ABSTRACT
The chapter supports a thesis that it names “substance gradualism.” This is the view that material objects can have different degrees of unity and cohesion, depending on the kind of principles which bind them together. The main argument is construed through a discussion within contemporary Aristotelian hylomorphism. The chapter further suggests that the degree of unity of an object is proportional to the tightness with which its constitutive parts are bound together and that tightness is inversely proportional to the level of freedom that a part maintains after being bound on the whole. “Tightness” and “freedom” are understood in terms of the degree at which the normal powers of a constitutive item are constrained when that item contributes as a part to a whole. Real essences are substantial – and the material object is then a substance in a strict sense – when they constraint matter at the lowest levels of material composition. The chapter suggests also that political communities can be thought in hylomorphic terms as substances having a certain degree of unity.
