In logic, philosophy and related fields, mereology is the study of parts and the wholes they form. Whereas set theory is founded on the membership relation between a set and its elements, mereology emphasizes the meronomic relation between entities, which—from a set-theoretic perspective—is closer to the concept of inclusion between sets.
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.
Henry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism, and aesthetics.
Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen is a Dutch-American philosopher noted for his contributions to philosophy of science, epistemology and formal logic. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University.
In formal ontology, a branch of metaphysics, and in ontological computer science, mereotopology is a first-order theory, embodying mereological and topological concepts, of the relations among wholes, parts, parts of parts, and the boundaries between parts.
Gianteresio Vattimo was an Italian philosopher and politician.
Richard Milton Martin was an American logician and analytic philosopher. In his Ph.D. thesis written under Frederic Fitch, Martin discovered virtual sets a bit before Quine, and was possibly the first non-Pole other than Joseph Henry Woodger to employ a mereological system. Building on these and other devices, Martin forged a first-order theory capable of expressing its own syntax as well as some semantics and pragmatics, all while abstaining from set and model theory, and from intensional notions such as modality.
The Institut Jean Nicod (IJN) is an interdisciplinary research center based in Paris, France. Its current director is the philosopher Roberto Casati (2017-), preceded by famous philosopher François Recanati (2010-2017) and Pierre Jacob (2002-2010). Created in 2002, its name commemorates the French philosopher, epistemologist and logician Jean Nicod (1893-1924). The IJN is jointly run by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), École normale supérieure (ENS) and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), three French research and higher education institutions. Since 2007, the ENS hosts the IJN where it is affiliated with both the Département d'Etudes Cognitives (DEC), of which it is a founding member, and the Department of Philosophy.
Lucio Colletti was an Italian Western Marxist philosopher. Colletti started to be known outside Italy because of a long interview with him that Marxist historian Perry Anderson published in the New Left Review in 1974.
Carlo Penco is an Italian analytic philosopher and full professor in philosophy of language at the University of Genoa in Italy.
Robert Culp Stalnaker is an American philosopher who is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Piergiorgio Odifreddi is an Italian mathematician, logician, student of the history of science, and popular science writer and essayist, especially on philosophical atheism as a member of the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics. He is philosophically and politically near to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky.
Deviant logic is a type of logic incompatible with classical logic. Philosopher Susan Haack uses the term deviant logic to describe certain non-classical systems of logic. In these logics:
Mario De Caro is an Italian philosopher, professor of moral philosophy at the University of Rome III in Italy. Since 2000, he has also been teaching at Tufts University, where he is regularly a visiting professor. He is interested in moral philosophy, the free-will controversy, theory of action, history of science, Donald Davidson's and Hilary Putnam's philosophies, and early modern philosophy. With David Macarthur, he has defended a metaphilosohical view called liberal naturalism.
In mathematics, point-free geometry is a geometry whose primitive ontological notion is region rather than point. Two axiomatic systems are set out below, one grounded in mereology, the other in mereotopology and known as connection theory.
Giulio Giorello was an Italian philosopher, mathematician, and epistemologist.
Sergio Fabbrini is an Italian political scientist. He is Head of the Department of Political Science and Professor of Political science and International relations at Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli in Rome, where he holds the Intesa Sanpaolo Chair on European Governance. He had also the Pierre Keller Visiting Professorship Chair at the Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government (2019/2020). He is the co-founder and former Director of the LUISS School of Government He is also recurrent professor of Comparative Politics at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.
Lorenzo Chiesa is a philosopher, critical theorist, translator, and professor whose academic research and works focus on the intersection between ontology, psychoanalysis, and political theory.
Franca D'Agostini is an Italian philosopher.
In ontology, a parasite is something which exists only in reference to something else. That is, it is a thing which can only exist as a feature, quality, or absence of another thing.
