The paper begins with a more carefully stated version of ontologically neutral (ON) logic, originally introduced in (Hailperin, 1997). A non-infinitistic semantics which includes a definition of potential infinite validity follows. It is shown, without appeal to the actual infinite, that this notion provides a necessary and sufficient condition for provability in ON logic.

E. J. Lowe, a prominent figure in contemporary metaphysics, sets out and defends his theory of what there is. His four-category ontology is a metaphysical system which recognizes four fundamental categories of beings: substantial and non-substantial particulars and substantial and non-substantial universals. Lowe argues that this system has an explanatory power which is unrivalled by more parsimonious theories and that this counts decisively in its favour. He shows that it provides a powerful explanatory framework for a unified account of (...) causation, dispositions, natural laws, natural necessity and many other related matters, thus constituting a full metaphysical foundation for natural science. (shrink)

A review of U. Mäki (ed.). Fact and Fiction in Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. xvi 384. ISBN 0521 00957. As people interested mainly in theory, methodologists and philos...

It is rare to come across a philosophical work that breaks away from what has come before it and augurs a new way of doing philosophy. Petri Berndtson’s remarkable new book, Phenomenological Ontolo...

A major disagreement between different views about the foundations of quantum mechanics concerns whether for a theory to be intelligible as a fundamental physical theory it must involve a ‘primitive ontology’ (PO), i.e. variables describing the distribution of matter in four-dimensional space–time. In this article, we illustrate the value of having a PO. We do so by focusing on the role that the PO plays for extracting predictions from a given theory and discuss valid and invalid derivations of predictions. (...) To this end, we investigate a number of examples based on toy models built from the elements of familiar interpretations of quantum theory. (shrink)

Helen Steward puts forward a radical critique of the foundations of contemporary philosophy of mind, arguing that it relies too heavily on insecure assumptions about the sorts of things there are in the mind--events, processes, and states. She offers a fresh investigation of these three categories, clarifying the distinctions between them, and argues that the category of state has been very widely and seriously misunderstood.

RÉSUMÉDans cette contribution, les points fondamentaux du livre d'Anjan Chakravartty, Scientific Ontology, sont discutés de manière critique. Après une brève présentation du projet d'une ontologie dite «stance-based», je critique la manière dont Chakravartty conçoit l'inférence métaphysique. Puis, dans la section 4, je conteste l'opinion de Chakravartty selon laquelle les débats fondamentaux en métaphysique conduisent inévitablement à un désaccord insoluble. La section 5 examine le concept de position épistémique et relève les problèmes inhérents à la manière dont Chakravartty conçoit la (...) rationalité de la sélection d'une position. Finalement, la section 6 concerne les implications d'une ontologie qui serait basée sur les positions épistémiques pour le débat sur le réalisme scientifique. (shrink)

In this novel re-examination of the archetype construct, philosopher Jon Mills and psychiatrist Erik Goodwyn engage in spirited dialogue on the origins, nature, and scope of what archetypes actually constitute, their relation to the greater questions of psyche and worldhood, and their relevance for Jungian studies and analytical psychology today. Arguably the most definitive feature of Jung's metapsychology is his theory of archetypes. It is the fulcrum on which his analytical depth psychology rests. With recent trends in post-Jungian and neo-Jungian (...) perspectives that have embraced developmental, relational, social justice, and postmodern paradigms, classical archetype theory has largely become a drowning genre. Despite the archetypal school of James Hillman and his contemporaries and the archetype debates that captured our attention over two decades ago, contemporary Jungians are preoccupied with the lived reality of the existential subject and the personal unconscious over the collective transpersonal forces derived from archaic ontology. Archetypal Ontology will be of interest to psychoanalysts, philosophers, transpersonal psychologists, cultural theorists, anthropologists, religious scholars, and many disciplines in the arts and humanities, analytical psychology, and post-Jungian studies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article proposes a theoretical framework for thinking systematically about Muslim males’ involvement in criminality, derived from the philosophy of critical realism. This theoretical framework is deployed to explore primary data from life story interviews with 17 Muslim male offenders in a way that explains the role of structural and cultural factors, as well as individual agency, in participants’ involvement in crime at a range of ‘emergent’ ontological levels. As well as factors in common with offending by young males (...) generally, such as absent role models at home, experiences of socio-economic marginalization, the presence of hypermasculine hegemonic masculinities on the street and an inadequate experience of school, ‘unserious’ religion and ‘religious’ justifications for involvement in crime are factored into the ontology of the male Muslim offender as rendering some young Muslim males particularly vulnerable to offending. (shrink)

