The three young philosophers Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons and Barry Smith have become well-known in the last few years especially in German-speaking analytical philosophy and phenomenology circles. This is on the one hand as a result of their historical and systematic philosophical work; but it is also because of the provocative way in which they represent their philosophy. Because they often appear in threes, they have become known as the "gang of three" or "three musketeers" or even – (...) and this in an admiring sense – "mafiosi" (Rescher). They are known primarily for the small workshops they have been organizing in uncomplicated Anglo-Saxon manner all over Europe. Their goal has been to show that analytic philosophy as it has been pursued up to now is in need of reform and also that the history of scientific philosophizing is not identical to the history of Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy. Above all, they have tried to make more well known the Austrian tradition of scientific philosophy, and they can be given credit for having done much to promote the current interest in this tradition, which means: the history of Austrian philosophy of the 19th and early 20th centuries and its historical context in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (shrink)

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

A letter to The Times of London, May 9, 1992 protesting the Cambridge University proposal to award an honorary degree to M. Jacques Derrida.

Wright’s “adaptive landscape” has been influential in evolutionary thinking but controversial, especially because the landscape that organisms encounter is altered by the evolutionary process itsel...

In this chapter we outline the need to develop ethical frameworks to guide research on the role of animal-orientated health, therapeutic, and service interventions. We discuss findings from our research on uses of animals in therapeutic settings and benefits of human–canine interactions for human health. These stories from the field reveal that current ethics review processes do not recognise the animal as an equal partner in the potential reciprocal benefits and risks of therapeutic human–animal relationships. We explore how these review (...) processes frame research on the relationships between humans and non-human animals and use the ethical review system of Aotearoa/New Zealand as an example. We propose an ethical framework that goes beyond animal welfare legislation and recognises a range of non-human animal capacities. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

The reproducibility movement in psychology has resulted in numerous highly publicized instances of replication failures. The goal of the present work was to investigate people’s reactions to a psychology replication failure vs. success, and to test whether a failure elicits harsher reactions when the researcher is a woman vs. a man. We examined these questions in a pre-registered experiment with a working adult sample, a conceptual replication of that experiment with a student sample, and an analysis of data compiled and (...) posted by a psychology researcher on their public weblog with the stated goal to improve research replicability by rank-ordering psychology researchers by their “estimated false discovery risk.” Participants in the experiments were randomly assigned to read a news article describing a successful vs. failed replication attempt of original work from a male vs. female psychological scientist, and then completed measures of researcher competence, likability, integrity, perceptions of the research, and behavioral intentions for future interactions with the researcher. In both working adult and student samples, analyses consistently yielded large main effects of replication outcome, but no interaction with researcher gender. Likewise, the coding of weblog data posted in July 2021 indicated that 66.3% of the researchers scrutinized were men and 33.8% were women, and their rank-ordering was not correlated with researcher gender. The lack of support for our pre-registered gender-replication hypothesis is, at first glance, encouraging for women researchers’ careers; however, the substantial effect sizes we observed for replication outcome underscore the tremendous negative impact the reproducibility movement can have on psychologists’ careers. We discuss the implications of such negative perceptions and the possible downstream consequences for women in the field that are essential for future study. (shrink)

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

Mercier and Sperber (M&S) claim that the main function of reasoning is to generate support for conclusions derived unconsciously. An alternative account holds that reasoning has a deliberative function even though it is an internalized analogue of public discourse. We sketch this alternative and compare it with M&S's in the light of the empirical phenomena they discuss.

Mood profiling has a long history in the field of sport and exercise. Several novel mood profile clusters were identified and described in the literature recently (Parsons-Smith, Terry, & Machin, 2017). In the present study, we investigated whether the same clusters were evident in an Italian language, sport and exercise context. The Italian Mood Scale (ITAMS; Quartiroli, Terry, & Fogarty, 2017) was administered to 950 Italian-speaking sport participants (659 females, 284 males, 7 unspecified; age range = 16–63 yr., M (...) = 25.03, SD = 7.62) and seeded k-means clustering methodology applied to the responses. Six distinct mood profiles were identified, termed the iceberg, inverse iceberg, inverse Everest, shark fin, surface, and submerged profiles, which closely resembled those reported among English-speaking participants (Parsons-Smith et al., 2017). Significant differences were found in the distribution of specific mood profiles across gender and age groups. Findings supported the cross-cultural generalizability of the six mood profiles and offer new research avenues into their antecedents, correlates and behavioral consequences in Italian-language contexts. (shrink)

