Metaphysics Of Substance Research Articles

Substance metaphysics is incompatible with the causal closure of the metaphysical realm

The present paper argues that substantialist metaphysics are in tension with the physicalist idea that the universe is causally closed. The argument is a rather specific one and proceeds through three steps. The first step consists in arguing that monistic substance metaphysics allow for the existence of entities that cannot belong to the intended first order domain. This result sensitively depends on the nature of substances as invariant entities. The second step concludes that, if further domains are to be admitted, then they are inhabited by “higher” or (systematically) “nonstandard” entities and that, in both cases if not made somehow innocuous, such entities may take part on the metaphysical construction of the world through their own distinctive properties and causal powers. However, this latter claim is in contradiction with causal closure. But closure is the principle that mainly characterizes physicalist approaches in metaphysics and as such physicalist metaphysics cannot get rid of it. Who attempted making exotic properties and causal powers innocuous usually appealed to the Supervenience Argument. Unfortunately, as the third step proves, this argument is invalid. Finally, the paper looks forward and toward alternative models for physicalist metaphysics, like processbased models.
 Keywords: Metaphysics of Quantities, Abstraction Principles, Locationism.

ДЕЙСТВИЕ И СУБСТАНЦИЯ: БАНИ, ВИНО И ПАЛЬМЫ В КЛАССИЧЕСКОЙ АРАБСКОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ

The world around us is a collection of things in constant motion and influencing one another. In other words, the world changes every instant. Each moment it differs from itself a moment ago, never staying the same. The difficulty discovered by the Greeks is that what is constantly changing cannot be cognized for if the world is always in motion, always new, knowledge becomes obsolete and useless the very instant after we acquired it, as the world will never be the same as we knew it. So we need to stop that movement, to see the unchanging in change, to understand the change as the renewal of the permanent. The Greeks learned doing it relying on the notion of substance, i. e., the immutable essence of a thing that constitutes its self and survives any of its changes. Such a way of conceptualizing the world was inherited by the big European culture. The big Arab-Muslim culture learned to conceptualize change as a renewal of an action, considering the action itself unchangeable as long as it flows from the actor to the recipient. Those two logics of sense positing gave birth to the metaphysics of substance and metaphysics of action. They the two ways of sense positing, manifest themselves in any activity of consciousness. They are not hard to find in the functioning of language either – both theoretical and ordinary. The classical Arabic texts provide possibility of reading them in perspectives of both substance and process logics, where the two contrasting meanings are suggested by the same verbal design.

Whitehead and Continental Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century: Dislocations

Whitehead and Continental Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century: Dislocations

Theories of multiplicity: philosophical and theological conceptions of material and metaphysical entanglement

ABSTRACT Philosophical and theological treatments of difference and relation are often limited to traditional discursive boundaries of substance metaphysics and transcendent causality. Eschewing the historic desire to categorize substance and doctrinal investments in cosmological mechanism, multiplicity theory experiments with immanent and relational ontologies that are materially attentive and immersed in difference. Tracing the emergence of multiplicity and its theorizing across philosophical and theological registers, I begin with Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead’s conceptually significant turn of the century work. Noting both Bergson and Whitehead’s profound influence on Gilles Deleuze, I examine the appearance and development of multiplicity in Deleuze’s individual writings and his collaborative work with Felix Guattari. Seeking resonances in the more recently theological theorizations of multiplicity, I find that Whitehead and Deleuze surface as vital interlocutors for the relational and incarnational theologies put forth, respectively, by Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider. Each concerned with theological formulations of embodied difference and divine relation, I suggest that both Keller and Schneider draw on theories of multiplicity to explore immanence and interdependence as ontological postures. I conclude that across philosophical and theological discourse diverse conceptions of multiplicity offer resources for alternative theorizations of complex difference and relation.

