We all know what water is, and we often take it for granted. But the spectre of a worldwide water crisis suggests that there might be something fundamentally wrong with the way we think about water. Jamie Linton dives into the history of water as an abstract concept, stripped of its environmental, social, and cultural contexts. Reduced to a scientific abstraction – to mere H20 – this concept has given modern society licence to dam, divert, and manipulate water (...) with apparent impunity. Part of the solution to the water crisis involves reinvesting water with social content, thus altering the way we see water. An original take on a deceptively complex issue, What Is Water? offers a fresh approach to a fundamental problem. (shrink)

An opinionated history of neuroscience, which argues that--due to the brain's complexity--neuroscientific theories have only captured partial truths, and therefore "neurophilosophy" is unlikely to be achieved.

Over the last fifteen years, studies on Sanskrit intellectual history between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries have produced a body of scholarship that has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the period. Yet, despite significant advances in the understanding of the social-historical circumstances of authors and disciplines as well as success in elucidating major features of intellectual thought, a main point of difficultly has been in combining both the intellectuality and sociality of Sanskrit scholars. By examining a debate within the (...) discipline of nyāya during the seventeenth century about how one cognizes the universal property ‘Brahman-ness ’ and by connecting it with a social debate that is found in available historical documents of the period, this essay attempts to combine the sociality of the Brahman scholarly community in Vārāṇasī with their intellectuality and offer a larger analysis of nyāya intellectual history for this period. The essay concludes by considering the ways in which the social world impinged upon nyāya argumentation and nyāya argumentation upon the social world. (shrink)

According to the antirealist view of history, history is something historians construct in the present. Although the warrants they may gather in favour of past events do not form a coherent class, such warrants constitute the assertibility conditions of our statements about the past. They are by nature partial, gradual and defeasible. The antirealist is then faced with two problems. One is to account for a notion of historical significance, either in terms of causal links, broad patterns, or (...) justified historiographic generalizations. A second one is to secure a bound to the holistic construal of historical cognitive content. A coherent antirealist about history must explain why historical claims are in the market for truth, without taking the position of an ideal observer looking at the past from an a-historical fixed point outside time. (shrink)

This volume explores the roles and uses of abstraction in scientific and artistic practice. Conceived as an interdisciplinary dialogue between experts across histories and philosophies of art and science, this collection of essays draws on the shared premise that abstraction is a rich and generative process, not reducible to the mere omission of details in a representation. When scientists attempt to make sense of complex natural phenomena, they often produce highly abstract models of them. In the history (...) and philosophy of art, there is a long tradition of debate on the function of abstraction, and - more recently - its relation with theories of depiction. Adopting a process-oriented perspective, the chapters in this volume explore the epistemic potential of a diversity of practices of abstracting. The systematic analysis of a wide range of historical cases, from early twentieth-century abstractionist painting to contemporary abstract photography, and from nineteenth-century physics to recent research in biology and neurosciences, invites the reader to reflect on the material lives of abstraction through concrete artefacts, experimental practices and theoretical and aesthetic achievements. Abstraction in Science and Art: Philosophical Perspectives will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of science, and epistemology, as well as to historians of science and art, and to practicing artists and scientists interested in exploring foundational questions at the heart of the creative practice of abstracting. (shrink)

For centuries abstraction was understood as an operation according to which, from a given phenomenon, something is kept, but something else is not paid attention to, is ”abstracted from”. This notion of abstraction not only has been rejected by the mainstream of analytic philosophy and logic as worthless psychologism but, moreover, largely replaced by a new conception of abstraction in which the allegedly ”psychological” feature of ”not paying attention to”, or ”abstracting from”, is no longer visible. Psychologism (...) has been overcome, of course, but at the expense of removing any genuine abstraction from the new notion. This is the ”trouble” in the history of abstraction. (shrink)

From the advent of general purpose, Turing-complete machines, the relation between operators, programmers and users with computers can be observed as interconnected informational organisms (inforgs), henceforth analysed with the method of levels of abstraction (LoAs), risen within the philosophy of information (PI). In this paper, the epistemological levellism proposed by L. Floridi in the PI to deal with LoAs will be formalised in constructive terms using category theory, so that information itself is treated as structure-preserving functions instead of Cartesian (...) products. The milestones in the history of modern computing are then analysed through constructive levellism to show how the growth of system complexity lead to more and more information hiding. (shrink)

The ardent antagonism between two aesthetic parties, figuration and abstraction, which for more than half a century has stamped art history in old Europe, with increasingly overlapping implications for youthful America, Japan and many other places, today tends to reduce itself to being simply the anecdotal imprint of an era: in the final analysis it seems already condemned to disappear in favor of a notion of complementarity and even synthesis.

