Aristotle on Ontological Dependence

Phronesis ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phil Corkum

AbstractAristotle holds that individual substances are ontologically independent from non-substances and universal substances but that non-substances and universal substances are ontologically dependent on substances. There is then an asymmetry between individual substances and other kinds of beings with respect to ontological dependence. Under what could plausibly be called the standard interpretation, the ontological independence ascribed to individual substances and denied of non-substances and universal substances is a capacity for independent existence. There is, however, a tension between this interpretation and the asymmetry between individual substances and the other kinds of entities with respect to ontological independence. I will propose an alternative interpretation: to weaken the relevant notion of ontological independence from a capacity for independent existence to the independent possession of a certain ontological status.

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 7-19
Author(s):  
Miroslava Andjelkovic

This paper deals with a criticism of Ryle's claim that the so called Intellectualist legend leads to an infinite regress. Critics have attempted to show that Ryle's argument cannot even get off the ground since its two basic premises cannot be true at the same time. In the paper I argue that this objection is based on a misinterpretation of Ryle's argumentation, which is complex and consists of two arguments, not of a single one as it is claimed. One of Ryle's argument attacks the thesis that an intelligent act is an indirect result of propositional knowledge, while the other, which I call the Asymmetry argument, claims that not every manifestation of knowledge that is accompanied with the manifestation of knowing how. In the paper I argue that both Ryle's arguments are valid and resistant to recent critique so it can be said that Ryle's distinction between knowledge that and knowing how is still an important distinction within contemporary epistemology.


Author(s):  
Ralph Wedgwood

It is explained how the conception of rationality proposed earlier in this book can set the agenda for the study of rational belief and rational choice. Part of the task will be to investigate the kind of ‘rational probability’ that was introduced in Chapter 9; the other part will be to study the conditions under which each kind of mental state counts as ‘correct’. There are reasons for thinking that the relevant notion of correctness must be such that in the case of belief, a correct belief is a belief in a true proposition, and in the case of choice, it is ‘akratic’ to choose something if one is fully confident that it is not correct to choose it. It is explained what light this approach could shed on the traditional issues about rational belief and rational choice.


2003 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keiko Nakamoto

Camac and Glucksberg reported there was no priming effect between constituent terms of a metaphor and argued that there was no prior similarity or association between the constituents. However, their study had several limitations. An important one was that they neglected the asymmetry of metaphor constituent terms. The purpose of this study is to replicate their experiment under the condition in which one of the constituents preceded the other. The experiment was conducted with Japanese participants using Japanese metaphoric sentences as stimuli. The results showed that the decision was facilitated if the vehicle served as prime and the topic served as target. In contrast, if the topic preceded the vehicle, no priming effect was found. These results are discussed in terms of the class inclusion model proposed earlier by Glucksberg and Keysar.


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-158
Author(s):  
Timur Maisak

AbstractThis paper gives an account of participial clauses in Agul (Lezgic, Nakh-Daghestanian), based on a sample of 858 headed noun-modifying clauses taken from two text corpora, one spoken and one written. Noun-modifying clauses in Agul do not show syntactic restrictions on what can be relativized, and hence they instantiate the type known as GNMCCs, or general noun-modifying clause constructions. As the text counts show, intransitive verbs are more frequent than transitives and experiencer verbs in participial clauses, and among intransitive verbs, locative statives with the roots ‘be’ and ‘stay, remain’ account for half of all the uses. The asymmetry between the different relativization targets is also significant. Among the core arguments, the intransitive subject (S) is the most frequent target, patient (P) occupies second place, and agent (A) is comparatively rare. The preference of S and, in general, of S and P over A also holds true for most other Nakh-Daghestanian languages for which comparable counts are available. At the same time, Agul stands apart from the other languages by its high ratio of non-core relativization which accounts for 42% of all participial clauses. Addressee, arguments and adjuncts encoded with a locative case, as well as more general place and time relativizations show especially high frequency, outnumbering such arguments as experiencers, recipients, and predicative and adnominal possessors. Possible reasons for the high ratio of non-argument relativization are discussed in the paper.


1947 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 135-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. C. Toynbee

Little more than a decade after Constantine's conversion to Christianity the ancient gods and goddesses of the Graeco-Roman pantheon ceased to appear upon the official coinage and public monuments of the Empire. The personifications—Victoria, Virtus, Pax, Libertas, Securitas, etc., and the ‘geographical’ figures of Res Publica, Roma, Tellus, cities, countries, and tribes—remained. Yet some of these had, up to that very time, received, like the Olympians, their shrines and altars and other honours associated with pagan cultus; and we ask ourselves how it was that a Christian State, while rejecting the one, could retain and ‘baptize’ the other. The answer to this question, which involves the whole complex problem of the nature of pagan religious belief under the later Empire, can only be tentatively suggested here. The pantheon had eventually to go because its denizens had possessed, for the great majority of pagans, a real, objective, and independent existence.


