Handbook of mereology

This Handbook of Mereology is the first comprehensive reference work for research on part-whole relations – or better, a substantive part of such a project. The guiding idea, developed by Burkhardt and Seibt more than a decade ago, was to offer an inclusive presentation of contemporary research on part-whole relations that would draw out systematic, historical, and interdisciplinary trajectories, show the subject’s fecundity, and inspire future explorations. In particular, the editors wants to impress that mereology is much more than the study of axiomatized reasoning systems. The relationship between part and whole is one of the most basic schemata of cognitive organization; it is not only a phenomenon at the level of language processing and propositional thought, but also at the level of sensory input processing, especially visual and auditory. In all research disciplines, part-whole relations organize all three core components of research: data domains, methods, and theories. In short, part-whole relations play a fundamental role in how we perceive and interact with nature, how we speak and think about the world and ourselves, as societies and as individuals. For this reason the study of part-whole relations, both within and across domains, begins long before the meta-mathematically motivated inquiries of logicians at the beginning of the 20th century, and goes far beyond it. The editors trust that the variety of contributions collected here will bring into view the fundamental significance of mereology for philosophy – not only for logic or ontology, but also for philosophy of biology, chemistry, and quantum physics, for a philosophy of nature that can accommodate chaos and emergence, for philosophy of art, for ethics, and for philosophy of cognition. The Handbook is not only addressed to philosophers, however. The included domain-specific investigations of part-whole relations can provide useful heuristics for researchers in various scientific disciplines (e. g., linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, biology, or chemistry). There are of course a good many entries exploring and explaining the meta-mathematical interest of formal mereology. But the Handbook also features several contributions that convey the richness and complexity of linguistic encodings of part-whole relations, as well as where and how our common sense reasoning departs from the classical formalizations of part-whole relationships that influence much of the contemporary ontological discussion. A considerable portion of the historical dimension of mereology could be documented, especially with respect to the medieval period. Finally, the editors also would like to stress that many entries in the Handbook not only report the state of the art but present new original research. ___________