Mereology

Mereology is the study of part-to-whole, part-to-part, and whole-to-part relations, the ensemble of which is known as parthood relations. In other words, it is the study of interacting components in a system. While the study of parthood relations traces back to Antiquity, the term “mereology” was invented by logician and mathematician Stanisław Leśniewski in 1927. As Aristotle wrote in Metaphysics “[i]n all things which have a plurality of parts, and which are not a total aggregate but a whole of some sort distinct from the parts, there is some cause,” he was already gesturing to questions of emergence, identity, and becoming, millenia before a formal term was coined. A critical problem at the heart of mereology: “under what circumstances do a collection of individual [parts] compose another individual?” bears relevance for us today as we face unfamiliar ways of conceiving subjectivity in Planetary conditions. At what threshold is some entity, composed of many diverse interacting parts, identifiable as something whole and thus a distinctly recognizable entity in its own terms? Considering the awareness Planetarity thrusts upon us as co-constituted by thousands of organisms, at what threshold does the sensation of ‘selfhood’ or ‘individuality’ emerge? How are those distinctions troubled at nonhuman scales of the microscopic, macroscopic and suprascopic?