Mereology

Edited by Meg Wallace (University of Kentucky)
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  1. In defense of disjointism.Martin A. Lipman - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):3007-3030.
    Disjointism is the view that co-located objects do not share any parts. A human-shaped statue is composed from a torso, head and limbs; the co-located lumpof clay is only composed from chunks of clay. This essay discusses the tenability of this relatively neglected view, focusing on two objections. The first objection is that disjointism implies co-located copies of microphysical particles. I argue that it doesn’t imply this and that there are more plausible disjointist views of tiny parts available. The second (...)
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  2. Concrete particulars: a metaphysics of spatiotemporal entities.Daniel Giberman - 2024 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    This book presents a novel metaphysics of concrete entities. The author uses the theory developed to address three major topics in the metaphysics of concreta: fundamentality, persistence over time, and phenomenal consciousness. The book provides a new theory of what "bundles" particular property instances, or tropes, into material property bearers. The theory is based on two new ideas. The first is that the primitive nature of one sui generis monadic property called markedness bears on the bundling of other properties' tropes. (...)
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  3. Advancing the Metascientific Program. First Dialogue.François Maurice & Martín Orensanz - 2024 - Mεtascience: Scientific General Discourse 3:68-100.
    What follows is a dialogue between Maurice and Orensanz, in which they will discuss some key topics stemming from Bunge’s oeuvre. The objective of this dialogue is to advance the metascientific program even further. The main points that will be discussed can be presented as a series of questions: Is it possible to prove that the external world exists? What is matter? Is the part-whole relation transitive? What is the difference between systems and assortments? Do fictional objects have a function (...)
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  4. Matter and Society. Response to Orensanz.Graham Harman - 2024 - Mεtascience: Scientific General Discourse 3:288-299.
    This article is a response to Martin Orensanz’s argument that object-oriented ontology ought to accept the existence of matter as both a sensual and a real object. That matter can exist as a sensual object is a point immediately granted, since “sensual object” is such a broad term that nothing could be excluded from this designation. Yet I argue that this is not the case with respect to real objects, which must exist independently of any other entity that might encounter (...)
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  5. From slot mereology to a mereology of slots.Cédric Tarbouriech, Laure Vieu, Adrien Barton & Jean-François Éthier - 2024 - Applied ontology 19 (2):181-230.
    In 2013, Bennett proposed a mereological theory in which the parthood relation is defined on the basis of two primitive relations: a is a part of b iff a fills a slot owned by b. However, this theory has issues counting how many parts an entity has. We explore the various counting problems and propose a new theory to solve them. Keeping the core idea of Bennett’s slots, this theory introduces mereological relations between slots. This theory enables us to solve (...)
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  6. The Mereology of Classes.Gabriel Uzquiano - 2024 - Cambridge University Press.
    This Element is a systematic study of the question of whether classes are composed of further parts. Mereology is the theory of the relation of part to whole, and we will ask how that relation applies to classes. One reason the issue has received attention in the literature is the hope that a clear picture of the mereology of classes may provide further insights into the foundations of set theory. We will consider two main perspectives on the mereology of classes (...)
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  7. From the History of Leśniewski’s Mereology.Andrzej Pietruszczak - 2024 - Studia Humana 13 (1):5-16.
    In this paper, we want to present the genesis of Stanisław Leśniewski’s mereology. Although ‘mereology’ comes from theword ‘part’, mereology arose as a theory of collective classes. That is why we present the differences between the concepts of being a distributive class and being a collective class. Next, we present Leśniewski’s original mereology from 1927, but with a modern approach. Leśniewski was inspired to create his concept of classes and their elements by Russell’s antinomy. To face it, Leśniewski had to (...)
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  8. Mereoloģija.L. Rotkale - 2024 - Nacionālā Enciklopēdija.
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  9. Monism and the Ontology of Logic.Samuel Elgin - forthcoming - Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
    Monism is the claim that only one object exists. While few contemporary philosophers endorse monism, it has an illustrious history – stretching back to Bradley, Spinoza and Parmenides. In this paper, I show that plausible assumptions about the higher-order logic of property identity entail that monism is true. Given the higher-order framework I operate in, this argument generalizes: it is also possible to establish that there is a single property, proposition, relation, etc. I then show why this form of monism (...)
