Metaphysical Framework Research Articles

Philosophical Education and Global Citizenship: Tapping into the Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead

This paper outlines how ethics and democracy can be conceived procedurally within the context of education for global citizenship, using the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead as a starting point. Education for global citizenship aims to create active individual consciousness within a community and a commitment to build upon values and practices. As this paper presents, Whitehead’s rejection of systematized, scientific rationalism formed the basis for his theory of internal relatedness. While scientific rationalism promotes the idea that things and individuals are distinct and discreet from each other, Whitehead’s process theory advances the idea that things and persons are internally related to each other. The nature of epistemology in Whitehead’s system of thought shines a spotlight on the immense richness of process theory as well as on the limits of the standard scientific rationalism. The paper, while highlighting the flaws of Kant’s basis for global citizenship, explores Whitehead’s reconstruction of metaphysics and rationality within the framework of process metaphysics. In addition it indicates the sociopolitical and educational implications of process thought. The paper concludes by discussing how Lipman’s Philosophy for Children is related to Whitehead’s process philosophy and, in fact, could actualize Whitehead’s educational philosophy that students should be interactive and creative participants in learning. It also demonstrates how Whitehead’s process thought and Lipman’s Philosophy for Children both share education beliefs that promote the values, skills, culture, and attitude needed for global citizenship.

Boundary-Crossing Species: Making the Realities of the Caterpillar Fungus

ABSTRACTUnderstanding reality-making in different cultures is crucial. Focusing on reality-making, a cultural difference emerges from ontological worlds, epistemic commitments and methodological practices. A good case of reality-making is divergent understandings of a caterpillar fungus, half animal and half plant, by Chinese materia medica studies and European natural history. The two profoundly differ regarding the organism’s reality, either as alternating constantly between plant and animal, or as remaining a plant after fungal infection, respectively. The reality of the organism came into being in imperial China through a method of collecting heterogenous, contradictory anecdotes, poems and administrative records. The Chinese saw everything as fluid, inscribing heterogenous forms using heterogenous sources. In contrast, the Eurocentric metaphysical framework of science was based on stable objects, so that its method made a reality through measurement and empirical observation of concrete materials. Analysis of the caterpillar fungus texts illuminates the tripartite framework of reality-making: methodologically how to know, ontologically what to know and epistemically what counts as knowledge. The juxtaposition of these texts also highlights postcolonial alternatives, where Western science becomes merely one among many realities. Tracing and understanding fluid ontologies and ways of making reality might therefore help us decenter the Western scientific world as universal.

‘Mon petit essai’: Émilie du Châtelet’s Essai sur l’optique and her early natural philosophy

ABSTRACTÉmilie du Châtelet’s recently-discovered Essai sur l’optique offers new insights into her early natural philosophy. Here I analyse the Essai in detail, focusing on Du Châtelet’s use of attraction and her discussion of the laws governing it. These features of the Essai are crucial to her early thought. I also analyse how other contemporaneous sources augment the Essai, including her review of Voltaire’s Elémens and her correspondence with Maupertuis. These sources track her growing appreciation of the need for a metaphysical framework in science. I also discuss the Essai’s implications for key passages of the Institutions de physique.

Divine Idealism as Physicalism? Reflections on the Structural Definition of Physicalism

Hempel’s Dilemma remains at the center of the problem of defining physicalism. In brief, the dilemma asks whether physicalism should be defined by appeal to current or future physics. If defined by current physics, physicalism is almost certainly false. If defined by an ideal future physics, then physicalism has little determinable content. Montero and Papineau have innovatively suggested that the dilemma may be avoided by defining physicalism structurally. While their definition is one among many definitions, it is significant in that—if successful—it would break the impasse for defining physicalism. I argue, however, that the structural definition fails because it counts metaphysical frameworks (crucially, versions of divine idealism) as “physicalist”—an unwelcome result for physicalists. This paper thus furthers the debate on the definition of physicalism and sheds light on the relationship between physicalism and idealism.

Sport, Christianity and Social Justice? Considering a Theological Foundation

ABSTRACTFollowing recent debates on the relationship between “God,” “ethics,” and issues of “social justice” within sporting locales, this article contends that Christian ethics and the biblical mandate of social justice have important contributions to make to broader understandings of sport and sport ethics. The aim of the article is to: (a) map the emergence of the concept of social justice within academic, social, and political discourse; (b) examine the metaphysical anchors of sport ethics; (c) explore how a Christian framework of metaphysics might be understood within sport and sport ethics; and (d) highlight how key dimensions of the sporting experience, i.e., play and embodiment, might impact theological understandings of ethics and social justice. The article concludes by suggesting that a Christian metaphysical vision has much to offer in reforming sport by grounding it within a Trinitarian theology, borne out of a biblical description of a perfectly “just,” Creator God.

