Dialogic Archaeology of Multiple Times and Ontological Pluralism: A Case from Türkiye

Ontological pluralism is the view that there are different ways of being. Historically, ways of being are aligned with the ontological categories. This paper is about to investigate why there is such a connection, and how it should be understood. Ontological pluralism suffers from an objection, according to which ontological pluralism collapses into ontological monism, i.e., there is only one way to be. Admitting to ontological categories can save ontological pluralism from this objection if ways of being ground ontological categories.

Participation in budgeting: A critical anthropological approach

Mathematical platonism is the view that abstract mathematical objects exist. Ontological pluralism is the view that there are many modes of existence. This paper examines the prospects for plural platonism, the view that results from combining mathematical platonism and ontological pluralism. I will argue that some forms of platonism are in harmony with ontological pluralism, while other forms of platonism are in tension with it. This shows that there are some interesting connections between the platonism–antiplatonism dispute and recent debates over ontological pluralism.

This paper analyses the institutional arrangements for the Waikato and Waipā Rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand to consider how effectively they promote Indigenous rights and the exercise of Māori law and relationships with place. We ask how these arrangements shape power relations and dynamics among different (human and non-human) actors and whether they foster relationality and create the enabling conditions that generate alternatives to modernist ways of governing. After examining the detail of these complex institutional arrangements in a way that exposes their ontological foundations, this paper argues that, despite limitations, particularly in relation to implementation, these arrangements operate to increase Iwi authority and, thus, promote Indigenous rights, and legal and ontological pluralism. This outcome demonstrates a vibrancy and plurality of thinking in relation to new models of law and institutional arrangements in settler-colonial contexts—beyond those grounded in rights of nature—and that there are a variety of pathways towards the realisation of Indigenous rights and authority, and the related promotion of legal and ontological pluralism.

Ontological pluralism is the doctrine that there are different ways or modes of being. In contemporary guise, it is the doctrine that a logically perspicuous description of reality will use multiple quantifiers which cannot be thought of as ranging over a single domain. Although thought defeated for some time, recent defenses have shown a number of arguments against the view unsound. However, another worry looms: that despite looking like an attractive alternative, ontological pluralism is really no different than its counterpart, ontological monism. In this paper, after explaining the worry in detail, I argue that considerations dealing with the nature of the logic ontological pluralists ought to endorse, coupled with an attractive philosophical thesis about the relationship between logic and metaphysics, show this worry to be unfounded.

This chapter explores the connections between truth pluralism and ontological pluralism, and develops the features of a global pluralism, which includes pluralism about truth and existence. It begins by noting that some motivations for truth pluralism can also be applied to ontological pluralism, before demonstrating how a method similar to the argument in Chapter 5 for truth pluralism can also be used to give an argument for ontological pluralism. It then discusses how the views complement each other, and how ontological pluralism can add to our understanding of domains by highlighting differences between the ways things exist. Once the pluralist metaphysical picture is up and running, its explanatory power is demonstrated by comparing it to global deflationism. In doing so, further problems for global deflationism are exposed.

Within the heterodox economic literature on pluralism, attention has predominately focussed on epistemic and methodological levels. The response to the question of what ontological pluralism could mean, and its contribution to the debate, remains limited. This paper argues for greater attention to be given to ontological pluralism, not only because it enriches the existing discussions around pluralism in the heterodox literature but it also provides support for a plurality of epistemological standards and methodological approaches. The paper proposes an alternative definition of ontological pluralism based on the work of McDaniel and Turner. Both argue that ontological pluralism should be understood as saying that there are different ways to exist and that acceptance of the semantic characteristics of ontological questions and statements within different ontological discourses are essential in a proper definition. This paper details their definition and explores its consequences with an analysis of the Searle–Lawson dispute on social objects.

This chapter explores how ontological pluralism should be formulated. We will see that similar issues arise to those that we saw in the formulation of truth pluralism, and that the models from the truth pluralism debate are applicable here as well. It begins by discussing in more detail the role of quantifiers in the existence debate, before turning to ontological pluralism itself. Strong ontological pluralism is examined, and the extent to which it suffers from analogues of the mixing problems we saw in the last chapter is evaluated, before other forms of ontological pluralism are looked at. After examining McDaniel’s (2009, 2010a) formulation, a form of determination pluralism for existence is developed, and then the question of whether existence is abundant or sparse is discussed.

The paper discusses the prospects of integrating the concepts of Digital Earth and Smart Cities to achieve synergy and improve global governance by harmonizing decision supports at different scales. Achieving this goal requires overcoming the scale-dependent differentiation of information systems and thus integration of Smart Cities with their geospatial context. A possible approach can be based on the unique property of spatial and temporal localizations – their invariance for all subjects. Spatial and temporal localizations are fundamentally different from classical "thematic" ontologies, inevitably contradictory and relative. Implementing the concept of "ontological pluralism" will allow the seamless integration of heterogeneous information into a single spatial and temporal volume. The urgency of practical implementation of such systems is demonstrated briefly against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to find new approaches to the processing and analyzing environmental factors.

