Ontological Claims Research Articles

Hegel on “the Living Good”

ABSTRACT Hegel calls social life “the living good,” but what this means is unclear. The idea expresses an ontological claim about the kind of being that human societies possess, but it is also normatively significant, clarifying why the category of social pathology is an appropriate tool of social critique. Social life consists in processes of life infused with ethical content. Societies are normatively and functionally constituted living beings that realize the good similarly to how organisms achieve their vital ends: via specialized, coordinated functions. In distinction to living organisms, the living good realizes itself through the consciousness and will of individual social members.

Plural media ethics? Reformist Islam in India and the limits of global media ethics

The transatlantic field of global media ethics is premised on a search for the conceptual foundations of plurality. This article is a critique of this very endeavor. I offer this critique through works authored by moral anthropologists of Islam and through a close reading of the Urdu text Cyberistan: Muslim Naujavan Aur Social Media (Cyberistan: Muslim Youth and Social Media) authored by Sadatullah Husaini, the current president of the Indian reformist Islamic organization Jamaat-e-Islami Hind. My article is a post-foundational critique of the implicit foundationalism through which “Islam” and “plurality” are related to each other within inquiries into the ethics of digital communication. I take on digital communication because of its increasingly global and synchronic nature that rendered questions concerning plurality in media ethics particularly urgent. I argue that even though it is important to ask what difference means conceptually for a global media ethics today, it can only make space for radical plurality via the negative, by way of its contradictions and structural constraints. If a global media ethics is supposed to be based on openness and plurality, it can be so only by limiting and weakening its own ontological claims – beyond positive metaphysical groundings, cultures, civilizations, Islam, etc. In other words, it requires a reflexivity to its own position as an academic discipline that produces knowledge under certain historical conditions and an understanding of its own political practice.

Revisiting Moore’s Anti-Skeptical Argument in “Proof of an External World”

Abstract This paper argues that we should reject G. E. Moore’s anti-skeptical argument as it is presented in “Proof of an External World.” However, the reason I offer is different from traditional objections. A proper understanding of Moore’s “proof” requires paying attention to an important distinction between two forms of skepticism. I call these Ontological Skepticism and Epistemic Skepticism. The former is skepticism about the ontological status of fundamental reality, while the latter is skepticism about our empirical knowledge. Philosophers often assume that Moore’s response to “external world skepticism” deals exclusively with the former, not the latter. But this is a mistake. I shall argue that Moore’s anti-skeptical argument targets an ontological form of skepticism. Thus, the conclusion is an ontological claim about fundamental reality, while the premises are epistemic claims. If this is correct, then the conclusion outstrips the scope of its premises and proves too much.

Is Liturgy Ludic? Distinguishing between the Phenomena of Play and Ritual

What is the nature (or “Wesen”) of the liturgical phenomenon? It has become immensely popular to describe liturgical or ritual practice as a kind of “holy play,” whether as metaphor, as productive analogy for pragmatic or theological purposes, or even as making an ontological claim about what liturgy “is” in its essence. The present article seeks to complicate the association of the phenomena of liturgy and of play. The first part traces the origins of the notion of play and the development of its application to ritual in the most influential sources from Kant to Gadamer. The second part highlights its prevalence in the contemporary discussion and elucidates how it is being used. The third part provides a phenomenological analysis to demonstrate important differences between the two phenomena and to question the contention that liturgy is a form of play. The final part tries to ascertain the broader practical and theological aims being served by the association of the two phenomena and—via a return to the question of the nature of the liturgical phenomenon in a more theological mode—suggests that these aims might be accomplished more productively in ways that avoid the downsides of identifying ritual or liturgy with play.

On the notion of dialectics in the linguistic bodies theory

This paper addresses the notion of dialectics in the linguistic bodies theory. First, it presents it as a three-aspect concept, namely, the ontological aspect, the methodological aspect, and the dialectical model. Subsequently, it discusses the ontological aspect and the dialectical model and, based on the enactivist linguistic notions of concreteness and abstraction, suggests that it can be conceived as a two-fold concept: methodological and epistemological. This suggestion intends to avoid the paradox we are led to by acknowledging three ontological enactivist claims and a few assumptions of the methodological approach.Keywords: Dialectics, Enactivism, Language, Epistemology, Ontology.

