Books on the topic 'Ontological dependence'

This chapter focuses on the question of whether concrete particular objects deserve to be classified as substances within a hylomorphic ontology, despite their metaphysical complexity, and, if so, according to what criterion of substancehood or “ontological privilege.” It is common to conceive of the substances as ontologically independent, following some preferred sense of “independence.” But what is this sense of “ontological independence” and do matter–form compounds qualify as substances when this notion is applied to them? This chapter discusses various relations defined in the literature under the heading of ontological dependence, beginning with existential construals of ontological dependence and turning next to construals of ontological dependence that are formulated in terms of a non-modal conception of essence. When evaluated against various plausible measures of success, it turns out that even the most promising candidate relations are open to objections.

The relation of ontological dependence or grounding, expressed by the terminology of separation and priority in substance, plays a central role in Aristotle’sCategories, Metaphysics, De Animaand elsewhere. The article discusses three current interpretations of this terminology. These are drawn along the lines of, respectively, modal-existential ontological dependence, essential ontological dependence, and grounding or metaphysical explanation. I provide an opinionated introduction to the topic, raising the main interpretative questions, laying out a few of the exegetical and philosophical options that influence one’s reading, and locating questions of Aristotle scholarship within the discussion of ontological dependence and grounding in contemporary metaphysics.

Metaphysical orthodoxy maintains that the relation of ontological dependence is irreflexive, asymmetric, and transitive. The goal of this paper is to challenge that orthodoxy by arguing that ontological dependence should be understood as non-symmetric, rather than asymmetric. A series of cases across a wide range of ontological commitments are presented, and it is argued that each case should be understood as one in which the relation of dependence holds symmetrically. If these arguments work, however, they provide reasons to be skeptical of the way in which contemporary discussions typically lump dependence together with relations such as grounding and in virtue of, which arguably need to be understood as asymmetric. If the asymmetry of dependence is relinquished, interesting things follow for what can be said about metaphysical explanation—particularly for the prospects of explanatory holism.

This book argues for both Metaphysical Infinitism—the view that there can be infinitely descending chains of ontological dependence and grounding, with no bottom level of fundamental things or facts—and Metaphysical Holism—the view that there can be circles of ontological dependence or grounding. It is argued that the orthodox view—Metaphysical Foundationalism, the view that everything in reality is ultimately accounted for by a base class of fundamental phenomena—is unmotivated. It is also argued that we should reject the orthodox view that relations like grounding and ontological dependence are explanatory relations. An alternative account of metaphysical explanation is defended that does not tie explanation to grounding, ontological dependence, or fundamentality. A number of cases are developed across a wide range of philosophical areas, to show the theoretical fruitfulness of allowing infinite regress and circularity, including: non-well-founded set theory, mathematical structuralism, the metaphysics of persons, the metaphysics of gender and sexuality, the semantic paradoxes, and others. In the course of the discussion, distinctive views are defended concerning when an infinite regress is vicious, the nature of truth, non-classical logic and dialetheism, social construction, and more.

Chapter 3 distinguishes four ways one might account for perceptual particular. We can take an epistemic approach and understand perceptual particularity in terms of a special epistemic relation to the particulars perceived. We can take an ontological approach and understand perceptual particularity in terms of the ontological dependence of the perceptual state on the particulars perceived. We can take a psychologistic approach and understand perceptual particularity in terms of the phenomenal character of perceptual states by arguing that phenomenal character is constituted by the particulars perceived. Finally, we can take a representational approach and understand perceptual particularity in terms of features of perceptual content. The chapter argues that perceptual particularity is best accounted for in terms of perceptual content rather than in terms of epistemic, psychologistic, or ontological dependency properties.

In ‘A New Modal Version of the Ontological Argument,’ E. J. Lowe has presented a version of the ontological argument that does not, like other versions of the modal argument, make use of a ‘possibility’ premise. (e.g. ‘It is possible for a perfect being to exist’.) Three of the premises of this carefully formulated argument are: some necessary abstract beings exist; all abstract beings are dependent beings; all dependent beings depend for their existence on independent beings. This chapter is an examination of the ‘interplay’ between these three premises and a defense of the author’s conviction that the second of them is false.

