As far as classical physics is concerned, it is possible to trace causal relations between physical objects back to intrinsic properties of these objects. On this view, causal relations turn out to be internal instead of external relations, supervening on intrinsic properties of the relata. However, one can raise doubts about this view already in Newtonian mechanics. The decisive blow to this view comes from quantum physics, with Bell’s theorem proving that no dynamics based on local, intrinsic (...) properties of quantum objects can yield the empirical predictions of quantum mechanics. Nonetheless, quantum entanglement by no means implies that we have to abandon an ontology of objects in favour of an ontology of structures. Any of the known proposals for a quantum ontology of matter in space-time is committed to objects. However, on any of these proposals, what determines the dynamics of these objects are not local, intrinsic properties, but a global or holistic property instantiated by all the objects together – that is, a structure that takes all the objects in the universe as its relata. The view set out in this paper thus amounts to combining ontic structural realism with an ontology of objects that can be conceived as substances. This suggestion is illustrated by drawing on the ontology of quantum physics worked out by Bohm and Bell. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martin Heidegger and OntologyEmmanuel Levinas (bio)The prestige of Martin Heidegger 1 and the influence of his thought on German philosophy marks both a new phase and one of the high points of the phenomenological movement. Caught unawares, the traditional establishment is obliged to clarify its position on this new teaching which casts a spell over youth and which, overstepping the bounds of permissibility, is already in vogue. For once, (...) Fame has picked one who deserves it and, for that matter, one who is still living. Anyone who has studied philosophy cannot, when confronted by Heidegger’s work, fail to recognize how the originality and force of his achievements, stemming from genius, are combined with an attentive, painstaking, and close working-out of the argument—with that craftsmanship of the patient artisan in which phenomenologists take such pride. In this study, it is important for us to understand, above all, the true intentions of our author, to illuminate what he thinks really needs to be said, and to surmise what is most critical for him.To get to the heart of Heidegger’s system, it seems fitting to begin with a problem that is generally familiar. We choose the problem of knowledge, a deeper understanding of which takes us to the very threshold of Heidegger’s thought. For this problem, central to modern philosophy, is one of the main obstacles of modern philosophy that Heidegger wishes to surmount. Neo-Kantianism, which takes knowledge as the philosophical problem of the first rank, is the movement against which Heidegger rebels with all his strength. We have, thus, every chance of gaining access to his thought by the main door, so to speak. Once inside the system we will try to trace its outlines, 2 reserving, for a second part of our work, the determination of Heidegger’s place in the history of ideas, especially in the phenomenological movement, as well as of his relations with the philosopher to whom he owes so much—Edmund Husserl. 31In its most general form, the problem of the theory of knowledge has a critical significance. It consists in delineating a domain where knowledge can be certain and in determining the criteria for the legitimate scope of knowledge. But this problem, as normal and as simple as it may appear, has deeper roots. That knowledge should need a criterion at all presupposes that truth is not identical to all that is known and that the course [End Page 11] of things can fail to correspond with the course of thought. “How does knowledge correspond to being?” is a more profound formulation of the problem of knowledge.But we are not going to touch anymore on the primordial phenomenon that generates the problem. The problem of correspondence between thing and thought presupposes a free activity of thought and its isolation in relation to the object. It is precisely this presupposition which renders their harmony and even their contact problematic. “How does the subject take leave of itself to attain the object?” is what the problem of knowledge, in the last analysis, boils down to. Its true source is thus the concept of “subject” as elaborated by modern philosophy. The cogito presided over the subject’s birth. The cogito was the affirmation of the privileged nature of the subject’s immanent sphere, of its unique place in existence; hence, the cogito was the specificity of the subject’s connection to the rest of reality, the sui generis nature which opens up the passage from immanence to transcendence, the passage from ideas contained in the thinking substance to 4 their “formal existence.”The concept of the subject, understood as a substance having a specific position in the entire domain of being, presents us with difficulties of two kinds. First, how do we understand this leave-taking from the self which the thinking substance brings about and which displays an entirely original aspect? Indeed, we could say that thought, in reaching out toward objects, does not actually take leave of itself, since its objects—considered as ideas and contents of thought—are, in a certain sense, already within it. In order to make sense of this paradox, Descartes... (shrink)

We argue that Halford et al.'s characterisation of relational complexity offers an unadaptive principle in terms of cognitive economy, that its relation with the empirical evidence is highly selective, and that the task behaviours used in support of a multivector processing space are better described by linear serial processes which do not require n-dimensional mappings for their emergence.