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This review article offers a discussion of some aspects of the historical and conceptual context when the term “ontology” (Lat. ontologia) was first introduced in the scholarly circles of the early 17th century. In particular, Barry Smith's (2022) analysis of the birth of ontology provides a springboard for some further remarks on the author of the work with the first known occurrence of the word “ontologia”, Jacob Lorhard, including an analysis of his relationship with earlier philosophers Petrus Ramus and (...) Clemens Timpler. (shrink)

In a two-tiered, or Dual Oughts, moral theory, the objective account of right and wrong is supplemented by decision guides designed to enable an agent, uncertain about the circumstances or consequences of her possible actions, to indirectly apply the objective theory by using an appropriate decision guide. But are the decision guides counsels of morality or counsels of rationality? Peter Graham argues they are counsels of pragmatic rationality. This paper shows Graham’s view is unsuccessful, and argues, based on the (...) approach recently developed in [Author] that decision guides must be seen as moral principles. An explanation is provided for why we may be tempted to interpret decision guides as principles of rationality. (shrink)

odel’s Theorems (CUP, heavily corrected fourth printing 2009: henceforth IGT ). Surely that’s more than enough to be going on with? Ah, but there’s the snag. It is more than enough. In the writing, as is the way with these things, the book grew far beyond the scope of the lecture notes from which it started. And while I hope the result is still pretty accessible to someone prepared to put in the time and effort, there is – to be (...) frank – a lot more in the book than is really needed by philosophers meeting the incompleteness theorems for the first time, or indeed by mathematicians wanting a brisk introduction. You might reasonably want to get your heads around only those technical basics which are actually necessary for understanding how the theorems are proved and for appreciating philosophical discussions about incompleteness. So you need a cut-down version of the book – an introduction to the Introduction! Well, isn’t that what lectures are for? Indeed. But there’s another snag. I haven’t got many lectures to play with. So either (A) I crack on at a very fast pace (hard-core mathmo style), cover those basics, but perhaps leave too many people puzzled and alarmed. Or (B) I do relaxed talk’n’chalk, highlighting the really Big Ideas, making sure everyone is grasping them as we go along, but inevitably omit important stuff and leave quite a gap between what happens in the lectures and what happens in the book. What to do? I’m going for plan (B). But then I ought to do something to fill that gap between lectures and book. Hence these notes. The idea, then, is to give relaxed lectures, highlighting Big Ideas, not worrying too much about depth or fine-detail (nor even about getting through all of the day’s intended menu of topics). These notes then expand things just enough, and give pointers to relevant chunks of IGT. Though I hope these notes will be to a fair extent be stand-alone, and tell a brief but coherent story read by themselves: so occasionally I’ll copy a paragraph or two from the book, rather than just refer to them.. (shrink)

In each of Parts 1A, IB and II of the Philosophy Tripos, there is an Essay paper in which you are asked to write for three hours on a single topic. In these notes I offer some suggestions about how to tackle this paper, and try to answer some Frequently Asked Questions. The notes are based (in the second half, very closely indeed) on notes written by Jane Heal -- I'm very grateful to her for allowing me to snaffle some (...) of her best suggestions, though she is not responsible for the final result. Do note, though, that the result is still just one view ... Consult other supervisors/directors of studies for additional advice. (shrink)

We’ve now proved our key version of the First Theorem, Theorem 42. If T is the right kind of ω-consistent theory including enough arithmetic, then there will be an arithmetic sentence GT such that T ￿ GT and T ￿ ¬GT. Moreover, GT is constructed so that it is true if and only if unprovable-in T (so it is true). Now recall that, for a p.r. axiomatized theory T , Prf T(m, n) is the relation which holds just if m (...) is the super g.n. of a sequence of wffs that is a T proof of a sentence with g.n. n. This relation is p.r. decidable (see §25.4). Assuming T extends Q, it can capture any p.r. decidable relation, including Prf T (§22). So we can define.. (shrink)

