Prefiguring Ontological Theory and Method beyond “The Human”: A Response to Clough’s Discussion of “Kittens in the Clinical Space”

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-165
Author(s):  
Katie Gentile
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
pp. 101891
Author(s):  
Giancarlo Guizzardi ◽  
Claudenir M. Fonseca ◽  
João Paulo A. Almeida ◽  
Tiago Prince Sales ◽  
Alessander Botti Benevides ◽  
...  

boundary 2 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Howard Eiland

There is no getting around our residence in language—language understood not primarily as a system of signification but as the necessarily ambiguous existential condition of intelligibility in which we always already find ourselves situated, the historically evolving collective articulation of things. The ontological theory of language at issue here, with its concern for the problems of meaning and translation in particular and its methodological distance-in-nearness, entails a simultaneously concentrated and expansive allegorical experience of the world. Allegory brings out the word inherent in the thing—the word not as flat marker but as gravitating and radiating body of history. This essay touches on prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources of this modernist theory of language and philosophical philology, thinkers who worked in different ways to open theoretical horizons while promulgating an art of reading. Such historically oriented and textually focused work of opening remains a political-educational imperative.


1982 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
J. N. Mohanty ◽  
Eliot Deutsch
Keyword(s):  

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (126) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Lorenz B. Puntel

Este artigo responde pormenorizadamente às críticas feitas por G. Imaguire em sua resenha do livro indicado no título (= ES). Trata-se principalmente de nove temas respectivamente teses de caráter central para a concepção exposta no livro. O presente artigo analisa cada um destes temas, em parte corrigindo erros de apresentação e de interpretação e em todos os casos respondendo às objeções de Imaguire. Trata-se dos seguintes temas/teses: (1) Para esclarecer o estatuto das sentenças filosóficas, ES propõe uma teoria dos três operadores que explicitam o caráter de sentenças: são estes o operador teórico, o operador prático e o operador estético. O artigo esclarece o sentido exato desta teoria. (2) ES apresenta uma nova definição de saber/conhecimento em oposição direta à já famosa definição “knowledge is true justified belief” articulada por E. Gettier. (3) ES defende uma concepção de orientação ontológica das estruturas formais fundamentais (lógicas e matemáticas); estas são esclarecidas. (4) Em ES é exposta e defendida uma nova concepção de ontologia em perfeita conformidade com a semântica de uma linguagem filosófica transparente; esta ontologia exclui o conceito de “substância” e critica o uso do conceito de “objeto”. (5) ES expõe uma nova teoria semântico-ontológica da verdade que tem como consequência um relativismo moderado da verdade. (6) ES formula um argumento muito especial contra o fisicalismo; o artigo explica pormenorizadamente este argumento. (7) A concepção exposta em ES afirma que o cristianismo, em virtude do caráter racional e teórico da teologia que o explicita, constitui, em oposição a outras religiões, uma temática com prioridade de importância e atenção para o filósofo sistemático. Neste artigo esta tese é explicada e defendida contra interpretações erradas. (8) O oitavo tema é a grande questão posta pelo conceito de mundo no contexto das relações entre teorias filosóficas e teorias científicas. O artigo esclarece uma série de mal-entendidos a respeito deste grande tema. (9) Finalmente, com relação a um argumento-chave que ES apresenta para fundamentar a tese que, por razões sistemáticas, se deve admitir uma dimensão absolutamente necessária do Ser, o artigo demonstra que a resenha comete um muito grave erro de interpretação, baseando neste erro uma crítica infundada ao argumento. O artigo esclarece extensamente o argumento, suas pressuposições e suas consequências.Abstract: This article is a detailed answer to G. Imaguire’s criticisms of the book Structure and Being: A Theoretical Framework for a Systematic Philosophy (hence referred as ES). Imaguire focuses on nine topics that are central to the book. The present article analyses each one of these theses, sometimes correcting errors made and misrepresentations introduced by Imaguire, and in all cases, responding to Imaguire’s objections. The theses are the following: (1) In order to clarify the status of theoretical sentences occurring in philosophical works, ES presents a theory about the three operators that make explicit the statuses of three mutually irreducible kinds of sentence: the theoretical operator, the practical operator, and the aesthetic operator. (2) ES offers a new definition of knowledge in significant opposition to the now-famous definition formulated by E. Gettier, “knowledge is true justified belief.” (3) ES defends an ontologically oriented conception of the fundamental formal (logical and mathematical) structures. (4) In ES, a new ontology is propounded in strong conformity with the semantics of a transparent philosophical language. This ontology rejects the category of substance and criticizes the widely used concept of object. (5) ES presents a completely new semantico-ontological theory of truth. One of its consequences is a moderate relativism with respect to truth. (6) ES presents a unique argument against physicalism; this article elaborates on it. (7) ES considers the phenomenon of religion and states that, due to its rational and theoretical theology, Christian religion, in opposition to other religions, provides a uniquely promising resource for philosophical considerations. (8) ES extensively thematizes the concept of world in connection with the problem of the relationship between philosophy and science. (9) Finally, ES develops the main features of a theory of Being as such and as a whole. ES offers especially an important argument on behalf of the thesis that the universal dimension of Being must be conceived of as two-dimensional: as the dimension of absolutely necessary Being and the dimension of contingent beings. This article reconstructs the exact meaning of the argument and explains its presuppositions and consequences.