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  10. Two Physicalist Arguments for Microphysical Manyism.Simon Thunder - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-22.
    I here defend microphysical manyism. According to microphysical manyism, each composite or higher-level object is a mere plurality of microphysical particles. After clarifying the commitments of the view, I offer two physicalist-friendly arguments in its favour. The first argument appeals to the Canberra Plan. Here I argue that microphysical particles acting in unison play the theoretical roles associated with composite objects - that they do everything that we think of composite objects as doing - and thus that composite objects are (...)
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  11. On the Necessity of Priority Monism.Stephen Harrop - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (2):685-703.
    Priority monism is the doctrine that there is only one basic object: the entire cosmos. Priority monists often take this to be a metaphysically necessary thesis. I explore the consequences of modalizing the priority monist thesis. I argue that, modulo some assumptions, the modalized thesis entails the necessary existence of the actual cosmos. I further argue that, if the modalized thesis is true, and the actual cosmos necessarily exists, then the only possible concrete objects are the actually existing ones.
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  12. On Mereology and Metricality.Zee R. Perry - 2024 - Philosophers' Imprint 23.
    This article motivates and develops a reductive account of the structure of certain physical quantities in terms of their mereology. That is, I argue that quantitative relations like "longer than" or "3.6-times the volume of" can be analyzed in terms of necessary constraints those quantities put on the mereological structure of their instances. The resulting account, I argue, is able to capture the intuition that these quantitative relations are intrinsic to the physical systems they’re called upon to describe and explain.
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  13. Totalismus a holismus.Radim Palouš - 1996 - Praha: Karolinum.
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  14. Dispositions, Mereology and Panpsychism: The Case for Phenomenal Properties.Simone Gozzano - 2023 - In Christopher J. Austin, Anna Marmodoro & Andrea Roselli (eds.), Powers, Parts, and Wholes. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 227 - 242.
    My interest in this chapter is to investigate this crossroad as applied to mental properties, considered powers. In particular, I scrutinize the possibility of taking the phenomenal property of feeling pain as a complex power or disposition. This possibility comes in handy in discussing panpsychism, the view that the ultimate elements of reality are phenomenal properties, which would ground physical properties as well.
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  15. The Many-Subjects Argument against Physicalism.Brian Cutter - forthcoming - In Geoffrey Lee & Adam Pautz (eds.), The Importance of Being Conscious. Oxford University Press.
    The gist of the many-subjects argument is that, given physicalism, it’s hard to avoid the absurd result that there are many conscious subjects in your vicinity with more-or-less the same experiences as you. The most promising ways of avoiding this result have a consequence almost as bad: that there are many things in your vicinity that are in a state only trivially different from being conscious, a state with similar normative significance. This paper clarifies and defends three versions of the (...)
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  16. Fazang’s mereology as a model for holism.Felipe Cuervo Restrepo - forthcoming - Philosophy East and West.
    Recently, much attention has been given to Buddhism as a precursor to contemporary holistic theories, and more specifically to the Huayan school’s radical holistic metaphysics (often given the metaphorical name of The Net of Indra), as well as to Huayan’s most elaborate theoretician, Fazang. Nevertheless, contemporary interpretations of Fazang have been weighted by either too strict an adherence to atomistic logic or by unfortunate translations. In this paper, I present new translations of the key passages of Fazang’s The Rafter Dialogue, (...)
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  17. Personal ontology: mystery and its consequences.Andrew Timothy Brenner - 2024 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    What are we? Are we, for example, souls, organisms, brains, or something else? In this book, Andrew Brenner argues that there are principled obstacles to our discovering the answer to this fundamental metaphysical question. The main competing accounts of personal ontology hold that we are either souls (or composites of soul and body), or we are composite physical objects of some sort, but, as Brenner shows, arguments for either of these options can be parodied and transformed into their opposites. Brenner (...)