. From the bankruptcy of relations to the reality of connections: language and semantics in Bradley and Bosanquet. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 26, Special Issue: British Idealism: Language, Aesthetics and Emotions. Guest Editors: Colin Tyler and James Connelly, pp. 700-718.

The debate on realism in physics is usually focused on the reality of unobservable entities admitted in physical theories. This reality has been often denied (e.g., by Bas van Fraassen). The present book shows that observability is a very complex notion that does not really have direct implications on ontological issues related to the existence of the non-observable entities. This is shown through historical, philosophical and scientific considerations presented in the different parts of the book. Emphasis is also (...) given to the role of experiments, measurement procedures and computer-analyzed data as interface between the theoretical and experimental cultures. (shrink)

Maya Zehfuss critiques constructivist theories of international relations (currently considered to be at the cutting edge of the discipline) and finds them wanting and even politically dangerous. Zehfuss uses Germany's first shift toward using its military abroad after the end of the Cold War to illustrate why constructivism does not work and how it leads to particular analytical outcomes and forecloses others. She argues that scholars are limiting their abilities to act responsibly in international relations by looking towards (...) constructivism as the future. (shrink)

Challenging the myth that mathematical objects can be defined into existence, Bigelow here employs Armstrong's metaphysical materialism to cast new light on mathematics. He identifies natural, real, and imaginary numbers and sets with specified physical properties and relations and, by so doing, draws mathematics back from its sterile, abstract exile into the midst of the physical world.

Whatever else it may be, philosophy is an attempt to grasp the basic and universal features of reality, of the world, of possible experience. The deductive validity of some arguments as against others is a pervasive and stable characteristic of reality, a basic condition of possible experience. Thus deductive logic belongs to philosophy, as indeed does mathematics. The relation of logic to philosophy is accordingly at least part-whole. Nor is it a detachable part, for the validity of arguments (...) is central to philosophy both as process and as product. Finally, the “philosophy of logic” feeds directly into ontology. It reveals some of the most basic things there are. In this sense logic qualifies as first philosophy. (shrink)

Temporal becoming is usually considered the essence of the concept of time. But in our century most physicists and philosophers have defended the view that becoming is dependent on the existence of conscious beings and that there is no ontological difference between past and future. I evaluate these related claims both in light of their conceptual implications and by bringing to bear our best spacetime theories. ;Since a mind-independent becoming should be grounded in an ontological, non-epistemic asymmetry between past and (...) future, I discuss the philosophical motivations for various "non-full views" of the future in contrast to the view that the future is as real as the past. I present the disagreement between these views both in terms of what is and in terms of possession of a definite truth value, thereby distinguishing an ontological and a semantic formulation. A formal definition of the "tree model" of reality allows a clear distinction of the often conflated notions of 'determinate', 'determined' and 'stable', and helps to formulate the differences between the "non-full" views and the "full view" of reality. ;To settle the issue concerning these views, I bring into the discussion the special theory of relativity . I show that oft-discussed arguments against the openness of the future presuppose a clarification of the properties of the relation 'being determinate for', in particular symmetry and transitivity. Within STR, objective becoming can be defended at the cost of relativizing what is determinate to spacetime points, of making the relation of determinedness time-asymmetric, and of denying determinateness to spacelike-related events. ;I conclude by urging that mind-independent temporal becoming can find a more hospitable environment in some isotropic cosmological models of general relativity, a claim that has been unreasonably neglected. If the universe does not present causal anomalies , the proper time of a co-moving 'fundamental particle' can be made common to every other world line. The existence of such a cosmic time would make current scientific talk of 'cosmic evolution' and 'the future of the universe' non-metaphorical. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Stability of Truth: A Discussion of Reality as Related to Thought and Action The generalizations and principles of science, the significance of scientific facts, the consequences of recognizing and adopting in our daily life the knowledge of science: these are the subjects of this series of books, to be called the Philosophy of Nature Series. The science which will be most in evidence in these books is the science of living things, biology. And it is the (...) application of the scientific knowledge of living things in general to the conduct of human life in particular which will be the subject most conspicuous in the list of titles of the books of the series. This first book, then, a robust treatment of science in life, by a robust exponent of the life scientific, should be a most excellent introduction to the Series. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

