of Objects	p. 83
The Mysterious Nature of Variable Embodiments	p. 85
The Formal Properties of Parthood	p. 88
Concluding Remarks	p. 89
Ancient Structure-Based Mereologies
The Role of Structure in Plato's Mereological Writings	p. 93
Introductory Remarks	p. 93
The Negative Mereological Undercurrent	p. 94
The Positive Mereological Undercurrent	p. 96
Platonic Wholes	p. 100
Normativity, Teleology, Intelligibility and Unity	p. 100
Structure and Content	p. 105
The Aristotelian Regress in Met. Z.17	p. 108
Parts as "Structure-Laden"	p. 112
A Final Word on Content	p. 117
Concluding Remarks	p. 119
Aristotle's Refinements of Plato's Theory	p. 122
Introductory Remarks	p. 122
The Centrality of "Part" and "Whole" in the Aristotelian Corpus	p. 123
The Problem of the One and the Many	p. 125
A Reading of the Text	p. 126
One, Divisibility, Part, Quantity and Measure	p. 126
Kinds of Measure and Principles of Unity	p. 128
The Ways of Being a Part: Met. ¿.25	p. 134
The Ways of Being a Whole: Met. ¿.26	p. 139
Wholes and Totals	p. 140
Degrees of Wholeness	p. 142
Summary of Sections VI.3-4: The Highlights	p. 150
Discussion	p. 157
The Formal Properties of Parthood	p. 157
In Search of the Ultimate Mereological Atom	p. 159
Concluding Remarks	p. 162
An Alternative Structure-Based Theory
Objects as Structured Wholes	p. 167
Introductory Remarks	p. 167
Outlines of the Theory	p. 167
Mereological Non-Proliferation: A Single Relation of Parthood	p. 167
The Restricted Nature of Composition	p. 168
An Ontology of Kinds	p. 170
Ontology and Mereology	p. 171
Form and Matter	p. 172
An Ontology of Structured Wholes	p. 174
The Dichotomous Nature of Wholes	p. 176
Material Components as Proper Parts	p. 176
Formal Components as Proper Parts	p. 179
Material and Formal Components as Proper Parts	p. 183
The Hierarchical Nature of Composition	p. 186
Change over Time	p. 188
Synchronic and Diachronic Identity	p. 191
Composition as Non-Identity	p. 192
The Unified Nature of Wholes	p. 192
Concluding Remarks	p. 198
In Defense of Kinds	p. 200
Introductory Remarks	p. 200
What Are Natural Kinds?	p. 201
The Special Features of Natural Kinds	p. 203
Induction and Projectibility	p. 204
Laws of Nature	p. 205
Causation and Explanation	p. 207
Biological Taxa	p. 210
The Ontological Status of Species	p. 210
Species as Kinds	p. 214
What Sorts of Entities Are Natural Kinds?	p. 219
The Semantics of Natural Kind Terms	p. 220
Rigid Designation	p. 223
Incommensurability and Indeterminacy: Physical and Chemical Kinds	p. 227
Impurities and Isotopes: Scientific and Ordinary Classifications	p. 227
Meaning-Change and Theory-Change	p. 230
Concluding Remarks	p. 233
Structure	p. 235
Introductory Remarks	p. 235
Some Preliminaries	p. 236
Related Notions	p. 236
Different Grammatical Roles	p. 238
The Gestalt Theorists: Rescher and Oppenheim	p. 239
Some Case Studies	p. 240
Mathematical Structure	p. 240
Logical Structure	p. 241
Chemical Structure	p. 244
Musical Structure	p. 246
Linguistic Structure	p. 248
Structures as Objects	p. 252
The Grounding Problem Revisited	p. 254
A Potential Problem Case	p. 256
The Detachability of the Grounding Problem	p. 256
Giving Up the Transitivity of Parthood	p. 257
Individual Forms and Haecceities	p. 257
Denying the Existence of Heaps	p. 258
Concluding Remarks	p. 259
Conclusion	p. 261
Bibliography	p. 265
General Index	p. 281
Index of Names	p. 286
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