On all sides, one hears appeals to objectivity and exhortations to be objective. These admonitions are usually made by scientifically-minded people. Laudable as these appeals may be, they are sometimes so framed as to give the impression that objectivity is a quality or property of events that is immediately recognizable. It is thus, a finality, an ultimate for knowledge, which, when recognized, is taken as given. Ulterior questions, as to what constitutes the objective character of fact, are considered spurious meanderings (...) of minds intent on weaving a cosy scheme of the universe.[...]. (shrink)

This chapter presents a detailed explanation of Peirce’s early and late views on semiotic indeterminacy and then considers how those views might be applied within biosemiotics. Peirce distinguished two different forms of semiotic indeterminacy: generality and vagueness. He defined each in terms of the “right” that indeterminate signs extend, either to their interpreters in the case of generality or to their utterers in the case of vagueness, to further determine their meaning. On Peirce’s view, no sign is absolutely determinate, i.e., (...) every sign is indeterminate to at least some degree and so exhibits some degree of generality or vagueness. If Peirce was right about this, then no instance of biosemiosis is completely determinate—every biosign must be general or vague to some degree. I show that on Peirce’s view, whether a sign is general or vague depends on its immediate object, “the idea which the sign is built upon,” and I explain how Peirce would go about identifying the immediate object of a sign lacking both a minded utterer and a minded interpreter—an identification that must be possible if any biosign is indeterminate. (shrink)

This edited collection highlights the valuable ontological and creative insights gathered from anticipation studies, which orients itself to the future in order to recreate the present. The gathered essays engage with many writers from speculative metaphysics to poetic philosophy, ancient writing systems to the fringes of pataphysics. The book situates itself as a creative intervention in and with various thinkers, designers, artists, scientists and poets to offer insight into ways of anticipating. It brings together philosophical practices for which creativity is (...) both a fundamental area of consideration and a mode of working, a characterization of recent Continental Philosophy which takes a departure from traditional futures studies thinking. This book will be of interest to scholars and research in futures studies, anticipation, philosophy, creative practice and theories about creative practice, as well as the intersections between philosophy, creativity and business. (shrink)

To be successful, collaboration at work requires its participants to have a common sense about what is happening and where things are heading. But how can collaborators have such a sense in common if what is going on continuously changes? This study investigates the joint communicative work participants in collaborative activity do to remain aligned on how things are going and where things are at for the purpose of maintaining a ground in common. Our test case for illustrating this joint (...) work is the fluid and constantly changing world of software development. Our study uses a transactional approach to show how software developers working together continuously make available what they are attuned to, which constitutes their common ground that allows actions and talk to make sense. The common ground enables a common, inherently shared sense of what is happening and how things are going. Rather than having “meaning” in themselves, signifiers (words, gestures, body movements, cursor movements) create and are part of the common ground against which they make sense. Signifiers are motivated by and produce an accented visible that is available to all group members; and this accented visible (including the signs) makes for the common ground. (shrink)