Rethinking the traditional concert format through the lens of Russian mystic composer Nikolai Obukhov

Born in 1892, composer Nikolai Obukhov belongs to the Russian avant-garde generation and was one of the pioneers in experimenting with twelve-tone systems, notation, and electronic instruments. He stands out from his contemporaries having inherited not only some aspects of Alexander Scriabin’s musical style, but, most prominently, the Russian symbolist belief in transcendence and collective spiritual uplifting through the performative act as well. The metaphysical substance and religious symbolism of Obukhov’s body of work reveals itself as a very rich and exciting source of inspiration for performers today. In this exposition I analyze the most relevant features of Nikolai Obukhov’s aesthetic, from his conception of the total work of art, to his harmonic language and annotations on the score, contextualizing them in the broader cultural and philosophical panorama of Russian Symbolism. I focus on understanding the social function of musical performance, and by conceptualizing certain basic principles, I shape my own performative approach to Nikolai Obukhov’s solo piano works. In the creative process of building a more holistic performance practice inspired by Russian Symbolism, the role of the modern performer expands from one of mere executor to the curator of an experience both for themself and for their audience. With this research I intend to encourage the musical community to reflect on our current relation with performance, to experiment with different concert formats, and to realize that we too, like the artistic community of Russians mystics, can project our own hopes about the future of civilization in our performance practices.

Triadic Metaphysics

The concept of expression grounds a large portion of Spinoza’s metaphysics, giving further depth to seemingly foundational concepts such as substance, causality, attribute, and essence. Spinoza adopts the term “expression” in crucial contexts such as the definition of attribute, the essential dependence of modes on substance, and the striving or effort of a finite conatus. In this essay, I seek to interpret expression as an instance of relational or structural ontology, escaping the reductionist tendencies that would see it as a mere result or combination of “more fundamental” properties such as causation, inherence, and conception. My interpretation of expression as a descriptive structural lens enriches our understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance and modes as a primarily structural ontology, which can only be read appropriately if its relata are conceived as ontologically dependent on the structure.

NO HEGEL IN THE RAINFOREST

If early Caribbean philosophy is characterized by its pan-African flourishes, what is less well known is its flirtations with existentialism. Although C.L.R. James’s 1965 Heideggerian reading of Wilson Harris’s novel Palace of the Peacock and his 1966 lecture “Existentialism and Marxism” are cited in books on both James and Harris, oddly, there has been no substantial reading of Heidegger’s own philosophy along with Palace of the Peacock, or, of James’s misreading of Heidegger’s technical term Dasein. In this article, I attempt that reading, while revealing a link between Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, through existentialism, to Harris’s work and thought. Harris’s novel offers a radical critique of colonial racism through a re-working of Spinoza’s metaphysics of Substance, and subsequently, although he only started the task, C.L.R. James’s odd articulation of Harris with Heidegger is acute, notwithstanding existentialism’s fall from fashion.

PROCESS-BASED ENTITIES ARE RELATIONAL STRUCTURES. From Whitehead to Structuralism

Abstract The aim of this work is to argue for the idea that processes and process-based entities are to be modelled as relational structures. Relational structures are genuine structures, namely entities not committed to the existence of basic objects. My argument moves from the analysis of Whitehead’s original insight about process-based entities that, despite some residual of substance metaphysics, has the merit of grounding the intrinsic dynamism of reality on the holistic and relational characters of process-based entities. The current model of process ontology requires genuine emergence and this, in turn, requires organizations, i.e., emergence in organizations. Another view about processes rely on a structural specification of processes. I suggest that the two views can be made compatible by the help of a specific sort of structures, namely relational structures. The appeal to the mathematical theory of genuine structures, category theory, reveals the formal plausibility of this convergence. According to this formal approach, genuine structures are essentially dynamic entities for they are relational, namely, as well as organizations, they are not existentially committed to particulars.

Does Judith Butler subvert gender binarism? Let’s talk about sex(ual dipoles)

It seems that there are compelling arguments why gender is not an ontological category. Although the deconstruction of the ontological accommodation of the subject (and of our world) has opened up new possibilities of understanding the subject and its structures, some pitfalls can be detected in the relevant literature. In particular, the theory that rejects essentialist understandings of the subject implicitly retains vestiges of the ontology that it rejects. A case in point is the anti-essentialist view on gender in its implicit reliance on the gender binarism that it meant to discard. In the present article, I critically engage with Judith Butler’s position on gender identity and with her aim of subverting gender binarism. Butler has based her position on grounds of gender as a non-ontological category. My main argument is that her effort to subvert gender binarism in and through the example of homosexuality is not as fruitful as the relevant literature has assumed (consider, for instance, that Butlers’ work has been highly influential in feminist and queer theory, cultural studies and other fields). Gender binarism subversion in and through the example of homosexuality is problematic because homosexuality adheres to the body binarism, thus to its “raw” corporeality, as much as heterosexuality does: in both heterosexuality and homosexuality, the sex of the body still determines one’s sexual orientation and her/his choice of partner(s). Thus, contra assertions to the opposite, I argue that homosexuality remains trapped in the “metaphysics of gender substance.” I conclude this article by discussing why bisexuality escapes the body binary and thus gender binarism.

