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Roberto Casati, Achille C. Varzi.
Holes and other Superficialities.
MIT Press. 1994

This fascinating investigation on the borderlines of metaphysics, everyday geometry, and the theory of perception seeks to answer two basic questions: Do holes really exist? If they do exist, what are they?

Holes are among the entities that down-to-earth philosophers would like to expel from their ontological inventory. Casati and Varzi argue in favor of holes’ existence and explore the consequences of their unorthodox approach. They examine the ontology, the geometry, and the part-whole relations of holes, their identity. their causal role, and the ways we perceive them.

There basic kinds of holes are distinguished: blind hollows, perforating tunnels, and internal cavities. Treating these uniformly as immaterial bodies, Casati and Varzi develop a morphology of holes, focusing on how a hole can be filled. They then look at the main properties of the resulting conceptual framework: Holes, they observe, are parasitic upon the surfaces of their hosts, holes can move, fuse into one another, and split; they can be born, develop, and die. Finally, Casati and Varzi examine how some morphological features of holes are represented in perception, including the conditions whereby we have the impression that we can see, feel, or even hear a hole.

James Higginbotham, Fabio Pianesi, Achille C. Varzi, eds.
Speaking of Events.
OUP. 2000

In recent years the idea that an adequate semantics of ordinary language calls for some theory of events has sparked considerable debate among linguists and philosophers. On the one hand, so many linguistic phenomena appear to be explained if (and, according to some authors, only if) we make room for logical forms in which reference to or quantification over events is explicitly featured. Examples include nominalization, adverbial modification, tense and aspect, plurals, and singular causal statements. On the other hand, a number of deep philosophical questions arise as soon as we take events into consideration. Are events entities of a kind? What are their identity and individuation criteria? How does semantic theorizing depend on such metaphysical issues?

Speaking of Events offers a vivid and up-to-date indication of this debate, with emphasis precisely on the interplay between linguistic applications and philosophical implications. Each chapter has been written expressly for this volume by leading authors in the field, including Nicholas Asher, Pier Marco Bertinetto, Johannes Brandl, Denis Delfitto, Regine Eckardt, James Higginbotham, Alessandro Lenci, Terence Parsons, Alice ter Meulen, and Henk Verkuyl. The volume also includes a comprehensive introductory essay by editors Fabio Pianesi and Achille Varzi which provides a state-of-the-art overview of this engaging and far-reaching interdisciplinary debate.

Contents

• Fabio Pianesi, Achille C. Varzi. Events and Event Talk: An Introduction. 2000
• James Higginbotham. On Events in Linguistic Semantics. 2000
• Terence Parsons. Underlying States and Time Travel. 2000
• Johannes L. Brandl. Do Events Recur?. 2000
• Regine Eckardt. Causation, Contexts, and Event Individuation. 2000
• Nicholas Asher. Events, Facts, Propositions, and Evolutive Anaphora. 2000
• Alice G. B. ter Meulen. Chronoscopes: The Dynamic Representation of Facts and Events. 2000
• Henk J. Verknyl. Events as Dividuals: Aspectual Composition and Event Semantics. 2000
• Denis Delfitto, Pier Marco Bertinetto. Word Order and Quantification over Times. 2000
• Alessandro Lenci, Pier Marco Bertinetto. Aspects, Adverbs, and Events: Habituality vs. Perfectivity. 2000

A. J. Cotnoir, Achille C. Varzi.
Mereology.
OUP. 2021

Is a whole something more than the sum of its parts? Are there things composed of the same parts? If you divide an object into parts, and divide those parts into smaller parts, will this process ever come to an end? Can something lose parts or gain new ones without ceasing to be the thing it is? Does any multitude of things (including disparate things such as you, this book, and the tail of a cat) compose a whole of some sort? Questions such as these have occupied us for at least as long as philosophy has existed. They define the field that has come to be known as mereology—the study of all relations of part to whole and of part to part within a whole—and have deep and far-reaching ramifications in metaphysics as well as in logic, the foundations of mathematics, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science, and beyond. In Mereology, A. J. Cotnoir and Achille C. Varzi have compiled decades of advanced research into a comprehensive, up-to-date, and formally rigorous picture. The early chapters cover the more classical aspects of mereology; the rest of the book deals with variants and extensions. Whether you are an established professional philosopher, an interested student, or a newcomer, inside you will find all the tools you need to join this ever-evolving field of inquiry and theorize about all things mereological.