There seems to be some movement towards an ontological turn in the philosophy of education. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute this current debate by framing what the ontology for the philosophy of education could be and what it could offer. Some current writings in this movement will shortly reviewed and criticized because of too narrow and shallow understanding of ontology and missing ontological seriousness. Then the task of ontology will be concretized to the (...) solving of some fundamental basic problems of philosophy of education. Solution to these problems will be sketched by introducing an alternative ontological theory developed originally by C. B Martin. This solution is closely connected to the theme of this book because it is essentially the ontology of interaction. Finally it will be noted that one cannot draw too straight practical conclusions from an ontological theory but in addition at least semiotic analysis of human interaction is needed. (shrink)

Both Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl addressed sound while trying to explain the inner consciousness of time and gave to it the status of a supporting example. Although their inquiries were not aimed at clarifying in detail the nature of the auditory experience or sounds themselves, they made some interesting observations that can contribute to the current philosophical discussion on sounds. On the other hand, in analytic philosophy, while inquiring the nature of sounds, their location, auditory experience or the audible (...) qualities and so on, the representatives of that trend of thought have remained silent about the depiction of sound and the auditory phenomena in the phenomenological tradition. The paper’s intention is to relate both endeavours, yet the perspective carried out is that of analytic philosophy and, thus, I pay special attention to conceptual analysis as a methodological framework. In this sense, I first explain what sound ontology is in the context of analytic philosophy and the views that it encompasses— namely, the Property View (PV), the Wave View (WV) and the Event View (EV)—. Secondly, I address the problems it entails, emphasising that of sound individuation. In a third section, I propose the possibly controversial conjunction of a “Brentano-Husserl Analysis of the Consciousness of Time” (for short “Brentano-Husserl analysis”) and outline the commonalities of both authors, without ignoring its discrepancies. My main focus is Husserl’s 1905 Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins. While addressing the Brentano-Husserl analysis, I elaborate on the problem of temporal and spatial extension (Raumlichkeit and Zeitlichkeit, respectively) of both consciousness and sound. Such comparison is a key one, since after these two developments, one can notice some theoretical movements concerning the shift of attention from sounds to the unity of consciousness, and how they mirror each other. After examining the controversial claims concerning the temporal and spatial extension of both consciousness and sound, I argue in the concluding paragraphs that while considering the accounts of sound ontology, the Brentano-Husserl analysis would probably endorse a Property View and that this could have interesting consequences for the issue of Sound Individuation. (shrink)

Consider the most recent Yale-Harvard football game, an event which occurred on 11/20/21 in New Haven, lasting about three hours. This event, like many college football games before, was composed of four quarters, each of which was composed of possessions, each of which was composed of downs, each of which was composed of particular movements, tackles and decisions of the individual players. Each of these parts of the game was itself an event, occurring in a smaller region of space and (...) time than the game itself. Each of these events involved material objects like players, helmets, jerseys, etc. Each had causes and effects, and each instantiated qualitative properties, such as being a kickoff or being a tackle. These are paradigmatic examples of events. Events are many and varied; some other examples include the melting of an ice cube, the birth of a horse, the supernova of a star, the presidential election campaign and a winter snowstorm. Each of these took place in a certain region of spacetime, had other events as parts, involved certain objects, had causes and effects, and instantiated properties. Objects and their properties are not the only furniture in the world. Events are a crucial part of our manifest and scientific pictures of the world. We go to football games, think about and participate in elections, eagerly anticipate the birth of a child, and quantify over and explain such things in our scientific theories. Yet, events have received insufficient attention from metaphysicians. Some philosophers have been skeptical of events, holding that talk of events can be paraphrased away, or that events can be reduced to objects and properties.1 When philosophers have accepted events, their motivations have usually been extrinsic—events are introduced in order to play a role in a larger philosophical system. This tendency has led philosophers to miss a number of interesting features of events. In this paper, I wish to reverse that trend by developing an ontology of events which is not an afterthought with respect to another philosophical project. In so doing, I will provide answers to substantive metaphysical questions about the relations in which events stand and their identity conditions. In the next section, I identify four basic relations in which events stand: parthood, involvement, causation and instantiation, focusing in particular on involvement. Then, I argue that events are individuated by their involvements, and criticize the identity conditions which have been offered by other philosophers, notably Quine, Davidson and Kim. I then conclude. (shrink)

There is a growing movement towards construing some classic debates in ontology as meaningless, either because the answers seem obvious or the debates seem intractable. In this paper, I respond to this movement. The response has three components: First, the members of the two sides of the ontological debates that dismissivists have targeted are using different quantifiers. Second, the austere ontologist is using a more fundamental quantifier than her opponent. Third, the austere ontologist’s more fundamental quantifier is (...) a restriction of her opponent’s quantifier. This response takes seriously the intuition that there is something wrong with the ontological disputes, but does not entail dismissivism. (shrink)

Abstract: The following is an outline of an emerging foundation for science that begins to explain living forms and their patterns of movement beyond the sphere of mechanistic interactions. Employing an event ontology based on a convergence of quantum physics and Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, coupled with the controversial yet promising theory of formative causation, this development will explore possible influences on the outcomes of events beyond any combination of external forces, laws of Nature, and chance. If it (...) turns out there are no such additional influences--beyond mechanistic causes--it is difficult to see how agency or free will could exist. Assuming agency exists, as Whitehead apparently does, while committing to an event ontology in which process is fundamental leads to interesting questions about the natures of any entities that might participate in events. Furthermore, what might the purposes and agendas of such entities be based upon, beyond memory traces or DNA code? This ontological model, recognizing processes as fundamental, leads to a revised cosmology where the trajectory of a series of events may be due to more than rearrangement of material bits according to external forces and where goal-directed, recurring processes and the emergence of mind are not so surprising. Just as special relativity reduces to classical treatment when speeds slow down, this scientific model for a living world reduces to mechanistic materialism whenever conditions are more limited. Though this development is based on a philosophy of process, there are some dissimilarities with respect to Whitehead’s particular version. (shrink)

The main idea of this book (in Arabic) is that the dichotomy of intention/behavior is about as viable as the mind/body dichotomy, which is to say it is not at all viable. An approach to the problem of knowledge of other minds and intersubjectivity via a discussion of the ontology of human action, which must be viewed as an original unity, not a combination of two really distinct things, namely, intention and bodily movement.

Cogitation described as calculation, the living being described as a machine, cognitive functions considered as algorithmic sequences and the ‘mechanization’ of the subjective were the theoretical elements that late heideggerian anti–humanism, especially in France was able to utilize[1], even more so, after the second cybernetics or post-cybernetics movement of the late ‘60s introduced the concepts of the autopoietic and the allopoietic automata[2]. Recently, neurologists pose claims on the traditional epistemological field of philosophy, proceeding from this ontological decision, the (...) equation of human cognition to cybernetic systems. -/- The emergence of the world-wide-web in the 1990s and the global expansion of the internet during the first decades of the 21st century indicate the fallacies of the cybernetics programme to mechanize the mind. We stand witnesses to a semantic colonization of the cybernetic system, a social imaginary creation and expansion within the digital ensemblistic – identitarian organization that cannot be described by mechanical or cybernetic terms. Paradoxically, cyberspace, as a new being, a form of alterity, seems to both exacerbate and capsize the polarization between the operational and the symbolic. The creation of the internet might be more than an epistemological revolution, to use the terminology of Thomas Kuhn. It might be an ontological revolution. -/- I will try to demonstrate that the emergence of the Internet refutes any such claims, since its context and utility can only be described by means of a social epistemology based on the understanding of social significances as continuous creations of an anonymous social imaginary proposed by Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997). I will try to explore some social-semantic aspects of the cyberspace as a nexus of social representations of the individual identity that forms a new sphere of being, where the subjective and the objective merge in a virtual subjective objectivity with unique epistemological attributes and possibilities. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to develop an account of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical project as a departure from ontology and ontological thinking. Ontology can be broadly understood as the study of being or the study of the meaning of being. Traditional ontology examines the nature of being while more contemporary philosophy often understands being itself as becoming or a process. In this respect, Deleuze has often been interpreted as a process or differential ontologist. This project departs from that (...) interpretation by arguing for a non-ontological Deleuze. The dissertation is broken into three papers where each presents a different account of what I call the non-ontological Deleuze through his work on the major pre-Kantian modern philosophers: David Hume, Benedict Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz. Each paper then uses the non-ontological Deleuze to engage with a related movement in post-Deleuzian Continental Philosophy. The first paper focuses on Deleuze’s early work on Hume to argue for a re-reading of the history of modern philosophy with a basis in transcendental empiricism rather than Kantian transcendental idealism. This paper uses Deleuze’s reading of Hume to respond to and critique the Speculative Realist movement’s charge that post-Kantian philosophy suffers from what they call correlationism. The second paper uses Deleuze’s work on Spinoza to argue for what the former calls ethology as a replacement for ontology. The claim here is that we should think of things in terms of what they do rather than what they are: in terms of their motion and affects rather than their being. There I contrast my reading of Deleuze’s Spinoza with those thinkers who have recently used that work to develop what is often referred to as New Materialism. The final paper argues that understanding things in terms of what they can do requires a nomadology, which is Deleuze’s play on Leibniz’s monadology. This paper uses Deleuze’s nomadology to create a dialogue with the emerging literature on Critical Posthumanism and subjectivity that has been influenced by Deleuze to suggest that posthumanist subjectivity should be understood in non-ontological terms. (shrink)

