This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of 'lenses' and 'tensions' to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and (...) procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the 'mess' of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses. (shrink)

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of ‘lenses’ and ‘tensions’ to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and (...) procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the ‘mess’ of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses. (shrink)

Social movements carry out extensive character work, trying to define not only their own reputations but those of other major players in their strategic arenas. Victims, villains, and heroes form the essential triad of character work, suggesting not only likely plots but also the emotions that audiences are supposed to feel for various players. Characters have been overlooked in cultural analysis, possibly because they often take visual, non-narrative forms. By focusing on characters within movements, we illuminate some cultural dilemmas that (...) both organizers and their opponents face as they try to influence players’ reputations. (shrink)

Heroes, villains, victims, and minions have been the building blocks of moral and political reputations throughout human history. In Public Characters, the authors look at visual images, music, and words to show the techniques by which these characters get constructed. They also trace the impact of these public characters in politics, including the 2016 triumph of Donald J. Trump through his ability to cast opponents as villains and minions.

Karl Jaspers' phenomenology remains important today, not solely because of its continuing influence in some areas of psychiatry, but because, if fully understood, it can provide a method and set of concepts for making new progress in the science of psychopathology. In order to understand this method and set of concepts, it helps to recognize the significant influence that Edmund Husserl's early work, Logical investigations, exercised on Jaspers' formulation of them. We trace the Husserlian influence while clarifying the main components (...) of Jaspers' method. Jaspers adopted Husserl's notions of intuition, description, and presuppositionlessness, transforming them when necessary in order to serve the investigations of the psychopathologist. Jaspers also took over from Wilhelm Dilthey and others the tools of understanding (Verstehen) and self-transposal. The Diltheyian procedures were integrated into the Husserlian ones to produce a method that enables psychiatrists to define the basic kinds of psychopathological mental states. (shrink)

Insofar as psychiatrists and neurologists tend to the cognitive well-being of others, their work is interwoven with philosophical concerns and theoretical assumptions about the nature of the mind, its myriad functions, and the conditions governing its multiform pathologies. That the mind figures so prominently in their ordinary language attests to the wealth of insights that stands to be gained through a dialogue with philosophy. In one of the earliest efforts to taxonomize psychiatric medicine, Allgemeine Psychopathologie, Jaspers incisively remarks that "the (...) exclusion of philosophy would be disastrous for psychiatry…if any psychopathologist thinks he can disregard philosophy and leave it aside as useless he will... (shrink)

Table of contents : 1. The beginnings of phenomenology: Husserl and his predecessors Richard Cobb-Stevens, Boston College 2. Philosophy of existence 1: Heidegger Jacques Taminiaux, University of Louvain, Belgium 3. Philosophy of existence 2: Sartre Thomas Flynn, Emory University 4. Philosophy of existence 3: Merleau-Ponty Bernard Cullen, Queen's University, Belfast 5. Philosophies of religion: Jaspers, Marcel, Levinas William Desmond, Loyola College 6. Philosophies of science: Mach, Duhem, Bachelard Babette Babich, Fordham University 7. Philosophies of Marxism: Gramsci, Lukacs, Benjamin, Althusser (...) class='Hi'>Michael Kelly, University of Southampton 8. Critical theory: from Adorno to Habermas David Rasmussen, Boston College 9. Hermeneutics: Gadamer, Ricoeur Gary Madison, McMaster University 10. Italian idealism and after: Croce, Gentile, Vattimo Giacomo Rinaldi, University of Urbino, Italy 11. French structuralism and after: Barthes, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault Hugh Silverman, State University of New York at Stony Brook 12. French feminism and after: de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixious Alison Ainley, Oxford Brookes University 13. Deconstruction Simon Critchley, Essex University 14. Derrida Timothy Mooney, Essex University 15. Postmodernist theory: Lyotard, Baudrillard Thomas Docherty, Trinity College, Dublin. (shrink)

The book provides the first systematic analysis of the question of responsibility for historical injustice since the publication of Karl Jaspers The Question of Guilt. Using the methods of modern philosophical analysis, it investigates the reasons and limits of moral and criminal responsibility and offers suggestions for solving the problem of compensation for past injustice.".

