{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026164311878597593, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0005232862375719519, 'mean_word_length': 4.7074626865671645, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Nothing Over and Above

“The whole is nothing over and above the parts”—this slogan animates many theories of parthood, is intuitively compelling, and is arguably central to our ordinary conception. Yet it seems to make no sense. As I understand it, the slogan says that an exceedingly intimate relationship holds between a whole and its parts: in some sense the whole is no different from its parts. But how can that be? I am just one thing; my head, arms, legs, and torso are more than one in number; so how can I be “nothing over and above” or “no different from” them? The slogan is admittedly vague. But there are various precise theses purporting to capture the slogan’s spirit whose truth we can meaningfully debate. The murky question of whether the theses really capture the spirit will remain— and I do not mean to downplay the importance of this question—but at least the murk will be contained. First we will consider a boring (though perhaps ultimately the best) precise rendering of the slogan’s spirit, which is simply that classical mereology is true. We’ll then discuss some more exciting ways to precisify the slogan, and conclude by asking whether the exciting ways promise anything better. ‘Nothing over and above’ is a exible piece of philosophical rhetoric, applicable across a variety of situations and to entities of various categories. A fact might be said to be nothing over and above another when it is necessitated or grounded by the latter fact; a property might be said to be nothing over and above another when it is realized by the latter property; one might say that wholes are qualitatively nothing over and above their parts meaning that composite objects possess no “emergent” properties; and so on.1 But the slogan to be explored here concerns, it would seem, a narrower sense of ‘nothing over and above’: that of a certain especially intimate ontic relation between a thing