The Revival of Panpsychism and its Relevance for the Science-Religion Dialogue

ABSTRACTPanpsychism, whereby mentality is considered fundamental within the natural world, does not appear prima facie to be a friend to with either natural science or Christian theology. This article challenges this first impression. Within the science and theology dialogue, panpsychism has been a central component of Process theologians’ efforts to integrate these disciplines into a larger metaphysical framework; but, this is not the method adopted in this paper. Instead, it is argued that panpsychism gives scholars the potential for greater progress in two field defining discussions: quantum accounts of special divine action and theistic evolution. It is shown that panpsychism currently finds sufficient consonance with the relevant scientific disciplines and has substantial benefits for theologians engaged in these areas. Panpsychism holds great promise as the philosophy of mind for future generations of science-and-religion scholars.

Duns Scotus on the metaphysics of virtue and conformity to right reason

For Duns Scotus, facts about moral psychology are ultimately reducible to facts about ontology. The created agent has a soul which includes as formal “parts” the intellect and will; the intellect and will, of course, are the seat of qualities (e.g. thoughts and volitions, respectively) and habits (e.g. virtues) that are related to one another in various ways. One of these ways is the conformity relation. From a metaphysical base of categorical being – whether Substance, Quality/Habit, or Relation – Scotus constructs an ethical theory which complements, though in some interesting ways departs from, the Aristotelian tradition of which he is a part. In this essay, our aim is twofold: first, to reconstruct the ontological status of virtue within Scotus's overall metaphysical framework. Second, we attend to the ways in which this metaphysic of virtue places constraints on how one is to understand the conformity relation that, according to Scotus, must exist between an agent's will and right reason whenever a morally good action results.

How Do We Understand the Meaning of a Sentence Under the Yogācāra Model of the Mind? On Disputes Among East Asian Yogācāra Thinkers of the Seventh Century

Understanding the meaning of a sentence is crucial for Buddhists because they put so much emphasis on understanding the verbal expressions of the Buddha. But this can be problematic under their metaphysical framework of momentariness, and their epistemological framework of multiple consciousnesses. This paper starts by reviewing the theory of five states of mind in the Yogācārabhūmi, and then investigates debates among medieval East Asian Yogācāra thinkers about how various consciousnesses work together to understand the meaning of a sentence. The major differences between the various explanations proffered lie in the minimum number of types of consciousnesses involved, and the minimum linguistic marks (sound, syllable, term, sentence and meaning) cognized, in order for one to understand a sentence consisting of four Chinese characters. I show that in these disputes, two points are key: First, the role played by the mental consciousness that arises simultaneously with a sensory consciousness: that is to say, whether a sensory consciousness should still be regarded as essential for understanding, if the simultaneous mental consciousness also cognizes the same mark. Second, whether the syntactic structure of a sentence is taken into consideration: that is to say, whether there is a separate determination of understanding regarding each character, or there is no determination until one has heard two or more characters and takes them as a syntactically meaningful unit.

Generalism and the Metaphysics of Ontic Structural Realism

Ontic structural realism (OSR) claims that all there is to the world is structure. But how can this slogan be turned into a worked-out metaphysics? Here I consider one potential answer: a metaphysical framework known as generalism (Dasgupta, 2009, 2016). According to the generalist, the most fundamental description of the world is not given in terms of individuals bearing properties, but rather, general facts about which states of affairs obtain. However, I contend that despite several apparent similarities between the positions, generalism is unable to capture the two main motivations for OSR. I suggest instead that OSR should be construed as a meta-metaphysical position.

The Hagiography of a Secular Saint: Alexander von Humboldt and the Scientism of the German Democratic Republic

Throughout its existence, the German Democratic Republic attempted to supplant religious authority and beliefs by promoting a wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung that served as a secular alternative for metaphysical frameworks of understanding and cultural orientation. An integral part of this program of substitution was the Marxist‐Leninist rehabilitation of certain members of the German canon who best embodied the socialist and scientistic potential of the German cultural tradition. As a figure who stood at the forefront of this group, Alexander von Humboldt was reimagined by the East German cultural apparatus as a “spontaneous materialist,” an educator of the masses who fought on the side of the oppressed worldwide. This analysis elucidates the ways in which the East German cultural apparatus appropriated and reconfigured Humboldt to fit its needs, as well as how, more generally, the SED designed and implemented a scientistic worldview that continues to affect and shape culture in eastern Germany today.

