Definitions

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  • adjective philosophy, logic Of or pertaining to mereology, a collection of axiomatic first-order theories dealing with parts and their respective wholes.

Etymologies

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mereology +‎ -ical

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Examples

  • (This account is sometimes referred to as mereological nihilism, in contrast to the mereological universalism expressed by (P. 15) and the like; see van Inwagen 1990:

    Wild Dreams Of Reality, 3 2009

  • Intuitively, a set of m is what we would now call a mereological sum, consisting of one or more m, but not necessarily all of the m.

    Stanisław Leśniewski Simons, Peter 2007

  • The Democritean vision of elementary particles as miniature snooker balls, however, has been somewhat vitiated by quantum theory, and it is not merely the classical notion of a particle as a localisable entity which has been undermined, but the mereological notion that a composite system has a unique decomposition into elementary entities.

    Archive 2009-02-01 Gordon McCabe 2009

  • This clearly undermines the Democritean mereological concept of elementarity, in which a composite entity has a unique decomposition into a set of indivisible entities.

    Archive 2009-02-01 Gordon McCabe 2009

  • So these are the mereological questions which beset elementary particles, but even if we successfully elucidate the quantum concepts of parts and wholes, we are still left with the question, 'What is an elementary particle?'.

    Archive 2009-02-01 Gordon McCabe 2009

  • Lewis, who accepts the universality of mereological summation, does not deny that possible objects in this sense are as real as possible objects in his preferred sense.

    Possible Objects Yagisawa, Takashi 2009

  • It does not analyze the notion of a possible world in mereological terms but leaves it as largely primitive (Yagisawa 2002, 2009).

    Possible Objects Yagisawa, Takashi 2009

  • Since there are no mereological classes which are not their own elements, the question which led to the Russell paradox simply makes no sense in Leśniewski's systems.

    Lvov-Warsaw School Wole&324;ski, Jan 2009

  • They present elements of a sophisticated semantic theory, epistemology, consequentialist ethics, and theory of analogical argumentation, along with intriguing discussions of causality, space and time, and mereological ontology.

    Mohist Canons Fraser, Chris 2009

  • In particular, it assumes mereological Universalism, the view that for any objects, there is an object that has all of them as its fusion.

    The Problem of the Many Weatherson, Brian 2009

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