Semen est sanguis Christianorum!—‘the blood of Christians is seed’—writes Tertullian at the end of his Apologeticum. This summing-up has justly become a cornerstone of Christian the...

Philosophical questions about events lie at the crossing of several disciplines, from metaphysics and logic to philosophy of language, action theory, the philosophy of space and time.

We discuss the distinction between the sensory modalities; the metaphysics of sounds; and the structure of sound space. We defend a physicalist conception of sounds, without accepting the identification of sounds with sound-waves in the medium. Sounds, we hold, are events in resonating objects. We evaluate the two main accounts of orientation in perceptual space: relationism and absolutism. We then address Strawson's problem of whether the logical space of sounds could be spatial in the full sense of the term. In (...) the Appendix, we discuss the logic of perceptual auditory reports, and show their compatibility with our theory of sounds. (shrink)

A magisterial study of the philosophy of physics that both introduces the subject to the non-specialist and contains many original and important contributions for professionals in the area. Modern physics was born as a part of philosophy and has retained to this day a properly philosophical concern for the clarity and coherence of ideas. Any introduction to the philosophy of physics must therefore focus on the conceptual development of physics itself. This book pursues that development from Galileo and Newton through (...) Maxwell and Boltzmann to Einstein and the founders of quantum mechanics. There is also discussion of important philosophers of physics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and of twentieth-century debates. In the interest of appealing to the broadest possible readership the author avoids technicalities and explains both the physics and philosophical terms. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The philosophical tradition approaches to morals have their grounds predominantly on metaphysical and theological concepts and theories. Among the traditional ethics concepts, the most prominent is the Divine Command Theory (DCT). As per the DCT, God gives moral foundations to the humankind by its creation and through Revelation. Morality and Divinity are inseparable since the most remote civilization. These concepts submerge in a theological framework and are largely accepted by most followers of the three Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and (...) Islam: the greatest part of the human population. Holding faith and Revelation for its grounds, the Divine Command Theories are not strictly subject to the demonstration. The opponents to the Divine Command conception of morals, grounded in the impossibility of demonstration of its metaphysical and religious assumptions, have tried for many centuries (albeit unsuccessfully) to devalue its importance. They held the argument that it does not show material evidence and logical coherence and, for this reason, cannot be taken into account for scientific nor philosophical purposes. It is just a belief and, as so, should be understood. Besides these extreme oppositions, many other concepts contravene the Divine Command theories, in one or another way, in part or in full. Many philosophers and social scientists, from the classic Greek philosophy up to the present date, for instance, sustain that morality is only a construct, and thus culturally relative and culturally determined. However, this brings many other discussions and imposes the challenge to determine what is the meaning of culture, which elements of culture are morally determinant, and finally, what are the boundaries of such relativity. Moral determinists claim that everything related to human behavior, including morality, is determined, once free will does not exist. More recently, modern thinkers argued that there is a strict science of morality. However, the scientific method alone, despite explaining several facts and evidence, cannot enlighten the entire content and full meaning of ethics. Morals’ understanding requires a broader perception, and an agreement among philosophers, which they have never achieved. All of these questions have many different configurations depending on each philosophical strand, and start complex analysis and endless debates, as long as many of them are reciprocally conflictive. The universe and the atmosphere involving this thesis are the dominions of all these conceptual conflicts, observed from an objective and evolutionary standpoint. Irrespective of this circumstance and its intrinsic importance, however, these questions are far distant from the methodological approach of an analytical discussion on objective morals, what is, indeed, the aim and scope of this work. We should briefly revisit these prominent traditional theories because this thesis shelters a comparative study, and its assumptions at least differ profoundly from all traditional theories. Therefore, it becomes necessary offering direct and specific elements of comparison to the reader, for the right criticism, dispensing interruptive researches. However, even revisiting the traditional theories, for this comparative and critical exposure purpose, they will be kept by the side of our main concerns, as “aliena materia.” Irrespective of the validity of any or all of the elements of this discussion, and their meaning as the philosophical universe of this thesis, the purpose of this work is demonstrating and justifying the existence and meaning of prehistoric moral archetypes arisen directly from the very first social needs and efforts for survival. These archetypes are the definition of the essential foundation of ethics, its aggregation to the collective unconscious and corresponding logic organization and transmission to evolutionary stages of the human genome and different relations space-time, irrespective of any contemporary experience of the individuals. The system defined by these archetypes composes an evolutionary human social model. Is this a metaethical position? Yes, it is. Moreover, as in any metaethical reasoning, we should look carefully for the best and coherent routes, as the Analytical Philosophy offers them. Thus, this work should reasonably demonstrate that morals are not a cultural product of the civilized men or modern societies and that despite being subject to several cultural relative aggregations and subtractions, its essential foundations are archetypal and have never structurally changed. This reasoning induces that morality is an original attribute of the “homo sapiens”; it is not a property and nor an accident: it integrates the human essence and belongs to the realm of the ontological human identity. The human phenomena is a continuing process, playing its role between random determination and free will, and we need to question how morality began and how did it come to us in the present. (shrink)