Sets, Set Sizes, and Infinity in Badiou's Being and Event

This paper argues that Cantorian transfinite cardinality is not a necessary assumption for the ontological claims in Badiou’s L’Être et l’Événement (Vol. 1). The necessary structure for Badiou’s mathematical ontology in this work was only the ordinality of sets. The method for reckoning the sizes of sets was only assumed to follow the standard Cantorian measure. In the face of different and compelling forms of measuring non-finite sets (following Benci and Di Nasso, and Mancosu), it is argued that Badiou’s project can indeed accommodate this pluralism of measurement. In turn, this plurality of measurement implies that Badiou’s insistence on the “subtraction of the one”, the move to affirm the unconditioned being of the “inconsistent multiple”, results in the virtuality of the one, a pluralism of counting that further complicates the relationship between the one and the multiple in the post-Cantorian era.

The World According to Physics

The World According to Physics

The World According to Physics

The World According to Physics

Generation and Class Antagonism

In a recent special issue of modernism/modernity entitled weak theory, a group of scholars debated, receptively but appropriately gently, the merits of “weak thought,” a notion that the editor Paul Saint-Amour derived from his readings of Eve Sedgwick, Wai Chee Dimock, and Gianni Vattimo—a mode of argument, and even intellection, designed to deflate expansive or overconfident epistemological and ontological claims. The issue occasioned a great deal of online dispute, then no fewer than four sets of responses from the various partisans and antagonists of “weak theory,” and eventually, in a final invaginating flourish, a set of responses to the responses by the initial authors (including me). In their response, Melanie Micir and Aarthi Vadde brought into the conversation a tweet by Jacquelyn Ardam: I've been watching the conversations around @MModernity's “Weak Theory” issue unfold from the sidelines and here is my take: sure is easy to claim weakness when you have tenure or TT job. The Q of weakness looks v different from the land of the contingent. (@jaxwendy)

Abduction and the Scientific Realist Case for Properties

Abstract Traditionally, many arguments for realism about properties (universals or tropes) rely on a priori claims. The author argues that if we make use of an abductive principle that is commonly employed by scientific realists, a new argument for property realism can be formulated which is based firmly in scientific practice. The abductive principle says that we should believe in the existence of certain theoretical entities if they figure in the best explanation for what scientists observe. The scientific argument for property realism then says (roughly) that the best explanation for various behavioural patterns that physical scientists observe is that microscopic entities (such as electrons) instantiate stable, causally efficacious properties. After presenting the argument, the author defends it against possible objections. More generally, the article provides a case study for how science and metaphysics can work together to generate ontological claims.

At Play in the Fields of the Law

Hans-Georg Gadamer famously uses the metaphor of play to illustrate the ontological nature of understanding. Under his account, a reader seeking to understand a text brings her horizon of pre-understanding into dialogue with the unfolding effective-history of the text. The resulting to-and-fro, which exhibits “the logic of question and answer,” is playful in nature. Prejudgments are refined, amended or abandoned in the process. Gadamer concludes that the best experience of coming to understand is ordinary conversation, in which two participants learn through a ludic give-and-take. Gadamer also argues that legal practice has exemplary significance for his philosophical hermeneutics, which would appear to mean that legal practice is an estimable instance of play in action – of playfulness. But, can we take this claim seriously? Would any person who has been caught up in the justice system regard law as “playful” and “conversational?” Sandy Levinson offers a witty retort: “As Chairman Mao pointed out, a revolution is not a tea party, and the massive disruption in lives that can be triggered by a legal case is not a conversation.” Robert Cover emphasizes the point more dramatically with one of the most noteworthy opening lines of a law review article: “Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.” In this chapter I reject the criticism that Gadamer fundamentally misunderstands the serious nature and effect of legal interpretation in his work and argue that legal practice does indeed exemplify his ontological claim that understanding results from being-at-play. I unfold my argument in five parts. First, I provide a close reading of Gadamer’s account of play to explore the contours of this central metaphor. Second, I discuss how Gadamer situates the phenomenological experience of “being played” within a larger frame. Play is not just a random experience of giving oneself up to an amorphous playful exchange. Rather, it is structured such that the play is experienced as an event, often in a ritualistic frame. There is a seriousness about play to which we must attend. Third, I connect play to legal practice. Gadamer does not directly describe how legal interpretation is “playful,” and so it is necessary to recreate his implicit argument. Fourth, I develop the implications that Gadamer’s layered analysis of play, ritual and event holds for contemporary jurisprudential debates engendered by “new originalism,” which seeks to locate legal meaning as a fixed element of the past that is not amendable to contemporary playful interpretation. I argue that judgment is the heart of legal practice, and judgment is the product of play. Contemporary originalist theorists seek to impose the rigors of empirical science on legal meaning. This approach founders on ontological shoals, because legal practice is a structured play that is realized in discrete events that participate in ritualistic belonging. Finally, I conclude that the ethic of play is much more demanding than one might assume. My claim that legal practice is playful by nature is a deeply serious assertion that has important ethical implications that extend far beyond a naive view of play as a frivolous indulgence. If we adopt Gadamer’s ontological argument, we must accept that our nature as interpretive beings implies an ethic of understanding, a challenging call of conscience to which we must respond. The ethic of lawyering well is intimately linked with the playful character of understanding. This is not a regrettable admission that legal practice is unconstrained. Quite the contrary, the ludic ethic of legal practice is the ground of the rule of law and therefore a critical foundation for social life.

