5. The Principle of Unity: No Essence, but No Emptiness Either

Tim Juvshik’s objection to the notion of a principle of unity identifies a real tension in our original formulation. On the one hand, we speak of a principle that concerns the persistence and identity of artifacts; on the other hand, we deny that this principle can be strictly defined, or that it consists in a fixed form or essence of the artifact. The question is therefore unavoidable: if the principle of unity is neither a definable essence nor a fixed organizing form, does it become a merely verbal notion? This objection requires a direct response.… [please read below the rest of the article].

Image credit: Sewing machine by MITSUBISHI ad, 1954 via Wikimedia Commons

The idea of a principle of unity was not aimed at reintroducing an essence after having rejected essentialism. It was used to avoid two opposite temptations. The first is the temptation to treat the identity of an artifact as governed by a rigid sortal classification or by law-like conditions. The second is the temptation to reactivate a hylomorphic model in which a fixed organizing form determines the being of the artifact. To say that the principle of unity is not strictly definable is precisely to reject the idea that artifact identity can be captured by necessary and sufficient conditions.

However, denying that the principle of unity identifies an essence does not empty it of content. The absence of a definable touchstone does not imply the absence of criteria. What we called the “principle of unity” can be formulated more precisely as a normatively governed pattern of continuity by virtue of which an artifact can continue to be recognized, evaluated, repaired, modified, and sustained as the same artifact across use, wear, maintenance, intervention, partial substitution, and situated transformation.

This is the point at which the earlier clarification of life-form becomes relevant. The principle of unity is not an additional entity behind the artifact, nor a hidden form inside it. It is disclosed through the natural history that expresses our understanding of the relevant artifactual life-form.^[1] In other words, the natural history of an artifact indicates the pattern of relations, operations, dependencies, and criteria through which the artifact acquires unity and internal articulation within a practice.

Understood in this way, the principle of unity is not reducible to a hidden property or to a fixed set of features concealed within the object; but neither is it a mere subjective projection. It is articulated through criteria of correctness that are learned, exercised, taught, and contested within public practices. It is not an underlying axiom, but a practice-embedded rule of application, embodied in concrete contexts of use, maintenance, repair, and transformation.

The example of the sewing machine makes this especially clear. What allows a sewing machine to be recognized and sustained as a sewing machine is not exhausted by the composition of its parts, nor by the abstract function of sewing. Its interactions with fabrics, needles, threads, patterns, scissors, and rulers are relevant; so are the professional and domestic practices within which it is embedded, the competences of the agents who use, maintain, or repair it, the habits of its users, and the kinds of work it is expected to perform.

These elements do not constitute an accidental context externally added to a previously determined core. They configure the pattern of continuity through which the object is sustained as a determinate artifact. For this reason, the technician who examines a sewing machine does not merely inspect its parts. In a broad but important sense, the technician reconstructs the artifact’s practical history: its uses, previous interventions, conditions of functioning, patterns of wear, and possibilities of repair or recovery.

The technician’s judgments in that context do not simply apply a prior classification, nor do they merely describe the present state of the object. They express what unifies the artifact within a practice: its history of use, the expectations that accompany it, the standards to which it remains answerable, and the conditions under which it can continue to be sustained as the same artifact. It is precisely this web of criteria, histories, and expectations that makes it possible to distinguish continuity from loss of identity within a practice.

The principle of unity, then, does not fix abstract conditions of identity in advance. It manifests itself in the way an artifact can continue to be recognized, evaluated, repaired, modified, and sustained as the same artifact over the course of its practical life. For this reason, the transformability of artifacts does not eliminate unity. It forces us to understand unity as normatively regulated continuity, rather than as the preservation of an invariable structure. This point will become especially important when we consider transformative maintenance: not every transformation preserves identity, but the transformations that do preserve it do so because they remain intelligible within a practice-governed pattern of continuity.

6. Wittgenstein: Form of Life as a Normative Background

Our central claim is that natural-historical judgments ground evaluative judgments in the domain of artifacts as well. This is the precise point at which the analogy with living beings matters. To evaluate an artifact as defective, well-functioning, repairable, improperly transformed, obsolete, or ready for discard is not merely to apply a description to an object. It is to situate that object within a practical background in which standards of correctness have been learned, stabilized, transmitted, and contested.

