Stockholm Colloquium in Philosophy: Øystein Linnebo (Oslo)

The dominant approach to mereology is “flat”, permitting neither nested structure nor hylomorphic structure. Kit Fine has developed an alternative approach that accommodates richly structured wholes, called “rigid” and “variable embodiments”. But his account has shortcomings. First, the account doesn’t provide an adequate account of the identity of embodiments. Second, the relation of the whole to its “building material” hasn’t been explained. Our constructionalist approach to embodiments addresses these shortcomings in a unified and systematic way. We provide a more rigorous and flexible approach to the identity of rigid embodiments, and we explain how embodiments are constructed from antecedently available entities. To illustrate our account, we consider an array of examples: material objects, social objects, concepts, and even abstract objects.