Ontology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anjan Chakravartty
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Scientific Ontology

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.

Thought Experiments and Religion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yiftach Fehige
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
The Core ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
The Relationship

Thought experiments are basically imagined scenarios with a significant experimental character. Some of them justify claims about the world outside of the imagination. Originally they were a topic of scholarly interest exclusively in philosophy of science. Indeed, a closer look at the history of science strongly suggests that sometimes thought experiments have more than merely entertainment, heuristic, or pedagogic value. But thought experiments matter not only in science. The scope of scholarly interest has widened over the years, and today we know that thought experiments play an important role in many areas other than science, such as philosophy, history, and mathematics. Thought experiments are also linked to religion in a number of ways. Highlighted in this article are those links that pertain to the core of religions (first link), the relationship between science and religion in historical and systematic respects (second link), the way theology is conducted (third link), and the relationship between literature and religion (fourth link).

How Preplatonic Worlds Became Ensouled

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
André Laks
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article shows how two basic meanings of psuchē—namely, ‘breath’ and ‘life’—may have helped Platonizing, or for that matter Stoicizing, doxographers in endowing various Preplatonic philosophers with the view that the world is ‘ensouled'. Although I do not attempt a systematic reconstruction of how these cosmo-philosophers conceived the relationship between the world and what was to become ‘the soul’, I suggest that framing the problem in terms of ‘breath’ and ‘life’ helps us to arrive at a more adequate understanding both of the authentic evidence and of the history of its reception. Indeed, to the extent that it is possible I try to reconstruct the interpretative steps that led, with various degrees of legitimacy, from the original wording to its Platonizing or Stoicizing deformations, which remain all too often the framework of analysis in modern interpretations. Five case studies are considered: Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, some Pythagoreans, and Alcmaeon.

Philosophy for economists and managers

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viktor Kanke
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Reference List ◽  
Analytical Philosophy ◽  
Higher Educational Institutions ◽  
Wide Circle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The tutorial is a sequential course of philosophy. The article considers the questions of philosophy of science and the history of philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. The course is designed taking into account the achievements of analytical philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, postructuralism and other major philosophical issues of the day. Uses the theory of conceptual transduction. Special attention is paid to the relationship of philosophy to Economics and management. The course is carefully calibrated in the didactic relation. Each paragraph ends with the conclusions, and test, by a reference list. For students of higher educational institutions, primarily economists and managers. Of interest to a wide circle of readers.

Historical Foundations, Strategic Visions, and World Order

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul J. Bolt ◽  
Sharyl N. Cross
Keyword(s):  
World Order ◽  
International Order ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
State Behavior ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 1 explores perspectives on world order, including power relationships and the rules that shape state behavior and perceptions of legitimacy. After outlining a brief history of the relationship between Russia and China that ranged from cooperation to military clashes, the chapter details Chinese and Russian perspectives on the contemporary international order as shaped by their histories and current political situation. Chinese and Russian views largely coincide on security issues, the desirability of a more multipolar order, and institutions that would enhance their standing in the world. While the Chinese–Russian partnership has accelerated considerably, particularly since the crisis in Ukraine in 2014, there are still some areas of competition that limit the extent of the relationship.

Introduction: The Translation History of Virgil

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna Braund ◽  
Zara Martirosova Torlone
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Large Collection ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

The introduction describes the broad landscape of translation of Virgil from both the theoretical and the practical perspectives. It then explains the genesis of the volume and indicates how the individual chapters, each one of which is summarized, fit into the complex tapestry of Virgilian translation activity through the centuries and across the world. The volume editors indicate points of connection between the chapters in order to render the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Braund and Torlone emphasize that a project such as this could look like a (rather large) collection of case studies; they therefore consider it important to extrapolate larger phenomena from the specifics presented here

The Historiography of Environmental History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.