The monad, of which we will speak here, is nothing else than a simple substance, which goes to make up compounds; by simple, we mean without parts. From its origins in antiquity the monad is a concept that has time and again beguiled and attracted philosophers. This thesis will argue that it is a concept that lives on in the work of Bruno Latour and that it continues to have a contemporary relevance, offering a way out of sterile debates rooted (...) in Cartesian dualism – subject/object, interior/exterior, essence/accident, whole/part, mind/body – and an alternative to those traditions which privilege one side of the dualism over the other – positivism on one hand, postmodernism on the other. The present study charts the development of the monad through the modern period, beginning with the work of Gottfried Leibniz and, thereafter, its recurrence in the work of Gabriel Tarde, Alfred North Whitehead, and, finally, Bruno Latour. However, rather than simply sketching a chronological history of the monad this study takes as its starting point Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, or to use Latour’s preferred formulation, Actant Rhizome Ontology. Arguing that Latour’s work is best understood as being another instance of a monadological metaphysics that – contra Graham Harman – owes more to Whitehead than Heidegger, to Tarde than Nietzsche, to Leibniz than Spinoza; the thesis traces the genetic intellectual relations between Latour and his three co-monadologists. Latour himself frequently identifies Leibniz, Tarde and Whitehead as intellectual antecedents in his own work; in the spirit of Latour’s own Actor-Network Theory, this thesis takes a closer look at these claimed chains of association. The first chapter surveys Leibniz’s monadology and argues that, far from being an idealist, Leibniz was committed to a monism that recognized the materiality of simple substance through his corporeal ‘de Volder’ monad. This does not necessarily lead, as argued forcibly Pauline Phemister, to pan-psychism, as Leibniz anticipates William James’ ‘depsychologized’ category of experience with his three level system of bare, soul and spirit monads, where only the spirit monads possess anything resembling a mind; however, it takes Whitehead’s transformation of the monad into the actual entity to complete the break between experience and mind. The second chapter provides a close reading of Gabriel Tarde’s Monadology & Sociology, a work only made available in English in 2012. Latour has played a significant role in the rediscovery of Tarde, claiming his criminologist compatriot as an intellectual forefather; yet throughout the 20th century Tarde’s work quietly influenced continental philosophy through Giles Deleuze who, despite only ever mentioning Tarde parenthetically, borrows Tarde’s very own formulation for the title of Difference et Repetition. The chapter presents Tarde’s work as being an explosion of the Leibnizian monad where the universe is no longer reflected but literally embodied in each individual entity while at the same time diffused through the universe of monads by virtue of relations of possession. Taken together with his theory of repetition and imitation, his privileging of difference over identity, and his philosophy of having – his ‘echontology’ – Tarde’s monadology provides the foundations for a truly relational ontology; foundations which Latour will retrospectively claim for Actor Network Theory. The third chapter considers Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme as presented in Process and Reality. Whitehead resolves the ‘audacious fudge’ committed by Leibniz – the doctrine of pre-established harmony – through a complex and sophisticated realist metaphysical system, one held together by ‘creativity’. Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, his peculiar vocabulary, his reiterative method whereby ideas are presented over and over again in different contexts mirror the very metaphysical scheme he describes. This – along with his insistence on the atomic nature of time and the instantaneous emergence and realization of each ‘actual entity’ – lays the basis for Latour’s democratic ontology which, as well as famously according equality between human and non-human actors affords concepts the same ontological status as the thinker in whose mind they have been formed. The final chapter returns to the work of Latour himself to find the monad reassembled as the ‘actor-network’. Latour’s ontological scheme is discussed in detail with reference to his three antecedents, and his ontology is presented as a reiteration/renewal of the monad; an ontology that itself demands to be renewed each and every time it is deployed. Finally, the thesis argues that Latour pays insufficient heed to Whitehead’s understanding of abstraction with the result that, despite developing the idea himself, Latour fails to fully embrace the ontological reality of the abstract. This in turn leads to his preference for litany over critique and results in a philosophy with a great deal of descriptive power but little or no transformational power. The ‘compositionist’ politics that emerge from Latour’s Actant Rhizome Ontology are ambiguous and utopian, and the thesis concludes by suggesting that more work is required to further Latour’s democratization of the monad, to include its radicalization, in pursuit of a monadology that provides an ontological basis for: …the genuine resolution of the conflict between man [sic] and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. (shrink)

This paper both elaborates and interrogates the transactional model of human experience at the center of Shannon W. Sullivan's Living Across and Through Skins. In particular, it highlights the need to supplement her account with a psychoanalytic reading of our gendered subjectivities. Moreover, it stresses the necessity to focus on such humanly important—and irreducibly somatic—phenomena as grief and eros.

