This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language and all but one appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy (Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Hegel) and twentieth-century thought (Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, the historian Aby Warburg, and the linguist J.-C. Milner). They also examine several central concerns of Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, (...) and Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality. (shrink)

The 18th-century Scottish ‘common sense’ philosopher Thomas Reid argued that perception can be distinguished on several dimensions from other categories of experience, such as sensation, illusion, hallucination, mental images, and what he called ‘fancy.’ We extend his approach to eleven mental categories, and discuss how these distinctions, often ignored in the empirical literature, bear on current research. We also score each category on five properties (ones abstracted from Reid) to form a 5 × 11 matrix, and thus can (...) generate statistical measures of their mutual dependencies, a procedure that may have general interest as illustrating what we can call ‘computational philosophy.’. (shrink)

The category of« organism » has an ambiguous status: scientific or philosophical? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific « bolstering » for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the « mechanistic » or « reductionist » trend, which is seen as dominant since the 17th century, whether in the case of Stahlian animism, Leibnizian monadology, the neo-vitalism of Hans Driesch, or, lastly, of the « phenomenology of organic life » in the (...) 20th century, with authors such as Goldstein, Straws, and Weizsäcker, whose influence on Merleau-Ponty but also Canguilhem is obvious. The aim of this article is both to bring to light the sedimentation of this category and to give a critical evaluation of it, in other words, to sec in what way it might still be useful once one has eliminated the possibility of any « organicist » excesses. I suggest a notion of organism as an instrumental fiction. (shrink)

Philosophy for children is an educational movement that includes diverse goals that are not always clearly articulated by theorists and practitioners. In order to navigate the multitude of aims found in the philosophy for children literature I propose distinguishing between the following categories of goals: aims of education; educational goals of philosophy for children ; goals of a community of philosophical inquiry ; goals of the facilitator; and goals of the children. The definitions of these various (...) types are given along with some examples of how the distinctions between them can be of aid in understanding the approaches, criticisms, and practice of philosophy for children. (shrink)

This book presents the Proceedings of the Second International Colloquium on Cognitive Science, held at San Sebastian in May, 1991, to discuss from an interdisciplinary point of view topics which are at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science. With a total of eleven papers from leading scholars in the field, the volume provides many different theoretical approaches to the study of Categories, Consciousness and Reasoning. The book is addressed to researchers, specialists, advanced students and scholars in the (...) fields of epistemology, philosophy of mind, psychology, semantics, logic and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

The category of the Ethico-Aesthetics, introduced by Søren Kierkegaard, was applied to the study of Byzantine Philosophy by the Greek philoso­pher and theologian Nikolaos Matsoukas. Matsoukas vehe­mently rejected the identification of Byzantine philosophy with a strict Christian moralism. Rather, he viewed it as an ethos which did not lead the ascetics to display Manichean contempt for the body. It was thus a kind of ‘mild asceticism’. This ethical acceptance of the body turns against Neoplatonic speculation and cultivates the (...) habitus that leads to artistic creativity. Byzantine philosophy is thus situated at the midpoint between nominalism and realism, but standing against the realism of the archetypal ideas. The paper concludes with some considerations on the pragmatics of Byzantine philosophy in a Christian world. (shrink)

I provide a critical commentary regarding the attitude of the logician and the philosopher towards the physicist and physics. The commentary is intended to showcase how a general change in attitude towards making scientific inquiries can be beneficial for science as a whole. However, such a change can come at the cost of looking beyond the categories of the disciplines of logic, philosophy and physics. It is through self-inquiry that such a change is possible, along with the realization (...) of the essence of the middle that is otherwise excluded by choice. The logician, who generally holds a reverential attitude towards the physicist, can then actively contribute to the betterment of physics by improving the language through which the physicist expresses his experience. The philosopher, who otherwise chooses to follow the advancement of physics and gets stuck in the trap of sophistication of language, can then be of guidance to the physicist on intellectual grounds by having the physicist’s experience himself. In course of this commentary, I provide a glimpse of how a truthful conversion of verbal statements to physico-mathematical expressions unravels the hitherto unrealized connection between Heisenberg uncertainty relation and Cauchy’s definition of derivative that is used in physics. The commentary can be an essential reading if the reader is willing to look beyond the categories of logic, philosophy and physics by being ‘nobody’. (shrink)

