Parts and Places: The Structures of Spatial Representation (Hardcover)

by Roberto Casati (Author), Achille C. Varzi (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review


"This is a lively and original survey of a broad and exciting territory. The scholarship is impeccable, the literature treated is up-to-date and thoroughly addressed, and the authors deal interestingly with cutting-edge problems at the borderlines of philosophy and cognitive science."
—Barry Smith, State University of New York at Buffalo

Product Description
"This is a lively and original survey of a broad and exciting territory. The scholarship is impeccable, the literature treated is up-to-date and thoroughly addressed, and the authors deal interestingly with cutting-edge problems at the borderlines of philosophy and cognitive science." -- Barry Smith, State University of New York at Buffalo

Thinking about space is thinking about spatial things. The table is on the carpet; hence the carpet is under the table. The vase is in the box; hence the box is not in the vase. But what does it mean for an object to be somewhere? How are objects tied to the space they occupy? In this book Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi address some of the fundamental issues in the philosophy of spatial representation. Their starting point is an analysis of the interplay between mereology (the study of part/whole relations), topology (the study of spatial continuity and compactness), and the theory of spatial location proper. This leads to a unified framework for spatial representation understood quite broadly as a theory of the representation of spatial entities. The framework is then tested against some classical metaphysical questions such as: Are parts essential to their wholes? Is spatial co-location a sufficient criterion of identity? What (if anything) distinguishes material objects from events and other spatial entities? The concluding chapters deal with applications to topics as diverse as the logical analysis of movement and the semantics of maps.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; illustrated edition edition (July 16, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 026203266X
• ISBN-13: 978-0262032667
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #741,850 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Splendid intro to contemporary mereology, June 10, 2003

By	galloamericanus "galloamericanus" (Podunk, Iowa) - See all my reviews

I like this book very much but cannot say that I have assimilated much of it yet. But it describes a line of thinking which I think is going to come into its own over the course of this new century. The bibliography is excellent.

Mereology all begins with Husserl's Logical Investigations in 1901. These had almost no impact until translated into English in 1970. Whitehead wrote on related topics but made for notoriously hard reading. (In the 1980s, Bowman Clarke splendidly corrected Whitehead's theory.) The American Theodore De Laguna adds his 2 cents worth in 1922. Lesniewski in Poland writes fascinating stuff starting in 1916, but nobody understands him except his brilliant student Tarski, who writes a nice little introduction but buries it as a technical appendix to a British book on mathematical biology. The USA philosopher Nelson Goodman finally produces a user-friendly version, and calls it the calculus of individuals. Again, nobody pays much attention and that's a pity.

The formal theory of part and whole finally takes off in the 1960s and now flourishes. Parts and Places is an excellent university level introduction to this theory, known as mereology.
Mereology can be viewed as a type of formal philosophy, and Casati and Varzi are most definitely highly competent philosophers writing in the relaxed manner of contemporary English language philosophy.

But I submit that mereology is also a form of math, altho' one unlike the chicken tracks that pass for math nowadays. This is math as math should be. Here's a little giveaway. C&S, like Peter Simons, refuse to apply mereology to abstract entities, and focus exclusively on material ones. Result? They are, IMHO, doing a sort of proto-geometry. Another giveaway: C&S often mention topology.

Mereology is first order logic with equality and a primitive dyadic predicate interpreted as "is included in" or "is part of".
If you grant the useful fiction of a null individual, then much
of the mathematics of mereology is good old Boolean algebra. Otherwise mereology is a join semilattice.

Like it or not, contemporary metaphysics has grown ever more mereological in flavor. Mereology is also useful for cognitive science, and probably for linguistics (mass/count nouns, etc). It may find applications in physics, can't say for sure. David Lewis, in his "Parts of Classes" convinced me that a mereological refoundation of ZF set theory was possible. Richard Martin (1916-85) argued that much of mathematics can be recast on mereological lines. David Bostock has argued that mereology should be the foundation of the theory of measurement. Peter Roeper has laid out a mereological refoundation of topology. If mereology displaces set theory, P&P and "Holes" become classics.

This book has a close competitor: Peter Simons's "Parts" of 1987.
The first 100 pages of Parts is a richer introduction to the formalities of classical mereology than P&P. Simons is also philosophically deeper than Parts and Places. The main strength of the latter is its coverage of the substantial recent progress in mereotopology, and of the applications of mereology to machine intelligence.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nice to see some new ideas..., February 2, 2001

By	Yuri Kuzyk "zentao" (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews

Sometimes it seems like philosophy has been caught in amber since the days of Aristotle and Plato with the same tired arguments simply being restated. Or perhaps it is simply the fact that to be anywhere outside of the "box" in philosophy immediately makes one a crank.

Casati and Varzi have bucked the trend to rehash old ideas and have broken a lot of new and very interesting ground in mereotopology. That is, they have put the study of parts and wholes (mereology) on some firm footing by starting with some ideas from topology and creating a first level theory.

Funny as it seems, the area of describing the ontology of wholes and their parts has been very fuzzy since the days of Aristotle. Only in a very literary sense have this "minor" (only kidding, of course) area been explored in the history of philosophy; something the reader realizes very quickly a chapter into this book.

This book is not for the faint of heart or those without some background in formal expressions. I believe the authors have English as a second language and, although the language is proper, it is also somewhat formal. I kept hoping for some breaks for humour or at least some variation in language but this book is a bit relentless.

The authors develop many axioms for mereotopology for everything from "standard" topological relations up to holes and boundaries. Many relations we would consider to be basic (read: boring) and mundane are revealed in a new light when one attempts to formalize them.

The only possible nit I would pick with the book is the fact that many areas have now recieved further treatment from the authors. In other words, I feel this book was released a bit too soon since, if one reads the papers at the author's websites, one sees the interesting developments. Particularly fiat boundaries, which are very interesting for many reasons, recieve only passing treatment in the book. One must read papers for more.

The authors also do not get into any epistemological arguments which I feel would not be out of place. Given that many axioms owe a great deal to how one defines "truth" the authors need a little more included in the book; they also have some very interesting ideas in this area.

1.0 out of 5 stars Loose Pages, July 8, 2009

By	Censor - See all my reviews

Just a short, angry comment - not on the content, but the incredibly incompetent bookbinding of this work: The combination of expensive hardcover and cheap adhesive makes no sense, the paper is in the wrong direction, which makes it buckle, and after only a few minutes I had to sort a handful of loose pages. The printing and bookbinding standards in the English-speaking world (as compared to, e.g., German-made books) are low enough (I wonder when they will start printing on toilet paper and charge 10 $ per page), but this is the worst example I have come across so far. And this from a copyright holder by the proud name of MIT!