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  1. (2 other versions)Parts : a Study in Ontology.Peter Simons - 1987 - Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 2:277-279.
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  • (1 other version)Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology.A. N. Whitehead - 1929 - Mind 39 (156):466-475.
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  • Things that Happen.J. E. Tiles - 1986 - Noûs 20 (1):111-113.
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  • Holes and Other Superficialities.Roberto Casati & Achille C. Varzi - 1994 - MIT Press.
    Holes are a good example of the sort of entity that down-to-earth philosophers would be inclined to expel from their ontological inventory. In this work we argue instead in favor of their existence and explore the consequences of this liberality—odd as they might appear. We examine the ontology of holes, their geometry, their part-whole relations, their identity and their causal role, the ways we perceive them. We distinguish three basic kinds of holes: blind hollows, perforating tunnels, and internal cavities, treating (...)
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  • (1 other version)Part-whole.Kit Fine - 1995 - In Barry Smith & David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge companion to Husserl. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 463.
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  • Formal Ontology in Information Systems.Nicola Guarino (ed.) - 1998 - IOS Press.
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  • (1 other version)Indivisible Parts and Extended Objects.Dean W. Zimmerman - 1996 - The Monist 79 (1):148-180.
    Physical boundaries and the earliest topologists. Topology has a relatively short history; but its 19th century roots are embedded in philosophical problems about the nature of extended substances and their boundaries which go back to Zeno and Aristotle. Although it seems that there have always been philosophers interested in these matters, questions about the boundaries of three-dimensional objects were closest to center stage during the later medieval and modern periods. Are the boundaries of an object actually existing, less-than-three-dimensional parts of (...)
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  • A calculus of individuals based on "connection".Bowman L. Clarke - 1981 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 22 (3):204-218.
    Although Aristotle (Metaphysics, Book IV, Chapter 2) was perhaps the first person to consider the part-whole relationship to be a proper subject matter for philosophic inquiry, the Polish logician Stanislow Lesniewski [15] is generally given credit for the first formal treatment of the subject matter in his Mereology.1 Woodger [30] and Tarski [24] made use of a specific adaptation of Lesniewski's work as a basis for a formal theory of physical things and their parts. The term 'calculus of individuals' was (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Process and reality: an essay in cosmology.Alfred North Whitehead - 1929 - New York: Free Press. Edited by David Ray Griffin & Donald W. Sherburne.
    Process and Reality, Whitehead’s magnum opus, is one of the major philosophical works of the modern world, and an extensive body of secondary literature has developed around it. Yet surely no significant philosophical book has appeared in the last two centuries in nearly so deplorable a condition as has this one, with its many hundreds of errors and with over three hundred discrepancies between the American and the English editions, which appeared in different formats with divergent paginations. The work itself (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Parts: a study in ontology.Peter M. Simons - 1987 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Although the relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, this is the first full-length study of this key concept. Showing that mereology, or the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology, Simons surveys and critiques previous theories--especially the standard extensional view--and proposes a new account that encompasses both temporal and modal considerations. Simons's revised theory not only allows him to offer fresh solutions to long-standing problems, but also has far-reaching consequences for (...)
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  • Boundaries: An essay in mereotopology.Barry Smith - 1997 - In Lewis H. Hahn (ed.), Philosophy of Roderick Chisholm (Library of Living Philosophers). Open Court. pp. 534--561.
    Of Chisholm’s many signal contributions to analytic metaphysics, perhaps the most important is his treatment of boundaries, a category of entity that has been neglected, to say the least, in the history of ontology. We can gain some preliminary idea of the sorts of problems which the Chisholmian ontology of boundaries is designed to solve, if we consider the following Zeno-inspired thought-experiment.
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  • Mereotopology: A theory of parts and boundaries.Barry Smith - 1996 - Data and Knowledge Engineering 20 (3):287–303.
    The paper is a contribution to formal ontology. It seeks to use topological means in order to derive ontological laws pertaining to the boundaries and interiors of wholes, to relations of contact and connectedness, to the concepts of surface, point, neighbourhood, and so on. The basis of the theory is mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, a theory which is shown to have a number of advantages, for ontological purposes, over standard treatments of topology in set-theoretic terms. One (...)
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  • Reasoning about Space: The Hole Story.Achille C. Varzi - 1996 - Logic and Logical Philosophy 4:3-39.