Susan Stebbing’s work on incomplete symbols and analysis was instrumental in clarifying, sharpening, and improving the project of logical constructions which was pivotal to early analytic philosophy. She dispelled use-mention confusions by restricting the term ‘incomplete symbol’ to expressions eliminable through analysis, rather than those expressions’ purported referents, and distinguished linguistic analysis from analysis of facts. In this paper I explore Stebbing’s role in analytic philosophy’s development from anti-holism, presupposing that analysis terminates in simples, to the more holist or foundherentist (...) analytic philosophy of the later 20th century. I read Stebbing as a transitional figure who made room for more holist analytic movements, e.g., applications of incomplete symbol theory to Quinean ontological commitment. Stebbing, I argue, is part of a historical narrative which starts with the holism of Bradley, an early influence on her, to which Moore and Russell’s logical analysis was a response. They countered Bradley’s holist reservations about facts with the view that the world is built up out of individually knowable simples. Stebbing, a more subtle and sympathetic reader of the British idealists, defends analysis, but with important refinements and caveats which prepared the way for a return to foundherentism and holism within analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This essay developed out of the final chapter of The Sympathy of Things where I related beauty to a notion of radical generosity. Tracing generosity back to the ancient Greeks brought me to a whole new world of grace and “charis”, the etymological root of words like charisma and charity. The essay establishes a fundamental connection between grace and beauty, deeply interrelating movement and object. In the second part the argument develops into an ontology based on the concept of (...) radiance, which we encounter in Aglaia, the first of the Three Graces, in fireworks, jewelry, makeup and in fashion, but also in acts of bravery, kindness and friendship. Radiance is subsequently defined as “thickened appearance”, where phenomenology and ontology become continuous in a “presence beyond the present”. (shrink)

This dissertation is a study of the relationship between dunamis and energeia in Aristotle’s ontology. Throughout his writings, Aristotle employs these terms to uncover what I call a proto-phenomenological description of the different ways of being. While contemporary scholarship has suggested the significance of dunamis and energeia for Aristotle’s understanding of being, the relationship between these terms has often been interpreted as mutually exclusive. Accordingly, dunamis would be understood as subordinate to energeia, which would function as the sole primary term (...) of Aristotle’s ontology. I argue that it is a mistake to consider dunamis and energeia as non-reciprocal and subordinate terms. Furthermore, I suggest that this mistake often leads to an underestimation of the dynamic character of Aristotle’s proto-phenomenological account of being. To recover this dimension of Aristotle’s thinking, I claim that dunamis and energeia ought to be understood as reciprocal and co-constitutive terms characterized by a constant and dynamic interrelation. To defend this interpretation, I turn to Aristotle’s conceptions of nature, movement, and soul as discussed in the Metaphysics, Physics, and De Anima. I argue that each of these key terms provide a concrete illustration of how dunamis and energeia function as co-constitutive principles for the manifestation of the being of natural beings. I propose that this proto-phenomenological approach to being remains Aristotle’s most significant and enduring contribution to Western ontology. (shrink)

Local food projects are steadily becoming a part of contemporary food systems and take on many forms. They are typically analyzed using an ethical, or sociopolitical, lens. Food focused initiatives can be understood as strategies to achieve ethical change in food systems and, as such, ethics play a guiding role. But local food is also a social movement and, thus social and political theories provide unique insights during analysis. This paper begins with the position that ontology should play a (...) more prominent part in the analysis of local food movements, as this lens could provide unique insights into basic commitments guiding such initiatives. The paper presents the argument that ontological analyses are imperative for fully understanding local food movements. It then provides an overview of the justice frameworks and ontological orientations that guide two dominant types of initiatives: Those committed to increasing food security and those committed to food sovereignty. The paper ends with the argument that food sovereignty projects are revolutionary, not only because they challenge us to change industrial food practices, but also because they are built on a radical new political ontology, and co-constitutive food-focused orientation, that forms the foundation for alternative social and political structures. (shrink)

I analyze Deleuze’s concept of temporality in terms of its ontology and axiological (political and aesthetic) aspects. For Deleuze, the concept of temporality is non-monolithic, in the senses that it is modified throughout his works — the monographs, lectures, and those works that were co-authored with Félix Guattari — and that it is developed through reference to a dizzying array of concepts, thinkers, artistic works, and social phenomena. -/- I observe that Deleuze’s concept of temporality involves a complex ontology of (...) difference, which I elaborate through reference to Deleuze’s analyses of Ancient Greek and Stoic conceptualizations of time. From Plato through to Chrysippus, temporality gradually comes to be identified as a form that comprehends the variation of particulars. Deleuze modifies the ancients’ concept of time to suggest that time obtains as a form of ceaseless ontological variation. Through reference to Deleuze’s reading of Gilbert Simondon, I further suggest that Deleuze tends to conceive of temporality as an ontogenetic force which participates in the complex process of individuation. -/- A standout feature of this dissertation involves an analysis of how Deleuze’s concept of temporality is modified in his works on cinema. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, temporality comes to be characterized as something other than the measure of the movement of existents. In his detailed analyses of Bergson — in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, and Bergsonism — Deleuze suggests that time involves an actualization of aspects of a virtual past as contemporaneous with the lived present. While not an outright denial of the relation of temporal succession, Deleuze’s claim implies a diminishment of this relation’s significance in an adequate elaboration of the nature of temporality. -/- Further, I observe —through reference to Deleuze’s readings of Marx, Kierkegaard, and Spinoza — that (the explicitly temporal) change of societal forms of economic organization is non-reducible to that suggested by linear evolution. The claim is that putatively discrete modes of economic organization do not enjoy temporal displacement with respect to one another. This suggests that linear evolutionary models of societal development are inadequate. This further implies that temporality is non-reducible to the relation of temporal succession. In concrete terms, societal change is characterized as immanent temporal variation. -/- Taken together, these analyses yield the conclusion that Deleuze tends to conceive of the nature of temporality as involving the ongoing realization of multiple — non-identical, sometimes contrary — aspects of a stochastic process of creation that is expressed in ontogenetic circumstances, social evolution, literary works, and filmic works. (shrink)

This paper investigates the connection between temporal attitudes (attitudes characterised by a concern (or lack thereof) about future and past events), beliefs about temporal ontology (beliefs about the existence of future and past events) and temporal preferences (preferences regarding where in time events are located). Our aim is to probe the connection between these preferences, attitudes, and beliefs, in order to better evaluate the normative status of these preferences. We investigate the hypothesis that there is a three-way association between (a) (...) being present-biased (that is, preferring that positive events are located in the present, and negative events are located in the non-present), (b) believing that past and future events do not exist and (c) tending to have present-focused rather than non-present-focused temporal attitudes. We find no such association. This suggests that insofar as temporal preferences and temporal attitudes are connected to the ways we represent time, they are not connected to the ways we represent temporal ontology; rather, they are more likely connected to the ways we represent relative movement in, or of, time. This has important consequences for, first, explaining why we exhibit these preferences and, second, for their normative evaluation. (shrink)

Nel 1956, in piena guerra fredda, una conferenza di scienziati al Dartmouth College negli Stati Uniti annunciò il lancio di un audace progetto scientifico, l’Intelligenza Artificiale (I.A.). Dopo l’iniziale fallimento degli sforzi della “Hard AI” di produrre un’intelligenza simile a quella umana, alla fine del XX secolo è emerso il movimento della “Soft AI”. Invece di essere orientato a imitare il comportamento umano in relazione a compiti specifici, ha preferito cercare modi alternativi di eseguire i compiti basati sulle particolari funzioni (...) e strutture della macchina. Il fattore decisivo è stata la combinazione della tecnologia di apprendimento automatico con le comunicazioni digitali online, l’incontro tra l’IA e Internet. Le applicazioni dell’IA “soft” sono quelle che vediamo nel mondo dei dispositivi automatici “intelligenti” che informano la nostra vita sociale digitale. Nel seguente articolo mi concentrerò su una particolare applicazione dell’IA per le discussioni online con utenti umani, ChatGPT, per mostrare le implicazioni della tecnologia digitale online nelle modalità storico-sociali dell’esistenza umana. ChatGPT è un’applicazione che combina l’IA con Internet, le possibilità della corrispondenza tra macchine e le potenzialità della tele-comunicazione umana. Il mio approccio si concentra sulle implicazioni fenomenologiche e storico-sociali della proliferazione della tecnologia AI per quanto riguarda la coscienza e la socialità umana. -/- Abstract (english) -/- In 1956, amidst the Cold War, a conference of scientists at Dartmouth College in the United States announced the launch of a bold, scientific project, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). After the initial failure of “Hard AI” efforts to produce a human-like intelligence, the “Soft AI” movement emerged in the late 20th century. Instead of being oriented towards imitating human behaviour concerning specific tasks, it preferred to seek alternative ways of performing tasks based on the particular functions and structures of the machine. The decisive factor was the combination of Machine Learning technology with Digital Online Communications, the meeting between AI and the Internet. The applications of “Soft” AI are those we see in the world of “smart”, “intelligent” automatic devices that inform our digital social life. In the following article, I will focus on a particular application of AI for online discussions with human users, ChatGPT, in order to show the implications of online digital technology in the social-historical modalities of human existence. ChatGPT is an application that combines AI with the Internet, the possibilities of Machine correspondence with the potentialities of human telecommunications. My approach focuses on the phenomenological and social-historical implications of the proliferation of AI technology as regards human consciousness and sociality. (shrink)

