scholarly journals The Transcendental Foundations of Science

Phainomenon ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Jairo José da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
The World ◽  
Logical Nature ◽  
The Senses

Abstract It is a philosophical naiveté to believe that the object of science is some ready-made world out there that the scientist, free of any preconceptions, simply stumbles upon. Of course, there is a world out there, given to us through the senses, but that must be intentionally elaborated to become a world for us and a possible object of scientific inquiry. The intentional constitution of the world of science supports and “justifies” a priori conceptions about the empirical world, even those of a logical nature, that are, then, properly transcendental rather than metaphysical. My goal here is to investigate what these presuppositions are and on what they are based.

scholarly journals Kataphysical inquiry, onto-relationality and elemental forms in T.F. Torrance’s doctrine of the mediation of Jesus Christ

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin M. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
A Priori ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The World ◽  
Hypostatic Union ◽  
Priori Knowledge

The doctrine of the mediation of Jesus Christ in the scientific theology of T.F. Torrance rests on the fundamental methodological axiom that knowledge is developed according to the nature (kata physin) of the object of scientific inquiry. To know God through the incarnate Son, who is ‘of one nature with the Father’, is to know God in strict accordance with God’s nature and hence in a theologically scientific way. In Torrance’s kataphysical method, a priori knowledge of God is excluded, for epistemology follows ontology. Because the fundamental aspects of reality are relational rather than atomistic, a scientific theological approach to the doctrine of the mediation of Jesus Christ requires that he be investigated within the nexuses of ‘being-constituting’ interrelations, or ‘onto-relations’, which disclose his identity as incarnate Saviour of the world. Following the principle of logical simplicity, the vast and scattered array of Torrance’s thought can be reduced to a minimal number of elemental forms that succinctly describe in a unitary, non-dualist manner the onto-relations that constitute the identity of the incarnate Son. The primary elemental forms of Torrance’s doctrine of mediation are the Nicene homoousion and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the hypostatic union. Two additional elemental forms that readily arise as corollaries of the doctrine of the hypostatic union are the doctrines of incarnational redemption and the ‘vicarious humanity’ of Jesus Christ. These elemental forms provide a conceptual lens for a theologically holistic view of the mediation of Jesus Christ in the scientific theology of T.F. Torrance.Die leer van die versoening van Christus in die wetenskaplike teologie van T.F. Torrance berus op die fundamentele metodologiese aanname dat kennis volgens die aard(kataphysin) van die voorwerp van wetenskaplike ondersoek verwerf word. Om God deur die vleesgeworde Seun (wat een in wese met die Vader is) te ken, is om Hom in noue ooreenstemming met sy wese en daarom op ’n teologies-wetenskaplike wyse te ken. Volgens Torrance se katafisiese metode is aprioriese kennis van God nie moontlik nie, omdat die ontologie aan die epistemologie voorafgaan. Aangesien die fundamentele kenmerke van die werklikheid relasioneel eerder as atomisties is, vereis ’n wetenskaplik-teologiese benadering tot die leer van die versoening van Christus dat die ondersoek binne die kader van ‘wesensbepalende’ verhoudings of ‘onto-verhoudings’ plaasvind. Dit is immers laasgenoemde wat Christus se identiteit as vleesgeworde Verlosser van die wêreld blootlê. Deur die beginsel van logiese eenvoud toe te pas, kan die omvangryke en sporadiese idees van Torrance gereduseer word tot ’n kleiner aantal kernelemente wat op ’n unitêre, ondubbelsinnige wyse die ‘onto-verhoudings’ wat die identiteit van die vleesgeworde Seun verteenwoordig, duidelik beskryf. Die vernaamste kernelemente van Torrance se leer oor die middelaarskap is die Niceaanse homoousion en die Chalcedoniese leer van die wesenseenheid. Twee opvallende, parallelle kernelemente by die leer van die wesenseenheid is die leer van die verlossing op grond van die vleeswording en die plaasvervangende mensheid van Jesus Christus. Hierdie kernelemente verskaf ’n konsepsuele lens waardeur ’n teologiese, holistiese beskouing van die middelaarskap van Jesus Christus in die wetenskaplike teologie van T.F. Torrance ondersoek kan word. 

THE BOUNDED LIFE: ADORNO, DICKENS, AND METAPHYSICS

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 547-563
Author(s):  
Helen Small
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
The World ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Aristotelian Metaphysics

THEODOR ADORNO'S LATE LECTURESonMetaphysicspropose a “shocking thesis”: “metaphysics began with Aristotle” (15). A “doubly shocking” thesis, Adorno tells his audience, because it gives credit where credit is not usually given, and declines to give it where most students of philosophy would understand that it belongs–with Plato (18). The Platonic doctrine of Ideas misses the essential criterion for metaphysics. Plato never fully accepted that the tension between the sphere of transcendence and the sphere of “direct experience” is not merely an adjunct of metaphysical inquiry but its defining subject matter (18). Aristotle understood this, and understood also that metaphysics has always a “twofold aim”; for, even as Aristotelian metaphysics criticizes Plato's attempt to define essence in opposition to the world of the senses, it tries to “extract an essential being from the sensible, empirical world, and thereby to save it.” True metaphysics, Adorno claims, is an effort to go beyond thought in the very act of defining the boundaries of thought. In his words, it is “the exertion of thought to save what at the same time it destroys” (20).

