The European Research Council (ERC) recently announced the winners of their sizable “Consolidator Grants,” and several philosophers were among them. They are: A.J. Cotnoir (University of St Andrews) “Instruments of Unity: the Many Ways of Being One” We perceive unities everywhere: from ant colonies to cellular automata, from organisms to organisations. Yet we have little understanding of the general constraints by which they are unified. The Instruments of Unity Project tackles this abstract question in a way that provides concrete applicable answers. The core hypothesis: unity is a complex pluralistic phenomenon, requiring a multifaceted theoretical approach. We identify unity relations across a variety of formal settings in a way that is receptive to insights and tools from the cognitive and computing sciences, even addressing the ‘meta-question’ as to whether there’s any unity to the different types of unity. We plan to apply the resulting framework to problems in metaphysics, social ontology, and formal ontology. Along the way, we seek to rehabilitate a more holistic ‘carving’-based metaphysics over against the dominant reductionistic ‘building’-based paradigm. (€1.7 million) Dennis Lehmkuhl (University of Bonn) “The Centre of Gravity Project” The foundations of the general theory of relativity (GR) were laid by Albert Einstein in 1915. But much of what has been built on those foundations was developed in the Renaissance Period of GR between 1955 and 1975. In these years, several researchers built on Einstein’s foundations, but also revolutionized the mathematical tools and physical concepts within GR. Indeed, without the concepts and tools formed during this Renaissance, the recent observation of gravitational waves, rewarded with the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017, and the convincing prediction of and mounting evidence for the existence of black holes, rewarded with the Nobel Prize in physics in 2020, would not have been possible. And yet, these developments have not been properly investigated by historians or philosophers of science thus far. The goal of The Centre of Gravity Project (COGY) is to close this gap. The project will combine pioneering research on the published papers and literary estates of the core figures of the Renaissance period—such as Sir Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, Sir Hermann Bondi, Jürgen Ehlers and John Wheeler—with the analysis of detailed oral-history interviews. The aim..