Results for 'parthood'

84 found
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  1. Parthood and naturalness.M. Eddon - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (12):3163-3180.
    Is part of a perfectly natural, or fundamental, relation? Philosophers have been hesitant to take a stand on this issue. One reason for this hesitancy is the worry that, if parthood is perfectly natural, then the perfectly natural properties and relations are not suitably “independent” of one another. In this paper, I argue that parthood is a perfectly natural relation. In so doing, I argue that this “independence” worry is unfounded. I conclude by noting some consequences of the (...)
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  2. Pregnancy, Parthood and Proper Overlap: A Critique of Kingma.Alexander Geddes - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):476-491.
    Elselijn Kingma argues that, in cases of mammalian placental pregnancy, the foster (roughly, the post-implantation embryo/foetus) is part of the gravida (the pregnant organism). But she does not consider the possibility of proper overlap. I show that this generates a number of serious problems for her argument and trace the oversight to a quite general issue within the literature on biological individuality. Doing so provides an opportunity to pull apart and clarify the relations between some importantly distinct questions concerning organismality (...)
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  3. (2 other versions)Parthood and location.Raul Saucedo - 2009 - In Dean Zimmerman, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 5. Oxford University Press UK.
    I argue that from a very weak recombination principle and plausible assumptions about the nature of parthood and location it follows that it's possible that the mereological structure of the material world and that of spacetime fail to correspond to one another in very radical ways. I defend, moreover, that rejecting the possibility of such failures of correspondence leaves us with a choice of equally radical alternatives. I also discuss a few ways in which their possibility is relevant to (...)
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  4. Propositions and Parthood: The Universe and Anti-Symmetry.Chris Tillman & Gregory Fowler - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (3):525 - 539.
    It is plausible that the universe exists: a thing such that absolutely everything is a part of it. It is also plausible that singular, structured propositions exist: propositions that literally have individuals as parts. Furthermore, it is plausible that for each thing, there is a singular, structured proposition that has it as a part. Finally, it is plausible that parthood is a partial ordering: reflexive, transitive, and anti-symmetric. These plausible claims cannot all be correct. We canvass some costs of (...)
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  5. The extensionality of parthood and composition.Achille C. Varzi - 2008 - Philosophical Quarterly 58 (230):108-133.
    I focus on three mereological principles: the Extensionality of Parthood (EP), the Uniqueness of Composition (UC), and the Extensionality of Composition (EC). These principles are not equivalent. Nonetheless, they are closely related (and often equated) as they all reflect the basic nominalistic dictum, No difference without a difference maker. And each one of them—individually or collectively—has been challenged on philosophical grounds. In the first part I argue that such challenges do not quite threaten EP insofar as they are either (...)
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  6. Why Parthood Might Be a Four Place Relation, and How it Behaves if it Is.Cody Gilmore - 2009 - In Benedikt Schick, Edmund Runggaldier & Ludger Honnefelder, Unity and Time in Metaphysics. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 83--133.
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  7. Materiality, Parthood, and Possibility.Samuele Iaquinto & Giuliano Torrengo - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87:1125-1131.
    This paper offers an argument in favour of a Lewisian version of concretism that maintains both the principle of material inheritance (according to which, if all the parts of an object x are material, then x is material) and the materiality-modality link (that is, the principle that, for every x, if x is material, then x is possible).
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  8. Formal Theories of Parthood.Achille C. Varzi - 2014 - In Claudio Calosi & Pierluigi Graziani, Mereology and the Sciences: Parts and Wholes in the Contemporary Scientific Context. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 359–370.
    A compact overview of the main formal theories of parthood and of their mutual relationships, up to Classical Extensional Mereology. Written as an Appendix to the other essays included in the volume.
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  9. Reengineering Metaphysics: Modularity, Parthood, and Evolvability in Metabolic Engineering.Catherine Kendig & Todd T. Eckdahl - 2017 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9 (8).
    The premise of biological modularity is an ontological claim that appears to come out of practice. We understand that the biological world is modular because we can manipulate different parts of organisms in ways that would only work if there were discrete parts that were interchangeable. This is the foundation of the BioBrick assembly method widely used in synthetic biology. It is one of a number of methods that allows practitioners to construct and reconstruct biological pathways and devices using DNA (...)
