Parts and Wholes
Parts and Wholes

Author: Meg Wallace

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-06-29

Total Pages: 139

ISBN-13: 100909209X

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The Odd Universe Argument aims to show that from four intuitive assumptions about parts and wholes, we can conclude a priori that there is an odd number of things in the universe. This Element investigates how this is so and where things might have gone awry. Section 1 gives an overview of general methodology, basic mereology, and plural logic. Section 2 explores questions about the nature of composition and decomposition. Does composition always occur? Never? Sometimes? Is the universe, at rock bottom, just many partless bits (simples)? Or do the parts have parts all the way down (gunk)? Section 3 looks at arguments for and against the thesis that composition is identity, with a healthy bias in its favor. In the wake of this discussion, we reconsider our methods of counting. We conclude with a return to the odd universe argument and suggestions on how best to resist it.

Plato on Parts and Wholes
Plato on Parts and Wholes

Author: Verity Harte

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 9780199278442

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What is the relation between a whole and its parts? Is a whole identical to its parts, or is there some other relation of composition? These questions are much discussed in modern philosophy; but Plato's rich discussion of composition has been neglected. Verity Harte provides the first sustained examination of this Platonic discussion and explains its relations to modern debates. She reveals how, in several late works, Plato criticizes the view that a whole is identical to its parts. Shethen goes on to discuss the intriguing alternative conception of wholes he offers in its place. This book is an invaluable resource both for scholars of Plato and for modern metaphysicians. For scholars of Plato, Harte's careful textual analysis provides fresh insights into some of his most difficult works. For modern metaphysicians, she illuminates the contemporary debate by placing it within an historical context.

Mereology and the Sciences
Mereology and the Sciences

Author: Claudio Calosi

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-06-02

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 3319053566

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This volume is the first systematic and thorough attempt to investigate the relation and the possible applications of mereology to contemporary science. It gathers contributions from leading scholars in the field and covers a wide range of scientific theories and practices such as physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, computer science and engineering. Throughout the volume, a variety of foundational issues are investigated both from the formal and the empirical point of view. The first section looks at the topic as it applies to physics. The section addresses questions of persistence and composition within quantum and relativistic physics and concludes by scrutinizing the possibility to capture continuity of motion as described by our best physical theories within gunky space times. The second part tackles mathematics and shows how to provide a foundation for point-free geometry of space switching to fuzzy-logic. The relation between mereological sums and set-theoretic suprema is investigated and issues about different mereological perspectives such as classical and natural Mereology are thoroughly discussed. The third section in the volume looks at natural science. Several questions from biology, medicine and chemistry are investigated. From the perspective of biology, there is an attempt to provide axioms for inferring statements about part hood between two biological entities from statements about their spatial relation. From the perspective of chemistry, it is argued that classical mereological frameworks are not adequate to capture the practices of chemistry in that they consider neither temporal nor modal parameters. The final part introduces computer science and engineering. A new formal mereological framework in which an indeterminate relation of part hood is taken as a primitive notion is constructed and then applied to a wide variety of disciplines from robotics to knowledge engineering. A formal framework for discrete mereotopology and its applications is developed and finally, the importance of mereology for the relatively new science of domain engineering is also discussed.

Powers, Parts and Wholes
Powers, Parts and Wholes

Author: Christopher J. Austin

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-25

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1000931110

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This volume offers a fresh exploration of the parts–whole relations within a power and among powers. While the metaphysics of powers has been extensively examined in the literature, powers have yet to be studied from the perspective of their mereology. Powers are often assumed to be atomic, and yet what they can do—and what can happen to them—is complex. But if powers are simple, how can they have complex manifestations? Can powers have parts? According to which rules of composition do powers compose into powers? Given the centrality of powers in current scientific as well as philosophical thought, recognizing and understanding the ontological differences between atomic and mereologically complex powers is important, for both philosophy and science. The first part of this book explores how powers divide; the second part, how powers compose. The final part showcases some specific study cases in the domains of quantum mechanics and psychology. Powers, Parts and Wholes will be of interest to professional philosophers and graduate students working in metaphysics, philosophy of science and logic.