Towards an Ontology and Ethics of Virtual Influencers

In 2018, TIME magazine named Miquela Souza one of the 25 most influential people on the internet, despite the fact she is not a person at all. Miquela is the first digitally created virtual influencer. This paper provides an initial analysis of some of the ontological and ethical issues associated with the rise of virtual influencers on social media platforms like Instagram. Through a focus on Miquela, it is argued that while these fabricated identities may cause uneasiness at first, there is nothing morally significant that distinguishes them from natural, ‘real life’ influencers. But, far from ‘business as usual’, the inability to separate ‘virtual’ and ‘real life’ influencers raises important questions about the ethical construction of identity, and how this may affect the ongoing preservation of social values like trust in online spaces. The paper draws on literature in personal identity and agency theory to establish the ontological claim that there is no meaningful difference between Miquela and other ‘real life’ influencers, which leads to the discussion about ethical issues including moral responsibility and motivation, and transparency. As of May 2020, this appears to be the first peer-reviewed article theorising about virtual influencers. There are significant opportunities for further research, both in terms of how we should conceptualise these identities, as well as more empirically based social research into how to preserve social values like trust in online spaces.

The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the PosthumousAntebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth CenturyNarratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life

The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the PosthumousAntebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth CenturyNarratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life

More than a Person

The question whether God should be thought of as personal or a-personal is closely linked to the issue of an appropriate model of God-world relation on the one hand and the question how to conceive divine action on the other hand. Starting with a discussion of the scientific character of theology, this article critically examines the univocal-personal concept of God. Traditional Christian conceptions of God have, however, always acknowledged a radical asymmetry between the personal existence of created beings and the ground of being itself. In a second step, the ontological truth claim associated with this way of speaking about God is being related to its methodological consequences. In final step, attention is given to the relation of immanence and transcendence as it is defended in different versions of panentheism: As an alternative to divine interventionism, panentheism can be shown to explicate divine providence as formal and final causation.

Two Histories of Bioinformatics: Data Science vs Life Science

This paper focuses on two attempts to reconstruct the history of bioinformatics as a scientific discipline. Paulien Hogeweg who coined the term “bioinformatics,” presents one of them, while Hallam Stevens, who is both a historian and sociologist of science, offers the other. Although both of them can speak authoritatively about bioinformatics inasmuch as Hogeweg was personally involved in creating the field while Stevens has amassed a substantial amount of microsociological, scientometric and other evidence, they tell two fundamentally different stories. According to Hogeweg, bioinformatics came about as a response to new epistemic demands on the life sciences that arose from several key discoveries in molecular biology in the middle of 20th century. For Stevens, the new discipline was the result of transplanting computational methods and technologies into biology. This difference stems from divergent interpretations of what bioinformatics is, and these in turn depend upon different ontological claims about the nature of living things. The link between the concepts of life and information is explained by Hogeweg through a systems approach. Stevens discounts that link and concentrates instead on the transposition of scientific practices from other disciplines and on the new ways of understanding the living which are generated by this transposition. The attempt to define bioinformatics as a scientific discipline ends for both of these theorists a tautology: the discipline is defined by something defined by this same discipline, that is, by a certain idea about information and/or data. The effect of this tautology is that a normative criterion for delimitation of disciplines (a set of requirements which are necessary and sufficient for considering a field of research as a scientific discipline) does not allow us to explain how each of them occurs individually. Instead, a descriptive criterion is proposed, which is to be understood as the study of the conditions which make possible the differentiations in scientific practices which have already taken place. A distinct understanding of information or data and the ontology associated with it should be the outcome of a study of this kind and not presupposed by it.

