This essay explores the role that GC II 10 plays in the context of the treatise as a whole. It argues that while the rest of the treatise, up to and including GC II 9, explains generation and perishing by means of material and formal causes, GC II 10 provides the efficient and final causes, and thus brings the project announced at the outset of GC to completion. The essay analyses the arguments for the efficient cause of generation and corruption (identified with the sun’s annual course along the ecliptic) and its final cause (identified with a universal desire for the highest kind of being). For Aristotle, the best approximation to the being of imperishable substance which the sublunary sphere permits, given the nature of its constituents, is perpetual reproduction (for living things) and an endless cycle of reciprocal change (for elements). Finally, the essay illustrates how Aristotle’s fourfold scheme of causal explanations practically applies to generation and perishing in view of what Aristotle claims elsewhere about the unmoved mover and the gradation of being.

Chapter 15 discusses the various features of the Platonic inner self (soul, psuche), in particular its interiorisation of controlling abstract value and of the master-slave relationship). We then take a detour through linguistics, the history of reflexivity in Greek and Sanskrit, to provide independent evidence for our view of monetisation as a factor in the emergence of the unitary inner self, which is then related to the influence of monetised self-sufficiency on a continuous passage of the Chandogya Upani?ad.

Take any putative ordinary object which is divisible into a finite number of small units and tolerant to the loss of one of them. We can remove these units one at a time, and since our object definitely doesn’t exist when there are zero units, and since we cannot pinpoint which removal brings about this destruction,the Sorites Puzzle threatens common sense. We can rescue ordinary objects from its grip, but since independently motivated linguistic explanations of vagueness depend on there being multiple candidate contents of vague terms, these efforts succeed only if there are multiple candidates that can be meant by ordinary object terms. Thus, many more objects than common sense accepts have to exist. The 'arguments from vagueness' also offer soritical reasons for object proliferation. Problematising the categories composite object and persisting thing (rather than specific object concepts), these show that either there are none of these (except simples) or every candidate for making up one, does. The latter, less revisionary alternative is plenitudinism. I defend Modally Full Plenitude, because it is three-dimensionalist and non-reductivist about de re modality – a distinct persisting object in any region, and for every modal profile satisfied by the matter in that region.