[[THIS IS THE COMPLETE SECOND ISSUE OF MΕTASCIENCE]] -/- This second issue of the journal Mεtascience continues the char acterization of this new branch of knowledge that is metasci ence. If it is new, it is not in a radical sense since Mario Bunge practiced it in an exemplary way, since logical positivists were accused of practicing only a mere metascience, since scientists have always practiced it implicitly, and since some philosophers no longer practice philosophy but rather metascience, but without (...) characterizing it or theorizing it, that is, without realizing that they have abandoned one general discourse for another. The novelty therefore lies in this aware ness that a general discourse without philosophy is possible: a scien tific general discourse. The twelve contributions gathered in this volume illustrate the metascientific approach to knowledge of the world as well as to knowledge of knowledge of the world, that is, science. And like Bunge’s project, they are neither part of the analytical movement nor the continental movement in philosophy. We will read here studies about the Bungean system, some applications of Bungean thought, some metascientific contributions, and some reflections around meta science. Among metascientific disciplines, ontology occupies a prominent place in this issue of Mεtascience. Metascience differs from philoso phy in its rejection of the fundamental philosophical distinction be tween appearance and reality. Metascientific ontology therefore does not postulate the existence of any metaphysical reality. But metasci entific ontology, no more than philosophical ontology, is a factual sci ence. The first, because it studies scientific constructs and not concrete objects, the second, because it is interested in transcendent or meta physical objects. (shrink)

This paper responds to an argument against a kind of anthropology. According to the argument, if the aim of anthropology is to describe the different worldviews of different groups, then anthropologists should only refer to material artefacts in order to illustrate a worldview; but the interest of artefacts to anthropology goes beyond mere illustration. This argument has been endorsed by key members of the ontological movement in anthropology, who found at least one of its premises in Marilyn Strathern’s (...) writing. (shrink)

What makes a person the same over time is a question dealt with by many philosophers. I too offered a purely metaphysical answer in a different work, however, as with many other theorists, I offered an answer outside of considering the political consequences of the theory I offered. Upon reflection, I now see that this was a mistake in need of correction. This is because theories concerning how an individual person remains one and the same over time presupposes an understanding (...) of the nature of personhood as an ontological kind. While being a person is a purely metaphysical matter, the fact is that having the status of being a person is highly significant both morally and politically, as any social movement fighting for being granted this status to groups of individuals who have been denied it. To ignore the moral and political consequences of a metaphysical theory of persons is therefore ethically irresponsible. I argue that many of the assumptions concerning personhood are ethically and politically biased in favor of a conception of persons that disadvantages certain individuals, and that examining and correcting these biases is essential to be ethically responsible theorists of personhood. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of Zeynep Tufekci’s capacities approach to social movements, which explains the strength of social movements in terms of their capacities. Tufekci emphasises that the capacities of contemporary social movements largely depend upon their uses of new digital technologies, and of social media in particular. We show that Tufekci’s approach has important implications for the structure of social movements, whether and what obligations they can have, and for how these obligations distribute to their members. In exploring (...) these implications, we develop a tripartite taxonomy of social movements. Each type of social movement in the taxonomy corresponds to a different type of group: social campaigns, social struggles, and social agitations. We show that all three types of social movement can bear obligations in virtue of their capacities. Finally, we argue that a surprising upshot of the obligations of social movements is that members of oppressed groups can have obligations to resist their own oppression in virtue of being members of social movements. (shrink)

Focusing on the notion of consciousness (Gewissen) as a phenomenon originating from Da-sein according to Heidegger's interpretation in the work “Being and Time” (II Part, II Chapter, From section § 55 to section § 60), Prof. Luiz Carlos Mariano Da Rosa, in line with the hermeneutic-phenomenological-ontological-existential principle, investigates the cry of consciousness as a summons of the self in its power-to-be itself, taking into account the Da-sein that cries out deep down of its strangeness as a cry of consciousness (...) in a theoretical-conceptual construction that encloses what cries out and what is ac-claimed within the borders of Da-sein. In this way, analyzing the Da-sein as one who cries out and its being-launched as “already-being-in” and the anguish with its power-being as a call to assume its own power-being, whose movement concludes the care character of Da-sein as an ontological possibility of the cry of consciousness, the article exposes that, constituting care, the being of Da-sein comprises in itself facticity (being- released), existence (project) and decay in a process that points out that Da-sein is as it determines itself as a power-being that belongs to itself as a power-being, which implies that, keeping only the possibility of existing as the being whose responsibility implies being what it is, the Da-sein -sence, existing, consists of the foundation of its power-to-be. Constituting being and being indebted to being designated as care, the cry consists of the cry of care in a construction that points out that the Da-sein is originally reunited with itself in strangeness and whose ac-clamation, converging into a pro-claiming complaint, ends the pro-claiming of possibility as a possibility that, in existing, involves assuming, in itself, the launched being that it is, implying the claim for the being launched in the face of the ought-to-be and the power-to-be in the sense of understanding oneself as the foundation of nothingness to be assumed in existence in a movement that attributes the decision to the most original truth condition of Da-sein. (shrink)

The movement has great significance for all philosophical problems, both metaphysical and epistemological. In the first part of this article I would like to show how Patočka takes up some theoretical knots of this problem in four essays on Aristotle. These texts explain movement as a fundamental ontological factor. They therefore link it to ontology. In the second part, however, I will use a contribution by Chiurazzi to show that the same theme was in fact also present (...) in the ancient thought of Plato, who was criticised by Aristotle. In the conclusion, I will try to summarise some common ideas about movement, all of which confirm the centrality of a dynamic ontology, and show the richness of the consequences of this approach. One of the most important results is that the basis of movement coincides with what makes life itself possible. In this way, dynamis becomes the very basis of reality itself. (shrink)

[In French]Both Patočka and Merleau-Ponty conceive the world not just as an Object, but rather as a field of an irreducible phenomenal and ontological depth. Patočka’s concept of movement and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh are two concrete figures of this depth, and as such they are understood by the respective authors as that what stands at the origin of every singular being so far as it detaches itself on the ground of the world as an open totality. Nevertheless, (...) the position of the two concepts seems to be quite different in relation to the traditional categories of the metaphysics. We argue that Patočka’s concept of movement is profoundly rooted in, and dependent on, the classical oppositions, whereas Merleau-Ponty’s flesh makes it possible to understand them rather as abstractions produced by segregation from the original field of presence. In order to establish these points, we propose an interpretation of Patočka’s and Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the concepts of horizon and world, and of course of those of movement and flesh. [In French.]. (shrink)

The ontological determination of the movement in its quality of way of Being incessantly moves the critic affirmed to denial it through come to be which affirms new critics, unity of continuities and discontinuities with the previous critic. Therefore, it is important to unveil the material determinations in which are rooted the conception of Being dissociated from Non-being consolidated in insurmountable distinction between Being and Entity in its quality of expression of ideas in an inverted reality, falsely apprehended. (...) Ideally reproduced reality that, nevertheless, allows alternatives corresponding to the realization of aims targeted to satisfy historically determined necessities. The confrontations in the production and reproduction of purposes to guide social relations cross-dress debility of determined and impotent movement to impose determinations to the full virtuosity of immobility that moves the transitory. The difference between Being e Entity conforms in a formal logic deprived from/of contradiction to affirm the development of knowledge in what, in truth, hindered and limit it to remain, reducing the movement to stationary, to what moves to what moves without moving, to what isolate the knowledge of reality, to what detaches idea and material, to what conserves and incarcerates and not to what transform and set free. The treatment conceived as a movement from radical critic brings together the ontological primacy to underpin the root of the constitution of social existence to establish the ontological determinations of the existence to consciousness is stated in Marx – being reaffirmed in Lukács – by affirming that categories are forms of Being, determinations from/of existence. The category of totality, as a result of it, constitute expression of form of Being from reality in movement and synthesis from multiples and mutual determinations of negated diversities in an unitarity which affirm them. Therefore, the dialectical reflexive movement refuses as an ineliminable condition to the movement which affirms to mould identity with unitarity between identity and non-identity or don’t conceive relation of identity with dialectic, with the existence of reality to express a contradiction and incessant transmutation between Being and Non-being. The totality by transmuting itself while remain totality albeit not identical to the previous moment embraces a category to synthesize the unity of diversity. This diversity moved and moving from/by unity contemplates the relation of identity ratio (nowadays totality) between the identity (continuity with the preceding totality) and the non-identity (discontinuity with the preceding totality). To ignore the identity of identity with a non-identity conforms the impotence of category to constitute an expression of existence for not affording the contradiction immanent to the existence of reality moving from transport incessant of Being to come to be which puts itself from Non-being to Being. In short, concomitantly the being is transposed to Non-being to a Being come to be transpose from Non-being to a Being whilst ontological determination is constituted and constitutive of movement. The realization of critic conditioned the self-critic that ontologically determines the denial of self-preservation because it constitutes roots in social conditions that limit the intended transformation through critic. The critique of science as an ideological and material condition of reproduction and realization of capital is not effective with the auto-conservation of Geography for conforming the necessity of conservation of science to be rooted in the conception of distinction idealized by superiority that would affirm the permanence and nullity of transcending the limitations to denial the inhumanity of alienation concomitantly affirm the conditions to recognition of necessities and possibilities oriented to an emancipatory purposes. The progressive compressing of expenditure of time on production and productivity of results in various fields of scientific knowledge – which do not realize strictly in the extent of knowledge or it would be equivalent to affirm the fallacy of isolation and to deny the material and historical determinations that constitutes the quality of form of Being -, expressed in the quality of objective necessity and possibility concomitantly to fragment the form and content of the orientation of aims for investigation and for apprehension of reality. The convergence of the movements above-mentioned conforms the constitution of consensus positivity of complexifying of knowledge, delimitating the conceiving of reality and the supposed objective determinations a priori that constraint the conscious apprehension of necessities and of purposes that manifestate in the immediacy by the quality of developing individual and humankind potentialities of social being. Therefore, the conception of suprahistorical and insuppressible ontological determination depriving from social intentionalities in naturalize the impute of greater speed and complexity with lesser time and size of fragmented reality to be known, strengthening the conditions of inversion of reality. Reversed reality deforms the conscious apprehension of corresponding reduce the humanity of individual and gender social sphere of Being for alienating the necessities and goals of theory and practice, consciously aimed to the development of conditions for impoverishment humanity cross-dress in fallaciously things provided by humanity. Things that would had identity with men humanization obfuscating the unifying the developing of thing in the developing of men in the quality of thing, to conceive the most primary theoretical and practical necessity for the purpose of development of thing as an irrevocable necessity from human activity. The confrontation in the sphere of ideas constitutes itself while conceiving the real and, in this direction, the domination of necessities and purposes of material (re)production of society requires the domination of the categories of space and time as forms of Being of substance in motion. The detachment between Being and Entity conceives the indetermination of the dominant conception of reality that determines the conditions for the reproduction of life and the come to be of individuals and humankind. (shrink)

