سکوت

Avicenna’s Mereology of the Predicables
Paul Thom
The University of Sydney
Abstract:
The account of genus, species and differentia in Avicenna’ Pointers and Reminders satisfies the core axioms of mereology, but accepts Supplementation for genus and differentia only in a negative sense. Genera of a shared species must be mutually subordinated, and consequently if a species has no constitutive differentia all its parts overlap with its genus. It is not ruled out that a species may have no constitutive differentia. It is not required that the genus be inseparable from the differentia.
There is a different mereology in The Cure, where a broad sense of ‘genus’ is introduced alongside the narrow sense of Pointers. For genera in the broad sense, Supplementation does not hold even in a negative sense: the higher differentia is in some cases a genus to the lower differentia – in which cases the genus and the lower differentia share an intensional part.