Technoscientific progress brings into question both anthropocentric epistemology and anthropocentric/humanistic ontology, which considers the human being as a self-constructing and self-sufficient entity. Even though, Darwinism recomposes the humanistic disjunction between reality and representation: by defining the human being as the result of an adaptive reflection, it reveals the idealistic character of post-Cartesian thought, which is the backbone of philosophical anthropocentrism. The non-human can be a dialogic entity if and only if it is considered not as “animal-by” but “animal-with”, that is, (...) free to express its authenticity in terms of subjectivity, diversity and uniqueness. Whilst the post-human laboratory celebrates the power of human beings, the post-humanistic perspective emphasizes the conjugation with the non-human. (shrink)

This volume is a detailed study of the concept of the nutritive capacity of the soul and its actual manifestation in living bodies in Aristotle and Aristotelianism. Aristotle’s innovative analysis of the nutritive faculty has laid the intellectual foundation for the increasing appreciation of nutrition as a prerequisite for the maintenance of life and health that can be observed in the history of Greek thought. According to Aristotle, apart from nutrition, the nutritive part of the soul is also responsible for (...) or interacts with many other bodily functions or mechanisms, such as digestion, growth, reproduction, sleep, and the innate heat. After Aristotle, these concepts were used and further developed by a great number of Peripatetic philosophers, commentators on Aristotle and Arabic thinkers until early modern times. This volume is the first of its kind to provide an in-depth survey of the development of this rather philosophical concept from Aristotle to early modern thinkers. It is of key interest to scholars working on classical, medieval and early modern psycho-physiological accounts of living things, historians and philosophers of science, biologists with interests in the history of science, and, generally, students of the history of philosophy and science. (shrink)

It is shown that axiomatic extensions of intuitionistic propositional calculus defining univocally new connectives, including those proposed by Gabbay, are strongly complete with respect to valuations in Heyting algebras with additional operations. In all cases, the double negation of such a connective is equivalent to a formula of intuitionistic calculus. Thus, under the excluded third law it collapses to a classical formula, showing that this condition in Gabbay's definition is redundant. Moreover, such connectives can not be interpreted in all Heyting (...) algebras, unless they are already equivalent to a formula of intuitionistic calculus. These facts relativize to connectives over intermediate logics. In particular, the intermediate logic with values in the chain of length n may be "completed" conservatively by adding a single unary connective, so that the expanded system does not allow further axiomatic extensions by new connectives. (shrink)

"a book about religion and a religious work in its own right, it proposes the content of a religion that can survive faith in a transcendent God and in life after death. According to this religion—the religion of the future—human beings can be more human by becoming more godlike, not just later, in another life or another time, but right now, on Earth and in their own lives."--Publishers website.