The contributions gathered here demonstrate how categorical ontology can provide a basis for linking three important basic sciences: mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Category theory is a new formal ontology that shifts the main focus from objects to processes. The book approaches formal ontology in the original sense put forward by the philosopher Edmund Husserl, namely as a science that deals with entities that can be exemplified in all spheres and domains of reality. It is a dynamic, processual, and non-substantial (...) ontology in which all entities can be treated as transformations, and in which objects are merely the sources and aims of these transformations. Thus, in a rather surprising way, when employed as a formal ontology, category theory can unite seemingly disparate disciplines in contemporary science and the humanities, such as physics, mathematics and philosophy, but also computer and complex systems science. (shrink)

This article investigates how late nineteenth century Japanese philosophers responded to large categories of ideas imported from the West and for which there were no Japanese equivalents; mainly "science," "religion," and "philosophy." Discussions on whether Buddhism or Confucianism would fall under "philosophy" or "religion" accompanied a re-categorization of ideas. Some philosophers made elaborate reconstructions of Buddhism and Confucianism as modern philosophies. However, over time, Japanese categorizations of Buddhism and Confucianism shifted from "philosophy" (tetsugaku) to "thought" (shisō). (...) Investigating Meiji philosophy from the perspective of this problem of categories makes it is possible to reevaluate it on its own terms. (shrink)

Plessner’s philosophical anthropology is presented as a non-naturalistic philosophy of nature. Such a position is attractive and indispensable, for instance, to all debates concerning personhood and human dignity. Plessner’s work rests on a conception of philosophy that distinguishes without exception the contents of possible experiences from their conditions of possibility. Thus, Plessner’s anthropology is a theory of categorial contents, but not in the aprioric sense according to which they would be assumed to be prior to all experience. Plessner (...) avoids such a misconception by structuring his philosophy in a reflexive way. Therefore his basic philosophical category or idea—eccentric positionality—doesn’t mean a property of human or any natural beings, but the categorial frame called personhood which is in use when we identify empirical properties of humans. The challenge in understanding personhood as conceptually independent of empirical properties consists in distinguishing between the contingency of personhood and arbitrariness. (shrink)

BY OVEREMPHASIZING MATERIALISTIC VALUES, we have perverted the culture and set modern Western civilization on a self-destructive course. Some critics have said that the economy, science, and technology are the only healthy aspects of our society. We have what I have called a saber-toothed tiger civilization. In the evolutionary process, the saber-toothed tiger developed great tusks as effective weapons in combat, but perished because they obstructed its eating. We have developed a culture that is highly successful in advancing science and (...) technology and producing wealth and power, but in doing so we have undermined and subjectivized the sectors of the culture that underwrite our identity, the meaning of our existence, and the norms and values by which we live our lives, organize our society, and run our institutions, including even science and the economy. But unlike the saber-toothed tiger, we can discover our error and correct our course. (shrink)

Résumé -/- Dans son premier livre (Philosophie de l’arithmétique 1891), Husserl élabore une très intéressante philosophie des mathématiques. Les concepts mathématiques sont interprétés comme des concepts de « deuxième ordre » auxquels on accède par une réflexion sur nos opérations mentales de numération. Il s’ensuit que la vérité de la proposition : « il y a trois pommes sur la table » ne consiste pas dans une relation mythique quelconque avec la réalité extérieure au psychique (où le nombre trois doit (...) être exemplifié de quelque manière), mais bien dans le fait que les pommes sur la table peuvent être dénombrées correctement en tant qu’elles sont au nombre de trois. Nous avons affaire ici à une position « antiréaliste » fondant la vérité mathématique non pas dans un monde platonicien, mais bien sur le concept de rectitude de nos opérations formelles. -/- Abstract -/- In his first book (Philosophy of Arithmetic 1891) Husserl develops a very interesting philosophy of mathematics. Mathematical concepts are interpreted as « second order » concepts gained by reflection on our mental operations of counting. Accordingly the truth of the proposition « There are three apples on the table » consists not in any mythical relation to the extra-mental reality (where the number three should be somehow exemplified), but rather in the fact that the apples on the table can be correctly counted as three. We have here an « anti-realist » position grounding the mathematical truth not in platonic realms, but rather in the concept of correctness of our formal operations. (shrink)

