scholarly journals Realism in Theology and Metaphysics

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-35
Author(s):  
Michael C. Rea
Keyword(s):  
Ontological Commitment ◽  
The Other ◽  
Van Fraassen ◽  
Bas Van Fraassen ◽  
The One ◽  
Analytic Metaphysics

Since the early 2000s, increasing attention has been paid in two separate disciplines to questions about realism and ontological commitment. The disciplines are analytic metaphysics on the one hand, and theology on the other. Chapter 1 discusses two arguments for the conclusion that realism in theology and metaphysics—that is, a realist treatment of doctrines in theology and metaphysics—is untenable. The first is due to Peter Byrne, the second to Bas van Fraassen. The chapter concludes that practitioners of metaphysics and theology ought simply to ignore this conclusion. Those who are already sceptical of theology or metaphysics or both will find in the objections plenty to agree with. But they should not convince the unconvinced.

The Wilding of Cape York Peninsula

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Neale
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
The Other ◽  
Northern Australia ◽  
Partial Failure ◽  
Hand Part ◽  
Cape York ◽  
The One ◽  
Colonial Encounters

In Chapter 1, I argue that ‘wildness’ is a product settler attempts to understand and thereby spatially remake the Northern Australia since the first colonial encounters in the 17th Century. For European explorers, a region like Cape York Peninsula was a wilderness to be surveyed, and through the misadventures and conflicts of inland expeditions it came to be understood as ‘wretched’ country populated with ‘treacherous’ peoples. Surveying subsequent uses of ‘the wild’ in this region, this chapter shows that if, on the one hand, part of the settler project has been to discursively and materially dictate the shape and texture of the region through such forms of wildness – ‘wilderness,’ ‘wild time,’ ‘wild blacks’ and ‘wild whites’ – then, on the other, the contemporary ‘wilderness’ should be understood not only as a product of the resistance and resilience of its Indigenous peoples, but also as the partial failure of this project.

Ontological commitment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Jubien
Keyword(s):  
Ontological Commitment ◽  
Comparative Assessment ◽  
Philosophical Problem ◽  
The Other ◽  
General Question ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
Occam’S Razor ◽  
The One ◽  
Occam's Razor

A person may believe in the existence of God, or numbers or ghosts. Such beliefs may be asserted, perhaps in a theory. Assertions of the existence of specific entities or kinds of entities are the intuitive source of the notion of ontological commitment, for it is natural to think of a person who makes such an assertion as being ‘committed’ to an ‘ontology’ that includes such entities. So ontological commitment appears to be a relation that holds between persons or existence assertions (including theories), on the one hand, and specific entities or kinds of entities (or ontologies), on the other. Ontological commitment is thus a very rich notion – one in which logical, metaphysical, linguistic and epistemic elements are intermingled. The main philosophical problem concerning commitment is whether there is a precise criterion for detecting commitments in accordance with intuition. It once seemed extremely important to find a criterion, for it promised to serve as a vital tool in the comparative assessment of theories. Many different criteria have been proposed and a variety of problems have beset these efforts. W.V. Quine has been the central figure in the discussion and we will consider two of his formulations below. Many important philosophical topics are closely connected with ontological commitment. These include: the nature of theories and their interpretation; interpretations of quantification; the nature of kinds; the question of the existence of merely possible entities; extensionality and intensionality; the general question of the nature of modality; and the significance of Occam’s razor.

Direction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Nordlund
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Main Plot ◽  
The One

Chapter 1 is entitled ‘Direction’, with a pun on the theatrical and the spatial senses of the word ‘direction’. The main purpose of the chapter is to mediate between, on the one hand, James Hirsh’s extended argument that Shakespeare’s soliloquies and asides were almost exclusively self-addressed, and, on the other, the modern tendency of scholars, actors, and directors to return Shakespeare to his medieval, audience-addressed roots. The chapter then turns to an extended reading of Launce’s soliloquies in The Two Gentlemen of Verona which explores how their satirical counterpoint to the main plot interrogates the underlying conditions of Shakespeare’s dramatic art.

Plato on Practical Reason and Practical Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. M. M. Olfert
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
The Other ◽  
Normative Structure ◽  
The One

In Chapter 1, I argue that in a number of dialogues, Plato proposes that when we reason about what to do, we are equally and inseparably concerned with two sets of aims or concerns: grasping the truth and gaining knowledge on the one hand, and acting and acting well on the other. That is, from the perspective of practical reasoning, the goals of grasping the truth and gaining knowledge is inseparable from, and equally fundamental as, the goals of acting rationally and well. I argue that this Platonic idea is a plausible and worth examining both on its own terms, and because it has a legacy in Aristotle’s notion of practical truth. As I argue in the remainder of the Book, Aristotle uses his innovative conception of practical truth to formalize and make explicit the dual normative structure of practical reasoning suggested by Plato.

