Book dossier

Parts and places

by Roberto Casati, Achille C. Varzi

"In this book, Casati and Varzi address some of the fundamental issues in the philosophy of spatial representation. Their starting point is an analysis of the interplay of 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: 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."--BOOK JACKET.