 Despite the appeal of commonsense, there were some medieval philosophers who took the maximal proposition to imply that if Socrates loses a finger, Socrates ceases to exist. At least at one point in his career, Peter Abelard appears to seriously entertain the radical reading of the maximal proposition (Henry 1991, 92–139). Abelard himself might have eventually backed away from this view (Martin 1998), but there are reports that suggest some of Abelard’s followers, the so-called Nominales, wholeheartedly embraced the extreme interpretation of the maximal proposition. One of the positions associated with the Nominales was that “nothing grows” (nihil crescit), and there is a surviving commentary on the  Categories with Nominalist features where the author argues that any addition, removal, or even relocation of a part compromises the identity of the thing itself (Ebbesen 1999, 397). This extreme interpretation is derived from the judgment that each whole is the same thing as a unique set of parts. This house must be composed out of these nails, these boards, and this cement. If I use other nails or other boards, I could make a house, but not this very house. This premise is no doubt controversial, but Abelard and many of his contemporaries have principled reasons for holding it. Abelard believes that the ultimate pieces of the universe are tiny, indivisible bits of matter, souls, and perhaps some forms. The items that we experience are composites of these elements. Each element is self-identical. Composite beings are individuated by the elements that make them up, and in the case of complex, composite beings—such as artifacts and substances—by the arrangement that these bits have. Given such a universe, it is quite plausible to assume that the identity of a composite item is solely determined by its parts. It would then easily follow that the removal or addition of a composing element entails that the new whole is not identical to the old whole. Another whole similar to the original might exist after the mereological change take place, but strictly speaking the two wholes are not identical. 