Concrete Particulars Research Articles

What the States of Truthmaker Semantics Could (Not) Be

AbstractDevelopments in truthmaker semantics for the most part stay clear of the metaphysical issue of what sort of entities serve as the truthmakers and falsitymakers for sentences. It is assumed that perhaps facts or states of affairs (Fine 2017a; Jago 2020), with these taken sometimes as concrete particulars (Hawke 2018) could serve for the job, but nonetheless that some such entities would do. In this paper I take a closer look at the issue of what entities could or could not play the role of truthmakers and falsitymakers in standard truthmaker semantics (Fine 2016, 2017a, b; Fine and Jago 2019), based on desiderata imposed by metaphysical and semantic considerations.

Theatre as a Transcultural Event: Notes on European Identity

ABSTRACT The subject of intercultural exchange is complex and demands that we keep the basic issues that shape our views of the world in mind. And one of these basic issues is what we mean by “European identity.” The ideological concerns over the norms of identity became necessarily entangled in the post-1989 interests and agendas of Europe’s various nations. So the great challenge for us as academics as well as for the policymakers in Brussels and Strasburg is to focus on these dialectics. European identity is too varied to be a unitary and homogenous thing; indeed, one of the battles within it is between the advocates of a unitary identity and those who see the whole as a complex that is irreducible to a unified identity. In this article I explore how the theatre, in the aftermath of the Second World War, served as a laboratory for the investigation, analysis, and constuction of dramatic models that became a means of transcultural communication. As attested by the continuing success of the experimental approaches of Brecht, Grotowski, La Mama, and Suzuki, this endeavour reflected the struggle of people from different cultural backgrounds to understand and accept each other. One of the reasons the theatre continues to have the potentiality to promote transcultural integration is that it deals in concrete particulars with universal resonances. As I will demonstrate with examples from my own work in various countries, the production and directing of plays by these and other dramatists shows that it is only in the performance—by transforming the familiar into the unfamiliar, by making the habitual and customary seem strange and unexpected—that the motives, relationships, and events enclosed in the written play are released so as to stimulate the audience to re-examine their own contemporary realities. Transcultural theatre thus creates dramatic experiences that are adequate and responsive to the changing world of migration and mobility in which both practitioners and audiences actually live. As such it offers the kind of transcultural education that promotes communication and understanding and that fosters an open-eyed and open-hearted attitude to the changing realities of Europe.

Thomas Aquinas on Concrete Particulars

There are two competing models for how to understand Aquinas’s hylomorphic theory of material substances: the Simple Model, according to which material substances are composed of prime matter and substantial form, and the Expanded Model, according to which material substances are composed of prime matter, substantial form, and all of their accidental forms. In this paper, I first explain the main differences between these two models and show how they situate Aquinas’s theory of material substances in two different places within the contemporary debate on concrete particulars, highlighting several advantages that Aquinas’s approach has over other varieties of substratum and bundle theory along the way. I then offer some reasons to think that the Expanded Model, as a theory of concrete particulars, is preferable. I argue that the Expanded Model avoids two major concerns for the Simple Model: the problem of extrinsicality, and the problem of too-many-possessors.

Logics of Discovery II: Lessons from Poetry-Parataxis as a Method That Can Complement the Narrative Compulsion in Vogue in Contemporary Mental Health Care.

This paper highlights the limitations of narrative logic in mental health care, and in particular of "narrative vigilance"-the tendency to watch over experience via narrativisation, and to tether the concrete particulars of experience to the hypothetical structure of a narrative signification. Narrative logic is grounded in hypotaxis-the syntactic structuring whereby a discourse is characterised by different levels of subordination using linking words that connect, especially in terms of temporal and explanatory consequentiality. I offer an alternative approach based on parataxis-the practice of placing phrases or parts of speech next to each other without subordinating conjunctions. Sentences are juxtaposed without a clear connection; the contrast may generate novel and unexpected combinations between these dissimilar fragments. After distinguishing between parataxis and psychopathological phenomena like disturbances of association, I take inspiration from the work and life of a poet, Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), considered among the greatest. He suffered for half his life from a severe form of mental illness that would perhaps, today, be diagnosed as schizophrenia. In the poems written during his illness, hypotaxis and narrative vigilance seem to blur, and parataxis takes centre stage. The fading of narrative structure in no way coincides with the absence of meaningfulness. Rather, meaningfulness is left to parataxis itself, that is, to the recombining power of words, sentences, and images. Parataxis itself can provide meaningfulness or, at least, provide the soil in which it can germinate. The void of narration opens the door for the fullness of "emergent" connections. In the final part of the paper, with the help of Freud's ideas on the relationship between "analysis" and "synthesis" in psychoanalytic treatment, some implications are derived about the relevance of parataxis to the logics of discovery in psychotherapeutic care, especially that of persons with severe mental conditions.