We humans tend to believe that things are only real in as much as we perceive them, an idea reinforced by modern philosophy, which privileges us as special, radically different in kind from all other objects. But as Graham Harman, one of the theory's leading exponents, shows, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) rejects the idea of human specialness: the world, he states, is clearly not the world as manifest to humans. "To think a reality beyond our thinking is not nonsense, but (...) obligatory." At OOO's heart is the idea that objects--whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human, or non-human--are mutually autonomous. This core idea has significance for nearly every field of inquiry which is concerned in some way with the systematic interaction of objects, and the degree to which individual objects resist full participation in such systems. In this brilliant new introduction, Graham Harman lays out OOO's history, ideas, and impact, taking in art and literature, politics and natural science along the way. From Sherlock Holmes, unicorns, and videogames to Dadaism, Voltaire, and string theory, this book will change the way you understand everything. (shrink)

The U.S. presidential election of 2000 was crucially decided in Florida. And, in Florida, the election hinged crucially on a peculiar sort of question: Does this ballot have a hole? “Yes, it does”, so the ballot is valid and ought to be counted. “No it doesn’t”, and the ballot must be discarded. If only one could tell! Where were the hole experts when we needed them? Eventually the matter was thwarted by the Supreme Court and we all gave up. But (...) we did learn something. We learned that even the destiny of a Presidential Election, if not more, might ultimately depend on one’s criteria for identifying holes—not their material surroundings, which everyone could detect, but the holes themselves. (shrink)

Dietrich von Hildebrand’s treatise The Nature of Love is set in relation to the theological personalism of the Cappadocian fathers of the Church, and to my own earlier work done in this tradition. Several points of divergence are explored, especially points concerning von Hildebrand’s claim that love exists as a response to the beauty of the beloved person. God’s love for human beings does not always seem to fit the paradigm of value-response; His love seems to be creative of beauty (...) in us rather than to respond to already existing beauty. But at the same time, the deep kinship of von Hildebrand’s personalism with that of the Cappadocian fathers is stressed; he is at one with them in affirming the heart as distinct from the intellect, in affirming love as the supreme act of the person, and in affirming the place of beauty in the existence of persons. (shrink)

Words are indispensable linguistic tools for beings like us. However, there is not much philosophical work done about what words really are. In this paper, I develop a new ontology for words. I argue that words are abstract artifacts that are created to fulfill various kinds of purposes, and words are abstract in the sense that they are not located in space but they have a beginning and may have an end in time given that certain conditions are met. (...) What follows from this two-fold argument is that words, from an ontological point of view, are more like musical works, fictional characters or computer programs, than numbers or sets. (shrink)

Epistemic reasons are mental states. They are not propositions or non-mental facts. The discussion proceeds as follows. Section 1 introduces the topic. Section 2 gives two concrete examples of how our topic directly affects the internalism/externalism debate in normative epistemology. Section 3 responds to an argument against the view that reasons are mental states. Section 4 presents two problems for the view that reasons are propositions. Section 5 presents two problems for the view that reasons are non-mental facts. Section 6 (...) argues that reasons are mental states. Section 7 responds to objections. (shrink)

Jeffrey E. Brower presents and explains the hylomorphic conception of the material world developed by Thomas Aquinas, according to which material objects are composed of both matter and form. In addition to presenting and explaining Aquinas's views, Brower seeks wherever possible to bring them into dialogue with the best recent literature on related topics. Along the way, he highlights the contribution that Aquinas's views make to a host of contemporary metaphysical debates, including the nature of change, composition, material constitution, the (...) ontology of stuff vs. things, the proper analysis of ordinary objects, the truthmakers for essential vs. accidental predication, and the metaphysics of property possession. (shrink)