Exercices, voire " leçons de méthode ", les études ici réunies ne prétendent pas contribuer au déchiffrement de quelque " histoire de l'être ", mais elles entendent plus simplement et modestement éclairer - soit par coups de sonde, soit en procédant à de plus larges coupes, et sur la longue durée - l'élaboration, dans le pluriel des langues, du vocabulaire de l'être et de la problématique catégoriale : essence, substance, sujet, substrat, quiddité, existence... C'est dire aussi que ce qui constitue (...) le véritable centre de gravité d'un propos apparemment divers - et qu'il s'agisse d'Aristote ou de ses commentateurs grecs néoplatoniciens, de Cicéron, de Sénèque, de Quintilien, de Jean Scot Erigène..., ou de Schelling et jusqu'à Heidegger confronté à la doctrine de l'analogie de l'être, c'est toujours la question de la traduction et de la traditionnalité, à travers lesquelles s'inscrivent et se sédimentent, mais aussi se redéfinissent et se réorganisent, en des constellations problématiques chaque fois singulières, quelques questions ontologiques, tenues pour fondamentales. (shrink)

The categories of health and disease/illness are conceptualized from the perspective of the philosophy of medicine. Philosophical contradictions are revealed, which, fueling the debate between naturalism and normativism, prevent biomedicine from developing a single satisfactory understanding of these categories. The theoretical and practical consequences of such biomedicine features as pathocentrism, identification of health with complete well-being, dichotomy of health and disease in the absence of a clear criterion for their differentiation are analyzed. The role of humanistic approaches (...) to the medicine rehumanization is investigated with a focus on their balanced view of health and disease/illness, attentive to the fundamental vulnerability of human nature. (shrink)

This paper investigates two related aspects of Aristotle’s conception of primary substances in the Categories. In Section 1 I distinguish different interpretations of the relation between a primary substance and its accidental attributes: one (A) according to which a primary substance encompasses all of its attributes, including the accidental ones; another (B) according to which a primary substance encompasses only its essential attributes, whereas the accidental attributes are extrinsic to the substance, though related to it; and a third, intermediate (...) one (C) according to which a primary substance encompasses neither all of its attributes nor only the essential ones, but all the necessary ones. I trace the history of all three interpretations and argue in favour of (B). In Section 2 I defend the view that a particular human being, their soul, and their body all count as primary substances, and that the relation between these three substances is that soul and body are parts of the substance. I show that this hypothesis harmonizes both with some views advanced in the Categories and with some passages from other Aristotelian works. I conclude by drawing a comparison between this view and Aristotle’s mature hylomorphic doctrine. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Textual Problems The Trinitarian Structure within the Introduction to the Philosophy of History The Trinitarian Structure in History The Role of Race in History List of Abbreviations of Works by Hegel References.

Rocco Gangle addresses the methodological questions raised by a commitment to immanence in terms of how diagrams may be used both as tools and as objects of philosophical investigation. Gangle integrates insights from Spinoza, Pierce and Deleuze in conjunction with the formal operations of category theory.

The concept that peope have of themselves as a 'person' is one of the most intimate notions that they hold. Yet the way in which the category of the person is conceived varies over time and space. In this volume, anthropologists, philosophers, and historians examine the notion of the person in different cultures, past and present. Taking as their starting point a lecture on the person as a category of the human mind, given by Marcel Mauss in 1938, the contributors (...) critically assess Mauss's speculation that ntions of the person, rather than being primarily philosophical or psychological, have a complex social and ideological origin. Discussing societies ranging from ancient Greece, India, and China to modern Africa and Papua New Guinea, they provide fascinating descriptions of how these different cultures define the person. But they also raise deeper theoretical issues: What is universally constant and what is culturally variable in people's thinking about the person? How can these variations be explained? Has there been a general progressive development toward the modern Western view of the person? What is distinctive about this? How do one's notions of the person inform one's ability to comprehend alternative formulations? These questions are of compelling interest for a wide range of anthropologists, philosophers, historians, psychologists, sociologists, orientalists, and classicists. The book will appeal to any reader concerned with understanding one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence. (shrink)

