Functors for Coalgebras

. Functors preserving weak pullbacks provide the basis for a rich structure theory of coalgebras. We give an easy to use criterion to check whether a functor preserves weak pullbacks. We apply the characterization to the functor F which associates a set X with the set F(X) of all filters on X. It turns out that this functor preserves weak pullbacks, yet does not preserve weak generalized pullbacks. Since topological spaces can be considered as F- coalgebras, in fact they constitute a covariety, we find that the intersection of subcoalgebras need not be a coalgebra, and 1-generated F-coalgebras need not exist. 1. Introduction Coalgebras have been introduced by Aczel and Mendler [AM89] to model various types of transition systems. Reichel [Rei95], and Jacobs [Jac96] show that coalgebras are well suited for modeling object oriented programmming and for program verification. In [Rut96], J.J.M.M. Rutten develops the a fundamental theory of "universal coalgebra" along the lines of univers..