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1
Lor, Na, and Uzma Chowdhury. What Is a Research Paradigm? Understanding Ontology, Epistemology, and Axiology. SAGE Publications Ltd, 2025. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781036223311.
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Hart, James G. Who One Is: Meontology of the “I”: A Transcendental Phenomenology. Springer Netherlands, 2009.
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Lipskiy, Boris. Fundamentals of ontology. INFRA-M Academic Publishing LLC., 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.12737/1860990.
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The purpose of the textbook is to form students' holistic understanding of the key ideas and categories of ontology, general orientation in its conceptual framework, theoretical and methodological problems, as well as the use of ontological knowledge in solving practical problems.
 It is aimed at familiarizing students with the fundamental problems of ontology, which form the basis of philosophical knowledge as a whole.
 Meets the requirements of the federal state educational standards of higher education of the latest generation.
 It is intended for students of the 47.03.01 "Philosophy" field of study studying the discipline "Ontology and theory of knowledge". The presented material is considered and discussed mainly in the historical and cultural context, so that it can be used as an additional one for students in the areas of training 46.03.01 "History" and 51.03.01 "Cultural studies".
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Rousselle, Duane, and Jason Adams, eds. Ontological Anarché. punctum books, 2014. https://doi.org/10.21983/p3.0060.1.00.
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Radical theory has always been beset by the question of ontology, albeit to varying degrees and under differing conditions. In recent years, in particular, political metaphysics has returned with force: the rise of Deleuze-influenced “new materialisms,” along with post-/non-Deleuzian Speculative Realism (SR) and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), all bear testament to this. In this same period, anarchism has returned as a major influence on social movements and critical scholarship alike. What, then, are some of the potential resonances between these currents, particularly given that anarchism has so often been understood/misunderstood as a fundamentally idealist philosophy? This special issue of Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies (Issue 2013.2) considers these questions in dialogue with the new materialisms, Speculative Realism, and Object-Oriented Ontology, in order to seek new points of departure. It is in this sense that ADCS also strives to play a critical role recent discussions in the wider political, cultural, and philosophical milieu.
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Adams, Robert Merrihew. What Is, and What Is in Itself: A Systematic Ontology. Oxford University Press, 2021.
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What Is, and What Is in Itself: A Systematic Ontology. Oxford University Press, 2024.
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Mendelovici, Angela. Is Intentionality a Relation to a Content? Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190863807.003.0009.
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This chapter argues against the relation view of intentionality, on which intentionality is a relation to distinctly existing contents, and for the alternative aspect view, on which intentionality is a matter of having states with certain aspects. The relation view faces two problems: First, it cannot accommodate all the intentional contents we can manifestly represent without accepting a bloated ontology, which suggests that the view is wrong-headed. Second, it is not clear why being related to an item should make it perceptually represented, thought, entertained, or otherwise represented. The relation view might be thought to have many virtues that the aspect view lacks: It is arguably supported by common sense, allows for public contents, provides an account of structured intentional states, facilitates a theory of truth and reference, and is congenial to externalism. This chapter argues that the aspect view has any such truth-indicating virtues to the same extent as the relation view.
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Chakravartty, Anjan. Ontology. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190651459.003.0001.
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This chapter considers the relationship between scientific and philosophical approaches to ontology, with the aim of clarifying what it means to engage in the project of scientific ontology. It introduces the most influential conceptions of ontology to emerge in the history of philosophy of science. These include deflationary views, which redescribe talk of ontology in terms of other things, as well as views which, conversely, take ontology at face value as an inquiry seeking knowledge of what there is in the world—a world whose existence is independent of the thoughts one may have concerning it. It is argued that the sciences do not yield ontologies until and unless they are interpreted, which requires some recourse to philosophical thinking, and that case studies of science cannot by themselves settle disputes about how these interpretations should go.
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Guttinger, Stephan. A Process Ontology for Macromolecular Biology. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779636.003.0015.
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This chapter argues (a) that macromolecules are fundamentally relational entities and (b) that only a process ontology can account for them. The basis for the argument is the ecological model proposed in 1981 by Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, which states that all entities, from atoms to populations, are ecosystems and hence fundamentally relational in character. The chapter first discusses how Birch and Cobb use the concept of internal relations to argue that ecosystems are processual in nature. It then shows that their account fails when it comes to macromolecules, as it does not offer an understanding of macromolecular behaviour in terms of internal relations. Following this, two case studies—symbiosis and enzyme function—are used for developing a fully relational account of molecular behaviour. This enables the expansion of Birch and Cobb’s ecological model into a process framework that also applies to macromolecules.
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Chakravartty, Anjan. Scientific Ontology. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190651459.001.0001.