The Dialogue between Theology and Science as an Open-Ended Hermeneutics of the Human Condition

This paper represents a direct continuation and development of my stance on the sense of the dialogue between theology and science as it is seen through the eyes of phenomenological philosophy and its extension towards theology. I further interpret the paradoxical position of humanity in the world (being an object in the world and subject for the world) to be the cause in the split between science and theology. Since, according to modern philosophy, no reconciliation between two opposites in the hermeneutics of the subject is possible, the whole issue of the facticity of human subjectivity as the sensebestowing centre of being acquires theological dimensions, requiring new developments in both theology and philosophy. The intended overcoming of the unknowability of man by himself, tacitly attempted through the “reconciliation” of science and theology (guided by a purpose to ground man in some metaphysical substance), is not ontologically achievable, but demonstrates the working of formal purposefulness (in the sense of Kant). Then the dialogue between theology and science can be considered as a teleological activity without a purpose representing never-ending hermeneutics of the human condition

Signifying Islamic Psychology as a Paradigm: A Decolonial Move

Abstract. Recognizing the fluidity around the definitions and boundaries of Islamic psychology (IP), I propose that the assumption of decolonial thought may help IP reimagine its vision, orientation, and directions. Distinguished by three fundamentals – epistemic freedom, liberation, and humanization – paradigmatic IP may harvest psycho-spiritual, cognitive, and affective resources as well as methodological, ethical, and metaphysical substance through the creation of an archive of Islamic humanism to speak back to all areas of psychology and cognate disciplines focused on human behavior. The espousal of decolonial thought locates IP within larger bodies of solidarity and decolonizing scholarship committed to pluriversal and transformatory enactments of knowledge.

Dialectical epistemology

The article is devoted to epistemology. It is revealed that progress in the direction of the true representation of a natural object occurs when a meaningful representative definition of it organically connects two fundamental dialectical epistemological flows. The first is the intuitive heuristics that are born of the imagination and are purely subjective nouns, the Genesis of which is idealistic. The second is the sensory-rational experience of observation-apperception, which is a purely external, in relation to the subject, induced reaction due to the material nature of the object. The results of verification activities are an indicator of the organic connection of the indicated flows. It is shown that the «parallel» materialistic and idealistic lines in epistemology point to two equal oppositional realities, the contradiction of which, according to the dialectical method of reasoning, is removed through the constitution of a single metaphysical substance — the spirit. These lines are clearly separated through the reflection of two heterogeneous cognitive components. The necessity of changing paradigmatic guidelines in the philosophy of natural science from mechanistic-atomistic to organismic is discussed. In the preceding part, a criticism is rejected of metaphysics of scientism.