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  18. Do Thoughts Have Parts? Peter Abelard: Yes! Alberic of Paris: No!Boaz Faraday Schuman - 2024 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 32:1-25.
    Spoken sentences have parts. Therefore they take time to speak. For instance, when you say, “Socrates is running”, you begin by uttering the subject term ("Socrates"), before carrying on to the predicate. But are the corresponding predications in thought also composite? And are such thoughts extended across time, like their spoken counterparts? Peter Abelard gave an affirmative response to both questions. Alberic of Paris denied the first and, as a corollary, denied the second. Here, I first set out Abelard’s account. (...)
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  19. Carving Up the Network of Powers.Aaron Cotnoir - 2023 - In Christopher J. Austin, Anna Marmodoro & Andrea Roselli (eds.), Powers, Parts and Wholes: Essays on the Mereology of Powers. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Do powers have parts? Mereological thinking is typically guided by two different metaphors: building versus carving. The building picture treats wholes as constructed from fundamental bits; the carving treats wholes as the result of carving some interconnected space. After considering some suggestions for how to view powers as built from other components, this chapter opts for the carving picture and suggests that a mereology of powers can be generated by carving the underlying space of an interconnected web of fundamental powers. (...)
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  20. What is priority monism? Reply to Kovacs.Damiano Costa - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Priority monism is the view that the cosmos is the basic concrete entity on which each of its parts depend. Kovacs has recently argued that none of the classical notions of dependence could be used to spell out priority monism. I argue that four notions of dependence – namely rigid existential dependence, generic existential dependence, explanatory dependence, and generalised explanatory dependence – can indeed be used to spell out priority monism, and specify the conditions under which this is possible.
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  21. Heraclitean Flux Metaphysics.Andrew Dennis Bassford - 2023 - Metaphysica: International Journal for Ontology and Metaphysics 24 (2):299-322.
    This essay offers an original interpretation and defense of the doctrine of flux, as it is presented in Plato’s Theaetetus. The methodology of the paper’s analysis is in the style of rational reconstruction, and it is highly analytic in scope, in the sense that I will focus on the text itself, and only on certain parts of it too, while ignoring the rest of Plato’s extensive corpus, and without worrying about whether, how, and to what extent the interpretation of the (...)
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  22. Mereology in Kal'm A New Reading of the Proof from Accidents for Creation.Ayman Shihadeh - 2021 - Kader 19 (1):347-376.
    The objective of this article is twofold. First, it investigates mereology in medieval Islamic theology, particularly the theologians’ claim that the whole is identical to its parts and accordingly that at least some attributes common to the parts must by extension be attributed of the whole. This claim was refuted by philosophers and, from the eleventh century onwards, an increasing number of theologians. Second, it offers a new interpretation of the standard theological proof from accidents for creation ex nihilo, to (...)
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  23. Open Problems in the Development of a Quantum Mereology.Federico Holik & Juan Pablo Jorge - 2023 - In Jonas R. B. Arenhart & Raoni W. Arroyo (eds.), Non-Reflexive Logics, Non-Individuals, and the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics: Essays in Honour of the Philosophy of Décio Krause. Springer Verlag. pp. 157-176.
    Mereology deals with the study of the relations between wholes and parts. In this work we will discuss different developments and open problems related to the formulation of a quantum mereology. In particular, we will discuss different advances in the development of formal systems aimed to describe the whole-parts relationship in the context of quantum theory.
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  24. Powers as Mereological Lawmakers.Michael Traynor - 2023 - In Christopher J. Austin, Anna Marmodoro & Andrea Roselli (eds.), Powers, Parts and Wholes: Essays on the Mereology of Powers. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 83-95.
    This chapter explores a potential analogy between mereological principles and laws of nature. Against a backdrop of what Marmodoro has termed ‘power structuralism’ (and a rejection of a Humean worldview), the connection between parthood and modality may be richer than has hitherto been considered. Mereological principles delineate possibilities for parts and wholes, and putting powers at the centre of a discussion about parthood can furnish a novel conception of mereological laws, much as dispositionalism has done so for natural laws; namely, (...)
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  25. The Empty World as the Null Conjunction of States of Affairs.Rafael De Clercq - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:0-17.
    If possible worlds are conjunctions of states of affairs, as in David Armstrong’s combinatorial theory, then is the empty world to be thought of as the null conjunction of states of affairs? The proposal seems plausible, and has received support from David Efird, Tom Stoneham, and Armstrong himself. However, in this paper, it is argued that the proposal faces a trilemma: either it leads to the absurd conclusion that the actual world is empty; or it reduces to a familiar representation (...)
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  26. Fragments, plinths and shattered bricks: Deleuze and atomism.Yannis Chatzantonis - 2023 - la Deleuziana 1 (15):39-45.
    There are two links that stand in the foreground of Deleuze’s treatment of Epicurus and Lucretius: the themes of immanent naturalism and of the externality of ontological relations. However, the links are problematised in Difference and Repetition, which presents an important critique of the concept of the atom. I will argue that this critique reveals the limits of the intellectual affinity between ancient atomism and Deleuzian metaphysics; in particular, that Deleuze’s notions of relationality and spatium respond to problems raised by (...)
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  27. Intuitionistic Mereology II: Overlap and Disjointness.Paolo Maffezioli & Achille C. Varzi - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (4):1197-1233.
    This paper extends the axiomatic treatment of intuitionistic mereology introduced in Maffezioli and Varzi (_Synthese, 198_(S18), 4277–4302 2021 ) by examining the behavior of constructive notions of overlap and disjointness. We consider both (i) various ways of defining such notions in terms of other intuitionistic mereological primitives, and (ii) the possibility of treating them as mereological primitives of their own.
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  28. Zur Philosophie und Psychlogie der Ganzheit.Felix Krueger - 1953 - Berlin,: Springer.
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  29. El todo y las partes.Florencio González Asenjo - 1962 - Madrid,: Editorial Martínez de urguía.
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  30. Problema t︠s︡elostnosti v filosofii i biologii.Viktor Grigoʹevich Afanasʹev - 1964
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  31. Dialektika chasti i t︠s︡elogo.G. A. I︠U︡gaĭ - 1965 - Alma-Ata: Nauka.
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  32. Edinichno i obshto.Ilii︠a︡ N. Tasev - 1966
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  33. Totalité et infini.Emmanuel Lévinas - 1971 - La Haye,: M. Nijhoff.
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  34. Struktur und Existenz.Herbert Christof Günzl - 1968 - (Linz,: Trauner in Kommission.
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  35. Appendix 3 and the Solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness.Jacob Parr - manuscript
    The author , after Bergson , provides a formal deduction which defends Bergson ’s claim that “ the character of movements which are externally identical are internally different “ . The author is responding to Diana Coole and Samantha Frost ’s “ Introducing the New Materialisms ” , wherein neither Coole nor Frost showed a knowledge of Bergson or his existence whatsoever despite seemingly having to have read Deleuze and Deleuze ’s contemporaries … -/- The author also presents a novel (...)
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  36. Lewis on Mereology and Set Theory.John P. Burgess - 2015 - In Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A companion to David Lewis. Chichester, West Sussex ;: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 459–469.
    David Lewis in the short monograph Parts of Classes (PC) undertakes a fundamental re‐examination of the relationship between mereology, the general theory of parts, and set theory, the general theory of collections. Given Lewis's theses, to be an element of a set or member of class is just to have a singleton that is a part thereof. Lewis in PC adds a claim of kind of ontological innocence, comparable to that of first‐order logic, for mereology. The only substantive assumption of (...)
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  37. Spinoza's Mereology.Tad M. Schmaltz - 2021 - In Yitzhak Y. Melamed (ed.), A Companion to Spinoza. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. pp. 135–143.
    Spinoza seems to argue both that “God or Nature” is mereologically simple, and that this being is mereologically complex insofar as it is composed of parts. This chapter proposes on Spinoza's behalf a resolution of this antinomy. This resolution focuses on Spinoza's mereology of the material world. It offers an alternative interpretation according to which Spinoza adheres both to the indivisibility of extended substance and to the reality of the finite modal parts that compose an infinite modal whole. In the (...)