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Both science and philosophy are interested in questions of ontology—questions about what exists and what these things are like. Science and philosophy, however, seem like very different ways of investigating the world, so how should one proceed? Some defer to the sciences, conceived as something apart from philosophy, and others to metaphysics, conceived as something apart from science, for certain kinds of answers. This book contends that these sorts of deference are misconceived. A compelling account of ontology must appreciate the ways in which the sciences incorporate metaphysical assumptions and arguments. At the same time, it must pay careful attention to how observation, experience, and the empirical dimensions of science are related to what may be viewed as defensible philosophical theorizing about ontology. The promise of an effectively naturalized metaphysics is to encourage beliefs that are formed in ways that do justice to scientific theorizing, modeling, and experimentation. But even armed with such a view, there is no one, uniquely rational way to draw lines between domains of ontology that are suitable for belief and ones in which it would be better to suspend belief instead. In crucial respects, ontology is in the eye of the beholder: it is informed by underlying commitments with implications for the limits of inquiry, which inevitably vary across rational inquirers. As result, the proper scope of ontology is subject to a striking form of voluntary choice, yielding a new and transformative conception of scientific ontology.
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Platten, Simon. Is it possible to escape western ontology in our conception of nature as a cultural construction?. Simon Platten, 1998.
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Azzouni, Jody. Ontology Without Borders. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190622558.001.0001.
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Part I is metametaphysics. Quantifier variance views are criticized, and it’s shown that ontological debate, to be cogent, requires a single existence concept shared by debate participants. Natural language expresses such a concept which has certain formal properties—univocality among them. It’s shown that an ontological neutralist interpretation of quantifier domains (both formal- and natural-language) is consistent and consistent with usage data. Finally, several puzzles, among them Hob-Nob sentences and truth-talk about fictions, are resolved using the neutralist interpretation. A result established here is crucial to establishing the metaphysics argued for in part II: the general invalidity of indispensability arguments. Part II is metaphysics. An austere metaphysical position—feature metaphysics—is presented and argued for. Features aren’t properties or relations or objects of any sort. They have no individuation conditions. A feature-characterization language, with the expressive strength provided by quantifiers, is given; and using the results of part I, it’s shown that no commitments to objects arise when using this language. Feature-characterization languages supplant predication (properties of objects) with an “is at” relation or a co-occurrence relation between features. It’s shown that the resulting notion doesn’t yield a property-bundle view. Feature metaphysics is argued for by showing that the notion of object borders (central to individuation conditions for objects) cannot be interpreted metaphysically. This is also true of the individuation conditions used by philosophers to argue for tropes over universals, or vice versa. The resulting position allows us to distinguish what we project onto the world from what we find there.
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Randazzo, Elisa, and Hannah Richter. Challenging Anthropocene Ontology. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9780755634705.
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Using the recent turn to ecology as a starting point, Hannah Richter and Elisa Randazzo bring ecological thinking into contact with Critical Indigenous Studies, in which awareness of the necessity for sustainable relations between humans and non-humans has long preceded Western Anthropocene discourse. Currently, the drastic ecological changes labelled as ‘the Anthropocene’ not only increasingly shape the political awareness and the priorities of citizens and governments, but also inform a large body of social scientific scholarship. Indigenous scholarship and practice, in particular ecological adaptability, is intrinsically related to power structures and political struggle – hence indigenous understanding of Anthropocene discourses are intertwined with discourses of colonialism and political contestation. This book problematises the depoliticising character of Western Anthropocene discourses in relation to indigenous ecologies. The authors reveal how the anti-colonial struggles of Indigenous communities and the unequal distribution of responsibilities for and suffering from ecological change, are concealed and devalued in Western discourses of the Anthropocene.
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Davies, Stephen. Ontology of Art. Edited by Jerrold Levinson. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199279456.003.0008.
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Ontology is the study of the kinds of things there are in the world. The ontology of art considers the matter, form, and mode in which art exists. Works of art are social constructs in the sense that they are not natural kinds but human creations. The way we categorize them depends on our interests, and to that extent ontology is not easily separated from sociology and ideology. Nevertheless, some classifications and interests are likely to be more revealing of why and how art is created and appreciated. There are a number of traditional classifications of the arts, for instance in terms of their media (stone, words, sounds, paint, etc.), their species (sculpture, literature, music, drama, ballet, etc.), or their styles or contents (tragedy, comedy, surrealism, impressionism, etc.). The ontology of works of art does not map neatly on to these classifications, however.
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Seibt, Johanna. What Is a Process? Modes of Occurrence and Forms of Dynamicity in General Process Theory. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198777991.003.0007.
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This chapter suggests that contemporary research in process ontology can be sorted into two varieties. The radical strategy, implemented in General Process Theory, takes our reasoning of processes to motivate a comprehensive rejection of a network of traditional presumptions in ontology (“substance paradigm”). More recent work on processes displays a more conservative approach where the traditional research paradigm is not replaced but expanded. One pivotal disagreement between the radical and conservative strategy is, it is suggested, the traditional tenet that all concrete individuals must be particulars. With focus on recent work by Stout and Steward the chapter argues that convincing arguments for the individuality of processes are undermined by the fact that such process individuals are conceived of as particulars. Such approaches are focused on the distinction between processes and “events” but fail to acknowledge an important distinction among processes that is an integral part of the data for process ontology.
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Miller, J. T. M., ed. The Language of Ontology. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192895332.001.0001.
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Metaphysical and ontological debates—debates about what exists and the nature of reality—have long been among the most discussed topics in philosophy. However, some argue that ontological debates are non-substantive, pointless, trivial, incoherent, or impossible. Debates about whether tables exist, or about the nature of reality, are taken to be defective in some way. This has led to a burgeoning literature studying the nature of metaphysical and ontological disputes themselves. A prominent line of argument has focused on questions concerning the language in which metaphysical disputes are conducted. Is there a ‘fundamental’ or ‘best’ language for ontology, or does the nature of language render metaphysical and ontological disputes non-substantive? This volume brings together new work from established and emerging authors on questions relating to the relationship between language and ontology. More specifically, essays in this volume consider such topics as whether there can be an ‘objectively best’ or privileged language of ontology; how we might compare languages to see which is the language of ontology; whether positing an ‘objectively best’ language is required of a substantive realist metaphysics; whether metaphysical debates are meaningless; the role of existence and truth in ontological theorizing; whether metaphysical claims should be interpreted as attempts to express truths about the nature of reality; and the relationship between natural language and theoretical metaphysics. Collectively, these essays advance a range of debates in metametaphysics and metaontology, and will be an invaluable resource for students and academics interested in the relationship between metaphysics and language.
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Janssen-Lauret, Frederique, ed. Quine, Structure, and Ontology. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864288.001.0001.
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Contemporary work on ontology, logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language still owes much to W.V. Quine. Nevertheless his views are now often dismissed because of mistaken or overly simplified conceptions of his philosophy. The development of his views over time are often overlooked, and in particular the growing importance of a kind of structuralism to his system as it evolved. This volume provides a fuller, richer picture of Quine’s views and their development. It is the first to investigate Quine’s views on structure and how it permeates and shapes his attitude to a range of philosophical questions. It includes contributions by world-famous philosophers and experts in a range of subfields including philosophical logic, philosophy of language, history of philosophy, mathematics, philosophy of time, and set theory. Chapters by Michael Resnik, Frederique Janssen-Lauret and Fraser MacBride, John Collins, Jaroslav Peregrin, and Paul Gregory explore whether Quine’s structuralism is epistemological, language-based, or ontological. Greg Frost-Arnold, Robert Sinclair, and Gary Kemp and Andrew Lugg explore Quine’s views on structure from a historical point of view. Nathan Salmón, Gila Sher, Marianna Antonutti Marfori, and Natalja Deng consider Quine’s views on the structure of logic, language, and theories in relation to contemporary philosophy, specifically ontology, the philosophy of logic and mathematics, philosophy of set theory, and philosophy of time.
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Bella, Michela. Ontology after Philosophical Psychology. Edited by John J. Kaag. Lexington Books, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781978725225.
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Ontology after Philosophical Psychology addresses the question of William James’s continuity of consciousness, with a view to its possible actualizations. In particular, Michela Bella critically delineates James's discourse. In the wake of Darwin's theory of evolution at the end of the nineteenth century, James's reflections emerged in the field of physiological psychology, where he developed for the case for a renewed epistemology and a new metaphysical framework to help us understand the most interesting theories and scientific discoveries about the human mind. Bella’s analysis of the theme of continuity makes it possible to appreciate, both historically and theoretically, the importance of James's gradual transition from making observations of experimental psychology on the continuity of thought to developing an epistemological and ontological argument that continuity is a characteristic of experience and reality. This analysis makes it possible both to clarify James's position in relation to his historical context and to highlight the most original results of his work.
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Tooley, Michael. Causes, Laws, and Ontology. Edited by Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock, and Peter Menzies. Oxford University Press, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199279739.003.0019.
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Different approaches to causation often diverge very significantly on ontological issues, in the case of both causal laws, and causal relations between states of affairs. This article sets out the main alternatives with regard to each. Causal concepts have surely been present from the time that language began, since the vast majority of action verbs involve the idea of causally affecting something. Thus, in the case of transitive verbs describing physical actions, there is the idea of causally affecting something external to one — one finds food, builds a shelter, sows seed, catches fish, and so on — while in the case of intransitive verbs describing physical actions, it is very plausible that they involve the idea of causally affecting one's own body — as one walks, runs, jumps, hunts, and so on.
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Zelmanovitz, Leonidas. Ontology and Function of Money. Published by Lexington Books, 2015. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781978737051.
