Appearance in Reality

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Heil
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Wilfrid Sellars ◽  
Scientific Images ◽  
The Universe

Appearance in Reality addresses topics in fundamental metaphysics, extending positions developed in From and Ontological Point of View (2003) and The Universe as We Find It (2012). This is not simply ‘Part III’ of a three-part project, however. The book takes what readers familiar with those earlier volumes would likely regard as a surprising turn, finding common ground between divergent ‘Aristotelian’ and ‘Humean’ cosmologies in Spinoza. The book includes considerable new and newly framed material on essences, universals, relations, emergence, hylomorphism, modality, conscious experiences, free will, and related topics. A substance–property ontology is proposed, one in which properties are not universals, but modes, particular modifications of particular substances. The ontology is meant to be consistent with both atomistic and non-atomistic cosmologies, or with whatever cosmology physics eventually settles on. One of the book’s unifying themes concerns the problem of reconciling what Wilfrid Sellars called the manifest and scientific images. The aim is to understand how the appearances comport with our best guess as to the nature of reality. The question of the relation of appearance to reality has always been central to metaphysics, but it is one faced by any reflective agent. Its unavoidability drives metaphysics. Far from being an idle pastime, metaphysics is not optional.

Pietro Pomponazzi’s De immortalitate and his clandestine De incantationibus

2001 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 87-115
Author(s):  
Paola Zambelli
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Spontaneous Generation ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Universe

The importance of Aristotelianism during the Renaissance is one of the points most emphasized in the past twenty years by American historians. In the Faculties of Arts, professors were obliged to illustrate Aristotelian texts and commentaries; but, of course, they did not subscribe to all of the original doctrines of Aristotle: so Van Steenberghen, Kristeller and C. B. Schmitt consider most of them, above all Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525), as »eclectics«. Having emerged unscathed from the dispute on his treatise »De immortalitate animae« and on its apologies, Pomponazzi circulated two handwritten treatises which were even more subversive of orthodox beliefs on fate and on the natural causes of prodigies and incantations. From a Stoic point of view and thanks to his readings of Bessarion, Ficino and Giovanni Pico, he analyzed the Neoplatonic theses on chance and determinism, astrology and magic, and the position of man in the universe. His late treatises deal with these questions (free will as attributed to the individual by Christian doctrine and by numerous philosophers, or, instead, the conditioning to which man’s body, or his passions, or — according to a more radical thesis — his entire personality is subjected by the influence of the stars; the great conjunctions of the stars and the cyclical nature of history; the spontaneous generation of man; the capacity of the astrologer and the natural magician to produce incantations and prodigies, etc.).

scholarly journals Compatibilism and Conscious Will

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-75
Author(s):  
Michaela Košová
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Scientific Thinking ◽  
Conceptual Level ◽  
Unconscious Processes ◽  
Scientific Images ◽  
Important Concept ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Conscious Will

Daniel Dennett’s compatibilism based on redefining free will via broadening the concept of self to include unconscious processes seems to disappoint certain intuitions. As Sam Harris points out, it changes the subject from the free will we seem to intuitively care about – conscious free will. This compatibilism is untenable since conscious will seems to be an illusion. However, if we take Dennett’s idea of “atmosphere of free will” and view conscious will as an important concept or “user illusion” which is one of the atmosphere’s building blocks, we can see how a new compatibilism could be reached. Although from the point of view of scientific thinking conscious will seems illusory, inspired by Wilfrid Sellars’s conception of manifest and scientific images we can start to understand free will as existing on its own conceptual level. The confusion stems from mixing the two frameworks. Kompatibilismus Daniela Dennetta, založený na redefinování svobodné vůle skrze rozšíření konceptu „já“ o nevědomé procesy, se zdá být v nesouladu s jistými intuicemi. Jak upozorňuje Sam Harris, vyhýbá se té svobodné vůli, o kterou nám zřejmě intuitivně jde – vědomé svobodné vůli. Tento kompatibilismus je neudržitelný, protože vědomá vůle se zdá být iluzí. Když ale přijmeme Dennettovu myšlenku „atmosféry svobodné vůle“ a nahlédneme vědomou vůli jako důležitý koncept nebo „uživatelskou iluzi“, která je součástí této atmosféry, můžeme najít cestu k novému kompatibilismu. Ačkoliv se z vědeckého pohledu zdá být vědomá vůle iluzí, inspirováni koncepcí zjevného a vědeckého obrazu Wilfrida Sellarse můžeme porozumět svobodné vůli jako existující na své vlastní konceptuální úrovni. Zmatení přichází právě s mícháním zmiňovaných dvou rámců.

