The Ontological Nature of Part-Whole Oscillations: An Interdisciplinary Determination

The nature of structures comprising part-whole relations belongs to the oldest, most fundamental and still discussed questions of philosophy. Unlike many former approaches, which either give priority to the parts or to the whole of such structures, the present book is an ontological, psychological, and cognitive-linguistic investigation that suggests an alternative to a hierarchical conception of parts and whole with a one-sided dependency relation. This alternative is called ‘part-whole-oscillation’ and is developed on a formal as well as empirical basis.