Data: 2 e 3 de Novembro de 2023

Local: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa - Sala B112B

Organização: CFUL

Mais informações: Neste site

Mereology (from the Greek word μέρος, for “part” or “portion”) is the discipline that studies part-whole relations and the principles of composition and decomposition governing all objects, whether material or abstract. Mereological questions have been at the centre of philosophical dispute since antiquity, and in contemporary Philosophy we witness a continued interest in them both in the analytic tradition, mainly stemming from the development of classical extensional mereology by Leśniewski and Leonard and Goodman in the early 20th century, and in the phenomenological tradition, stemming from the work of Husserl and his conception of mereology as part of a formal ontology, a general theory of objects as they belong to the category of objects.

In this workshop we aim to bring together these two traditions and discuss questions that are actively being discussed in both of them. In the analytic tradition, the recent publication of Mereology (2021) by A. J. Cotnoir and A. C. Varzi both witnesses the lively state of the debate and illustrates the range of questions that can be explored. These include the following: if the parthood relation is antisymmetric; if whenever an object has a proper part, it must have a further proper part disjoint from it; if two distinct entities can have the same parts; if the operation of composition has priority over the relations of parthood and overlap; if there is a universe (an object having everything as part); if composition ever occurs, always occurs or if it should be restricted in some way, and if so, when it should be restricted; and if a null individual (an object that is part of everything) should be accepted.