Through a direct reference to Louis Marin’s theory of the visual representation, in the article some filmic and non-filmic images (Biblical episodes, paintings, tapestry, movies and digital images) are analysed as they all display the character of a screen. The convergence between visual representations and screens is then generalized in order to show that, at least during Western Modernity, image vision often functioned as an absorption into a screen space, where the spectator was not only able to reorganize his optical (...) experience, but was also empowered, through the relationship established with the figures in the representation, to act and display his/her agency, desires and claims. Considered as screens, images show thus the coincidence between an aesthetic and a political experience, where the spectator is not a passive consumer, but an actor on the stage. (shrink)

Abstract I argue that meaning in life is importantly influenced by bioloical ties. More specifically, I maintain that knowing one's relatives and especially one's parents provides a kind of self-knowledge that is of irreplaceable value in the life-task of identity formation. These claims lead me to the conclusion that it is immoral to create children with the intention that they be alienated from their bioloical relatives?for example, by donor conception.

A debated topic in Avicennan psychology is whether for Avicenna abstraction is a metaphor for emanation or to be taken literally. This issue stems from the deeper philosophical question of whether humans acquire intelligibles externally from an emanation by the Active Intellect, which is a separate substance, or internally from an inherently human cognitive process, which prepares us for an emanation from the Active Intellect. I argue that the tension between thesedoctrines is only apparent. In his logical works Avicenna (...) limns an account where through the internal human process of abstraction accidents accruing to an essence existing in matter are extracted, thus preparing the essence for new accidents emanating externally from the Active Intellect, which make the essence something conceptualized in the intellect. This study, then, outlines the epistemological and metaphysical framework presented in the logical works that underpins Avicenna’s theory of abstraction presented in his psychological works. (shrink)

Contains overviews of religious, intellectual, literary, economic, political, and scientific concepts.

Dignity plays a central role in current thinking about law and human rights, but there is sharp disagreement about its meaning. Combining conceptual precision with a broad historical background, Michael Rosen puts these controversies in context and offers a novel, constructive proposal. “Penetrating and sprightly...Rosen rightly emphasizes the centrality of Catholicism in the modern history of human dignity. His command of the history is impressive...Rosen is a wonderful guide to the recent German constitutional thinking about human dignity...[Rosen] is (...) in general an urbane and witty companion, achieving his aim of accessibly written philosophy.” —Samuel Moyn, The Nation “[An] elegant, interesting and lucid exploration of the concept of dignity...Drawing on classical, liberal and Catholic traditions, Rosen hopes to rehabilitate dignity to its rightful place near the centre of moral thought...Rosen's admirable book deserves wide attention from political theorists, jurisprudes and political philosophers.” —Simon Blackburn, Times Higher Education “Dignity deserves to be widely read, not only for its intrinsic interest, but also as a corrective to the habit of discussing such topics in abstraction from their social context. Whether or not one agrees with Rosen's arguments, there can be no doubt he has widened our horizons.” —Rae Langton, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

A debated topic in Avicennan psychology is whether for Avicenna abstraction is a metaphor for emanation or to be taken literally. This issue stems from the deeper philosophical question of whether humans acquire intelligibles externally from an emanation by the Active Intellect, which is a separate substance, or internally from an inherently human cognitive process, which prepares us for an emanation from the Active Intellect. I argue that the tension between thesedoctrines is only apparent. In his logical works Avicenna (...) limns an account where through the internal human process of abstraction accidents accruing to an essence existing in matter are extracted, thus preparing the essence for new accidents emanating externally from the Active Intellect, which make the essence something conceptualized in the intellect. This study, then, outlines the epistemological and metaphysical framework presented in the logical works that underpins Avicenna’s theory of abstraction presented in his psychological works. (shrink)

