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Analysis Advance Access originally published online on July 10, 2009
Analysis 2009 69(4):599-604; doi:10.1093/analys/anp102
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Universalism entails Extensionalism

Achille C. Varzi

Columbia University New York, USA av72@columbia.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

1. Universalism (also known as Conjunctivism, or Collectivism) is the thesis that mereological composition is unrestricted. More precisely:

(U) Any non-empty collection of things has a fusion, i.e. something that has all those things as parts and has no part that is disjoint from each of them.1

Extensionalism is the thesis that sameness of composition is sufficient for identity. More precisely:
(E) No two things have exactly the same proper parts (unless they are atomic, i.e. have no proper parts at all).

Clearly, these two theses are not equivalent. They are, however, more closely related than one might think. For while (E) does not entail (U), the converse entailment holds – or so I will argue. More precisely, the entailment holds as long as it is agreed that the following postulates are constitutive of the meaning of ‘part’:
(1) Transitivity: any part of any part of a thing . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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