Hasil untuk "Metaphysics"

Amy Reed‐Sandoval

This chapter begins to explore what it means to have a socially undocumented identity by means of establishing what asocial identities are. It engages the respective metaphysical accounts of social identity of Linda Martín Alcoff and Pierre Bourdieu, both of which focus, albeit in different ways, on the embodied aspects of certain social identities. It adopts an account of social identity that understands such identities—particularly those that are race, gender and class-based—to be real, embodied sites of hermeneutical horizons. The goal is to develop a theory of socially undocumented identity that will prove useful for dismantling the sorts of institutions, thinking, and rhetoric that serve to brand and constrain unjustly a subset of the population as so-called “illegals.”

Andrea L. Guzman, S. Lewis

Artificial intelligence (AI) and people’s interactions with it—through virtual agents, socialbots, and language-generation software—do not fit neatly into paradigms of communication theory that have long focused on human–human communication. To address this disconnect between communication theory and emerging technology, this article provides a starting point for articulating the differences between communicative AI and previous technologies and introduces a theoretical basis for navigating these conditions in the form of scholarship within human–machine communication (HMC). Drawing on an HMC framework, we outline a research agenda built around three key aspects of communicative AI technologies: (1) the functional dimensions through which people make sense of these devices and applications as communicators, (2) the relational dynamics through which people associate with these technologies and, in turn, relate to themselves and others, and (3) the metaphysical implications called up by blurring ontological boundaries surrounding what constitutes human, machine, and communication.

D. Morgan

T. Williamson

R. Nisbett, K. Peng, I. Choi et al.

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process-content distinction.

T. Burge, P. Grice

J. Rawls

J. Lyotard

J. Schaffer

Oleg T. Ermishin

The research is devoted to the morphology that V.N. Ilyin developed in the work Static and Dynamics of Pure Form and other archival texts. Morphology is central to the philosophy of V.N. Ilyin, but it remains an unexplored subject. The article’s author explores the morphology of the philosopher from a historical and philosophical point of view. In addition to apparent influences (G.W. Leibniz, E. Husserl, N. Lossky), the article’s author revealed the connection of V.N. Ilyin’s ideas with the history of Western European philosophy and his attitude to medieval thinkers. The author considered how V.N. Ilyin understood and assessed his modern philosophy and its results by the middle of the twentieth century. V.N. Ilyin especially paid attention to phenomenology and its connection with morphology, analyzing phenomenology's influence on existential philosophy. In addition to phenomenology, V.N. Ilyin highly appreciated the intuitism of H. Bergson and N. Lossky. The third main philosophical direction in the twentieth century for V.N. Ilyin was religious philosophy (Neo-Thomists and followers of H. Bergson), which aimed at creating axiology, a new system of values. V.N. Ilyin sought to combine various philosophical ideas in the project of morphology based on logic and scientific methodology. He stated the need to reform formal logic and create “metalogic” that would be more consistent with the philosophical tasks of the twentieth century. The morphology of V.N. Ilyin is based on the idea of synthesis and focuses on creating universal science. The comparison of various philosophical ideas of the twentieth century with morphology makes it possible to understand better his philosophical worldview, the course of his reflections, and the meaning of the morphological project.

Benedikt Paul Göcke, Jean-Baptiste Guillon, Michele Paolini Paoletti et al.

It is a great pleasure for the editors of TheoLogica to present this special issue in honour of Dean Zimmerman. Dean Zimmerman’s work in metaphysics has had a profound impact on discussions of analytic theology and the philosophy of religion over the last three decades. Few contemporary philosophers have done as much to bring analytic rigour into conversation with traditional theological concerns, or to frame metaphysical inquiry in ways that illuminate doctrines long central in the Christian intellectual tradition.

