Bottom Up or Top Down?

In our interactions with the world, we constantly make distinctions, for example between a cat and the mat it sleeps on, but also between the paws and the rest of the cat. It is natural for us to do this, but from a philosophical point of view it is also problematic: what is the basis for making such distinctions? And if a thing consists of so many - and so many different - parts, to what extent is it even a whole? And is it still the same whole if it loses one of its parts? Philosophically, a lot depends on the answer to this question, as it determines, for example, what we can consider to be one thing or a thing that persists over time. This problem can also be found in many places in the history of philosophy, and medieval philosophers in particular developed diverse sophisticated systems in order to be able to master all possible distinctions that we encounter both in everyday life and in science. Although these theories are not explicitly adopted by their successors in the early modern period, who work in the context of the newly emerging mechanistic worldview, they help us to understand better how individual things, especially bodies, might be thought of at all from now on. The early modern rationalists are particularly interesting in this context. On the one hand, they were concerned with getting a conceptual grasp on the fundamental properties of bodies, such as extension, and thereby they arrive at metaphysical and physical theories in which bodies as such cannot be seen at all, or only very vaguely and cumbersomely, as individuals. But on the other hand, these thinkers are equally obliged to explain how this idea of bodies can be reconciled with our experience, in which individual bodies are not only quite obviously given to us but in which they also play a major role. It is precisely this tension that can be explained, according to the thesis of this project, with the help of theories of distinction. Such an analysis shows that early modern rationalists thought of bodies in two ways: from the individual whole down to its parts (i.e. thinking of the whole as being prior to the parts) and from its parts up (i.e. thinking of the parts as the basis for the whole). On the one hand, this way of looking at things shows that thinkers from the same tradition, namely rationalism, come to surprisingly different conceptions of how bodies can be thought of at all, but it also shows us how we can think of individual things today and what it actually means to be and remain an individual thing.