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LIT-1022: Parts and Places: The Structures of Spatial Representation

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Properties2
StatusUnavailable — filed 2026-10-13 from its Crossref record, not read. Registered at the owner's request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for QUESTION-035 and CLAIM-194. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unavailable until it is read, not on merit. Looked for on 2026-10-13, none found: OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report it closed, with no open-access or repository location; Crossref carries no licence or full-text link; it is not an open-access title on MIT Press Direct (the page refused automated access, and the MIT Press still sells it in print); a web search found only catalogue and retail records; Varzi's Columbia page (columbia.edu/~av72) and the PhilArchive record (CASPAP) could not be opened from here (bot challenges), and the Wayback Machine holds no snapshot of the former, so an author-posted copy is not ruled out.
Tagsmereology, metaphysics, individuation

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Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi (1999), The MIT Press — DOI-10.7551/mitpress/5253.001.0001

Key takeaways

Filed, not read. Known here by what it is standardly cited for.

  • Mereology gives parthood and nothing else. It cannot tell two halves of one ball from two separate balls, because both have the same mereological description; connection has to be added as a primitive.
  • With connection, interior, boundary and self-connectedness become definable, which is what makes boundary talk possible.
  • Its contents beyond this, including how it treats holes, location and fiat boundaries, are not checked here.

Standing in the record

Filed with Smith & Varzi (2000; LIT-1024), beside it, as the reference theory behind the fiat/bona fide distinction, for QUESTION-035 and CLAIM-194. The survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus pointed to both (MOM-LIT-016).

What a reading should check. The record’s boundary criterion is dynamical: a block whose spectral gap beats the Occam factor (CLAIM-157). Mereotopology’s connection is a primitive of space. Whether connection can be read off a coupling structure, so that the two meet, is the question to bring to the book.

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