Mastering Languaging and Extending our Agency in and through the Virtualities of Languaging: The Interplay of Causes and Constraints in Actualising the World

Abstract In a process-ontological perspective, I consider some aspects of the ways in which human languaging enables persons to operate on and to actualize and de-actualize the modal potentials of their world. I examine Johanna Seibt’s notion of functional individuals to show how some aspect of the world can be selected and differentiated and thus located in some region of space-time by a particular linguistic (or other) operation. Rather than referring to an already given and present actuality, utterances actualise and situate functional individuals to varying degrees of definiteness, specificity, realness, and so on in occasions of languaging and in texts. Wordings enable and scaffold de-coupled intentional-semantic registration that coordinate selves and the functional individuals that populate their world. With reference to the nominal group and criteria of Thinghood, I consider concrete particulars and functional stuffs in relation to the capacity of our languaging to activate selective aspects of the modal potentials of the processes that we encounter in the world. This requires a process-ontological account of the world on which and in which we act in and through languaging. Languaging functions to sensibilize us to different aspects of the modal potentials that it activates.

Using historical evidence: The semantic profiles of Ancient History in senior secondary school

This paper presents findings from the Australian Research Council funded ‘Disciplinarity, Knowledge and Schooling’ project (DISKS) which investigates knowledge-building practices in Australian secondary schools and gave rise to the ground-breaking notions of ‘semantic waves’ (Maton, 2013) and ‘power pedagogy’ (Martin, 2013). In this paper, we investigate student writing in senior secondary school Ancient History. We focus on how students use evidence in their responses to different types of exam questions. Our research question focuses on the extent to which key features of responses to short answer questions appear in extended responses and vice versa. This focus arose through findings that teachers in our study tended to view short answer questions as a ‘mini’ version of extended responses and prepared students accordingly. The similarities and differences are important to identify as extended responses make a significant contribution to the overall exam grade. To better understand the use of evidence in responses to different types of exam questions, the study draws on the dimension of Semantics in Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2013). We use the newly developed wording and clausing tools (Doran & Maton, 2018, forthcoming) to analyse the relative strength of context dependence in responses to Year 12 exam questions. Context dependence is particularly relevant to how students use evidence, as it involves relating the concrete particulars of specific historical artefacts, events, and the behaviours of historical figures to more abstract concepts in the discipline of history that are not bound to one historical setting. Our analysis tracks relative shifts in context dependence in student texts to generate semantic profiles of their exam responses. Findings show that although teachers may use the writing of short answer questions as preparation towards the high-stakes extended writing tasks, short answer responses are not ‘minature’ versions of extended responses. We argue that the differences are teachable and propose the use of model texts to make these features visible to students. Beyond the timeframe of secondary school education, learning to use evidence, particularly for the development of arguments, may provide a robust foundation for tertiary level writing tasks where students need to control degrees of context dependence.

Are the Realist Bundle Theorists Committed to the Principle of Constituent Identity?

Abstract One of the key questions in the contemporary analytic ontology concerns the relation between the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles (PII) and the Bundle Theory (BT). The majority of authors believe that BT implies PII. Therefore, it is widely believed that the world violating PII presented by Max Black (1952. “The Identity of Indiscernibles.” Mind 61 (242): 153–64) is also devastating for BT. However, this has been questioned by Rodriguez-Pereyra (2004. “The Bundle Theory is Compatible with Distinct but Indiscernible Particulars.” Analysis 64 (1): 72–81), who formulated an interpretation of BT with instances. Recently Robert (2019. “Can the Realist Bundle Theory Account for the Numerical Difference between Qualitavely Non-discernible Concrete Particulars?” Theorema 38 (1): 25–39) argued that this version of BT is not a constituent ontology and, therefore, Rodriguez-Pereyra’s solution comes at a price of excluding bundle theory from the domain of constituent ontologies, and, in this sense, it fails. I question Robert’s point by claiming that his account of constituent ontologies is too demanding. In particular, I show that the instance version of BT is compatible with the constrains defining constituent ontologies in general, and therefore Rodriguez-Pereyra’s argument is correct.

