School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry: Seminar on Temporal Connection Structures. Towards a unified mereotopological theory of time presented by Dr Claudio Mazzola

Event Details

Date:

Friday, 20 March 2015

Time:

3:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Room:

Room E302

UQ Location:

Forgan Smith Building (St Lucia)

URL:

http://www.hapi.uq.edu.au/seminars-and-events

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Temporal structures are typically defined by means of the earlier-later relation, which is generally assumed to be a partial order. This choice has two major disadvantages: firstly, it rules out closed or partially closed temporal structures by fiat; and secondly, it makes the resulting models hardly generalizable to the spatial case, where no analogous relation can be found.

This paper presents an alternative approach to temporal modelling, which aims to overcome such limitations by constructing temporal structures out of the mereological relation of parthood and the topological relation of connection. The resulting theory is then proved to admit of closed models, as well as of linear and branching ones.