    This is a revised and extended version of the formal theory of holes outlined in the Appendix to the book "Holes and Other Superficialities". The first part summarizes the basic framework (ontology, mereology, topology, morphology). The second part emphasizes its relevance to spatial reasoning and to the semantics of spatial prepositions in natural language. In particular, I discuss the semantics of ‘in’ and provide an account of such fallacious arguments as “There is a hole in the sheet. The sheet is (...)
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  • Boundaries, continuity, and contact.Achille C. Varzi - 1997 - Noûs 31 (1):26-58.
    There are conflicting intuitions concerning the status of a boundary separating two adjacent entities (or two parts of the same entity). The boundary cannot belong to both things, for adjacency excludes overlap; and it cannot belong to neither, for nothing lies between two adjacent things. Yet how can the dilemma be avoided without assigning the boundary to one thing or the other at random? Some philosophers regard this as a reductio of the very notion of a boundary, which should accordingly (...)
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  • The niche.Barry Smith & Achille C. Varzi - 1999 - Noûs 33 (2):214-238.
    The concept of niche (setting, context, habitat, environment) has been little studied by ontologists, in spite of its wide application in a variety of disciplines from evolutionary biology to economics. What follows is a first formal theory of this concept, a theory of the relations between objects and their niches. The theory builds upon existing work on mereology, topology, and the theory of spatial location as tools of formal ontology. It will be illustrated above all by means of simple biological (...)
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  • Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries.Barry Smith & Achille C. Varzi - 2000 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (2):401-420.
    There is a basic distinction, in the realm of spatial boundaries, between bona fide boundaries on the one hand, and fiat boundaries on the other. The former are just the physical boundaries of old. The latter are exemplified especially by boundaries induced through human demarcation, for example in the geographic domain. The classical problems connected with the notions of adjacency, contact, separation and division can be resolved in an intuitive way by recognizing this two-sorted ontology of boundaries. Bona fide boundaries (...)
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  • (1 other version)Point, line, and surface, as sets of solids.Theodore de Laguna - 1922 - Journal of Philosophy 19 (17):449-461.
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  • (1 other version)Indivisible Parts and Extended Objects.Dean W. Zimmerman - 1996 - The Monist 79 (1):148-180.
    Physical boundaries and the earliest topologists. Topology has a relatively short history; but its 19th century roots are embedded in philosophical problems about the nature of extended substances and their boundaries which go back to Zeno and Aristotle. Although it seems that there have always been philosophers interested in these matters, questions about the boundaries of three-dimensional objects were closest to center stage during the later medieval and modern periods. Are the boundaries of an object actually existing, less-than-three-dimensional parts of (...)
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  • Logische Untersuchungen: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis.Edmund Husserl (ed.) - 1984 - Tübingen,: de Gruyter.
    Husserls »Logische Untersuchungen« sind eines der folgenreichsten Werke der neueren Philosophiegeschichte. Mit dem ersten Erscheinen in den Jahren 1900 und 1901 (Max Niemeyer Verlag, Halle/Saale) nimmt jene Schule ihren Anfang, deren Name im Untertitel des zweiten Bandes zum ersten Mal sinnfällig wird: die Phänomenologie. Husserl sah damals in diesem Werk »Versuche zur Neubegründung der reinen Logik und Erkenntnistheorie«, die den Grund zu einem größeren Gedankengebäude zu legen imstande waren. Sie wollten freilich kein bloßes Programm sein, sondern »Fundamentalarbeit an den unmittelbar (...)
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  • Parts and Places: The Structures of Spatial Representation.Roberto Casati & Achille C. Varzi - 1999 - MIT Press.
    Thinking about space is thinking about spatial things. The table is on the carpet; hence the carpet is under the table. The vase is in the box; hence the box is not in the vase. But what does it mean for an object to be somewhere? How are objects tied to the space they occupy? This book is concerned with these and other fundamental issues in the philosophy of spatial representation. Our starting point is an analysis of the interplay between (...)
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  • The Structure of Spatial Localization.Roberto Casati & Achille Varzi - 1996 - Philosophical Studies 82 (2):205 - 239.
    What are the relationships between an entity and the space at which it is located? And between a region of space and the events that take place there? What is the metaphysical structure of localization? What its modal status? This paper addresses some of these questions in an attempt to work out at least the main coordinates of the logical structure of localization. Our task is mostly taxonomic. But we also highlight some of the underlying structural features and we single (...)
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  • (1 other version)The calculus of individuals and its uses.Henry S. Leonard & Nelson Goodman - 1940 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 5 (2):45-55.
