3-5 Jul 2017
Pisa, Italy
A conference on mereology and identity will be held at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (http://www.sns.it/en ), Italy from July 3rd to July 5th 2017. The following scholars will deliver a talk at the conference: Einar Bohn (Oslo) Philipp Bricker (UMass Amherst) Claudio Calosi (Neuchâtel) Aaron Cotnoir (Saint Andrews) Paul Hovda (Reed College) Shieva Kleinschmidt (Southern California) Kris McDaniel (Syracuse) Jeroen Smid (Lund) Achille Varzi (Columbia) Megan Wallace (Kentucky) Byeong-Uk Yi (Toronto) DESCRIPTION OF THE CONFERENCE The contemporary debate on mereology is largely hinged on the notion of identity. Indeed, classical mereology dictates that complex entities are identical if and only if they have the same proper parts. On the other hand, many scholars who doubt the adequacy of classical mereology point to real or fictional cases in which different wholes would have the same proper parts. The upholders of Composition as Identity think that identity, or a relation analogous to identity, also connects a whole with its parts. By contrast, the opponents of Composition as Identity retort that composition fails to respect some pivotal principles that holds for standard identity, such as the Indiscerniblity of Identicals, coreferentiality or transitivity. Finally, in the debate about Composition as Identity, the so-called Sider-Yi Collapse seems to show that some roles sometimes attributed to identity are incompatible with the standard characterization of plural identity. The conference will host the main scholars involved in this debate, with the purpose of encouraging innovative solutions to the following open problems: a) Is there any inferential or evidential connection between Composition as Identity and mereological principles? b) Does the debate between monism and dualism in the theory of constitution really concern mereology? Is dualism compatible or incompatible with mereological extensionalism? c) Is it possible and interesting to combine mereological extensionalism and/or Composition as Identity with non-standard doctrines of identity, such as relative identity or milder forms of pluralism about identity? d) What does the Yi/Sider Collapse show about the application of plural logic to mereology? e) How do the appeals to the Indiscernibility of Identicals in the debate about Composition as Identity differ from the appeals to the Indiscernibility of Identicals in the debate about the theory of constitution? f) Is Composition as Identity compatible with non-standard mereologies, or to pluralist theories of parthood? g) According to Composition as Identity the Principle of Indiscernibility of Identicals can be extended to composition, by resorting to broadly Fregean relativizations of cardinality ascriptions. How is this relativization achieved? The conference is organized by Massimiliano Carrara (University of Padua), Giorgio Lando (Scuola Normale Superiore), and Massimo Mugnai (Scuola Normale Superiore). Philevents entry: http://philevents.org/event/show/27253 A detailed programme will be supplied in due course. No registration is required. Everybody is welcome. For any information, please contact Giorgio Lando (giorgio.lando@gmail.com) or Massimiliano Carrara (massimiliano.carrara@gmail.com). -- [LOGIC] mailing list http://www.dvmlg.de/mailingliste.html Archive: http://www.illc.uva.nl/LogicList/ provided by a collaboration of the DVMLG, the Maths Departments in Bonn and Hamburg, and the ILLC at the Universiteit van Amsterdam