Public communication and the role of social media in enhancing democratic innovation: the case of the City of Bologna

Social media represents for public administration an important area to experi-ment forms of democratic innovation, however this potentiality is often unex-plored. This article, with a focus on the case of the city of Bologna aims to explore 1) whether and how public communication practices enhanced in local participa-tory processes can support a substantial form of participation; 2) which roles so-cial media specifically play in enhancing a participatory environment; 3) which kind of dynamics of interaction emerge between public administration and citizens and the challenges which need to be addressed by a public communication orient-ed to the public engagement.

The Body in Jesus’ Tomb as a Hylemorphic Puzzle: a Response to Jaeger and Sienkiewicz and an Application for Christological Anthropology

In a recent paper, Andrew Jaeger and Jeremy Sienkiewicz attempt to provide an answer consistent with Thomistic hylemorphism for the following question: what was the ontological status of Christ’s dead body? Answering this question has christological anthropological import: whatever one says about Christ’s dead body, has implications for what one can say about any human’s dead body. Jaeger and Sienkiewicz answer the question this way: that Jesus’ corpse was prime matter lacking a substantial form; that it was existing form-less matter. I argue that their argument for this answer is unsound. I say, given Thomistic hylemorphism, there was no human body in Jesus’s tomb between his death and resurrection. Once I show their argument to be unsound, I provide a christological anthropological upshot: since there was no human body in Christ’s tomb, there are no human bodies in any tomb.

No Substances in a Substance

In this paper I analyze the most controversial thesis of Aristotelian substantialism, namely, that substances cannot be composed of other substances. I call this position the Mereological Limitation Thesis (MLT). I find MLT valid and defend it. My argument for MLT is a version of the argument from the unicity of substantial form. Every substance can have only one substantial form, thus, if some substances compose the object O, then what binds them is only a set of their accidental forms (relations) and in the result thereof O is not a substance (O is not informed by a substantial form). I argue against the relativization of the substantiality of forms to the level of composition by showing that substantial forms must be absolutely identity-independent. In the last section I specify the ontological status of parts of substances and argue that they are spatially distributed bundles of accidents of a compound substance itself.

Potens per accidens sine accidentibus: Ockham on Material Substances and Their Essential Powers

Medieval scholastics share a commitment to a substance-accident ontology and to an analysis of efficient causation in which agents act in virtue of their powers. Given these commitments, it seems ready-made which entities are the agents or powers: substances are agents and their accidents powers. William of Ockham, however, offers a rather different analysis concerning material substances and their essential powers, which this article explores. The article first examines Ockham’s account of propria and his reasons for claiming that a material substance is essentially powerful sine accidentibus. However, the article subsequently argues that, given Ockham’s reductionism about material substance, only substantial forms – never substances – are truly agents and powers. Thus, a material substance is essentially powerful but only by courtesy – per accidens, as Ockham calls it – because it has a non-identical part, its substantial form, which does all the causal work by itself, per se.

Aristotelian Powers, Mechanism, and Final Causes in the Late Middle Ages

Henrik Lagerlund explores the topic of final causality in the High and later Middle Ages. He argues that the seventeenth-century mechanists weren’t the only ones critiquing and rejecting final causality. There were earlier figures who developed a form of mechanical materialism that eschewed final causes, most notably William of Ockham and John Buridan. Lagerlund begins with the way that Ockham and Buridan in the fourteenth century understood the mereology of the body. Bodily substances were composed of essential parts and integral parts. Essential parts were its metaphysical constituents, its matter and substantial form. Integral parts were its various extended bits. This distinction generated a metaphysical divide between material objects with extended substantial forms and simple, immaterial substances like God, angels, and the human soul. And this divide raises a number of philosophical puzzles for the entities on either side of it. Of special concern to Lagerlund is the numeric identity and unity of material substances across time. Lagerlund shows how Buridan in particular struggled to make sense of the identity and unity of material substances through time. In the end, Buridan could only say that material substances are successively identical through time; they are not totally or partially identical.

Thirteenth-Century Engagements with Thomas Aquinas

Before he gained the status of received authority, Thomas Aquinas influenced scholastic thought by shaping conversations around and by establishing approaches to specific topics. Scholastic thinkers engaged in these conversations and with these specific topics in various ways, both directly and indirectly. While the Correctoria controversy reflected direct engagements with Aquinas, whether critical or supportive, the majority of scholastic engagements with Thomas was more indirect. Typical examples can be found in the works of Giles of Rome, Siger of Brabant, Godfrey of Fontaines, and Henry of Ghent. Among other topics, these thinkers engaged with Thomas on the possibility of an eternal world, on the unicity of substantial form, and on the relationship between esse and essentia. Engagements with Aquinas were complicated by Stephen Tempier’s condemnations of 1277, which touched upon some Thomistic positions and more generally reframed scholastic approaches to philosophical speculations with theological bearings.

Haecceities

This chapter is an account of the particularity of ordinary concrete objects like balls and bikes that appear within our experience. It argues that certain sorts of haecceities, which is to say irreducible individualities or bare particularities, are required to account for the particularity of such things. These haecceities involve modal structure of a distinctive sort. Various accounts are explored. But the central model developed involves haecceities of minimal spatial and temporal material bits, which help in turn to constitute the present time slice of a perceived object. This time slice could occur at different times or in different possible worlds, and instantiates a substantial form that constrains, in a perdurantist manner, available forms of identity over time rooted in concrete relations.

Universals

Immanent realism is the view that some fundamental properties are immanent universals, entities that can exist wholly in different places at the same time that yet only exist when instanced. This chapter develops the proper immanent realist account of the basic properties and relations that appear in our experience. It includes a new understanding of the relation between determinate and determinable universals. Another novelty involves determinable structural universals constituting one fundamental substantial form of ordinary concrete particulars. Various other complexities of modal structure are developed. Cases discussed include phenomenal color, other sensory properties, spatial and temporal relations, causal powers, and substantial forms. Some affinities but also differences with transcendental realism are considered.