In the history of philosophy, two standard critiques of the reality of modes in Spinoza’s philosophy come from Pierre Bayle and Georg Wilhelm Hegel. Both philosophers in some way assume that attributes and relations among modes constitute a shared reality in which modes participate. As a result, they assert that Spinoza’s monism leads either to an over-identification of God with contingent modes or to a limited God. In this paper, I will show how attributes and relations (...) among modes in Spinoza’s work simply explain an active modal reality; modes do not depend upon or participate in ideal relations and attributes for their existence. The result is that in Spinoza’s philosophy attributes must be seen as unreal and modal reality must be understood as primary. (shrink)

The paper offers a modelling of the sense of justice as it is displayed in ordinary situated disputes. While this model accounts for a plurality of legitimate forms of evaluation which are used in the process of critique and justification, it escapes a relativism of values by demonstrating that all these forms satisfy a set of common requirements. The reasonable character of the everyday sense of justice is also anchored in a reality test involving the engagement of objects which (...) qualify for a certain form of evaluation. The paper discusses this model in relation to competing theories of justice, and models of social action and interaction. (shrink)

One of the most widespread claims combining epistemology and metaphysics in post-Avicennian Islamic philosophy was that every object of thought is real. In Muʿtazilite reading, it was endorsed due to a theory of knowledge which states that knowledge is a connection or relation between the knower and the object known. Avicennists accepted it due to the rule that in a proposition “s is p” if p is something positive s has to be positive and real too. Hence, insofar as one (...) can conceptually distinguish between two non-existent items, they have to be real. In this article, the author presents significant consequences of this theory: the acceptance and denial of non-existent yet real extramental objects; the concept of mental existence as an alternative solution; the conceivability of paraconsistent ideas and their reality or reducibility to some real objects. (shrink)

L'attenzione dell'A. si concentra sull'opposta concezione della distinzione tra essenza ed esistenza che per Egidio è reale, mentre per Enrico è solo intenzionale. In modo analogo, i due autori dissentono rispetto al tipo di realtà da ascrivere alle relazioni divine. Dopo avere dedicato un breve paragrafo al contesto dottrinale trinitario, l'A. passa ad esaminare in modo sistematico il pensiero dei due autori.

The starting point for my reading of the exchanges between Marx and Balzac is the repetition in The Eighteenth Brumaire of a striking image employed in Colonel Chabert to represent the force of ideology as experienced by a man forcibly set outside the conventions it endorses. Balzac first: “The social and judicial world weighted on his breast like a nightmare.”3 Marx’s appropriation occurs in a much-quoted meditation on the past as impediment to the future.Men make their own history, but they (...) do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.4What is the weight of an nightmare, and why do Balzac and Marx agree that invoking it is a valid means to express humanity’s relation to its history?5 4. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 15; my emphasis. Further references to this work, abbreviated EB, will be included in the text.5. In French and German: “Le monde social et judiciare lui pesait sur la poitrine comme un cauchemar”; “Die Tradition aller toten Geschlechter lastet wie ein Alp auf dem Gehirne der Lebenden.” This strikes me as so obvious a borrowing that I have to wonder why it does not seem to be generally known. On contributing factor may be that the standard French translation of The Eighteenth Burmaire gives a fanciful version of the sentence in Marx: “La tradition de toutes les generations mortes pèse d’un poids très lourd sur le cerveau des vivants”. Does this poids très lourd come from a misreading of ein Alp as eine Alp? Sandry Petrey is professor of French and comparative literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The author of History in the Text: Quatrevingt-Treize and the French Revolution, he is completing a book entitled Realism and Revolution. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the ontological nature of the past and our experience of the present in relation to the actual. It is argued that philosophers mistakenly equate the real with the actual. The actual is what is presented to us in experience, but what is presented to us in experience is confined to the present; so one might think that it follows that only the present is real. This presentist theory is subsequently rejected. Past, present and future are real (...) and certain mental acts such as memories of the past and expectations of the future have as their content objects at those times; these objects are just as real as the objects of present experiences. This paves the way for a distinctive brand of eternalism that is defended in the remainder of this chapter. (shrink)