Let us return to the case of the hairdresser’s scissors, now from the point of view of the criteria that make the judgment authoritative. What makes the attribution “defective” philosophically operative is not an isolated semantic feature of the predicate, but its belonging to a practice in which there are shared ways of testing, sharpening, lubricating, repairing, replacing, or discarding scissors. The judgment has force because it is answerable to standards that competent participants in the practice can recognize, apply, teach, and correct.

The same applies to a generic statement such as “carburetors require regular maintenance.” Its normative force does not derive from an implicit quantifier, but from its embedding in a technical language-game: procedures of cleaning, fault diagnosis, expectations regarding deterioration, thresholds of intervention, and distinctions between what is misaligned, damaged, obsolete, repairable, or irreparable. In both cases, normativity is not added to a previously complete description. It belongs to the web of practices within which the artifact is intelligible as the artifact it is.

This is the point of the Wittgensteinian (1953/2009) appeal to form of life. It does not name an additional property of artifacts, nor a hidden structure behind them. It names the background of practices in which words such as “defective,” “broken,” “deformed,” “repaired,” or “irreparable” acquire criteria of application. Such criteria are public, not because they are always explicit, codified, or uncontested, but because they can be learned, challenged, corrected, and stabilized within shared practices.

For this reason, conceding that many of our judgments take the form of generics does not settle their philosophical role. Their operativity depends on their insertion within practices in which criteria of correctness, learning, evaluation, and correction are established. What guides intervention, maintenance, and repair is not the generic form of the sentence by itself, but the practical mastery of a field of distinctions: proper/improper use, ordinary wear/deformation, repair/transformation, adaptation/distortion, maintenance/discard.

The notion of form of life plays a major role in argument. It identifies the practical background that holds together three dimensions that would otherwise be treated separately: the diachronic unity of the artifact, the normativity involved in its maintenance and repair, and the thresholds beyond which transformation no longer counts as continuity but as dismantling, replacement, or transition to waste. These are not independent problems. They are interwoven aspects of a practical ontology of artifacts.

7. Kinds and Family Resemblances: Relocating the Disagreement

Juvshik’s discussion of kinds and family resemblances raises a further issue that directly concerns our earlier work on artificial classes and artifact kinds (Lawler and Vega 2011). His suggestion is that rejecting classificatory vocabulary for artifacts would be justified only if that vocabulary were understood in an essentialist or nomological way. If kinds are instead conceived flexibly, for instance in terms of family resemblance, then there seems to be no reason to exclude kind talk from the ontology of artifacts. This is an important point, and it allows us to specify more carefully the scope of our disagreement.

We readily accept the descriptive thesis. We do classify artifacts; we speak of chairs, scissors, carburetors, sewing machines, and many other artifact kinds; and we organize our dealings with them by means of concepts that group objects into relatively stable families, types, or lineages. In this descriptive sense, the vocabulary of kinds, especially when understood in a non-essentialist way, is not problematic.

In earlier work (2011), our skepticism toward the vocabulary of classes did not amount to denying that artifacts are classified, nor to rejecting the ordinary use of classificatory concepts. The point was different. In the domain of the artificial, the concept of family resemblance seemed philosophically more adequate than that of class because it allowed us to preserve realist commitments about artifacts without grounding their identification in real essences. Family resemblance made it possible to account for the stability of artifact groupings while also acknowledging their openness, variability, and dependence on practices.

However, alongside this acceptance of the descriptive dimension, we reject a stronger, foundational thesis: that membership in a kind, even when the kind is understood non-essentialistically, constitutes the ultimate ontological ground of the identity and persistence of the artifact. This is where the disagreement with Juvshik should be located.

In light of our earlier work, we can accept Juvshik’s correction while resisting the conclusion he draws from it. Our rejection of essentialist class talk was never an absolute rejection of classification. But accepting classification does not require restoring kinds to a primary ontological role. It requires relocating classificatory vocabulary within the practices that make artifact identity and persistence intelligible.

From this perspective, artifact kinds can be understood as practical stabilizations rather than as foundations. They describe relatively stable patterns in our dealings with artifacts, but they do not exhaust the conditions under which artifacts continue to be recognized, maintained, repaired, transformed, or withdrawn as the artifacts they are. The point, then, is not to abolish classification, but to deny that classification is the ultimate explanatory principle of artifactual identity.