Methodological innovations have a special status in disciplinary histories, because they can be widely adopted and anonymised. In the 1950s, this occurred to Georges Laplace’s innovative use of 3-dimensional metric Cartesian coordinate system to record the positions of archaeological objects. This paper proposes a conceptual and social history of this process, with a focus on its spatial context, the Pyrenean region (Spain, Basque Country, and France). Main results of this research based on archives, publications, and bibliometric data, include: 1) (...) a critical discussion of the notions concerning authorship of such methodological innovations; 2) a presentation of the lesser-known aspects of Laplace’s method, showing its contribution to the abstraction and formalisation of archaeological observations and data recording; and 3) the identification of an international Pyrenean intellectual lineage of innovation regarding stratigraphy and excavation methods, from the late 19th century to the early 21th century. (shrink)

This paper looks at the history of the problem of individuation from Plato to Whitehead. Part I takes as its point of departure Reiner Wiehl’s interpretation of the different meanings of “abstract” in the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead and arrives at a corresponding taxonomy of different ways things can be called concrete. Part II compares the way philosophers in different periods understand the relation between thought and intuition. The view mostly associated with ancient philosophy is that thought and (...) sense-perception target different kinds of objects. The view mostly associated with modern philosophy (although it was introduced by the Stoics) is that thought and sense-perception are different ways of targeting the same objects. These differences have specific consequences for theories of individuation, which are assessed historically in Part III and then applied to Whitehead’s difficult texts in part IV. (shrink)

Abstraction and generalization are two processes of reasoning that have a special role in the construction of scientific theories and models. They have been important parts of the scientific method ever since the nineteenth century. A philosophical and historical analysis of scientific practices shows how abstraction and generalization found their way into the theory of the logic of science of the nineteenth-century philosopher Charles S. Peirce. Our case studies include the scientific practices of Francis Galton and John Herschel, (...) who introduced composite photographs and graphical methods, respectively, as technologies of generalization and thereby influenced Peirce’s logic of abstraction. Herschel’s account of generalization is further supported by William Whewell, who was very influential on Peirce. By connecting Herschel’s scientific technology of abstraction to Peirce’s logical technology of abstraction—namely, diagrams—we highlight the role of judgments in scientific observation by hypostatic abstractions. We also relate Herschel’s discovery-driven logic of science and Peirce’s open-ended diagrammatic logic to the use of models in science. Ultimately, Peirce’s theory of abstraction is a case of showing how logic applies to reality. (shrink)

This paper explores the influence of Søren Kierkegaard upon Paul Feyerabend by examining their common criticisms of totalising accounts of human nature. Both complained that philosophical and scientific theories of human nature which were methodologically committed to objectivity and abstraction failed to capture the richness of human experience. Kierkegaard and Feyerabend argued that philosophy and the science were threatening to become obstacles to human development by imposing abstract theories of human nature and reality which denied the complexities of both. (...) In both cases, this took the form of asserting an ‘existential’ criterion for the assessment of philosophical and scientific theories. Kierkegaard also made remarks upon the inappropriateness of applying natural scientific methods to human beings which Feyerabend later expanded and developed in his criticisms of the inability of the ‘scientific worldview’ to accommodate the values necessary to a flourishing human life. I conclude by noting some differences between Kierkegaard and Feyerabend’s positions and by affirming the value of existential criticisms of scientific knowledge.Keywords: Feyerabend; Kierkegaard; Objectivity;ion; Human nature. (shrink)

There has long been a tension in Fredric Jameson’s work regarding the extent to which it is possible or warranted to develop transhistorical categories for literary interpretation across of the whole of the capitalist mode of production. In my contribution to this symposium, I take up the problem of how Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology participates in such questions in its consideration of periodisation and narrativisation through the particular construction of allegory, from the early modern age to our financial present.