普遍者の多重位置と相対化

The strong immanent realism (i.e., the view that there exist universals as entities capable of being wholly present wherever their instances are located) has been traditionally criticized for having certain absurd consequences. Although Gilmore (2003) replied to these criticisms by taking spatial relations involving universals as relativized to their locations, his reply has been rebutted by Keskinen et al. (2015). This paper aims to defend the strong immanent realism by proposing a new version of the relativization strategy, according to which a spatial relation is to be relativized just to the extent that it contains universals or concrete particulars among its terms. This version, it will be argued, can satisfactorily address the objections hitherto posed to the strong immanent realism.

The Persisting Problem of Persistence: A Call for an Alternative Theory

The question of how to characterise the diachronic identity of a concrete particular within a metaphysical framework is the problem of persistence. There are two major theories, Endurantism and Perdurantism affirming a problem of persistence for concrete particulars. While Endurantism, on the one hand, argues that concrete particulars persist wholly, Perdurantism, on the other hand, argues that they persist as temporal slices. This paper argues that neither Endurantism nor Perdurantism adequately characterise the persistence of concrete particulars. This is because there is an impasse between these two major theories of persistence. The article concludes that hence, there is a need for another hypothesis or theory of persistence to address the problem of persistence in metaphysics. This paper broadens the discourse on persistence of concrete objects beyond a debate between Endurantism and Perdurantism. The paper uses the methods of conceptual analysis and philosophical argumentation.

Propositions: Who Needs Them?

William Lane Craig maintains that propositions and properties are not real. Yet, if we examine his proposed nominalism and his appeal to Rudolf Carnap’s linguistic frameworks, we can find that his view depends upon their reality, even as abstract objects. By drawing upon phenomenological insights, I argue that if we pay close attention to what can be before our minds in conscious awareness, we can become aware that there is more to what is real than simple, concrete particulars, even in his linguistic examples. We can become aware of the reality of Platonic, ante rem universals, including propositions and properties.

When “Face-to-Face” is No Longer an Option: Classroom Management Challenges During the Covid-19 Pandemics

The article examines the current context of teaching online or in a hybrid environment and provides recommendations pertaining to some of the classroom management techniques primary and secondary school teachers might find useful in their activities during the COVID 19 pandemics. The main aims of this article are to analyse the challenges posed by online teaching in relation to class management; to provide a toolkit for educators in relation to class management in an online teaching environment; and to better understand how the various learning styles of the students should be responded to by teachers as part of their classroom management techniques. The methodology which the current paper relies on involves both a critical analysis of classroom management techniques currently employed in traditional (i.e., face-to-face) and online education, as well as empirical methods pertaining to our own daily activities as educators (observation, questionnaires, conversation, dialogue, self-assessment of the learning outcomes, evaluation sheets). Building upon such methods, we formulate practical recommendations as to how an efficient classroom management should be handled to ensure that online teaching is performed at its best during the COVID-19 pandemics. The following results were attained as part of our research: the identification of the main challenges that the educators must deal with when managing the online class; a potential toolkit for the educators when managing their class in an online environment; a clearer understanding on how to best approach all students according to their styles of learning. The conclusions allow asserting that the educators have an essential role in adapting the online class management to the learning styles of the students and to the concrete particularities of e-learning during de COVID-19 pandemics, creating an optimum environment for the teaching and learning process.

Sellars's ontological nominalism

AbstractWilfrid Sellars is widely known for two positions that he calls “nominalism.” On the one hand, there is his “psychological nominalism,” according to which any awareness one might have of abstract entities—be they properties, relations, or facts—is a thoroughly linguistic affair, and so cannot be presupposed in thinking about the process of learning a (first) language. On the other hand, there is his ontological nominalism, according to which the world, as it is in itself, is fundamentally a world of concrete particulars and so does not ultimately contain such things as properties, relations, or propositionally‐structured facts. Sellars clearly takes these two sorts of “nominalism” to go together. However, one of the most influential inheritors of Sellars's philosophy, Robert Brandom, thinks that they do not. Brandom endorses the former, but denies that the latter “is in the end so much as intelligible.” In this paper, I articulate the connection between Sellars's psychological and ontological nominalism and draw on Brandom's own development of Sellars's functional role semantics to argue, against Brandom, that Sellars's ontological nominalism not only harmonizes with the rest of his philosophical commitments, but is actually made fully intelligible by the very aspect of Sellars's theory that Brandom himself develops.

