Contenders
Mereological essentialism is a position defended in the debate regarding material constitution. What is the relationship between, for instance, a statue and the lump of clay from which it is made. Several different answers are proposed. Take coincidentialism, the view that there are two objects located at the same place. The lump of clay should be distinguished from the statue because they have different persistence conditions. The lump would not survive the loss of a very small part of clay, but the statue would. The statue would not survive being squashed into a ball, but the lump of clay would.
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