perfectly natural properties that do not supervene on other perfectly natural prop-
erties is enjoyed by beings by courtesy.
I tentatively conclude that parthood, spatiotemporal distance, and causation are
not perfectly natural relations. Instead, the perfectly natural relations are parthood,
spatiotemporal distance, and causation. These latter relations are eachrestricted
relations in that they are exemplified only by genuine beings. The lesson I am
inclined to draw is this: if we accept a kind of ontological pluralism that recognizes
being-by-courtesy, then we should also accept a kind of pluralism about these
relations as well. Just as there are modes of being, some of which are degenerate,
there are different kinds of parthood, modes of spatiotemporal relatedness, and
so forth.
What about those perfectly natural properties and relations that do supervene on
other perfectly natural properties and relations? Could almost nothings enjoy these
perfectly natural properties and relations? The most plausible candidates for such
properties are higher-order properties: properties enjoyed by abstract objects.
Eddon (2013), for example, argues that some fundamental properties (among
them quantitative determinates) themselves enjoy fundamental properties. But the
paradigmatic beings by courtesy are not abstract objects, but rather are concrete:
holes, shadows, heaps of things, arbitrary undetached parts, and so on.^72 As far as
I can see, the only potential candidate for being a supervening but fully real property or
relation enjoyed by almost nothings is the identity relation. And even then it is not
clear to me that the identity relation is asuperveningrelation: if all other perfectly
natural properties and relations are not haecceities, then it fails to supervene as well.
(We’ll discuss haecceities more in section 6.5.)
But I also don’t see a particularly compelling reason to think that identity per se is
perfectly natural (rather than identity), and it might be a cleaner theory to follow
Suárez all the way and deny that beings by courtesy and genuine beings enjoy
“common concepts.”^73
5.8 Chapter Summary
Holes, shadows, and other almost nothings fittingly show the cracks of many
ontological theories. Their reality must be recognized, but their way of being must
also be recognized as in some way deficient. In this chapter, I discussed several ways
(^72) Whether there are abstract objects that are also beings by courtesy will be discussed further in
chapter 7. 73
Note that I do not endorse the claim that fundamental objects can’t instantiate non-fundamental
properties. There is an interesting middle position worth considering, namely that fundamental quantifiers
cannot be attached to non-fundamental predicates. That is, if“E”is a fundamental quantifier and“F”is a
non-fundamental predicate, then neither“ExFx”nor“~ExFx”expresses a proposition. A position like this
is inspired by some remarks in Siderits (2007: 61–3), who writes at page 62,“at the level of ultimate truth,
no statement about persons could be true; all such statements are simply meaningless.”The view suggested
by these remarks is also similar to what Sider (2011) callspurity.