This chapter examines some initially attractive attempts by E. J. Lowe and Michael Gorman at formulating an independence criterion of substancehood in terms of a particular essentialist construal of ontological dependence. It is argued that the stipulative exclusion of non-particulars and proper parts (or constituents) from these accounts raises difficult issues for their proponents. These results indicate that, in order for a criterion of substancehood to yield the desired results when applied to hylomorphic compounds, a unity criterion for composite substances is more suitable to the task at hand than an independence criterion, despite a general preference among Aristotelians for the latter.

The book is concerned with the existence of the real world, that is, with the existence of a world of objects that exist independent of human interests, concerns, and cognitive activities. The main thesis defended is that we have good reason to deny the existence of such a world. The discussion is concerned with four main facets of assuming a real world: (a) the existence of an external world of physical objects in space and time; (b) the existence of an internal world, comprising various mental states congregated around a self; (c) the existence of an ontological foundation that grounds the existence of all the entities in the world; and (d) the existence of an ultimately true theory that provides a final account of all there is. I argue specifically that: (a) we should reject the postulation of an external world behind our representations; (b) the internal world is not as epistemically transparent as is usually assumed, and there is no substantial self acting as central unifier of our mental lives; (c) there are good reasons for adopting an anti-foundational account of ontological dependence; and (d) ontology, and philosophy more generally, must not be conceived of as providing an ultimately true theory of the world.

Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa (c.800–840), one of the most original Indian philosophers, a skeptic with a strong affiliation to the materialists, launches a devastating project against all philosophical schools: to demonstrate the existence of inherent flaws in any philosophical system one may construct. He does this by demonstrating systemic inconsistencies primarily involving the mutual dependence of our knowledge, on the one hand, and the means and categories, epistemic and ontological, we adopt in order to establish its validity and certitude, on the other. The upshot is that no consistent philosophical system is possible in which its fundamental premises can be proved by a valid, effective procedure. Perhaps the most significant outcome of Jayarāśi’s project is that all philosophical claims are necessarily made within a particular set of beliefs, or a particular closed system, the foundations of which are based on arbitrarily accepted criteria, definitions, and categories.

This chapter approaches the work of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, from the point of view of embodied, extended, and distributed cognition. The concepts that form Bourdieu’s central dyad, habitus and field, are remarkably consonant with externalist views. Habitus is a form of knowledge that is not only embodied but fundamentally environment-dependent, and field is a distributed network of cognitively active positions that serves not only as a repository of social knowledge, but also as an external template for individual schemes of perception and action. The aim of this chapter’s comparative analysis is not to merely show that Bourdieu’s concepts are compatible with cognitive and epistemological externalism. They further demonstrate that the resources of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework can prove particularly useful for developing externalist accounts of culture and society—two areas that are significantly underexplored within mainstream debates in analytic philosophy.

Naturalism is still facing a strong opposition in the philosophy of social science from influential scholars who argue that philosophical analysis must be autonomous from scientific investigation. The opposition exploits philosophers’ traditional diffidence toward social science and fuels the ambition to provide new foundations for social research. A classic anti-naturalist strategy is to identify a feature of social reality that prevents scientific explanation and prediction. An all-time favorite is the dependence of social phenomena on human representation. This article examines two prominent versions of the dependence thesis and concludes that they both fail. Contemporary social science is capable of accounting for the causal dependence of social reality on representation, and there is no reason to believe that social entities are ontologically dependent on the collective acceptance of a constitutive rule.

This chapter discusses and evaluates the role of truthmaking in articulating an unproblematic concept of emergence—specifically, the proposal that emergent properties should be characterized as those that, while “ontologically dependent”, are yet needed as truthmakers. It argues that while emergence so understood appears to avoid several well-known concerns about emergence and emergent properties, including those that stem from the alleged “brute determination” of emergent properties, this result is secured through the weak notion of dependence that it employs. The appeal to truthmaking, in contrast, proves largely superfluous. While truthmaking may thus not be able to play a significant role in emergentist metaphysics, it is argued that it is consistent with this verdict that truthmaking can play a more significant role in characterizing an attractive middle ground between reductive and nonreductive approaches to physicalism.

