Constitution and Unity. Lynne Baker and the Unitarian Tradition

Lynne Baker’s Constitution Theory seems to be the farthest-reaching and yet the most subtly elaborated anti-reductive metaphysics available today. Its original theoretical contribution is a non-mereological theory of material constitution, which yet has a place for classical and Lewisian mereology (this formalized version of Materialism). Constitution Theory hence apparently (i) complies with modern natural science, and yet (ii) rescues the concrete everyday world, and ourselves in it, from ontological vanity or nothingness, and (iii) does it by avoiding dualism. Why, then, does it meet so many opponents – or rather, why are its many opponents so stubbornly resisting the very idea of constitution, in its Baker’s form, in an “odd dialectic” (Baker 2007) which does not seem to allow for any substantial progress? One of the most resisted claim is (iii). Is unity without identity – the feature distinguishing the relation between constituting and constituted things – the only non dualist way to oppose reductionism? What would be the price to pay for unity with identity – without reduction? What I (jokingly) call the Unitarian Tradition, going back to Plato, keeps working out the original Platonic way of constructing a complex object as a Unity comprising a Collection, as opposed to the Aristotelian suggestion of opposing Collections and Substances. For once you have split things apart ontologically, unifying them again may prove a very hard task.