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  • A proof system for contact relation algebras.Ivo Düntsch & Ewa Orłowska - 2000 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 29 (3):241-262.
    Contact relations have been studied in the context of qualitative geometry and physics since the early 1920s, and have recently received attention in qualitative spatial reasoning. In this paper, we present a sound and complete proof system in the style of Rasiowa and Sikorski (1963) for relation algebras generated by a contact relation.
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  • (1 other version)Part-whole.Kit Fine - 1995 - In Barry Smith & David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge companion to Husserl. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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  • Individuals and points.Bowman L. Clark - 1985 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 26 (1):61-75.
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  • Review of Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi, Holes and Other Superficialities. [REVIEW]David Lewis & Stephanie Lewis - 1996 - Philosophical Review 105 (1):77-79.
    Argle. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: all things are material. Either holes are somehow material, or else there are no such things. Maybe a hole is the material hole-lining that, as we so misleadingly say, “surrounds” the hole; or else whatever ostensible reference we make to holes is secretly some other sort of language-game altogether, or it’s fictitious reference, or it’s just plain mistaken.
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  • Consiglio nazionale delle ricerc.N. Guarino & I. Roma - 1998 - In Nicola Guarino (ed.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems. IOS Press.
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  • Refining Temporal Reference in Event Structures.Fabio Pianesi & Achille C. Varzi - 1996 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 37 (1):71-83.
    This paper expands on the theory of event structures put forward in previous work by further investigating the subtle connections between time and events. Specifically, in the first part we generalize the notion of an event structure to that of a refinement structure, where various degrees of temporal granularity are accommodated. In the second part we investigate how these structures can account for the context-dependence of temporal structures in natural language semantics.
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  • Parts, Wholes, and Part-Whole Relations: The Prospects of Mereotopology.Achille C. Varzi - 1996 - Data and Knowledge Engineering 20:259–286.
    We can see mereology as a theory of parthood and topology as a theory of wholeness. How can these be combined to obtain a unified theory of parts and wholes? This paper examines various non-equivalent ways of pursuing this task, with specific reference to its relevance to spatio-temporal reasoning. In particular, three main strategies are compared: (i) mereology and topology as two independent (though mutually related) chapters; (ii) mereology as a general theory subsuming topology; (iii) topology as a general theory (...)
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  • Things that happen.J. E. Tiles - 1981 - [Aberdeen]: Aberdeen University Press.
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  • Holes and Other Superficialities.Brian Rotman - 1995 - Substance 24 (1/2):184.
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  • A complete axiom system for polygonal mereotopology of the real plane.Ian Pratt & Dominik Schoop - 1998 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 27 (6):621-658.
    This paper presents a calculus for mereotopological reasoning in which two-dimensional spatial regions are treated as primitive entities. A first order predicate language ℒ with a distinguished unary predicate c(x), function-symbols +, · and - and constants 0 and 1 is defined. An interpretation ℜ for ℒ is provided in which polygonal open subsets of the real plane serve as elements of the domain. Under this interpretation the predicate c(x) is read as 'region x is connected' and the function-symbols and (...)
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  • Events, Topology and Temporal Relations.Fabio Pianesi & Achille C. Varzi - 1996 - The Monist 79 (1):89--116.
    We are used to regarding actions and other events, such as Brutus’ stabbing of Caesar or the sinking of the Titanic, as occupying intervals of some underlying linearly ordered temporal dimension. This attitude is so natural and compelling that one is tempted to disregard the obvious difference between time periods and actual happenings in favor of the former: events become mere “intervals cum description”.1 On the other hand, in ordinary circumstances the point of talking about time is to talk about (...)
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  • Connection structures.Loredana Biacino & Giangiacomo Gerla - 1991 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 32 (2):242-247.
    Whitehead, in his famous book "Process and Reality", proposed a definition of point assuming the concepts of “region” and “connection relation” as primitive. Several years after and independently Grzegorczyk, in a brief but very interesting paper proposed another definition of point in a system in which the inclusion relation and the relation of being separated were assumed as primitive. In this paper we compare their definitions and we show that, under rather natural assumptions, they coincide.
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  • Connection Structures: Grzegorczyk's and Whitehead's Definitions of Point.Loredana Biacino & Giangiacomo Gerla - 1996 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 37 (3):431-439.
    Whitehead, in his famous book Process and Reality, proposed a definition of point assuming the concepts of "region" and "connection relation" as primitive. Several years after and independently Grzegorczyk, in a brief but very interesting paper, proposed another definition of point in a system in which the inclusion relation and the relation of being separated were assumed as primitive. In this paper we compare their definitions and we show that, under rather natural assumptions, they coincide.