What it would mean for phenomenology to move in an ontological direction that would render its relevance to contemporary political movement less ambiguous while at the same time retaining those aspects of its method that are epistemologically and politically advantageous? The present study crafts the beginnings of a response to this question by examining four configurations of consciousness that seem to be respectively tied to certain oppressive contexts and certain kinds of oppressed bodies: 1. false consciousness, 2. bad (...) faith, 3. double consciousness, and 4. se faire objet (making oneself an object). Such a comparison both promises to widen our understanding of the ontology of consciousness in general and generate a suggestive vision of what it would take to follow through, ontologically speaking, on the idea that consciousness is fundamentally and irrevocably of a bodily nature. (shrink)

Emergence is typically discussed in the context of mental properties or the properties of the natural sciences, and accounts of emergence within these contexts tend to look a certain way. The emergent property is taken to emerge instantaneously out of, or to be proximately caused by, complex interaction of colocated entities. Here, however, I focus on the properties instantiated by the elements of certain systems discussed in social ontology, such as being a five-dollar bill or a pawn-movement, and I (...) suggest that these properties emerge in a distinctive way. They emerge in part because of a system that is far beyond and typically before the object that instantiates them. I characterize how emergence occurs in these cases, juxtaposing it with how emergence is typically discussed. I then consider whether their emergence is best framed as weak or strong as these notions are characterized in the literature, and I reveal what debates are central to answering this question. Though I will not resolve these debates, I do show a collection of views that would vindicate these properties as strongly emergent and downwardly causing. (shrink)

During the last few decades, the historical turn within the tradition of the analytic tradition has experienced growing enthusiasm concerning the procedure of rational reconstruction, whose validity or importance, despite its paradigmatic examples in Frege and Russell, has not always enjoyed a consensus. Among the analytic philosophers who are the frontrunners of this movement, Robert Brandom is one of a kind: his work on Hegel as well as on German Idealism has been increasing interest in, as well as awareness (...) of, Hegel´s possible contributions to some current problems in that tradition, and connecting Hegel scholars to current questions. Thus, this work aims to explore Brandom´s methodology of rational reconstruction, as well as his dialogue with history of Philosophy, mainly exposed in his Tales of the mighty dead (2002). As we will see, Brandom´s distinction between a de dicto and a de re approach intends to present a way of identifying and analyzing a given philosopher´s theoretical (hidden) commitments that can be useful to improve the quality of the dialogue with past philosophers. From such methodological exposition, I to turn to Kierkegaard in order to make explicit some of his ontological commitments and presenting Brandom’s approach as a valuable tool for doing history of philosophy. (shrink)

The main aim of this article consists in an interpretation of the concept of Ereignis (Event) in the work of Martin Heidegger, explaining central aspects of the modification produced in the development of this work by the movement known as Kehre (turn-around), which implies the transition from the fundamental ontology or analytics of the finitude for the thought of the truth of Being.

Deep Ecology, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), and Anti-Civilization Primitivism have frequently been labeled as radical environmental ideologies, owing to their relationship with activities conducted by environmental extremists. Nonetheless, given the serious concerns faced by climate change and biodiversity loss, it is critical to engage with a broad range of perspectives and techniques. Such participation allows us to have access to a greater range of perspectives and a more diverse pool of knowledge, boosting our capacity for creative problem-solving. (...) The purpose of this essay is to reconsider the underlying concepts and principles that drive these theories, as well as to assess their relevance in tackling modern environmental issues. We think that Deep Ecology, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), and Anti-Civilization Primitivism should be called "unconventional" or "distinctive" rather than "radical," because they primarily focus on the ontological perspective but do not urge extreme acts. Meanwhile, their distinctiveness helps increase public awareness about environmental issues and promote reflection on and rethinking of the ontological link between mankind and the natural world. (shrink)

The tradition of realist phenomenology was founded in around 1902 by a group of students in Munich interested in the newly published Logical Investigations of Edmund Husserl. Initial members of the group included Johannes Daubert, Alexander Pfänder, Adolf Reinach and Max Scheler. With Reinach’s move to Göttingen the group acquired two new prominent members – Edith Stein and Roman Ingarden. The group’s method turned on Husserl’s idea that we are in possession a priori (which is to say: non-inductive) knowledge of (...) entities (for example, colors, tones, values, shapes) of a range of different sorts. Pfänder applied this method in his descriptive psychology of willing and motivation, Reinach (anticipating the later speech act theory) to what he called ‘social acts’, Stein to the ontology of communities, and Ingarden to works of art and aesthetic phenomena. The movement latter, through Ingarden, lived on in Poland, where it influenced the young Karol Wojtyła. (shrink)

I offer a theory of art that is based on science. I maintain that, as any other human activity, art can be studied with the tools of science. This does not mean that art is scientific, but aesthetics, the theory of art, can be formulated in accord with our scientific knowledge. I present elucidations of the concepts of aesthetic experience, art, work of art, artistic movement, and I discuss the ontological status of artworks from the point of view (...) of scientific philosophy. (shrink)

Tony Lawson, founder of The Social Ontology Group and The Realist Workshop of Cambridge, has proposed critical realism to reorient economics. The transformation of the social world that Lawson tries, emerges from the adherence to critical realism, this is, from taking the transcendental realism of Roy Bhaskar to the social realm. With the purpose of deepening the criticisms to this movement, we will specify what is critical realism, and which are the philosophical assumptions of the mainstream according to this (...) author. We will set out the criticisms on: a) the notion of mainstream economics, b) the possibilities of economics based on social ontology, c) the realism of economic models, and d) the notions of isolation and abstraction. (shrink)