This paper argues that Jan Patočka and Paul Ricoeur endured their own cognitive-spiritual crisis, particularly during the development and outbreak of war in the 1930s. Their philosophies of history are thus, on the one hand, born of a rethinking of modern philosophy from the time of Galileo and Descartes, and on the other, a suffering of crisis that Europe itself was suffering. Stemming from the historical and philosophical context of Husserl’s epistemology in the Krisis, both Ricoeur and Patočka had to (...) confront history and the decadence of European sciences, as it concerns the difficulty of remembering the past and describing events in history. These responses to the problem of modern philosophy and science in Europe point to the symptom of spiritual crisis due to ‘modern man’ having no unified worldview. By means of care of the soul and the challenging of the state in action, a hermeneutics of peace emerges from their spiritual crises. (shrink)

The qualities of great works of art, their profundity, their insight into the human condition, are epitomised in Brakhage's films, which are, I argue, from the beginning related to and inseparable from a philosophical attitude toward existence. His films emerge out of an authentic 'existential' mode of attunement, a mind-set wherein the potential for human transcendence is framed and filmed within its intractable relationship to death, the most extreme possibility of non-existence. Brakhage not only views existence in a philosophical manner, (...) beyond this, he engages in philosophical inquiry in a fundamental way through the medium of film. The films arise from and respond to what Karl Jaspers views as the ultimate source of philosophy, namely, 'the will to authentic communication,' which embraces 'wonder leading to knowledge, doubt leading to certainty, forsakenness leading to the self.' This amounts to the philosophical struggle to arrive at a sense of metaphysical coherence and existential familiarity, i.e., the precarious undertsanding of belonging to the world in communion with others. This essay seeks to elucidate and detail, through a series of interpretive gestures, the philosophical themes present to Brakhage's silent films by way of a reading that emerges from the phenomenological-ontological tradition in philosophy. In doing so, I hope to interpret Brakhage's filmic art as conveying a legitimate source of human understanding, which contributes to our interpreting and discoursing about the world and our lives in new and revelatory ways. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Good of Recognition: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Lévinas and Ricœur by Michael SohnLevi CheckettsThe Good of Recognition: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Lévinas and Ricœur Michael Sohn WACO, TX: BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014. 172 PP. $69.95Michael Sohn's book The Good of Recognition: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Lévinas and Ricœur explores the philosophical and religious (...) writings of two of twentieth-century France's most significant thinkers, Paul Ricœur and Emmanuel Lévinas, "to gain, by thinking with and through them, an insight into the phenomenon of recognition" (128). Recognition, to these authors, is not merely an act of re-cognition (identifying something one already knows), nor is it simple cognition (consciousness of something). For Lévinas, to whom Ricœur is indebted for his own work, recognition precedes ontological identification and is a "sensation of the infinite" in the Other (29). Recognition entails "a primordial ethical claim by the other" (57), up to and including self-sacrifice. For Ricœur, on the other hand, recognition of the other is situated in the "loving struggle for existence" between people seeking mutual recognition (72) and presents itself as "one among many sources of value and motivation" [End Page 207] for moral decision (81). In other words, while recognition of the other is a central concept in both authors' ethical writings, Sohn notes that "Lévinas' phenomenological description of recognition emerges out of a fundamental project to uncover the principle of all principles," while "Ricœur's attention to the locus of will integrates passivity and activity as it is taken up within the dialectic of the voluntary and the involuntary," making recognition one value among others (127).In highlighting the different positions of each of these authors, Sohn structures his writing in a highly systematized and clear way. He first divides the book broadly by author, then for each author devotes a chapter each to philosophical and religious approaches to recognition. Within each chapter, he outlines the intellectual influences for the given author, then articulates in turn the phenomenon, the ethics, and the politics of recognition. This tactic serves as a helpful reference for readers interested in Sohn's comparative project, though it sometimes leads to repetition insofar as there are overlaps in how different thinkers, philosophical schools, or principles function for each area. The overall project is framed by an introductory chapter that briefly outlines the main points of discussion throughout the book and a conclusion that summarizes, compares, and contextualizes the significance of the project. Sohn offers this text as a clarifying study of the phenomenon of recognition, a term the application of which "touches upon a broad spectrum of issues ranging from battles over multiculturalism to questions of national sovereignty and from matters of international human rights to social movements within feminism and human rights" (135). With such a broad range of applications, this relatively short examination of two pivotal thinkers' works on recognition is highly valuable.This work will be of interest to ethicists hoping to use the works of Ricœur or Lévinas, or to philosophers and historians interested in the development of recognitionbased ethics. Sohn provides thorough citations from the broad corpuses of both authors, giving students of either philosopher a helpful resource both for summarizing ideas and for carrying out research. Sohn also provides deep intellectual genealogies for each author, noting how thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Karl Barth, G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and their interpreters influenced Lévinas and Ricœur; he downplays the influence of thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, and Gabriel Marcel. This book does offer useful and clear summaries of the main ideas discussed, but it may be difficult for newer students unfamiliar with French language or philosophical concepts. Overall, this book is a valuable reference tool for Lévinas and Ricœur studies, especially those that focus on the phenomenology, religious thought, ethics, or politics of these two men. [End Page 208]Levi CheckettsGraduate Theological UnionCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Wolff's book defends the Kantian idea of a "general logic" whose principles underlie special systems of deductive logic. It thus undermines "logical pluralism," which tolerates the co-existence of divergent systems of modern logic without asking for consistent common principles. Part I of Wolff’s book identifies the formal language in which the most general principles of logic must be expressed. This language turns out to be a version of syllogistic language already used by Aristotle. The universal validity of logical principles, as (...) well as the translatability of other logical languages into this language, are shown to depend only on the meanings of its logical vocabulary. Part II of the book answers the metalogical question concerning the deductive relation between general logic and special logical systems, which also have their own (less general) principles. This part identifies the rules according to which logical rules can be derived from principles. The main result of the book is that the highest principles of logic and metalogics are provided by the syllogistic, when properly understood. (shrink)