Whatever else it may be, philosophy is an attempt to grasp the basic and universal features of reality, of the world, of possible experience. The deductive validity of some arguments as against others is a pervasive and stable characteristic of reality, a basic condition of possible experience. Thus deductive logic belongs to philosophy, as indeed does mathematics. The relation of logic to philosophy is accordingly at least part-whole. Nor is it a detachable part, for the validity of arguments (...) is central to philosophy both as process and as product. Finally, the “philosophy of logic” feeds directly into ontology. It reveals some of the most basic things there are. In this sense logic qualifies as first philosophy. (shrink)

Fifteen philosophers offer new essays exploring the metaphysics of relations from antiquity to the present day. They address topics as diverse as ancient and medieval reasons for scepticism about polyadic properties; recent attempts to reduce causal and spatiotemporal relations; recent work on the directionality of relational properties; powers ontologies and their associated problems; whether the most promising interpretations of quantum mechanics posit a fundamentally relational world; and whether the very idea of such a world is coherent. From those (...) who question whether there are relational properties at all, to those who hold they are a fundamental part of reality, The Metaphysics of Relations covers a broad spectrum of positions on the nature and ontological status of relations, from antiquity to the present day. (shrink)

My three main points are: Mental disease is a metaphor, but mental illness is not. Feeling ill and having a physical illness are logically related. If there were no such thing as feeling ill, there would be no such thing as suffering from a physical illness. Yet there is no logical connection between feeling ill and being mentally ill. Mental illness is manifested in various forms of behaviour, for example, suspiciousness, elation, depression, etc.; if a form of behaviour is to (...) count as mental illness, it has to be an insane form; yet it is possible to be mentally ill without being insane and it is possible to be insane without being mentally ill. (shrink)

Though there are many analogies between time and space, there appear to be three commonplace yet deeply perplexing features of time that reveal it to be quite unlike space. These can be called ‘orientation’, ‘flow’ and ‘presence’. By orientation I mean that there is a direction to time, a temporal order between events which is not merely a reflection of how they are observed (what McTaggart 1908/1968 labelled the B-series time). Assertions that objects stand in spatial relations, such as (...) to the left of, or above, or to the north of explicitly depend upon the position from which they are asserted or upon arbitrary, conventionally established spatial frameworks. There is nothing intrinsic about them; the objects involved are, so to speak, indifferent to them. Temporal relations are not like that – times are not just arranged along, as it were, a line but are successive along that imaginary line. Whether one event is before or after another is not (altogether) dependent upon how, or from where, they are viewed. Nature appears to respect temporal orientation, as enshrined in the laws of thermodynamics, though it remains a deep mystery exactly how the temporally symmetric basic laws of physics ground strongly asymmetric temporal processes (see Sklar 1993). (shrink)

