David Lewis (1991, 84) famously argued that mereology is ontologically innocent. Many who have considered this claim believe he was mistaken. Mereology is not innocent, because its acceptance entails the acceptance of sums, new objects that were not previously part of one's ontology. This argument, the argument from ontological parsimony, has two versions: a qualitative and a quantitative one. I argue that the defender of mereology can neutralize both arguments by holding that, given mereology, a commitment to the parts of an object is not an extra ontological commitment, made in addition to the commitment to the object; and that if the parts of an object are 'ontologically innocent', then sums cannot fail to be innocent either.

Some philosophers say that a whole is "nothing over and above" its parts. Most also take general extensilonal mereology to be treating wholes as "nothing over and above" their parts. It is not always clear, however, what exactly is meant by the phrase "nothing over and above." Nor is it obvious why the phrase is associated with mereology, and what purpose it serves there. In the words of Peter Van Inwagen (1994, 210): "This slippery phrase has had a lot of employment in philosophy, but what it means is never explained by its employers." This paper sheds light on the various senses in which one might hold that a whole is "nothing over and above" its parts, and on how these senses are related both to each other and to mereology. | INTRODUCTIONThis paper explicates different senses of "nothing over and above its parts" and aims to determine which of these, if any, accurately describes the way general extensional mereology (which I shall now refer to simply as "mereology") characterizes parts and wholes. I hope to remove some of the confusion concerning the phrase and aid debates on (mereological) composition and the so-called Composition as Identity debate.The plan is as follows. First, I shall present some quotations containing the phrase "nothing over and above" (Section 2). This will allow me to formulate different senses, or meanings, of "nothing over and above" explicitly.Then, in Section 3, I will examine interrelations among the various senses of "nothing over and above" that have been identified. Following this, in Section 4, I will relate those senses to mereology. I shall conclude that mereology does give reason to think of a whole as "nothing over and above its parts"-at least, in some senses of the phrase. | EXAMPLES OF " NOTHING OVER AND ABOVE"The phrase "nothing over and above" is often used in discussions of mereology (and cats):The fusion is nothing over and above the cats that compose it. (Lewis, 1991, 81) A cat-fusion is "nothing over and above" the cats that compose it. (Varzi, 2014a, 48-referring to the above quote.)But there are different senses of this phrase, even within mereology. To show this, I need to present some passages from philosophical work containing the phrase. Many deployments of "nothing over and above" appear to admit of more than one reading. This means that my interpretations of what various authors seem to mean when they use the phrase can be challenged. Ironically enough, it also shows that it is vital to distinguish various senses of "nothing over and above," as I set out to do in this paper.As a first example, let us consider Achille Varzi's use of the phrase in discussing the conditions of the existence of a whole:Any fusion of a class of things is itself an existing thing. Thus, in particular, a perdurantist universalist draws no ontological distinction between homogeneous, temporally continuous wholes and scattered fusions of arbitrarily selected temporal parts. If the parts exist, they constitute a whole, for the whole is nothing over and above the parts. (Varzi, 20...

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In a recent article, Marian David (2008) distinguishes between two interpretations of Tarski's work on truth. The standard interpretation has it that Tarski gave us a definition of truth in-L within the meta-language; the non-standard interpretation, that Tarski did not give us a definition of true sentence in L, but rather a definition of truth, and Tarski does so for L within the meta-language. The difference is crucial: for on the standard view, there are different concepts of truth, while in the alternative interpretation there is just one concept. In this paper we will have a brief look at the distinction between these two interpretations and at the arguments David gives for each view. We will evaluate one of David's arguments for the alternative view by looking at Tarski's 'On the Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages', and his use of the term 'extension' therein, which, we shall find, yields no conclusive evidence for either position. Then we will look at how Tarski treats 'satisfaction', an essential concept for his definition of 'true sentence'. It will be argued that, in light of how Tarski talks about 'satisfaction' in §4 of 'On the Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages' and his claims in the Postscript, the alternative view is more likely than the standard one.

In debates about the metaphysics of material objects examples of colocated objects are commonly taken to be examples of coincidence too. But the argument that colocation is best understood as involving coincidence is never spelled out. This paper shows under what conditions colocation entails coincidence and argues that the entailment depends on a principle that actually rules out certain forms of colocation. This undermines the argument from colocation to coincidence.