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The central thesis of the book is that in order to evaluate monetary policy, one should have a clear idea about the characteristics and functions of money as it evolved and in its current form. That is to say that without an understanding about how money evolved as a social institution, what it is today, and what is possible to know about monetary phenomena, it is not possible to develop a meaningful ethics for money; or, to put it differently, to find what kind of institutional arrangements may be deemed good money for the kind of society we are in. And without that, one faces severe limitations in offering a normative position about monetary policy. The project is, consequently, an interdisciplinary one. Its main thread is an inquiry of moral philosophy and its foundations, as applied to money, in order to create tools to evaluate public policy in regard to money, banking, and public finance; and the views of different schools on those topics are discussed. The book is organized in parts on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics of money to facilitate the presentation of all the subjects discussed to an educated readership (and not necessarily just one with a background in economics).
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Matheron, Alexandre. Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza. Edited by Filippo Del Lucchese, David Maruzzella, and Gil Morejón. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.001.0001.
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Alexandre Matheron (1926–2020) worked and wrote substantially on the 17<sup>th</sup> century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza beginning with the publication of his influential 1969 masterpiece Individu et communauté chez Spinoza. Widely considered one of the most important and original interpreters of Spinoza’s philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but whose work was rarely translated into English, the 20 essays gathered here span the entirety of Matheron’s prolific career and present to the Anglophone the first collection of its kind outside of France. From texts on Spinoza’s epistemology and metaphysics to his signature interpretation of Spinoza’s political philosophy, Matheron’s work touches on every imaginable theme in the Spinozist corpus from Spinoza’s views on sexuality to his relationship to his predecessors, contemporaries, and inheritors such as Aquinas, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Rousseau to Spinoza’s latent communism and importance for the development of Spinozist Marxism in France. Complete with a substantial interview conducted by two of Matheron’s best known students, Laurent Bove and Pierre-François Moreau, and a comprehensive bibliography of Matheron’s publications, this is a crucial collection for anyone seeking to understand 20th-century continental Spinozism. Whether it be the established scholar looking for translations of difficult to find essays or the advanced undergraduate or graduate student in search of reliable secondary literature on Spinoza, this volume is the perfect introduction to Matheron’s rigorous, masterful, and original interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy.
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Hoover, Kevin D. Microfoundations and the Ontology of Macroeconomics. Edited by Don Ross and Harold Kincaid. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195189254.003.0014.
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The typical concerns of macroeconomics—such as national output, employment and unemployment, inflation, interest rates, and the balance of payments—are among the oldest in economics, having been dominant among the problems addressed by both the mercantilists and classical economists, such as David Hume, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, as well as even earlier writers. These concerns co-existed with ones that are now regarded as characteristically microeconomic, such as the theory of prices exemplified in the labor theory of value of the classical economists or the theory of marginal utility of the early neoclassical economists. Questions about the relationship between these two groups of concerns could hardly be articulated until a categorical distinction between macroeconomics and microeconomics had been drawn. This article asks whether there is a successful ontology of macroeconomics. It also discusses the implications that this ontology has for practical macroeconomics.
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Brown, Deborah J., and Calvin G. Normore. Descartes and the Ontology of Everyday Life. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198836810.001.0001.
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Far from being the founder of an austere reductionism, Descartes is committed to a rich, multilayered, and complex metaphysics. This book begins by locating Descartes’s work against the ancient and medieval background to which he is reacting. It proceeds to argue that his theory of distinctions requires what he explicitly endorses―that in addition to minds and modes, there are material substances of every size. These substances when appropriately configured form automata, self-sustaining, functionally integrated systems of which animals and human bodies are important sub-classes. Descartes’ conception of function, which is crucial to his characterization of these uniquely organized collections of matter, is shown to be compatible with his rejection of final causes in natural science, and gives him resources to account for composite beings which are not themselves substances. It is argued that besides automata, these composites include individual human beings, which are unions of minds and bodies individuated by minds. The unique modes which characterize the union, in particular, its passions, set the foundation for a social ontology that includes genuine social entities such as families and nation states. Societies are forged by individuals in acts of willing to join in union with others that Descartes takes to be of the essence of love. The result is a picture of Descartes very different from the myths that have come to surround him.
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Tritten, Tyler. Boutroux’s Alternative: An Ontology of the Fact. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474428194.003.0003.
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Boutroux, approximately 150 years prior to Meillassoux, already argued for the contingency of laws of nature, as well as truths of logic and mathematics. Boutroux, however, does not espouse factiality, namely, the necessity of contingent beings, but he rather offers a veritable ontology of the fact. Boutroux does not abandon necessity, but he does show how all necessity is itself consequent, that is, a matter of fact. He does this by arguing for the laws of nature as nothing but the habit of nature, which springs not from chance but from spontaneity. Being bottoms out in pontaneity rather than in simple randomness.
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Mallon, Ron. Racial Identity, Racial Ontology, and Racial Norms. Edited by Naomi Zack. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190236953.013.26.
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Racial norms—norms that prescribe or proscribe behaviors based on racial identity—are common, but controversial. While they explicitly refer to racial identity, it is not clear how race, understood as a kind of person, could justify such norms. The existence of racial identity presupposes the existence of race, and certain understandings of what racial identity amounts to presuppose much more. In light of this discussion, we can consider whether any racial norms are justified and, if so, how. Racial norms, if they are to be justified by appeal to racial identity, require strong communal accounts of what race is. But these communal forms of racial identity require demanding social arrangements among members of a racial identity that are not in place for prototypical national racial categories in the contemporary United States. It follows that racial norms cannot be justified by appeal to racial identity.
