The Fragmentation of Being

For example, if necessarily everything were located in space–time, then being
spatiotemporally located would be classified as a topic-neutral property, contrary
to what was said in the previous paragraph. So this characterization of topic-
neutrality is rough. However, it will suffice for our purposes here.
Whenever we have a feature that applies to many different ontological categories
(or kinds of things more generally), there is an interesting metaphysical question:
is this relatively topic-neutral feature perfectly natural (or at least highly natural) or
is it akin to a mere disjunction of more natural, more topic-specific features?
Consider againbeing healthy. I am healthy, my circulatory system is healthy, and
broccoli is healthy. Let us suppose that there is a common property that we all share.
On many theories of properties, such as Lewis’s (1986) theory according to which
any set of possible individuals is a property, there definitely is a property we
exemplify. Even so, that in virtue of which we exemplify this common property
differs from case to case. I am healthy in virtue of being aflourishing organism, my
circulatory system is healthy in virtue of functioning properly, and broccoli is healthy
in virtue of its contributing to theflourishing of organisms like me. Being healthy is
something like a mere disjunction whose disjuncts includebeing aflourishing
organism,being a properly functioning part of an organism, andbeing something
that contributes to theflourishing of an organism. Each of these properties is more
natural than being healthy. Being healthy is ananalogousfeature: each of the
specifications of being healthy just listed are more natural than the“generic”feature
of being healthy. But being healthy is not a mere disjunction: the various specifica-
tions of being healthy are related in such a way to ensure some kind of unity. (Unlike,
say,being an electron or a female sibling.) The kinds of healthiness are unified via how
they relate to a single specification.
It is good to have a rich diet of examples. Considerbeingflexible. My aunt is
flexible, my rubber chicken isflexible, my thinking on these matters isflexible, and
my schedule isflexible. My inclination is to distinguish ways of beingflexible and to
hold the generic property of beingflexible is analogous. Considerbeing elegant.The
swan is elegant, Obama’s speech was elegant, and the theory of general relativity is
elegant. Finally, I suspect thatx is a cause of y,x is an explanation for y, andxisa
consequence of yare all analogous relations, but I won’t argue for this here. I merely
suggest these relations for further consideration.
Analogous features are something akin to disjunctive properties, but they aren’t
merely disjunctive. Analogous features enjoy a kind of unity that merely disjunctive
features lack: their specifications are, to put it in medieval terms,unified by analogy.
We’ve discussed some examples of analogous properties. For a putatively con-
trasting example, consider the identity relation. The dominant view about the
identity relation is that it is topic-neutral but neither merely disjunctive nor analo-
gous. Instead, it is a good candidate for being a perfectly natural logical relation. I say
that identity is a“good candidate”because I don’t want to dogmatically reject a kind
of identity pluralism according to which identity is analogous. For example, such a

ARETURNTOTHEANALOGYOFBEING 