These seventeen lectures given in 1963 focus largely on Kant, 'a thinker in whose work the question of morality is most sharply contrasted with other spheres of existence'. After discussing a number of the Kantian categories of moral philosophy, Adorno considers other, seemingly more immediate general problems, such as the nature of moral norms, the good life, and the relation of relativism and nihilism. In the course of the lectures, Adorno addresses a wide range of topics, including: theory (...) and practice, ethics as bad conscience, the repressive character, the problem of freedom, dialectics in Kant and Hegel, the nature of reason, the moral law as a given, psychoanalysis, the element of the Absurd, freedom and law, the Protestant tradition of morality, Hamlet, self-determination, phenomenology, the concept of the will, the idea of humanity, The Wild Duck, and Nietzsche's critique of morality. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay tracks Heidegger’s thought from 1919 forwards to the decisive years of his political engagement, on behalf of the Nazi movement. Part 1 tracks how the question concerning Being devolves into the implicitly identitarian question of who “we” are. Part 2 addresses the “existential” of Befindlichkeit which Heidegger in Sein und Zeit positions as prior to understanding, and examines his esoteric mode of writing as the means to cultivate a prerational Stimmung. Part 3 examines Heidegger’s response to his 1929–1930 (...) questions of “What mood must we awaken?... Who are we, then?” in the decisive years of the Gleichchaltung, showing how Heidegger’s thinking elevates to ontological primacy a discriminatory and identitarian decision concerning who “we” are as the German volk. Part 4 examines in this light the Heideggerian “end of philosophy” in what the Black Notebooks talks of in terms of a “metapolitics ‘of’ the historical people”. (shrink)

In the Categories, Aristotle intends to ascribe to particular substances ontological priority over all other things, but it is far from obvious what notion of priority would make this plausible. This question is the focus of my paper. I will examine what has been the standard account of his notion of ontological priority— the “modal-existential” account—and the problems it entails, as well as some scholarly alternatives to it. I will defend my own alternative account—the “explan- atory-existential” account—which addresses the (...) problems that arise for other pro- posed accounts, and will make plausible Aristotle’s claim that particular substances have priority over all other things. I will argue that he puts forth this notion of prior- ity in Categories 12, and that it bears a similarity to the notion of grounding as dis- cussed in contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

The notion of 'natural kinds' has been central to contemporary discussions of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Although explicitly articulated by nineteenth-century philosophers like Mill, Whewell and Venn, it has a much older history dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In recent years, essentialism has been the dominant account of natural kinds among philosophers, but the essentialist view has encountered resistance, especially among naturalist metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Informed by detailed examination of classification in the natural and social (...) sciences, this book argues against essentialism and for a naturalist account of natural kinds. By looking at case studies drawn from diverse scientific disciplines, from fluid mechanics to virology and polymer science to psychiatry, the author argues that natural kinds are nodes in causal networks. On the basis of this account, he maintains that there can be natural kinds in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences. (shrink)

John Rawls based his theory of justice, in the work of that name, on a ‘Kantian interpretation’ of the status of human beings as ‘free and equal’ persons. In his subsequent, ‘political rather than metaphysical’ expositions of his theory, the conception of citizens of democracies as ‘free and equal’ persons retained its foundational role. But Rawls appealed only to Kant’s moral philosophy, never to Kant’s own political philosophy as expounded in his 1797 Doctrine of Right in theMetaphysics of (...) Morals. I argue here that the structure of Kant’s political philosophy, with its categories of the innate right to freedom, private acquired right and public right, can clarify the relationship between Rawls’s two principles of justice and his scheme of basic liberties and primary goods. (shrink)