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  10. A Note on the Transitivity of Parthood.Achille C. Varzi - 2006 - Applied ontology 1 (2):141-146.
    That parthood is a transitive relation is among the most basic principles of classical mereology. Alas, it is also very controversial. In a recent paper, Ingvar Johansson has put forward a novel diagnosis of the problem, along with a corresponding solution. The diagnosis is on the right track, I argue, but the solution is misleading. And once the pieces are properly put together, we end up with a reinforcement of the standard defense of transitivity on behalf of classical mereology.
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  11. A (contingent) content–parthood analysis of indirect speech reports.Alex Davies - 2021 - Mind and Language 36 (4):533-553.
    This article presents a semantic analysis of indirect speech reports. The analysis aims to explain a combination of two phenomena. First, there are true utterances of sentences of the form α said that φ which are used to report an utterance u of a sentence wherein φ's content is not u's content. This implies that in uttering a single sentence, one can say several things. Second, when the complements of these reports (and indeed, these reports themselves) are placed in conjunctions, (...)
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  12. How to Distinguish Parthood from Location in Bioontologies.Stefan Schulz, Philipp Daumke, Barry Smith & Udo Hahn - 2005 - In Stefan Schulz, Philipp Daumke, Barry Smith & Udo Hahn, Proceedings of the AMIA Symposium. American Medical Informatics Association. pp. 669-673.
    The pivotal role of the relation part-of in the description of living organisms is widely acknowledged. Organisms are open systems, which means that in contradistinction to mechanical artifacts they are characterized by a continuous flow and exchange of matter. A closer analysis of the spatial relations in biological organisms reveals that the decision as to whether a given particular is part-of a second particular or whether it is only contained-in the second particular is often controversial. We here propose a rule-based (...)
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  13. Non-transitive Parthood, Leveled Mereology, and the Representation of Emergent Parts of Processes.Johanna Seibt - 2014 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 91:161-190.
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  14. Dao as You? Dropping Proper Parthood in a Mereological Reconstruction of Daoist Metaphysics.Rafal Banka - 2022 - Journal of Chinese Philosophy 49 (1):97-105.
    In this article, I discuss parthood status in mereologi- cally interpreted Daoist metaphysics, based on the Daodejing. I depart from the dao and you interrela- tion, which mereologically overlap by sharing parts. I consider the case of a complete overlap, which (a) challenges proper parthood, according to which a part cannot be identical with the whole that it com- poses, and (b) entails the question of identity that, while complying with classical mereology, cannot be consis- tent with Daoist (...)
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  15. Erratum to: Parthood and naturalness.M. Eddon - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (12):3181-3181.
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  16. ‘Identity’ as a mereological term.Jeroen Smid - 2017 - Synthese 194 (7):2367-2385.
    The mereological predicate ‘is part of’ can be used to define the predicate ‘is identical with’. I argue that this entails that mereological theories can be ideologically simpler than nihilistic theories that do not use the notion of parthood—contrary to what has been argued by Ted Sider. Moreover, if one accepts an extensional mereology, there are good philosophical reasons apart from ideological simplicity to give a mereological definition of identity.
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  17. Between Atomism and Superatomism.T. Scott Dixon - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 49 (6):1215-1241.
    There are at least three vaguely atomistic principles that have come up in the literature, two explicitly and one implicitly. First, standard atomism is the claim that everything is composed of atoms, and is very often how atomism is characterized in the literature. Second, superatomism is the claim that parthood is well-founded, which implies that every proper parthood chain terminates, and has been discussed as a stronger alternative to standard atomism. Third, there is a principle that lies between (...)
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  18. Composition.Daniel Z. Korman & Chad Carmichael - 2016 - Oxford Handbooks Online.
    When some objects are the parts of another object, they compose that object and that object is composite. This article is intended as an introduction to the central questions about composition and a highly selective overview of various answers to those questions. In §1, we review some formal features of parthood that are important for understanding the nature of composition. In §2, we consider some answers to the question: which pluralities of objects together compose something? As we will see, (...)