Metaphysics

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
John Heil
Keyword(s):  
Wilfrid Sellars ◽  
Scientific Images ◽  
Scientific Image ◽  
Holistic Conception ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Manifest Image

A discussion of the inevitability of metaphysics centered on the question, how are the appearances related to reality? The universe as we encounter it in our everyday and scientific pursuits, what Wilfrid Sellars called the ‘manifest image’, presents itself as strikingly at odds with the ‘scientific image’, the universe as revealed by physics. Every reflective agent must eventually confront the problem of how the manifest and scientific images are related, how the appearances stand to reality. Three responses to the problem are discussed, and a fourth is introduced. A holistic conception of metaphysics—a ‘package deal’—is endorsed, two competing worldviews, ‘Aristotelianism’ and ‘Humeanism’ are set out, followed by brief chapter-by-chapter summaries of the book’s contents.

Kate O'Brien and Virginia Woolf: Common Ground

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-142
Author(s):  
Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Political Alignments ◽  
Literary Influences ◽  
Kate O'brien

Convergences in the work of Kate O'Brien and Virginia Woolf range from literary influences and political alignments, to a shared approach to narrative point of view, structure, or conceptual use of words. Common ground includes existentialist preoccupations and tropes, a pacifism which did not hinder support for the left in the Spanish Civil War, the linking of feminism and decolonization, an affinity with anarchism, the identification of the normativity of fascism, and a determination to represent deviant sexualities and affects. Making evident the importance of the connection, O'Brien conceived and designed The Flower of May (1953), one of her most experimental and misunderstood novels, to paid homage to Woolf's oeuvre.

Changes in the Prognosis of Functional Psychoses Since the Days of Kraepelin

1967 ◽  
Vol 113 (501) ◽  
pp. 813-822 ◽  
Author(s):  
Örnulv Ödegård
Keyword(s):  
Special Problem ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
General Point ◽  
Course Of Illness ◽  
Dynamic Reasoning ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Functional Psychoses ◽  
External Conditions ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Universe

My choice of Kraepelin as a point of departure for this lecture has definite reasons. If one wants to stay within the field of clinical psychiatry (as opposed to psychiatric history), that is as far back as one can reasonably go. By this no slight is intended upon the pre-Kraepelinian psychiatrists. For our topic Henry Maudsley would indeed have been a most appropriate starting point, and by no means for reasons of courtesy. His general point of view is admirably sound as a basis for the scientific study of prognosis in psychiatry. I quote: “There is no accident in madness. Causality, not casualty, governs its appearance in the universe, and it is very far from being a good and sufficient practice simply to mark its phenomena and straightway to pass on as if they belonged not to an order but to a disorder of events that called for no explanation.” On the special problem of prognosis he shows his clinical acumen by stating that the outlook is poor when the course of illness is insidious, but this only means that these cases develop their psychoses on the basis of mental deviations which go very far back in the patient's life, so that in fact they are generally in a chronic stage at the time of their first admission to hospital. Here he actually corrects a mistake which is still quite often made. He shows his dynamic attitude when he says that prognosis is to a large extent modified by external conditions, in particular by the attitude of friends and relatives. Maudsley's dynamic reasoning was limited by the narrow framework of the degeneration hypothesis of those days. He had a sceptical attitude towards classification, which he regarded as artificial and dangerously pseudo-exact. His own classification was deliberately provisional, with very wide groups. He held that a description of various sub-forms of chronic insanity was useless, as it would mean nothing but a tiresome enumeration of unconnected details.

PHILOSOPHY AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

Think ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (60) ◽  
pp. 33-49
Author(s):  
William Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Evolution Of The Universe ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
The Universe

The author sets out to respond to the student complaint that ‘Philosophy did not answer “the big questions”’, in particular the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ The response first outlines and evaluates the most common religious answer, that human life is given a meaning by God who created us and informs us that this life is just the pilgrim way to the next eternal life in heaven. He then discusses the response that, from the point of view of post-Darwinian science and the evolution of the universe and all that is in it, human life on Earth must be afforded no more meaning than the meaning we would give to a microscopic planaria or to some creature on another planet in a distant universe. All things including human creatures on Planet Earth just exist for a time and that is that. There is no plan or purpose. In the last sections the author outlines the view that it is we humans ourselves who give meaning to our lives by our choices of values or things that are worth pursuing and through our resulting sense of achievement or the opposite. Nevertheless the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ can mean quite different things in different contexts, and so merit different if related answers. From one point of view one answer may lie in terms of the love of one human for another.

