Hereditary set

For example, it is vacuously true that the empty set is a hereditary set, and thus the set containing only the empty set is a hereditary set. Similarly, a set that contains two elements: the empty set and the set that contains only the empty set, is a hereditary set.

In formulations of set theory that are intended to be interpreted in the von Neumann universe or to express the content of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, all sets are hereditary, because the only sort of object that is even a candidate to be an element of a set is another set. Thus the notion of hereditary set is interesting only in a context in which there may be urelements.

The inductive definition of hereditary sets presupposes that set membership is well-founded (i.e., the axiom of regularity), otherwise the recurrence may not have a unique solution. However, it can be restated non-inductively as follows: a set is hereditary if and only if its transitive closure contains only sets. In this way the concept of hereditary sets can also be extended to non-well-founded set theories in which sets can be members of themselves. For example, a set that contains only itself is a hereditary set.