Cardinal Composition.

The thesis of Weak Unrestricted Composition says that every pair of objects has a fusion. This thesis has been argued by Contessa (Analysis 72(3):455-457, 2012) and Smith (Erkenntnis 84(1):41-55, 2019) to be compatible with the world being junky and hence to evade an argument against the necessity of Strong Unrestricted Composition proposed by Bohn (Analysis 69(1):27-31, 2009a, Philos Q 59(235):193-201, 2009b). However, neither Weak Unrestricted Composition alone nor the different variants of it that have been proposed in the literature can provide us with a satisfying answer to the special composition question, or so we will argue. We will then go on to explore an alternative family of purely mereological rules in the vicinity of Weak Unrestricted Composition, Cardinal Composition: A plurality of pairwise non-overlapping objects composes an object iff the objects in the plurality are of cardinality smaller than κ. As we will show, all the instances for infinite κs determine fusion and are compatible with junk, and every instance for a κ>ℵ0 is furthermore compatible with gunk and dense chains of parthood.

Ground by Status.

What is the explanatory role of 'status-truths' such as essence-truths, necessity-truths and law-truths? A plausible principle, suggested by various authors, is Ground by Status, according to which status truths ground their prejacents. For instance, if it is essential to a that p, then this grounds the fact that p. But Ground by Status faces a forceful objection: it is inconsistent with widely accepted principles regarding the logic of grounding (Glazier in Philos Stud 174(11):2871-2889, 2017a, Synthese 174(198):1409-1424, 2017b; Kappes in Synthese 199(1-2):2575-2595, 2020, Philos Stud 178(4):1267-1284, 2021). I defend Ground by Status against this objection.

Modulation of Dietary Fatty Acids in an Open-Label Study Improves Psoriasis and Dampens the Inflammatory Activation Status.

Obesity and high abdominal fat mass are risk factors for developing the chronic inflammatory skin disease psoriasis. They are associated with increased incidence, prevalence and severity of the disease. A positive effect of weight loss on psoriasis activity has been shown in several studies. Obesity-related factors such as the dysregulation of glucose and lipid metabolism, the activation of adipose tissue and resultant persistent low-grade inflammation have been discussed as links of obesity and inflammatory diseases. Recently, we demonstrated a critical role of free fatty acids (FFAs) in obesity-mediated exacerbation of psoriatic skin inflammation in both mice and humans. In the present study, we translated these findings into a therapeutic intervention. An open-label study focusing on the dietary reduction of FFAs was conducted in patients with mild-to-moderate plaque psoriasis, and disease severity and serum markers of inflammation were analyzed. Here, we show that such a dietary intervention improves psoriatic disease activity independently of weight loss. Diet-related metabolic changes, such as a reduction in saturated free fatty acids (SFAs), may thus be more important than weight loss itself. Moreover, dietary intervention inhibited the overall pro-inflammatory activation status in patients, as shown by analysis of serum inflammatory parameters using the Olink platform. From our pilot study, we conclude that dietary intervention focusing on SFA reduction has the capacity to reduce disease activity and general inflammatory status in psoriasis patients.

Nominalist dispositional essentialism.

Dispositional Essentialism, as commonly conceived, consists in the claims that at least some of the fundamental properties essentially confer certain causal-nomological roles on their bearers, and that these properties give rise to the natural modalities. As such, the view is generally taken to be committed to a realist conception of properties as either universals or tropes, and to be thus incompatible with nominalism as understood in the strict sense. Pace this common assumption of the ontological import of Dispositional Essentialism, the aim of this paper is to explore a nominalist version of the view, Austere Nominalist Dispositional Essentialism. The core features of the proposed account are that it eschews all kinds of properties (be they universals, tropes, or sets of particulars), takes certain predicative truths as fundamental, and employs the so-called generic notion of essence. As I will argue, the account is significantly closer to the core idea behind Dispositional Essentialism than the only nominalist account in the vicinity of Dispositional Essentialism that has been offered so far-Ann Whittle's (2009) Causal Nominalism-and is immune to crucial problems that affect this view.

The strong arm of the law: a unified account of necessary and contingent laws of nature.

A common feature of all standard theories of the laws of nature is that they are 'absolutist': They take laws to be either all metaphysically necessary or all contingent. Science, however, gives us reason to think that there are laws of both kinds, suggesting that standard theories should make way for 'non-absolutist' alternatives: theories which accommodate laws of both modal statuses. In this paper, we set out three explanatory challenges for any candidate non-absolutist theory, and discuss the prospects of the two extant candidates in light of these challenges. We then develop our own non-absolutist theory, the essentialist DTA account, which combines the nomic-necessitation or DTA account with an essentialist approach to metaphysical modality in order to meet the three explanatory challenges. Finally, we argue that the distinction between kinematical and dynamical laws found in physical theories supports both non-absolutism in general and our proposed essentialist DTA view in particular.

The modal status of the laws of nature. Tahko's hybrid view and the kinematical/dynamical distinction.

In a recent paper, Tuomas Tahko has argued for a hybrid view of the laws of nature, according to which some physical laws are metaphysically necessary, while others are metaphysically contingent. In this paper, we show that his criterion for distinguishing between these two kinds of laws - which crucially relies on the essences of natural kinds - is on its own unsatisfactory. We then propose an alternative way of drawing the metaphysically necessary/contingent distinction for laws of physics based on the central kinematical/dynamical distinction used in physical theorising, and argue that the criterion can be used to amend Tahko's own account, but also that it can be combined with different metaphysical views about the source of necessity.