In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines their ideas not simply in the context of political languages but as creative responses to the social relations and conflicts of their time and place. She identifies a distinctive relation between property and state in Western history and shows how the canon, while largely the work of members or clients of dominant (...) classes, was shaped by complex interactions among proprietors, labourers and states. Western political theory, Wood argues, owes much of its vigour, and also many ambiguities, to these complex and often contradictory relations. In this new edition, incorporating both volumes, the book takes us from classical antiquity to the age of enlightenement. In the first volume, Wood traces the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through to the Middle Ages in the perspective of social history--a significant departure not only from the standard abstract history of ideas but also from other contextual methods. In the second volume, Wood moves on to explore the formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment. In her focus on canonical thinkers through the ages, Wood illuminates a rich and provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history"--Publisher's website. (shrink)

What can philosophy bring to the reading of Beckett? Combining intertextual analysis with a ‘schizoanalytic genealogy’ derived from the authors of L’Anti-Œdipe, Garin Dowd’sMachines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari offers an innovative response to this much debated question. The author focuses on zones of encounter and thresholds of engagement between Beckett’s writing and a range of philosophers and philosophical concepts. Beckett’s writing impacts in a variety of ways on Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, and, in particular, resonates with (...) Deleuze’s contributions to the history of philosophy, and his ‘critical and clinical’ approach to literature. Furthermore, the books co-written with Guattari, concerned as they are with the ‘molecularization’ of the discipline of philosophy in the name of ‘thinking otherwise’, reveal themselves in a new light when explored in conjunction with Beckett’s œuvre. With its arresting perspectives on a wide range of Beckett’s works, Abstract Machines will appeal to academics and postgraduate students interested in the philosophical aspects of his writing. Its engagement with alternative contributions to the question of Beckett and philosophy, including that of Alain Badiou, renders it a timely and provocative intervention in contemporary debates on the relationship between literature and philosophy, both within the field of Beckett studies and beyond. (shrink)

In empirical science, hypostatic abstraction posits an entity defined by its assumed physical relation to a known phenomenon. If the assumed relation is real, the posited entity is physically real and is not an ens rationis. The posited entity, being identified indirectly, by its relation to something else, may be the agreed-upon subject of mutually incommensurable theories, and this is a key to understanding the history of science. Natural kinds may be introduced by hypostatic abstraction, and this (...) explains why, contrary to received doctrine, concepts of natural kinds can never be vague in the sense of being fuzzy, though they can be vague in the sense of lacking specificity. Terms defined by hypostatic abstraction are rigid designators in Kripke's sense, but show how rigid designation is consistent with the Fregean theory of reference. (shrink)

Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit examines a conspicuous feature of Hegel's major works: that they are progressive narratives. They advance from less to more perfect, abstract to concrete, indeterminate or empty to determinate. This is true, argues the author, of his lectures on aesthetics and on the history of philosophy, and it is also true of his most abstract work, the Science of Logic. In answer to the question of why is it so important for (...) Hegel to structure his various philosophical works as developmental narratives, this book defends the thesis that Hegel's motivation is in part metaphysical, intending his developmental accounts to reveal something significant about who we are as thinking, willing natures. He undertakes his study of past in order to demonstrate that there have been advances in the nature of human thought or reason itself and in our resulting freedom and his concern with our reason's development conveys his interest in how human reason is anchored in and shaped by its past. Ultimately, this book specifies the extent to which we can accurately attribute to Hegel the view that human reason and the freedom it affords us are indebted for their nature to this temporal order of nature and history. (shrink)

ABSTRACT For some years now, the history of modern mathematics and the history of modern science have developed independently. A step toward a reunification that would benefit both disciplines could come about through a revived appreciation of mathematical practice. Detailed studies of what mathematicians actually do, whether local or broadly based, have often led in recent work to examinations of the social, cultural, and national contexts, and more can be done. Another recent approach toward a historical understanding of (...) the abstractness of modern mathematics has been to see it as a species of modernism, and this thesis will be tested by the raft of works on the history of modern applied mathematics currently under way. (shrink)

Reification is to abstraction as disease is to health. Whereas abstraction is singling out, symbolizing, and systematizing, reification is neglecting abstractive context, especially functional, historical, and analytical-level context. William James and John Dewey provide similar and nuanced arguments regarding the perils and promises of abstraction. They share an abstraction-reification account. The stages of abstraction and the concepts of “vicious abstractionism,” “/the/ psychologist’s fallacy,” and “the philosophic fallacy” in the works of these pragmatists are here analyzed (...) in detail. For instance, in 1896 Dewey exposes various fallacies associated with reifying dualistic reflex arc theory. The conclusion prescribes treatments (pluralism and assumption archaeology) for de-reifying ill models (i.e., universalized, narrowed, and ontologized models) in contemporary scientific fields such as cognitive science and biology. (shrink)

One of the key features of modern mathematics is the adoption of the abstract method. Our goal in this paper is to propose an explication of that method that is rooted in the history of the subject.