For a long time it was believed that it was impossible to be realist about quantum mechanics. It took quite a while for the researchers in the foundations of physics, beginning with John Stuart Bell [Bell 1987], to convince others that such an alleged impossibility had no foundation. Nowadays there are several quantum theories that can be interpreted realistically, among which Bohmian mechanics, the GRW theory, and the many-worlds theory. The debate, though, is far from being over: in what respect (...) should we be realist regarding these theories? Two diff erent proposals have been made: on the one hand, there are those who insist on a direct ontological interpretation of the wave function as representing physical bodies, and on the other hand there are those who claim that quantum mechanics is not really about the wave function. In this paper we will present and discuss one proposal of the latter kind that focuses on the notion of primitive ontology. (shrink)

The aim of natural language ontology is to uncover the ontological categories and structures that are implicit in the use of natural language, that is, that a speaker accepts when using a language. This article aims to clarify what exactly the subject matter of natural language ontology is, what sorts of linguistic data it should take into account, how natural language ontology relates to other branches of metaphysics, in what ways natural language ontology is important, and (...) what may be distinctive of the ontological categories and structures reflected in natural language. (shrink)

In this paper I give an overview of a perspectival realist ontology. I discuss the role of situated knowledge and multiculturalism in perspectival ontology and offer a working definition of ‘phenomena’ as the minimal unit of such ontological commitment. I clarify how the view differs from Kuhn’s view, and highlight some of its implications for how to think of scientific knowledge as a multicultural and cosmopolitan inquiry.

This chapter focuses on the methodological challenges and practical implications of the experimental ontology of music. It offers an overview of the existing research, primarily focusing on how people judge whether two musical performances are of one and the same or two distinct musical works, followed by a discussion of the current methodological debates in this field and, finally, an exploration of its potential legal implications.

Existing proposals concerning the ontology of quantum mechanics either involve speculation that goes beyond the scientific evidence or abandon realism about large parts of QM. This paper proposes a way out of this dilemma, by showing that QM as it is formulated in standard textbooks allows for a much more substantive ontological commitment than is usually acknowledged. For this purpose, I defend a non-fundamentalist approach to ontology, which is then applied to various aspects of QM. In particular, I (...) will defend realism about spin, which has been viewed as a particularly hard case for the ontology of QM. (shrink)

[Stephen Yablo] The usual charge against Carnap's internal/external distinction is one of 'guilt by association with analytic/synthetic'. But it can be freed of this association, to become the distinction between statements made within make-believe games and those made outside them-or, rather, a special case of it with some claim to be called the metaphorical/literal distinction. Not even Quine considers figurative speech committal, so this turns the tables somewhat. To determine our ontological commitments, we have to ferret out all traces of (...) nonliterality in our assertions; if there is no sensible project of doing that, there is no sensible project of Quinean ontology. /// [Andre Gallois] I discuss Steve Yablo's defence of Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions. In the first section I set out what I take that distinction, as Carnap draws it, to be, and spell out a central motivation Carnap has for invoking it. In the second section I endorse, and augment, Yablo's response to Quine's arguments against Carnap. In the third section I say why Carnap's application of the distinction between internal and external questions runs into trouble. In the fourth section I spell out what I take to be Yablo's version of Carnap. In the last I say why that version is especially vulnerable to the objection raised in the second. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy has recently become recognised as a self-standing philosophical sub-discipline. Still, metaphysics has remained largely dismissive of feminist insights. Here I make the case for the value of feminist insights in metaphysics: taking them seriously makes a difference to our ontological theory choice and feminist philosophy can provide helpful methodological tools to regiment ontological theories. My examination goes as follows. Contemporary ontology is not done via conceptual analysis, but via quasi-scientific means. This takes different ontological positions to be (...) competing hypotheses about reality’s fundamental structure that are then assessed with a loose battery of criteria for theory choice. Such criteria make up the constitutive values of ontology. These values are distinguished from contextual values of a practice: the political and moral values embedded in the social context of inquiry.. (shrink)