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Keiling, Tobias. Phenomenology and Ontology in the Later Heidegger. Edited by Dan Zahavi. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198755340.013.17.
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Heidegger’s later philosophy is marked by two conflicting claims about phenomenology. On the one hand, phenomenology and philosophy generally is tasked with “responding to the claim of what is to be thought” in a novel and unprecedented manner. On the other hand, Heidegger recognizes that there have been earlier attempts at thus doing justice to phenomena; in the ontological commitments of earlier thinkers, Heidegger finds accounts of the “things themselves,” each of which has different implications for what phenomenology should concern itself with. Phenomenology, as Heidegger conceives it, should thus both incorporate the history of philosophy and exceed it, yet it is unclear how these ideas can be reconciled. This chapter calls this problem the “dilemma of the historicity of phenomenology” and identifies different versions of it in Heidegger’s works after 1935/6.
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Uranga, Emilio. Essay on an Ontology of the Mexican (1951). Translated by Carlos Alberto Sánchez. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190601294.003.0013.
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Emilio Uranga challenges the underlying assumptions of Samuel Ramos’s popular and controversial thesis regarding the “Mexican inferiority complex.” Uranga’s basic claim, influenced by Heidegger, is that Ramos’s analysis overlooks a more foundational “difference”: that between ontological sufficiency and insufficiency. Ramos’s analysis remains always at an ontic, or philosophically superficial, level of explanation, attributing “inferiority” to the Mexican character without explaining that on which it is grounded. The clue to its grounding lies in fragility, unwillingness, and melancholy, seemingly essential characteristics that define Mexican existence. Thus, fragility is not related to a simple feeling of inferiority, which is itself related to actual intersubjective relationships between Mexicans and their European colonizers, but rather to a more complex emotive life predicated on an unconscious awareness of a primordial relationship to nothingness and non-being. Unwillingness, likewise, is not a simple lack of will, but a refusal to be part of the world.
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Carruth, Alexander, and Sophie Gibb. The Ontology of E. J. Lowe’s Substance Dualism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198796299.003.0010.
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E. J. Lowe’s model of psychophysical causation offers a way of reconciling interactive substance dualism with the causal completeness principle by denying the homogeneity of the causal relata—more specifically, by invoking a distinction between ‘fact causation’ and ‘event causation’. According to Lowe, purely physical causation is event causation, whereas psychophysical causation involves fact causation, allowing the dualist to accept a version of causal completeness which holds that all physical events have only physical causes. But Lowe’s dualist model is only as plausible as the distinction between fact and event causation upon which it rests. In this chapter it is argued that a suitable distinction between fact and event causation is difficult to maintain within most common ontological systems. It is examined whether accepting the four-category ontology that Lowe defends can alleviate the problem, but it is argued that it is not clear that it can.
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Adams, Robert Merrihew. What Is, and What Is In Itself. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192856135.001.0001.
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This work is “a systematic ontology.” Ontology is the study of being as such, and a systematic ontology is an account of the most fundamental ways of being something or other—of what they are and of how they are related to each other. The questions it pursues are not primarily about what causes things, but about what things are or consist in (though causal questions cannot be totally avoided). The title of the work, What Is, and What Is in Itself, marks the most important distinction in ways of being. What is includes everything there is, but not everything there is included in what is in itself. The first five chapters of the book define and examine the ways of being: in Chapters 1 and 2, being actual or existing, or even just being something without existing or being actual; in 3, being an intentional object, and perhaps a merely intentional object; in Chapter 4, relations between things and their properties; and in Chapter 5, being a thing in itself. Chapter 6 discusses whether only conscious beings are things in themselves, and suggests an affirmative answer. Chapter 7 discusses the epistemology of ontology. Chapters 8 and 9 discuss issues about thisness and identity. And Chapters 10 and 11 discuss mainly occasionalist and panentheist answers to questions about the causal unity of the universe.
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Heck, Richard Kimberly. Logicism, Ontology, and the Epistemology of Second-Order Logic. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198792161.003.0008.
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In two recent papers, Bob Hale has attempted to free second-order logic of the “staggering existential assumptions” with which Quine famously attempted to saddle it. This chapter argues, first, that the ontological issue is at best secondary: the crucial issue about second-order logic, at least for a neo-logicist, is epistemological. It is then argued that neither Crispin Wright’s attempt to characterize a ‘neutralist’ conception of quantification that is wholly independent of existential commitment, nor Hale’s attempt to characterize the second-order domain in terms of definability, can serve a neo-logicist’s purposes. The problem, in both cases, is similar: neither Wright nor Hale is sufficiently sensitive to the demands that impredicativity imposes. Finally, the chapter defends the author’s own earlier attempt to finesse this issue, in “A Logic for Frege’s Theorem,” from Hale’s criticisms.