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  19. Ordinary Objects and Series‐Style Answers to the Special Composition Question.Paul Silva - 2013 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (1):69-88.
    The special composition question asks, roughly, under what conditions composition occurs. The common sense view is that composition only occurs among some things and that all and only ‘ordinary objects’ exist. Peter van Inwagen has marshaled a devastating argument against this view. The common sense view appears to commit one to giving what van Inwagen calls a ‘series-style answer’ to the special composition question, but van Inwagen argues that series-style answers are impossible because they are inconsistent with the transitivity of (...)
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  20. The Metaphysics of Pregnancy.Francesca Bellazzi - 2025 - Philosophy Compass 20 (4):e70026.
    Pregnancy is a one of the most complex phenomena of life and is essential to the life cycle of mammals. Pregnancy is also a crucial aspect of humans' life and experience. But what is pregnancy? This question has received little attention in philosophy until recently, when it got picked up by metaphysicians and philosophers of science. However, the philosophical discussion is still in its infancy. This article provides a survey of the recent debate on the metaphysics of pregnancy. It explores (...)
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  21. Kenelm Digby (and Margaret Cavendish) on Motion.Daniel Whiting - 2024 - Journal of Modern Philosophy 6 (1):1-27.
    Motion—and, in particular, local motion or change in location—plays a central role in Kenelm Digby’s natural philosophy and in his arguments for the immateriality of the soul. Despite this, Digby’s account of what motion consists in has yet to receive much scholarly attention. In this paper, I advance a novel interpretation of Digby on motion. According to it, Digby holds that for a body to move is for it to divide from and unify with other bodies. This is a view (...)
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  22. Disjunctive Parts.Mark Jago - forthcoming - In Federico L. G. Faroldi & Frederik Van De Putte, Outstanding Contributions to Logic: Kit Fine. Springer.
    Fine (2017a) sets out a theory of content based on truthmaker semantics which distinguishes two kinds of consequence between contents. There is entailment, corresponding to the relationship between disjunct and disjunction, and there is containment, corresponding to the relationship between conjunctions and their conjuncts. Fine associates these with two notions of parthood: disjunctive and conjunctive. Conjunctive parthood is a very useful notion, allowing us to analyse partial content and partial truth. In this chapter, I extend the notion of (...)
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  23. Matter and Society. Response to Orensanz.Graham Harman - 2024 - Mεtascience: Scientific General Discourse 3:288-299.
    This article is a response to Martin Orensanz’s argument that object-oriented ontology ought to accept the existence of matter as both a sensual and a real object. That matter can exist as a sensual object is a point immediately granted, since “sensual object” is such a broad term that nothing could be excluded from this designation. Yet I argue that this is not the case with respect to real objects, which must exist independently of any other entity that might encounter (...)
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  24. Against the Compositional View of Facts.William Bynoe - 2011 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (1):91-100.
    It is commonly assumed that facts would be complex entities made out of particulars and universals. This thesis, which I call Compositionalism, holds that parthood may be construed broadly enough so that the relation that holds between a fact and the entities it ‘ties’ together counts as a kind of parthood. I argue firstly that Compositionalism is incompatible with the possibility of certain kinds of fact and universal, and, secondly, that such facts and universals are possible. I conclude (...)
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  25. Communicating in contextual ignorance.Alex Davies - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12385-12405.
    When A utters a declarative sentence in a context to B, typically A can mean a proposition by the sentence, the sentence in context literally expresses a proposition, there are propositions A and B can agree the sentence literally expressed, and B can acquire knowledge from this testimonial exchange. In recent work on linguistic communication, each of these four platitudes has been challenged, and on the same basis: viz. on the ground that exactly which proposition the sentence expressed in context (...)
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  26. Sparse Parts.Kristie Miller - 2006 - Sorites 17:31-48.
    Four dimensionalism, the thesis that persisting objects are four dimensional and thus extended in time as well as space, has become a serious contender as an account of persistence. While many four dimensionalists are mereological universalists, there are those who find mereological universalism both counterintuitive and ontologically profligate. It would be nice then, if there was a coherent and plausible version of four dimensionalism that was non-universalist in nature. I argue that unfortunately there is not. By its very nature four (...)
