What does “nothing over and above its parts” actually mean?

Abstract

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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