Genres inform our appreciative practices. What it takes for a work to be a good work of comedy is different than what it takes for a work to be a good work of horror, and a failure to recognize this will lead to a failure to appreciate comedies or works of horror particularly well. Likewise, it is not uncommon to hear people say that a film or novel is a good work, but not a good work of x (where x (...) is the genre of that work). A work can be good all things considered, but genre membership provides us with an additional set of evaluative criteria over and above those of the medium, which colors how we interpret and appreciate the work. Given this importance, it is not surprising that philosophers of art have been interested in providing an account of what, exactly, a genre is. Despite this interest, there is not widespread agreement about what it takes for something to be a genre, nor what kinds of considerations are relevant in determining whether a work is a member of that genre. Beyond this, we might also want to know to what degree we ought to consider genre in evaluating a work of art and why it should matter at all. Here, I explore the variety of recent theories that philosophers have taken up on the topic of genre and why we should ultimately think of genres as artistic practices rather than the alternatives. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty's Developmental Ontology shows how the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, from its very beginnings, seeks to find sense or meaning within nature, and how this quest calls for and develops into a radically new ontology. -/- David Morris first gives an illuminating analysis of sense, showing how it requires understanding nature as engendering new norms. He then presents innovative studies of Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, revealing how these early works are oriented by the (...) problem of sense and already lead to difficulties about nature, temporality, and ontology that preoccupy Merleau-Ponty's later work. Morris shows how resolving these difficulties requires seeking sense through its appearance in nature, prior to experience—ultimately leading to radically new concepts of nature, time, and philosophy. -/- Merleau-Ponty's Developmental Ontology makes key issues in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy clear and accessible to a broad audience while also advancing original philosophical conclusions. (shrink)

Following the lead of Gustav Bergmann ( 1967 ), if not his precise terminology, ontologies are sometimes divided into those that are ‘relational’ and those that are ‘constituent’ (Wolterstorff 1970 ). Substance ontologies in the Aristotelian tradition are commonly thought of as being constituent ontologies, because they typically espouse the hylemorphic dualism of Aristotle ’s Metaphysics – a doctrine according to which an individual substance is always a combination of matter and form. But an alternative approach drawing more on the (...) fourfold ontological scheme of Aristotle’s Categories is not committed to this doctrine and may regard individual (or ‘primary’) substances as having no constituent structure, their only possible complexity residing in their possession, in some cases, of a multiplicity of substantial parts. However, as we shall see, this does not imply that such an ontology falls instead into the relational camp: for although it invokes, in addition to the category of individual substance, also those of substantial kind (‘secondary’ substance), attribute, and mode (or ‘individual accident’), it need not and arguably should not take there to be external relations between entities in the different categories. On this view, truths of exemplification and instantiation, such as ‘Dobbin is white’ and ‘Dobbin is a horse’, do not need relational truthmakers. Hence, it can be maintained that there are no such relations as ‘exemplification’ and ‘instantiation’, at most only certain relational truths of exemplification and instantiation – truths whose logical form is relational. Th is being so, I shall argue, such an ontology cannot fairly be classified as a ‘relational’ one. (shrink)

A defense of an ontology of propositions and of some logical resources for representing them. It begins with an austere formulation of a theory of propositions in a first-order extensional logic, but then uses the commitments of this theory to justify an enrichment to modal logic - the logic of necessity and possibility - as an appropriate framework for regimented languages that are constructed to represent any of our scientific and philosophical commitments. Both the proof-theory and the model theory (...) of a first-order quantified modal logic are developed in detail, and it is argued that these formal resources help to sharpen questions about ontology and predication. The clarification of predication helps to provide a motivation for extending our ontological commitment to properties and relations that are expressed by predicates, and for extending the logic to a higher-order modal logic that provides a conception of metaphysical modality that allows for the contingent existence, not only of persons and physical objects, but also of properties, relations and propositions. Even though both the specific ontological commitments defended (to propositions, properties and relations) and the logical resources that are used to defend them (modal and higher-order logic) were famously rejected by W. V. Quine, the book adopts a self-consciously neo-Quinean methodology, and argues that the theory that is developed helps to motivate and clarify Quine's naturalistic metaphysical picture. (shrink)

A bewildering array of accounts of the ontology of musical works is available. Philosophers have held that works of music are sets of performances, abstract, eternal sound-event types, initiated types, compositional action types, compositional action tokens, ideas in a composer’s mind and continuants that perdure. This paper maintains that questions in the ontology of music are, in Rudolf Carnap’s sense of the term, pseudo-problems. That is, there is no alethic basis for choosing between rival musical ontologies. While we (...) have no alethic basis for choosing any ontology of music, pragmatic reasons can be given for favoring certain ontologies of musical works over others. (shrink)