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  27. Toward a Commonsense Answer to the Special Composition Question.Chad Carmichael - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (3):475-490.
    The special composition question is the question, ‘When do some things compose something?’ The answers to this question in the literature have largely been at odds with common sense, either by allowing that any two things compose something, or by denying the existence of most ordinary composite objects. I propose a new ‘series-style’ answer to the special composition question that accords much more closely with common sense, and I defend this answer from van Inwagen's objections. Specifically, I will argue that (...)
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  28. Sixteen days.Barry Smith & Berit Brogaard - 2003 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28 (1):45 – 78.
    When does a human being begin to exist? We argue that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. We lay down a set of conditions for being a human being, and we determine when, in the course of normal fetal development, these conditions are first satisfied. Issues dealt with along the way include: modes of substance-formation, twinning, the nature of the intra-uterine environment, and the nature of the (...)
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  29. Cardinal Composition.Lisa Vogt & Jonas Werner - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (4):1457-1479.
    The thesis of Weak Unrestricted Composition says that every pair of objects has a fusion. This thesis has been argued by Contessa and Smith to be compatible with the world being junky and hence to evade an argument against the necessity of Strong Unrestricted Composition proposed by Bohn. However, neither Weak Unrestricted Composition alone nor the different variants of it that have been proposed in the literature can provide us with a satisfying answer to the special composition question, or so (...)
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  30. 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 (...)
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  31. Universalism entails Extensionalism.Achille C. Varzi - 2009 - Analysis 69 (4):599-604.
    I argue that Universalism (the thesis that mereological composition is unrestricted) entails Extensionalism (the thesis that sameness of composition is sufficient for identity) as long as the parthood relation is transitive and satisfies the Weak Supplementation principle (to the effect that whenever a thing has a proper part, it has another part disjoint from the first).
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  32. Partialhood.David Liebesman - 2025 - In Dean W. Zimmerman & Karen Bennett, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 14. Oxford University Press. pp. 131-175.
    My bedroom window is a part of my house, but it is not a partial house. A half-built house is a partial house, but there is no house it is a part of. Being a part of something—parthood—is a familiar topic of philosophical inquiry. Being a partial something—partialhood—is not. The neglect of partialhood is a shame because it is intrinsically interesting as well as metaphysically and semantically important. After using fractions and counting constructions to identify partialhood in §1, I (...)
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  33. Counterparts and Compositional Nihilism: A Reply to A. J. Cotnoir.Meg Wallace - 2013 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (2):242-247.
    One of the primary burdens of the mereological nihilist is accounting for our ordinary intuitions about material objects. It certainly *seems* as if I am typing on a keyboard, which has particular keys and buttons as parts. But such intuitions are mistaken if mereological nihilism is right, leading to widespread error. So nihilists often propose paraphrases of our everyday utterances as compensation. Cotnoir aims to deliver a new paraphrase strategy on behalf of the nihilist: one that interprets parthood and (...)
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  34. Can Subjects Be Proper Parts of Subjects? The De‐Combination Problem.Gregory Miller - 2018 - Ratio 31 (2):137-154.
    Growing concern with the panpsychist's ostensive inability to solve the ‘combination problem’ has led some authors to adopt a view titled ‘Cosmopsychism’. This position turns panpsychism on its head: rather than many tiny atomic minds, there is instead one cosmos-sized mind. It is supposed that this view voids the combination problem, however I argue that it does not. I argue that there is a ‘de-combination problem’ facing the cosmopsychist, which is equivalent to the combination problem as they are both concerned (...)
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  35. Individuating Part-whole Relations in the Biological World.Marie I. Kaiser - 2018 - In O. Bueno, R. Chen & M. B. Fagan, Individuation across Experimental and Theoretical Sciences. Oxford University Press.
    What are the conditions under which one biological object is a part of another biological object? This paper answers this question by developing a general, systematic account of biological parthood. I specify two criteria for biological parthood. Substantial Spatial Inclusionrequires biological parts to be spatially located inside or in the region that the natural boundary of t he biological whole occupies. Compositional Relevance captures the fact that a biological part engages in a biological process that must make a (...)