Zusammenfassung Ein wohlbekannter kritischer Einwand gegen jene unter uns, die versuchen, kulturelle Unterschiede im Dienste verantwortungsvoller kultureller Vergleiche hervorzuheben, richtet sich darauf, dass wir uns dabei der Essentialisierung genau dieser Kulturen schuldig machen. Essentialismus ist dabei als eine Verallgemeinerung zu verstehen, die besagt, dass bestimmte Eigenschaften einer gegebenen Bevölkerung innerhalb dieser Kultur universell und zugleich ihr eigentümlich sind, demnach nicht von kontingenten Kontexten abhängen und dass wiederum ebendiese Eigenschaften Relativismus und Inkommensurabilität unter den Kulturen bedingen. In diesem Essay möchte ich (...) den Widerstand einiger zeitgenössischer Forscher anfechten, die es ablehnen, grobe kulturelle Verallgemeinerungen als notwendig zu akzeptieren, wenn es darum geht, die reichhaltigen Differenzen, die zwischen Traditionen walten, zu respektieren und so weit als möglich einen verarmenden Kulturreduktionismus zu vermeiden. Ich würde voraussetzen, dass die Wipfel eines kontinuierlich emergierenden kulturellen Vokabulars selbst in einem tiefen und relativ stabilen Grund aus unbenannten Annahmen wurzeln, die sich über Generationen in der Sprache, den Gebräuchen und den Lebensformen einer lebendigen Tradition abgelagert haben. Und weiter möchte ich argumentieren, dass das Versäumnis, den fundamentalen Charakter kultureller Differenzen als eine ursprüngliche Absicherung gegen die Vergehen des „Essentialismus“ anzuerkennen, selbst nicht harmlos ist. Tatsächlich bewirkt diese Ablehnung kultureller Verallgemeinerungen ironischerweise eine unkritische Essentialisierung der je eigenen kulturellen Annahmen, so dass sich ebendiese Voraussetzungen in die Interpretationen der Lebens- und Denkweisen anderer Traditionen einschleichen. (shrink)

Some Lessons in Metaphysics is José Ortega y Gasset’s testament to metaphysics in relation to existential longing. While Ortega writes about metaphysics in other of his works, it is in Some Lessons in Metaphysics that he defines metaphysics as springing from man’s immediate necessity to find coherence in individual human existence, which man experiences as a «shipwrecked» being in the cosmos. Metaphysical reflection aims to establish coherence and meaning in human life. As a result of existential inquietude, Ortega argues that (...) metaphysics is the cornerstone of thoughtful philosophical reflection for people who «need it». (shrink)

Al considerar el tratamiento que realiza Juan David García Bacca de Process and Reality de Alfred North Whitehead, el articulo busca apreciar la afinidad entre ambos autores en su caracterización de las deficiencias de la ontología clásica y en su invención de conceptos para un nuevo enfoque de la ontología; a saber, una metafísica de la creación y la novedad.

This essay sets forth the decisive notions and postulates of process philosophy in Process Philosophy and Social Thought, edited by John B. Cobb, Jr. and W. Widick Schroeder. After commenting on the circumstances in which process philosophy came to be a major option among philosophical theologians, I provide some amplification of those notions and postulates. Then, selecting material from the eighteen articles in the volume, I offer several critical assessments of the process viewpoint and its relation to science and to (...) the contemporary call for liberation. (shrink)

Volume 31, Issue 4, December 2017, Page 429-432.

Volume 31, Issue 4, December 2017, Page 427-429.

The debate over scientific realism, simply put, is a debate over what we can and should believe about reality once we've critically assessed all the available arguments and empirical evidence. Thinking earnestly about the merits of scientific realism as a philosophical thesis requires navigating contentious historiographical issues, being familiar with the technical details of various scientific theories, and addressing disparate philosophical problems spanning aesthetics, metaphysics, epistemology, and beyond. This issue of Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of (...) Science aims to make participating in the scientific realism debate easier for both newcomers and veterans, collecting over twenty invited and peer-reviewed papers under the title "The Future of the Scientific Realism Debate: Contemporary Issues Concerning Scientific Realism.". (shrink)