Brentano on the individuation of mental acts

AbstractThis paper aims to present and evaluate Brentano's account of the individuation of mental acts. In his early works, Brentano assimilated mental acts to tropes; however, he encountered difficulties in explaining their individuation, since the usual solutions for the individuation of tropes were not readily applicable to his theory of mental acts. In a later period, Brentano introduced into his psychology what he called the “soul,” and this allowed him to explain the individuation of mental acts. Finally, after his “reistic” turn, he excluded mental acts from his ontology, for he rejectedabstractaof any kind, including abstract particulars, and admitted only things, orres(in Latin), that is, concrete particulars; in his late philosophy, there are no “thinkings,” but only “thinkers.” However, he still needed to explain what individuates different thinkers, and this was again the soul. In the conclusion, the paper critically compares the different theoretical options considered by Brentano.

Hostile environments? Down’s syndrome and genetic screening in contemporary culture

This essay explores the complex entanglement of new reproductive technologies, genetics, health economics, rights-based discourses and ethical considerations of the value of human life with particular reference to representations of...

G. E. Moore on Concepts and Judgment

In “The Nature of Judgment” (1899), G. E. Moore defends the strange thesis according to which “[i]t seems necessary… to regard the world as formed of concepts”. Philosophers have offered distinct understandings of this proposal, in particular of what Moorean concepts really are. In this article I discuss and reject three of them: one, according to which Moorean concepts are universals within the framework of a bundle theory of concrete particulars (Nelson, 1962; Baldwin, 1990); a second one, according to which Moorean concepts are particulars within a mereological framework of analysis (Bell, 1999); and a third one, according to which Moorean concepts are a sui generis category, resulting from his alleged rejection of the substance (particular)/attribute (universal) distinction (MacBride, 2018). I end by defending my own understanding, which highlights the openly Platonic stance of the young G. E. Moore.

Good’s Irreducibility: The Discordancy Argument and Aristotle

In this paper, I argue that the good is irreducible. I use the term ‘irreducible’ in a way similar to but not identical to G. E. Moore’s usage of ‘indefinable’ as found in Principia Ethica. By ‘irreducible,’ I mean that something cannot be simplified into something other than itself. For my purposes, this is to say that the good is sui generis and cannot be accounted for by anything other than itself. Inspired by what I take to be Moore’s basic insight, I develop my own argument pertaining to the uniqueness of the good. My argument goes partially beyond intuition, and hence beyond Moore, by means of applied intuitions (counterexamples). In the penultimate section, I apply the Discordancy Argument to Aristotle’s ethics, arguing that it is an attestation to the general virtue thesis that what is good does not admit of a reducible deduction. Broadly speaking, I consider the Discordancy Argument and general ethical intuitionism as justification for the Aristotelian idea that good actions are found in concrete particulars and not reducible abstractions, hinting at Aristotle’s affinity for ethical intuitionism. Furthermore, a recent debate surrounding moral ontology (per William Lane Craig and dissenters) is deemed obsolete.