Author(s):  
James P. Scanlan

In 1922, the Russian neo-Leibnizian idealist Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky, one of his country’s most distinguished professional philosophers, was banished from Russia along with more than a hundred other non-Marxist intellectuals whose influence the communist authorities feared. A prolific writer before his exile, Lossky continued to write and publish widely abroad, becoming not only the dean of the Russian émigré philosophical community but a thinker well known in Europe and the English-speaking world through many translations of his works. The systematic structure and rationalistic tone of Lossky’s philosophizing set him apart from most of his fellow Russian idealists, but like them he proceeded in his thinking from a strong conviction of the truth of Christianity; he wrote of his commitment to ‘working out a system of metaphysics necessary for a Christian interpretation of the world’ (1951: 266). He adhered to a radical form of theism according to which the created natural order has nothing in common ontologically with the divine order that created it. Lossky is best known for a set of interrelated views in epistemology and metaphysics connected with what he considered his fundamental philosophical insight – the principle that ‘everything is immanent in everything’. According to his doctrine of ‘intuitivism’ in epistemology, all cognition is intuitive; there is an ‘epistemological co-ordination’ of subject and object such that any object, whether sensory, intellectual or mystical, is immediately present in the mind of the knower. As the heir to a Leibnizian tradition in Russian metaphysics represented before him by Aleksei Kozlov and others, Lossky advanced a theory of ‘hierarchical personalism’ in which Leibniz’s monads became interacting ‘substantival agents’ existing at various levels of development; the choices of these ideal beings generate the material world (hence Lossky’s term ‘ideal realism’ for his ontology) and their reconfigurations and reincarnations move the cosmic process towards the perfection of the Kingdom of God. In his ‘ontological theory of values’ Lossky affirms a metaphysical basis for absolute values and attributes all evil – including diseases and natural disasters – to the misuse of free will by substantival agents, both human and subhuman.


Author(s):  
Marek Perek

The Tübingen School spread a new interpretation of Platonism, according to which the most valuable part of the Academy’s legacy are the so-called unwritten doctrines. These doc-trines contain ontological theory of first rules of the Unity and the Dyad. The article discusses mathematical fundamentals of the doctrines in the context of modern applications of mathematical structures in the description of reality.


Human Affairs ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josef Šmajs

AbstractThe author notes that European spiritual culture has provided the world with two great myths: the myth of Jesus Christ and the Promethean myth. These two myths were an early indication of the rise of the hidden predatory spiritual paradigm. As a result of this paradigm (setting), later culture hypertrophically strengthened the human genetic predisposition towards an aggressive adaptive strategy. It is therefore necessary, according to the author, to expose and criticize this predatory paradigm and eventually transform it into a biophilic paradigm. If we want to understand this requirement, we need a higher-order theory, an evolutionary ontological theory of culture. One of the ways of achieving this objective is to weaken and criticize the myth in which the defiant Prometheus acts as an honored civilization hero. In the second part the author briefly introduces his evolutionary-ontological concept of culture. He defends the claim that culture is an artificial system with its own internal information and that two types of order have come into existence within culture in harmony with this information (spiritual culture): 1. strictly information-prescribed structures (specifically the material culture and technology), 2. Spontaneously (through succession) originating structures (especially institutions). If we want to change the orientation of the cultural system, we have to change not only its current information but also its former spiritual setting (paradigm).


Politik ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Casper Mølck ◽  
Malte Frøslee Ibsen

WikiLeaks has faced much criticism after massive leaks of secret US military les and diplomatic cables, revealing both trivial and compromising details of the superpower’s judgments and actions in international politics. However, in this article we argue that WikiLeaks harbours a democratic potential, which so far has been overlooked, principally because the organisation’s activities have been interpreted within a traditional Weberian theory of power focused on strategic action. Relying on Martin Saar’s re ections on power, we argue that WikiLeaks is more fruitfully understood in terms of an ontological theory of power focused on the subjectivity-constituting function of power and power as a constitutive space of potential ways of being. Placing WikiLeaks within Jürgen Habermas’s diagnosis of our present social and historical context, we argue that WikiLeaks – despite its obvious faults – harbours a democratic potential by constituting the possibility for democratic criticism of globalised functional systems that increasingly undermine the necessary condi- tions for the e cacious exercise of popular sovereignty. 


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