Parfit denies that the introduction of reasons into our ontology is costly for his theory. He puts forth two positions to help establish the claim: the Plural Senses View and the Argument from Empty Ontology. I argue that, first, the Plural Senses View for ‘exists’ can be expanded to allow for senses which undermine his ontological claims; second, the Argument from Empty Ontology can be debunked by Platonists. Furthermore, it is difficult to make statements about reasons true (...) unless these statements include reference to objects in reality. These arguments show the instability of Parfit’s claimed metaethical advantages over naturalism. [Open access]. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the search for the nature of the ontology of an art work on the example of a literary work. Tradition viewed a work of art as the discovery of a higher truth. Analytical philosophy deprived literature of the status of truth in general, and thereby deprived it of any ontological dimension. Heidegger’s attempt to return this dimension to literature through its relationship with being did not find continuation in philosophy. The author proposes to consider (...) a literary work as a model of the world, primarily the social world. This approach makes liken a literary work to a mathematical theory. A mathematical theory is built as a correlation of simple elements; in a literary work such elements are characters (sometimes things). A mathematical theory is built on clearly defined axioms, a literary work is also built on axioms, but they do not have an explicit expression within the work and cannot always be perceived intuitively. The author shows that the mathematical theory never fully meets the specified conditions, and the mathematicians themselves note that in the future they will largely lose their strength. Thus, a literary work is of the same nature as a mathematical theory, only it presents a more complex case. The problem of truth serves as the way to find the ontological dimension. Analysis shows that in mathematics it is solved not by reducing a hypothesis to axioms, but by recognizing a theory through its effectiveness or applicability. For a work of art, such a criterion is its perception by its readers. In both cases, the ontological dimension is in the mind of the reader. (shrink)

Critical Notice on Organizations as Wrongdoers By Stephanie Collins Oxford University Press, 2023. -/- Extract: What, if any, role does metaphysics have to play in addressing moral questions? When answering questions about moral responsibility, many theories rely on answers to questions about the nature of agency and agents, the persistence of persons and the existence and nature of free will. In recent work in social ontology, philosophers have argued for views of social categories or identities that take ethical and (...) social–political desiderata into consideration in several ways. Some argue for views of gender identities that depend on epistemic and ethical considerations (Bettcher, 2009). Others develop views of gender categories in ways they take to be metaphysically realist, tracking robust explanatory patterns in the world. For instance, Barnes (2017) argues for this interpretation of Haslanger’s views of racial and gender categories. Others argue that injustice and oppression are reflected in the nature of social categories. For instance, while it ought not to be this way, some gender categories are, for instance, trans-exclusionary (Ásta 2018). Indeed, one might even argue that social categories can involve a distinctively metaphysical form of oppression (Jenkins 2020, 2023). It is clear that many philosophers argue in ways that draw close connections between metaphysical and moral theorizing. ... (shrink)

Paraphrase is ubiquitous in philosophy, especially in discussions about ontological commitment. But should it be? Paraphrases are seldom accompanied by evidence that would convince, say, a linguist that the paraphrase and the paraphrased sentence have the same meaning. Indeed, from the perspective of linguistics, many paraphrases would seem to be nothing but bad jokes. For this reason, many philosophers have become deeply suspicious about paraphrase. I ague in this paper that this worry is misguided--that successful paraphrases do not need to (...) preserve semantic content, and that the way that paraphrase has been used in Quinean meta-ontology, and philosophical inquiry more generally, corresponds, at least roughly, to the way it should be used. (shrink)

This is a book about the concept of a physical thing and about how the names of things relate to the things they name. It questions the prevalent view that names 'refer to' or 'denote' the things they name. Instead it presents a new theory of proper names, according to which names express certain special properties that the things they name exhibit. This theory leads to some important conclusions about whether things have any of their properties as a matter of (...) necessity. This will be an important book for philosophers in metaphysics and the philosophy of language, though it will also interest linguists concerned with the semantics of natural language. (shrink)