Abstract in English, German, French and Croatian -/- In the paper “The ‘Bubbling Up’ of Subterranean Politics in Europe”, which was published in 2013 in the Journal of Civil Society, Mary Kaldor and Sabine Selchow attempted to reveal the specific qualities of the uprisings which emerged after the year 2010 in some European countries, such as Germany, Spain, Italy, England etc. According to the authors, the mode of organization which forms the main body of these emancipatory movements obtains its basic (...) logic from the world of the Internet. The use of the Internet requires a re-evaluation of negative philosophical commentary regarding technology. In the context of twentieth-century philosophy, Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse are the most influential philosophers who studied the negative aspects of technology. Heidegger portrayed the destructive effects of scientific reasoning and technology on the Western culture through the criticism of the traditional Western metaphysics on a phenomenological-ontological level. Marcuse, belonging to the tradition of Western Marxism, formed his critique of technology in the context of the concept of instrumental rationality and the critique of advanced industrial society and capitalism. Although the starting points of their perspectives on technology and the underlying purposes of their critiques of technology were different, it may be asserted that both have a rather negative and almost entirely pessimistic disposition towards technology. Heidegger’s and Marcuse’s criticisms of technology will be discussed in this context and the differences and similarities between these criticisms will be shown. Finally, the paper will emphasise the question of the possibility of a positive role of technology. Technology can serve as an alternative to negative uses by shedding light on the relation between the current uprisings and the Internet. Keywords technology, rationality, freedom, enframing, criticism, revolt movements, Internet, politics //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /////// Ist die Emanzipation des Menschen durch Technologie möglich? Zusammenfassung In dem Artikel „The ‘Bubbling Up’ of Subterranean Politics in Europe”, veröffentlicht im Jahre 2013 im Journal of Civil Society, versuchten Mary Kaldor und Sabine Selchow die spezifischen Qualitäten der Aufstände zum Ausdruck zu bringen, die nach 2010 in den europäischen Ländern ausbrachen – Deutschland, Spanien, Italien, England usw. Nach Ansicht der Autoren erhält der Modus der Organisation, der den Hauptkörper dieser emanzipatorischen Bewegungen bildet, seine grundlegende Logik aus der Welt des Internets. Die Analogie mit dem Internet erfor- dert eine Neubewertung der negativen Kommentare über die Technologie aus philosophischer Perspektive. Martin Heidegger und Herbert Marcuse sind die einflussreichsten Philosophen, die sich mit den negativen Aspekten der Technologie in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts befasst haben. Heidegger schilderte die zerstörerischen Auswirkungen der wissenschaftlichen Vernunft und Technologie auf die westliche Kultur durch die Kritik an der traditionellen abend- ländischen Metaphysik auf der phänomenologisch-ontologischen Ebene, während Marcuse, ein Mitglied des westlichen Marxismus, seine Kritik an der Technologie im Rahmen des Konzepts der instrumentellen Rationalität und der Kritik der fortgeschrittenen Industriegesellschaft und Kapitalismus geformt hat. Obgleich die Ansatzpunkte ihrer Perspektiven über die Technologie und die zugrunde liegenden Zwecke ihrer Kritik an der Technologie unterschiedlich waren, kann behauptet werden, dass beide eine eher negative und fast völlig pessimistische Einstellung zur Technologie hatten. In diesem Zusammenhang werden Heideggers und Marcuses Kritiken an der Technologie diskutiert sowie Unterschiede und Ähnlichkeiten zwischen den beiden Kri- tiken aufgezeigt. Abschließend unterstreicht das Paper die Frage nach der Möglichkeit einer positiven Rolle für die Technologie, die als Alternative zur negativen Perspektive dienen kann, indem sie Licht in das Verhältnis zwischen aktuellen Aufständen und Internet bringt. Schlüsselwörter Technologie, Rationalität, Freiheit, Gestell, Kritik, Revoltebewegungen, Internet, Politik //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /////// L’émancipation humaine est-elle possible à travers la technologie ? Résumé Dans l’article « The “Bubbling Up” of Suberranean Politics in Europe » publié en 2013 dans Journal of Civil Society, Mary Kaldor et Sabine Selchow tentent de mettre en lumière les caractéristiques spécifiques des révoltes qui ont fait jour après 2010 dans certains pays européens – Allemagne, Espagne, Italie, Angleterre, etc. Selon nos auteures, le mode d’organisation qui a formé le corps essentiel de ces mouvements émancipatoires tire sa logique de base du monde de l’internet. Cette analogie avec l’internet requiert une réévaluation, à partir d’un point de vue philosophique, des commentaires négatifs sur la technologie. Martin Heidegger et Herbert Marcuse sont les philosophes les plus influents ayant travaillé sur les aspects négatifs de la technologie au sein de la philosophie du XXe siècle. Heidegger a dépeint les effets destructeurs de la raison scientifique et de la technologie de notre culture occidentale à travers son criticisme de la métaphysique traditionnelle occidentale à un niveau phénoménologico-ontologique, tandis que Marcuse, membre du « communisme occidentale », a formé une critique de la technologie au sein du concept de rationalité instrumentale et une critique de la société industrielle avancée et du capitalisme. Bien que le point de départ de leur perspective sur la technologie et que le but sous-jacent de leur critique diffèrent, il est possible d’affirmer que leur point commun est d’avoir posé un regard négatif et presque entièrement pessimiste sur la technologie. À cet égard, le criticisme d’Heidegger et de Marcuse vont être abordés afin d’en soulever les différences et les similarités. Enfin, cet article mettra l’accent sur la possibilité d’un rôle positif de la technologie qui pourrait servir d’alternative aux perspectives négatives en faisant la lumière sur le lien entre les révoltes actuelles et l’internet. Mots-clés technologie, rationalité, liberté, mettre en forme, criticisme, mouvements de révolte, internet, politique //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /////// Je li moguća ljudska emancipacija kroz tehniku? Sažetak U članku »The ‘Bubbling Up’ of Subterranean Politics in Europe«, objavljenom 2013. u časopisu Journal of Civil Society, Mary Kaldor i Sabine Selchow pokušale su otkriti specifične značajke pobuna koje su se javila nakon 2010. godine u europskim zemljama poput Njemačke, Španjolske, Italije, Engleske itd. Prema autoricama, način organiziranja koji čini glavno tijelo ovih emancipatornih pokreta preuzima svoju osnovnu logiku iz svijeta Interneta. Analogija s Internetom zahtijeva ponovnu evaluaciju negativnih komentara o tehnici iz filozofske perspektive. Martin Heidegger i Herbert Marcuse najutjecajniji su filozofi 20. stoljeća koji su se bavili negativnim aspektima tehnike. Heidegger je prikazao destruktivne učinke znanstvene racionalnosti i tehnike na zapadnu kulturu kroz kritiku tradicionalne zapadne metafizike na fenomenološko-ontološkoj razini, dok je Marcuse, kao predstavnik zapadnoga marksizma, oblikovao svoju kritiku tehnike u kontekstu pojma instrumentalne racionalnosti te kritike razvijenog industrijskog društva i kapitalizma. Iako su polazišne točke njihovih pogleda na tehniku, kao i osnovne svrhe kritike tehnike, različite, može se reći da obojica imaju poprilično negativno i gotovo u potpunosti pesimističko shvaćanje tehnologije. U tom će se kontekstu razmotriti Heideggerova i Marcuseova kritika tehnike kao i razlike i sličnosti između tih dvaju pristupa. Zaključno će rad naglasiti mogućnost pozitivne uloge tehnike, koja može služiti kao alternativa negativnoj perspektivi osvjetljavajući odnos između nedavnih pobuna i interneta. Ključne riječi tehnologija, racionalnost, sloboda, postav, kritika, pobunjenički pokreti, Internet, politika. (shrink)

Metamorphosis seems problematic for our occidental point of view. Becoming in general is viewed as an error or exception by our classic standpoint. In fact, it is strongly against identity and law of non-contradiction: A is fundamentally something different from B and for A it is impossible to be at the same time B. We need to think A as what-becomes-B in order to make metamorphosis possible. Anyway, how can A become B? As a matter of fact, this very claim (...) has been historically the most common critic opposed to becoming. Deleuze and Guattari in their monumental work had tried to offer an enormous contribution to a few related problems. Redefining the subject as an event described by movement and affect can exceed the metamorphosis’ aporia. This new principle of individuation provides a new look upon arisen questions primarily because affects and movements are constant coordinates that define how metamorphosis is experienced. The paper tries to show how the betweenness in action in the encounter with people, human beings, things, animals, plants and minerals defines the logic field of metamorphosis. This is shown in dialogue with the ontological turn in anthropology that is particularly focused on this affective and lively dimension of encounter especially among Amazonian populations. Actually this is also what happens in our – occidental and classical but live – relation with things and objects, as long as we try to think a real conceptualisation of experience. (shrink)

Transhumanism is a challenging movement that invites us to rethink what defines humanity, including what we value and regret the most about our existence. Vulnerability is a key concept that require thorough philosophical scrutiny concerning transhumanist proposals. Vulnerability can refer to a universal condition of human life or, rather, to the specific exposure to certain harms due to particular situations. Even if we are all vulnerable in the first sense, there are also different sources and levels of vulnerability depending (...) on concrete social circumstances. Recently, Michael Hauskeller argued about a fundamental incompatibility between transhumanism and vulnerability. He understands vulnerability as an existential category, linked to woundability and mortality. This idea is akin to ontological vulnerability, but it does not notice some important features of social vulnerability. On the other side, transhumanism is a complex and non-homogeneous movement. Here we distinguish between a strong and a weak version of transhumanism. We will propose that the salience of vulnerability is only diminished in the radical one, while a moderate version can reconcile vulnerability with human enhancement. Thus, vulnerability, a concept that has recently gained much importance as an anthropological category in contemporary ethics, is not necessarily at odds with any transhumanist project. (shrink)

Can an understanding be formed of how sensory experience might be presented or manipulated in visual art in order to promote a relational concept of the senses, in opposition to the customary, capitalist notion of sensation as a private possession, as a sensory impression that is mine? I ask the question in the light of recent visual art theory and practice which pursue relational, ecological ambitions. As Arnold Berleant, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Grant Kester see it, ecological ambition and artistic form (...) should correspond, but they fail to recognize sensation as a site where the ecological cause can be fought. Jacques Rancière argues for the political force of the senses, but his distribution of the sensible does not address the particularity of sensory experience. I identify the difference between these approaches within recent relational or ecological aesthetics and my position on sensibility, and indicate some of the problems involved in referring to the senses. I set out the concepts that are central to the cultivation of relational sensibility: style, autofiguration, and the mobility of sensory meaning, extrapolated from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Paul Cézanne. They amount to positioning the senses ontologically as movements along lines of conceptual-sensory connection and implication, based on the transfer of meanings created artistically through style and autofiguration. (shrink)

In this essay, I offer a critical analysis of one of the most provocative aspects of Heidegger’s unfinished confrontation with Aristotle’s thinking. Over the course of his lifelong engagement with Aristotle’s texts, Heidegger rarely failed to notice the constitutive ambiguity of the ancient Greek philosopher’s position within the history of being. On the one hand, Aristotle appeared to be the founder of the Western metaphysical tradition of ontotheology, whereby God was understood as the supreme principle and being of all beings. (...) But on the other hand, there were traces or echoes of a more originary thinking in Aristotle’s texts that, according to Heidegger, could be developed for the sake of another beginning. In this essay, I draw on this constitutive ambiguity by focusing on Heidegger’s partial translation of Metaphysics Λ 6, where Aristotle most explicitly discusses the being (οὐσία) of the unmoved being. Using Heidegger’s translation as an aid, I argue that Aristotle’s account of the unmoved being in Metaphysics Λ 6 is perhaps best understood as of- fering an enigmatic description of the origin of movement and time as an act of pure temporalizing (reine Zeitigung), which is how Heidegger translates the notion of ἐνέργεια. In the conclusion of this essay, I suggest that the temporal account of being and time as pure temporalizing offers a possible way to reappropriate Aristotle’s thinking in a phenomenological context. (shrink)

