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Author: Verity Harte
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780199278442
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
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.
Author: Verity Harte
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780199278442
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Get Book
Book Description
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.
Author: Claudio Calosi
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319053566
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 389
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Book Description
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.
Author: Meg Wallace
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100909209X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 139
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Book Description
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.
Author: Verity Harte
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0198236751
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
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 itsparts. 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.
Author: Friederike Moltmann
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 019509574X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
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.
Author: Christopher J. Austin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000931110
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
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.
Author: Adam Kuper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134926499
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 163
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Book Description
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.
Author: Roberto Casati
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262032667
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
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? In this book Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi address some of the fundamental issues in the philosophy of spatial representation. Their starting point is an analysis of the interplay betwen mereology (the study of part/whole relations), topology (the study of spatial continuity and comapctness) 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 whole? Is spatial co-location 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.
Author: Menas Kafatos
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1468403605
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
This discussion resulted from a dialogue which began some seven years ago between a physicist who specializes in astrophysics, general relativity, and the foundations of quantum theory, and a student of cultural history who had done post-doctoral work in the history and philosophy of science. Both of us at that time were awaiting the results of some experiments being conducted under the direction of the physicist Alain Aspect at the University of Paris-South. ! The experiments were the last in a series designed to test some predictions based on a mathematical 2 theorem published in 1964 by John Bell. There was no expectation that the results of these experiments would provide the basis for developing new technologies. The questions which the experiments were designed to answer concerned the relation ship between physical reality and physical theory in the branch of physics known as quantum mechanics. Like most questions raised by physicists which lead to startling new insights, they were disarmingly simple and direct. Is quantum physics, asked Bell, a self-consistent theory whose predictions would hold in a new class of experiments, or would the results reveal that the apparent challenges of quantum physics to the understanding in classical physics of the relationship between physical theory and physical reality were merely illusory? Answering this question in actual experiments could also, suggested Bell, lead to another, quite dramatic, result.
Author: K L Cook
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781948509114
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
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.