scholarly journals Plato on Natural Kinds: The Promethean Method of the Philebus

Apeiron ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Proios
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Natural World ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Abstract Plato’s invention of the metaphor of carving the world by the joints (Phaedrus 265d–66c) gives him a privileged place in the history of natural kind theory in philosophy and science; he is often understood to present a paradigmatic but antiquated view of natural kinds as possessing eternal, immutable, necessary essences. Yet, I highlight that, as a point of distinction from contemporary views about natural kinds, Plato subscribes to an intelligent-design, teleological framework, in which the natural world is the product of craft and, as a result, is structured such that it is good for it to be that way. In Plato’s Philebus, the character Socrates introduces a method of inquiry whose articulation of natural kinds enables it to confer expert knowledge, such as literacy. My paper contributes to an understanding of Plato’s view of natural kinds by interpreting this method in light of Plato’s teleological conception of nature. I argue that a human inquirer who uses the method identifies kinds with relational essences within a system causally related to the production of some unique craft-object, such as writing. As a result, I recast Plato’s place in the history of philosophy, including Plato’s view of the relation between the kinds according to the natural and social sciences. Whereas some are inclined to separate natural from social kinds, Plato holds the unique view that all naturalness is a social feature of kinds reflecting the role of intelligent agency.

scholarly journals ‘There Must Be a Poetry of Sound That None of Us Knows…’: Early British documentary film and the prefiguring of musique concrète

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-186
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Cox
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Coal Face ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Musique Concrete

Standard histories of electronic music tend to trace the lineage of musique concrète as lying mainly in the Futurists’ declarations of the 1910s, through Cage’s ‘emancipation’ of noise in the 1930s, to Schaeffer’s work and codifications of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This article challenges this narrative by drawing attention to the work of filmmakers in the 1930s that foreshadowed the sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and thus offers an alternative history of their background. The main focus of the article is on the innovations within documentary film and specifically the sonic explorations in early British documentary that prefigured musique concrète, an area ignored by electronic music studies. The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the documentary movement’s members, particularly their leader John Grierson, will be compared with those of Pierre Schaeffer, and the important influence of Russian avant-garde filmmaking on the British (and musique concrète) will be addressed. Case studies will focus on the groundbreaking soundtracks of two films made by the General Post Office Film Unit that feature both practical and theoretical correspondences to Schaeffer: 6.30 Collection (1934) and Coal Face (1935). Parallels between the nature and use of technologies and how this affected creative outputs will also be discussed, as will the relationship of the British documentary movement’s practice and ideas to post-Schaefferian ‘anecdotal music’ and the work of Luc Ferrari.

On the Lives of Modern State Law

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Samera Esmeir
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Modern State ◽  
State Law ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Intimate Life ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Key Questions

Modern state law is an expansive force that permeates life and politics. Law's histories—colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial—tell of its constitutive centrality to the making of colonies and modern states. Its powers intertwine with life itself; they attempt to direct it, shape its most intimate spheres, decide on the constitutive line dividing public from private, and take over the space and time in which life unfolds. These powers settle in the present, eliminate past authorities, and dictate futures. Gendering and constitutive of sexual difference, law's powers endeavor to mold subjects and alter how they orient themselves to others and to the world. But these powers are neither coherent nor finite. They are ripe with contradictions and conflicting desires. They are also incapable of eliminating other authorities, paths, and horizons of living; these do not vanish but remain not only thinkable and articulable but also a resource for the living. Such are some of the overlapping and accumulative interventions of the two books under review: Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures and Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria. What follows is an attempt to further develop these interventions by thinking with some of the books’ underlying arguments. Familiar Futures is a history of Iraq, beginning with the British colonial-mandate period and concluding with the 1958 Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a history of “French Algeria” that covers a century of French colonization from 1830 to 1930. The books converge on key questions concerning how modern law and the modern state—colonial and postcolonial—articulated sexual difference and governed social and intimate life, including through the rise of personal-status law as a separate domain of law constitutive of the conjugal family. Both books are consequently also preoccupied with the relationship between sex, gender, and sovereignty. And both contain resources for living along paths not charted by the modern state and its juridical apparatus.

scholarly journals Using History as Evidence in Philosophy of Science: A Methodological Critique

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. McAllister
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
Qualitative Approaches ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article offers a critical review of past attempts and possible methods to test philosophical models of science against evidence from history of science. Drawing on methodological debates in social science, I distinguish between quantitative and qualitative approaches. I show that both have their uses in history and philosophy of science, but that many writers in this domain have misunderstood and misapplied these approaches, and especially the method of case studies. To test scientific realism, for example, quantitative methods are more effective than case studies. I suggest that greater methodological clarity would enable the project of integrated history and philosophy of science to make renewed progress.

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