Stated as precisely as possible: the problem was never whether we use or do not use classificatory concepts. We obviously do. The problem is whether artifact kinds should be taken as the ultimate foundation of an ontology of artifacts. Our point, both then and now, is that artifactual identity is not exhausted by subsumption under a kind, because it also depends on insertion into historical practices of use, care, maintenance, repair, transformation, and discard. It is within this web that the criteria are established that make it possible to recognize continuities, justify interventions, and determine thresholds of transformation.

Classes, kinds, or types may therefore continue to operate as local descriptive tools. What we reject is that they are sufficient to explain the temporal unity of artifacts. In this sense, family resemblance does not merely provide a more flexible taxonomy. It helps us understand how artifact concepts operate in practice: through comparisons, inferences, analogies, partial overlaps, and groupings that reflect the open and dynamic structure of our engagements with artifacts.

This is why family resemblance should not be interpreted as a way of replacing essences with looser classificatory clusters and then stopping there. Its philosophical interest lies in showing that classificatory stability is achieved within practices. The similarities that matter are not simply observed; they are selected, weighted, stabilized, and sometimes revised in relation to use, maintenance, repair, transformation, and discard. In this sense, family resemblance supports rather than undermines our central claim: artifact kinds are intelligible only within the normative-practical contexts in which artifacts are used, sustained, transformed, and sometimes withdrawn from use.

8. Transformative Maintenance and Regulated Continuity

Juvshik is right to emphasize that maintenance and repair are not merely restorative but also transformative. This point allows us to make explicit something that was already implicit in our article. If the practical trajectory of an artifact is a continuous process of construction and reconstruction, and if the expectations associated with it are not entirely fixed or predefined, then maintenance cannot be conceived simply as the restoration of a prior immutable identity. On the contrary, maintenance belongs to a structural dynamic in which the continuity of the artifact is sustained through adjustments, adaptations, and, at times, significant transformations.

Far from weakening or dissolving the idea of unity, the transformative character of maintenance allows us to understand unity with greater precision. If practices of maintenance can reconfigure some of the very features by which we identify an artifact, then unity cannot depend on the preservation of a fixed set of properties. It must depend instead on the continuity of a normative regime of expectations, interventions, and evaluations. We are thus dealing with unity as a normatively governed pattern of continuity, not with the preservation of an invariable structure or the mere stability of a classificatory kind.

In this sense, transformative maintenance does not constitute a marginal case, but an explicit manifestation of a general feature of the artifactual world: the continuity of artifacts depends, to a significant extent, on the revision and renegotiation of expectations in response to changing technical, material, institutional, and cultural contexts. Forms of use, standards of functioning, and conditions of intervention are not fixed once and for all. They are stabilized, challenged, and readjusted in the course of practices.

This allows us to understand that an artifactual life-form should not be conceived as a rigid framework, but as a pattern of continuity capable of absorbing regulated metamorphoses. Consider the case of a bicycle transformed into an electric bicycle. This modification may preserve continuity in certain niches, such as urban mobility, while introducing normative discontinuities in others, such as competitive sport. In an urban mobility context, the transformation may count as an adaptation that extends the artifact’s trajectory; in a competitive cycling context, it may count as a transformation that disqualifies the object from continuing to function as the same kind of artifact within that practice.

What such cases show is not the absence of unity, but the dependence of unity on criteria that operate within partially overlapping practice-governed contexts. An artifact may continue to be recognized as the kind of thing it is through certain transformations; yet not every transformation preserves its identity. The relevant transformations are normatively regulated: there are thresholds that distinguish between modifications that sustain the artifact’s continuity and those that interrupt it or redirect it toward another practical or ontological regime.

These thresholds are not deduced from an essence, nor from a merely material description of the object. They are learned, negotiated, and sometimes contested within practices. What counts as an adequate repair, a legitimate adaptation, or an improper alteration depends on criteria anchored in technical practices, historical standards, and shared forms of use.

One might think, for example, of modifying an artifact in such a way that its typical profile of use changes without thereby losing all continuity with its previous configuration. Cases of this kind show that artifacts can undergo trajectories of reconfiguration in which certain relevant features are preserved while others are transformed, giving rise to new forms of integration into practices. This does not imply that “anything goes.” It means that artifactual identity admits regulated variability.

The philosophical importance of this point is twofold. On the one hand, it compels us to abandon an overly static image of the principle of unity. On the other hand, it clarifies why unity must be understood as continuity through regulated transformation. An artifact may continue to be the kind of thing it is through certain transformations, but not every transformation preserves its identity. This is why the notion of regulation is crucial. It indicates that transformations are assessed against criteria internal to practices: criteria concerning function, use, safety, acceptability, repairability, compatibility with other artifacts, and the continuation or interruption of a practical trajectory.