Epistemological Analysis of the Concept of Time in Esai Krymetsy’s Scientific Heritage

Modern science leaves the specific nature of temporality unclear, despite the generally accepted notions of the unity and diversity of the forms of time. In contrast to the nature of space, the history of the development of views on the nature of time is neither evolutionary nor revolutionary. As a result, the focal point of the person biological and cognitive unity is regarded only as an auxiliary tool for constructing a computable world. Considering that the activity of consciousness was and remains the condition for the synthesis of Time, the way out of the current situation is in a constructive transition from the ontological claims of science to the study of epistemology of temporality, from the question “what is time” to the question “why is it possible to move”. Using the example of little-known data from the Armenian history of science about Esai Krymetsy, 15th century medieval astronomist, authors reconstruct the primary cognitive mechanisms of secularization and desacralization of the nature of time.

The Material Turn and the Fantasy to Undo Modernity

The Material Turn and the Fantasy to Undo Modernity Benjamin Boysen and Jesper Lundsfryd Rasmussen The emergence of the so-called "material turn" (e.g., speculative realism, new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and actor-network theory) has been one of the most influential trends in the humanities and social sciences in the last decades. The ardent call for a reconnection with and immediate access to reality has left a deep impact. As has the critique of modernity for having endowed us with a fatal misconception of human exceptionality, which (it is argued) has led us into our current predicaments—which, above all, means the climate crisis. With the promise to regain immediate access to reality and to teach us ontological humility, the "material turn" embodies a pledge to revolutionize our understanding of the universe and our place in it, allowing us to join forces with new politico-ethical communities stretching across the human and nonhuman realms—thus aiming at establishing a real political and ethical community with things.1 However, discarding modernity and the human subject comes with a heavy price. For the theories advanced in the "material turn" entail serious theoretical, practical, and political problems.2 Scholars within the material turn make ontological claims about the material world that not only seem unusual or even extravagant, but also self-contradictory and unscientific (dogmatic). However, despite this, the theories have been and remain immensely attractive to many scholars in the humanities and social sciences. From a scientific point of view, this is puzzling. We believe that the answer to the reason for its popularity is not so much philosophical or scientific in nature as it is psychological and socio-political. Indeed, the huge popularity of "the material turn" may in itself be taken as a sign of a deep crisis and as one manifestation among others of the dire nature of the global situation now. But though this movement arguably is ill-suited to provide solutions or answers, an insight into the sources fuelling the contemporary desire or craving for such theories may nevertheless prove helpful in shedding light on the basic tenets behind the crisis facing us today. Inquiring critically with Marx about what it is in an epoch or society that fuels the need and demand for such illusions may entail the possibility of better understanding the contemporary sociopolitical crisis of modernity (the discomfort with autonomy, finitude, and secularism) and adjacent phenomena like the [End Page 7] US presidential election of Donald Trump, the last decades' ascend of right-wing populism in the West (but also globally), and the general discrediting and delegitimization of universal institutions and thinking. If we take a closer look on some of the most towering figures within the different branches of "the material turn," we come across curiously identical assumptions, arguments, and hypothesis. Graham Harman (object-oriented ontology), Jane Bennett (new materialism), and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (presence theory) have gained huge popularity with materialistically swayed theories in fields as disparate as metaphysics, political science, and cultural and literary theory. Moreover, they have worked independently of and seemingly without knowledge of one another. Nonetheless, essentially their theories have strikingly similar traits. And to us this is a suggestive indication of a general Zeitgeist in the "material turn" worth enquiring further. These three authors identify modernity and its secularism as the main cause of the current loss of reality. Therefore, Gumbrecht, Harman, and Bennett seek to break with modernity and its twentieth-century advocates.3 According to these authors, modernity has left behind a world without inner moral structures resulting in homeand rootlessness, while postmodernity has furthermore added insult to injury by reducing everything to images, fictions, and play. With the advent of modernity, we have become alienated not only from the world but also from things in the world. The world is thoroughly mediated: it is never seen as itself but only through pictures and language. The magic and inner life of things together with a sense of meaning-and purposefulness have disappeared with modernity as well as postmodernity, which have destroyed our original unity with the world and things. In the critique of modernity, Gumbrecht, for example, problematises the cultural-theoretical priority of...