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  • (1 other version)The Calculus of Individuals and Its Uses.Henry S. Leonard & Nelson Goodman - 1940 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 5 (3):113-114.
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  • Axiomatizability of geometry without points.Andrzej Grzegorczyk - 1960 - Synthese 12 (2-3):228 - 235.
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  • Temporal reasoning based on semi-intervals.Christian Freksa - 1992 - Artificial Intelligence 54 (1-2):199-227.
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  • The topology of boundaries.Margaret M. Fleck - 1996 - Artificial Intelligence 80 (1):1-27.
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  • A Connection Based Approach to Common-sense Topological Description and Reasoning.A. G. Cohn - 1996 - The Monist 79 (1):51-75.
    This paper describes the topological aspect of a logic-based, artificial intelligence approach to formalising the qualitative description of spatial properties and relations, and reasoning about those properties and relations. This approach, known as RCC theory, has been under development for several years at the University of Leeds. The main rationale for this project is that qualitative descriptions of spatial properties and relationships, and qualitative spatial reasoning, are of fundamental importance in human thinking about the world: even where quantitative spatial data (...)
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  • (1 other version)Boundaries as Dependent Particulars.Roderick M. Chisholm - 1983 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 20 (1):87-95.
    Körner has made an important distinction between dependent and independent particulars, noting that any adequate theory of categories will divide particulars into those that are independent and those that are not. In the present paper, the concept of a spatial boundary is used to illustrate the concept of a dependent particular. It is suggested that, if we follow Brentano and think of such boundaries as ontologically dependent upon the things of which they may be said to be boundaries, then we (...)
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  • Analysis and Metaphysics.Richard Cartwright - 1975 - Reidel.
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  • Free part-whole theory.Peter M. Simons - 1991 - In Karel Lambert (ed.), Philosophical applications of free logic. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 285--306.
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  • Scattered Objects.Richard Cartwright - 1975 - In Analysis and Metaphysics. Reidel. pp. 153-171.
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  • Spatial and Temporal Reasoning.Oliviero Stock (ed.) - 1997 - Kluwer Academic Publishers.
    Qualitative reasoning about space and time - a reasoning at the human level - promises to become a fundamental aspect of future systems that will accompany us in daily activity. The aim of Spatial and Temporal Reasoning is to give a picture of current research in this area focusing on both representational and computational issues. The picture emphasizes some major lines of development in this multifaceted, constantly growing area. The material in the book also shows some common ground and a (...)
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  • Spatial Continuity and the Theory of Part and Whole: A Brentano Study.Roderick M. Chisholm - 1992 - Brentano Studien 4:11-24.
    The concepts of a spatially continuous substance, of spatial dimension and of spatial boundary are here "analyzed out" of the concepts of individual thing, of constituent and of coincidence. The analysis is based upon the theory of spatial coincidence that was developed by Brentano. Its presuppositions are essentially these: (1) if there are spatial objects of any kind, then there are continuous spatial substances. (2) such substances are possibly such that they are not constituents of any individual thing; and (3) (...)
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  • Paradoxien des Unendlichen.Bernard Bolzano - 2012 - Hamburg: Meiner, F. Edited by Christian Tapp.
    Die "Paradoxien des Unendlichen" sind ein Klassiker der Philosophie der Mathematik und zugleich eine gute Einführung in das Denken des "Urgroßvaters" der analytischen Philosophie. Das Unendliche - seit jeher ein Faszinosum für die philosophische Reflexion - wurde in der Zeit nach der Grundlegung der Analysis durch Leibniz und Newton in der Mathematik zunächst als Problem betrachtet, das sich nicht vollkommen widerspruchsfrei behandeln lässt. Bernard Bolzano, der heute als "Urgroßvater der analytischen Philosophie" (Michael Dummett) gilt, zeigt in diesem klassisch gewordenen Text (...)
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  • (1 other version)Process and Reality. By A. E. Murphy. [REVIEW]A. N. Whitehead - 1929 - International Journal of Ethics 40:433.
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  • Philosophische Untersuchungen zu Raum, Zeit und Kontinuum.Franz Brentano - 1976 - Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
    Die in diesem Band vereinten Aufsätze spiegeln Brentanos späte Ansichten wieder; die Einleitung wurde für den allgemein philosophisch interessierten Leser konzipiert und behandelt Brentanos Theorie des Kontinuums, des Ursprungs des ...
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