Locke's Ideas of Mind and Body by Han-Kyul Kim

Reviewed by: Locke's Ideas of Mind and Body by Han-Kyul Kim Shelley Weinberg Han-Kyul Kim. Locke's Ideas of Mind and Body. New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. xiv + 166. Cloth, $112.00. In the brief space I have, I can provide only a quick taste of what the reader is in for with Han-Kyul Kim's Locke's Ideas of Mind and Body. Kim argues that his account of Locke's metaphysics of substance in terms of ideas of mind and body (nominal essences) makes sense of the relation between four crucial and often overlooked topics in Locke's philosophy: "(1) Locke's mind-body nominalism, (2) his epistemic humility, (3) his functionalist account of substrata, and (4) his naturalist approach to the human mind" (4). Kim opens in chapter 1 with a survey of various ontological doctrines (materialism, substance dualism, and property dualism) that have been associated with Locke and provides arguments that none are correct. Instead, Kim puts forward a novel argument that Locke's metaphysics of substance should be understood in functional terms. Qualities are explained and known, insofar as we know them, in terms of their causal/functional roles: any intrinsic natures should be understood simply as possibly multi-realizable bearers of those causal roles. This dovetails with Kim's understanding of Locke's "substance nominalism" (chapter 2), the view that the distinction between the mental and the material (mind and body) is only a nominal (ideational) one reflecting our two different perspectives on the world given in sensation and reflection. So, "the two nominal entities [mind and body] are differentiated only by reference to their functional roles in our psychological and physical theories," both of which should be understood in a naturalistic framework (131). Consistent also with Locke's "epistemic humility," the subject of chapter 3, any claim about the fundamental stuff of the universe—that it is either material, immaterial, or something with both material and immaterial properties—confuses "ideas with reality" (9). Shedding light on this confusion between ideas and reality allows Kim to see in Locke a kind of naturalism consistent with an "emergentist" interpretation of superaddition (chapter 4): everything from motion to thinking emerges as something more than the material particles so organized and "made fit" by God for that emergence. Higher-level beings "may thus appear to be entirely distinct from and over and above the solid particles of which they are composed, but are nevertheless described as 'superadded' only in the sense that they are not contained in the idea of matter" (89). Such confusion between what belongs to the realm of ideas and what belongs to reality also leads to the perennial "mind-body problem" for which a solution is offered in chapter 5. Following Colin McGinn, Consciousness and Its Objects (Clarendon Press, 2004), Kim argues that once we realize that all Lockean talk about material or immaterial substance is really only about our ideas (nominal essences) and that it takes a being far superior to us to organize the fundamental stuff in such a way [End Page 818] that it exhibits the causal order it does, part of which results in the nominal essences (ideas) of matter and thinking, we should realize that mind-body interaction as problematic is due simply to the way we think about the mind and the body. A superior understanding of the natural world would reveal some property, in terms of its functional role, that would "enable us to see a priori how the phenomena we call 'mental' and 'physical' are related to each other" (112). In crafting his functionalist and "substance nominalist" interpretation of Locke, Kim has provided interesting links to various historical (William Carroll, Richard Burthogge) and contemporary (Colin McGinn) "Spinozist" readings of Locke as well as a historical naturalist reading (Joseph Priestley) that have not been in the foreground for some time. He also appeals to twentieth- and twenty-first-century metaphysics of the mind (Frank Ramsey, Jaegwon Kim, Donald Davidson, Colin McGinn) to shed more light on various arguments. Some may object to doing the history of philosophy by appeal to contemporary thinking. I think Kim has done a good job of allowing Locke...

Substances, Agents and Processes

AbstractThis paper defends a substance-based metaphysics for organisms against three arguments for thinking that we should replace a substantial understanding of living things with a processual one, which are offered by Dan Nicholson and John Dupré in their edited collection, Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Dupré and Nicholson consider three main empirical motivations for the adoption of a process ontology in biology. These motivations are alleged to stem from facts concerning (i) metabolism; (ii) the life cycles of organisms; and (iii) ecological interdependence. The paper discusses each of the three arguments in turn and concludes that none gives us any compelling reason to abandon the metaphysics of things. At best, they are arguments against a kind of caricature substance metaphysics that ought never to have been in the running in any case. Then, at the end of the paper, it is suggested that there may be more positive arguments for insisting on retaining things in our metaphysics, arguments which, perhaps ironically (given the opposed standpoint of Everything Flows) get their main impetus from the phenomenon of life.

Il ceppo e l’intaglio. Riflessioni metafisiche sul Daodejing

The complex and long genesis of the Daodejing is widely known. Whether it was originally composed by a single author, the legendary Laozi, or whether it emerged over time as a sort of collective anthology ancient sayings, the text underwent countless changes made by copyists and commentators over the centuries, and the Daodejing extensively published today is clearly something different from its first (and second) versions. For this reason, as well as for the nature of Chinese thought itself, it seems inappropriate to search for a philosophical “system” in the Daodejing. Nonetheless, the text can shed light on the view of nature permeating classical China. The paper will focus on three issues. The first is the ontological non-individualization of the Dao, which is the counterpart to the epistemological individualization of the human and social world. The second is the kind of metaphysics that can frame these features: a metaphysics of diachronic events, processes, and emergences, rather than a synchronic metaphysics of objects, substances, and monadic properties. The third, finally, is the fragmenting power of language, which through naming and knowledge creates that individualization that splits the undivided unity of the Dao.

Hegel and Aristotle on Ethical Life: Duty-Bound Happiness and Determined Freedom

AbstractHegel's account of ethical life can be shown to contradict Aristotle's in two main ways: first, Hegel follows Kant in emancipating virtue/duty from the particularity associated with the content of motivational drives and with Aristotle's eudaimonia. Hegel thus rejects Aristotelian happiness as the final end of rational action and prioritizes duty. However, against Kant, Hegel unites (1) abstract duty and (2) determined drives within a speculative notion of ethical duty: rational agents find happiness in heeding duty's call. Second, Hegel follows Kant in emancipating agency's subjective dimension from the all-encompassing determinacy of Aristotelian substance metaphysics. At the same time and against Kant, Hegel unifies agency's undetermined, subjective dimension with the determinacy of objective norms and habitual praxis: ethical praxis must be animated by undetermined subjectivity whilst being determined. In both cases, Hegel goes beyond Aristotle by resting his argument on the speculative structure of ‘the concept of the will’.