From the logic of ideas to active-matter materialism: Priestley’s Lockean problem and early neurophilosophy

ABSTRACTEmpiricism is a claim about the contents of the mind: its classic slogan is nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, “there is nothing in the mind (intellect, understanding) which is not first in the senses.” As such, it is not a claim about the fundamental nature of the world as material. I focus here on in an instance of what one might term the materialist appropriation of empiricism. One major component in the transition from a purely epistemological claim about the mind and its contents to an ontological claim about the nature of the world is the new focus on brain–mind relations in the eighteenth century. Here I examine a Lockean trajectory as exemplified in Joseph Priestley’s 1777 Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. However, Locke explicitly ruled out that his inquiry into the logic of ideas amounted to a “physical consideration of the mind.” What does it mean, then, for Priestley to present himself as continuing a Lockean tradition, while presenting mental processes as tightly identified with “an organical structure such as that of the brain” (although he was not making a strict identity claim as we might understand it, post-Smart and Armstrong)? One issue here is that of Priestley’s source of “empirical data” regarding the correlation and indeed identification of mental and cerebral processes. David Hartley’s theory in his 1749 Observations on Man was, as is well known, republished in abridged form by Priestley, but he discards Hartley’s “vibratory neurophysiology” while retaining the associationist framework, although not because he disagreed with the former. Yet Hartley was, at the very least, strongly agnostic about metaphysical issues (and it is difficult to study these authors while bracketing off religious considerations). One could see Locke and Hartley as articulating programs for the study of the mind which were more or less naturalistic (more strongly so in Hartley’s case) while avoiding “materialism” per se; in contrast, Priestley bit the (materialist) bullet. In this paper I examine Priestley’s appropriation and reconstruction of this “micro-tradition,” while emphasizing its problems.

Ecological Restoration or Healing?: Conflicting Ontologies and Missed Opportunities in Public Debates Surrounding Mississippi River Gorge Restoration

ABSTRACT This article describes an instance of public debate about the proposed dam and lock removals along the Upper Mississippi River Gorge in Minnesota, showing ways that environmental controversy plays out in settler colonial and Indigenous publics, attending to who and what gets heard and valued in public debate about potential river restoration. Importantly, this essay attends to ontological incommensurability that may exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous publics in public debates about the environment. I ultimately argue that in settler colonial contexts, Indigenous ontologies - storied realities and experiences that are emergent in practice - in relation with the river cannot be heard by settler colonial publics because they fundamentally challenge settlers' ontological claims to land and water as resource for their exclusive use. Such claims are rooted in colonial violence that contribute to destruction of ecosystems. This essay shows, however, that Indigenous individuals and communities continue to create unique realities with story and visual art to exert presence in the face of settler attempts of erasure, and it shows how better understanding of political ontologies allows for more thorough and ethical engagement when controversies about land and water arise in public debate.

Techne in Affective Posthumanism and AI Artefacts: More (or Less) than Human?

In affective neuroscience, constructivist models are acutely influenced by the modern technological evolution, which underwrites an ongoing epistemological substitution of techne for episteme. Evidenced symptomatically in the influence of artificial intelligence (AI), affective artefacts, these models inform an ontological incursion of techne seen to coincide with posthumanist aspirations and anthropology. It is from the perspective of this neuroscientific techne that posthumanism views the human being as increasingly ill adapted to the modern technological civilization, which, conversely, is understood to require a technical governance of the sort envisioned through AI. Among the projects thought necessary for implementing this framework is a recasting of the human emotional spectrum. Revealed through its techne recasting, however, are explanatory commitments to a metaphysic of extrinsic and contiguous causes, where malleability is ontologically constitutive. Aligned with posthumanist assertions malleability is invoked to argue for a rapid advance of the human form, normatively driven by enlightenment ideals. The ontological claim, however, dispenses with the stability of an a priori, intersubjective and interrelational metaphysical form that undergirds the emotions, leading to the collapse of a definitional anthropos. This paper will argue that techne models of the emotions selectively endorse philosophy of science commitments, thereby introducing a normative inversion that deconstructs the notion of anthropology pursued in posthumanist aspirations.