Jef Huysmans, Ángela Iranzo

Recently, several calls have been made to renew research agendas on movement, mobility, and motion in IR. They invite us to prioritise analyses that explore how movement itself rather than belonging to a polity, society, and community enacts social and political relations. Such approaches have raised and continue to present challenges for modern conceptions of the international that embed social and political life in a sedentarist metaphysic that prioritises territorial roots and relations between enclosed entities, in particular territorialised sovereign states — or, state-like entities — that contain a society. Drawing on Malkki (1992 #3729@31, 34), sedentarism is defined as combining four elements. (i) Being rooted to a territory, or more generally soil, is the condition of identity and stability, the condition of proper being. Being a refugee, for example, emerges as being uprooted from the soil or territory where one belongs. (ii) The world exists by segmenting space into discrete territorial and cultural units. Borders and boundaries are constitutive because they define the units by partitioning insides from outside. (iii) This understanding of matter and life as rooted into segmented territorial entities is naturalised through various practices that make it a commonsense, self-evident imagination of the nature of life and matter. This process includes daily expressions like ‘home sweet home’, cartographic representations of migration, and representing human history in terms of an evolution from early hunter-gatherers to agricultural communities that expand into cities and later nation-states. (iv) Displacement is pathological in a sedentary world, an uprooting that pulls the living from the soil where they thrive. This article contributes to the work that has developed mobility agendas by unpacking what it means to prioritise movement in IR. In the first instance, giving primacy to movement means establishing conceptions of it as the primary analytical driver for understanding political and social relations. The article also develops a second answer to the question. It proposes that giving conceptual primacy to movement requires taking the point of view that life and matter are essentially movement, and that movement is continuous and undivided. Drawing on literature in mobility studies, the article introduces three different ways of conceptualising movement: crossing perimeters, connecting points, and threading passings. The first is movement within a sedentary world. The latter two create relations that challenge sedentary arrangements through networked organisations of movement and the entangling of movements moving in relation to one another. A sedentary world is not without movement. There is lots of movement — trade between states, migration of people, flows of viruses, migration of animals, tourism and so on. Of interest here is not a list of movements or the tension or relation between movement and sedentary entities, but the specific nature of movement as it emerges in sedentarist metaphysics. Our way into this is to look closer at the kind of line privileged in drawing a sedentary space. In sedentary conceptions of worlds, the defining lines are partitioning lines, lines separating insides and outsides by drawing perimeters that divide an existing space into enclosed figures. They separate an entity from the environment in which other entities exist. Once we partition space into insides and outsides, movement can appear as crossing from inside to outside and vice versa. Movement takes the form of border or boundary crossing. If we change the defining line from the one separating A and B to the connecting one, the one crossing the distance between A and B, do we enter a different world? We do, and it is a relatively familiar one. We move from a world of states or sedentary communities to networks. Instead of drawing enclosed figures on the page to visualise a social or political space, we draw points and lines connecting the points. The dots, or nodes, can be territorially circumscribed places, like cities or ports, but they can also be computer servers or individuals. Movement connecting makes the network different from the sedentary conception of space. What matters are the speed, density, and intensity of the movement of goods, people, animals, and services that connect the nodes. The multiple lines of transport that connect the dots create the network. Networks retain an awkward static-ness, however, not in the sense of ‘absence of movement’, but as letting movement arise from positions. The nodes are spatial positions — a city, a server, a port. From the point of view of circulation, they are projected onto the flows as positions where movement arrives and stops before moving on. Even if the nodes change location or relevance at different points in time, the movement is sensed through a series of positions rather than through the movement itself. The life being lived along the lines is not important. In that sense, we can say that a juxtaposition of immobilities — the nodes — organises the network; movement becomes simply the bridging of the distance between these points of immobility. That explains why, for circulation through networks, the life being lived and the entangling and encountering that takes place while moving along the line are not crucial for understanding movement. Migration, for example, is imagined and regulated as movement connecting nodes that represent ‘transport hubs’, which can be train stations, coastal areas, detention centres, etc. The connecting lines are not the actual route the migrants take but represent the crossing of distance between the hubs. A third conception of movement displaces both a sedentarist and network metaphysics and starts from taking everything as movement and nothing else. Giving primacy to movement then refers to specific modes of thought that foreground movement as continuous passing and refuse conceptualising movement in relation to stasis or non-motion. It holds that movement slips through our fingers when we recognise non-motion — stasis — exists. We render it as positions in space or time by drawing lines to enclose perimeters or connectors between points. Instead of connectors, it conceptualises the lines of movement as threads. Threads are drawn in a continuous movement rather than from point to point. A thread bends and entangles but is not cut up in points. It moves and is moved by other movements like the wind, someone running into the thread, and so on. Transitions and changes are bending the thread rather than cutting it or partitioning it into discrete bounded sections. The thread is a line that remains continuous, undivided. Movement is passing. What matters are the experiences, encounters and forces along the lines and the meshing of various filaments moving in relation to one another. The network nodes fade, and the lines meander as lines without points. The movement of a ship, for example, entangles with movements of wind, water, and barnacles. But the ship and its movement are also linked to the entangling movements of people living on the ship that create and alter the patterns of social relations and the changes made to ships, for example, in repairs or when taken over by pirates. Life on and off a container ship becomes important, transfiguring the container ship from a vehicle into the entangling of multiple threads that continue outwards. Analytically, the ship is understood in terms of the bendings and tensions between threads; it is a knot or meshwork of knots rather than a place. Movement as threading introduces a point of view that refuses stasis by taking everything as in continuous motion. The article concludes that such a conception of movement provides a pathway for developing research agendas in International Political Sociology that fracture the inside/outside binary and facilitate experimenting with transversal understandings of the social and political. It creates a paradoxical situation for IR, however, in that ‘the international’ can then no longer be the defining reference with which to organise the analysis as long as the concept of ‘the international’ inherently pulls studies of movement into sedentary arrangements that partition insides and outsides and conceive of movement mainly in terms of border crossing. When saying that such a conception of movement makes it impossible for ’the international’ to be the analytical driver, it does not mean that the matters of concern that drive IR, such as questions of borders, territorial rule, logistics, and war, disappear or are written out of the world. They exist from a transversal point of view but are sensed differently — they are transmuted. For example, borders transmute into mobility regimes — into confluences of movements moving — and thus are no longer ‘borders’ that draw partitioning perimeters rooting life, matter, and rule into exclusionary territories. That does not mean violence, suffering, and relocating are no longer analytically present. They are, but they must be thought through the inter-twining of movements rather than fixing perimeters.

