mereology

mereology

Branch of logic, founded by Stanislaw Lesniewski, that studies class expressions and the relations between parts and wholes. It rejects the hierarchy of sets generated in set theory through the member-of relation and instead proposes a part-whole relationship. It has attracted philosophers of logic and mathematics who are nominalists (see universal), those who suspect set theory of being inherently Platonistic, and those who are otherwise suspicious of the complex entities proposed by, and the complicated assumptions needed for, set theory.