Are grounding claims fully general in character? If an object a is F in virtue of being G, does it follow that anything that’s G is F for that reason? According to the thesis of Weak Formality, the answer here is ‘yes’. In this paper, however, I argue that there is philosophical utility in rejecting this thesis. More exactly, I argue that two currently unresolved problems in contemporary metaphysics can be dealt with if we hold that there can be cases (...) of ‘kind-dependent grounding’, the key thought being that once we allow for such cases, we must also accept that Weak Formality is false. (shrink)

sProblems about the nature of integral parts and wholes were central to twelfth-century discussions of the individuation and persistence over time of both substances and artifacts. This paper examines in detail Abaelard’s contribution to these discussions arguing that Abaelard proposes a solution to these problems which preserves our common sense intuitions about identity over time. In Abaelard’s work we find an explicit solution to the problem of the identity over time of living things which appeals to the persistence of the (...) vegetative soul through the loss or addition of corporeal matter. In work from the school of the Montani we apparently also have an account of Abaelard’s solution to the problem of the identity over time of artifacts which distinguishes between the role of a part in an integral whole and the material which plays that role such that the role persists when the matter is replaced. (shrink)

An encyclopedia entry which covers various revisionary conceptions of which macroscopic objects there are, and the puzzles and arguments that motivate these conceptions: sorites arguments, the argument from vagueness, the puzzles of material constitution, arguments against indeterminate identity, arguments from arbitrariness, debunking arguments, the overdetermination argument, and the problem of the many.