This article is an attempt to compare the monadological multitude in Leibniz with Whitehead's view of process and the present. Some contemporary philosophers are considered in the effort to understand the monadologies of these two thinkers.

Mutual critique by scientists and religious believers mostly entails the pruning of untenable religious beliefs by scientists and warnings against scientific minimalism on the part of believers. John F. Haught has been prominent in formulating religious apologetics in response to the challenges posed by evolutionary theory. Haught's work also resonates with a parallel criticism of the conventional scientific metaphysics undergirding neo-Darwinian theory. Contemporary systems ecology seems to indicate that nothing short of a complete reversal of the Enlightenment assumptions about nature (...) is capable of repositioning science to deal adequately with the origin and dynamics of living systems. A process-based alternative metaphysics substantially mitigates several ostensible conflicts between science and religion. (shrink)

Under the general tutelage of Kant, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) introduced American pragmatism to yet another philosophical dialectic: between a neglected transcendental instinct and earthly authorities. The dialectic became Peirce’s response to various evolutionary schemes in the 19th century. Guided by the recollected voices of Socrates, Jesus, St. John, Anselm, and Kant, as well as his own brand of pragmatism, Peirce eventually developed a “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” a century ago, in 1908. Here, Peirce endorsed a more (...) adventurous god than ecclesiastical or theological authorities could imagine, a god of love (agapism) and chance (tychism), but still rife with fallibility. (shrink)

This essay aims to shed new light on the relations between physiology and psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by focusing on the use of unicellular organisms as research objects during that period. Within the frameworks of evolutionism and monism advocated by Ernst Haeckel, protozoa were perceived as objects situated at the borders between organism and cell and individual and society. Scholars such as Max Verworn, Alfred Binet, and Herbert Spencer Jennings were provoked by these organisms to (...) undertake experimental investigations situated between general physiology and psychology that differed from the physiological psychology advocated by Wilhelm Wundt. Some of these investigations sought to locate psychological properties in the molecular structure of protoplasm; others stressed the existence of organic and psychological individuality in protozoa. In the following decades, leading philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Henri Bergson, as well as psychological researchers like Sigmund Freud, integrated the results of these investigations into their reflections on such problems as the nature of the will, the structure of the ego, and the holistic nature of the reactions of organisms to their environment. (shrink)

In this essay both the facts/values and facticity/normativity divides are considered from the perspective of global semiotics and with specific regard to the relationships between legal meaning and spatial scope of law’s experience. Through an examination of the inner and genetic projective significance of categorization, I will analyze the semantic dynamics of the descriptive parts comprising legal sentences in order to show the intermingling of factual and axiological/teleological categorizations in the unfolding of legal experience. Subsequently, I will emphasize the translational (...) and enactive cognitive disposition underlying the construction of the second premise of the so-called judiciary syllogism and thereby the untenability of the idea that ‘law makes its facts.’ Hence, I will try to bring to the fore the cultural pre-assumptions encapsulated in the positivistic and therefore also formalistic or analytical approaches to legal experience and the loss of their inner consistency when legal experience confronts the phases and major changes of global semiotics. Finally, I will strive to relativize the opposition between the positivist and non-positivistic theories of law in view of an understanding of legal experience focused not only, or at least not primarily, on what ‘law is’ but also on ‘how’ it unwinds through, and _in spite of_, environmental and semantic transformations. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to explain why Charles Sanders Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics would not have seemed strange to its original 1890s audience. Building on the pioneering work of Andrew Reynolds, I will excavate the scientific context of Peirce’s Monist articles—in particular “The Law of Mind” and “Man’s Glassy Essence,” both published in 1892—focusing on the relationship between protoplasm, evolution, and consciousness. I argue that Peirce’s discussions should be understood in the context of contemporary evolutionary and physiological speculations, many of (...) which were featured in late- 1880s issues of Open Court, sister journal to the Monist. (shrink)

A priori metaphysics has come under repeated attack by naturalistic metaphysicians, who take their closer connection to the sciences to confer greater epistemic credentials on their theories. But it is hard to see how this can be so unless the problem of theory change that has for so long vexed philosophers of science can be addressed in the context of scientific metaphysics. This paper argues that canonical metaphysical claims, unlike their scientific counterparts, cannot meaningfully be regarded as ‘approximately true,’ and (...) that this means that the epistemic progress that science arguably enjoys through episodes of theory change cannot be expected to transfer to its metaphysics. What the value of engaging in metaphysics of science before the emergence of a final theory becomes correspondingly unclear. (shrink)