The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. Elizabeth Grosz. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+322.

<i>The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism</i>. Elizabeth Grosz. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+322.

Dark Night of the Early Modern Soul

During the sixteenth century, Jesuit renovations of medieval Aristotelian conceptions of the soul afforded an important discursive field for René Descartes to craft a notion of the soul as a substance distinct from the body and defined by thought. Cartesianism, however, augmented rather than diminished the skeptical crisis over the soul and the mind–body union. This article explores the work of a Jesuit intellectual, René-Joseph Tournemine, whose attempt to navigate between Malebranche’s Cartesianism and the metaphysics of Leibniz proved influential during the eighteenth century in ways that intersect with the development of Enlightenment biological science. Tournemine’s theologically motivated conjectures about the nature of the mind–body union reinforced an important shift away from considering the soul as a metaphysical substance in favor of seeing it as a pervasive motive force or vital principle animating the human organism.

УКРАЇНСЬКА ЛІТЕРАТУРНА ЕМІГРАЦІЯ: МОДЕЛІ «ВІДСУТНЬОЇ ПРИСУТНОСТІ» В МАТЕРИКОВОМУ ПИСЬМЕНСТВІ

The article focuses on various aspects and peculiarities of Ukrainian literary emigration – from the need to surround other people’s space with the whole complex of psychological, socio-cultural, creative problems – to the re-accentu- ation of the notions of motherland / stranger, center / periphery, etc. In this context, various individual views on the notion of a homeland as a territory and a homeland as a spiritual, metaphysical substance are considered. It is noted that under the conditions of a closed system of totalitarianism, this was perhaps the only opportunity to perceive the intellectual, philosophical, artistic-style impulses of the world not only through the mediation of Russian and Polish translation, but also directly within other cultures. Writers outside Ukraine produced other models of world perception – hence the explanation of a broad map of scattering of Ukrainian emigrants. The emigre writers integrated into a strange world, the world of the Other is not as Alien, where, accordingly, there is a dominant, “central” or dominant culture and culture marginal, peripheral, brought from other ethnic territories and communities. On the one hand, they got the freedom of creativity, and on the other hand, they were limited by harsh conditions of survival (most of them had to work for a long time on different jobs). Open to change, they were guided by the guideline to maintain a certain balance between their / stranger to balance the images of their homeland / stranger. The received “gift of freedom” tried to convey creativity, “liberating” itself from traditional aesthetics, instead seeking the new, “unburied aesthetics”. Different models of “absent presence” of diasporic writers in mainland Ukrainian literature (B. Boychuk, B. Rubchak, I. Koshelevets, Emma Andievskaya, Vera Vovk, Anna-Galya Gorbach, Martha and Ostap Tarnavsky, etc.) are analyzed in the article. Some of them tried to legalize their presence in the Ukrainian socio-cultural space still far from gaining independence from Ukraine; others have proven active in the Ukrainian cultural environment since the 1990’s. The author stresses the need to study the holistic image of Ukrainian literature, including the study of mentality, psychological peculiarities of emigration writers.

Common Conceptions and the Metaphysics of Material Substance

This paper explores how, according to three early modern philosophers, philosophical theory should relate to our pre-theoretical picture of reality. Though coming from very different backgrounds, the Spanish scholastic, Domingo de Soto, and the English natural philosopher, Kenelm Digby, agreed that an ability to accommodate our pre-theoretical picture of the world and our ordinary way of speaking about reality is a virtue for a philosophical theory. Yet at the same time, they disagreed on what kind of ontology of the material world is implied by these. The Dutch Cartesian, Johannes de Raey, took a very different approach, and argued that the picture of reality we naturally develop from our early days onwards and the language associated with it have their use in domains such as law and medical practice, but are a poor guide to the ontology of the material world. Thus, if we are to arrive at a proper understanding of the nature of matter, we need to move beyond the picture of reality we naturally develop from our early days onwards in order to come to see that the nature of matter consists in bare extension.