Physicians frequently encounter situations in which their professional practice is intermingled with moral affordances stemming from other domains of the physician’s lifeworld, such as family and friends, or from general morality pertaining to all humans. This article offers a typology of moral conflicts ‘at the margins of professionalism’ as well as a new theoretical framework for dealing with them. We start out by arguing that established theories of professional ethics do not offer sufficient guidance in situations where professional ethics overlaps (...) with moral duties of other origins. Therefore, we introduce the moral theory developed by Christine M. Korsgaard, that centres around the concept of practical identity. We show how Korsgaard’s account offers a framework for interpreting different types of moral conflicts ‘at the margins of professionalism’ to provide either orientation for solving the conflict or an explanation for the emotional and moral burden involved in moral dilemmas. (shrink)

In recent years sociological research on social movements has identified emotional dynamics in all the basic processes and phases of protest, and we are only beginning to understand their causal impacts. These include the solidarities of groups, motivations for action, the role of morality in political action, and the gendered division of labor in social movements. Anger turns out to be at the core of many of these causal mechanisms.

The main goal of this essay is to propose and make plausible a framework for developing a philosophical account of musical notation. The proposed framework countenances four elements of notation: symbols (abstract objects that collectively constitute the backbone of a ‘system’ of notation), their characteristic ‘forms’ (for example, shapes, understood abstractly), the concrete instances, or ‘engravings’, of those forms, and the meanings of the symbols. It is argued that these elements are distinct. Along the way, several preliminary arguments are given (...) for how one ought to understand them—for example, it is suggested that engravings represent symbols rather than instantiate forms, although they are characteristically seen to represent a symbol by being seen to instantiate an associated form. Having proposed this framework, the essay explores the nature of musical instructions, as the meanings of symbols, and offers an argument in favor of the commonly held (but recently challenged) view that those meanings are imperative. Specifically, composites of musical notation (paradigmatically, musical scores) primarily express instructional meaning, and denote something like ‘sonic structures’ only secondarily, in virtue of their primary, imperative, meaning. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an ecological-enactive perspective on the role rules play in linguistic behaviour. I formulate and motivate the hypothesis that metalinguistic reflexivity – our ability to talk about talking – is constitutive of linguistic normativity. On first sight, this hypothesis might seem to fall prey to a regress objection. By discussing the work of Searle, I show that this regress objection originates in the idea that learning language involves learning to follow rules from the very start. I (...) propose an ecological-enactive response to the regress objection. The key move is to deny that language learning consists initially in learning rules. A child first engages in regular communicative behaviour, by learning first-order linguistic skills, and then retroactively interprets her own behaviour in normative metalinguistic terms, i.e., as being guided by rules by relying on reflexive or second-order linguistic skills. On this view, metalinguistic reflexivity enables regulation of already regular communicative behaviour, and thereby constitutes linguistic normativity. Finally, I argue that linguistic rules are resources: they are available to participants in order to (re)negotiate properties of situated language behaviour and thereby reorganize linguistic practices. The account developed in this paper thus allows us to understand the constitutive role of metalinguistic reflexivity for linguistic normativity without falling prey to the regress objection. (shrink)