This idea enriches rather than weakens our position. Transformative maintenance shows that the historicity of artifacts is not an obstacle to unity, but one of the conditions under which unity must be understood. A practice-governed conception of artifactual continuity makes it possible to explain how an object can remain recognizable through reconfigurations that alter its typical profile, and also how certain transformations may bifurcate the object’s trajectory toward another niche, another practical regime, or another mode of artifactual existence.

9. Repairability, Maintainability, and the Transition to Waste

One of the suggestions we defended in our article is that an artifact continues to exist as a practically sustained artifact only insofar as it remains repairable within the relevant practices, and that its natural history includes the cultural and technical conditions that support its maintenance and restoration. Reread in a Wittgensteinian key, this point becomes clearer: repairability is not merely a material property of the object, nor a subjective assessment made by an isolated observer, but a status conferred within a field of practices, competences, standards, and material supports.

The expression “being considered repairable” should not be understood as implying a subjective judgment or the manifestation of a mere preference. It should be understood as indicating that the artifact is embedded in a technical form of life in which there exist sustaining practices: spare parts or functional equivalents, technical know-how, safety standards, criteria of correctness, and competent authorities capable of determining what counts as an adequate restoration. Thus, when this web collapses, the transition to discard and disassembly does not amount to a merely verbal reclassification. It involves a genuine modification in the artifact’s ontological-practical status within material culture.

A particularly illustrative case is that of obsolescence without failure. A device may continue to function materially and yet lose its status as an acceptable or sustainable artifact within a given practice when it no longer has technical support, security updates, or institutional authorization within certain normative environments. In contexts such as healthcare, banking, or public administration, a computer may cease to be acceptable not because it has failed, but because the technical and institutional regime that made its use possible has changed. At that point, the transition to discard does not constitute a mere reclassification. It marks a transformation in the artifact’s mode of existence within material culture.

Cases of this kind show that the transition to waste cannot be understood solely in semantic or classificatory terms. What is at stake is the loss of the conditions of repairability, maintainability, support, and authorization that sustained the artifact’s place within a practice. In this sense, repairability is not a merely contingent property. It is one of the constitutive conditions of an artifact’s continued existence as an artifact embedded in a technical form of life.

Our aim is to capture the normative background against which it makes sense to identify these transitions: from functioning to malfunctioning, from malfunctioning to repairable, from repairable to no longer repairable, from maintainable to no longer maintainable, and from there to discard, disassembly, or waste. A reconstruction in terms of kinds and generics can describe regularities and classifications involved in these processes. What we want to emphasize is the practical background that gives these transitions their significance within material culture.

The transition to waste, in particular, occurs when the web of practices that sustained the artifact’s repairability, maintainability, and continued recognition no longer holds. Spare parts are unavailable; technical competences disappear or become institutionally irrelevant; safety standards change; support networks are withdrawn; authorized forms of restoration cease to exist. At that point, the artifact’s status changes because the conditions that made it repairable and maintainable within a practice have been transformed or have collapsed.^[2]

10. The Social Epistemology of Artifacts

Juvshik also rightly recalls, toward the end of his commentary, that our reflections have consequences for a social epistemology of artifacts. If the social ontology of artifacts and artifact kinds informs epistemology, and if epistemology in turn informs how we understand artifacts, then the question becomes unavoidable: in what sense is knowledge of artifacts and artifact kinds distinctly social?

Our answer follows from the argument developed throughout this reply. Knowledge of artifacts is distinctly social because the natural-historical judgments through which artifacts are understood are embodied in social, cultural, and technical practices. These judgments express knowledge. As participants in practices involving artifacts, we exhibit some understanding of what it is for an object to be this or that artifact. This does not mean that every participant possesses the technical knowledge required to design or manufacture the artifact. Nor does it mean that every user possesses the knowledge required for efficient use, maintenance, or repair. The point is rather that an artifact can inhabit a specific niche and sustain its existence within it only insofar as predictive and normative expectations about its behavior, functioning, persistence, and possible restoration are continuously secured.