If something could boast of the ancient Greek world for its contribution to this global culture should be the development of philosophical thought. The search for "laws", i.e. the rules governing the nature and binding together, shifted the centre of human thought from the man himself, in the world, in the universe. His search starts with the pre-Socratic philosophical schools and reaches its peak, with the two main proponents of ancient intellect, Plato first and Aristotle's pupil. The contribution of Aristotle (...) particularly could be focused on the attempt to answer the problem of truth. For Aristotle, the search for truth sits in this thing and the intellectual space and the subjective judgment based on reasoning and evidence. Even the metaphysical thought of Aristotle, about God's problem, recommends the apotheosis of reason. The existence of God is a rational truth, it is the reason, and the truth because it fits with the being, the thing. The thought of Aristotle about the existence of God is identified with the existence of God, therefore God exists and proving that it exists. The mind can match things and establish the truth of the existence of God. In this rational metaphysics Aristotelian awareness of the existence of God, in which God, according to Aristotle, moves all other beings, but he remains motionless because it is not material and therefore not have the need of movement, at rival of the Christian philosophy. The Christian philosophy puts the concept of the person, so selfishness and diversity as a means of approach to God through the process of experience. Which is the common point between Aristotle and Christian Philosophy. In their attempt to investigate the relationship of being concerning the ontological beings and the reflection on the Being. (shrink)

The distinction between action and omission is of interest in both theoretical and practical philosophy. We use this distinction daily in our descriptions of behaviour and appeal to it in moral judgements. However, the very nature of the act/omission distinction is as yet unclear. Jonathan Bennett’s account of the distinction in terms of positive and negative facts is one of the most promising attempts to give an analysis of the ontological distinction between action and omission. According to Bennett’s account, (...) an upshot is the result of an agent’s action if and only if the relevant fact about her conduct is positive. A proposition about an agent’s conduct is positive if and only if most possible movements of the agent would not have made that proposition true. However, Bennett’s account will fail unless it is possible to make sense of claims about ‘most possible movements of the agent’. We need a way of comparing the size of subsets of the behaviour space (the set of possible movements). I argue that Bennett’s own method of comparison is unsatisfactory. I present an alternative method of comparing subsets of the behaviour space. (shrink)

The addiction literature is fraught with conceptual confusions, stalled debates, and an unfortunate lack of clear and careful attempts to delineate the phenomenon of addiction in a way that might lead to consensus. My dissertation has two overarching aims, one metaphysical and one practical. -/- The first aim is to defend an account of addiction as the systematic disposition to fail to control one’s desires to engage in certain types of behaviors. I defend the inclusion of desires and impaired control (...) in the definition, and I flesh out the notion of systematicity central to my dispositionalist framework. I engage the so-called ‘disease vs. choice’ debate, criticizing its presupposition that we are dealing here with a dichotomy and arguing that the movement towards a middle ground is the right track to take. I explain how the dispositionalist account can capture this middle ground and how it serves to expand upon existing views, in particular by filling in the metaphysical details. -/- The second aim is to show how the account I defend can help to unify the extant views and disciplinary perspectives in the literature. Both the dispositionalist aspect of my framework and the methodology adopted (applied ontology and systematic metaphysics) can move the literature towards both substantive and methodological unification. This will help to clear up conceptual confusions, resolve (or sometimes dissolve) apparently intractable disputes, situate different research perspectives with respect to each other, facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue, and help to frame important questions about addiction. Finally, I offer the beginnings of an ontology of addiction, which will provide a terminologically well-structured guide to the addiction literature in a way that will facilitate more effective and efficient communication and data management across disciplines. (shrink)

(Recipient of the 2020 Everett Mendelsohn Prize.) This article revisits the development of the protoplasm concept as it originally arose from critiques of the cell theory, and examines how the term “protoplasm” transformed from a botanical term of art in the 1840s to the so-called “living substance” and “the physical basis of life” two decades later. I show that there were two major shifts in biological materialism that needed to occur before protoplasm theory could be elevated to have equal status (...) with cell theory in the nineteenth century. First, I argue that biologists had to accept that life could inhere in matter alone, regardless of form. Second, I argue that in the 1840s, ideas of what formless, biological matter was capable of dramatically changed: going from a “coagulation paradigm” that had existed since Theophrastus, to a more robust conception of matter that was itself capable of movement and self-maintenance. In addition to revisiting Schleiden and Schwann’s original writings on cell theory, this article looks especially closely at Hugo von Mohl’s definition of the protoplasm concept in 1846, how it differed from his primordial utricle theory of cell structure two years earlier. This article draws on Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of “ontological metaphors” to show that the cell, primordial utricle, and protoplasm can be understood as material container, object, and substance, and that these overlapping distinctions help explain the chaotic and confusing early history of cell theory. (shrink)

Applied Evolutionary Epistemology is a scientific-philosophical theory that defines evolution as the set of phenomena whereby units evolve at levels of ontological hierarchies by mechanisms and processes. This theory also provides a methodology to study evolution, namely, studying evolution involves identifying the units that evolve, the levels at which they evolve, and the mechanisms and processes whereby they evolve. Identifying units and levels of evolution in turn requires the development of ontological hierarchy theories, and examining mechanisms and processes (...) necessitates theorizing about causality. Together, hierarchy and causality theories explain how biorealities form and diversify with time. This paper analyzes how Applied EE redefines both hierarchy and causality theories in the light of the recent explosion of network approaches to causal reasoning associated with studies on reticulate and macroevolution. Causality theories have often been framed from within a rigid, ladder-like hierarchy theory where the rungs of the ladder represent the different levels, and the elements on the rungs represent the evolving units. Causality then is either defined reductionistically as an upward movement along the strands of a singular hierarchy, or holistically as a downward movement along that same hierarchy. Upward causation theories thereby analyze causal processes in time, i.e. over the course of natural history or phylogenetically, as Darwin and the founders of the Modern Synthesis intended. Downward causation theories analyze causal processes in space, ontogenetically or ecologically, as the current eco-evo-devo schools are evidencing. This work demonstrates how macroevolution and reticulate evolution theories add to the complexity by examining reticulate causal processes in space–time, and the interactional hierarchies that such studies bring forth introduce a new form of causation that is here called reticulate causation. Reticulate causation occurs between units and levels belonging to different as well as to the same ontological hierarchies. This article concludes that beyond recognizing the existence of multiple units, levels, and mechanisms or processes of evolution, also the existence of multiple kinds of evolutionary causation as well as the existence of multiple evolutionary hierarchies needs to be acknowledged. This furthermore implies that evolution is a pluralistic process divisible into different kinds. (shrink)

There has been a movement aiming to teach agents about their privilege by making the information about their privilege as costless as possible. However, some argue that in risk-sensitive frameworks, such as Lara Buchak’s (2013), it can be rational for privileged agents to shield themselves from learning about their privilege, even if the information is costless and relevant. This threatens the efficacy of these information-access efforts in alleviating the problem of elite-group ignorance. In response, I show that even within (...) the same framework, in this case David Kinney and Liam Kofi Bright’s (2021), the rationality of this information avoidance rests on shaky ground in practice. In this framework, whether an agent should avoid information depends on the precise details of (1) how relevant they expect the information to be, (2) their priors about the value of various options, and (3) their risk attitudes. The model suggests that the rationality of elite-group ignorance is a function of structural factors that are pervasive but nonetheless not insurmountable, thus offering a way out of pessimism about elite group education. (shrink)

Non-commuting quantities and hidden parameters – Wave-corpuscular dualism and hidden parameters – Local or nonlocal hidden parameters – Phase space in quantum mechanics – Weyl, Wigner, and Moyal – Von Neumann’s theorem about the absence of hidden parameters in quantum mechanics and Hermann – Bell’s objection – Quantum-mechanical and mathematical incommeasurability – Kochen – Specker’s idea about their equivalence – The notion of partial algebra – Embeddability of a qubit into a bit – Quantum computer is not Turing machine – (...) Is continuality universal? – Diffeomorphism and velocity – Einstein’s general principle of relativity – „Mach’s principle“ – The Skolemian relativity of the discrete and the continuous – The counterexample in § 6 of their paper – About the classical tautology which is untrue being replaced by the statements about commeasurable quantum-mechanical quantities – Logical hidden parameters – The undecidability of the hypothesis about hidden parameters – Wigner’s work and и Weyl’s previous one – Lie groups, representations, and psi-function – From a qualitative to a quantitative expression of relativity − psi-function, or the discrete by the random – Bartlett’s approach − psi-function as the characteristic function of random quantity – Discrete and/ or continual description – Quantity and its “digitalized projection“ – The idea of „velocity−probability“ – The notion of probability and the light speed postulate – Generalized probability and its physical interpretation – A quantum description of macro-world – The period of the as-sociated de Broglie wave and the length of now – Causality equivalently replaced by chance – The philosophy of quantum information and religion – Einstein’s thesis about “the consubstantiality of inertia ant weight“ – Again about the interpretation of complex velocity – The speed of time – Newton’s law of inertia and Lagrange’s formulation of mechanics – Force and effect – The theory of tachyons and general relativity – Riesz’s representation theorem – The notion of covariant world line – Encoding a world line by psi-function – Spacetime and qubit − psi-function by qubits – About the physical interpretation of both the complex axes of a qubit – The interpretation of the self-adjoint operators components – The world line of an arbitrary quantity – The invariance of the physical laws towards quantum object and apparatus – Hilbert space and that of Minkowski – The relationship between the coefficients of -function and the qubits – World line = psi-function + self-adjoint operator – Reality and description – Does a „curved“ Hilbert space exist? – The axiom of choice, or when is possible a flattening of Hilbert space? – But why not to flatten also pseudo-Riemannian space? – The commutator of conjugate quantities – Relative mass – The strokes of self-movement and its philosophical interpretation – The self-perfection of the universe – The generalization of quantity in quantum physics – An analogy of the Feynman formalism – Feynman and many-world interpretation – The psi-function of various objects – Countable and uncountable basis – Generalized continuum and arithmetization – Field and entanglement – Function as coding – The idea of „curved“ Descartes product – The environment of a function – Another view to the notion of velocity-probability – Reality and description – Hilbert space as a model both of object and description – The notion of holistic logic – Physical quantity as the information about it – Cross-temporal correlations – The forecasting of future – Description in separable and inseparable Hilbert space – „Forces“ or „miracles“ – Velocity or time – The notion of non-finite set – Dasein or Dazeit – The trajectory of the whole – Ontological and onto-theological difference – An analogy of the Feynman and many-world interpretation − psi-function as physical quantity – Things in the world and instances in time – The generation of the physi-cal by mathematical – The generalized notion of observer – Subjective or objective probability – Energy as the change of probability per the unite of time – The generalized principle of least action from a new view-point – The exception of two dimensions and Fermat’s last theorem. (shrink)

