What is Mereology?

This chapter provides a brief illustration of the centrality of part-whole inquiry throughout the history of philosophy, West and East. It explains two original motivations for the contemporary formal explorations of mereological systems. Husserl’s approach, stemming from Brentano, sought to treat part-whole relations as formal ontology – comprising a set of general structural principles applying to any objects whatsoever. Leśniewski’s approach was motivated by nominalism and the search for an alternative foundation for mathematics not beset by the paradoxes of naïve set theory. Some attention is paid to the different uses of ‘part’ in natural language and to whether mereology should be thought of as providing a single, overarching account. The final section details the logical machinery used throughout the book.