Coleridge is presented as a two-level theorist of the innate powers of mind in Chapter 11, which argues that Coleridge distinguishes (1) a transcendental, Kantian sense of the a priori principles of human discursive cognition (comparable to Plato’s mid-level diánoia), from (2) the noëtic, Platonic a priori principles of intellectual intuition (or nóēsis, a higher-level intuitive cognition of ontological, theological, and ethical truths). Drawing on Logic and Opus Maximum, the author demonstrates that Coleridge characterizes Kantian a priori principles as ‘subjectively real’, finite-mind-dependent rules of sense-experience and cognition, and Platonic a priori principles as ‘objectively real’ principles of knowing and being that are dependent upon ‘the transcendent and unindividual’ reason (i.e. God, ‘the absolute Self, Spirit, or Mind’). This ‘two-level’ theory is framed in terms of Coleridge’s Kantian ‘threefold division’ of the human cognitive capacities into sense, understanding, and reason, and their respective a priori operations and contents.

The devout life literature requires the self to see itself as nothing—but what does this mean? The dialectic of being and non-being has a long history in Western metaphysics, but in the wake of the Copernican revolution nothingness is no longer a relative element in the great chain of being but something more absolute. With the help of Fénelon’s proof for the existence of God from human imperfection, it is shown how the devout self is figured as suspended between being and nothingness, dependent entirely on God for being. In this situation, Descartes’s assurance regarding the ontological basis of human existence is unsustainable. Yet even in the face of annihilation, the soul may still love God and practise a grateful acknowledgement of God’s good gifts.

This chapter expands on the basic theory, which is presented in the Categories. It offers a treatment of the mereotopological properties of bodies, for instance, what belongs to them insofar as they are bodies of physical substances. Bodies are complete and perfect in virtue of being three‐dimensional. Body is prior to surfaces and lines and, because bodies are complete, there cannot be a four‐dimensional magnitude. The explanation offered is that certain topological properties are linked to and determined by the nature of the object in question. Body is a composite of the boundary and the interior or extension. A formal characterization of boundaries as limit entities is offered and it is argued that boundaries are dependent particulars. Similarly, the extension is ontologically dependent on bodies. Aristotle’s argument that the extension of objects is divisible into ever‐divisibles is revisited.

The previous three chapters described three central problems that recur when courts have to deal with religious litigation: the teleological problem, epistemological problem, and ontological problem. All three problems are both the occasion for disputes, and (taken together) exacerbate other disputes, bringing the courts themselves into the fray, preventing them from playing the role of standing above the conflict. So, what is to be done? This chapter proposes a reconstructed practice-dependent theory of human rights that addresses issues of religion. It discusses how human dignity provides a normative foundation for the system of human rights as a whole. The proposed theory accepts that human rights law and human rights practice beyond the legal sphere is pluralistic, and that building this pluralism into human rights theory accurately reflects the diverse nature of human rights, including judicial adjudication and religious narratives within that system.

The World According to Kant offers an interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s critical idealism, as developed in the Critique of Pure Reason and associated texts. Critical idealism is understood as an ontological position, which comprises transcendental idealism, empirical realism, and a number of other basic ontological theses. According to Kant, the world, understood as the sum total of everything that has reality, comprises several levels of reality, most importantly, the transcendental level and the empirical level. The transcendental level is a mind-independent level at which things in themselves exist. The empirical level is a fully mind-dependent level at which appearances exist, which are intentional objects of experience. Empirical objects and empirical minds are appearances, and empirical space and time are constituted by the spatial and temporal determinations of appearances. On the proposed interpretation, Kant is thus a genuine idealist about empirical objects, empirical minds, and space and time. But in contrast to other intentional objects, appearances genuinely exist, which is due both to the special character of experience compared to other kinds of representations such as illusions and dreams, and to the grounding of appearances in things themselves. This is why, on the proposed interpretation, Kant is also a genuine realist about empirical objects, empirical minds, and empirical space and time. This book develops the indicated interpretation, spells out Kant’s case for critical idealism thus understood, pinpoints the differences between critical idealism and ‘ordinary’ idealism, such as Berkley’s, and clarifies the relation between Kant’s conception of things in themselves and the conception of things in themselves by other philosophers, in particular, Kant’s Leibniz-Wolffian predecessors.

