I argue that is intuitive and useful to think about composition in light of the familiar functionalist distinction between role and occupant. This involves factoring the standard notion of parthood into two related notions: being a parthood slot and occupying a parthood slot. One thing is part of another just in case it fills one of that thing’s parthood slots. This move opens room to rethink m...

Part One of my dissertation is about composite objects: things with proper parts, like plates, planets, plants and people. I begin chapter 1 by pointing out that if one were to judge by the way we normally speak about composite objects, one would suppose that we were all completely certain of a theory I call folk mereology. For instance, we seem to be completely convinced that whenever some thi...

According to the Weak Supplementation Principle (WSP)--a widely received principle of mereology--an object with a proper part, p, has another distinct proper part that doesn’t overlap p. 1 A guiding thought behind WSP is that there must be some mereological difference between a composite and any one of its proper parts and there would be no such difference if something were composed by a single...

"Lesniewski defined ontology, one of his three foundational systems, as 'a certain kind of modernized 'traditional logic' [On the foundations of mathematics (FM), p. 176]. In this respect it is worth bearing in mind that in the 1937-38 academic year Lesniewski taught a course called "Traditional 'formal logic' and traditional 'set theory' on the ground of ontology"; cf. Srzednicki and Stachniak...

Fall 2014 (Lecture notes version: Aug 4 th , 2014) 2 Preface Expressions like John and Mary or the water in my cup intuitively involve reference to collections of individuals or substances. The parthood relation between these collections and their components is not modeled in standard formal semantics of natural language (Montague 1974; Heim and Kratzer 1998), but it takes central stage in what...

New towns built in North Africa and the Middle East incorporate modern elements into their built environments unprecedented in the traditional city of the region. This thesis addresses the questions: Do these new built environments respond to the prevalent culture? What modern and traditional design qualities enable new towns to maintain cultural integrity? The new towns Sadat City, Egypt and Y...