The Nature and Concept of Meta-artistic Objects

This paper introduces two concepts useful for the understanding of current trends in art. One of them is the concept of meta-art, which is proposed here because of the perception that contemporary art goes beyond the traditional borders of art, transforming the aesthetic question (is it beauty?) to a more ontological question (what is it?). Diverse elements are identified at the borders of artistic expression, as the question starts to implicate the changes caused by the notion of the meta-artistic. The second concept deals with the other main category of judgement of art, which was formerly defined by beauty, and yet now gets displaced in the limits of the meta-artistic by another process that we call aesthetic impact. This given pair of theoretical instruments help in a better understanding the astonishing objects developed by the artists of our time.

What Is Science About?

The linkage between epistemological and ontological claims, between calling a theory true because it correctly accounts for experimental data and claiming that therefore it is true of reality, became an issue in nineteenth-century physical science. In particular, Fourier’s mathematical theory of heat explicitly set aside the ontological question of what heat was in reality in favor of a mathematical account that correctly described and predicted how heat behaved. The founders of thermodynamics set aside the question of what matter really was, in favor of a mathematical theory that described how matter behaved in its interactions with energy. Maxwell proposed a mathematical theory of electromagnetic waves propagated through a space-filling aether, without identifying a physical structure for the aether or a causal mechanism for its action. Finally, the millennial acceptance of Euclidean geometry as a true account of space because of its deductive logical character was undermined by the creation of non-Euclidean geometries.

Metaphors and their semantic predictability in dyadic interaction

Philosophy of dialogue is primarily concerned with the relation of I to you, alternatively as the I-and-you（I ⇄ you） sphere of relation, in Martin Buber’s terminology, on the basis of primary words such as I, you, and it. It is convincingly held that the primary words do not refer to or denote or signify things but they intimate human relations. Grounded on primary words, metaphorical expressions are created to bridge over the cognition gaps encountered in the process of dyadic interaction between I and you. To interpret the spontaneously created metaphorical expressions has become intuitive responses frequenting the participants I and you in the ongoing dyadic interaction. In what way I and you collaboratively predict the meaning of metaphorical expressions is an ontological question which might be tackled from the perspective of epistemology. Therefore, it is in epistemology assumed that the semantic predictability of metaphorical expressions in any dyadic interaction can be conceptually realized by means of the four types of coherence in dialogism such as dictional coherence, emotional coherence, intentional coherence and rational coherence. The four types of coherence might be created saliently either in combination with each other or in isolation. No matter what kind of salience is identified, the I-and-you sphere of relation has at most sixteen channels for predicting the semantics of metaphor created in actual dyadic interaction.

Earth in practice: Uncertainty, expertise and the expected Istanbul earthquake

In 1999, two devastating earthquakes occurred in Northwestern Turkey, which claimed around 18,000 lives. Since the disaster, many scientific studies and projects, both international and national, have been conducted, concluding that another earthquake at the magnitude of at least six will hit Istanbul. Even though there is a consensus among scientists that an earthquake will happen in Istanbul, there is a plethora of different theories and arguments about the anticipated earthquake. This paper is an historical account of how different technoscientific practices have enacted different North Anatolian Faults stretching across Anatolia and Marmara Sea. The multiplicity of the fault does not emerge as an epistemic problem of having different perspectives, but it is an ontological question of how plural realities are being made in different scientific practices. We argue that scientific uncertainties emerge when these different faults do not fit together in technoscientific circles and across public venues.

On being insecure: Heidegger’s fears

Security happens in the future. Threats to our security concern the potential of a future event, of possibility and uncertainty. Fear, omnipresent in popular culture is thereby non-uniform. Like time itself, it intensifies and softens, accelerates and slows, and disrupts and destabilises as a function of many variables. This article re-interprets the phenomenon of insecurity by reading it together with Heidegger’s analytic of time as a function of our proximity to being as fundamental ontological question, one which unfolds in the form of a threatening future.

The radical and requisite openness of viable systems - implications for healthcare strategy and practice

This paper begs an ontological question about the nature of health and challenges some underpinning assumptions in western healthcare. In its analysis, the structure of health, in its various statuses, is framed as a complex adaptive system made up of dynamically interacting subsystems that include the physiological, psychological, spiritual, social, cultural, and more, realms. Furthermore, openness in complex systems such as health, is necessary for the exchange of energy, information, and resources. Yet, within healthcare much effort is invested in constraining systems’ behaviours, whether they be systems of knowledge, states of health, models of care, and more. This paper draws on the complexity sciences and Levinasian philosophy to explicate the essential role of system openness in individual and population health, and the viability of healthcare systems. It highlights holism to be ‘not whole-ism’, and system openness to be, not just a reality, but a critical feature of viability. Hence requisite openness is advocated as essential to efficacious and ethical healthcare practice and strategy, and vital for good quality health.