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  36. Location and perdurance.Antony Eagle - 2009 - In Dean Zimmerman, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 5. Oxford University Press UK. pp. 53-94.
    Recently, Cody Gilmore has deployed an ingenious case involving backwards time travel to highlight an apparent conflict between the theory that objects persist by perduring, and the thesis that wholly coincident objects are impossible. However, careful attention to the concepts of location and parthood that Gilmore’s cases involve shows that the perdurantist faces no genuine objection from these cases, and that the perdurantist has a number of plausible and dialectically appropriate ways to avoid the supposed conflict.
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  37. Parts generate the whole but they are not identical to it.Ross P. Cameron - 2014 - In Aaron J. Cotnoir & Donald L. M. Baxter, Composition as Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press USA.
    The connection between whole and part is intimate: not only can we share the same space, but I’m incapable of leaving my parts behind; settle the nonmereological facts and you thereby settle what is a part of what; wholes don’t seem to be an additional ontological commitment over their parts. Composition as identity promises to explain this intimacy. But it threatens to make the connection too intimate, for surely the parts could have made a different whole and the whole have (...)
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  38. Minimal Rationality and the Web of Questions.Daniel Hoek - 2025 - In Peter van Elswyk, Dirk Kindermann, Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini & Andy Egan, Unstructured Content. Oxford University Press.
    This paper proposes a new account of bounded or minimal doxastic rationality (in the sense of Cherniak 1986), based on the notion that beliefs are answers to questions (à la Yalcin 2018). The core idea is that minimally rational beliefs are linked through thematic connections, rather than entailment relations. Consequently, such beliefs are not deductively closed, but they are closed under parthood (where a part is an entailment that answers a smaller question). And instead of avoiding all inconsistency, minimally (...)
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  39. Parts of Propositions.Cody Gilmore - 2014 - In Shieva Kleinschmidt, Mereology and Location. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 156-208.
    Do Russellian propositions have their constituents as parts? One reason for thinking not is that if they did, they would generate apparent counterexamples to plausible mereological principles. As Frege noted, they would be in tension with the transitivity of parthood. A certain small rock is a part of Etna but not of the proposition that Etna is higher than Vesuvius. So, if Etna were a part of the given proposition, parthood would fail to be transitive. As William Bynoe (...)
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  40. Vague parts and vague identity.Elizabeth Barnes & J. R. G. Williams - 2009 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 90 (2):176-187.
    We discuss arguments against the thesis that the world itself can be vague. The first section of the paper distinguishes dialectically effective from ineffective arguments against metaphysical vagueness. The second section constructs an argument against metaphysical vagueness that promises to be of the dialectically effective sort: an argument against objects with vague parts. Firstly, cases of vague parthood commit one to cases of vague identity. But we argue that Evans' famous argument against will not on its own enable one (...)
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  41. Dao as a Unified Composition or Plurality: A Nihilism Perspective.Rafal Banka - 2023 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 22 (3):1-15.
    This article departs from a mereological conceptualization of the Daoist metaphysi- cal system in the Daodejing 道德經. I discuss what parthood status applies to dao 道. Whereas it is quite intuitive that you 有—the region of concrete objects—has parthood relationships and compositions (entities made from parts), the other, undif- ferentiated region, dao, poses a considerable problem. This problem can be charac- terized in the following way: (a) dao cannot be characterized as a particular com- position, which entails that (...)
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  42.  44
    Informational mereology.Giuseppe Spolaore - manuscript
    Intuitively, any object can be made to correspond to an informational content, that is, roughly, the totality of information about its structure and composition. The first aim of this paper is to make this notion of informational content precise, based on insights from Bar-Hillel, Carnap, Lewis, and Humberstone. The second aim is to make a start in the formal study of the connections between the informational contents of wholes and the informational contents of their parts, which I call “informational mereology.” (...)
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  43. Weak speech reports.Martín Abreu Zavaleta - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (8):2139-2166.
