I read through Molly's post and I definitely agree with the points made. I would also like to add that it is not only the material composition of an object that define it but it is also the structure of an object. I was reading a book on philosophers by Bryan Magee and there is a very good example in the book.
"If you commissioned a builder to build a house on your land, and his trucks unloaded on to the site the bricks, the tiles, the wood and so on, and he said to you: 'Here you are, here's your house,' you would think it must be a joke, and a bad one. There would be all the constituent materials of a house, but it would not be a house at all- just a hiddledy-piggledy heap of bricks and so on. To be a house, everything would need to be put together in certain ways, with a very specific and detailed structure, and it would be by virtue of that structure that it was a house."
...so relating to the blue marker Mr. Perkins used as an example last Thursday, something might have all the parts of that blue dry-erase marker, but it may not be that marker at all. I believe that the structure must be stated before an assumption may be made.
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Outstanding! You have tapped into the issue of the whole and its parts. Is the whole equal to the sum of parts and greater than any one of them? Or is the whole somehow greater than the sum of its parts?
Related to this...consider the computer sitting on the desk that is devoid of all other items. How many items do you count as being on the desk? If you think of all the parts that comprise the computer, you may answer hundreds. If you consider the organizing principal that makes the parts a computer, you may answer only one.
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