Virittäjä ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 121 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krista Ojutkangas

Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on selvittää, millaisissa konstruktioissa suomen seuralaisuutta ilmaisevat mukana ja mukaan esiintyvät. Seuralaisuussuhteelle on tyypillistä, että suhteen osallistujat tai vähintään kiintopiste ovat ihmisiä ja että osallistujien välillä on symmetriaero: seuralainen (engl. companion) osallistuu tilanteeseen epäsuorasti, seurattavan (engl. accompanee) välityksellä. Suomen grammeille ominaiseen tapaan mukana- ja mukaan-sanoja käytetään syntaktisesti monenlaisissa asemissa siten, että kiintopisteen (seurattavan) ilmaisun tyyppi vaihtelee. Tutkimuksessa selvitetäänkin, mikä on kiintopisteen ilmaisutavan rooli siinä, miten seuralaisuussuhteen osallistujien välinen epäsymmetria hahmottuu. Tutkimuksen syntaktisessa luokittelussa pidetään lähtökohtana postpositiokonstruktiota, jossa osallistujien välisen symmetriaeron voi katsoa perustuvan kiintopisteen viitepisteroolin kautta grammin semantiikkaan (tyyppi lapio oli kaivajan mukana). Symmetriaero sen sijaan voimistuu, kun kiintopiste edustuu omistusliitteen välityksellä subjektina (tyyppi hän otti lapion mukaansa) tai kun se ilmaistaan teemapaikalla paikallissijaisena adverbiaalina (tyyppi hänellä oli lapio mukana[an]). Symmetriaero sen sijaan heikkenee, jos (toissijainen) kiintopiste ilmaistaan adverbiaalina muualla kuin teemapaikalla (tyyppi hän oli mukana kaivamassa), ja vetäytyy taustatiedoksi, kun kiintopistettä ei ilmaista lainkaan (tyyppi hän on mukana). Tutkimus perustuu aineistoon, jossa ovat edustettuina 1800-luvun kirjakieli, Lauseopin arkiston murrehaastattelut ja nykykirjakieli. Aineisto osoittaa, että mukana- ja mukaan-grammeilla ilmaistuissa seuralaisuussuhteissa on tapahtunut muutos: 1800-luvun kirjakielen ja pääosin 1960-luvulla tallennetun murreaineiston esiintymissä yleisin kiintopiste on ihminen, kun taas nykykirjakielen aineistossa kiintopisteeksi hahmottuu tyypillisimmin toiminta. Kiintopisteen semanttinen tyyppi ja sen kielellinen ilmaisukeino ovat suorassa suhteessa toisiinsa. Ihmiskiintopiste ilmaistaan yleisimmin subjektin kanssa samaviitteisellä omistusliitteellä tai teemapaikkaisella paikallissijaisella elementillä ja toimintakiintopiste puolestaan ei-teemapaikkaisella paikallissijaisella elementillä. Eri ilmaisukeinot jakautuvat eri verbien ympärille rakentuvien konstruktioiden kesken. Tutkimuksen perusteella voi todeta, että esiintymäkonstruktiolla on merkittävä rooli siinä, millaista seuralaisuutta mukana- tai mukaan-grammilla kuvataan.   Finnish mukana and mukaan ‘with, along’ as comitative markers: Grammatical roles of expressions of the landmarks, constructions, and asymmetry between the participants of the accompaniment relation The topic of this article is the syntax of Finnish comitative markers mukana and mukaan ’with, along’. Comitative markers express accompaniment relations, which are typically conceived as being asymmetrical: the accompanee (landmark) is the pre-dominant participant, while the companion (trajector) is involved in the situation only via the accompanee (see Stolz et al. 2006: 26–27). However, markers such as mukana and mukaan are used in several syntactic constructions where the grammatical roles of expressions of the accompanees/landmarks vary. The main research question of the article is, how does the grammatical role of expression of the accompanee/landmark affect the asymmetry between the participants of the accompaniment relation. Five syntactic construction types were analysed from a corpus data. On the basis of this study, it is shown that syntactic variation has an effect on the conceived asymmetry between the accompanee and the companion, and that syntax makes an important contribution to the semantics of comitative constructions. In strongly asymmetric accompaniment relations, a human accompanee is expressed by a possessive suffix affixed to the comitative marker, or by a clause-initial adverbial. On the other hand, the question of asymmetry contracts to the background when the accompanee is expressed by a non-clause-initial adverbial and when the accompanee is implicit, without any overt marking. The research is based on a corpus data comprising 19th-century written Finnish, dialect interviews, and modern written Finnish. The data shows that accompaniment relations expressed by mukana and mukaan have changed: in the 19th-century and dialect data, the majority of the landmarks are humans, but in the modern data activities dominate as (secondary) landmarks.  


