Blackwell Reference Online

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The relation of part to whole is one of the most fundamental in ontology. It applies to all or almost all objects we can consider. Concrete particulars clearly have parts: a cat has its tail, a chair its seat. Regions of space, time, and space-time stand in part/whole relations, and any object extended in space and/or time has parts corresponding to sub portions of the portion of space and/or time it covers. Likewise stuffs, events, aggregates may have parts and be parts. Part/whole relations are also found among abstract objects: sets have subsets, algebras have sub algebras, vector spaces have subspaces, the real line has intervals, etc. The determinables of a determinate, the genera of a species, and the marks of a concept are often called logical parts of their wholes. Some objects, such as atoms, points, souls and God, are said to be without parts, but it is still significant (if false) to talk of parts. Philosophers from the Milesians onwards have used concepts of part and whole. They frequently played crucial roles in the history of metaphysics, for example, in Thales’ view that everything is made of water, Aristotle 's argumenta against Zeno 's paradoxes, Leibniz 's argument for monads, Bradley 's argument for the Absolute. The discovery that there are as many squares as natural numbers was taken as a paradox, seemingly contradicting Euclid's principle that the whole ... log in or subscribe to read full text