The aim of the paper is to present and evaluate Bolzano's theory of grounding, that is, his theory of the concept expressed and the relation brought into play by 'because'. In the first part of the paper (Sections 1-4) the concept of grounding is distinguished from and related to three other concepts: the concept of an epistemic reason}, the concept of causality, and the concept of deducibility (i.e., logical consequence). In its second part (Sections 5-7) Bolzano's positive account of grounding is reconstructed in axiomatic form and critically discussed.

This paper is the first part of an exploration into the logical properties of relative identity. After providing the semantic grounds for various monadic logics of relative identity, I define the minimal system and its nine extensions. It is suggested that despite their purely formal origin at least some of them may contain nontrivial philosophical insights. All logics are axiomatized by means of sound and complete sequent calculi. I show their affinities with existing formalizations.

We construct a class of relations on computable structures whose degree spectra form natural classes of degrees. Given any computable ordinal $\alpha$ and reducibility r stronger than or equal to m-reducibility, we show how to construct a structure with an intrinsically $\Sigma_\alpha$ invariant relation whose degree spectrum consists of all nontrivial $\Sigma_\alpha$ r-degrees. We extend this construction to show that $\Sigma_\alpha$ can be replaced by either $\Pi_\alpha$ or $\Delta_\alpha$.