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Greenstine, Abraham Jacob. Diverging Ways: On the Trajectories of Ontology in Parmenides, Aristotle, and Deleuze. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474412094.003.0011.
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Abraham Jacob Greenstine’s “Diverging Ways: On the Trajectories of Ontology in Parmenides, Aristotle, and Deleuze” asks what is ontology – how do we speak being? Starting from Deleuze’s claim that there is only one ontology, Greenstine successively interrogates the projects of Parmenides, Aristotle, and Deleuze. These three, in dialogue with one another, agree that there is some discourse on being, but disagree about its scope, method, and content. For Parmenides, ontology is a path to the truth, a narrative that leads us to attributes of being itself. For Aristotle, ontology is a knowledge of the first principles, an account that clarifies the many senses of being in order to recognize the divine cause of being itself. For Deleuze, ontology expresses only a single proposition, and being has but a single attribute: being is univocal. By contrasting these projects, Greenstine seeks to outline ontology as such.
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Tritten, Tyler. Meillassoux against the Principle of Reason: An Ontology of Factiality. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474428194.003.0002.
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While Meillassoux has famously argued for the necessity of contingency, this chapter offers a critique of Meillassoux in order to pose the possibility of the contingency of necessity. An alternative conception of chaos, in opposition to Meillassoux’s Hyper-Chaos, is offered that is not amenable to an empirical rather than rationalist approach, even if Meillassoux does reject the principle of sufficient reason. In addition, Meillassoux’s argument for factiality and his argument that only contradictory beings are necessary beings, and therefore cannot exist, are exposed as sophistical.
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Stéphane, Beaulac. Part VI Constitutional Theory, A Constitutional Interpretation, Ch.41 Constitutional Interpretation: On Issues of Ontology and of Interlegality. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/law/9780190664817.003.0041.
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The chapter addresses, first, the ontological issue of whether the interpretation of a constitution is fundamentally different than the construction of statutes. Based on a comparison of the Supreme Court of Canada decisions in constitutional interpretation, especially Charter cases, and the contemporary approach to statutory interpretation, endorsing Driedger’s modern principle, it is argued that a convergence of methodology has occurred. Second, recent developments in the domestic use of international law—that is interlegality—also show commonality in constitutional and statutory interpretation. The hypothesis is that recent case law on the operationalization of international normativity, far from supporting the end of the international/national divide, actually reaffirms the Westphalian paradigm. The contextual argument and the presumption of conformity, as interpretative tools, allow courts to be more flexible, indeed more permissive, in resorting to international law.
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Newbery, John. Logic Made Familiar and Easy : To Which Is Added a Compendious System of Metaphysics or Ontology: Being the Fifth Volume of the Circle of the Sciences, &C. Published by the King's Authority. Creative Media Partners, LLC, 2018.
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Newbery, John. Logic Made Familiar and Easy : To Which Is Added a Compendious System of Metaphysics or Ontology: Being the Fifth Volume of the Circle of the Sciences, &C. Published by the King's Authority. Creative Media Partners, LLC, 2023.
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Parnas, Josef, and Annick Urfer-Parnas. The ontology and epistemology of symptoms: The case of auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia. Edited by Kenneth S. Kendler and Josef Parnas. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/med/9780198796022.003.0026.
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We present a phenomenological account of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in schizophrenia. We examine the mode of articulation of AVH, their spatial and temporal characteristics, and their relation to self-alienation, reflecting an emergence of otherness (alterity) in the midst of the patient’s self. This process of self-alienation is associated with the emergence of a different reality, a new ontological framework, which obeys other rules of causality and time. Patient becomes psychotic not because they cannot distinguish AVH from mundane perception, but because they are in touch with an alternative form of reality. A characteristic feature of schizophrenia is the coexistence of these incompatible realities. AVH are radically different from perception, and associated delusions stem from a breakthrough to another ontological framework. Thus, the current definition of AVH seems incorrect: The symptom is ontologically complex, involving first- and second-person dimensions, relations to the structure of consciousness, and other psychopathological phenomena.
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Khader, Serene J. Toward a Decolonial Feminist Universalism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190664190.003.0002.
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This chapter distinguishes the features that make certain feminisms complicit in imperialism from universalism and develops a nonideal universalist position that is simultaneously feminist and anti-imperialist. Characteristic of imperialism-complicit missionary feminisms are commitments to ethnocentrism, justice monism, idealization, and what this chapter calls “moralism.” Ethnocentric justice monism is the view that gender justice can only be actualized within one set of (Western) cultural forms. Idealization and moralism involve the adoption of a false social ontology according to which the West’s ostensible superiority comes from endogenous cultural factors, the West represents the desired future of all societies, and Western action is driven by concern with justice. In contrast, nonideal universalists hold that feminism is opposition to sexist oppression and recognize that transnational feminist praxis is a justice-enhancing project. Justice-enhancing projects are not monist about justice, and they recognize the practical character of judgments about what will aid transitions out of nonideal conditions.