This book presents the theory of anticipation, and establishes anticipation of the future as a legitimate topic of research. It examines anticipatory behavior, id est a behavior that 'uses' the future in its actual decisional process. The book shows that anticipation violates neither the ontological order of time nor causation. It explores the question of how different kinds of systems anticipate, and examines the risks and uses of such anticipatory practices. The book first summarizes the research on anticipation conducted within (...) a range of different disciplines, and describes the connection between the anticipatory point of view and futures studies. Following that, its chapters on Wholes, Time and Emergence, make explicit the ontological framework within which anticipation finds its place. It then goes on to discuss Systems, Complexity, and the Modeling Relation, and provides the scientific background supporting anticipation. It restricts formal technicalities to one chapter, and presents those technicalities twice, in formal and plain words to advance understanding. The final chapter shows that all the threads presented in the previous chapters naturally converge toward what has come to be called "Discipline of Anticipation". (shrink)

Responding to Hasok Chang’s vision of the history and philosophy of science as the continuation of science by other means, I illustrate the methods of HPS and their utility through a historico-critical examination of the problem of “time’s arrow‘, that is to say, the problem posed by the claim by Boltzmann and others that the temporal asymmetry of many physical processes and indeed the very possibility of identifying each of the two directions we distinguish in time must have a ground (...) in the laws of nature. I claim that this problem has proved intractable chiefly because the standard mathematical representation of time employed in the formulation of the laws of nature “forgets‘ one of the connotations of the word ”time’ as it is used in ordinary language and in experimental physics. (shrink)

The paper presents color as a case study for the analysis of phenomena that pertain to several levels of reality and are typically framed by different sciences and disciplines. Color, in fact, is studied by physics, biology, phenomenology, and esthetics, among others. Our thesis is that color is a different entity for each level of reality, and that for this reason color generates different observables in the epistemologies of the different sciences. By analyzing color as a paradigmatic case of an (...) entity naturally spreading over different levels of reality, the paper raises the question as to whether making explicit the usually implicit ontological assumptions embedded within the different observables exploited by the different sciences may eventually clarify some of the difficulties of developing a comprehensive theory of color. (shrink)

This paper discusses the possibility of an absolute vacuum - a space without any substance. The motivation of this study is the contrast between most philosophers, up to Descartes, who stated that a vacuum was impossible, and the 17th century change of outlook, when the possibility and effective existence of the vacuum was accepted after the experiments of Torricelli and Pascal. This article attempts to show that, contrary to the received opinion, the acceptance of an ether is preferable to the (...) acceptance of a vacuum for several reasons. First: it is impossible to provide an empirical proof of the non-existence of the ether; second, an absolute vacuum is unthinkable; third, the ether concept is useful for the understanding of physical phaenomena; and fourth, the hypothesis of an ether in apparently void spaces is useful for the future development of science. The paper also endeavours to show that no recent advance of science changed those conclusions and that no future development can change them. (shrink)

Although long treated as the human space par excellence, the city is in fact a vibrant ecosystem that is home to many more nonhuman animals than human ones. Nonetheless, the longstanding emphasis on the city as human built environment and human center of culture has occluded extensive study of it as a thriving ecosystem in its own right. Ethology offers valuable tools for conducting a serious study of the zoological dimensions of urban areas. Companion and domestic animals such as dogs (...) and cats share domestic spaces. Synanthropes such as crows, raccoons, and coyotes are able to easily take advantage of areas around humans. And animals labeled as “pests,” such as rats and roaches, thrive in human buildings and on refuse. Indeed, such animals even play a key role in converting organic matter in the city and preventing its buildup. (shrink)

