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 (...) mereology (the study of part/whole relations), topology (the study of spatial continuity and compactness), and the theory of spatial location proper. This leads to a unified framework for spatial representation understood quite broadly as a theory of the representation of spatial entities. The framework is then tested against some classical metaphysical questions such as: Are parts essential to their wholes? Is spatial colocation a sufficient criterion of identity? What (if anything) distinguishes material objects from events and other spatial entities? The concluding chapters deal with applications to topics as diverse as the logical analysis of movement and the semantics of maps. (shrink)

Classical mereology is a formal theory of the part-whole relation, essentially involving a notion of mereological fusion, or sum. There are various different definitions of fusion in the literature, and various axiomatizations for classical mereology. Though the equivalence of the definitions of fusion is provable from axiom sets, the definitions are not logically equivalent, and, hence, are not inter-changeable when laying down the axioms. We examine the relations between the main definitions of fusion and correct some technical errors in prominent (...) discussions of the axiomatization of mereology. We show the equivalence of four different ways to axiomatize classical mereology, using three different notions of fusion. We also clarify the connection between classical mereology and complete Boolean algebra by giving two "neutral" axiom sets which can be supplemented by one or the other of two simple axioms to yield the full theories; one of these uses a notion of "strong complement" that helps explicate the connections between the theories. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Achille Varzi (2009) argues that mereological universalism (U) entails mereological extensionalism (E). The thesis that U entails E (call it ‘T’) has important implications. For example, as is well known, T plays a crucial role in Peter van Inwagen’s argument against universalism (1990: 74–79). In what follows, I show that Varzi’s arguments for T rely on a tendentious assumption about parthood.

Nella ricerca antropologica, la distinzione “natura/cultura” è considerata una delle dicotomie di base che soggiacciono – nel corso della storia – ai diversi modelli del mondo. Nei termini di questa distinzione ci orientiamo nell’ambiente che ci circonda, tracciamo distinzioni metafisiche, formuliamo giudizi di valore. Eppure, tanto questa opposizione è intuitiva e di immediata comprensione, tanto diventa sfuggente non appena si tenti di individuare dove sia il confine che la definisce, e di...