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In philosophy, mereological essentialism is a mereological thesis about the relationship between wholes, their parts, and the conditions of their persistence. According to mereological essentialism, objects have their parts necessarily. If an object were to lose or gain a part, it would no longer be the original object.
Mereological essentialism is typically taken to be a thesis about concrete material objects, but it may also be applied to abstract objects, such as a set or proposition. If mereological essentialism is correct, a proposition, or thought, has its parts essentially; in other words, it has ontological commitments to all its conceptual components.
The two prominent, competing material models of mereological essentialism are endurantism and perdurantism. It is important to note that neither endurantism nor perdurantism imply mereological essentialism. One may advocate for either model without being committed to accepting mereological essentialism. Within an endurantist framework, objects are extended within space; they are collections of spatial parts. Objects persist through change (endure) by being wholly present at every instant of time. According to mereological essentialism, enduring objects have only their spatial parts essentially. Within a perdurantist framework, objects are extended through space-time; they have parts in both space and time. Under a framework that combines mereological essentialism and perdurantism, objects have both their temporal parts and spatial parts essentially.
Essentiality can be explained by referencing necessity and/or possible worlds. Mereological essentialism is then the thesis that objects have their parts necessarily or objects have their parts in every possible world in which the object exists. In other words, an object X composed of two parts a and b ceases to exist if it loses either part. Additionally, X ceases to exist if it gains a new part, c.
Mereological essentialism is a position defended[ by whom? ] in the debate regarding material constitution.
For instance, several answers have been proposed regarding the question: "What is the relationship between a statue and the lump of clay from which it is made?" Coincidentalism is the view that the statue and the lump of clay are two objects located at the same place. The lump of clay should be distinguished from the statue because they have different persistence conditions. The lump would not survive the loss of a bit of clay, but the statue would. The statue would not survive being squashed into a ball, but the lump of clay would.
The following philosophers have thought mereological essentialism to be true:
Pre-20th century: Peter Abelard; Gottfried Leibniz
20th century: G.E. Moore; Roderick Chisholm; James Van Cleve
21st century: Michael Jubien; Mark Heller
Chisholm and van Cleve consider objects as enduring. Michael Jubien and Mark Heller defend mereological essentialism for perduring objects.
There are several arguments for mereological essentialism. Some are more formal; others use mereological essentialism as a solution to various philosophical puzzles or paradoxes. (This approach is mentioned in Olson (2006).)
What would be the opposite of mereological essentialism? It would be that objects would survive the loss of any part. We can call this mereological inessentialism. But mereological inessentialism means that a table would survive replacement or loss of any of its parts. By successive replacement we could change the parts of the table so in the end it would look like a chair. This is the Ship of Theseus paradox. Because it is difficult to justify a clearly defined point at which the table is destroyed and replaced by the chair, the best solution to this puzzle may be mereological essentialism (Chisholm 1973).
Imagine a person called Deon. He has a proper part, his foot. One day he loses his foot. The resulting entity is then known as Theon. But it seems that Theon existed when Deon existed by being a proper part of Deon. Did Deon survive? If he did, then Deon and Theon must be identical. But Theon is a proper part of Deon. This is paradoxical.
One way to solve this puzzle is to deny that Deon has any proper parts. Defending this view is rejecting the principle of arbitrary undetached parts (Van Inwagen 1981). It means that a cup in front of you doesn't have a left part, a right part, a part where the ear of the cup is or a part where the coffee is stored (if the hole of the cup is a part of the cup).
Some philosophers reject the existence of individual objects, or simples. According to such authors, the world does not contain single, individualizable objects which we can use logic to quantify. Instead the world only contains stuff, or masses of matter which come in different quantities. We have for instance a gram of gold. There is a grammatical difference between stuff and things. It would not make sense to say, "take a gold," but instead we must specify a lump of gold (Simons 1987). Standard methods of quantification are methods of invoking thinghood on the world; it is then argued that if the world is made only of stuff, mereological essentialism must be true.
The argument from a world made only of stuff was first noted by van Cleve (1986). Defenders of a stuff ontology are Michael Jubien (1993) and Mark Heller (1990).
Because mereology is a new branch of formal systems, clear arguments against mereological essentialism have not yet been raised. The most common counterargument is that mereological essentialism entails that an object which undergoes a subtle change is not the same object. This seems to be directly contrary to common sense. For example, if my car gets a flat tire and I then replace the tire, mereological essentialism entails that it is not the same car.
The most common argument against mereological essentialism is the view that it cannot be universally true. Take us, for example. As humans, which are living organisms, we survive by having our parts replaced by metabolic processes or even organ transplantation. We might have our hair or fingernails cut. All of these procedures do not seem to cause the nonexistence of the person or, for that matter, the nonexistence of any living organism. Therefore, mereological essentialism cannot be universally true (Plantinga 1975).
This argument may fail if the mereological essentialist believes in presentism, that the present is the only relevantly true world. This view is a response to the problem of Qualitative Change.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the basic structure of reality. It is traditionally seen as the study of mind-independent features of the world, but some modern theorists view it as an inquiry into the fundamental categories of human understanding. Some philosophers, including Aristotle, designate metaphysics as first philosophy to suggest that it is more fundamental than other forms of philosophical inquiry.
Ontology is the philosophical study of being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of reality and every entity within it. To articulate the basic structure of being, ontology examines what all things have in common. It also investigates how they can be grouped into basic types, such as the categories of particulars and universals. Particulars are unique, non-repeatable entities, like the person Socrates. Universals are general, repeatable entities, like the color green. Another contrast is between concrete objects existing in space and time, like a tree, and abstract objects existing outside space and time, like the number 7. Systems of categories aim to provide a comprehensive inventory of reality, employing categories such as substance, property, relation, state of affairs, and event.