Abstract This philosophical work is about the metaphysical preconditions of natural science. It develops and defends a new metaphysical theory of natural modality called ‘Modal Platonism’, which puts properties first in the metaphysical hierarchy. According to this theory, natural properties—such as mass and charge—are ontologically fundamental entities which ground the laws of nature and the dispositions of things. The theory differs from other ‘properties-first’ approaches in two main ways. First, it views properties as Platonic universals, which exist even if they are not instantiated. Second, the theory rejects the popular idea that properties are identical with, or essentially dependent upon, dispositions. Instead, Modal Platonism views properties as qualities which necessarily ground dispositions and other modal phenomena. This theory, it is argued, solves a range of puzzles regarding dispositions and laws. Given that natural modality is a necessary precondition for scientific enquiry, Modal Platonism promises to provide a plausible metaphysical framework for all natural science.

Heterodox work in Global Political Economy (GPE) finds its motive force in challenging the ontological atomism of International Political Economy (IPE) orthodoxy. Various strains of heterodoxy that have grown out of dependency theory and World-Systems Theory (WST), for example, emphasize the social whole: Individual parts are given form and meaning within social relations of domination produced by a history of violence and colonial conquest. An atomistic approach, they stress, seems designed to ignore this history of violence and relations of domination by making bargaining among independent units the key to explaining the current state of international institutions. For IPE, it is precisely this atomistic approach, largely inspired by the ostensible success of neoclassical economics, which justifies its claims to scientific rigor. International relations can be modeled as a market-like space, in which individual actors, with given preferences and endowments, bargain over the character of international institutional arrangements. Heterodox scholars’ treatment of social processes as indivisible wholes places them beyond the pale of acceptable scientific practice. Heterodoxy appears, then, as the constitutive outside of IPE orthodoxy.Heterodox GPE perhaps reached its zenith in the 1980s. Just as heterodox work was being cast out from the temple of International Relations (IR), heterodox scholars, building on earlier work, produced magisterial studies that continue to merit our attention. We focus on three texts: K. N. Chaudhuri’s Asia Before Europe (1990), Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982), and L. S. Stavrianos’s Global Rift (1981). We select these texts for their temporal and geographical sweep and their intellectual acuity. While Chaudhuri limits his scope to the Indian Ocean over a millennium, Wolf and Stavrianos attempt an anthropology and a history, respectively, of European expansion, colonialism, and the rise of capitalism in the modern era. Though the authors combine different elements of material, political, and social life, all three illustrate the power of seeing the “social process” as an “indivisible whole,” as Schumpeter discusses in the epigram below. “Economic facts,” the region, or time period they extract for detailed scrutiny are never disconnected from the “great stream” or process of social relations. More specifically, Chaudhuri’s work shows notably that we cannot take for granted the distinct units that comprise a social whole, as does the IPE orthodoxy. Rather, such units must be carefully assembled by the scholar from historical evidence, just as the institutions, practices, and material infrastructure that comprise the unit were and are constructed by people over the longue durée. Wolf starts with a world of interaction, but shows that European expansion and the rise and spread of capitalism intensified cultural encounters, encompassing them all within a global division of labor that conditioned the developmental prospects of each in relation to the others. Stavrianos carries out a systematic and relational history of the First and Third Worlds, in which both appear as structural positions conditioned by a capitalist political economy. By way of conclusion, we suggest that these three works collectively inspire an effort to overcome the reification and dualism of agents and structures that inform IR theory and arrive instead at “flow.”