Author(s):  
Geoffrey Schwartz

Abstract Two acoustic studies were carried out with L1 Polish learners of English. One study examined L1 phonetic drift, comparing learners of L2 English who were undergoing intensive L2 phonetic training with quasi-monolingual Polish speakers. The other study looked at L2 acquisition, comparing learners at two different levels of proficiency. Unlike most previous studies of Polish-English bilinguals, VOT data of both voiced and voiceless consonants were analyzed. In both experiments, an asymmetry was observed by which voiced stops were more susceptible to cross-language phonetic influence (CLI) than voiceless stops. These results build on evidence of a similar asymmetry observed in a number of other L1–L2 pairings. Predictions of competing phonological models are evaluated with regard to equivalence classification and phonetic CLI. It is shown that both traditional approaches to the phonological representation of voice contrasts fail to predict the observed asymmetry. An alternative theory, which predicts the asymmetry, is discussed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 167 ◽  
pp. 375-383
Author(s):  
Valentyna Gerasymchuk

Existence and nonexistence of death in the semantic picture of reality and artistic text on the material of romans Leonid Leonov Road to the Ocean and Maxim Gorkogo The Life of Klim SamginIn this article the problem of death is unfolding in the semantic space of its ontological and existential conception in reality and a literary text. On the one hand, death as the concept of being is presented as its continuation, spiritual content, confirmation. On the other hand, death as a concept of non-being is considered as nothingness, rejection of being and its spiritual content.In reality the concept of death becomes an issue of the questionary and transcendental philosophy, that takes place in the physical time and metaphysical space of thought and expression. When the matter concerns the death of human being, his death acquires an ontological status of being, a status of spiritual significance. In the contrary case, it is possible to consider death and even life in terms of the concepts of being and nothingness. In literary texts the concept of death is also considered to be being or non-being, but taking into account constitutive characteristics of the text, its figurative and notional polysemant, the concept of death acquires not only aesthetic but also conceptual focus. In the article the main points of the topic of death, its being and non-being, are illustrated on the examples of specific literary texts. Буття і небуття смерті в смисловій картині реальності і художньому текстіПроблема смерті у статті розгортається в смисловому просторі онтологічного і екзистенціалістського її розуміння в реальності і в художньому тексті. З одного боку, смерть — поняття буття — постає як його продовження, його духовна наповненість, його стверждення. З другого — смерть — поняття небуття — розглядається як ніщо, як заперечення буття і його духовної наповненості.У реальності поняття смерті стає проблемою запитальної, трансцендентальної філософії, що розгортається у фізичному часі і метафізичному просторі думки і слова. І якщо йдеться про смерть буттюючої особистості, то і її смерть набуває онтологічного статусу, статусу духовної значущості, інакше можна говорити про смерть і навіть життя у поняттях небуття і ніщо. У художніх текстах поняття смерті також розглядається як буття і небуття, проте з урахуванням конститутивних особливостей тексту, його образної і смислової багатозначності, образ смерті набуває, крім онтологічної, ще й естетичну спрямованість.


2018 ◽  
pp. 239-278
Author(s):  
Montgomery McFate

Jomo Kenyatta, who held a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics, became the first president of Kenya. Kenyatta successfully employed his knowledge of anthropology – the so-called ‘handmaiden of colonialism’ – against a colonial regime, using that knowledge to pinpoint British political weaknesses, unify the Kikuyu and other tribes of Kenya, and construct an ethnographic Trojan Horse that undermined the British edifice upon which colonial law had been built. On the other side, the British counterinsurgency against the Mau Mau also utilized anthropology, both in theory and in practice. As this chapter describes, Louis Leakey’s conceptualization of Kikuyu culture influenced how the British fought the war and demonstrates how elements of the host nation culture – in this case, the Kikuyu practice of oathing and counter-oathing – may be employed in a security strategy. In this intersection of two lives – Jomo Kenyatta and Louis Leakey – many of the themes of this book become apparent, including the danger of fantasy ideologies, the limits of anthropological knowledge, and the asymmetry of cultural knowledge.


Author(s):  
Arthur Fine

Traditionally, scientific realism asserts that the objects of scientific knowledge exist independently of the minds or acts of scientists and that scientific theories are true of that objective (mind-independent) world. The reference to knowledge points to the dual character of scientific realism. On the one hand it is a metaphysical (specifically, an ontological) doctrine, claiming the independent existence of certain entities. On the other hand it is an epistemological doctrine asserting that we can know what individuals exist and that we can find out the truth of the theories or laws that govern them. Opposed to scientific realism (hereafter just ‘realism’) are a variety of antirealisms, including phenomenalism and empiricism. Recently two others, instrumentalism and constructivism, have posed special challenges to realism. Instrumentalism regards the objects of knowledge pragmatically, as tools for various human purposes, and so takes reliability (or empirical adequacy) rather than truth as scientifically central. A version of this, fictionalism, contests the existence of many of the objects favoured by the realist and regards them as merely expedient means to useful ends. Constructivism maintains that scientific knowledge is socially constituted, that ‘facts’ are made by us. Thus it challenges the objectivity of knowledge, as the realist understands objectivity, and the independent existence that realism is after. Conventionalism, holding that the truths of science ultimately rest on man-made conventions, is allied to constructivism. Realism and antirealism propose competing interpretations of science as a whole. They even differ over what requires explanation, with realism demanding that more be explained and antirealism less.


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