Atomistic metaphysics motivated an explanatory strategy which science has pursued with great success since the scientific revolution. By decomposing matter into its atomic and subatomic parts physics gave us powerful explanations and accurate predictions as well as providing a unifying framework for the rest of science. The success of the decompositional strategy has encouraged a widespread conviction that the physical world forms a compositional hierarchy that physics and other sciences are progressively articulating. But this conviction does not stand up to (...) a closer examination of how physics has treated composition, as a variety of case studies will show. (shrink)

In his Material Beings, Peter van Inwagen distinguishes two questions about parthood. What are the conditions necessary and sufficient for some things jointly to compose a whole? What are the conditions necessary and sufficient for a thing to have proper parts? The first of these, the Special Composition Question (SCQ), has been widely discussed, and David Lewis has argued that an important constraint on any answer to the SCQ is that it should not permit borderline cases of composition. This is (...) a far-reaching claim, since many plausible-seeming accounts of composition do permit borderline cases. Ned Markosian has recently directed our attention to the second, the neglected Inverse Special Composition Question (ISCQ). I will argue that those who accept Lewis’s constraint on answers to the SCQ should accept an analogous constraint on answers to the ISCQ, and I will discuss the effects of such a constraint. (shrink)

Sider’s (2001) modification of the Lewisean argument from vagueness for unrestricted mereological composition is advertised as having the advantage over the original that the assumption of the semantic determinacy of ‘part of’ (its lack of multiple eligible precisifications) is not required. This is not so; without this assumption the crucial step in Sider’s defence of his most contentious premiss, (P3), is one no defender of the linguistic theory of vagueness is obliged to take. Since the aim of the argument is (...) precisely to show that a defender of the linguistic theory of vagueness must accept unrestricted mereological composition the argument has no advantage over Lewis’s. (shrink)