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Renz, Ursula. The Justification of a Realist Rationalism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199350162.003.0007.
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This chapter is concerned with the interpretation of the first few propositions of Part Two of the Ethics. The interpretive question is, how are we to make sense of these propositions if we read Spinoza’s metaphysics as a general ontology rather than a rational theology? The chapter addresses this question by interpreting these propositions as a stepwise justification of Spinoza’s realist rationalism. Three steps are distinguished. The first is the claim put forward in 2p1 that thought is an attribute, which serves to vindicate the attribution of proper or irreducible reality to human thought. Second, by deriving the notion of the idea of there being an idea of God, Spinoza establishes, in 2p3, that all being is intelligible. Third, by maintaining that the idea of God is unique, he commits himself to the view that reality must be conceived as unique, which is necessary for ruling out any asylum ignorantiae.
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Nuovo, Victor. The Philosophy of a Christian Virtuoso ii. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198800552.003.0007.
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Although Locke’s Essay is primarily a discourse in logic, he says enough about the physical nature of things to construct a theory of the nature of things. As a virtuoso, physics replaces metaphysics in his philosophical system. His ontology, however, includes not only bodies, but God and finite spirits, and its major achievement is to prove the existence of God and demonstrate his immateriality. Perhaps encouraged by reading Cudworth, Locke was confident that our faculty of reason is sufficient to refute materialism and atheism. As to the nature of bodies, Locke finds empirical evidence that solidity or impenetrability is their most evident quality. The idea of superaddition is central to Locke’s speculative or divine physics. But although such insights may elevate the mind to God, Locke’s physics is theoretically sterile, although it may have beneficial practical uses.
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Anjum, Rani Lill, and Stephen Mumford. Evidence of Causation Is Not Causation. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198733669.003.0003.
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Philosophers draw a distinction between ontology and epistemology: a distinction between what is and what we know. What counts as evidence of causation will be fixed by our choice of methods of discovery, and our choice of methods will be fixed by what we take causation to be. Nevertheless, causation cannot be identified with its methods of discovery. Hume argued that causation was not directly observable. If this is the case, we need methods that can reliably latch on to the signs of causation. But we cannot automatically judge there to be no causation if we find no sign of it.
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Mitcham, Carl. Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering. Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd., 2019. https://doi.org/10.5040/9798881811303.
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The rise of classic Euro-American philosophy of technology in the 1950s originally emphasized the importance of technologies as material entities and their mediating influence within human experience. Recent decades, however, have witnessed a subtle shift toward reflection on the activity from which these distinctly modern artifacts emerge and through which they are engaged and managed, that is, on engineering. What is engineering? What is the meaning of engineering? How is engineering related to other aspects of human existence? Such basic questions readily engage all major branches of philosophy --- ontology, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics --- although not always to the same degree. The historico-philosophical and critical reflections collected here record a series of halting steps to think through engineering and the engineered way of life that we all increasingly live in what has been called the Anthropocene. The aim is not to promote an ideology for engineering but to stimulate deeper reflection among engineers and non-engineers alike about some basic challenges of our engineered and engineering lifeworld.
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Thomas, Emily. Locke as a Steadfast Relationist about Time and Space. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807933.003.0008.
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In the literature on John Locke’s metaphysics of space and time, there is a near-consensus that his views undergo a radical evolution. In the 1670s, Locke holds relationism, but, by the first, 1690 edition of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke has adopted Newtonian absolutism. This chapter argues for an alternative reading, on which Locke’s Essay is explicitly neutral or non-committal with regard to the ontology of space and time, and yet there is reason to believe that the Essay implicitly preserves Locke’s earlier relationism. As well as challenging the existing scholarship, this chapter excavates another form of pre-Leibnizian relationism, and which may be of interest to twenty-first-century relationists; and provides ammunition to anti-Newtonian readings of Locke more generally.
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Bohnet, Clayton. Toward a Philosophy of Protest. The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781978738966.
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Toward a Philosophy of Protest: Dissent, State Power, and the Spectacle of Everyday Life is an inquiry into the nature of protest, legislative efforts at its criminalization, and the common good. Using the method of montage, Clayton Bohnet juxtaposes definitions, etymologies, journalism on contemporary events, philosophy, sociology, mainstream and social media content to illuminate rather than obscure the contradictions in our contemporary understanding of dissent and state power. By problematizing the identification of the good of a political community with the good of the economy, Bohnet develops a political ontology of a people who find their values subordinated to a good identified with the smooth flow of traffic, the forecasts of capital, and the predictability of everyday life. A text populated more with questions than authoritative answers, this book asks readers to think through particular impasses involving protest and the possibility of egalitarian, participatory politics, such as the risks taken and courage involved in a society that places the expression of political truths above the collective benefits of the well-tempered economy and the dangers of protesting, of dissent, in an era that refers to protesters as economic terrorists.
