The Reality-Status of the Empirical World: The Mādhyamika Teaching

2013 ◽  
pp. 66-77
Author(s):  
Stephen Cross
Keyword(s):  
Empirical World

Platón, Einstein y el triunfo de la imaginatividad cosmológica

1998 ◽  
pp. 87-98
Author(s):  
T. M. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Model ◽  
Striking Similarity ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Cosmology ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
Changing World

This article argues the following five claims: 1. Plato’s description of the origins of cosmos in the Timaeus is not a myth, nor something unlikely: when he called it an eikos mythos or eikos logos, he meant a likely or trustworthy account on this very subject. 2. Among the details in this account, the following are prominent and surprising: a) the world was fashioned in time, in that precise point that was the beginning of time; b) several kinds of duration can be distinguished in cosmology (mainly eternity, sempiternity, perpetuity and time); and c) space is an entity characterized by movement and tension. 3. In the Statesman, Plato repeats much the same thing, adding this time the strange notion that the universe’s circular movement is periodically reversed. 4. In spite of the important differences in detail, there is a striking similarity between Plato’s account of the origins of the world and the explanation adopted by much of modern cosmology. 5. What Plato shares with so many instances of recent thought is here termed “cosmological imaginativity”. A first section of the paper deals exclusively with the Timaeus. Claims 1 and 2a are supported by a revision of the meanings of mythos and logos, followed by brief reference and discussion of the argument at Timaeus 27d, leading to the conclusion that Plato affirms that the ever-changing world has indeed had a beginning in time. Claim 2b describes five different types of duration, corresponding to Forms, the Demiurge, Space, the [empirical] world and its contents, physical objects. The second section is concerned with the myth in the Statesman, discussing it as a parallel and describing its peculiar turn to the Timaeus’ cosmology and cosmogony, a complex spheric and dynamic model. After digressing into some important ideas in modern cosmology, touching especially on affinities of some of Einstein’s ideas with of Plato’s own, the paper closes with a discussion of cosmological imaginativity, oriented to recover and recognize fully Plato’s greatness as a cosmologist.

Empiricism and Normative Constraint

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Ginsborg
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Intentional Content ◽  
Empirical Reality ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
Normative Constraint ◽  
Normative Relation

McDowell holds that our thinking, in order to have intentional content, must stand in a normative relation to empirical reality. He thinks that this condition can be satisfied only if we adopt “minimal empiricism”: the view that beliefs and judgements stand in rational relations to perceptual experiences, conceived as passive. I raise two complementary difficulties for minimal empiricism, one challenging McDowell’s view that experiences, conceived as passive, can be reasons for belief, the other challenging his view of experience as presupposing conceptual capacities. I go on to argue that minimal empiricism is not necessary for satisfying the condition that thinking be normatively related to the empirical world. There is another way of understanding the relation between thought and reality which construes it as normative without being rational: we can understand it as the world’s normative constraint on the activity through which empirical concepts, and hence empirical thinking, become possible.

Moral Values as Religious Absolutes

1992 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 145-160
Author(s):  
James P. Mackey
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
True Proposition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Centrifugal Forces ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Idea Of God

Those who have had the benefit of a reasonably lengthy familiarity with the philosophy of religion, and more particularly with the God question, may be so kind to a speaker long in exile from philosophy and only recently returned, as to subscribe, initially at least, to the following rather enormous generalization: meaning and truth, which to most propositions are the twin forces by which they are maintained, turn out in the case of claims about God, to be the centrifugal forces by which they disintegrate. In simpler language, the greater the amount of intelligible meaning that can be given to the idea of God, the less grounds there would appear to be for assuming let alone asserting, that God exists, at least as a being distinguishable from all the things in this empirical world which are the source of the range of meanings available to us; on the other hand, the more we insist that God exists, a being over and above the things that make up this empirical world (the more we take the proposition ‘God exists’ to be a true proposition in this particular transcendent sense, for the adjective ‘transcendent’ has many uses) the less the amount of commonly available meaning we appear to be able to apply to God. Or, to put this in a manner which might obviate an obvious objection to it; either everything we know is tout ensemble, God, and then nothing in the world that we know is distinctively divine; or else nothing in this world is God, and then nothing that we appear to be able to know is God. That same formulation will work, it should be noted, even if we substitute for ‘things in the world’, ‘an aspect or aspects of things in the world’.

Diversifying Method

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-261
Author(s):  
Anik Waldow
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Scientific Enterprise ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
Capacity To Act ◽  
General Scientific ◽  
Deterministic Framework

By investigating Kant’s anthropology, this chapter presents him as a thinker who was firmly committed to a conception of the human being as shaped by its situatedness in the empirical world of history and culture. However, due to Kant’s own methodological constraints, he could recognize this situatedness only if approached through a deterministic framework that traces the causes and effects of the laws of nature. Human freedom here becomes almost unrecognizable, which makes it necessary for us to acknowledge the systematic nature of Kant’s general “scientific” enterprise. This enterprise employs different methodological strategies and disciplines that all in their own way clarify what it means to be human: a creature that is able to know and understand, but also able to act freely. Kant’s anthropology appeals to us in our capacity to act, thereby performing a function his theoretical sciences fail to cover.

Induction Justified (But Just Barely)

Philosophy ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 58 (226) ◽  
pp. 481-488
Author(s):  
Ralph W. Clark
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
Future Events

Hume's sceptical arguments regarding induction have not yet been successfully answered. However, I shall not in this paper discuss the important attempts to answer Hume since that would be too lengthy a task. On the supposition that Hume's sceptical arguments have not been met, the empirical world is a place where, as the popular metaphor goes, all the glue has been removed. For the Humean sceptic, the only empirical knowledge that we can have is given to us in immediate perception. We have no reason to believe that the patterns of future events will in any way resemble patterns of events in the present or past. We have no reason to believe even that present events not observed resemble present events that are observed, or that knowledge of past and present can be any guide in making new discoveries about what took place in the past. What we have is an ideal setting for the calculation of a priori probabilities. We have a field of distinct events having no logical or evidential ties to one another. The attempt to justify induction that I wish to present is an appeal to a priori probability.

The Gains Debate: Framing State Choice

1997 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 789-805 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Berejekian
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Prospect Theory ◽  
European Community ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Montreal Protocol ◽  
Risk Averse ◽  
State Behavior ◽  
New Model ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
Relative Gains

The theoretical bifurcation of international relations theory into (neo)realist and (neo)liberal camps has resulted in a “gains debate” that says little about an empirical world in which states exhibit both relative and absolute gains pursuit. This article deploys prospect theory in an attempt to move beyond the gains debate. The intent here is synthetic. By bringing the predictions of both perspectives under a single theoretical umbrella, we can model a broader set of state behavior. The thesis developed demonstrates that states in a gains frame pursue absolute gains and are risk averse, while states in a losses frame pursue relative gains and are risk acceptant. This hypothesis is assessed against the behavior of the European Community in the formation of the Montreal Protocol, a regime intended to protect the earth's protective ozone shield. The new model accurately predicts the timing and content of shifts in EC preferences, suggesting that a synthesis of realist and liberal approaches is possible.

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