On the Basic Properties of Parthood Relation and Their Ontological Applications
The parthood relation is a fundamental and important relation that exists universally within objects.As the theory on the part-whole relation,mereology has been an application of predicate logic,and also a branch of formal ontology,which is axiomatized in various ways by adding some content of formal ontology to predicate logic.In Paul Hovda's classical mereology system CLM,many theorems involving part-whole relation can be proven,which along with axioms express both part-whole and identity relation,and have strong ontological meanings.Therefore,the basic properties of these relations also provide an effective analytical path to philosophical problems involving parthood relations.