Parts And Wholes

Author : Verity Harte
Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN 13 : 9780199278442
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.4X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Plato on Parts and Wholes written by Verity Harte and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2005 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Friederike Moltmann
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0195344650
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Parts and Wholes in Semantics written by Friederike Moltmann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-08-14 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a unified account of expressions involving the notions of "part" and "whole " in which principles of the individuation of part structures play a central role. Moltmann presents a range of new empirical generalizations with data from English and a variety of other languages involving plurals, mass nouns, adnominal and adverbial modifiers such as as a whole, together, and alone, nominal and adverbial quanitfiers ranging over parts, and expressions of completion such as completely and partly. She develops a new theory of part structures which differs from traditional mereological theories in that the notion of an integrated whole plays a central role and in that the part structure of an entity is allowed to vary across different situations, perspectives, and dimensions.

Author : Claudio Calosi
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319053566
Total Pages : 389 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mereology and the Sciences written by Claudio Calosi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 13 : 100909209X
Total Pages : 139 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Parts and Wholes written by Meg Wallace and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-29 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 13 : 0198236751
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Plato on Parts and Wholes written by Verity Harte and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2002-09-19 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 13 : 019509574X
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Parts and Wholes in Semantics written by Friederike Moltmann and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 1997-08-14 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 13 : 1000931110
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Powers, Parts and Wholes written by Christopher J. Austin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-25 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 13 : 1134926499
Total Pages : 163 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Conceptualizing Society written by Adam Kuper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-03-11 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : John Chapman
Publisher : Oxbow Books Limited
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Parts and Wholes written by John Chapman and published by Oxbow Books Limited. This book was released on 2007 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a highly original work that attempts to take fragmentation studies further towards integrating archaeology, social anthropology and material culture, and concerns the relationship between whole objects and broken ones. The authors construct a new fragmentation premise and examine its implications for the Balkans in the Neolithic, using case studies taken from the Balkans and Greece. Key issues covered include a biographical method of considering objects and their relation to the creation of personhood; methodological issues of site formation; a questioning of the assumption that excavated data is a more or less accurate reflection of the operation of past social practices; and a discussion of what happened to pieces missing from an assemblage. It concludes by seeking to put Balkan prehistory back together again by looking at variations in social practices and the construction of personhood at different socio-spatial levels.

Author : Stuart J. Murphy
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0064467015
Total Pages : 44 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Give Me Half! written by Stuart J. Murphy and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1996-03-27 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Splitting things in half may seem like an easy thing to do, but when two siblings and a pizza are involved, things can get messy. Children learn about fractions at school but fractions are also an important part of everyday life outside the classroom.In this riotous book, Stuart J. Murphy and G. Brian Karas introduce the simplest of fractions, 1/2.