How do reasons combine? How is it that several reasons taken together can have a combined weight which exceeds the weight of any one alone? I propose an answer in mereological terms: reasons combine by composing a further, complex reason of which they are parts. eir combined weight is the weight of their combination. I develop a mereological framework, and use this to investigate some structur...

Recent work of Gustav Bergmann develops an ontological framework within which an account of relations has been sketched out. The approach is a kind of new logical atomism which has some of the features of an Aristotelian hylomorphism (of sorts). It recognizes a number of categories and groups of a hylomorphic kind, chiefly “determinates” and “subdeterminates” — the latter only indirectly or imp...

Functional decomposition is an important goal in the life sciences, and central to mechanistic explanation explanatory reduction. A growing literature philosophy of science, however, has challenged decomposition-based notions explanation. ‘Holists’ posit that complex systems exhibit context-sensitivity, dynamic interaction, network dependence, these properties undermine decomposition. They then...

Conceptual Atomism (CA) is the view that psychological concepts are atoms (no internal structure, no necessary relations to other concepts). CA is a psychological/semantic theory. I show that CA has become mixed up with a separate, meta-semantic project that seeks to naturalize content, and that this Naturalized Conceptual Atomism has ended up in the self-defeating position of positing non-atom...

Within the framework of the theory of interacting classical and quantum gases it is shown that the atomistic constitution of gases can be understood as a consequence of (second) quantization of a continuum theory of gases. In this note this is explained in some detail for the theory of non-relativistic interacting Bose gases, which can be viewed as the second quantization of a continuum theory ...

Organic mathematics is an applied mathematics of philosophical atomism. The order of the chemical elements in the table of elements is the source of order for the logical operations of addition and subtraction of atomic numbers. The inverse square laws of physics are the source of organization of subatomic structures of chemical atoms (atomic and molecular structures). These facts are foundatio...