The proposed book presents an overview of select theories in the classical Vaiśeṣika system of Indian philosophy, such as the concept of categories, creation and existence, atomic theory, consciousness and cognition. It also expounds in detail the concept of dharma, the idea of the highest good and expert testimony as a valid means of knowing in Vaiśeṣika thought. Some of the major themes discussed are the religious inclination of Vaiśeṣika thought towards Pasupata Saivism, the affiliation of the Vaiśeṣika (...) System to the basic foundations of Indian philosophical thought, namely Veda and Yoga, and their insights into science, hermeneutics and metaphysics. In addition, this book includes recent Sanskrit commentaries on key Vaiśeṣika texts and provides a glimpse of Vaiśeṣika studies across the world. Overall, this book enunciates the Vaiśeṣika view from original sources and is an important work for Vaiśeṣika studies in current times for serious students as well as researchers.. (shrink)

The concept of mentality in the context of today's post-pandemic society, its role in the development of historical and socio-postmodern scientific thought are analyzed. Its correlation with other categories has been determined, revealing phenomena that are close in meaning. Revealed the significance of the category of mentality for the study of the development of society.Mentality as a system is a categorical characteristic of a nation, and hence of a society, the core of which is a given nation. The study (...) of mentality allows us to understand the internal relationships in society identify the internal reasons for the development of society and do praxeological research. The analysis of mentality within the framework of social philosophy cannot be limited to a certain time period, this category characterizes the nation and society at the present stage, accumulating in itself all the historical influences and changes projected at the present.The article examines the phenomenon of mentality as a system of internal deep-psychological socio-cultural attitudes of the individual. The article considers and substantiates a mental approach to understanding the phenomena of socially individual life. The philosophical and educational aspects of the formation of personality mentality and the main "problematic sides" of modern education through the prism of the mental approach are actualized. (shrink)

‘Neokantianism and Platonism’ indicates an important issue of Neo-Hellenic Philosophy during the 1920s and the 1930s. The protagonist was Johannes Theodorakopoulos. His Heidelberg dissertation Platons Dialektik des Seins (1927) follows the Neokantian theories of judgement (of Emil Lask and Heinrich Rickert) and explores Plato’s theory of judgement with emphasis on Philebos’ categories of peras and apeiron. Theodorakopoulos’ prolegomena to the Greek translation (1929) of Paul Natorp’s Platos Ideenlehre are relevant here. Nevertheless, Theodorakopoulos developed a personal interpretation of Plato’s (...) philosophy and almost demoted the Neokantian interpretation, as is clear in his Introduction to Plato (1941, in Greek) as also in his Heidelberg Vorlesungen 1969 entitled Die Hauptprobleme der Platonischen Philosophie. Besides, other interpretations of Plato came forward. Evangelos Papanoutsos wrote his Tübingen dissertation Das religiöse Erlebnis bei Platon (1926) under the supervision of Adickes. Konstantinos Georgoules, an earlier student of Husserl and Heidegger, published a translation of Plato’s Politeia (1939, in Greek) with a rather philological introduction.The Marxist Demetres Glenos, an opponent of Neokantianism, proposed a realistic interpretation of Plato’s Sophistes (1939, in Greek). Basileios Tatakes (an adherent of Henri Bergson) presented Plato’s philosophy as a reconciliation of reason and mysticism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Being after Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in QuestionG. Felicitas MunzelRichard L. Velkley. Being after Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in Question. