Mereology

This meeting begins a 6-week series of lectures presenting a Modest Metaphysics, while giving you a survey of and deep dive into the topics of mereology, location, and persistence. In this week's lecture I will give you a survey of the different mereological relations and axioms. We'll discuss debates about what's primitive, debates about which rules to endorse, and debates about the domains of the relations and rules. This content will provide a foundation for the rest of the course.

I invite you to read what you can of these 2 chapters, but note: reading these chapters is not required, and I will go over them in class.

And here are some additional, optional papers:

I also recommend Cotnoir and Varzi's 2021 Mereology.