The notion of a physiological individuals has been developed and applied in the philosophy of biology to understand symbiosis, an understanding of which is key to theorising about the major transition in evolution from multi-organismality to multi-cellularity. The paper begins by asking what such symbiotic individuals can help to reveal about a possible transition in the evolution of cognition. Such a transition marks the movement from cooperating individual biological cognizers to a functionally integrated cognizing unit. Somewhere along the way, (...) did such cognizing units simultaneously have cognizers as parts? Expanding upon the multiscale integration view of the Free Energy Principle, this paper develops an account of reciprocal integration, demonstrating how some coupled biological cognizing systems, when certain constraints are met, can result in a cognizing unit that is in ways greater than the sum of its cognizing parts. Symbiosis between V. Fischeri bacteria and the bobtail squid is used to provide an illustration this account. A novel manner of conceptualizing biological cognizers as gradient is then suggested. Lastly it is argued that the reason why the notion of ontologically nested cognizers may be unintuitive stems from the fact that our folk-psychology notion of what a cognizer is has been deeply influenced by our folk-biological manner of understanding biological individuals as units of reproduction. (shrink)

A collaborative article by the Editorial Collective of Social Imaginaries. Investigations into social imaginaries have burgeoned in recent years. From ‘the capitalist imaginary’ to the ‘democratic imaginary’, from the ‘ecological imaginary’ to ‘the global imaginary’ – and beyond – the social imaginaries field has expanded across disciplines and beyond the academy. The recent debates on social imaginaries and potential new imaginaries reveal a recognisable field and paradigm-in-the-making. We argue that Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and Taylor have articulated the most important theoretical frameworks (...) for understanding social imaginaries, although the field as a whole remains heterogeneous. We further argue that the notion of social imaginaries draws on the modern understanding of the imagination as authentically creative. We contend that an elaboration of social imaginaries involves a significant, qualitative shift in the understanding of societies as collectively and politically-instituted formations that are irreducible to inter-subjectivity or systemic logics. After marking out the contours of the field and recounting a philosophical history of the imagination, the essay turns to debates on social imaginaries in more concrete contexts, specifically political-economic imaginaries, the ecological imaginary, multiple modernities and their inter-civilisational encounters. The social imaginaries field imparts powerful messages for the human sciences and wider publics. In particular, social imaginaries hold significant implications for ontological, phenomenological and philosophical anthropological questions; for the cultural, social, and political horizons of contemporary worlds; and for ecological and economic phenomena. The essay concludes with the argument that social imaginaries as a paradigm-in-the-making offers valuable means by which movements towards social change can be elucidated as well providing an open horizon for the critiques of existing social practices. (shrink)

The issue of the definition and position of archaeology as a discipline is examined in relation to the dispute which took place from 1980 to 2009 between the archaeologist Jean-Claude Gardin and the sociologist Jean-Claude Passeron. This case study enables us to explore the actual conceptual relationships between archaeology and the other sciences (as opposed to those wished for or prescribed). The contrasts between the positions declared by the two researchers and the rooting of their arguments in their disciplines are (...) examined: where the sociologist makes use of his philosophical training, the archaeologist relies mainly on his work on semiology and informatics. Archaeology ultimately plays a minor role in the arguments proposed. This dispute therefore cannot be considered as evidence for the movement of concepts between archaeology and the social sciences. A blind spot in the debate, relating to the ontological specificities of archaeological objects, nevertheless presents itself as a possible way of implementing this movement. (shrink)