1968: On Social, Epistemic, and Historiographic(?) Revolutions

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto D. Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Young Students ◽  
Historic Significance ◽  
Agent Of Change

This article addresses the meaning and significance of the “world revolution of 1968,” as well as the historiography of 1968. I critically interrogate how the production of a narrative about 1968 and the creation of ethnic studies, despite its world-historic significance, has tended to perpetuate a limiting, essentialized and static notion of “the student” as the primary actor and an inherent agent of change. Although students did play an enormous role in the events leading up to, through, and after 1968 in various parts of the world—and I in no way wish to diminish this fact—this article nonetheless argues that the now hegemonic narrative of a student-led revolt has also had a number of negative consequences, two of which will be the focus here. One problem is that the generation-driven models that situate 1968 as a revolt of the young students versus a presumably older generation, embodied by both their parents and the dominant institutions of the time, are in effect a sociosymbolic reproduction of modernity/coloniality’s logic or driving impulse and obsession with newness. Hence an a priori valuation is assigned to the new, embodied in this case by the student, at the expense of the presumably outmoded old. Secondly, this apparent essentializing of “the student” has entrapped ethnic studies scholars, and many of the period’s activists (some of whom had been students themselves), into said logic, thereby risking the foreclosure of a politics beyond (re)enchantment or even obsession with newness yet again.

Divine Machines

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
Living World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Generation Theory

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

A Critique of Modernist Synthesis in Islamic Thought

1994 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-503
Author(s):  
Masudul Alum Choudhury
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Scientific Investigation ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Muslim Scholars

Is it the realm of theoretical constructs or positive applications thatdefines the essence of scientific inquiry? Is there unison between thenormative and the positive, between the inductive and deductivecontents, between perception and reality, between the micro- andmacro-phenomena of reality as technically understood? In short, isthere a possibility for unification of knowledge in modernist epistemologicalcomprehension? Is knowledge perceived in conceptionand application as systemic dichotomy between the purely epistemic(in the metaphysically a priori sense) and the purely ontic (in thepurely positivistically a posteriori sense) at all a reflection of reality?Is knowledge possible in such a dichotomy or plurality?Answers to these foundational questions are primal in order tounderstand a critique of modernist synthesis in Islamic thought thathas been raging among Muslim scholars for some time now. Theconsequences emanating from the modernist approach underlie muchof the nature of development in methodology, thinking, institutions,and behavior in the Muslim world throughout its history. They arefound to pervade more intensively, I will argue here, as the consequenceof a taqlid of modernism among Islamic thinkers. I will thenargue that this debility has arisen not because of a comparativemodem scientific investigation, but due to a failure to fathom theuniqueness of a truly Qur'anic epistemological inquiry in the understandingof the nature of the Islamic socioscientific worldview ...

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.

How Reality is Reasonable

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C. Williams
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Dimensional Manifold ◽  
The World ◽  
Being There ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Fundamental Entity ◽  
Spatiotemporal Relations ◽  
Priori Knowledge

This chapter begins with a systematic presentation of the doctrine of actualism. According to actualism, all that exists is actual, determinate, and of one way of being. There are no possible objects, nor is there any indeterminacy in the world. In addition, there are no ways of being. It is proposed that actual entities stand in three fundamental relations: mereological, spatiotemporal, and resemblance relations. These relations govern the fundamental entities. Each fundamental entity stands in parthood relations, spatiotemporal relations, and resemblance relations to other entities. The resulting picture is one that represents the world as a four-dimensional manifold of actual ‘qualitied contents’—upon which all else supervenes. It is then explained how actualism accounts for classes, quantity, number, causation, laws, a priori knowledge, necessity, and induction.

Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stroud
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Structural Description ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
The World ◽  
Empirical Realism

This chapter presents a straightforward structural description of Immanuel Kant’s conception of what the transcendental deduction is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to do it. The ‘deduction’ Kant thinks is needed for understanding the human mind would establish and explain our ‘right’ or ‘entitlement’ to something we seem to possess and employ in ‘the highly complicated web of human knowledge’. This is: experience, concepts, and principles. The chapter explains the point and strategy of the ‘deduction’ as Kant understands it, as well as the demanding conditions of its success, without entering into complexities of interpretation or critical assessment of the degree of success actually achieved. It also analyses Kant’s arguments regarding a priori concepts as well as a posteriori knowledge of the world around us, along with his claim that our position in the world must be understood as ‘empirical realism’.

Hegel's Critique of Foundationalism in the “Doctrine of Essence”

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Houlgate
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Logical Structure ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
The World

It is a commonplace among certain recent philosophers that there is no such thing as the essence of anything. Nietzsche, for example, asserts that things have no essence of their own, because they are nothing but ceaselessly changing ways of acting on, and reacting to, other things. Wittgenstein, famously, rejects the idea that there is an essence to language and thought — at least if we mean by that some a priori logical structure underlying our everyday utterances. Finally, Richard Rorty urges that we “abandon […] the notion of ‘essence’ altogether”, along with “the notion that man's essence is to be a knower of essences”.It would be wrong to maintain that these writers understand the concept of essence in precisely the same way, or that they are all working towards the same philosophical goal. Nevertheless, they do share one aim in common: to undermine the idea that there is some deeper reality or identity underlying and grounding what we encounter in the world, what we say and what we do. That is to say, they may all be described as anti-foundationalist thinkers — thinkers who want us to attend to the specific processes and practices of nature and humanity without understanding them to be the product of some fundamental essence or “absolute”.

scholarly journals The weirdest people in the world?

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 61-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Henrich ◽  
Steven J. Heine ◽  
Ara Norenzayan
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Spatial Reasoning ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Behavioral Sciences ◽  
The World ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Behavioral Phenomenon

AbstractBehavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

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