Christian Wolff über motivierende Gründe und handlungsrelevante Irrtümer

In this paper, I discuss Christian Wolff’s conception of motivating and normative reasons. My aim is to show that in the discussion of error cases, Wolff pursues a strategy that is strikingly similar to the strategy of contemporary defenders of nicht-psychologist accounts of motivating reasons. According to many nicht-psychologist views, motivating reasons are facts. My aim is to show that Wolff’s motivation in pursuing this strategy is very different. The point is that due to his commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Wolff has to show that error cases are compatible with the PSR. The issue is worth discussing because it is not yet sufficiently explored what motivating reasons are, according to Wolff, and how they relate, in substance, to normative reasons. Methodologically, my approach can be characterized as one of “mutual illumination”: I think it is possible to highlight some crucial ambiguities of Wolff’s conception against the backdrop of the contemporary conception of motivating reasons, but also to question the importance and role of the ontological question of what motivating reasons are in contemporary discussions against the backdrop of Wolff’s position.

Critical Realism

This chapter evaluates critical realism, a term which refers to a philosophy of science connected to the broader approach of scientific realism. In contrast to other philosophies of science, such as positivism and post-positivism, critical realism presents an alternative view on the questions of what is ‘real’ and how one can generate scientific knowledge of the ‘real’. How one answers these questions has implications for how one studies science and society. The critical realist answer starts by prioritizing the ontological question over the epistemological one, by asking: What must the world be like for science to be possible? Critical realism holds the key ontological belief of scientific realism that there is a reality which exists independent of our knowledge and experience of it. Critical realists posit that reality is more complex, and made up of more than the directly observable. More specifically, critical realism understands reality as ‘stratified’ and composed of three ontological domains: the empirical, the actual, and the real. Here lies the basis for causation.

An ESR Framework for the Study of Consciousness

I will argue that, in an interdisciplinary study of consciousness, epistemic structural realism (ESR) can offer a feasible philosophical background for the study of consciousness and its associated neurophysiological phenomena in neuroscience and cognitive science while also taking into account the mathematical structures involved in this type of research. Applying the ESR principles also to the study of the neurophysiological phenomena associated with free will (or rather conscious free choice) and with various alterations of consciousness (AOCs) generated by various pathologies such as epilepsy would add explanatory value to the matter. This interdisciplinary approach would be in tune with Quine’s well known idea that philosophy is not simple conceptual analysis but is continuous with science and actually represents an abstract branch of the empirical research. The ESR could thus resonate with scientific models of consciousness such as the global neuronal workspace model (inspired by the global workspace theory—GWT) and the integrated information theory (IIT) model. While structural realism has already been employed in physics or biology, its application as a meta-theory contextualising and relating various scientific findings on consciousness is new indeed. Out of the two variants: ontic structural realism (OSR) and epistemic structural realism (ESR), the latter can be considered more suitable for the study of consciousness and its associated neurophysiological phenomena because it removes the pressure of the still unanswered ‘What is consciousness?’ ontological question and allows us to concentrate instead on the ‘What can we know about consciousness?’ epistemological question.

Collective Intentionality

Collective intentionality concerns the intentionality of groups or collectives. Intentionality is the property of being about, directed at, oriented toward, or representing objects, events, properties, and states of affairs. Examples of intentional states (states with intentionality, not just intentions) are belief, desire, hope, intention, admiration, perception, guilt, love, grief, fear, and so on. Collective intentionality involves joint, shared, or group intentionality and the intentionality of members (qua members) of groups that have joint or shared attitudes. More broadly, the study of collective intentionality concerns forms of intentionality that underpin social reality. What is distinctive about the study of collective intentionality within the broader study of social interactions and structures is its focus on the conceptual, ontological, and psychological features of joint or shared actions and attitudes, that is, actions and attitudes of (or apparent attributions of such to) groups or collectives, their relations to individual actions and attitudes, and their implications for the nature of social groups and their functioning. It subsumes collective action, intention, thought, reasoning, emotion, phenomenology, decision-making, responsibility, knowledge, trust, rationality, cooperation, competition, and related issues, and how these underpin social practices, conventions, institutions, and social ontology. The two main theoretical questions in the study of collective intentionality concern the ontology and psychology of collective agency and collective attitudes. The main ontological question is whether we should admit into our ontology group subjects of intentional states or attribute intentionality only to their members. The main psychological questions are, if we admit group subjects of intentional states, first, how to understand what they come to, whether they are the same or different than the intentional states we attribute to individuals and if different exactly how, and, second, what is special about the attitudes of individuals who participate in group action or whose attitudes underpin attributions of intentionality to groups? More specifically, can we understand what is special about the attitudes of individuals who participate in group agency or sustain the potential for group agency in terms of concepts already available in our understanding of individual agency, or must we introduce new concepts either of the modes of intending, believing, etc., or in the contents of such attitudes? Both questions concern the debate between methodological individualists and holists about the social, the first with respect to its ontology, the second with respect to its ideology.