Aristotle and Newman on the Concreteness of Theoretical Knowing

Aristotle and Newman on the Concreteness of Theoretical Knowing Jonathan Buttaci* "Aristotle has been my master."1 In The Idea of a University John Henry Newman affirmed the inevitable influence—overt or covert—of Aristotle on our thinking. He wrote: While the world lasts, will Aristotle's doctrine on these matters last, for he is the oracle of nature and of truth. While we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being Aristotelians, for the great Master does but analyze the thoughts, feelings, views, and opinions of human kind. He has told us the meaning of our own words and ideas, before we were born. In many subject-matters, to think correctly, is to think like Aristotle; and we are his disciples whether we will or no, though we may not know it.2 This approach, in general, motivates the present article, reflecting on Aristotelian themes in Newman's thought and, in turn, exploring how he might aid the scholar of Aristotle. I argue that, at least in one crucial respect, Newman's thought is even more thoroughly Aristotelian than has been appreciated. [End Page 56] More specifically, this paper begins with an insight animating Newman's thought throughout his life and its potential tension with Aristotle. Newman wrote (and reiterated), "After all, man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. He is influenced by what is direct and precise."3 This remark may be taken to be un-Aristotelian or even anti-Aristotelian in spirit, and on at least two counts. First, Aristotle and those working in the Aristotelian tradition commonly regard man as a rational and reasoning animal, indeed, defining him as such.4 Second, for Aristotle the characteristic human activity is theoretical or contemplative activity most of all. If that means trading in what is abstract and universal, as is commonly held, then by saying "[man] is influenced by what is direct and precise," Newman would have been proposing a substantial revision of Aristotelian views of theoretical knowledge, even while acknowledging an enormous debt to Aristotle's practical philosophy.5 So goes one interpretation of Newman's work based on a certain understanding of Aristotle's theory.6 According to this interpretation, in emphasizing concrete particulars and "what is direct and precise," Newman thereby thought "practice controls theory,"7 reversing the Aristotelian priority of theoretical knowing. If this were the right view, although Aristotle had been his master in general, Newman would have departed from Aristotle on this point by prioritizing the concrete, practical, and imaginative, and by subordinating the abstract, theoretical, and intellectual.8 [End Page 57] In this article I argue against that interpretation. Instead, Newman was more Aristotelian than it may seem, at least on this issue.9 Far from being un- or anti-Aristotelian, Newman's insistence that we are not merely syllogizing animals, and that even our theoretical knowledge is rooted in and directed toward concrete particulars, is thoroughly at home within Aristotle's thought. In fact, careful attention to Aristotle's scientific works shows the importance of familiarity with concrete particulars, as both the origin and the end of theoretical knowing. When these passages are read with Newman's chief philosophical insights in mind, they correct a common misreading of Aristotle, in fact, the very misreading that generates the alleged tension between Newman and Aristotle on this issue. As we shall see, Aristotle did not favor abstractions while rendering concrete experience superfluous or merely preparatory. On the contrary, even in Aristotle's account of theoretical knowing, the abstract is subordinated to the concrete. This way of reading Aristotle helps us to appreciate an even greater harmony between them.10 PRACTICAL LOGOS, INCARNATE AND EMPTY Before examining Newman's alleged departure from Aristotle when it comes to theoretical knowing, I begin with one strand of Newman's thinking that is uncontroversially Aristotelian. My eventual aim is to see how these uncontroversial Aristotelian debts in the practical case reveal deeper connections in their accounts of theoretical knowing. [End Page 58] Let us begin with a quote from Newman's sermon "On Holiness."11 Each of the following passages reveals the broadly Aristotelian view about human...

Blessing as the Ground of Morality: Pavel Florensky and Political Resistance

This essay argues that Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), one of Russia’s most creative religious philosophers, makes an important contribution to Christian social ethics by positing “blessing” as a central moral act. Drawing on Orthodox liturgical practices of blessing, Florensky redescribes reality; it is filled with God’s energies. Especially in letters from the gulag, after his arrest in 1933 for “counter-revolutionary” activity, Florensky calls forth the sacramental mystery of the natural world around the camps and of each person to whom he writes. In attending to them in their concrete particularity, he offers resistance to a totalitarian regime that would reduce them to raw, exploitable material.

The concept sketch as a space

In this paper I explore some of the ways a concept sketch can be used in the professional practice of industrial design. The paper shows generally how an inscribed object is situated and utilized in collaborative activity, by focusing particularly on the space over the sketch as a site for participation in a concept development meeting. This participation is both bodily and verbally manifested and I attempt to show how using the sketch and not using the sketch are distinctly organized. A main finding is that the sketch – a ubiquitous artifact in design – is much more than the iconic representations inscribed upon it. For example, the ‘sketch space’ in the air over the sketch is a site that can arbitrate a fundamental organizational resource, namely turn taking. Another type of organization concerns the sorts of verbal actions carried out with and without the sketch, or the space over it. Actions concerning the organization of design were carried out without the sketch, while actions concerned with the concrete particulars of the design project at hand were carried out with the sketch. Its uses in the meeting allow for the artful demonstration of the professional competences of industrial designers.

More Grounds for Grounding Nominalism

In this paper, I examine Peter Schulte’s “Grounding Nominalism” (Schulte, 2018), understood as the claim that first-order properties and relations are grounded in the concrete particulars which instantiate them. While Schulte offered reasons to think that this view is consistent, along with answers to a number of objections, a more straightforward argument for GN is still needed. I take on this task here, by discussing and defending what I call the “argument from abstraction”. The latter, I suggest, offers more grounds to Grounding Nominalism.