Fitch's basic logic is an untyped illative combinatory logic with unrestricted principles of abstraction effecting a type collapse between properties (or concepts) and individual elements of an abstract syntax. Fitch does not work axiomatically and the abstraction operation is not a primitive feature of the inductive clauses defining the logic. Fitch's proof that basic logic has unlimited abstraction is not clear and his proof contains a number of errors that have so far gone undetected. This paper corrects (...) these errors and presents a reasonably intuitive proof that Fitch's system K supports an implicit abstraction operation. Some general remarks on the philosophical significance of basic logic, especially with respect to neo-logicism, are offered, and the paper concludes that basic logic models a highly intensional form of logicism. (shrink)

Al-Fârâbî’s thought on intellect was known to the Latin West through the translation of his Letter on the Intellect, through the Long Commentary on the De Anima by Averroes and through some other works. Al-Fârâbî identified the active power of intellect in Aristotle’s De Anima 3.5 as the unique and separately existing Agent Intellect, but the role of the Agent Intellect in forming intelligibles in act in the human soul is by no means unequivocally clear. Further, the apprehension of intelligibles (...) by human beings and the intellectual development of the soul, oftentimes described as an activity of abstracting (intaza`a), seems to be a genuineabstraction from experience, yet it somehow involves the emanative power of the Agent Intellect. This paper works to provide a coherent explanation of the natureof abstraction and the role of Agent Intellect in that activity. (shrink)

Berkeley's critique of abstract ideas in the Introduction to Principles of Human Knowledge has provoked a great deal of commentary of various sorts. This anthology, first published in 1989, presents a selection of historically important and philosophically interesting discussions on Berkeley's theories.

These are the abstracts of papers for the conference, History Unveiled Science Unfettered: A Conference in Celebration of James E. McGuire University of Pittsburgh, January 19, 2002.

Formal abstraction is a key instrument Aquinas employs to secure the possibility of mathematics conceived as a theoretical Aristotelian science. In this concept, mathematics investigates quantitative beings, which are grasped by means of formal abstraction in their necessary, universal, and changeless properties. Based on this, the paper divides into two main parts. In the first part (section II) I explicate Aquinas’s conception of (formal) abstraction against the background of the Aristotelian theory of science and mathematics. In the (...) second part (section III) I present and critically assess the problems associated with formal abstraction in mathematics. With all due respect to Aquinas’s genius, I find his conception of formal abstraction (as well as mathematics) unsatisfactory and list the main reasons for its failure in the conclusion. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to emphasize a number of important points that will provide a better understanding of the history of philosophical thought concerning scientific knowledge. The main points made are: (a) that the principal way of viewing abstraction which has dominated the history of thought and epistemology up to the present is influenced by the original Aristotelian position; (b) that with the birth of modern science a new way of conceiving abstraction came into (...) being which is better characterized by the term idealization, the name that was later, in fact, to be used by scientists to describe their scientific activity; (c) that, however, on account of the influence of empirical and inductive philosophy, scientists have often not had sufficient methodological awareness of this new way of viewing abstraction; (d) that this new concept of abstraction has frequently been expressed in the framework of philosophies that lie outside the mainstream of contemporary epistemology or even exhibit marked anti-scientific tendencies; (e) that the theme of idealization has been taken up again in the last few decades and a great contribution in this direction has been made by the so-called Pozna school of methodology. (shrink)

Peano's axiomatizations of geometry are abstract and non-intuitive in character, whereas Peano stresses his appeal to concrete spatial intuition in the choice of the axioms. This poses the problem of understanding the interrelationship between abstraction and intuition in his geometrical works. In this article I argue that axiomatization is, for Peano, a methodology to restructure geometry and isolate its organizing principles. The restructuring produces a more abstract presentation of geometry, which does not contradict its intuitive content but only puts (...) it into a particular form. (shrink)