Kathrin Koslicki offers an analysis of ordinary materials objects, those material objects to which we take ourselves to be committed in ordinary, scientifically informed discourse. She focuses particularly on the question of how the parts of such objects are related to the wholes which they compose. Many philosophers today find themselves in the grip of an exceedingly deflationary conception of what it means to be an object. According to this conception, any plurality of objects, no matter how disparate or gerrymandered, itself composes an object, even if the objects in question fail to exhibit interesting similarities, internal unity, cohesion, or causl interaction amongst each other. This commitment to initially counterintuitive objects follows from the belief that no principled set of criteria is available by means of which to distinguish intuitively gerrymandered objects from commonsensical ones; the project of this book is to persuade the reader that systematic principles can be found by means of which composition can be restricted, and hence that we need not embrace this deflationary approach to the question of what it means to be an object. To this end, a more full-blooded neo-Aristotelian account of parthood and composition is developed according to which objects are structured wholes: it is integral to the existence and identity of an object, on this conception, that its parts exhibit a certain manner of arrangement. This structure-based conception of parthood and composition is explored in detail, along with some of its historical precursors as well as some of its contemporary competitors.

The objects we encounter in ordinary life and scientific practice - cars, people, houses, molecules, etc. - have long been a fruitful source of perplexity for metaphysicians. This title gives an analysis of those material objects to which we take ourselves to be committed in our ordinary, scientifically informed discourse.

Tim Crane addresses the ancient question of how it is possible to think about what does not exist. He argues that the representation of the non-existent is a pervasive feature of our thought about the world, and that to understand thought's representational power ('intentionality') we need to understand the representation of the non-existent.

By developing object calculi in which objects are treated as primitives, the authors are able to explain both the semantics of objects and their typing rules, and also demonstrate how to develop all of the most important concepts of object-oriented programming languages: self, dynamic dispatch, classes, inheritance, protected and private methods, prototyping, subtyping, covariance and contravariance, and method specialization. An innovative and important approach to the subject for researchers and graduates.

This book is about our ordinary concept of matter in the form of enduring continuants and the processes in which they are involved in the macroscopic realm. It emphasises what science rather than philosophical intuition tells us about the world, and chemistry rather than the physics that is more usually encountered in philosophical discussions. The central chapters dealing with the nature of matter pursue key steps in the historical development of scientific conceptions of chemical substance. Like many contemporary discussions of material objects, it relies heavily on mereology. The classical principles are applied to the mereological structure of regions of space, intervals of time, processes and quantities of matter. Quantities of matter, which don’t gain or lose parts over time, are distinguished from individuals, which are typically constituted of different quantities of matter at different times. The proper treatment of the temporal aspect of the features of material objects is a central issue in this book, which is addressed by investigating the conditions governing the application of predicates relating time and other entities. Of particular interest here are relations between quantities of matter and times expressing substance kind, phase and mixture. Modal aspects of these features are taken up in the final chapter.

A cross-linguistic study of how objects are affected by information structure.

We conceived the idea for this book after teaching a graduate seminar on 'Habitat Complexity' at The University of South Florida. Discussions during the seminar led us to conclude that similar goals were to be found in studies of the topic that spanned the breadth of ecological research. Yet, the exact meaning of 'habitat structure', and the way in which it was measured, seemed to differ widely among subdisciplines. Our own research, which involves several sorts of ecology, convinced us that the differences among subdisciplines were indeed real ones, and that they did inhibit communica tion. We decided that interchange of ideas among researchers working in marine ecology, plant-animal interactions, physiological ecology, and other more-or-less independent fields would be worthwhile, in that it might lead to useful generalizations about 'habitat structure'. To foster this interchange of ideas. we organized a symposium to attract researchers working with a wide variety of organisms living in many habitats, but united in their interest in the topic of 'habitat structure'. The symposium was held at The University of South Florida's Chinsegut Hill Conference Center, in May. 1988. We asked participants to think about 'habitat structure' in new ways; to synthesize important, but fragmented, information; and. perhaps. to consider ways of translating ideas across systems. The chapters contained in this book reflect the participants' attempts to do so. The book is divided into four parts, by major themes that we have found useful categorizations.

This edited collection casts light on central issues within contemporary philosophy of mathematics such as the realism/anti-realism dispute; the relationship between logic and metaphysics; and the question of whether mathematics is a science of objects or structures. The discussions offered in the papers involve an in-depth investigation of, among other things, the notions of mathematical truth, proof, and grounding; and, often, a special emphasis is placed on considerations relating to mathematical practice. A distinguishing feature of the book is the multicultural nature of the community that has produced it. Philosophers, logicians, and mathematicians have all contributed high-quality articles which will prove valuable to researchers and students alike.

"This work proposes a Multibody Structure from Motion (MSfM) algorithm for moving object reconstruction that incorporates instance-aware semantic segmentation and multiple view geometry methods. The MSfM pipeline tracks two-dimensional object shapes on pixel level to determine object specific feature correspondences, in order to reconstruct 3D object shapes as well as 3D object motion trajectories" -- Publicaciones de Arquitectura y Arte.

'Bertoloni Meli reexamines such major texts as Galileo's Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Descartes' Principles of Philosophy, and Newton's Principia, and in them finds a reliance on objects that has escaped proper understanding. From Pappus of Alexandria to Guidobaldo dal Monte, Bertoloni Meli sees significant developments in the history of mechanical experimentation, all of them crucial for understanding Galileo. Bertoloni Meli uses similarities and tensions between dal Monte and Galileo as a springboard for exploring the revolutionary nature of seventeenth-century mechanics.' (Back cover)