Unlike his other major typescripts, the Big Typescript is divided into titled chapters, themselves divided into titled sections. But within a section we still get a collection of remarks typically without connecting tissue and lacking any transparently significant ordering or helpful signposting. So we still encounter the usual difficulties in trying to think our way through into what Wittgenstein might be wanting to say. Some enthusiasts like to try to persuade us that the aphoristic style is really of the essence. (...) But I’ve always wondered how true that is. So I here propose an experiment. Let’s take §108 of the ‘Big Typescript’ (the first of the sections in the part of the book titled ‘The Foundations of Mathematics’). There are four and a bit pages of remarks. I’m going to try to render them into rather more conventional prose. In the section that follows, then, I have embedded almost every sentence Wittgenstein wrote in his §108 – or rather, of course, I’ve embedded almost every sentence from the well-regarded translation. I have, however, often changed the order in which remarks appear, omitted some ‘and’s and ‘but’s and the like, changed some punctuation, demoted some passages to footnotes, but not – I hope – in any way that radically changes the significance of any remark, or distorts what is going on. And I’ve added a lot of signposting. I’ll comment, necessarily very briefly, on the results of the exercise starting in §3 below. So here we go . . (shrink)

I am interested in the philosophical prospects of what is called ‘predicativism given the natural numbers’. And today, in particular, I want to critically discuss one argument that has been offered to suggest that this kind of predicativism can’t have a stable philosophical motivation. Actually you don’t really need to know about predicativism to find some stand-alone interest in the theme I will be discussing. But still, it’s worth putting things into context. So I’m going to start by spending a (...) bit of time introducing you to the background. (shrink)

The first main topic of this paper is a weak second-order theory that sits between firstorder Peano Arithmetic PA1 and axiomatized second-order Peano Arithmetic PA2 – namely, that much-investigated theory known in the trade as ACA0. What I’m going to argue is that ACA0, in its standard form, lacks a cogent conceptual motivation. Now, that claim – when the wraps are off – will turn out to be rather less exciting than it sounds. It isn’t that all the work that (...) has been done on ACA0 has been hopelessly misplaced: that would be a quite absurd suggestion. The mistake, if that’s what it is, has been a relatively small one. Still, we really ought to try to put things into conceptual good order here. That’s part of what philosophers are for. Here’s the structure of my main claim. On the one hand, interesting work on ACA0 actually only uses part of the strength of the theory: or as we might put it, the interesting work is actually carried on in a cut-down theory I’ll call ACA!. This theory, I’ll be claiming, does have a good conceptual motivation – it is in fact the theory that the putative conceptual grounding for ACA0 actually underpins. On the other hand, I’ll be arguing that original-strength ACA0 inductively inflates. I mean, to put it more carefully, that anyone who accepts ACA0 as a cogent theory can have no reason not to accept a certain significantly stronger theory, with a stronger induction principle. This stronger theory is standardly known as plain ACA. So, my claim comes to this: you can either go for the cut-down theory ACA!; or you can go for the much richer theory ACA. What you can’t do is – I mean, what you can’t have a stable conceptual motivation for doing – is to rest content with the intermediate strength ACA0 in its standard presentation. Yet in much of the literature, in particular in Simpson’s encyclopedic book Subsystems of Second-Order Arithmetic (1991), neither ACA! nor full ACA gets so much as a mention, and the conceptually unstable theory ACA0 gets all the glory. Why is my claim at all interesting? For at least two reasons.. (shrink)

Why these notes? After all, I’ve written An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems. Surely that’s more than enough to be going on with? Ah, but there’s the snag. It is more than enough. In the writing, as is the way with these things, the book grew far beyond the scope of the lecture notes from which it started. And while I hope the result is still pretty accessible to someone prepared to put in the time and effort, there’s a lot more (...) in the book than is really needed by philosophers meeting the incompleteness theorems for the first time. After all, you might want to get your heads around only those technical basics which are actually needed for understanding philosophical discussions about incompleteness. So you need a cut-down version of the book – an introduction to the Introduction! Well, isn’t that what lectures are for? Indeed. But there’s another snag. I haven’t got many lectures to play with. So either I crack on at quite a fast pace, cover those basics, but perhaps leave too many people puzzled and alarmed. Or I do relaxed talk’n’chalk, highlighting the really Big Ideas, making sure everyone is grasping them as we go along, but inevitably omit important stuff and leave quite a gap between what happens in the lectures and what happens in the book. What to do? I’m going for plan. But then I still need to do something to fill that gap between lectures and book. Hence these notes. The idea, then, is to give relaxed lectures, highlighting Big Ideas, not worrying too much about depth or fine-detail. Then after the lecture, I’ll write up notes that expand things just enough, and then give pointers to relevant chunks of IGT. The idea, however, is for the notes to be more or less stand-alone, and to tell a brief but coherent story read by themselves. So occasionally I’ll copy a paragraph or two from the book, rather than just refer to them. Warning: just occasionally in these notes, I’ll no doubt apply that good maxim ‘Where it doesn’t itch, don’t scratch’. (shrink)