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". He served as the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978.
Mereology is the philosophical study of part-whole relationships, also called parthood relationships. As a branch of metaphysics, mereology examines the connections between parts and their wholes, exploring how components interact within a system. This theory has roots in ancient philosophy, with significant contributions from Plato, Aristotle, and later, medieval and Renaissance thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus. Mereology gained formal recognition in the 20th century through the pioneering works of Polish logician Stanisław Leśniewski, who introduced it as part of a comprehensive framework for logic and mathematics, and coined the word "mereology". The field has since evolved to encompass a variety of applications in ontology, natural language semantics, and the cognitive sciences, influencing our understanding of structures ranging from linguistic constructs to biological systems.
Roderick Milton Chisholm was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, value theory, deontology, deontic logic and the philosophy of perception.
In logic and philosophy, a property is a characteristic of an object; a red object is said to have the property of redness. The property may be considered a form of object in its own right, able to possess other properties. A property, however, differs from individual objects in that it may be instantiated, and often in more than one object. It differs from the logical/mathematical concept of class by not having any concept of extensionality, and from the philosophical concept of class in that a property is considered to be distinct from the objects which possess it. Understanding how different individual entities can in some sense have some of the same properties is the basis of the problem of universals.
Peter van Inwagen is an American analytic philosopher and the John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is also a research professor of philosophy at Duke University each spring. He previously taught at Syracuse University, earning his PhD from the University of Rochester in 1969 under the direction of Richard Taylor. Van Inwagen is one of the leading figures in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of action. He was the president of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 2010 to 2013.
Perdurantism or perdurance theory is a philosophical theory of persistence and identity. The debate over persistence currently involves three competing theories—one three-dimensionalist theory called "endurantism" and two four-dimensionalist theories called "perdurantism" and "exdurantism". For a perdurantist, all objects are considered to be four-dimensional worms and they make up the different regions of spacetime. It is a fusion of all the perdurant's instantaneous time slices compiled and blended into a complete mereological whole. Perdurantism posits that temporal parts alone are what ultimately change. Katherine Hawley in How Things Persist states that change is "the possession of different properties by different temporal parts of an object".
In philosophy, mereological nihilism is the metaphysical thesis that there are no objects with proper parts. Equivalently, mereological nihilism says that mereological simples, or objects without any proper parts, are the only material objects that exist. Mereological nihilism is distinct from ordinary nihilism insofar as ordinary nihilism typically focuses on the nonexistence of common metaphysical assumptions such as ethical truths and objective meaning, rather than the nonexistence of composite objects.
In contemporary mereology, a simple or indivisible monomere is any thing that has no proper parts. Sometimes the term "atom" is used, although in recent years the term "simple" has become the standard.
In philosophy, four-dimensionalism is the ontological position that an object's persistence through time is like its extension through space. Thus, an object that exists in time has temporal parts in the various subregions of the total region of time it occupies, just like an object that exists in a region of space has at least one part in every subregion of that space.
In contemporary metaphysics, temporal parts are the parts of an object that exist in time. A temporal part would be something like "the first year of a person's life", or "all of a table from between 10:00 a.m. on June 21, 1994 to 11:00 p.m. on July 23, 1996". The term is used in the debate over the persistence of material objects. Objects typically have parts that exist in space—a human body, for example, has spatial parts like hands, feet, and legs. Some metaphysicians believe objects have temporal parts as well.
The B-theory of time, also called the "tenseless theory of time", is one of two positions regarding the temporal ordering of events in the philosophy of time. B-theorists argue that the flow of time is only a subjective illusion of human consciousness, that the past, present, and future are equally real, and that time is tenseless: temporal becoming is not an objective feature of reality. Therefore, there is nothing privileged about the present, ontologically speaking.
Metaontology or meta-ontology is the study of the field of inquiry known as ontology. The goal of meta-ontology is to clarify what ontology is about and how to interpret the meaning of ontological claims. Different meta-ontological theories disagree on what the goal of ontology is and whether a given issue or theory lies within the scope of ontology. There is no universal agreement whether meta-ontology is a separate field of inquiry besides ontology or whether it is just one branch of ontology.
In philosophy, specifically in the area of metaphysics, counterpart theory is an alternative to standard (Kripkean) possible-worlds semantics for interpreting quantified modal logic. Counterpart theory still presupposes possible worlds, but differs in certain important respects from the Kripkean view. The form of the theory most commonly cited was developed by David Lewis, first in a paper and later in his book On the Plurality of Worlds.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world. Someone who studies metaphysics can be called either a "metaphysician" or a "metaphysicist".
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to metaphysics:
In mereology, an area of metaphysics, the term gunk applies to any whole whose parts all have further proper parts. That is, a gunky object is not made of indivisible atoms or simples. Because parthood is transitive, any part of gunk is itself gunk. The term was first used by David Lewis in his work Parts of Classes (1991), in which he conceived of the possibility of "atomless gunk", which was shortened to "gunk" by later writers. Dean W. Zimmerman defends the possibility of atomless gunk.
Donald Cary Williams, usually cited as D. C. Williams, was an American philosopher and a professor at both the University of California Los Angeles and at Harvard University.
Compositional objects are wholes instantiated by collections of parts. If an ontology wishes to permit the inclusion of compositional objects it must define which collections of objects are to be considered parts composing a whole. Mereology, the study of relationships between parts and their wholes, provides specifications on how parts must relate to one another in order to compose a whole.