In the first section, ‘Morphology and Classification’, I give a brief account of the history of morphology and classification, examining the philosophical and theoretical basis of these disciplines. I criticise Darwin’s contribution, questioning whether the explanations he gives in The Origin of Species are valid. I favour the cladistic theory of classification, which rejects the need for evolu...

Some tools introduced by Linnebo to show that mathematical entities are thin objects can also be applied non-mathematical entities, which have been thought as well for a variety of reasons. In this paper, I discuss some difficulties and opportunities concerning the application abstraction interpretational modalities mereological sums. particular, on one hand prima facie attractive candidates ro...

Visual forms come in countless varieties, from the simplicity of a sphere, to the geometric complexity of a face, to the fractal complexity of a rugged coast. These varieties have been studied with mathematical tools such as topology, differential geometry and fractal geometry. They have also been examined, largely in the last three decades, in terms of mereology, the study of part-whole relati...

Mereology is a theory based on a binary predicate “being a part of.” Most philosophers believe that such a predicate must at least define a partial ordering: that is, it is reflexive (P1), antisymmetric (P2) and transitive (P3). In other words, three basic principles of mereology can thus be fixed. The theory axiomatized by these three basic principles is called ground mereology (GM). There are...

Achille Varzi ends his note [10] on my paper [6] by saying: “Parthood is transitive, φ-parthood—for many values of ‘φ’—is not.” Let me call this view ‘the (Simons/Casati/Varzi) predicate modifier account’ of non-transitive parthood relations [9, 2]. As summarized in this quotation, I agree with it here, and did agree with it in the paper Varzi criticizes. It is puzzling to me why he surrounds h...

The present article provides a mereological analysis of Euclid’s planar geometry as presented in the first two books of his Elements. As a standard of comparison, a brief survey of the basic concepts of planar geometry formulated in a set-theoretic framework is given in Section 2. Section 3.2, then, develops the theories of incidence and order (of points on a line) using a blend of mereology an...

The Basic Mereology framework of [8] is enriched by adding colimit construction from Category Theory. The new framework is then used to model component-based software architecture.

Sometimes mereologists have problems with counting. We often don’t want to count the parts of maximally connected objects as full-fledged objects themselves, and we don’t want to count discontinuous objects as parts of further, full-fledged objects. But whatever one takes “fullfledged object” to mean, the axioms and theorems of classical, extensional mereology commit us to the existence both of...

This predicate1 has played a central role in the debate on the special composition question and on related metaphysical issues concerning the mereological structure of objects. In this note we show that the characterization in (1) is nonetheless inadequate. We do so by constructing a mereological model M where everything qualifies as composed of atoms even though some elements in the domain are...