Nina Emery

In her paper, “The Non-Governing Conception of Laws,” Helen Beebee argues that it is not a conceptual truth that laws of nature govern, and thus that one need not insist on a metaphysical account of laws that makes sense of their governing role. I agree with the first point but not the second. Although it is not a conceptual truth, the fact that laws govern follows straightforwardly from an important (though under-appreciated) principle of scientific theory choice combined with a highly plausible claim about the connection between scientific theory choice and theory choice in metaphysics. I present and defend this argument and then show how the resulting understanding of governance gives rise to an especially strong version of recent explanatory circularity arguments against Humeanism about laws of nature. Finally, I present three options for a further understanding of the governance relation that are compatible with my argument.

Marie-Élise Zovko

The hypothetical approach to the supersensible developed by Kant in his three Critiques, exemplified by his analysis of the aesthetic and reflective judgment in his third Critique, with their principle fortuitous purposiveness, can be considered as the basis for a new foundation of metaphysics. According to Kant’s limitation of cognition to the realm of sense intuition, theoretical knowledge of God, the subject, things-in-themselves, transcendental ideas is impossible. This leads to a kind of “negative theology” of the highest principle and the supersensible as a whole. The reasons are rooted in the character of propositional thought, which can only circumscribe a singular, supersensible reality by means of predicative sentences and discursive thought. Taking Kant’s lead, but in contrast to his terminology, I call really existent singularities, including the thinking, knowing, desiring, feeling unique individuals we know as human beings, spontaneities, in order to distinguish them from descriptive characteristics attributed to them by predicative thought. Kant’s “practico-dogmatic” account of the postulates of God and immortality of the soul, based on the “fact of freedom” and its connection to the moral imperative, ensure the possibility of the “highest good” as final aim of moral behaviour — but cannot satisfy our need for knowledge of the supersensible. To “lay the groundwork” for experience of our own self-conscious reality, the reality of others like ourselves, of things which transcend the boundaries of sense intuition, and of true reciprocity, a different method is needed, one which leads us “beyond being and thought” to the unconditional beginning of conditional reality.

Griffith Aaron M.

Ásta’s Categories We Live By is a superb addition to the literature on social metaphysics. In it she offers a powerful framework for understanding the creation and maintenance of social categories. In this commentary piece, I want to draw attention to Ásta’s reliance on explanatory individualism – the view that the social world is best explained by the actions and attitudes of individuals. I argue that this reliance makes it difficult for Ásta to explain how many social categories are maintained and why certain categories are reliably available to us and so resistant to change. These explanatory deficiencies could be overcome, I argue, by eschewing explanatory individualism and positing social structures to figure in structural explanations of the maintenance and availability of social categories.

Joan Lluís Llinàs Begon

Se pretende indagar sobre la consideración de Comenio y Descartes como dos de los principales impulsores de la modernidad, pedagógica en el caso de Comenio y filosófica en el caso de Descartes. Para ello, en primer lugar, se analizan las bases filosóficas del proyecto pedagógico de Comenio, centradas en la idea de Ciencia Universal. En segundo lugar, se explica por qué este proyecto aparentemente configura la modernidad pedagógica pero no la filosófica. En tercer lugar, se presentan las líneas básicas de lo que podría ser el proyecto pedagógico cartesiano, proyecto en cualquier caso no expuesto por Descartes en ninguna obra específicamente dedicada al tema. Finalmente, se defiende, a partir de la comparación entre Comenio y Descartes, que la modernidad pedagógica se configuró a partir de una didáctica proporcionada por Comenio, pero con un marco programático cartesiano. Ello fue posible, entre otros factores, porque ambos comparten un principio básico de la nueva pedagogía: la democratización de la enseñanza.