Such expectations involve forms of knowledge distributed across many agents. A user’s claim to know what an artifact is, how it is to be used, or whether it is functioning properly depends in part on other forms of knowledge that are reasonably attributed to designers, manufacturers, technicians, maintainers, repairers, institutions, and communities of practice. What makes artifact knowledge distinctly social, then, is not only the division of technical-artifactual labor. It is also the epistemic dependence built into each claim to know an artifact. Expertise concerning artifacts is distributed, and the grounds of such expertise exhibit relations of dependence, trust, correction, and delegation similar in some respects to those found in scientific contexts.

This point also allows us to resist a misleading picture of epistemic privilege in the ontology of artifacts. Some accounts of artifacts, especially those that determine artifact kinds primarily by reference to makers’ intentions, may seem to imply that there can be no genuine ignorance or error concerning the kind to which an artifact belongs. If the artifact is what the maker intends it to be, then those capable of determining the relevant concept may appear to occupy a privileged epistemic position. But no agent can claim complete knowledge of what an artifact is, and no agent can occupy a position so privileged that ignorance or error becomes impossible. In the artifactual domain, there are multiple claims to knowledge: those of designers, users, maintainers, repairers, regulators, and institutions. None of these claims exhausts the knowledge of the artifact or of the kind.

What matters, therefore, is the kind of knowledge that is mobilized in practical and material engagement with artifacts. This knowledge may include observational and inductive knowledge of how objects behave, practical knowledge and know-how, diagnostic capacities, repair skills, and modes of transmission through which the continued existence of the artifact is sustained. These forms of knowledge often operate under conditions of partial opacity. This opacity is not only a consequence of the distributed character of the relevant expertise; it also follows from the local and sometimes subtle transformations that occur in the history of artifacts, transformations that may not always be visible in ordinary processes of use, maintenance, and repair.

Ontology and epistemology therefore go together. What an artifact is cannot be separated from the practices through which it is sustained, and those practices are also epistemic practices. They involve agents who maintain the artifact’s environment, preserve its functioning, transmit skills, revise standards, repair failures, and transform the very capacities through which artifacts are handled. An artifact “lives,” in the analogical sense defended here, only insofar as agents cultivate the knowledge and practical abilities required to maintain it within a distributed social network of dependencies. The fragility of artifacts is thus not only physical or material. It is also epistemic. Artifacts are endangered not only by wear, breakdown, and material deterioration, but also by the neglect of the knowledge, care, and know-how through which they are maintained, repaired, and transformed.

11. Conclusion

Juvshik’s critique helps us sharpen several aspects of our view. The analogy between artifacts and living beings must be carefully restricted; many of the judgments we employ to capture features of artifacts take a generic form; the vocabulary of kinds does not disappear without remainder; the terms “natural” and “historical” require clarification; transformative maintenance deserves a more explicit place in an ontology of artifacts; and the social epistemology of artifacts follows from, rather than merely accompanies, their practical ontology. These points should be accepted. But accepting them does not require a deflation of our proposal. It requires a more precise formulation of what our proposal was meant to explain.

The reformulation can be stated as follows. Artifacts are not adequately understood either as instances of kinds fixed by essences or as mere objects to which we apply generic generalizations. Their unity and persistence depend on historically sedimented webs of production, use, maintenance, repair, transformation, learning, evaluation, and discard. Natural-historical judgments may often take the form of generics, but their normative force derives from the practical background in which they function as criteria. What we called the “principle of unity” designates the pattern of continuity normatively sustained by those practices: the principle by virtue of which an artifact can be recognized, evaluated, repaired, transformed, and sustained as the same through regulated transformations.

The fact that natural-historical judgments often have the form of generics may suggest that the vocabulary of kinds can be applied to artifacts with full ontological confidence. We have argued that this transition is not straightforward. What matters is not only the generic form of those judgments, but the way in which they ground evaluative judgments that operate as criteria of unity and identity in the artifact’s own “life”: how it comes into existence, how it persists, how it is maintained or transformed, and how it ceases to be the artifact it was. The natural history of an artifact expresses a particular artifactual life-form; but that life-form becomes actual only within technical practices that are social, material, and historical.

This is also why Juvshik’s critique is useful. It forces us to move away from any formulation that could suggest a biological extension of the notion of life to artifacts. In the sense defended here, “form of life” names the background of correctness, learning, intervention, and sustainment within which artifacts can have history, unity, and trajectory. It is within this background that structural and functional features acquire practical anchoring without requiring a return to essentialist or hylomorphic models.