1 Introduction1 In the 1980s, hermeneutics was often incorporated into deconstructionism and literary theory. Rather than focus on authorial intentions, the nature of writing itself including codes used to construct meaning, socio-economic contexts and inequalities of power,2 Gadamer introduced a different perspective; the interplay between effects of history on a reader’s understanding and the tradition(s) handed down in writing. This interplay in which a reader’s prejudices are called into question and modified by the text in a fusion of understanding and (...) topic revitalized the study of the printed word. Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being also appealed to the post-modern antipathy toward modernity and metaphysics.3 If the truth and validity of interpretations are limited to communities of language, then our mode of being in history cannot but be historical. This point of view rendered Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics vulnerable to the critique of moral and epistemological relativism. However, Gadamer’s theory of interpretation also stems from re-examination of the beginning of knowledge in the Pre-Socratics and Plato, and on this basis, is receptive to another dimension of inquiry than that which was trending in North America. -/- At the East-West Center, University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 1982, Chung-ying Cheng for the first time introduced onto-hermeneutics to an audience of esteemed philosophers including Li Zehou, Ren Jiyu, Feng Youlan, and Zhang Liwen.4 In contrast to schools of deconstruction and literary theory that had disengaged the interpreter from trans-historical sources of meaning and truth, Cheng explained that interpreters exist within a cosmological order inextricable from responsibility to harmonize Heaven and Earth in creative acts of interpretation. By integrating Chinese cosmology into hermeneutics through ontology, he tacitly challenged philosophers in the West to re-examine assumptions about humanity’s place in nature and by implication, Gadamer’s recovery of the beginnings of knowledge in Western philosophy. -/- Cheng’s Neo-Confucianism is inspired by the method and goals of Thomé H. Fang. The following words by Fang seem to prefigure, although in an indistinct and bundled way, aspects of Cheng’s philosophy including a Mencian theory of human nature, comprehensive observation, and creativity: “In the very process of living in concord with creative Nature, Man is charged with an ideal to be fully realized in the light of the principle of comprehensive harmony.”5 Like Fang, Cheng reinvigorates Chinese culture and language, but not solely in order to vindicate the insights of Neo-Confucianism. He has studied Western thought, from pragmatism and the analytic school to German idealism and phenomenology, to unlock and clarify philosophical concepts within the Yijing tradition and thereby render them intelligible to Anglophones. The result has been an awakening of Western scholars to the moral and cultural consequences of decoupling their thought from metaphysical foundations that are neither dogmatic nor doctrinal. -/- Not unlike the dialectic of Gadamer’s dialogue form, onto-generative hermeneutics integrates contrary positions on the same topic in order to blend both sides into a world philosophy, or as Cheng says, a “totalizing or integrative theory,”6 not to be confused with a theoretical rewording of a theory. On the contrary, the universal scope and relevance of hermeneutics stems from personal experience. Just as Gadamer, in response to faction and strife, immersed himself in Plato during the war years, and developed a method with which to harmonize opposites, so too, according to On-cho Ng, was Cheng moved by faction, strife and political persecution to develop a path toward unity.7 Gadamer taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Cheng at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa among other institutions in North America. They facilitated trans-continental educational and cultural ties. Similar experiences yield similar insights irrespective of differences of time and place. Hence, authors in this issue who reside in Europe, China and North America, delineate the differences between Gadamer and Cheng, yet also, in light of Cheng’s onto-generative method and cosmology, develop integrative theories. Due to the page-budget restriction of the publisher, certain articles of this special theme will be subsequently published in the next issue. -/- 2 Integrative Theory This special issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy confirms a dimension of hermeneutics that Cheng has both motivated and inspired. The contributors do not abide by the conviction that since thought is mediated by language, interpretations cannot transcend culture. On the contrary, their research exemplifies the fruits of trans-historical onto-dialogical hermeneutics within limits defined by their field inquiry, organized into Parts I and II, around three themes: language, the philosophy of history and ethics. -/- Andrew Fuyarchuk introduces the theme of ontology in relation to Gadamer’s turn to language. Fuyarchuk argues that Chung-ying Cheng’s criticism of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is informed by Heidegger’s concept of Dasein and thereby overlooks how Gadamer’s Platonic-Pythagorean problem of the division between the One and Many is harmonized in the event of language, which in turn positions Gadamer in proximity to the presupposed grounds of receptivity in Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics. Lauren Pfister’s contributing article addresses the year 2000 meeting between Cheng and Gadamer in Heidelberg and expands the transhistorical grounds of meaning in Gadamer to matters of theology. Pfister’s summary of the written Chinese record of their conversation indicates that Cheng does not address the role of Christian philosophy and hence, the role of the inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. This is important not only for detecting changes in Cheng’s philosophical development, but also for modifying his hermeneutics along the lines of a living conversation, possibilities explored by Pfister in a sequel to the article submitted to this issue. Nevertheless, by raising the issue of how Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being extends possibilities in Cheng’s thought, Pfister anticipates the article by Katarina Gajdosova. She returns to the roots of Chinese thought during the Warring States period and broadens the meaning of names in recently excavated texts. Contrary to the conventions about how to understand terms, she appeals to both Heidegger’s ontology and Cheng’s notion of receptivity and creativity to reinterpret naming in relation to cosmology. Along the same lines, insofar as the event of Being is lingual, Jay Goulding captures its emergent structure in an evolving community of scholars and scholarship. He recalls his philosophical journey toward Cheng’s philosophy that begins in conversations with Gadamer at McMaster University in Hamilton, leads to Heidegger and Asian thought, expands into turning points with teachers and colleagues from various backgrounds that by increments contributed to Goulding’s formulation of “Daoist phenomenology.” -/- Although differing traditions guide their inquiries and research, Cheng and Gadamer recall the wisdom of the past to ameliorate the fragmentation in contemporary life. This leads them to re-examine the origins of philosophy; historical roots and thus sources of creative re-interpretations East and West whose affinities are developed in contributions by Hyun Höchsmann and Friederike Assandri. Höchsmann assesses convergences and divergences in the origins of Chinese and Western philosophy (Confucius and Socrates, the Yijing and Pre-Socratics) that culminates in pairing Gadamer’s understanding of paideia in the context of Plato’s political cosmology in the Timaeus with moral and social cultivation in The Western Inscription. She delineates the limits of this comparison which in turn justifies introducing Vattimo’s notion of locality. Assandri’s comparative analysis moves between India and China, Buddhism and Tang Daoism. Based on Gadamer’s argument that writing detaches concepts from their cultural moorings, she defines and applies three levels of understanding in onto-generative hermeneutics to Buddhist terms that were assimilated into the Benji Jing and in so doing clarifies essential dimensions of Daoism. -/- Contributions by Stephen Palmquist and Nicholas Brasovan position Cheng in relation to Kant and Gadamer by way of Aristotle’s ethics respectively. On the one hand, Palmquist plots Cheng’s evolving criticism of Kant’s moral philosophy and draws on crucial dimensions of Gadamer’s hermeneutics to reposition that criticism in a constructive relation to Kant’s emphasis on the philosophical conditions of morality while also indicating how religious dimensions of his thought answer Cheng’s concerns for lived moral action. For Palmquist, Gadamer enables a constructive criticism of Cheng. On the other hand, Brasovan compares Cheng’s Yijing-based account of moral deliberation with Gadamer’s Aristotelian-based ethics and reasons that in contrast to Cheng, Gadamer’s hermeneutical consciousness is disengaged from practical knowledge. For Brasovan, Cheng is a constructive critic of Gadamer. Palmquist and Brasovan’s divergent angles on Gadamer and Cheng map onto a dialectic of contrast and complementarity that constitutes the inner logic of Cheng’s philosophy. In other words, Gadamer and Cheng ought to be read alongside one another for the sake of removing discrepancies and contradictions, which constitutes the organic structure of their thinking. -/- 3 Our Mode of Being in History Is Not Historical The conversations between Cheng and Gadamer in this issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy pivot on language, philosophy of history and ethics within a comparative framework of analysis, but also explore the grounds that make the comparisons possible. Those grounds are informed by Chinese cosmology, and function to wrest Gadamer from the shadow of Heideggerian facticity and reposition him within the range of Cheng’s ideas about our place in nature that is embedded in his question about how mind emerges from inorganic matter.8 -/- For Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, human finitude, our ownmost individuating death ensures that hermeneutics is always open to the other as other, always on the way toward understanding the meaning of Being. To arrest the process in a concept of “the Absolute” cannot but represent someone’s point of view, and thereby render hermeneutics indistinguishable from ideology. However, insofar as finitude is defined by them in terms of an onto-theological concept of immorality, finitude is a metaphysical concept consistent with epistemologies and confuse beings with the meaning of Being. As a result, the celebrated political value of hermeneutics to always be on the way toward an understanding of the meaning of Being admits subtle variations on the same worldview that are insufficiently self-critical. -/- Gadamer scholars of Heidegger are right. A transformation in ethos and opening to the meaning of Being depends on awareness of finitude. Yet this awareness does not yield openness to more of the same, i.e., discourse structurally incapable of coming to unity but instead, for both Gadamer and Cheng, openness to a distinctly different ontological dimension of reality. As Sandra Wawrytko and So-Seong Park indicate,9 this ontological dimension is prefigured in the experience of being-as-a-whole or the totality of all possible relations in both Chinese totemic shamanistic rituals,10 and Greek Dionysian festivals.11 Through these religious experiences human ethos and therefore consciousness is expanded and elevated from being centered on one’s ownmost concerns toward an affinity with all sentient beings from insects and plants to animals. The channel for this affinity is an auditory disposition and hence, the emotions, compassion, and feeling response. -/- The capacity for an auditory disposition, or as Gadamer calls it, listening consciousness to respond to the inter-relationality and therefore inherent balance of nature is developed through music, song and dance of the religious rituals and festivals. They facilitate the unity of mind with nature. This use of music, that transforms ordinary consciousness, explains Cheng’s emphasis on the receptivity of feeling response in comprehensive observation, and Gadamer’s emphasis on openness to the other in attunement. However, an auditory disposition characteristic of pre-literate oral cultures that reveals the “All” need not rely on religion. As theorists about the evolution of language have explained,12 modern languages preserve their pre-historical past in music or prosody. That is to say, the song and dance that revealed the totality of inter-related beings to an ethos of comprehensive observation and attunement toward beings in classical civilizations is retained in the back-and-forth movement or rhythm of the dialogue form. Our mode of being in history is a mode of being in nature – through the music of language. -/- While alerting the reader to the limits of a nominalist interpretation, Gadamer expresses the inner law of the nature as follows: “in perishing there is always becoming, and in becoming there is always perishing.”13 Considered in process, opposites generate and blend into each other. This law of nature applies to everything.14 Hence, in a manner comparable to Pfister’s concluding insights, onto-dialogical hermeneutics is not only open to discrete events of otherness but moreover, to the moving structure of reality expressed, as Gajdosova suggests, in the existential moment of naming. Considered as interplay of tension and resolution with a life of its own, the dialectic of a dialogue is self-similar to the way in which an organism grows (by instinct). There is, therefore, a sense in which the art of interpretation extends the human mind into the eternal cycles of nature such that we participate in the articulation of the inner telos/homeostasis toward which all beings strive and importantly for Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, within the material limits of energy to which our embodied minds are self-evidently subject. In mortality there is always immortality. (shrink)

When approaching the nature and etiology of psychophysical problems in a given population, it is important to understand the causal relations, the mechanisms, and the processes which underlie given problems, issues, and disorders. This examination attempts to investigate the connection between neural pathophysiology and proprioceptive ontology of olfactory and visual cortical circuitry on the basis of the current scientific evidence indicated by the results of studies in which subjects underwent a series of therapeutic modalities focused on the improvement of overall (...) wellbeing with the utilization of devices and technologies to stimulate multiple motor vs. somatosensory processes. More specifically, the studies at the centers of this analysis incorporated physical movement and virtual reality interactions, with the supplement of olfactory stimulation. In this examination, such research is also investigated from a theoretical standpoint, with the ultimate goal to better determine which interventions are justified under the premise of a mutual support between empirical values (through laboratory examination) and logical deduction (via philosophical investigation). (shrink)

Certain advocates of the so-called “neo-logicist” movement in the philosophy of mathematics identify themselves as “neo-Fregeans” (e.g., Hale and Wright), presenting an updated and revised version of Frege’s form of logicism. Russell’s form of logicism is scarcely discussed in this literature and, when it is, often dismissed as not really logicism at all (in light of its assumption of axioms of infinity, reducibility and so on). In this paper I have three aims: firstly, to identify more clearly the primary (...) meta-ontological and methodological differences between Russell’s logicism and the more recent forms; secondly, to argue that Russell’s form of logicism offers more elegant and satisfactory solutions to a variety of problems that continue to plague the neo-logicist movement (the bad company objection, the embarrassment of richness objection, worries about a bloated ontology, etc.); thirdly, to argue that neo-Russellian forms of logicism remain viable positions for current philosophers of mathematics. (shrink)

Scholars have wrestled with "consciousness", a major scholar calling it the "hard problem". Some thirty-plus years after the Towards a Science of Consciousness, we do not seem to be any closer to an answer to "What is consciousness?". Seemingly irresolvable metaphysical problems are addressed by bootstrapping, provisional assumptions, not unlike those used by logicians and mathematicians. I bootstrap with the same ontology and epistemology applicable to everything we apprehend. Here, I argue for a version of the unity of opposites, a (...) form of neutral monism. Something exists because of what it is not; nothing can exist by itself, singularities (analogous to monads), expressing the model. Applying this most fundamental law to the consciousness problem, the physical (movement) comes into being simultaneously as the mental (stasis), each displayed by a field that is variegated (ranging from creative to entropic processes). Such is in keeping with how the singularity emerged as our universe, the same form that may account for sub-Planck-scale phenomena. Overall, like the most fundamental law, deep structures are imminent in our universe, both as objects and processes. (shrink)