PROPOSED COPING SUGGESTIONS AND STRATEGIES TO SOLVE THE TRUST DEFICIT FOR THE INDIANS AND CHINESE MEDIA IN THE POSTCOVID-19 ERA

2021 ◽  
pp. 61-64
Author(s):  
Niranjana Niranjana ◽  
Ren Feng
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Developmental Trend ◽  
Chinese Media ◽  
Peaceful Rise ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Sister Cities ◽  
India And China

The rise of India and China is a major historical developmental trend that has led to peaceful India-China media cooperation. From a long-term strategic point of view, the Indian and Chinese media platforms should seek common ground while overcoming differences and increasing mutual trust. The governments of India and China should grasp the dominant power of public opinion in traditional media, new media and self-media platforms. We must increase the number of each other's reporting stations and media branches to promote the "opposite column" in the content of the mainstream media. Meanwhile both sides should strengthen the training of reporters and journalist, thus improve the existing India-China media cooperation systems and gradually cut mutual misunderstandings by building friendly provinces, sister cities, and cultural and tourism exchange projects to jointly serve the two countries' national strategy for the smooth realization of a peaceful rise.

DARK GEOMETRY

2004 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 2275-2279 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. R. CEMBRANOS ◽  
A. DOBADO ◽  
A. L. MAROTO
Keyword(s):  
Dark Matter ◽  
Extra Dimensions ◽  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Planck Scale ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Missing Mass ◽  
Brane Worlds ◽  
Mass Problem ◽  
Extra Space ◽  
The Universe

Extra-dimensional theories contain additional degrees of freedom related to the geometry of the extra space which can be interpreted as new particles. Such theories allow to reformulate most of the fundamental problems of physics from a completely different point of view. In this essay, we concentrate on the brane fluctuations which are present in brane-worlds, and how such oscillations of the own space–time geometry along curved extra dimensions can help to resolve the Universe missing mass problem. The energy scales involved in these models are low compared to the Planck scale, and this means that some of the brane fluctuations distinctive signals could be detected in future colliders and in direct or indirect dark matter searches.

scholarly journals What are the wild waves saying? Yet another meditation on the predictions, searches for, and detections of gravitational waves

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (14) ◽  
pp. 1830009
Author(s):  
Virginia Trimble
Keyword(s):  
General Relativity ◽  
Gravitational Waves ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Large Majority ◽  
Laboratory Apparatus ◽  
New Information ◽  
Theory Of Gravity ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Universe

A large majority of the physics and astronomy communities are now sure that gravitational waves exist, can be looked for, and can be studied via their effects on laboratory apparatus as well as on astronomical objects. So far, everything found out has agreed with the predictions of general relativity, but hopes are high for new information about the universe and its contents and perhaps for hints of a better theory of gravity than general relativity (which even Einstein expected to come eventually). This is one version of the story, from 1905 to the present, told from an unusual point of view, because the author was, for 28.5 years, married to Joseph Weber, who built the first detectors starting in the early 1960s and operated one or more until his death on 30 September 2000.

scholarly journals Dialogue on Alternating Consciousness: From Perception to Infinities and Back to Free Will

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claus Janew
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Basic Structure ◽  
Freedom Of Choice ◽  
Trace Back ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Universe

Can we trace back consciousness, reality, awareness, and free will to a single basic structure without giving up any of them? Can the universe exist in both real and individual ways without being composed of both? This dialogue founds consciousness and freedom of choice on the basis of a new reality concept that also includes the infinite as far as we understand it. Just the simplest distinction contains consciousness. It is not static, but a constant alternation of perspectives. From its entirety and movement, however, there arises a freedom of choice being more than reinterpreted necessity and unpredictability. Although decisions ultimately involve the whole universe, they are free in varying degrees also here and now. The unity and openness of the infinite enables the individual to be creative while this creativity directly and indirectly enters into all other individuals without impeding them. A contrary impression originates only in a narrowed awareness. But even the most conscious and free awareness can neither anticipate all decisions nor extinguish individuality. Their creativity is secured.

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