BACKGROUND: Delusions in schizophrenia are commonly approached as empirical false beliefs about everyday reality. Phenomenological accounts, by contrast, have suggested that delusions are more adequately understood as pertaining to a different kind of reality experience. How this alteration of reality experience should be characterised, which dimensions of experiential life are involved, and whether delusional reality might differ from standard reality in various ways is unclear and little is known about how patients with delusions value and (...) relate to these experiential alterations. This study aimed to investigate the nature of delusional reality experience, and its subjective apprehension, in individuals with lived experience of delusions and a schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis. METHODS: In this qualitative phenomenological study, we recruited individuals with lived experience of delusions and a schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis from two psychiatric-hospital services in Belgium using homogenous sampling. Criteria for participation were having undergone at least one psychotic episode with occurring delusional symptoms, present at least 1 year before participation, on the basis of clinical notes assessed by the attending psychiatrist; a schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis, ascertained through clinical interview by the attending psychiatrist upon admission; being aged between 18 years and 65 years; and having the capacity to give informed consent. Exclusion criteria included worries concerning capacity to consent and risk of distress caused by participation. We did phenomenologically driven semi-structured interviews with the participants to explore the nature of delusional reality experience and their subjective valuation of these experiences. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative method tailored to the in-depth exploration of participants’ first-person perspective, to analyse their accounts. FINDINGS: Between March 2, 2020, and Sept 30, 2020, 18 adults participated in the interview study. The findings suggest that delusions are often embedded in wide-ranging alterations of basic reality experience, involving quasi-ineffable atmospheric and ontological qualities that undermine participants’ sense of the world as unambiguously real, fully present, and shared with others. We also found that delusional reality experience can differ from standard reality in various ways, across multiple dimensions, and that participants are often implicitly or explicitly aware of the distinction between delusional and standard reality. Delusional experience can have an enduring value and meaning that is not fully captured by a strictly medical perspective. INTERPRETATION: Increased awareness and recognition of the distinctive nature of delusional reality experience, in both clinical and research settings, can improve diagnostic accuracy, explanatory models, and therapeutic support for individuals with delusions whose lived realities are not always evident from an everyday perspective. FUNDING: FWO Flanders. TRANSLATION: For the Dutch translation of the abstract see Supplementary Materials section. (shrink)

Since independence Ukraine has been in the zone of conflict with Russia in 1991. Russia can not accept the collapse of the Union, which allowed hundreds of other ethnic groups to be kept in a state of colonial enslavement. At the same time, she resorted to the use of the Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, which is legally operating in Ukraine, in its anti-Ukrainian activities.

This paper focuses on a crucial question of social ontology addressed by Gerda Walther, namely, whether a social community has its own reality over and above that of its members and its cultural “products”, such as language, religion, infrastructure, and works of art. Walther has a nuanced answer which combines elements of phenomenology and Marxism. She praises Marxists for drawing our attention to the “community as such”, taken as an object distinct from its members and their relations. She (...) maintains the thesis, defended according to her by “certain socialists and Hegelians” (which presumably includes Marxists), that communities have their own reality. However, she develops it one step further, arguing that these social structures are “higher-order” unitary realities that exist over and above their members and cultural products. In addition, she enriches this realist position from a phenomenological point of view by identifying with precision the kinds of mental act on which communities are founded, namely, “unifications” and “we-experiences”. As such, Walther’s theory is an early encounter between phenomenology and Marxism, prior to Trần Đức Thảo and Jean-Paul Sartre, and thus deserves much more attention than it has received in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The representational dynamics of the brain is a subsymbolic process, and it has to be conceived as an "agent-free" type of dynamical self-organization. However, in generating a coherent internal world-model, the brain decomposes target space in a certain way. In doing so, it defines an "ontology": to have an ontology is to interpret a world. In this paper we argue that the brain, viewed as a representational system aimed at interpreting the world, possesses an ontology too. It decomposes target space (...) in a way that exhibits certain invariances, which in turn are functionally significant. A challenge for empirical research is to determine which are the functional regularities guiding this decomposition process. What are the explicit and implicit assumptions about the structure of reality, which at the same time shape the causal profile of the brain's motor output and the representational deep structure of the conscious mind arising from it (its "phenomenal output")? How do they constrain high-level phenomena like conscious experience, the emergence of a first-person perspective, or social cognition? By reviewing a series of neuroscientific results, we focus on the contribution the motor system makes to this process. As it turns out, the motor system constructs goals, actions, and intending selves as basic constituents of the world it interprets. It does so by assigning a single, unified causal role to them. Empirical evidence now clearly shows how the brain actually codes movements and action goals in terms of multimodal representations of organism-object relations. Under a representationalist analysis, this process can be interpreted as an internal representation of the intentionality relation itself. We try to show how such a more complex form of representational content, once it is in place, can later function as the building block for social cognition and a for more complex, consciously experienced representation of the first-person perspective as well. The motor system may therefore play a decisive role in understanding how the functional ontology of the human brain could be gradually extended into the subjective and social domains. (shrink)

