The Quasi-Empirical Epistemology of Mathematics

This paper clarifies and discusses Imre Lakatos’ claim that mathematics is quasi-empirical in one of his less-discussed papers A Renaissance of Empiricism in the Recent Philosophy of Mathematics. I argue that (1) Lakatos’ motivation for classifying mathematics as a quasi-empirical theory is epistemological; (2) what can be called the quasi-empirical epistemology of mathematics is not correct; (3) analysing where the quasi-empirical epistemology of mathematics goes wrong will bring to light reasons to endorse a pluralist view of mathematics.

Causation and mnemonic roles: on Fernández’s Functionalism

Debates about causation have dominated recent philosophy of memory. While causal theorists have argued that an appropriate causal connection to a past experience is necessary for remembering, their opponents have argued that this necessity condition needs to be relaxed. Recently, Jordi Fernández (2018; 2019) has attempted to provide such a relaxation. On his functionalist theory of remembering, a given state need not be caused by a past experience to qualify as a memory; it only has to realize the relevant functional role in the subject’s mental economy. In this comment, I argue that Fernández’s theory doesn’t advance the debate about memory causation. I propose that this debate is best understood as being about the existence of systems, which support kinds of interactions that map onto the relations dictated by (causal) theories. Since Fernández’s functionalism tells us very little about this empirical question, the theoretical gains from endorsing it are minimal.

Attitudes and the (dis)continuity between memory and imagination

The current dispute between causalists and simulationists in philosophy of memory has led to opposing attempts to characterize the relationship between memory and imagination. In a recent overview of this debate, Perrin and Michaelian (2017) have suggested that the dispute over the (dis)continuity between memory and imagination boils down to the question of whether a causal connection to a past event is necessary for remembering. By developing an argument based on an analogy to perception, I argue that this dispute should instead be viewed as a dispute about the nature of the attitudes involved in remembering and imagining. The focus on attitudes, rather than on causal connections, suggests a new way of conceiving of the relationship between memory and imagination that has been overlooked in recent philosophy of memory.

Freedom to Choose Between Good and Evil: Theological Anthropology in Discussion with Philosophy

After a brief discussion of the terms determinism and free will, the paper sets out to compare some recent philosophical approaches to the problem of free will with a theological anthropology account of the notion. It aims to defend the claim, that even though different kind of questions are asked on both sides, they tackle similar issues and a complementary approach is needed. Recent philosophy considers the problem mostly from the standpoint of logic, naturalist evolutionary ontology and cognitive science. In the Christian theological tradition, the idea of free will has been discussed mostly from the perspective of the problem of sin and grace, thus on the grounds of soteriology, hamartiology and theological ethics. The paper shows similarities between the approaches, mainly between the problem of physical determinism and theological determinism and also divine foreknowledge.

Nature

This essay explores ways in which a notion of “weak nature” drawn from certain strains of recent philosophy (especially works by Adrian Johnston and Leonard Lawlor) might be mobilized in critical engagements with contemporary and historical writings on music and sound. To thematize nature’s weakness in this context means to understand ecological phenomena as rooted in contingency, transience, non-identity, and non-presence. Through readings of texts by Timothy Morton, Charles O. Nussbaum, Gary Tomlinson, and G. W. F. Hegel, this essay shows how philosophical thought on music often works to deny or foreclose nature’s weakness, rooting accounts of musical experience or music history (including music’s deep evolutionary history) in visions of nature as consistent, gapless, and present. This same inquiry, however, suggests that musical thought that gives fuller rein to nature’s inconsistency can do greater justice to the spectra of difference that range across the many phenomena of musicking.

Affect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead

The book develops a process metaphysical conception of subjectivity from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead. This alters existential orientations towards affect and attention in ways described as ecological attunement. The study is guided by two methodological commitments: (i) demonstrating the importance and relevance of responsible speculative thinking and (ii) translating metaphysical ideas into their existential implications. Both commitments are motivated by a contemporary context of ecological crisis and paradigm transformation. In the course of its argument, the book relates the work of Deleuze and Whitehead to other speculative trends in recent philosophy, particularly posthumanisms and speculative realisms. Deleuze and Whitehead are read in a shared lineage of radical empiricism that emphasizes processes and events as metaphysically primary. A key theme is understanding subjectivity through dynamic processes of individuation at variable scales where feeling/affect and attention acquire metaphysical rather than psychological scope and status. Whitehead’s analysis of “feeling” as metaphysical operation is explored in relation to Deleuze and Guattari's Spinozist-inspired deployment of affect. Attending participates as a crucial bridge between the metaphysical and the existential in processes of consolidation of present real actual occasions. The book develops existential implications of these claims in the context of an expanded philosophical conception of ecology. These implications challenge dominant modes of subjectification under what Guattari calls “Integrated World Capitalism” (IWC). The book concludes with discussion of how speculative philosophy may contribute to alternative futures.

Valid for What? On the Very Idea of Unconditional Validity

What is a valid measuring instrument? Recent philosophy has attended to logic of justification of measures, such as construct validation, but not to the question of what it means for an instrument to be a valid measure of a construct. A prominent approach grounds validity in the existence of a causal link between the attribute and its detectable manifestations. Some of its proponents claim that, therefore, validity does not depend on pragmatics and research context. In this paper, I cast doubt on the possibility of a context-independent causal account of validity (what I call unconditional validity). I assess several versions, arguing that all of them fail to judge the validity of measuring instruments correctly. Because different research purposes require different properties from measuring instruments, no account of validity succeeds without referring to the specific research purpose that creates the need for measurement in the first place.

Peter Browne on the Metaphysics of Knowledge

The central unifying element in the philosophy of Peter Browne (d. 1735) is his theory of analogy. Although Browne's theory was originally developed to deal with some problems about religious language, Browne regards analogy as a general purpose cognitive mechanism whereby we substitute an idea we have to stand for an object of which we, strictly speaking, have no idea. According to Browne, all of our ideas are ideas of sense, and ideas of sense are ideas of material things. Hence we can conceive of spiritual things – including even our own spirit – only by analogy. One interesting application Browne makes of his theory is an account of how concepts such as knowledge can be correctly applied to beings that have no intrinsic properties in common, such as non-human animals, humans, angels, and God. I argue that this is best understood as what, in the contemporary literature, is known as a ‘multiple realizability’ problem and that Browne's solution to this problem has important similarities to functionalist theories in recent philosophy of mind.

Philosophy as communication theory

There has been comparatively little attention for the fundamental ontology of communication in recent philosophy. Nevertheless, from classical metaphysical accounts of relationality and communal being to the analysis of intersubjectivity in phenomenology and to concrete existence as understood by process philosophy, the communicative structure of the act of being has been, if not explicitly then implicitly, a perennial component of metaphysical reflection. Communication theory can be conceived in such a way that it takes this ontological dimension into account. The ramifications of connecting being to communication in this way are explored in discussion with the conceptualizations of communication in integrationism and biosemiotics. An interpretation of Gabriel Marcel’s existential analysis of “my life” is used to show what philosophy as communication theory (in the strong sense of the notion elaborated here) might look like.