    Indirect speech reports can be true even if they attribute to the speaker the saying of something weaker than what she in fact expressed, yet not all weakenings of what the speaker expressed yield true reports. For example, if Anna utters ‘Bob and Carla passed the exam’, we can accurately report her as having said that Carla passed the exam, but we can not accurately report her as having said that either it rains or it does not, or that either (...)
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  44.  24
    Mereological indeterminacy at logically determinate worlds.Raul Saucedo - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue that indeterminacy in matters of part and whole does not require indeterminacy in matters of identity, existence, or cardinality. I argue that if we distinguish between matters of mereology and matters of spatiotemporal location it is possible for parthood and composition to be indeterminate without identity, existence, or cardinality being indeterminate. This affords a new, general line of defense for friends of mereological indeterminacy against influential objections in the literature and suggests a novel approach to the problem (...)
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  45. The Form is Not a Proper Part in Aristotle’s Metaphysics Z.17, 1041b11–33.Liva Rotkale - 2018 - Metaphysics 1 (1):75-87.
    When Aristotle argues at the Metaphysics Z.17, 1041b11–33 that a whole, which is not a heap, contains ‘something else’, i.e. the form, besides the elements, it is not clear whether or not the form is a proper part of the whole. I defend the claim that the form is not a proper part within the context of the relevant passage, since the whole is divided into elements, not into elements and the form. Different divisions determine different senses of ‘part’, and (...)
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  46. Composition and the Logic of Location: An Argument for Regionalism.Cody Gilmore & Matt Leonard - 2020 - Mind 129 (513):159-178.
    Ned Markosian has recently defended a new theory of composition, which he calls regionalism : some material objects xx compose something if and only if there is a material object located at the fusion of the locations of xx. Markosian argues that regionalism follows from what he calls the subregion theory of parthood. Korman and Carmichael agree. We provide countermodels to show that regionalism does not follow from, even together with fourteen potentially implicit background principles. We then show that (...)
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  47. Brentano's Mereology.Uriah Kriegel - manuscript
    My approach to the exposition of Brentano's mereology is to first introduce the basics of Classical Mereology and then point out the respects in which Brentano's mereology deviates from it. There are two such respects: first, Brentano rejects the axiom of supplementation; second, he distinguishes two primitive notions of parthood.
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  48. Evaluating Ectogenesis via the Metaphysics of Pregnancy.Suki Finn & Sasha Isaac - 2021 - In Robbie Davis-Floyd, Birthing Techno-Sapiens: Human-Technology Co-Evolution and the Future of Reproduction. Routledge: Taylor & Francis. pp. Chapter 8.
    Ectogenesis, or “artificial womb technology,” has been heralded by some, such as prominent feminist Shulamith Firestone, as a way to liberate women. In this chapter, we challenge this view by offering an alternative analysis of the technology as relying upon and perpetuating a problematic model of pregnancy which, rather than liberating women, serves to devalue them. We look to metaphysics as the abstract study of reality to elucidate how the entities in a pregnancy are related to one another. We consider (...)
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  49. Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism.Jonas Werner - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-16.
    This paper develops the metaphysical hypothesis that there are irreducibly collective pluralities, pluralities of objects that do not have a singular object among them. A way to formulate this hypothesis using plural quantification will be proposed and the coherence of irreducibly collective existence will be defended. Furthermore, irreducibly collective existence will be shown to allow for bottomless scenarios that do not involve things standing in relations of parthood. This will create logical space for an anti-atomistic form of mereological nihilism.
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  50. Don't Get Hung Up In the Middle!Yash Agarwal - 2022 - Dianoia The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College 1 (9):42-52.
    Grounding chains are usually taken to be top-ist, grounded in the largest entity (the cosmos), or bottom-ist, grounded in the smallest entity(ies) (mereological atoms). Between these two, middle-ism, the view that grounding chains terminate in middle-sized entities (like iPhones, toasters, amoebae), is almost never considered. Sarah Bernstein in her paper Could a middle level be the most fundamental? argues for the plausibility for middle-ism. In this paper I argue against Bernstein in that middle-ism is a view much more problematic than (...)
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