زهرا خزاعی, محسن جوادی, ندا زمان فشمی

تنگناهای اخلاقی (Moral Dilemmas )، موقعیتهایی هستند که در آنها فاعل با دو گزینه متعارض روبرو است که نمیتواند بر اساس هر دو عمل کند. کسانی که از وجود چنین موقعیتهایی طرفداری میکنند، معتقدند فاعل در این موقعیتها ناگزیر است مرتکب خطای اخلاقی (Moral Wrongdoing ) شود و اگر هر کدام از گزینهها را برگزیند، با احساسات منفی از قبیل احساس گناه (guilt) ، افسوس (Regret) و پشیمانی (remorse) مواجه خواهد شد. مخالفان تنگناها علیه وجود چنین موقعیتهایی استدلال کردهاند و معتقدند این موقعیتها، انسجام نظریه اخلاقی را زیر سؤال میبرند. آنها ادعا میکنند که نظریه اخلاقی خوب باید بتواند در هر موقعیتی برای فاعل راهنمای عمل (action guiding) باشد و نباید دستورات متعارض صادر کند؛ در حالی‌که تنگناهای اخلاقی، مثال نقضی برای راهنمای عمل بودن نظریههای اخلاقی هستند. مدافعان تنگناها که عمدتاً در چارچوب اخلاق فضیلتی استدلال میکنند، مدعیاند که نظریه اخلاق فضیلت، درعینحال که میتواند منسجم و راهنمای عمل باشد، تبیین مناسبی هم برای تنگناهای اخلاقی فراهم میآورد.

Sanderson Molick

O livro do filósofo finlandês Tuomas Tahko, An introduction to Metametaphysics, recentemente lançado pela Cambridge University Press (2015) como um dos volumes da série Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy, fornece uma resposta à pergunta: Por que acrescentar um outro "meta" à palavra "metafísica" e tentar falar de uma metametafísica? De acordo com o autor, o termo "metametafísica" serve para designar a área da Filosofia que busca questionar a própria metodologia da metafísica, bem como seu propósito último. Deste modo, a metametafísica pode ser definida como o estudo dos fundamentos e metodologia da metafísica. O livro de Tuomas Tahko é uma notável obra que compila parte considerável do debate contemporâneo sobre o tema. [The book written by the finnish philosopher Tuomas Tahko, An introduction to Metametaphysics, recently published by Cambridge University Press as a volume of the series Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy,  provides an answer to the question: why to add another "meta" to the word "metaphysics" and talk about a "metametaphysics"? According to the author, the term "metametaphysics" refers to the field of Philosophy which seeks to investigate the very methodology of Metaphysics, as well as its ultimate goal. Therefore, metametaphysics might be defined as the study of the foundations and methodology of Metaphysics. Tuomas Tahko's book is a notable contribution which compiles much of the contemporary debate on the theme.]

Danilo Vaz-Curado R. M. Costa, José Pinheiro Pertille

The present analysis defends the thesis that Hegel elaborates an original transformation of the concept of metaphysics, assuming its presuppositions as they were developed in the philosophic tradition, that metaphysics is a doctrine of the first principles, a theory of Being, a theodicy and even, as for Kant, a theory of knowledge.

Anatolii M. Malivskyi

The purpose is to reveal and comprehend forms of influence metaphysical' revolution for a way of interpretation of the anthropological project by Descartes on the basis of investigations of modern dekartes's researchers, that is the recognition of a fundamental role of metaphysics. Methodology. As methodological base modern investigations of dekartes's researchers accenting a fundamental role of metaphysics and expediency of unbiassed judgment of heritage of the great thinker are used. The scientific novelty. The transformation of the anthropological project is outlined as manifestation of metaphysical revolution. It is about a transcendencecy of naive anthropology (as an embodiment of reductive mindset), that is interpretations of human nature as its corporality and transition to metaphysical anthropology which consists in upholding of unconditional priority of human thinking as associated with God. As result of transition concentration of attention on intense human nature, that is at tension between sensuality and intelligence, aspiration to truth and tendency to delusion, between Life and Nothing, etc. Conclusions. The appeal to the incomplete anthropological project of Descartes on the basis of innovative researches allows proving the thesis about influence of metaphysical revolution on a way of its interpretation. The main forms of oriented to science ideals of naive anthropology, trust in evidence of the senses, atheism, interpretation of science as the main form of detection rationality of human nature, which Descartes tends constructively to overcome in the text of "meditation", are highlighted. During creation of metaphysical anthropology the attention of the thinker is drawn by the fact of impossibility of comprehension of human nature by means of natural-science rationality and expediency of the appeal to metaphysics. The subject of attention of the thinker is the tension between sensuality and intelligence, need for truth and tendency to delusion, ontologic tension between Life and Nothing etc.