Moving Beyond Materialism: Can Transpersonal Psychology Contribute to Cultural Transformation?

The issue of whether it is possible to separate science and metaphysics is discussed, with reference to William James and the writings of quantum physicists. The metaphysical framework of scientific materialism is analysed and some of its key assumptions are identified. It is suggested that these assumptions are becoming increasingly untenable, as is evident by the advocacy of post-materialist science by some contemporary scientists. The main appeal of transpersonal psychology to students and practitioners is arguably its lack of allegiance to a materialist metaphysics. Rather than allying itself to the metaphysical paradigm of naturalistic science or attempting to bracket out metaphysics, transpersonal psychology should operate openly within the framework of post-materialistic science. Rather than distancing itself from areas such as near-death studies and parapsychology, it should embrace and cooperate with them, sharing the same post-materialist perspective. Transpersonal psychology should not attempt to reduce itself to fit into mainstream psychology but to try expand mainstream psychology to include its concerns and principles. In a laudable attempt to pursue a more scientific approach, some transpersonal theorists have arguably swung too extremely away from essentialism/perennialism and metaphysics. It is hoped that a more balanced approach may be found, incorporating more nuanced and phenomenological forms of perennialism, and more cautious metaphysical claims.

Vico's Providence Today

According to Vico, it is piety, the way divine providence breaks into fractured time, that teaches the ideal patterns of history. Today, we stand in need of a post-secular, metaphysical framework for this Vichian insight in order to counter the nihilist impulse that has swept through late modernity. Vico had already identified nihilism as the dark secret of Cartesianism. Indeed, it is the historical vicissitudes of that dark secret for which he presciently sought to prepare us. Piety finds its roots in something beyond the subject, beyond the will. It is that disruptive, ineffable force that resists the impulse toward totality (the will to power) in whatever historic form it may take: from the totalizing mechanics of Hobbes’ Leviathan state to the totalizing algorithmic programming that covertly constructs and drives today’s digital social media and the so-called ‘Internet of Experience.’

¿Cuándo entra el alma al cuerpo?

In this article I contrast the two traditional theories about the moment of the animation of the body, which serve as justification for the permissiveness of abortion. I analyze some of the metaphysical commitments of the idea of the soul and present some objections to the metaphysical framework that supports it. Although it is not possible to prove or disprove the existence of the soul, by an inference to the best explanation we should reject the idea and, therefore, claim that the soul does not enter the body at any time.

How Not to Link the Reformation and Science: Reflections on Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation

This article evaluates Brad Gregory’s argument in The Unintended Reformation that links the Reformation with the rise of secular science. I provide an overview of Gregory’s claims and make two criticisms, arguing that Gregory’s thesis lacks historical evidence to support it and mistakenly implies that retaining the framework of premodern metaphysics would have prevented the rise of scientific naturalism. The paper concludes by pointing to more positive accounts on the connection between the Reformation and science by recent historians.

Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx by Leif Weatherby

Reviewed by: Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx by Leif Weatherby Alice A. Kuzniar Leif Weatherby. Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. 462 pp. Many notable recent scholars in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German studies have established fascinating ties between literature, philosophy, mathematics, physics, and the life sciences, as is demonstrated by the work of Dalia Nassar, John H. Smith, Frederick Amrine, Howard Pollack-Milgate, Jocelyn Holland, and Joan Steigerwald. Their work is as expository as it is interpretive. Clearly, to become knowledgeable and conversant in these diverse fields is a difficult task, that is to say, to become as familiar with these intersecting discourses as the German Idealists and Romantics themselves were. Leif Weatherby both excels and falls short in this task, depending on the field he chooses to investigate. On the plus side, Weatherby displays an impressive command of the philosophical and physiological discourses of the era. His book ranges widely: it starts with Leibniz, travels from Haller to Herder, Kant to Kielmeyer, Hölderlin to Schelling, Fichte to Novalis, Goethe to Hegel, and ends with Marx. He renavigates and redefines the Romantic project via the words Organon and das Organ, noting that the term das Organ did not appear in German-speaking lands until the 1780s. It was used initially to indicate that a particular biological part was an instrument or tool, that it had a specific function, faculty, or capacity. Only subsequently did it brush off this semantic dimension of instrumentality and mechanism to evoke solely the isolated, physical part of the body, its prime meaning today. Weatherby argues that the Romantics played with this duality between the vital and the mechanistic in order to conjoin metaphysics and aesthetics with the life sciences. He thus searches for the use of the word in these various writers and meticulously traces out the various appropriations to varying methodological purposes, including their construction of a philosophical Organon (i.e., an aid or vehicle providing or erecting an edifice for knowledge). In so doing, he disputes the prevalent association of Romantic organicism with aesthetic wholeness or a natural unfolding. Weatherby stresses instead the functional, mechanistic, technological side of the words Organ and Organon that writers of the period brought into play. On the negative side, this investigation would have profited from a more careful, thorough grounding in the life sciences, specifically, medical discourses at the time. Because Weatherby focuses on the German tradition and the impact of Haller, there are no references to the mid-eighteenth-century Montpellier vitalistic school of medicine, where a discourse on the organ first arose. In contrast to Boerhaave's (1668–1738) and Hoffmann's (1660–1742) pathology, vitalistic rather [End Page 324] than iatromechanical theories of the body took hold in the Montpellier school of medicine in the eighteenth century. Its founder Sauvages (1706–67) was influenced by Stahl's theory of an anima regulating the body; yet at the same time Sauvages advocated precise empirical observation in order to collect and classify illness. Bordeu (1722–66), discontent with the Stahlian metaphysical framework adopted by his predecessor, located sensibility in specific organs and physiological systems. Others, such Cabanis (1757–1808), Bichat (1771–1802), and Pinel (1775–1826), then furthered the recognition that the physician must detect the causes of disease. Theirs was a science of etiology that refined a methodicalempirical approach to understanding phenomena. Bichat investigated pathological anatomy and ascertained that diseases derived from tissue lesions. Pinel studied the brain. There is also no mention in Weatherby's book of the all-important term principe de vie, coined in 1772 by the Montpellier physician Paul-Joseph Barthez (1734–1806). To argue as Weatherby does that biology as a science does not arise until the beginning of the nineteenth century is to ignore these eighteenth-century advances made in the sciences of etiology, nosology, and pathology. Already in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie of 1765, organe is defined first as an instrument and second as an isolated biological part capable of executing this or that action, such as in the work of veins, arteries, nerves, and muscles...

Aquinas’s Theory of Perception: An Analytic Reconstruction by Anthony J. Lisska

Reviewed by: Aquinas’s Theory of Perception: An Analytic Reconstruction by Anthony J. Lisska David L. Whidden III Aquinas’s Theory of Perception: An Analytic Reconstruction. By Anthony J. Lisska. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xviii + 353. $99.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-19-877790-8. At the beginning of this monograph, Anthony Lisska quotes Dorothea Frede’s observation that “the vis cogitativa is, for Aquinas, ‘an embarrassment’” (4). In the remainder of this very helpful book, Lisska provides a sustained rebuttal to Frede’s statement by arguing that the vis cogitativa is crucial to Aquinas’s overall theory of perception because it “is the faculty by which human perceivers are aware of individuals as individuals of a natural kind” (4). In the course of this argument, Lisska makes an important contribution to our understanding of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, beginning with a detailed analysis of his understanding of sensation and ending with a description of how phantasms work with the agent and possible intellects. Because the vis cogitativa plays an important role in how we come to perceive objects as individual objects, which can later be abstracted, Lisska carefully walks the reader through each step of the process of sensation, perception, and abstraction, with a special emphasis on Aquinas’s understanding of the inner senses. In pursuing his analysis, Lisska engages with two sets of conversation partners. First, among contemporary philosophers, he is primarily engaged with other analytical Thomists and at times affirms and at times corrects the work of Robert Pasnau, John Haldane, Eleonore Stump, and Anthony Kenny, among others. Part of his disagreement with some of these contemporary Thomists is methodological, as he argues that Aquinas offers a more robust account of sensation and the inner senses in his commentary on De anima than the more commonly preferred Summa theologiae, which offers an abbreviated account of his philosophy of mind since it is focused on theological issues. In engaging his second set of interlocutors, Lisska demon-strates his concern with the negative impact the British Empiricists (Hume, Locke, Berkeley, et al.) have had upon contemporary philosophies of mind and sees Aquinas’s theories of sensation and cognition as a helpful antidote to the philosophical cul-de-sacs into which their approaches to sensation have led us. In his first chapter, Lisska raises the fundamental question of the book, which is how Aquinas understands our ability to be aware of individuals as individuals rather than as a bundle of sensations. As Lisska is describing this problem, he also argues for the importance of Aquinas’s metaphysics for understanding his overall philosophy of mind, especially perception, adopting Haldane’s maxim “that there is ‘no epistemology without ontology’” (11). Additionally, Lisska provides his methodological case for the superiority of the commentary on De anima over the Summa theologiae with regard to understanding Aquinas’s theory of perception, arguing that the Summa theologiae focuses on the intellect and will and so does not contain a full account of perception, because the theological commitments of the Summa [End Page 625] limit Aquinas’s need to treat perception (23–27). This is not to say that Lisska ignores the Summa, but rather that he finds the commentary on De anima to provide a fuller account of perception, one that can help us better to interpret the Summa on perception or to fill in blanks that the Summa leaves in Aquinas’s overall theory of perception. In his next two chapters, Lisska provides his understanding of the metaphysical framework in which Aquinas’s theory of perception operates. In the second chapter, he gives an account of Aquinas’s theory of intentionality, arguing in six propositions that Aquinas is both an ontological and epistemological realist, that “esse intentionale is the cognitive content of an act of awareness” and is dependent upon the ontological status of the knower, and that Aquinas is an externalist in his philosophy of mind (37). Lisska points out that the foundation of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is his distinction between act and potency, so that our senses and intellects must be properly disposed to receive forms. In the third chapter, Lisska puts Aquinas’s philosophy of...