Ultimately, the issue is not a choice between kinds and form of life, nor between generics and normativity. The issue is what kind of ontology is required by a world of objects whose identity depends on production, use, care, maintenance, repair, repertoires of intervention, and the possibility of being sustained over time. A purely deflationary route centered on generics, kinds, and descriptions of use may explain how we speak and classify. What remains to be explained is why maintenance, repair, transformation, and discard are not external episodes in the history of artifacts, but internal elements of their practical ontology.

The threshold between repairability and waste makes this especially clear. An artifact does not become waste merely because we apply a different word to it. It becomes waste when the practices that sustained its repairability, maintainability, and continued recognition no longer hold. This is why the appeal to form of life is not opposed to the vocabulary of kinds or to the semantics of generics. It clarifies the practical background within which kinds matter and generic judgments acquire normative force.

The same point has an epistemological consequence. If artifacts persist only within practices that sustain, repair, transform, authorize, and sometimes withdraw them, then knowledge of artifacts is also distributed across those practices. No single agent possesses complete epistemic authority over what an artifact is, how it should be used, whether it is functioning properly, whether it can be repaired, or when it has ceased to be maintainable. Designers, users, technicians, maintainers, repairers, regulators, institutions, and communities of practice occupy different epistemic positions, none of which exhausts the artifact or the kind. The social character of artifact knowledge therefore lies not only in the division of technical labor, but in the epistemic dependence built into every claim to know an artifact. Ontology and social epistemology meet at this point: what an artifact is depends on practices that are at once material, normative, and epistemic.

Juvshik is right that the issue cannot be addressed with conceptual imprecision. We hope to have shown that, once the biological analogy is restricted, the semantics of generics acknowledged, the vocabulary of kinds relocated, and the distributed character of artifact knowledge made explicit, the notion of form of life remains philosophically indispensable for articulating the unity, normativity, historicity, and epistemic dependence of artifacts. The outcome of the debate is therefore not a choice between generics and forms of life, nor between ontology and social epistemology, but a clarification of their order. Generics are one of the discursive vehicles through which our practices are articulated; forms of life name the ontological-practical background that gives those vehicles direction, sense, and normative force; and the social distribution of knowledge explains how those practices can sustain artifacts over time.

❧ Please refer to Part I of Diego Lawler and Jesús Vega-Encabo’s “Between Generics and Forms of Life: Toward a Practical Ontology of Artifacts.”

References

Juvshik, Tim. 2026. “Maintenance, Repair, and the Nature of Artifacts: Comments on Lawler and Vega-Encabo.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 15 (2): 75–84.

Lawler, Diego and Jesús Vega-Encabo. 2025. “Artifacts as Living Entities: Insights from Maintenance and Repair Practices.” Techné 29 (2–3): 230–259.

Lawler, Diego and Jesús Vega-Encabo. 2011. “Clases Artificiales.” Azafea: Revista De Filosofía 12 (1): 119–147. doi: 10.14201/8000.

Foot, Philippa. 2001. Natural Goodness. Oxford University Press.

Thompson, Michael. 2008. Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought. Harvard University Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953/2009. Philosophical Investigations, 4^th edition. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Translated by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte.Wiley-Blackwell.

^[1] Note that nothing in our argument excludes, in principle, the possibility of applying the vocabulary of kinds to artifacts, even with ontological overtones. The question concerning the role of life-form in our argument, following Thompson (2008), is independent of whether the ontology of artifacts ultimately refers to a form shared by the members of a class. Our main point is that the principle of unity to which we appeal is disclosed through the natural history that expresses our understanding of the particular artifactual life-form at issue.

^[2] Juvshik also suggests that his framework may be applied to artworks. We cannot address here the broader metaphysical questions raised by artworks, process metaphysics, hylomorphism, or Ship of Theseus cases. Still, artworks reinforce the point at issue. Their identity and persistence often depend on highly specialized practices of conservation and restoration, in which criteria of acceptable intervention, material continuity, authorship, historical integrity, and modes of appreciation vary across traditions and institutions. This suggests that even highly idiosyncratic artifacts can be approached through the question of their artifactual life-form, provided this notion is understood through the practices that sustain, repair, conserve, or transform them.

Categories: Critical Replies

Tags: Diego Lawler, Jésus Vega-Encabo, maintenance and repair, ontology of artifacts, Philosophy of Technology, SERRC 7/3/2026, Tim Juvshik