Overview
- First thorough attempt to investigate the relation and possible applications of an important area of ontology, metaphysics and logic, i.e. mereology and different scientific disciplines
- Offers a self-contained and accessible introduction to a relatively new subject in the metaphysics and the foundations of science while promoting an inter-disciplinary approach
- Presents a brief introduction to each section that serves as an overview of single applications of mereological theories to specific sciences
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Synthese Library (SYLI, volume 371)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (12 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Computer Sciences and Engineering
-
Front Matter
-
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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 discretemereotopology and its applications is developed and finally, the importance of mereology for the relatively new science of domain engineering is also discussed.
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Claudio Calosi is currently a post-doc at University of Urbino. He has been Visiting Research Scholar at University of Pittsburgh, University of California at Irvine and New York University. His main research interests are philosophy of science and analytic metaphysics and he has published extensively on both in journals such as Synthese, Foundations of Physics, Topoi to mention a few.
Pierluigi Graziani received his Ph.D from University of Rome La Sapienza and is currently a post-doc at University of Urbino. His works spans from mathematical logic, especially proof theory, to history and philosophy of mathematics. He has been editor of different volumes and published in different distinguished journals.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Mereology and the Sciences
Book Subtitle: Parts and Wholes in the Contemporary Scientific Context
Editors: Claudio Calosi, Pierluigi Graziani
Series Title: Synthese Library
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05356-1
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-05355-4Published: 23 June 2014
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-35793-5Published: 17 September 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-05356-1Published: 02 June 2014
Series ISSN: 0166-6991
Series E-ISSN: 2542-8292
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XX, 378
Number of Illustrations: 161 b/w illustrations
Topics: Epistemology, Mathematical Logic and Formal Languages, Mathematical Logic and Foundations