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. x + 192. Cloth, $40.00. Paper, $18.00.In this collection of essays Velkley realizes a dual achievement: a penetrating scholarly analysis of a familiar topic, modern philosophy's on-going criticism of rational Enlightenment as a "project aiming at progressive rational (...) mastery of nature and the human situation" (60, 3), and an exemplary presentation of philosophizing as a self-reflexive activity in which the "know thyself" is posed to philosophy itself. The focus is on the German Idealist tradition, taking its origins from Rousseau and Kant to "reform, not simply to reject," but still to "overcome earlier modern accounts of scientific reason as abstract, mechanistic, and narrow, and as failing to do justice to the concrete wholeness or richness of nature and human experience, thus impoverishing our conceptions of morality, political life, and human aspirations toward the noble, the sacred, and the beautiful" (93). Velkley's scholarly interpretation identifies Rousseau as the pivotal figure who is the source both of the modern philosophical effort to achieve "human wholeness" by recovering an "original prediscursive or prerational unity" (an account that is the further source of the distinction between culture and civilization [12]) and of the "bifurcation in the ways to reach such wholeness," the ways of "citizenship" and "natural freedom" (13-14). The essays argue for an "important connection between Rousseau and Heidegger, through Kant and Schelling" (6). [End Page 345]While other thinkers are treated (for example, Pufendorf and Nietzsche), the essays primarily examine the writings of these four thinkers to elucidate "the persistence of a set of problems and a way of questioning" particular to modern philosophy (8).Velkley points out that Rousseau's critique of modern rationality is far more subtle than it is usually read. Granted, "through its introduction of self-reflectiveness into the previously 'innocent' and prereflective human situation," reason is perceived as the "true origin" and not the means for overcoming human ills (53). However, the "prereflective origin is nowhere to be found," it is an "imaginative construction," and it is a "mistake to take at face value any apparent assertion that natural man was merely an animal with only instinct and sensation" (37, 41). Because of his distinctively human awareness of time, natural man, "far from being mere animal," is "the only being whose openness to being exposes him to the nonbeing of death" (48). In short, "some 'bondage' to reason" is inescapable and "Rousseau's various plans for the reform of politics, education, the family, and the philosophical life" should be read as "ways of making the most of that bondage" (33).In the case of Kant, Velkley's emphasis is on the critical effort to resolve the dialectic, to correct the rational self-ignorance "so that the striving of reason for totality will not turn into a nihilistic rejection of reason" (112); or put another way, Rousseau inspires Kant's quid juris question, the issue of the "justification of reason as a whole," specifically the legitimacy of the categories (50-61, 101). Schelling, together with Kant's other Idealist successors, seeks a "greater unity, integration, wholeness, and concreteness than Kant provides" (113). The two main aspects of Schelling's project that Velkley discusses are (1) the discovery of the true human self in nature, the "hidden infinite unconscious self beneath the apparent finite conscious self," a "self whose objectification by the finite categories of discursive reason is quite impossible" and which thus discloses an "infinite contradiction" (115); and (2) the affirmation of the error of earlier philosophizing as belonging "essentially to philosophical inquiry" and being the very "precondition for finding truth" (125). From the philosophical attempt to correct reason's fundamental error, to its reading of "being in error" as an ineliminable step in the historical progress of reason and philosophy, Velkley turns to Heidegger's effort to step behind traditional metaphysics altogether and to move "forward into a new thinking beyond metaphysics" (142), from speech about Being to language as a power of disclosure of Being that overpowers the... (shrink)

