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.