Structure has played a significant role in recent philosophy of science, often at the expense of objects, but for Kathrin Koslicki structures and objects are inseparable: every composite material object has a structure, and the structure is literally a part of the object. Whilst she draws her inspiration-and her critical targets-from the metaphysical works of Plato and Aristotle, David Lewis and Kit Fine, Koslicki's book contains much that will interest philosophers of science, perhaps especially philosophers of physics and of biology. Early chapters dissect and reject two key claims of classical extensional mereology. Any old objects, no matter how loose and separate, form a set. But Koslicki denies that just any old objects sum to form a whole: for example, there is simply no such thing as the sum of the American President's left hand and the Eiffel Tower. It's not that hand-plustower is a minor, or degenerate, or insignificant object; it's that there is no such object. This is one point of disagreement with classical extensional mereology.

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Metaphysicians have recently found it useful to apply the notion of ground to a wide range of phenomena. Jonathan Schaffer, for example, cites the following cases, among others, as exhibiting genuine grounding connections:1 the relation between true propositions and their truthmakers; the relation between higher-order (e.g., biological) and lower (e.g., physical)properties; the relation between complex truths (e.g., conjunctions) and simpler truths (e.g., their conjuncts); the relation between substances and their qualities or modes (e.g., an apple and its redness); as well as the relation between a non-empty set and its members. When presented with such an apparently heterogeneous collection of cases, however, one may legitimately wonder whether much of anything has been accomplished by subsuming these phenomena, and perhaps others as well, under a single general rubric of grounding. In response to this concern, it is not uncommon for proponents of grounding to respond that, by collecting the data in question together in this way, we have in fact gained a valuable insight, namely that a collection of correlations which might at first strike us as quite disparate in reality presents us with a unified phenomenon ("the Unity Hypothesis").