This paper addresses a philosophical problem concerning the ontological status of age classification. For various purposes, people are commonly classified into categories such as “young adulthood”, “middle adulthood”, and “older adulthood”, which are defined chronologically. These age categories prima facie seem to qualify as natural kinds under a homeostatic property cluster account of natural kindhood, insofar as they capture certain biological, psychological, and social properties of people that tend to cluster together due to causal processes. However, this is (...) challenged by the observation that age categories are historically unstable. The properties that age categories are supposed to capture are affected by healthcare and cultural developments, such that people are staying biologically, psychologically, and socially young for longer. Furthermore, the act of classifying people into age categories can bring about changes in their behaviors, which in turn alter the biological, psychological, and social properties that the categories are supposed to capture. Accordingly, I propose that age categories are best understood as interactive kinds that are influenced in dynamic ways by looping effects. I consider some implications of these looping effects for our classificatory practices concerning age, including how different disciplines may need to review the ways they define and use age categories in their inductive inferences. (shrink)

Rodrigues and Banzato related the validity of diagnostic categories to their meaningfulness and I wish to explore this relation further without attempting to make criticisms. To commence, if a diagnostic category is to be valid, it must mean something.

Gyorgy Tamas works in the philosophy of logic, that difficult interdisciplin ary region wherein the notion of categories is both basic and subtle. To understand ways of thinking, to understand patterns of whatever is real, to recognize what is possible and to reject the nonsensical and the impossible is to comprehend the categories. This was a in thought and in fact, recurring motive of European thought from the earliest self-aware beginnings, and Tamas knows that history well, as (...) his critical respect demonstrates. Ancient, medieval, and modern thinkers appear in this book, set forth in their own words; and likewise we see that Tamas has built upon the historians and commentators, upon the pioneering historical investigation of the categories by Trendelenburg a century ago and by Bochenski in our days. Tamas has two principal goals here: to investigate the logic, which is to say the structure and the relations, of the philosophical categories; and to set forth the logic of thought which may then be based upon the critically established system of categories obtained by that investigation. Ancillary but of striking value is his style of historical relevance which enables the reader to engage in a discussion that is both analytically sharp and developmentally insightful. Furthermore, Tamas draws upon his contem porary colleagues with similar critical respect: Lukasiewicz, Quine, Patzig, Menne, Tavanets and others. (shrink)

Among the main concerns of 20th century philosophy was that of the foundations of mathematics. But usually not recognized is the relevance of the choice of a foundational approach to the other main problems of 20th century philosophy, i.e., the logical structure of language, the nature of scientific theories, and the architecture of the mind. The tools used to deal with the difficulties inherent in such problems have largely relied on set theory and its “received view”. There are (...) specific issues, in philosophy of language, epistemology and philosophy of mind, where this dependence turns out to be misleading. The same issues suggest the gain in understanding coming from category theory, which is, therefore, more than just the source of a “non-standard” approach to the foundations of mathematics. But, even so conceived, it is the very notion of what a foundation has to be that is called into question. The philosophical meaning of mathematics is no longer confined to which first principles are assumed and which “ontological” interpretation is given to them in terms of some possibly updated version of logicism, formalism or intuitionism. What is central to any foundational project proper is the role of universal constructions that serve to unify the different branches of mathematics, as already made clear in 1969 by Lawvere. Such universal constructions are best expressed by means of adjoint functors and representability up to isomorphism. In this lies the relevance of a category-theoretic perspective, which leads to wide-ranging consequences. One such is the presence of functorial constraints on the syntax–semantics relationships; another is an intrinsic view of (constructive) logic, as arises in topoi and, subsequently, in more general fibrations. But as soon as theories and their models are described accordingly, a new look at the main problems of 20th century’s philosophy becomes possible. The lack of any satisfactory solution to these problems in a purely logical and set-theoretic setting is the result of too circumscribed an approach, such as a static and punctiform view of objects and their elements, and a misconception of geometry and its historical changes before, during, and after the foundational “crisis”, as if algebraic geometry and synthetic differential geometry – not to mention algebraic topology – were secondary sources for what concerns foundational issues. The objectivity of basic geometrical intuitions also acts against the recent version of structuralism proposed as ‘the’ philosophy of category theory. On the other hand, the need for a consistent and adequate conceptual framework in facing the difficulties met by pre-categorical theories of language and scientific knowledge not only provides the basic concepts of category theory with specific applications but also suggests further directions for their development (e.g., in approaching the foundations of physics or the mathematical models in the cognitive sciences). This ‘virtuous’ circle is by now largely admitted in theoretical computer science; the time is ripe to realise that the same holds for classical topics of philosophy. (shrink)

A pluralistic view of psychiatric classification is defended, according to which psychiatric categories take a variety of structural forms. An ordered taxonomy of these forms—non-kinds, practical kinds, fuzzy kinds, discrete kinds, and natural kinds—is presented and exemplified. It is argued that psychiatric categories cannot all be understood as pragmatically grounded, and at least some reflect naturally occurring discontinuities without thereby representing natural kinds. Even if essentialist accounts of mental disorders are generally mistaken, they are not implied whenever a (...) psychiatric category that is not pragmatically grounded is posited. (shrink)

Fichte argues that the conclusion of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories is correct yet lacks a crucial premise, given Kant’s admission that the metaphysical deduction locates an arbitrary origin for the categories. Fichte provides the missing premise by employing a new method: a genetic deduction of the categories from a first principle. Since Fichte claims to articulate the same view as Kant in a different, it is crucial to grasp genetic deduction in relation to the sorts (...) of deduction that Kant offers. I propose to interpret genetic deduction as the simultaneous fulfillment of two tasks: answering the question quid facti by deriving the categories from the I and answering the question quid juris by establishing our entitlement to the categories as conditions of experience. While the second task represents Fichte’s agreement with Kant’s transcendental deduction, the first reflects his correction of Kant’s metaphysical deduction. (shrink)