Buildings and grounds: notes on Karen Bennett’s Making Things Up

Bennett (2017) argues that the various building relations are all directed, necessitating and generative. This note provides interpretations of these conditions different from Bennett’s. According to Bennett, the full builders for an entity must necessitate its existence alone or in conjunction with other items that are not builders. I suggest that the full builders must necessitate the built item outright. According to Bennett, building is generative only in the sense that when the xx build y we are thereby “licensed” to say that y exists/obtains because the xx exist/obtain. I suggest that the building relations are unified by the fact that when the xx build y, the xx together metaphysically ground y. This entails, contra Bennett, that causation is not a building relation.