Abstract
A recurrent and striking feature of reflection on wholes and parts, both in ancient and modern times, is the attempt to draw a distinction between what might be described as higher-grade and lower-grade wholes. Perhaps the earliest example of such a distinction is that standing at the source of the present work, namely, Plato’s distinction in Theaetetus between a complex which is different from all its elements and a complex which is identical to them. A more familiar ancient example is found in Aristotle’s distinction between substances and heaps. In early modem times, Leibniz distinguishes similarly between monads and monadic aggregates.1 In the 19th and early 20th centuries, two notions in particular developed into central representatives of this perennial attempt to explicate a higher-grade type of whole: The notion of an organic whole, and the notion of a Gestalt.2 The latter two are fairly described as the main traditional modem notions of higher-grade wholes.
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References
See Plato, Theaetetus 201c ff.; Aristotle, Metaphysics 1041b11–31; Rescher 1967, Chs. 7 and 9 (regarding monads and monadic aggregates).
See Husserl 1901, Investigation III, section 22; Russell 1903, 139; Nagel 1952 (regarding dynamic and functional wholes; Simons 1987, Ch.9; Lowe 1989, Ch. 6.
Moore speaks disapprovingly of the widespread, and often very vague, use of the term ‘organic whole’ in Moore 1903, 27ff. See also Benziger 1951.
See Benziger 1951; Moore 1903, 27ff.; Shusterman 1988. The view that Aristotle’s substances should be understood as organic wholes can be found in Bogaard 1979, 12, and similarly in Ross 1924, 219.
See Oelschlaeger 1991, 97–98.
Benziger 1951, 33.
Benziger notes Vol. XXX, 9 of Goethes Sämtliche Werke,Jubiläumsausgabe, Stuttgart, 1902–7, as the source for this quotation.
See Wartenberg 1993, 102ff., and esp. 108.
Ehrenfels 1890. Ehrenfels takes his views to be a development of some observations made by Mach. Simons, 1987, 356, claims that “the same concept was elaborated and exploited at the time by two other former students of Brentano, Meinong and Husserl, who used the terms ‘founded content’ and ‘figural moment’ respectively for what Ehrenfels called a ‘Gestalt-quality’‘. For an illuminating account of the development of the notion of a Gestalt, see Smith 1988, 11–81; for a more detailed discussion of Ehrenfels, see Smith 1994, Chs. 8 and 9.
For a brief survey of ways in which the notion of a Gestalt has featured in a variety of scientific fields, see Palmer and Rock 1990.
See Grelling and Oppenheim 1938. See also Simons 1987, 354–360.
See, for example, the discussion in Köhler 1929, Ch. 4.
See Grossmann 1983, 242.
See Grossmann 1983, 241. On the plausibility of interpreting Ehrenfels’ “sums” as classes, see also Nagel 1952, 143.
Simons does however take it that the notion of a Gestalt, as developed, for example, by Köhler, is valuable in helping to direct us to the important problem, ‘what makes something a natural (or other) complex, which entails giving a schematic account of the constitutive interrelations of parts characteristic of such complexes.’ See Simons 1987, 324–6.
See Moore 1903, 27–36.
Moore 1903, 31.
Moore 1903, 31.
Moore 1903, 31; see also 29.
See Nagel 1952; Grossmann 1983, Ch.5; Hartshorn 1942; Wartenberg 1993, Sec.II; Shusterman 1988; Köhler 1929, esp. Ch. 4.
Moore 1903, 32.
See Köhler 1929, Ch. 4, esp. 111–120; See also Nagel 1952, 147, making reference (notes 6 and 7) to Wertheimer, Koffka and Lewin. An interesting formal account of the notion of a functional whole is proposed by Grelling, in Grelling 1987, and discussed in Simons 1987, 342ff.
Hartshorn 1942, 127.
Moore 1903, 33.
Moore 1903, 33.
Shusterman 1988, 382 (italics mine).
See, in this connection, Simons’ remarks (in Simons 1987, 295) on the fuzzy boundary between causal and ontological dependence.
See Simons 1987, 290–323. Husserl’s theory is found chiefly in the Logical Investigations, Investigation m. For treatments of Husserl’s theory that are alternative to Simons’, see Fine 1995.
The distinction between determinables and determinates is due to W. E. Johnson (see Johnson 1921, 174). See also Rosenberg 1995; Simons 1987, 343f.
The view that wholes may have emergent properties is particularly associated with Samuel Alexander and with C. Lloyd Morgan, in whose views the notion played a central role. Kim mentions in addition G. H. Lewes and C. D. Broad as representatives of emergentist thought. See Kim 1993, 134.
Kim 1993, 134.
See Alexander 1927, Vol. 2, 5–6 (quoted in Kim 1993, 345 ).
Lloyd Morgan 1923, 35 (quoted in Kim 1993, 345).
See Kim 1993, 344ff.
I do not go into the question what this assumption precisely amounts to. For the emergentists, at any rate, one of its principle expressions was the rejection of Cartesian minds, as well as of Driesch’s notion of an entelechy and Bergson’s élan vital. For a brief discussion of the latter two notions, see Feldman 1995.
Various aspects of reduction and supervenience are discussed in Kim 1993 (see Chs. 4 and 8 in particular).
Grossmann suggests an understanding of the claim in this way, when he says that ‘A structure… is also more than the class of its parts in that it may have properties which none of its parts has. There are, as it is sometimes put, emergent properties.’ (Grossmann 1983, 246), or when he says that a certain ‘spatial figure has a certain property, its shape, which none of its part has’, in virtue of which he takes the shape to be an emergent property (See Grossmann 1983, 249).
Grossmann’s use of ‘sum’ seems not to be consistent, though. In the first paragraph of Sec. 101 (Grossmann 1983, 242) he adds that the whole is ‘more… than the sum of its nonrelational and relational parts’, and provides an argument for this claim which would be both superfluous and misleading had he used ‘sum’ here in the sense of ‘class’.
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Meirav, A. (2003). Traditional Higher-grade Wholes as Sums. In: Wholes, Sums and Unities. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 97. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0209-6_6
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