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  38. Review of Cotnoir, A.J. and Varzi, A.C. Mereology[REVIEW]Daniel Nolan - 2023 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
    Review of Cotnoir and Varzi's _Mereology_.
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  39. (1 other version)Powers, Parts and Wholes: Essays on the Mereology of Powers.Christopher J. Austin, Anna Marmodoro & Andrea Roselli (eds.) - 2023 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    This volume offers a fresh exploration of the parts-whole relations within a power and among powers. While the metaphysics of powers has been extensively examined in the literature, powers have yet to be studied from the perspective of their mereology. Powers are often assumed to be atomic; and yet what they can do--and what can happen to them--is complex. But if powers are simple, how can they have complex manifestations? Can powers have parts? According to which rules of composition do (...)
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  40. (1 other version)Three Logico-Ontological Notions and Mereology.Uwe Meixner - 2013 - In Christer Svennerlind, Almäng Jan & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Johanssonian Investigations: Essays in Honour of Ingvar Johansson on His Seventieth Birthday. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. pp. 439-447.
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  41. Vzaimoopredelennostʹ v bytii i poznanii.A. A. Tolkachev - 1985 - Minsk: "Nauka i tekhnika". Edited by L. V. Uvarov & A. K. Maneev.
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  42. Totalité et formalisme: esquisse d'une analyse morphomorphologique.Lokadi Longandjo - 1987 - Ottignies [Belgium]: Noraf.
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  43. Zheng ti di zhe xue: zu zhi di qi yuan, sheng zhang he yan hua.Guantao Jin - 1987 - Chengdu: Sichuan sheng xin hua shu dian fa xing.
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  44. Boolean Mereology.Xinhe Wu - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (3):731-766.
    Most ordinary objects - cats, humans, mountains, ships, tables, etc. - have indeterminate mereological boundaries. If the theory of mereology is meant to include ordinary objects at all, we need it to have some space for mereological indeterminacy. In this paper, we present a novel degree-theoretic semantics - Boolean semantics - and argue that it is the best degree-theoretic semantics for modeling mereological indeterminacy, for three main reasons: (a) it allows for incomparable degrees of parthood, (b) it enforces classical logic, (...)
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  45. Problema t︠s︡elostnosti i sistemnyĭ podkhod.Igorʹ Viktorovich Blauberg - 1997 - Moskva: Editorial URSS.
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  46. Erkennendes Leben: ganzheitsphilosophische Gespräche.Woldemar Oskar Döring - 2000 - Münster: Lit.
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  47. Zong ti lun =.Xiangyang Gan - 2002 - Changsha Shi: Hunan ren min chu ban she.
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  48. When do parts form wholes? Integrated information as the restriction on mereological composition.Kelvin J. McQueen & Naotsugu Tsuchiya - forthcoming - Neuroscience of Consciousness.
    Under what conditions are material objects, such as particles, parts of a whole object? This is the composition question and is a longstanding open question in philosophy. Existing attempts to specify a non-trivial restriction on composition tend to be vague and face serious counterexamples. Consequently, two extreme answers have become mainstream: composition (the forming of a whole by its parts) happens under no or all conditions. In this paper, we provide a self-contained introduction to the integrated information theory of consciousness (...)
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  49. Filosofii︠a︡ totalʹnosti.I︠E︡vhen Akymovych - 2012 - Odesa: Pres-kur'i︠e︡r.
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  50. Somewhere Together: Location, Parsimony and Multilocation.Roberto Loss - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (2):675-691.
    Most of the theories of location on the market appear to be ideologically parsimonious at least in the sense that they take as primitive just one locative notion and define all the other locative notions in terms of it. Recently, however, the possibility of some exotic metaphysical scenarios involving gunky mixtures and extended simple regions of space has been argued to pose a significant threat to parsimonious theories of locations. The aim of this paper is to show that a theory (...)
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