The aim of the microfoundations movement in management is to link macro management phenomena, such as corporate governance and strategic alliances, with more micro disciplines, such as organizational behavior and psychology. The core ideas of microfoundations are closely related to methodological individualism, which is the epistemological stance stressing the explanatory primacy of individuals and their purposeful behavior. Methodological individualism should be distinguished from ontological individualism, which is the thesis that all social phenomena are created, or caused, by individuals. Coleman’s boat is a visual representation showing how large-scale entities (the macro) influence smaller-scale entities (the micro) and how a macro phenomenon is composed of microscale events and activities. A key limitation of the microfoundations movement is that emergent entities, such as organizations, and their properties are common in management research. The properties of an emergent entity itself cannot be explained away and thus eliminated entirely from explanations involving the exercise of the entity’s causal powers.

We understand Aristotle’s soul–body hylomorphism better if we first understand the critical discussions of his predecessors which occupy most of the first book of his De Anima.  Given that he regards his view as preferable to all earlier approaches, he must also think that his alternative, hylomorphism, avoids the pitfalls he identifies in those positions. In some cases, it is easy to see why he might think hylomorphism is defensible where they are not: for instance, he regards the reductively materialistic views of the earliest natural philosophers as explanatorily impoverished. In other cases, however, this is far from clear. Aristotle highlights for special consideration the view that the soul is a harmonia (attunement) of the body, a view which, as was noted in antiquity, bears more than a passing resemblance to his own hylomorphism. It proves both difficult and instructive to determine, then, how he supposes hylomorphism avoids the problems he identifies in the doctrine of the soul as a harmonia. The core difference, it emerges, turns on Aristotle’s thoroughgoing teleology: the soul, he thinks, unlike a harmonia, has an intrinsic good toward which the body is orchestrated.

This chapter is concerned with understanding the limited liability corporation, the dominant form of conducting business today. First, I consider the relationship between the corporation and the individuals underlying it and argue that this is best captured by a ‘supervenience relation’: the corporation is not reducible to but dependent upon the individuals underlying it. Secondly, I consider the very purpose of forming a corporate entity and argue for a ‘socio-liberal conception of the corporation’. This view understands the corporation as a structure designed to harness the expression of individual economic interests for social benefits. Both the wider social purpose and individual profit-seeking motives are necessary to understand the complex duality that is the modern corporation. These reflections on the nature and purpose of the corporate form – as will be seen later in this book - are of vital importance to explicating the obligations such entities have that flow from fundamental rights.

Mathematical models of biological populations and communities are the most common type of representation in ecology, with a wide array of functional forms and many different types of variables and parameters. This complexity and the uneasy relationship between theoretical and empirical work in ecology makes for fertile philosophical fodder. For example, most ecological models are highly idealized, incorporating unrealistic assumptions to make mathematical model analysis tractable. This is troubling in ecology as mathematical ecologists often uncritically emulate mathematically sophisticated models of physics to ensure their modeling is mathematically rigorous. Showing the characterization of ecological stability as Lyapunov stability as indefensible is one goal of this chapter. Another goal is assessing the ecological promise of individual-based models (IBMs) and the philosophical issues they pose. IBMs do not aggregate over, or abstract from, the details of interactions between individual organisms. This modeling strategy is part of a more general, well-vetted “methodologically-individualistic” approach to representing the world often employed in social sciences. Debates about methodological individualism in the social sciences reveal insights about how individual-based ecological modeling should be understood and indicate their reductive potential in ecology.

Do all truths have truthmakers, or just a proper subset? The chapter adopts the latter answer, and uses the ontological accounting paradigm to defend it. The primary goal in this chapter is to defend nonmaximalism, that is, to defend the existence of legitimate truthmaker gaps: truths without a truthmaker. The goal is not to offer a precise statement of which truths have, and which truths lack truthmakers. Doing so goes against this book’s preferred methodological approach to truthmaking, according to which truths must be treated on a case by case basis. The main ambition, then, is to defend the tenability of truthmaker gaps in general; where exactly they are found is a topic that will surface frequently in the rest of the book, as truthmaker theorists have reasonable disagreements about it. For now, a general defense of non-maximalism is undertaken. A large part of the defense is concerned with meeting the objections that maximalists have offered against their opponents. As it is argued, those objections frequently turn on presupposing an explanatory approach to truthmaking, or on conflating truthmaker gaps with supervenience gaps: truths whose truth does not supervene on being.

The chapter uses the principle according to which difference-making or counterfactual dependence is sufficient for causation to show that there are physical effects of mental causes. If non-reductive physicalism is true, applying the principle is straightforward. The principle also yields higher-level causes that are not mental but might be considered problematic. These causes are best diagnosed as causes that have little explanatory relevance. If dualism is true, applying the principle about causation in order to show the existence of mental causation is less straightforward, but still possible. In order to avail themselves of the principle, dualists need to assume that the laws that connect the mental and physical realms have a special status. Rival approaches according to which mental causation or human agency require the transference of a physical quantity or of a power are in conflict with empirical results. The account of mental causation by counterfactual dependence, by contrast, squares with these results.

The chapter lays the groundwork about the mind and causation. It characterizes theories about the nature of mind: physicalism, particularly non-reductive physicalism, and dualism, particularly naturalistic dualism. It then turns to causation, its relata, and counterfactual conditionals, the claims that express difference-making. Counterfactual conditionals, their general truth-conditions and logical relations are introduced, as are issues about how to evaluate them. A principle about causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals is defended that is crucial for later arguments. According to this principle, an event causes a later event if the later event would not have occurred had the first event not occurred. Although plausible, the principle needs refinement to deal with some prima facie difficulties. Assumptions need to be made about how to evaluate counterfactual conditionals like ‘If the first event had not occurred, then the second event would not have occurred’. Rival views about causation in terms of transference conflict with the counterfactual principle in so-called cases of double prevention. The conflict should be resolved in favour of the counterfactual principle.

The epistemicist solution to the Sorites Paradox consists of two key components. First, vague terms, just as non-vague ones, have ordinary classical semantic-values and do not require any revision of classical logic or semantics. In the case of ‘tall’, each person is either tall or not tall, and there is a specific number k such that someone is tall if and only if they are over k metres in height, thus ensuring that one of the premises of the paradox is just plainly false. Second, although words like ‘tall’ have such sharp boundaries, we do not and cannot know what these boundaries are, and this explains why we might be tempted to (falsely) conclude that such boundaries do not exist.

Epistemicm faces four principle challenges: addressing the counterintuitiveness of the view; accounting for how the sharp meanings of vague terms are determined; explaining why we are principally ignorant of the sharp-boundaries of vague terms; and explaining what makes vagueness into a distinctive phenomenon, different than other kinds of ignorance. The chapter focuses on discussion of these four challenges, presents the most prominent defence of Epistemicism - Timothy Williamson’s- and discusses a range of objections from recent literature to these responses.