Ned Markosian has recently defended a new theory of composition, which he calls regionalism : some material objects xx compose something if and only if there is a material object located at the fusion of the locations of xx. Markosian argues that regionalism follows from what he calls the subregion theory of parthood. Korman and Carmichael agree. We provide countermodels to show that regionalism does not follow from, even together with fourteen potentially implicit background principles. We then show that regionalism (...) does follow from five of those background principles together with and two additional principles connecting parthood and location, which we call and. While the additional principles are not uncontroversial, our conjecture is that many will find them attractive. We conclude by mentioning that fills a previously unnoticed gap in the formal theory of location presented in Parsons. (shrink)

The strong immanent realism (i.e., the view that there exist universals as entities capable of being wholly present wherever their instances are located) has been traditionally criticized for having certain absurd consequences. Although Gilmore (2003) replied to these criticisms by taking spatial relations involving universals as relativized to their locations, his reply has been rebutted by Keskinen et al. (2015). This paper aims to defend the strong immanent realism by proposing a new version of the relativization strategy, according to which (...) a spatial relation is to be relativized just to the extent that it contains universals or concrete particulars among its terms. This version, it will be argued, can satisfactorily address the objections hitherto posed to the strong immanent realism. (shrink)