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Nascimento, Abimael Francisco do. Emmanuel Levinas: Um estudo sobre a ética da alteridade. Brazil Publishing, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.31012/978-65-5861-006-9.
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The general objective of this study is to analyze the postulate of the ethics of otherness as the first philosophy, presented by Emmanuel Levinas. It is a proposal that runs through Levinas' thinking from his theoretical foundations, to his philosophical criticism. Levinas' thought presents itself as a new thought, as a critique of ontology and transcendental philosophy. For him, the concern with knowledge and with being made the other to be forgotten, placing the other in totality. Levinas proposes the ethics of otherness as sensitivity to the other. The subject says here I am, making myself responsible for the other in an infinite way, in a transcendence without return to myself, becoming hostage to the other, as an irrefutable responsibility. The idea of the infinite, present in the face of the other, points to a responsibility whoever more assumes himself, the more one is responsible, until the substitution by other.
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Kidd, Ian James. Is Scientism Epistemically Vicious? Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190462758.003.0007.
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This chapter offers a virtue epistemological framework for making sense of the common complaint that scientism is arrogant, dogmatic, or otherwise epistemically vicious. After characterizing scientism in terms of stances, it argues that their components can include epistemically vicious dispositions, with the consequence that an agent who adopts such stances can be led to manifest epistemic vices. The main focus of the chapter is the vice of closed-mindedness, but the idea that arrogance and dogmatism are “cooperative vices” is also considered: vices liable to be activated by closed-mindedness. The chapter concludes that determining whether or not any given stance is vicious will require sensitivity to the ontology of that stance and the psychology of the agents who adopt them. This would be contributing to our understanding both of scientism and of epistemically virtuous and vicious characters or psychologies.
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Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. What is Theory? Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.361.
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The concept of theory takes part in a conceptual network occupied by some of the most common subjects of European Enlightenment, such as “science” and “reason.” Generally speaking, a theory is a rational type of abstract or generalizing thinking, or the results of such thinking. Theories drive the exercise of finding facts rather than of reaching goals. To formulate a theory, or to “theorize,” is to assert something of a privileged epistemic status, manifested in the traditional scholarly hierarchy between theorists and those who merely labor among the empirical weeds. In so doing, a theory provides a fixed point upon which analysis can be founded and action can be performed. Scholar and author Kenneth W. Thompson describes a nexus of relations between and among three different senses of the word “theory:” normative theory, a “general theory of politics,” and the set of assumptions on the basis of which a given actor is acting. These three types of theory are somehow paralleled by Marysia Zalewski’s triad of theory as “tool,” theory as “critique,” and theory as “everyday practice.” While Thompson’s and Zalewski’s interpretations of theory are each inherently consistent, both signal a different philosophical ontology. Thompson’s viewpoint is dualist, presuming the existence of a mind-independent world to which knowledge refers; while Zalewski’s is more of a monist, rejecting the mind/world dichotomy in favor of a more complex interrelationship between observers and their objects of study.
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Fred-Rivera, Ivette, and Jessica Leech, eds. Being Necessary. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198792161.001.0001.
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What is the relationship between ontology and modality: between what there is, and what there could be, must be, or might have been? Throughout a distinguished career, Bob Hale’s work has addressed this question on a number of fronts, through the development of a Fregean approach to ontology, an essentialist theory of modality, and in his work on neo-logicism in the philosophy of mathematics. This collection of new essays engages with these themes in Hale’s work in order to make further progress in our understanding of ontology, modality, and the relations between them. Some essays directly address questions in modal metaphysics, drawing on ontological concerns. Others raise questions in modal epistemology and its links to matters of ontology, such as the challenge to give an epistemology of essence. There are also several essays engaging with questions of what might be called ‘modal ontology’: the study of whether and what things exist necessarily or contingently. Such issues can be raised and addressed directly, but they also have an important bearing on the kinds of semantic commitments engendered in logic and mathematics, e.g., to the existence of sets, or numbers, or properties, and so on. It is thus explored in some chapters to what extent one’s ontology—and indeed, one’s ontology of necessary beings—interacts with other plausible assumptions and commitments.
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Gover, K. E. When the Work Is Finished. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198768692.003.0003.
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This chapter examines the relation between the ‘second moment of authorship’, in which the author ratifies the work as his or her own, and another crucial but often overlooked aspect of authorship, which is artwork completion. These two moments are logically separate but often collapsed, both in theory and in practice. The chapter explains what is at stake for authors, audiences, and philosophers in determining whether an artwork is finished or not. Finally, it turns to the philosophical debate surrounding the necessary and sufficient conditions for artwork completion. While it finds much to agree with in their work, the author finds that both Hick and Livingston, the chief interloctors in this debate, commit a fundamental error in ontology when reasoning about artwork completion. The chapter argues, contrary to the prevailing theories, that artwork completion is ultimately provisional.