History[edit]

Informal part-whole reasoning was consciously invoked

in metaphysics and ontology from Plato (in particular, in the second half of the Parmenides)
and Aristotle onwards, and more or less unwittingly in 19th-century mathematics until the
triumph of set theory around 1910.
Ivor Grattan-Guinness (2001) sheds much light on part-whole reasoning during the 19th and
early 20th centuries, and reviews how Cantor and Peano devised set theory. It appears that
the first to reason consciously and at length about parts and wholes[citation needed] was Edmund
Husserl, in 1901, in the second volume of Logical Investigations – Third Investigation: "On
the Theory of Wholes and Parts" (Husserl 1970 is the English translation). However, the
word "mereology" is absent from his writings, and he employed no symbolism even though
his doctorate was in mathematics.
Stanisław Leśniewski coined "mereology" in 1927, from the Greek word μέρος (méros,
"part"), to refer to a formal theory of part-whole he devised in a series of highly technical
papers published between 1916 and 1931, and translated in Leśniewski (1992).
Leśniewski's student Alfred Tarski, in his Appendix E to Woodger (1937) and the paper
translated as Tarski (1984), greatly simplified Leśniewski's formalism. Other students (and
students of students) of Lesniewski elaborated this "Polish mereology" over the course of
the 20th century. For a good selection of the literature on Polish mereology, see Srzednicki
and Rickey (1984). For a survey of Polish mereology, see Simons (1987). Since 1980 or so,
however, research on Polish mereology has been almost entirely historical in nature.
A. N. Whitehead planned a fourth volume of Principia Mathematica, on geometry, but never
wrote it. His 1914 correspondence with Bertrand Russell reveals that his intended approach
to geometry can be seen, with the benefit of hindsight, as mereological in essence. This
work culminated in Whitehead (1916) and the mereological systems of Whitehead (1919,
1920).
In 1930, Henry S. Leonard completed a Harvard Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy, setting
out a formal theory of the part-whole relation. This evolved into the "calculus of individuals"
of Goodman and Leonard (1940). Goodman revised and elaborated this calculus in the
three editions of Goodman (1951). The calculus of individuals is the starting point for the
post-1970 revival of mereology among logicians, ontologists, and computer scientists, a
revival well-surveyed in Simons (1987) and Casati and Varzi (1999).

Axioms and primitive notions[edit]

Reflexivity: A basic choice in defining a mereological system, is whether to consider things
to be parts of themselves. In naive set theory a similar question arises: whether a set is to
be considered a "subset" of itself. In both cases, "yes" gives rise to paradoxes analogous
to Russell's paradox: Let there be an object O such that every object that is not a proper
part of itself is a proper part of O. Is O a proper part of itself? No, because no object is a
proper part of itself; and yes, because it meets the specified requirement for inclusion as a
proper part of O. In set theory, a set is often termed an improper subset of itself. Given such
paradoxes, mereology requires an axiomatic formulation.
A mereological "system" is a first-order theory (with identity) whose universe of
discourse consists of wholes and their respective parts, collectively called objects.
Mereology is a collection of nested and non-nested axiomatic systems, not unlike the case
with modal logic.
The treatment, terminology, and hierarchical organization below follow Casati and Varzi
(1999: Ch. 3) closely. For a more recent treatment, correcting certain misconceptions, see
Hovda (2008). Lower-case letters denote variables ranging over objects. Following each
symbolic axiom or definition is the number of the corresponding formula in Casati and Varzi,
written in bold.
A mereological system requires at least one primitive binary relation (dyadic predicate). The
most conventional choice for such a relation is parthood (also called "inclusion"), "x is
a part of y", written Pxy. Nearly all systems require that parthood partially order the
universe. The following defined relations, required for the axioms below, follow immediately
from parthood alone:

 An immediate defined predicate is "x is a proper part of y", written PPxy, which holds
(i.e., is satisfied, comes out true) if Pxy is true and Pyx is false. Compared to parthood
(which is a partial order), ProperPart is a strict partial order.

3.3
An object lacking proper parts is an atom. The mereological universe consists of all
objects we wish to think about, and all of their proper parts:

 Overlap: x and y overlap, written Oxy, if there exists an object z such

that Pzx and Pzy both hold.

3.1
The parts of z, the "overlap" or "product" of x and y, are precisely those objects that
are parts of both x and y.

 Underlap: x and y underlap, written Uxy, if there exists an object z such

that x and y are both parts of z.

3.2
Overlap and Underlap are reflexive, symmetric, and intransitive.
Systems vary in what relations they take as primitive and as defined. For
example, in extensional mereologies (defined below), parthood can be
defined from Overlap as follows:

3.31
The axioms are:

 Parthood partially orders the universe: