Essences, Kinds, Universals

The chapter provides an account of essences according to which essences are not entities, but what it is to be a kind of entity or to be a particular entity of its kind. To grasp something’s essence is to have a sense of what it takes to be the kind of entity it is. Thinking about Bunkin as a rabbit requires having some conception of what it takes to be a rabbit. Trivially, everything is what it is, everything, however outlandish, has what it takes to be whatever it is. Essences might be thought to play the role of universals. Were that so, universals would be metaphysically unremarkable, and not a species of general entity, a thought in keeping with a conception of properties as modes. The chapter introduces the notion of ‘slippage’ in the course of discussing attempts by philosophers to align the manifest and scientific images.

Development of Online Virtual Laboratory Platform for Supporting Real Laboratory Experiments in Multi Domains

The increasing use of online virtual laboratories (OVLs) in educational institutions as a recent educational technology application necessitates developing a new educational platform for assisting instructors in using such technology in the teaching process without web programming obstacles. The OVLs are online environments that provide students with several types of content such as simulations, videos, scientific images, and infographics related to real laboratory experiments. This article proposes a unified online virtual laboratory platform (OVLP) to support instructors who teach real laboratory experiments in multi-domains. To evaluate the proposed platform, five university instructors and five experts of ICT in education have participated in this study. The data were collected using online questionnaires for both specialists, respectively. Regarding the results, they confirm that the proposed platform is acceptable for teaching real laboratory experiments, especially in the tested domains.

Metaphysics

A discussion of the inevitability of metaphysics centered on the question, how are the appearances related to reality? The universe as we encounter it in our everyday and scientific pursuits, what Wilfrid Sellars called the ‘manifest image’, presents itself as strikingly at odds with the ‘scientific image’, the universe as revealed by physics. Every reflective agent must eventually confront the problem of how the manifest and scientific images are related, how the appearances stand to reality. Three responses to the problem are discussed, and a fourth is introduced. A holistic conception of metaphysics—a ‘package deal’—is endorsed, two competing worldviews, ‘Aristotelianism’ and ‘Humeanism’ are set out, followed by brief chapter-by-chapter summaries of the book’s contents.

Reconciliation

The chapter explores the idea, implicit in earlier chapters, that the manifest and scientific images are ultimately unified. An Aristotelian cosmology of interacting objects facilitates our negotiation of the manifest image, but the scientific image could turn out to be better served by Humeanism. Efforts to reconcile the manifest and scientific image that regard one or the other as provisional or illusory, and those that depict the scientific image as accommodating the ‘fundamental’ things and the manifest image as applicable to less-than-fundamental, ‘higher-level’ things, are examined and found wanting. A fourth option is proposed: the scientific image gives us an account of what the manifest image is an image of. The nature of the truthmakers for truths embedded in our Aristotelian manifest image could turn out to be Humean. More dramatically, Hume and Spinoza might be seen to converge.

Appearance in Reality

Appearance in Reality addresses topics in fundamental metaphysics, extending positions developed in From and Ontological Point of View (2003) and The Universe as We Find It (2012). This is not simply ‘Part III’ of a three-part project, however. The book takes what readers familiar with those earlier volumes would likely regard as a surprising turn, finding common ground between divergent ‘Aristotelian’ and ‘Humean’ cosmologies in Spinoza. The book includes considerable new and newly framed material on essences, universals, relations, emergence, hylomorphism, modality, conscious experiences, free will, and related topics. A substance–property ontology is proposed, one in which properties are not universals, but modes, particular modifications of particular substances. The ontology is meant to be consistent with both atomistic and non-atomistic cosmologies, or with whatever cosmology physics eventually settles on. One of the book’s unifying themes concerns the problem of reconciling what Wilfrid Sellars called the manifest and scientific images. The aim is to understand how the appearances comport with our best guess as to the nature of reality. The question of the relation of appearance to reality has always been central to metaphysics, but it is one faced by any reflective agent. Its unavoidability drives metaphysics. Far from being an idle pastime, metaphysics is not optional.

Roots of Things

This chapter returns to idea that the manifest image concerns a higher-level reality, dependent on, but distinct from a more fundamental reality, the characterization of which falls to physics, noting that a more appealing option is available. Although the universe depicted by physics is apparently at odds with the Aristotelian character of the manifest image, the two images are not images of distinct realities, but different ways of depicting a single reality. The possibility that the scientific image is Humean in the manner of Lewis and Williams is explored and its implications for change and efficient causation discussed, setting the stage for Chapter 13, which concerns the reconciliation of the manifest and scientific images.

Neuroimaging. How to Question Scientific Images and Their Artistic Value

Unquestionable holders of aesthetic content, images have a well-known role even in conveying scientific knowledge. In the present work, we focus on the epistemological role of images within neuroscience. We first analyze the concepts of representation, similarity, and informativeness. Second, we discuss relevant case-studies, i.e., images by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and how the pictorial interventions commonly applied on them might have an impact on their informational content. Finally, we explore the notion of imagination as a relevant faculty for modelling neuroscientific theories and the concept of creativity as an instrument to aesthetically modify brain images. These manipulations enable images to achieve the scientific purpose, altering the relation of similarity between the image and the studied phenomenon. In conclusion, this process leads to rethinking the role of the neuroscientist as an active observer.

Galileis Fernrohr und das Menschen-Bild

The new biotechnologies have triggered profound questions about what it means to be human, as the debates about ‘our’ image of humans show. How we deal with human life before birth or with individuals at the end of life affects our self-image. We have delegated these dilemmas to applied ethics, which, however, avoids anthropological questions. This book attempts to identify the crisis in our present self-understanding in the context of the last 500 years and scientific images of man. It shows that scientific anthropology has been determined by the medical profession since the beginning and is driven by technology—just like applied ethics today.

Popular Science Images: Reflections on Visual Practices in Science Communication

Images play a considerable role in the communication of scientific knowledge. This article deals with the recontextualization of originally scientific images in multimodal popular science articles. The focus is on the visual editing of these images, and thus on an aspect of visual design in science communication. I present different types of multimodal transcriptive procedures that are related to the recontextualization and readdressing of images in popular science contexts. Since these procedures may be accompanied by a change in the legibility of visualizations, I will conclude by suggesting possible implications for the evidence potential of popular science images.