Humans often behave altruistically towards strangers with no chance of reciprocation. From an evolutionary perspective, this is puzzling. The evolution of altruistic cooperative behavior—in which an organism’s action reduces its fitness and increases the fitness of another organism —only makes sense when it is directed at genetically related organisms or when one can expect the favor to be returned. Therefore, evolutionary theorists such as Sober and Wilson have argued that we should revise Neo-Darwininian evolutionary theory. They argue that human altruism (...) evolved through group selection in which groups of altruists were naturally selected because they had a comparative advantage over other groups. Wilson and Sober’s hypothesis attracted followers but is rejected by most of their peers. The heated debate between advocates and critics of group selection often suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity. In response, I set out to clearly distinguish ‘genetic’ from ‘cultural’ group selection and argue that the latter does not face the potentially debilitating problems plaguing the former. I defend the claim that human altruistic dispositions evolved through cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution and offer empirical evidence in support. I also argue that actual altruistic behavior often goes beyond the kind of behavior humans have evolved to display. Conscious and voluntary reasoning processes, I show, have an important role in altruistic behavior. This is often overlooked in the scientific literature on human altruism. (shrink)

Across the globe, radical conservative political forces and ideas are influencing and even transforming the landscape of international politics. Yet IR is remarkably ill-equipped to understand and engage these new challenges. Unlike political theory or domestic political analyses, conservatism has no distinctive place in the fields’ defining alternatives of realism, liberalism, Marxism, and constructivism. This paper seeks to provide a point of entry for such engagement by bringing together what may seem the most unlikely of partners: critical theory and the (...) New Right. Important parts of today’s New Right represent self-conscious appropriations of Critical themes and thinkers—turning them to self-declared “reactionary” ends. Developing outside the confines of the academy, these forms of thought have woven insights from across Critical theory into new and mobilizing forms of conservative ideology, seeking to link that ideology to social forces that play increasingly active roles in global politics. Our intention here is not to somehow blame Critical perspectives for the ideas of the New Right, either directly or by association. Rather, we seek to show how an engagement with Critical theory helps us understand the New Right, while also demonstrating some of the direct challenges the New Right poses for critical perspectives. (shrink)

À propos de : Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, Londres, Rowman & Littlefield, coll. « Media Philosophy », 2019, 320 p. Le mouvement du livre suit un triple questionnement : 1) la réflexion grâce à laquelle la philosophie a cherché à systématiser la pensée peut-elle se réduire à une opération de récursivité? 2) Si oui, la notion cybernétique de feedback (rétroaction) signifie-t-elle que la machine informatique automatise ce type de réflexion et, par conséquent, réalise et achève le proje...

Spinoza has been interpreted as a rationalist and a monist. This article tries to show that these views are to be specified. The intuitive knowledge of God plays a constitutive role in Spinoza's "Ethics". To reach it, one has to run through long chains of inferences. But the inferential mode of cognition will not lead to an understanding of the definition of God given in the first part of the "Ethics". This understanding can only be gained in the fifth part. (...) Thus, there is circular epistemic structure hidden in Spinoza's opus magnum, which has not been sufficiently described in the literature yet. (shrink)

This commentary on Philip Kitcher’s book What’s the Use of Philosophy? addresses two questions. First, must philosophers be methodologically self-conscious to do good work? Second, is there value in the questions pursued in the traditional areas of analytic philosophy?