In Living with Uncertainty Michael Zimmerman argues against the Objective view and for the Prospective view of morality. He claims that the conscientious agent would always choose the act that maximizes projected value, and that this is incompatible with Objectivism. Peter Graham defends Objectivism against Zimmerman’s attack. He argues that a conscientious agent must balance fulfilling obligations against avoiding the worst wrong-doings, and that this stance is consistent with Objectivism and with the agent’s choosing an act she believes to (...) be Objectively wrong. In Ignorance and Moral Obligation Zimmerman argues that Graham’s “Objectivism” is only terminologically distinct from his Prospectivism. I argue that Graham faces a dilemma: if his theory delivers different prescriptions from Zimmerman’s, those prescriptions are implausible. On the other hand, if his theory avoids such implausible recommendations, it now generates exactly the same recommendations as Zimmerman’s theory, and so does not constitute a serious challenge to it. (shrink)

Introduction, W G Runciman Social Evolution in Primates: The Role of Ecological Factors and Male Behaviour, Carel P van Schaik Determinants of Group Size in Primates: A General Model, R I M Dunbar Function and Intention in the Calls of Non-Human Primates, Dorothy L Cheney & Robert M Seyfarth Why Culture is Common, but Cultural Evolution is Rare, Robert Boyd & Peter J Richerson An Evolutionary and Chronological Framework for Human Social Behaviour, Robert A Foley Friendship and the Banker?s (...) Paradox: Other Pathways to the Evolution of Adaptations for Altruism, John Tooby & Leda Cosmides The Early Prehistory of Human Social Behaviour: Issues of Archaeological Inference and Cognitive Evolution, Steven Mithen The Emergence of Biologically Modern Populations in Europe: A Social and Cognitive ?Revolution??, Paul Mellars Responses to Environmental Novelty: Changes in Men?s Marriage Strategies in a Rural Kenyan Community, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder Genetic Language Impairment: Unruly Grammars, M Gopnik, J Dalalakis, S E Fukuda, S Fukuda & E Kehayia The Emergence of Cultures among Wild Chimpanzees, Christophe Boesch Terrestriality, Bipedalism and the Origin of Language, Leslie C Aiello Conclusions, John Maynard Smith. (shrink)

This is the seventh volume in a series of Profiles, a scaled-down version of Schilpp’s celebrated Library of Living Philosophers. Roderick Chisholm contributes an extended ‘Self-Profile’, there are five essays critically examining aspects of his work, and a useful set of replies by Chisholm: an exhaustive bibliography completes the volume.

This article is part of a For-Discussion-Section of Methods of Information in Medicine about the paper "Biomedical Informatics: We Are What We Publish", written by Peter L. Elkin, Steven H. Brown, and Graham Wright. It is introduced by an editorial. This article contains the combined commentaries invited to independently comment on the Elkin et al. paper. In subsequent issues the discussion can continue through letters to the editor.

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next (...) twenty or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

Essays that put noted political thinkers of the past—including Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Wollstonecraft, Marx, and Confucius—in dialogue with current environmental political theory. Contemporary environmental political theory considers the implications of the environmental crisis for such political concepts as rights, citizenship, justice, democracy, the state, race, class, and gender. As the field has matured, scholars have begun to explore connections between Green Theory and such canonical political thinkers as Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, and Marx. The essays in this volume put important figures (...) from the political theory canon in dialogue with current environmental political theory. It is the first comprehensive volume to bring the insights of Green Theory to bear in reinterpreting these canonical theorists. Individual essays cover such classical figures in Western thought as Aristotle, Hume, Rousseau, Mill, and Burke, but they also depart from the traditional canon to consider Mary Wollstonecraft, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and Confucius. Engaging and accessible, the essays also offer original and innovative interpretations that often challenge standard readings of these thinkers. In examining and explicating how these great thinkers of the past viewed the natural world and our relationship with nature, the essays also illuminate our current environmental predicament. Essays on Plato • Aristotle • Niccolò Machiavelli • Thomas Hobbes • John Locke • David Hume • Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Edmund Burke • Mary Wollstonecraft • John Stuart Mill • Karl Marx • W. E. B. Du Bois • Martin Heidegger • Hannah Arendt • Confucius Contributors Sheryl D. Breen, W. Scott Cameron, Peter F. Cannavò, Joel Jay Kassiola, Joseph H. Lane Jr. Timothy W. Luke, John M. Meyer, Özgüç Orhan, Barbara K. Seeber, Francisco Seijo, Kimberly K. Smith, Piers H. G. Stephens, Zev Trachtenberg, Andrew Valls, Harlan Wilson. (shrink)