A CRITIQUE OF EMERGENT THEOLOGIES

AbstractThis article is an analysis and critique of emergent theologies, focusing on areas of Christology and pneumatology. An increasing number of Christian theologians are integrating (strong) emergence theory into their work. I argue that, despite the range of theological commitments and methodological approaches represented by these scholars, each faces similar problematic tendencies when their Christian doctrines are combined with (strong) emergence theory. It is concluded that the basic logic of emergence theory, whereby matter is seen to precede mind, makes it difficult for emergent theologies to offer an account of salvation, avoid significant issues regarding God's involvement with evil, and maintain divine transcendence. It is concluded, therefore, that Christian theology should look elsewhere for a complementary metaphysical framework with which to bridge scientific and theological discourse.

Non-Factualist Dispositionalism

This paper aims to defend that the best framework for characterizing dispositions is a Rylean, non-factualist dispositionalism. I follow Tugby (Mind, 122 (486), 451–480, 2013) in explaining which are the main candidates for characterizing the ontology of dispositions. Tugby (Mind, 122 (486), 451–480, 2013) concludes that the best metaphysical framework for characterizing dispositions is Platonism, because it is the only theory that can account for the central and the intrinsic platitudes. Following this I show that Platonism (which postulates the existence of non-natural, trascendent universals) is not desirable because it is difficult to reconcile with ontological naturalism and because it is not parsimonious. Thus, I offer a different candidate: Rylean non-factualist dispositionalism. This approach retains the explanatory power of our dispositional vocabulary without appealing to facts, entities, or properties. In conclusion, non-factualist dispositionalism is preferable over naturalism and Platonism for characterizing dispositions.

Ecstatic Experience in Pseudo-Longinus’s On the Sublime

Although Pseudo-Longinus’s work is basically a study of the theory and practice of rhetorics in public discourse, its main concern with the sublime reaches beyond the limits of its initial frame of reference. An attempt to understand the sublime, the wonderful that lies beyond the realm of rational rhetorical structures constitutes the metaphysical framework of the text. The paper surveys one aspect of the sublime: its ability to make the receiver ecstatic. How can the sublime trigger the state of ecstasy?

Social construction as grounding; or: fundamentality for feminists, a reply to Barnes and Mikkola

Feminist metaphysics is guided by the insight that gender is socially constructed, yet the metaphysics behind social construction remains obscure. Barnes and Mikkola charge that current metaphysical frameworks—including my grounding framework—are hostile to feminist metaphysics. I argue that not only is a grounding framework hospitable to feminist metaphysics, but also that a grounding framework can help shed light on the metaphysics behind social construction. By treating social construction claims as grounding claims, the feminist metaphysician and the social ontologist both gain a way to integrate social construction claims into a general metaphysics, while accounting for the inferential connections between social construction and attendant notions such as dependence and explanation. So I conclude that a grounding framework can be helpful for feminist metaphysics and social ontology.