This chapter develops a version of ontological pluralism that appeals to semantically primitive restricted quantification and naturalness. It also articulate different ways of formulating versions of ontological pluralism. Although the author defends ontological pluralism from some objections, the main goals of this chapter are to get some versions of ontological pluralism on the table, show that they are intelligible and worthy of consideration, and show how concerns about ontological pluralism connect up with historical and contemporary meta-metaphysical issues. The chapter considers versions of ontological pluralism that say that substances have a different mode of being than attributes, that things in time have a different mode of being than atemporal objects, that stuff has a different mode of being than things, and many others.

This paper studies the concept of “ontological pluralism”, developed by Heidegger scholar Iain Thomson, in relation to the waḥdat al-wujūd framework of Ibn ʻArabī’s school. Heidegger’s ontological difference between being and entities, and the definition of being in excess of any particular entitative determination, calls for an ethic of pluralism and acceptance of the myriad ways in which being is encountered and understood. In my paper, this pluralism—and its conceptual foundation on the meaning and reality of being—is developed further through Ibn ʻArabī’s complex distinction and interpenetration between the Real’s transcendence (tanzīh) and immanence (tashbīh). The pluralistic and polysemic possibilities of this Akbarian “transimmanence” is compared with Heideggerian ontological pluralism, using Milad Milani’s recent Heideggerian approach to the study of Sufism. This comparison asks if elements of a robust pluralism cannot be found in an avowedly premodern metaphysical framework like that of Ibn ʻArabī, thereby attempting to trouble the uniqueness of the critical breaks in the history of modern Western thought. An attempt to develop a decolonial approach to the study of pluralism sees waḥdat al-wujūd and its later development not just as an object of historical analysis but as a theoretical framework that can positively inform our political and ethical concerns. This is why this paper brings together Heideggerian and Akbarian approaches to pluralism in their own terms. This combined conceptual framework is then used to bring to light the Akbarian pluralism in the life, death, and writings of subcontinental Sufis like Dārā Shikōh and Sarmad Kāshānī.

How are our scientific theories related to each other? Do they draw, together, a unified picture of the world, or should we infer from their disunity that reality is ontologically plural in some way? This chapter addresses the question of whether ontological pluralism is a defendable metaphysical thesis and whether philosophy of science has anything to say about it. It examines whether psychological phenomena possess an irreducible nature of their own that would be distinct from the nature of the phenomena studied by neuroscience. If, on the contrary, the explanatory gap between physics and special sciences is to be filled, the question is raised as to how it has to be done. Is conceptual analysis enough? Or should the explanatory gap be simply dismissed as being badly formulated? The chapter proposes a discussion of the current reductionist strategies.

This article examines whether it is possible to uphold one form of deflationism towards metaphysics, ontological pluralism (as defined by Eklund 2008), whilst maintaining metaphysical realism. The focus therefore is on one prominent deflationist who fits the definition of an ontological pluralist, Eli Hirsch, and his self‐ascription as a realist. The article argues that ontological pluralism is not amenable to the ascription of realism under some basic intuitions as to what a “realist” position is committed to. These basic intuitions include a commitment to more than a stuff‐ontology, and a view that realism carries with it more than a rejection of idealism. This issue is more than merely terminological. The ascription of realism is an important classification in order to understand what sorts of entities can be the truthmakers within a given theory. “Realism” is thus an important term to understand the nature of the entities that a given theory accepts into its ontology.

Ethnopharmacologists are scientists and anthropologists that study indigenous medicines and healing practices, and who often develop new therapies and medicines for wider use. Ethnopharmacologists do fieldwork with indigenous peoples in traditional societies, where they encounter a wide range of cultural values and varying ideas about the nature of property relations. This poses difficulties for protecting indigenous intellectual property and for making just trade agreements. This Note reviews the legal issues relevant to the protection of indigenous resources in ethnopharmacology trade agreements, and suggests that recent developments in anthropology and the social study of science could be instructive in furthering the legal discourse and in providing policy directions. Specifically, the Note introduces the concepts of ‘ontological pluralism’ and ‘epistemic subsidiarity’, which could help lawmakers write sui generis trade agreements to better protect indigenous knowledge and resources.

This paper differentiates between two readings of Aristotle’s argument that unity and being are not “genē” (UBANG for short). On the first reading – proposed by commentators such as Ackrill, Shields, Loux, and McDaniel – UBANG entails the proposition that there are no features that characterise all beings insofar as they are, referred to by its contemporary proponents, including McDaniel, as ‘ontological pluralism’. On the second reading – proposed here – UBANG does not entail this proposition. The paper argues that only on the second reading does Aristotle’s argument secure its conclusion, that the second reading is, in fact, the correct reading of UBANG, and that anyone who thinks that UBANG succeeds and entails ontological pluralism probably equivocates between two different senses of ‘genos’.