What is mereological harmony?

Say that mereological harmony is the view that there is at least some mirroring between the mereological structure of material objects and the mereological structure of their locations: each, in some way, mirrors the other. As it turns out, there is a confusing array of systems of harmony available to the substantivalist. In this paper, I attempt to bring some order to these systems. I explore some systems found in the literature, as well as some natural systems which haven’t been discussed. Along the way, I explore a number of metaphysical consequences of the different systems of harmony. The paper ends with a roadmap of possible views for the substantivalist.

[1]  R. Ceballos Parthood and location , 2011 .

[2]  Ludger Jansen,et al.  Crisp Islands in Vague Seas: Cases of Determinate Parthood Relations in Biological Objects , 2014 .

[3]  Daniel Nolan Balls and All , 2014 .

[4]  Shieva Kleinschmidt Mereology and location , 2014 .

[5]  K. Bennett,et al.  Oxford Studies in Metaphysics , 2011 .

[6]  Hud Hudson,et al.  A materialist metaphysics of the human person , 2001 .

[7]  Jacek Brzozowski,et al.  On Locating Composite Objects , 2008 .

[8]  J. Hawthorne,et al.  Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics , 2008 .

[9]  Theodore Sider Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time , 2002 .

[10]  Matt Leonard Locating Gunky Water and Wine , 2014 .

[11]  Judith Jarvis Thomson,et al.  The Statue and the Clay , 1998 .

[12]  P. Inwagen Symposia Papers: Four-Dimensional Objects , 1990 .

[13]  D. Braddon-Mitchell,et al.  The physics of extended simples , 2006 .

[14]  P. Simons Parts: A Study in Ontology , 1991 .

[15]  Roberto Casati,et al.  Parts and Places: The Structures of Spatial Representation , 1999 .

[16]  Josh Parsons,et al.  Must a Four-Dimensionalist Believe in Temporal Parts? , 2000 .

[17]  N. Markosian A Spatial Approach to Mereology , 2014 .

[18]  K. McDaniel Gunky Objects in a Simple World , 2006 .

[19]  Thomas Sattig,et al.  The language and reality of time , 2006 .

[20]  Achille C. Varzi Spatial Reasoning and Ontology: Parts, Wholes, and Locations , 2007, Handbook of Spatial Logics.

[21]  B. Dainton Time and Space: Contents , 2010 .

[22]  Cody Gilmore WHERE IN THE RELATIVISTIC WORLD ARE WE , 2006 .

[23]  Paul Hovda,et al.  What is Classical Mereology? , 2009, J. Philos. Log..

[24]  J. Schaffer Spacetime the one substance , 2009 .

[25]  David Lewis,et al.  The Paradoxes of Time Travel , 2016 .

[26]  Anthony Shiver,et al.  How do you say ‘everything is ultimately composed of atoms’? , 2015 .

[27]  K. McDaniel Extended simples , 2007 .

[28]  Cody Gilmore Why Parthood Might Be a Four Place Relation, and How it Behaves if it Is , 2009 .

[29]  James E. Tomberlin,et al.  On the Plurality of Worlds. , 1989 .