According to the survivalist interpretation of mediumship, the existence of discarnate persons provides the best explanation for the data associated with physical and mental mediumship. Others—advocates of what is often called the “super-psi hypothesis”—maintain that the data of mediumship may be at least equally explained in terms of living agent psi (ESP and psychokinesis). Many defenders of the survivalist interpretation of mediumship attempt to defl ate the alleged explanatory virtues of the super-psi hypothesis by arguing that the hypothesis is unfalsifi (...) able and lacks independent evidential support. My central contention in this paper is that these frequently encountered survivalist criticisms of the super-psi hypothesis are ultimately self-defeating to the case for survival from mediumship. To show this I first argue in some detail that the survivalist interpretation of mediumship is committed to a kind or degree of psi that is indistinguishable from what is required by the super-psi hypothesis. From this vantage point it can be shown that any attempt to impugn the explanatory virtues of the super-psi hypothesis on account of the kind or degree of psi it requires undercuts the argument for survival itself. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas has defended Germany’s cautious support for Ukraine against the ongoing Russian invasion. Instead of trying to defeat Russia on the battlefield, he argued that Western nations should seek a compromise with the attacker. Critics worried that this would lead to more suffering than the war, encourage further Russian aggression, and ignore the concerns of the Ukrainian population. However, one question that has not been addressed is if Habermas’s pleas are part of a wider pacifist commitment—and if so, what (...) kind of pacifist he is. Examining Habermas’s writings on the Ukraine War, his cosmopolitan views and his idea of a “constitutionalization of international law,” I argue that Habermas can be called a political pacifist—someone who seeks to abolish the institutions that provide the ultimate causes of war. While one can still criticize his vision, it deserves to be taken seriously as a pacifist account. (shrink)

To understand why a phenomenon occurs, it is not enough to possess a correct explanation of the phenomenon: you must grasp the explanation. In this formulation, “grasp” is a placeholder, standing for the psychological or epistemic relation that connects a mind to the explanatory facts in such a way as to produce understanding. This paper proposes and defends an account of the “grasping” relation according to which grasp of a property (to take one example of the sort of entity that (...) turns up in explanations) is a matter of recognitional ability: roughly, a property is grasped to the extent to which the would-be understander is capable of recognizing instances of the property. (shrink)

Over the past years, the intersubjective dimension of psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia, has gained increasing phenomenological attention. Psychopathologists and philosophers have developed ideas on how the social aspects of psychotic symptoms and experiences could be understood, in particular in their relation to the ipseity disturbance model, namely the idea that schizophrenia is essentially a disorder of the minimal self. Although the exact characteristics of the ipseity disorder hypothesis can differ from author to author, emphasizing certain phenomenological aspects like temporality or (...) embodiment... (shrink)

Eldred offers a remedy to the consequences of ancient Greek misconceptions of time that are also entrenched in today’s mathematized physics. Here time is spatialized as the one-dimensionally linear ‘arrow of time’ for the sake of predicting and controlling movement. But such spatialized time distorts the phenomenon of time itself. An alternative, hermeneutic-phenomenological path begins with a pre-spatial concept of time that is genuinely three-dimensional. This paves the way for recasting who we are as humans in belonging, first of all, (...) to the free openness of 3D-temporality. This belonging enables temporally 3D-vision of the psyche that empowers us to see movement at all and reconcile its inherent contradictoriness. We are then also able to conceive ourselves no longer merely as internally cogitating, self-conscious subjects, but as engaged existentially in temporally 3D-interplay, mutually estimating and esteeming who we are. This unpredictable interplay is constrained, however, by being played out in the sociating medium of thingified value, the accumulative movement of thingified value having gained the upper hand in dictating our life-movements as well as our interplay with the earth. (shrink)

This very short introduction will first outline how ontological investigations and questions of practice go together. The second section will bring in the next pole of this entire book, history of mathematics. How do ontology, practice, and history go together? Is this a forced marriage or one born in true love? That is, do these three belong together in some very basic way? One chapter in the section argues that the philosophy of mathematical practice intersects with the history of mathematics (...) essentially. If the first section of this introduction is persuasive that will also show that the history of mathematics intersects with ontological questions as well, specifically, that historical questions are very much about the ontological commitments of past mathematicians. The last section will take up what might seem a very different theme, namely, how these things matter to mathematics education. This section is connected closely to the second section since mathematics education has taken an interest in the role of history of mathematics in mathematics education, and much insight can be gained by seeing the issues in relation to the ontology-practice-history triad. The question of education is also important since teachers must consider what it is exactly that they are teaching, or, to adapt the title of Reuben Hersh’s well-known book, “What is mathematics really about?” And the “aboutness” of mathematics is really the ontological question. (shrink)

Goguen categories extend the relational calculus and its categorical formalization to the fuzzy world. Starting from the fundamental concepts of sets, binary relations and lattices, this book introduces several categorical formulations of an abstract theory of relations such as allegories, Dedekind categories and related structures. It is shown that neither theory is sufficiently rich to describe basic operations on fuzzy relations.