En este artículo presento una reconstrucción de la controversia sobre el determinismo en la física a principios del siglo xx. Usaré el modelo de espacios controversiales de Oscar Nudler, pues permite analizar controversias haciendo énfasis en el cambio conceptual. Esto servirá para respaldar la hipótesis de partida: la aceptación del indeterminismo en la física estuvo estrechamente ligado al uso de los métodos estadísticos. La conclusión es que la probabilidad pasó por tres estadios de asimilación: primero, fue una herramienta de cálculo; (...) luego, se convirtió en un elemento indispensable para la interpretación de algunos fenómenos y, finalmente, pasó a concebirse como un elemento constitutivo de la naturaleza. (shrink)

This is a review of the issue of randomness in quantum mechanics, with special emphasis on its ambiguity; for example, randomness has different antipodal relationships to determinism, computability, and compressibility. Following a philosophical discussion of randomness in general, I argue that deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics are strictly speaking incompatible with the Born rule. I also stress the role of outliers, i.e. measurement outcomes that are not 1-random. Although these occur with low probability, their very existence implies that the no-signaling (...) principle used in proofs of randomness of outcomes of quantum-mechanical measurements should be reinterpreted statistically, like the second law of thermodynamics. In three appendices I discuss the Born rule and its status in both single and repeated experiments, review the notion of 1-randomness that in various guises was investigated by Kolmogorov and others and treat Bell’s Theorem and the Free Will Theorem with their implications for randomness. (shrink)

Sequential transformative design of research :224–235, 2015; Groleau et al. in J Mental Health 16:731–741, 2007; Robson and McCartan in Real world research: a resource for users of social research methods in applied settings, Wiley, Chichester, 2016) allows testing a group of theoretical assumptions about the connections of artificial intelligence with culture and education. In the course of research, semiotics ensures the description of self-organizing systems of cultural signs and symbols in terms of artificial intelligence as a special set of (...) algorithms. This approach helps to consider the arguments proposed by Searle :417–457, 1980) against ‘strong’ artificial intelligence. Searle :417–457, 1980) believes that artificial or machine intelligence cannot fully emulate the processes of the human mind. Machine intelligence shows own inevitable weakness. This is non-autonomous tool for computations and data operating. In fact, this tool cannot provide insight into real cognitive conditions. After Lotman and Uspensky, authors expand the meaning of artificial intelligence. The authors identify a cultural type of ‘strong’ artificial intelligence or ‘self-increase of Logos’ in terms by Lotman and Uspensky. The interpretation of human intelligence as imitation of machine intelligence makes possible such immersion of artificial intelligence in culture. The authors reveal a case of self-organizing autonomous generation, encoding, decoding, reception, storage, and transmission of social information in the field of physical training. From the empirical studies it is clear that the organization of collective activities without external control ensures the development of positive emotions and social orientations. Interest in autonomous behavior provides the formation of educational and cognitive motives. As a special set of algorithms, these motives are the most promising and favorable for personal development. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that the pragmatisms of Peirce and James are fundamentally opposed; this view is supported by the fact that in 1905 Peirce deliberately chose a new name for his original doctrine. Yet Peirce and James were not only life-long friends but to a surprising extent were life-long collaborators. It is true that their approaches to philosophy were very different, reflecting their distinct personalities, with James exhibiting a pluralistic and humanistic style as opposed to Peirce the analyst and (...) formalist. James was a popular philosopher and Peirce a philosopher for philosophers. But they followed each other’s work, corresponded about philosophical problems, and deeply influenced each other. Peirce never completely renounced James’s broader pragmatism and tried hard to find common ground, even to some extent reshaping his own views to accommodate James’s. (shrink)

Peirce remarks on several occasions in the 1790s on affinities between his evolutionary metaphysics and Schelling's Idealism, behind which, he avers, lies ‘the monstrous mysticism of the East’. What are these affinities? Why are they affinities with Schelling rather than with Hegel? And what is the mysticism in question? I argue that Schelling, like Peirce but unlike Hegel, is committed to evolution, not only across species boundaries, but also across the boundary between the inorganic and the organic. Moreover, Schelling, like (...) Peirce but unlike Hegel, embeds this account of evolution in an account of the evolution of God through love. The monstrous mysticism of the East, I argue, is Lurianic kabbalah, to which Schelling is demonstrably indebted, and which is committed to an evolutionary theism on which is based, if not an account of natural evolution, an account of reincarnation as a mechanism by which life-forms progress from inorganic to organic bodies as they develop their consciousness. Publicized by.. (shrink)