{"id":14908,"date":"2025-12-12T05:38:32","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T05:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/event\/unity-seminar-christopher-masterman-how-to-explain-composition\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T05:53:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T05:53:10","slug":"unity-seminar-christopher-masterman-how-to-explain-composition","status":"publish","type":"tribe_events","link":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/event\/unity-seminar-christopher-masterman-how-to-explain-composition\/","title":{"rendered":"Unity Seminar: Christopher Masterman &#8220;How to Explain Composition&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Abstract: It is commonplace to think that composition is explained by relations&#8212;what I call <i>the relational idea<\/i>. Many argue that taking this seriously requires rejecting the idea that classical mereology&#8212;the most well-known formal theory of parthood&#8212;tells us anything important about the nature of composites. In this paper, I have two aims. First, I want to explore the extent to which we can take the relational idea seriously without abandoning classical mereology completely. Second, I want to motivate an interest in a neglected question about composition, which asks <i>how<\/i> relations figure in explanations of composition. I argue that by taking this question seriously, we can better understand the extent to which the relational idea is in tension with classical mereology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Abstract: It is commonplace to think that composition is explained by relations&#8212;what I call the relational idea. Many argue that taking this seriously requires rejecting the idea that classical mereology&#8212;the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","_tribe_events_is_hybrid":"","_tribe_events_is_virtual":"","_tribe_events_virtual_video_source":"","_tribe_events_virtual_embed_video":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button_text":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_at":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_to":[],"_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_event":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_views":"","_tribe_events_virtual_url":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[33],"class_list":["post-14908","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","hentry","tribe_events_cat-unity-seminar","cat_unity-seminar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/14908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/tribe_events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/14908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14914,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/14908\/revisions\/14914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14908"},{"taxonomy":"tribe_events_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events_cat?post=14908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}