The Death of (a) Cinema

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lúcia Nagib
Keyword(s):  
Local Environment ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
End Of History ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
The One

Chapter 1 focuses on Wim Wenders’s 1982 The State of Things, a watershed film that distils, in programmatic fashion, the idea of cinema’s inherent but unachievable mission to become material reality. The film is located at a significant historical juncture, which marks, on the one hand, the end of the European new waves and new cinemas, and, on the other, Hollywood’s move into a self-styled postmodern era, dominated by selfreflexive remakes. More pointedly, it attempts to theorise, in form and content, this cinematic end of history by means of a mise-en-abyme construction evolving across multiple layers of self-referentiality and self-negation, that exposes it to the contingencies of the local environment and improvisations of the characters/actors.

Hot Souls, Pneumatic Bodies, and Interplanetary Journeys

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-68
Author(s):  
Anya P. Foxen
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Subtle Body ◽  
Medical Theory ◽  
The One

Chapter 1 establishes the origins of harmonial ideas in antiquity, focusing primarily on the Greek and later more broadly Hellenic world, and especially on thought of the Pythagorean, Platonic, Aritotelian, and Stoic traditions, ranging approximately from 500 BCE to 500 CE. It starts by exploring the evolution of cosmological ideas of harmony (harmonia) and sympathy (sympatheia) on the one hand, and spirit (pneuma) and its relationship to notions of the soul (psyche) on the other. It then proceeds to focus on the idea of a subtle body and the two spheres in which its utility has been explored: religious soteriology (or theurgy) and medical theory and practice.

The Logics of Worldlessness

2020 ◽  
pp. 245-292
Author(s):  
Roland Végső
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Historical Condition ◽  
The One

The final chapter provides a close reading of Alain Badiou’s The Logics of Worlds. It argues that the theoretical conflict between Being and Event and The Logics of Worlds plays out in the space defined by the tension between the ontological primacy of worldlessness and the phenomenological necessity of worlds. While the ontology of radical multiplicity introduced in Being and Event provides us with one of the most compelling arguments in favour of worldlessness, in the sequel to Being and Event Badiou turns to a novel phenomenology to account for the necessity of worlds. The chapter argues that it is the Heideggerian contradictions expounded upon in Chapter 1 that will help us make sense of a fundamental contradiction in Badiou’s philosophy: a conflict between the ontology of worldlessness and the politics of world-creation. To put it differently, in Badiou’s thought we encounter two forms of worldlessness: on the one hand, Being is worldless (which is a positive enabling condition) and, on the other hand, Capital is worldless (which is a negative historical condition).

Perrin’s Brownian Motion Experiments

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-182
Author(s):  
George E. Smith ◽  
Raghav Seth
Keyword(s):  
Brownian Motion ◽  
Umbilical Cord ◽  
The Other ◽  
Molecular Theory ◽  
Van Fraassen ◽  
Avogadro’S Number ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The One ◽  
Surrounding Liquid

Between 1908 and 1911 Perrin published values for Avogadro’s number—the number of molecules per mole of any substance—on the basis of theory-mediated measurements of the mean kinetic energies of granules in Brownian motion. The umbilical cord connecting these energies to Avogadro’s number was the assumption that they are the same as the mean kinetic energies of the molecules in the surrounding liquid. This, as van Fraassen has argued, seems to presuppose that molecules exist, thereby undercutting Perrin’s claim to be proving their existence. This chapter reviews Perrin’s four theory-mediated measurements, showing, on the one hand, that none of them in fact depended on molecular theory yet, on the other, that, by virtue of being exemplars of theory-mediated measurement at its best, they managed to establish several extraordinary landmark conclusions about Brownian motion in its own right.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
George E. Smith ◽  
Raghav Seth
Keyword(s):  
Brownian Motion ◽  
Albert Einstein ◽  
The Other ◽  
Molecular Theory ◽  
Van Fraassen ◽  
Standard View ◽  
Bas Van Fraassen ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Side

Lore has it that research on Brownian motion, spearheaded on the theoretical side by Albert Einstein, but then strongly supported by Jean Perrin’s experimental efforts, finally ended the controversy over whether molecules exist. That view has nevertheless been challenged on more than one occasion, most recently by Bas van Fraassen. A discussion of the history of the standard view and challenges to it leads to two issues that the remainder of the monograph addresses: one concerning just what Perrin established about Brownian motion itself, and the other concerning how the standing of molecular theory had changed from 1900, first to Einstein’s initial paper of 1905 and then between that year and Perrin’s Les atomes of 1913. At the center of both of these issues is evidence resulting from theory-mediated measurements of aspects of Brownian motion—hence the subtitle of the monograph.

Untangling the Impact of Negative Campaigning on Citizens

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Kim L. Fridkin ◽  
Patrick J. Kenney
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Negative Campaigning ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Negative Messages ◽  
The Impact

The tolerance and tactics theory of negativity is presented in Chapter 1. The marriage of citizens’ tolerance for negativity, on the one hand, with the tactics employed by candidates, on the other hand, will clarify when negative campaigning works. The theory begins with a simple premise: people vary in their tolerance for negative campaigning and individuals with less tolerance for negativity will be more influenced by attack advertising. In addition, it is crucial to consider the content and tone of the negative messages to know when negativity will be effective. Finally, the interplay between people’s tolerance of negativity and candidates’ tactics provide a framework for understanding the effects of negativity on citizens’ assessments of candidates and their likelihood of voting on Election Day.

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