Volume 1 of Politics, a work in constructive social theory. Newly available, the complete work of Politicsa program for a comprehensive progressive alternative to the dominant ideologies of social democracy and neo-liberalismfrom one of the worlds leading social and political thinkers. False necessity is the central theme in the three-volume series Politics. It presents both a way of explaining society and a program for changing it. The explanation develops a radical alternative to Marxism, showing how we can account for established (...) social arrangements without denying their contingency or our freedom. The program offers a progressive alternative to the now-dominant ideological conceptions of neoliberalism and social democracy: a set of institutional innovations that would democratize markets, deepen democracy and empower individuals. For this new edition, Unger has written a comprehensive introduction that explores the limits of our understanding of society and our practice of politics, and reconsiders proposals contained in the book as special cases of a larger family of untried political possibilities. (shrink)

An anticipatory system is a system with the capacity to anticipate its own evolution. This paper generalizes the idea of anticipatory systems from its original biological setting to the fields of cognitive and social sciences, and it shows that anticipatory systems are a generalization of autopoietic systems. Anticipatory systems, almost by definition, escape the possibilities of rote iteration. This argument shows that the complexity of an anticipatory system extends well beyond mainstream complexity theory. For this reason, the idea of systems (...) of higher-order complexity has been introduced. These types of systems come in at least two forms: impredicative or self-referential systems, and living systems. It follows that anticipation does not necessarily require life. (shrink)

Listening to the landscape means hearing the world differently, this article contends. Since its theorization in the pictorial figuration of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, landscape has been conceived as a spatial extent delimited by the gaze of a spectator. In the late 1960s a more complex and sensitive approach to landscape, including reflection on its sound and acoustic aspects, began to emerge. Despite this new focus, a certain oculo-centrism still persists. The ecosophical approach — which complicates and goes beyond (...) the antitheses of subject/object, ethics/aesthetics, nature culture — that is put forward here promotes a new aesthetic dimension focused on listening. Based on the notions of presence, holism and non-separation, this approach makes it possible to combine the individual and the collective imagination with social relations and natural processes. (shrink)

JULIÃO, José Nicolao. Reflexões filosóficas sobre a história: Agostinho, Hegel e Nietzsche. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. ViaVerita, 2019.

Although the few references to the term, Nietzsche's notion of perspectivism is an important assumption of his philosophical reflection. It is a notion, as it will be tried to demonstrate, significant for the understanding of many theoretical positions of the author concerning science and knowledge and decisively for the interpretation of both notions as interpretative perspectives The following argument aims to analyze the influences and assumptions of this notion, highlighting its Kantian (Neokantian), Schopenhaurian background, but also considering influences outside of (...) philosophy, such as Ruggero Boscovich's theoretical physics, which plays a decisive role in the formulation of the notions of perspectivism and perspectivist interpretation in Nietzsche's philosophy. (shrink)

This article reports a notable misprint in J.C.G. Strachan's Oxford Classical Text of Plato's Phaedo.

Advanced technologies can shed a new light on traditional discussions related to medical models and social models regarding people and dissabilities. Convergent scientific and technological fields such a synthetic biology, nanotechnology or 3D printers, bring new opportunies to modify bodily biological functionalities. New possibilities for personalize and accesible manufacturing of mechanical and biological prosthesis are very promising regading body rehabilitación and, also, for augmenting and improving natural capacities. Ableism and functional diversity models can be seen from a new perspective, regarding (...) new possibilities for augmented functionalities, in a way that individual options for rehabilitation become a new form of social diversity. This model can be a social model if we admit technological autonomy as a source of individual rehabilitation beyond normative models for standard abilities. (shrink)

Dans cet article nous étudions le Trattato della sfera de Galilée, écrit avant 1600. C’est un traité d’astronomie géocentrique qui suit la structure du Tractatus de sphæra de Johannes de Sacrobosco. Nous analysons quelques particularités du traité, en le comparant à d’autres travaux astronomiques du xvie siècle, et nous discutons ses sources probables. Nous soutenons que l’influence du commentaire de Christoph Clavius sur la Sphæra de Sacrobosco ne peut pas être considérée comme son influence unique ou principale. Le traité de (...) Galilée était probablement inspiré par la Sfera del mondo de Piccolomini, un travail qui anticipait plusieurs particularités du Trattato della sfera. Cette influence est établie par de nombreuses annotations de Galilée trouvées dans un exemplaire du livre de Piccolomini. (shrink)

""Forty-nine steps" refers to the Talmudic doctrine that there are forty-nine steps to meaning in every passage of the Torah. Employing this interpretive approach, Calasso offers a "secret history" of European literature and philosophy in the wake of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Calasso analyzes how figures ranging from Gustav Flaubert, Gottfried Benn, Karl Kraus, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Adorno has contributed to, or been emblematic of, the current state of Western thought. This book's theme, (...) writ large, is the power of fable - specifically, its persistence in art and literature despite its exclusion from orthodox philosophy."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

An inspired and provocative exploration of mankind's relationship with myth, the divine, and the idea of transformation.

Formal ontology combines two ideas, one originating with Husserl, the other with Frege: that of ontology of the formal aspects of all objects, irrespective of their particular nature, and ontology pursued by employing the tools of modern formal disciplines, notably logic and semantics. These two traditions have converged in recent years and this is the first collection to encompass them as a whole in a single volume. It assembles essays from authors around the world already widely known for their work (...) in formal ontology, and illustrates that through the application of formal methods the ancient discipline of ontology may be put on a firm methodological basis. The essays not only illuminate the nature of ontology and its relation to other areas, in language, logic and everyday life, but also demonstrate that common issues from the analytical and phenomenological traditions may be discussed without ideological barriers. Audience: advanced students of and specialists in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, computer science, database engineering. (shrink)

This paper deals with recent work on the role of objects in cognition and the methodological problems created by findings and theories in various strands of the cognitive sciences. The term ‘object’ is here mean to refer to spatially extended items that persist over time. The main theses of this paper are as follows. First, we should ideally consider the various notions and representations of objects and objecthood that emerge from the literature as components of something akin to the notion (...) of internalized language that is at the core of mainstream linguistics. There appear to be as many different I-representations of objects as there are fields of investigation, and this creates some interesting methodological problems. Second, it is important to assess whether these different notions may be traced back to a common ground of underlying principles. Existing unification attempts either underestimate the differences between the I-representations or pave the way to an eliminative position that would dispose of the variety of I-notions altogether. The paper builds on these previous attempts and proposes to use again an analogy from linguistics in order to show how commonalities and differences between the various I-notions can be accounted for. Third, this framework can allow us to make sense of some so far piecemeal analyses of the commonsense notion of an object. (shrink)

Unter dem Willen versteht man die Fähigkeit eines Akteurs, sich frei und überlegtermaßen Ziele zu setzen sowie sie im Handeln planmäßig und beharrlich zu verfolgen. In diesem Band werden erstmals umfassend die begriffs- und problemgeschichtlichen Entwicklungen innerhalb der verschiedenen Philosophenschulen (Stoa, Neuplatonismus, Peripatetik) sowie in der christlichen Patristik untersucht, die zur Ausbildung eines philosophisch "vollwertigen" Willensbegriffs in der Spätantike geführt haben.

This book concerns the soul/body problem in Plato and Aristotle. Established as well as early career scholars actually working on Plato and Aristotle explore - under different points of view as well as through original readings and interpretations - the manifold dimensions involved in the conception of the soul/body relation articulated by the two greatest founders of Western Thought. The book starts with an exploration of the relation between cause and matter in Plato and Aristotle, then some papers on Plato's (...) theory of soul and body are presented, which involve new advancements in the research about Platonic epistemology, moral and political theory, metaphysics of mind, even about his religious and 'theological' view. Some papers on Aristotle's model follow, which are focused on his so-called "hylomorphism" as an alternative view to Plato's alleged "dualism": the ontology of the soul/body relation in Aristotle is explored, as well as the implications of this theoretical framework for his theory of knowledge, his moral theory, his cognitive psychology. Finally, two papers critically assess the philosophical connections between Aristotle's hylomorphism and its modern and contemporary Wirkungsgeschichte. (shrink)