The following paper addresses the experience of reality in video-calls. To this extent, it first draws from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reflections that connect the question of reality with that of interaction and that of intersubjective communication. These reflections set the larger theoretical framework for sketching out ten theses with regard to the specific case of video-calls. To this extent it addresses issues like the public-private divide, the specific image-form of contemporary video-calls, the mutual intersubjective relations they involve, (...) as well as their specific spatiality and temporality. (shrink)

The first five essays, including the title essay, are a stimulating contribution to contemporary discussion in philosophical theology. Their most striking feature is the attempted synthesis of Heideggerian-Bultmannian existentialism with Hartshorne's neo-classical metaphysics. Unlike Hartshorne, Ogden gives particular attention to the moral argument for God's reality, drawing heavily on the work of Stephen Toulmin, and engaging the atheism of Sartre and Camus in provocative fashion, in both the title essay and in "The Strange Witness of Unbelief." The final three (...) essays treat specifically Christian problems within the context of the philosophical framework previously developed—How is Jesus Christ God's unique and decisive act in history? What does it mean to call him Lord? What is the meaning of Christian eschatology? An explicit discussion of the relation between the theologian as philosopher and the theologian as Christian witness would have been helpful, since it is difficult to gather precisely what Ogden thinks of this relation by comparing the final three with the first five essays.—M. W. (shrink)

Is reality static, or dynamic and relational? This book dives into the complexities of this question to reveal a new view of the relationship between thinking and being. Philosophy has traditionally considered reality as a set of static objects. This book transcends this understanding to explore the depths of relational and dynamic ontology. These explorations can be both complex and problematic as it attempts to understand and conceptualize becoming. To navigate this level of understanding, this book takes a (...) novel path into dynamic realism that is both temporal and relational, without dismissing the epistemological implications. It combines phenomenology and process ontology in a way that is neither naive nor reductive. With an appetite to challenge ways of thinking that can be argued as outdated in our rapid, interconnected world, this book will provide insight, inspiration and lead to further questioning as to the depths our understanding can go to. (shrink)

Auschwitz and Hiroshima stand out as two realities whose uniqueness must be reconciled with their inevitability as outcomes of highly rationalized processes of technoscientific progress. Contrary to Michael Walzer’s notion of “double effect”, whereby unintended consequences and the particular uses to which warfare may lead remain outside the moral purview of scientists, this paper endorses the commitment of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science to argue that members of the technoscientific community are always responsible for their work and the (...) eventual uses made of it. In what follows four related views are outlined pertaining to modern situations within which the technoscientific community operates, so as to highlight the urgency of infusing a sense of responsibility for the products of their activities into this community. A provisional “code” is suggested that may serve as a guide for increased personal responsibility of individual technoscientists (academic scientists and industrial engineers). (shrink)

The purpose of this investigation is to define the central issues of the current and future relations between the Western and Chinese civilizations through the evaluation of the myths and realities of these relations. The methodology is based on an interdisciplinary big-picture view of the world scene, driven by the global economy and civilization with an attempt to compare both civilizations according to key criteria. Among the findings are: Today China has become a “robot” of the West. Due (...) to its old culture and ability to invent important civilizational tools, China is becoming an independent developer of its own economic power, and it is very probable that it will surpass its master sooner or later. Due to its transformation to a global civilization, Western civilization has lost its Christian values and adopted new ones based on business. It is probable that the economic success of China will lead to a clash between civilizations, both grasping for access to the strategic resources. Practical implication: Society should elaborate the path to the development of wise civilization driven by a new political system, ecoism.Social implication: It is probable that if the “1%” won’t self-correct its misbehavior, a social revolution by the “99%” cannot be excluded from the current calendar ofWestern civilization. Originality: This investigation, by providing the interdisciplinary and civilizational approach, expands the scope of the traditional relevant approach. (shrink)

