The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, edited by Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, Routledge: London and New York, 2016, xiv + 266 p. The collective research concentrated in this volume is claimed both from theoretical sources, mainly positioned in the last two decades of the past century – such as the innovative contribution made by the volume edited by Arjun Appadurai in 1986 or by the volume of author signed by Daniel (...) Miller in 1987 – and from the attempt of reconfiguring this interpretative tendency after a decade, through what the editors call “the global turn”, pointing to the manner in which globalization inherently affects the discourse of social sciences and humanities. Opening such a hermeneutical path, this book gives us grounds for a research program sui generis, for the globalization that characterizes the early modernity expressed through material culture, a program with multiple development opportunities, some of them quite unexpected and unpredictable. (shrink)
This is a transcript of a conversation between P F Strawson and Gareth Evans in 1973, filmed for The Open University. Under the title 'Truth', Strawson and Evans discuss the question as to whether the distinction between genuinely fact-stating uses of language and other uses can be grounded on a theory of truth, especially a 'thin' notion of truth in the tradition of F P Ramsey.
New mechanistic philosophy has not examined explanations in ecology although they are based extensively on describing mechanisms responsible for phenomena under scrutiny. This chapter uses the example of research on the shrub Lonicera maackii (Amur honeysuckle) to scrutinize individual-level mechanisms that are generally accepted and used in ecology and confronts them with the minimal account of mechanisms. Individual-level mechanisms are for a phenomenon, are hierarchical, and absent entities play a role in their functioning. They are distinguished by the role played (...) by properties in determining activities and organization. The chapter also considers the experimental methods for discovery of individual-level mechanisms, the possibility of group-level mechanisms in ecology, and suggests further research problems. (shrink)
James Woodward offers a conception of explanation and mechanism in terms of interventionist counterfactuals. Based on a case from ecology, I show that ecologists’ approach to that case satisfies Woodward’s conditions for explanation and mechanism, but his conception does not fully capture what ecologists view as explanatory. The new mechanistic philosophy likewise aims to describe central aspects of mechanisms, but I show that it is not sufficient to account for ecological mechanisms. I argue that in ecology explanation involves identification of (...) invariant and insensitive causal relationships and descriptions of the mechanistic characteristics that make these relations possible. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Dayton, 300 College Park, Dayton, OH 45469‐1546; e‐mail: [email protected] (shrink)
A compilation of all previously published writings on philosophy and the foundations of mathematics from the greatest of the generation of Cambridge scholars that included G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maynard Keynes.
In this paper, I will attempt to formulate some observations about the limits of a traditional ontology that is in its essence a judicative one. The main goal is to explore the possibility of constructing a pre-judicative ontology; in other words, to describe the cognitive and affective elements that are “under” the main ontological judgments, related naturally to being. The arguments in favor of a pre-judicative ontology offer a new perspective on judicative ontology itself. This pre-judicative ontology is nevertheless a (...) kind of judicative ontology that covers a nonspecific realm of values. The paper has three parts: 1) a description of the main characteristics of traditional ontology from a judicative perspective; 2) the formulation of some logical conditions of possibility for a pre-judicative ontology; and 3) the outline of a pre-judicative ontology as an ontology of values. (shrink)