Parts and Wholes in Semantics
Parts and Wholes in Semantics

Author: Friederike Moltmann

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 1997-08-14

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 019509574X

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Moltmann provides a unified account of a broad range of English and cross linguistic data involving expressions of the notions of "part" and "whole". She presents a new theory of part structures in which the notion of an integrated whole plays a fundamental role, and in which the part structure of an entity may vary across different situations, perspectives, and dimensions.

Conceptualizing Society
Conceptualizing Society

Author: Adam Kuper

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-03-11

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 1134926499

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The social anthropologists represented in this volume share the view that, together, ethnography and theoretically informed comparison constitute a single, plausible enterprise, and they reject both the postmodernist criticism of ethnography as epistemologically problematic, and the opposing view that no theory could possibly do justice to the insights and complex descriptions of ethnography. In this volume, the first papers taken from the first conference of the newly-formed European Association of Social Anthropologists, the contributors discuss the various models at the disposal of the modern ethnographer. Their concerns range through structuralism, postmodernism and world systems theory, and the volume as a whole offers a lively account of the state of general theory in social anthropology today.

Plato on Parts and Wholes
Plato on Parts and Wholes

Author: Verity Harte

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2002-09-19

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0191519138

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What is the relation between a whole and its parts? Is a whole identical to its parts, or is there some other relation of composition? These questions are much discussed in modern philosophy; but Plato's rich discussion of composition has been neglected. Verity Harte provides the first sustained examination of this Platonic discussion and explains its relations to modern debates. She reveals how, in several late works, Plato criticizes the view that a whole is identical to its parts. She then goes on to discuss the intriguing alternative conception of wholes he offers in its place. This book is an invaluable resource both for scholars of Plato and for modern metaphysicians. For scholars of Plato, Harte's careful textual analysis provides fresh insights into some of his most difficult works. For modern metaphysicians, she illuminates the contemporary debate by placing it within an historical context.

Marrying Kind
Marrying Kind

Author: K L Cook

Publisher:

Published: 2019-10-06

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781948509114

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In his fourth book of fiction, award-winning novelist and short story writer K. L. Cook explores marriage--not only to people, but to places and vocations--and how our lives are shaped by both the ideal and reality of lifelong commitments. A bride and groom discover secrets during their Las Vegas honeymoon and, years later, grapple with emotional and moral fissures in their relationship. A bankrupt academic flees to the Florida coast with his family and finds provisional hope in a big fish story. A fifteen-year-old boy sees Shakespeare's plays in the Colorado mountains, an experience that marries him for life to the theatre. A college dean and his attorney wife face unexpected changes that force them to re-envision their understanding of home. With insight, empathy, and humor, this collection of stories examines who and what we wed and what it means to be the marrying kind.

John Duns Scotus on Parts, Wholes, and Hylomorphism
John Duns Scotus on Parts, Wholes, and Hylomorphism

Author: Thomas M. Ward

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2014-07-17

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9004278974

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In John Duns Scotus on Parts, Wholes, and Hylomorphism, Thomas M. Ward examines Scotus's arguments for his distinctive version of hylomorphism, the view that at least some material objects are composites of matter and form. It considers Scotus's reasons for adopting hylomorphism, and his accounts of how matter and form compose a substance, how extended parts, such as the organs of an organism, compose a substance, and how other sorts of things, such as the four chemical elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and all the things in the world, fail to compose a substance. It highlights the extent to which Scotus draws on his metaphysics of essential order to explain why some things can compose substance and why others cannot. Throughout the book, contemporary versions of hylomorphism are discussed in ways that both illumine Scotus's own views and suggest ways to advance contemporary debates.