The author attempts here to sketch the beginnings of an adequate interpretation of Plato's treatment of the tall and the equal in the "Phaedo". The paper consists of seven sections (roman numerals). In I-II, he (a) argues that any attempt to solve the puzzle stated at "Phaedo" 102 bc within the parameters there set down would "eo ipso" be an attempted theory of relational statements; (b) formulates that puzzle; and (c) shows that Frege solved it by denying its presuppositions. In (...) IV the author proposes an interpretation of Plato's solution: that the "than y" in "x is taller than y" modifies the "is." In V-VI he shows how this theory fits in with and sheds light on other aspects of the theory of forms: the connection to Non-Contradiction, The doctrines of degrees of reality and of immanent characters. Finally in VII he shows that the puzzle of relational statements as formulated in the "Phaedo" need not extend to "equal." the paper also includes (iii) a discussion of H-N Castañeda's interpretation of Plato's theory. (shrink)

The long-standing conflict between the two theories centers about the question whether time can exist independently of that which is in it. Those who advocate absolute time answer in the affirmative while the relationists take the opposite position claiming that temporal relations, and thus time, have no reality apart from the things and events which they order. In the terminology of Paul Weiss, relational time is "concrete." The considerable emphasis placed upon this issue of the concreteness of time (...) has adversely affected the absolute theory, leading to presentations of the absolutist position that are confusing, if not erroneous. Absolute time, as interpreted by philosophers such as Broad, Gunn, and Whitehead, posits the existence of abstract moments which are arranged in serial order one before the other by virtue of relations of precedence between them. Things and events participate in time only vicariously, so to speak, being joined to their respective moments by another kind of relation which Whitehead calls "occupation." The overall structure presented by the absolute theory is therefore thought to be as follows: one event is before another if both are respectively bound by relations of occupation to moments which are in turn so related as to be one before the other. Relational time mercifully simplifies this picture by a neat bit of surgery, cutting away the abstract moments and tying the relations of precedence directly to things and events themselves. As a consequence, the parasitic relations of occupation wither away. (shrink)

The first five essays, including the title essay, are a stimulating contribution to contemporary discussion in philosophical theology. Their most striking feature is the attempted synthesis of Heideggerian-Bultmannian existentialism with Hartshorne's neo-classical metaphysics. Unlike Hartshorne, Ogden gives particular attention to the moral argument for God's reality, drawing heavily on the work of Stephen Toulmin, and engaging the atheism of Sartre and Camus in provocative fashion, in both the title essay and in "The Strange Witness of Unbelief." The final three (...) essays treat specifically Christian problems within the context of the philosophical framework previously developed—How is Jesus Christ God's unique and decisive act in history? What does it mean to call him Lord? What is the meaning of Christian eschatology? An explicit discussion of the relation between the theologian as philosopher and the theologian as Christian witness would have been helpful, since it is difficult to gather precisely what Ogden thinks of this relation by comparing the final three with the first five essays.—M. W. (shrink)

This book is about universals. "Mathematics," we learn, "is the theory of universals". Natural numbers turn out to be universals, as do real numbers, complex numbers, and sets. It is natural, therefore, that the reader demand some evidence that universals abound sufficiently to supply models of canonical mathematical theories. The author devotes nearly a third of his book to one potential source of such evidence: the Truthmaker axiom. In the case of some propositions P, Truthmaker entails that if P is (...) true, then there are things whose joint existence strictly implies P's truth. These things are truthmakers for P. Might Truthmaker, then, transform evidence for the truth of propositions into evidence for the existence of truthmaking universals? And might we thus be guaranteed a rich supply of numbers and sets? The author thinks not: "universals must not be construed as truthmakers". Something is a universal only if it can be instantiated by individuals x and y such that x's being an instance does not strictly imply y's being an instance. Since this characteristic of universals is incompatible with natural assumptions about truthmakers, the author's disheartening conclusion follows: "universals should not be expected to play any distinctive role in truthmaking". So Truthmaker is not a wellspring of universals. Why should we, then, believe that universals abound? One must understand, first, that the author embraces David Armstrong's a posteriori realism: "Everything there is is physical.... Hence universals, too, are physical. That is to say, the universals which exist are all real physical properties and relations among physical things". Universals are reasonably posited, then, only if their existence is entailed by our best accounts of the physical universe: "In cutting universals away from truthmakers, I am making their existence a matter, not for a priori proof from logic alone, but for total science". Sentences not interpretable in optimal physical theory will, on this view, not be modeled by universals and, hence, will be either bad mathematics or no part of mathematics at all. (shrink)