Non-Self II

The second of two chapters on the central Buddhist thesis of non-self, this chapter explores the Buddhist claim that the person, as the mereological sum of a causal series of sets of psychophysical elements, is a mere conceptual fiction, something thought to exist only due to our use of an opaque enumerative expression. Buddhists use the doctrine of the two truths to express this: persons are only conventionally and not ultimately real, and it is conventionally but not ultimately true that there are persons. The device of the tetralemma as a tool for surveying all the logical possibilities on a given issue is introduced; denial of all four lemmas is shown to involve presupposition failure. The heterodox Buddhist position known as Personalism is introduced, and its refutation explored.

Nothingness and the Ground of Reality

In this paper Priest argues that everything (the totality of all objects) and nothing (the absence of all objects) are perfectly good objects. Each can be defined as a certain mereological sum (fusion). He also argues that nothing is a contradictory object, which is also not an object; and further, that this contradictory object is, in a certain sense, the ground of reality.

A Unified Account of Three Uses of Dou

This paper gives a unified account of the distributive, occasion andcumulative readings of dou in the framework of event semantics, the last of whichis rarely discussed in the literature. Previous analyses on dou will be shown tohave difficulties capturing the cumulative reading (Lin 1998; Liu 2017). FollowingChampollion’s analysis of distance distributive items, I analyze dou as a distributorover events. What’s inside the scope of dou is the description of the subevents andwhat’s outside the scope of dou is the description of the mereological sum event.This analysis can capture the three uses of dou and adds dou to the category ofdistance distributive items surveyed in Champollion (2016).

Mereology

Mereology is the theory of the part–whole relation and of derived operations such as the mereological sum. (The sum of several things is the smallest thing of which they are all parts.) It was introduced by Leśniewski to avoid Russell’s paradox. Unlike the set-membership relation, the part–whole relation is transitive. This makes mereology much weaker than set theory, but gives the advantage of ontological parsimony. For example, mereology does not posit the proliferation of entities found in set theory, such as ∅⁣,{∅⁣},{{∅⁣}},…. Mereology has occasioned controversy: over whether many things really have a mereological sum if they are either scattered or, even worse, of different categories; over the uniqueness of sums; and over Lewis’ claim that the non-empty subsets of a set are literally parts of it.

Empty Negations and Existential Import in Aristotle

Aristotle draws what are, by our lights, two unusual relationships between predication and existence. First, true universal affirmations carry existential import. If ‘All humans are mortal’ is true, for example, then at least one human exists. And secondly, although affirmations with empty terms in subject position are all false, empty negations are all true: if ‘Socrates’ lacks a referent, then both ‘Socrates is well’ and ‘Socrates is ill’ are false but both ‘Socrates is not well’ and ‘Socrates is not ill’ are true. In this paper, I conjecture that for Aristotle predications have mereological truth conditions: for example, ‘Socrates is pale’ is true just in case Socrates is a part of the mereological sum of pale things. The existential import of universal affirmations and the semantic profile of empty negations follow from this mereological semantics.

Truth and Truthmakers in Early Modern Scholasticism

ABSTRACT:Seventeenth-century Iberian and Italian Scholastics had a concept of a truthmaker (verificativum) similar to that found in contemporary metaphysical debates. I argue that the seventeenth-century notion of a truthmaker can be illuminated by a prevalent seventeenth-century theory of truth according to which the truth of a proposition is the mereological sum of that proposition and its intentional object. I explain this theory of truth and then spell out the account of truthmaking it entails.