This volume brings together a range of influential essays by distinguished philosophers and political theorists on the issue of global justice. Global justice concerns the search for ethical norms that should govern interactions between people, states, corporations and other agents acting in the global arena, as well as the design of social institutions that link them together. The volume includes articles that engage with major theoretical questions such as the applicability of the ideals of social and economic equality to the (...) global sphere, the degree of justified partiality to compatriots, and the nature and extent of the responsibilities of the affluent to address global poverty and other hardships abroad. It also features articles that bring the theoretical insights of global justice thinkers to bear on matters of practical concern to contemporary societies, such policies associated with immigration, international trade, and climate change. -/- Contents: Introduction; Part I Standards of Global Justice: (i) Assistance-Based Responsibilities to the Global Poor: Famine, affluence and mortality, Peter Singer; We don't owe them a thing! A tough-minded but soft-hearted view of aid to the faraway needy, Jan Narveson; Does distance matter morally to the duty to rescue? Frances Myrna Kamm. (ii) Contribution-Based Responsibilities to the Global Poor: 'Assisting' the global poor, Thomas Pogge; Should we stop thinking about poverty in terms of helping the poor?, Alan Patten; Poverty and the moral significance of contribution, Gerhard Øverland. (iii)Cosmopolitans, Global Egalitarians, and its Critics: The one and the many faces of cosmopolitanism, Catherine Lu; Cosmopolitan justice and equalizing opportunities, Simon Caney; The problem of global justice, Thomas Nagel; Against global egalitarianism, David Miller; Egalitarian challenges to global egalitarianism: a critique, Christian Barry and Laura Valentini. Part II Pressing Global Socioeconomic Issues: (i) Governing the Flow of People: Immigration and freedom of association, Christopher Wellman; Democratic theory and border coercion: no right to unilaterally control your own borders, Arash Abizadeh; Justice in migration: a closed borders utopia?, Lea Ypi. (ii) Climate Change: Global environment and international inequality, Henry Shue; Valuing policies in response to climate change: some ethical issues, John Broome; Saved by disaster? Abrupt climate change, political inertia, and the possibility of an intergenerational arms race, Stephen M. Gardiner; Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change, Elinor Ostrom. (iii) International Trade: Responsibility and global labor justice, Iris Marion Young; Property rights and the resource curse, Leif Wenar; Fairness in trade I: obligations arising from trading and the pauper-labor argument, Mathias Risse; Name index. -/- See: www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=483&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_i d=9958&edition_id=13385. (shrink)

I examine a dispute about the nature of practical reason, and in particular moral reason, generated by Thomas Nagel's proposal of an internalist rationalism which claims we can explain motivation in terms of reason and belief alone. In opposition, Humeans contend that such explanations must also appeal to further desires. Arguments on either side of this debate typically assume that a rationalist or Humean conclusion can be reached independently of a claim about the nature of moral judgment. I'll maintain, to (...) the contrary, that a resolution of this dispute can only be achieved on the basis of such a claim. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, yet until now there has been no full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. This has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of such classical philosophical (...) concepts as identity, individual, class, substance and accident, matter, form, essence, dependence, and integral whole. It also enables the author to offer new solutions to long-standing problems surrounding these concepts, such as the Ship of Theseus Problem and the issue of mereological essentialism. The author shows by his use of formal techniques that classical philosophical problems are amenable to rigorous treatment, and the book represents a synthesis of issues and methods from the analytical tradition and from the older continental realist tradition of Brentano and the early Husserl. (shrink)

A collection of material on Husserl's Logical Investigations, and specifically on Husserl's formal theory of parts, wholes and dependence and its influence in ontology, logic and psychology. Includes translations of classic works by Adolf Reinach and Eugenie Ginsberg, as well as original contributions by Wolfgang Künne, Kevin Mulligan, Gilbert Null, Barry Smith, Peter M. Simons, Roger A. Simons and Dallas Willard. Documents work on Husserl's ontology arising out of early meetings of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy.