Ontological Presuppositions Research Articles

Pragmatic ontology—Enhancing the philosophical foundation for critical systems thinking/practice

AbstractA sound theoretical foundation for multimethodology should be consistent across the main branches of philosophy: ontological heterogeneity, epistemological plurality and methodological multiplicity. In this light, I posit that (1) Jackson's recent embracement of pragmatism lacks a critical element: a well‐formulated ontology; (2) to overcome this shortcoming, it is necessary to bring ontology back into critical systems thinking/practice; and (3) such an urgent task has further to overcome the current indifference in systems thinking toward ontology. I shall draw intellectual insights from Quine's ‘ontological commitment’, Habermas's ‘ontological presupposition’, Xu Changfu's ‘theory of heterogeneity’, Husserl's ‘ontology layers’, Gadamer's hermeneutic notions ‘prejudice’ and ‘tradition’, as well as ‘ontology building’ practice across the natural and social sciences. I shall also use a multimethodology approach wuli–shili–renli (WSR) as an example to illustrate the working and evolving of pragmatic ontology.

The relational love in the dialogue between Lutheran theology and Chinese traditional religions

AbstractThe concept of love occupies a central position not only in the Lutheran–Augustinian theology of justification and sanctification, but also in some traditional Chinese religions such as Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. For the Finnish interpretation of Luther's theology, a range of pivotal concepts such as two kinds of love, union (participation), gift, favor, unifying power, as well as the real‐ontic presence in faith act a fundamental role in addressing the doctrine of justification and divinization. As a new research approach, the formulation of unio cum Christo in Spiritu sancto develops Tuomo Mannermaa's interpretation of in ipsa fide Christus adest thus opening a new dialogue with the relational creativity of love in Chinese Tao‐Qi framework. While the ontological presuppositions of these two religious traditions are different, the relational love can be explored as a new conceptual model for deepening the theoretical communications between Lutheran theology and Chinese faith traditions.

In Conversation With Erin Manning: A Refusal of Neurotypicality Through Attunements to Learning Otherwise

This paper documents a conversation with Erin Manning in the first webinar of the series Doing Academica Differently: In conversation with Neuroatypicality. Drawing on her scholarship, teaching experience, as well as the more recent 3Ecologies project, Manning shows how systems serve to pathologize by framing difference from the angle of typicality and as a divergence from the norm. She argues, therefore, that it is necessary to move beyond the ontological presuppositions enacted by systems of whiteness/neurotypicality. She proposes that academic work must continue to remain open to the differential within difference, and value slow and convivial practices that texture qualities of existence as a mode rather than as gridded individual identities. By focusing on the crucial notion of value in higher education and how it might be reworked in experimental ways, Manning suggests ways of attuning for learning otherwise beyond a neurotypical frame.

Indigenous Knowledge and Ontological Difference? Ontological Pluralism, Secular Public Reason, and Knowledge between Indigenous Amazonia and the West

AbstractReal knowledge emerges from “impossible” worldviews. Or, put differently, it is possible to accept knowledge that is produced by people whose ontological presuppositions–their baseline assumptions about the nature of reality–one entirely rejects. How can this fact be accommodated, not by advancing a wishful post-dualism, dangerous post-secularism, or implausible ontological relativism, but by working within the tradition of secular political philosophy so that indigenous knowledge, too, can be a basis for public policy and collective action in secular societies? Via a reframing Amazonian multinaturalist perspectivism–which has so inspired post-dualist civilizational critiques–as a social theory of health and illness that informs contemporary Western epidemiology’s struggles to theorize the distribution of health and illness in mass society, this article advances a general approach to recognizing knowledge that has been developed on the other side of boundaries of ontological difference. It argues that the accuracy or efficacy of any particular indigenous knowledge-practice implies the generative potential as theory of the ontological presuppositions that facilitated the knowledge-practice’s evolution. Combining the ontological turn’s interest in the innovativeness of indigenous concepts with a proposal for superseding its incommensurable worlds and abandonment of the aspiration to more-than-local knowledge, the article shows that indigenous ideas and their underlying ontologies are more than generic alternatives to inspire Western civilizational renewal, and opens a path to their legitimization as actionable knowledge in the terms of secular public reason.

Sublime aesthetics in Philippe Grandrieux’s Un lac

ABSTRACT In this article, I assess Philippe Grandrieux’s Un lac (2008) through the lens of the sublime. I offer a formal analysis of the film supported by contemporary theorists who have previously articulated the stakes of Grandrieux’s work in the tradition of narrative cinema. Similar to prior research, my work sets out to understand Grandrieux’s aesthetics and how his filmmaking attempts to engage spectators’ sensory engagements and alter their perceptions of film. Where I diverge is in demonstrating how the theory of the sublime is useful for theoretical understandings of Grandrieux’s films and experimentations with narrative cinema more generally. Specifically, I turn to Un lac’s protagonist Alexi as an anchor to unpack Grandrieux’s experimental cinematography, editing, and sound. Following this, I examine the film through Cynthia A. Freeland’s conceptualization of sublime cinema. I conclude that the snowy landscapes, overwhelming woods, treacherous weather, and fragile bodies in the film work to diminish and dismantle the human figure. I draw on recent theories of cinema and affect to argue that the sublime encourages us to rethink our ontological presuppositions – Un lac posits an alternative to anthropocentrism.

Wittgenstein and Stenlund on Mathematical Symbolism

In recent work, Sören Stenlund (2015) contextualizes Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics as aligned with the tradition of symbolic mathematics. In the early modern era, mathematicians began using purely formal methods disconnected from any obvious empirical applications, transforming their subject into a symbolic discipline. With this, Stenlund argues, they were freeing themselves of ancient ontological presuppositions and discovering the ultimately autonomous nature of mathematical symbolism, which eventually formed the basis for Wittgenstein’s thinking. A crucial premise of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics, on this view, is that the development of mathematical concepts is independent of any ontological implications and occurs in principle without normative connections to empirical applicability. This paper critically examines this narrative and arrives at the conclusion that Stenlund’s view of mathematical progress is in stark contrast to the later Wittgenstein’s writing, which emphasizes links between symbolisms and their applications.

Developing an instrument to examine students' analogical modeling competence: An example of electricity

AbstractScience education reforms advocate modeling as a core practice in which analogy is a significant form and analogical modeling is a creative process for scientific explanation and discovery. This study adopts the self‐generated analogical modeling approach involving electricity, which considers all the modeling subprocesses and includes two subtopics (circuits and energy) with incompatible ontological presuppositions as a conceptual space to develop an analogical modeling competence (AMC) instrument. Two constructs, phenomenon‐related abductive premises (Phenomenon‐AbPr) and analogical modeling processes (AMP), that describe the increasing sophistication of students' AMC (i.e., Level 0 experience to Level 4 high‐order relation) are considered. The procedures utilize a construct‐based approach of developing an assessment to validate the underlying constructs and subtopics to develop the mapping between the target and the analogical models, design items, and determine outcome spaces. Data were collected from 294 Grade 6 students to examine their AMC. The item response theory technique based on the Rasch partial credit model was used to validate the two‐phase model. Student results revealed that the infit and outfit mean square values were between 0.75 and 1.33, indicating acceptable item fit. Results revealed that students scored highest on the open series circuit and lowest on electric energy in the Phenomenon‐AbPr phase. Most students demonstrated relational mapping in the analogical model validation (Level 3) stage, which performed best in the AMP phase. However, they struggled to transfer factors during the analogical model application and deployment (Level 0). Implications for science assessment and teaching are discussed.

Peace as Awakening to the Other: A Comparative Hermeneutics of Levinasian Face and Qisong’s Chan Buddhist Notion of Inherent Nature (Xing 性)

ABSTRACT This essay presents an analysis of Levinas’ and Qisong’s perceptions of the peace as an awakening to the other and its context. Based on an analysis of their views, it suggests that we as a society need to develop an ethical sensitivity, and also to base it otherwise than on an ethically neutral ontology. The first section examines Levinas’ perception of the Western ideal of peace and presents its ontological presupposition of the “sufficiency of being.” The second section interprets his conception of peace as relationship with the other grounded in a “nondual transcendent.” In the third part, a parallel analysis of Levinas’ Chan Buddhist counterpart is presented: Qisong’s peace as relationship with the other grounded in a “nondual transcendent.” The last part explores a second parallel: between Levinas’ peace as disinterestedness and Qisong’s no-form good deeds.

On seagulls, hedgehogs, and foxes: Representation, reconstruction, and the challenge of getting from here to there

The common bond linking feminist theories of identity politics and process ontologies is that, while differing in their ontological presuppositions, both are modes of representation of an external reality, asserting an unverifiable correspondence between our mental representations and an antecedent, external reality. To escape the quagmire of representationalism, Ihnji Jon turns to transitionalist pragmatism in a radical move that redirects attention from intellectual debates between contending theorists to charting a route to practical reconstruction. Jon's pragmatist turn transcends enduring dualisms that have hampered knowledge production since the Greeks while posing daunting challenges to the purpose and process of political practice and social inquiry.

The Ontological Presupposition of Sellars’ Criticism of the Myth of the Given

The Ontological Presupposition of Sellars’ Criticism of the Myth of the Given

The Methodological Way out for Contemporary Philosophical Difficulty

Today’s philosophy is not so self-consistent, the difficulty of which actually lies as follows: in the ontological presupposition the domain of its discourse is shrinking, in its theoretical construction it tends to be self-proclaimed, and in its reason construction it shows the tendency of one-sided concern. Philosophical reasons are differentiated and have collapsed. Philosophical reasons of this kind are problematic. They should be reconstructed as a whole. By putting the theoretical orientation of philosophy to such a way that the structural and the historical approaches integrate with each other, we can reconstruct philosophy as a holistic wisdom. This integration is such an approach that reconstructs human cultural reasons as a whole. It is both broad and dialectical. So it is necessary for us to establish an academic mechanism regarding such a wisdom form of the scope of the cultural existence of man, for philosophy is self-consistent only when it can effectively dissolve the notional conflicts between various culture forms of human beings and when it can promote the comprehension and harmony between cultures.

Symbolic Classification and The Emergence of a Metaphysics of Causality

Symbolic Classification and The Emergence of a Metaphysics of Causality Owen Goldin what is distinctive about metaphysics as a mode of thought that emerged in the fifth century before the Common Era? How did it emerge out of early ways of conceptualizing the world as a whole, and why? Many answers have been proposed. One common view is that earlier modes of thought personify natural agencies; once this is abandoned, the way is open for discerning more complex regularities among natural events.1 Another view is that the process of "rationalization" introduced by the Greeks involves an implicit appeal to the individual's natural intelligence, in contrast to a dependence on an "inherited stock of wisdom."2 A third view is that the first Greek philosophers introduced inference as a way of navigating conceptual relationships, independent of the sorts of personal interactions among divinities related in mythical narrative.3 According to a fourth account, the mode of rationality that allowed for the development of ancient Greek metaphysics was a social [End Page 3] practice with the aim of persuasion, brought on by more democratic involvement in societal deliberations concerning law and policy.4 To these I add a fifth way of answering the question. Crucial to the emergence of Greek metaphysics is explicit distinction of ontological/causal priority and posteriority. Ancient Greek scientific explanations developed out of older, archaic modes of conceptualization, which I maintain have deep parallels with modes of conceptualization shared by many nonliterate cultures. Such modes of thought rest on an implicit worldview which can be called a metaphysics, in a loose sense, and are still worthy of philosophical consideration. I begin with a red flag that will be raised for many as soon as we start talking about the metaphysical traditions of nonliterate cultures. What counts as a metaphysical tradition? I make some distinctions. In the loosest sense, an account or tradition is metaphysical if it reflects a coherent worldview concerning the kinds of beings that there are and how they are related to one another. According to a stricter sense of the term, a tradition is metaphysical if it involves working through this worldview in an explicit and systematic matter. In an even stricter sense, a tradition is metaphysical if, in addition to being explicit and systematic, it merits being classified as "philosophical," itself not an unproblematic term. I here stipulate that an account is philosophical if it does not rest on premises that are specific to certain cultural traditions and employs inferential arguments that are in principle subject to refutation. Generally speaking, there are two ways in which a tradition that is metaphysical in the strictest sense can listen to one that is metaphysical in a looser sense. First, a metaphysician might examine the latter tradition in order to explore how, historically, it served as the root for the former. An example is Aristotle's interest in Hesiod as expressing metaphysical intuitions that later philosophers unpacked.5 By studying [End Page 4] the ontological presuppositions of the sort of account from which our own metaphysics is derived, one learns more about our own ontological presuppositions and what we gain from them.6 This sort of dialogue carries with it the danger that the later thinker presupposes that—in the spirit of "you have to start somewhere"—the earlier thinkers were simply doing a bad job working through their own theories; Aristotle has often been accused of precisely this.7 Another sort of dialogue is possible as well. An alternative metaphysical tradition can reveal the possibility of a radically different way of conceptualizing the causal and ontological structure of the world, one with its own advantages. In such a case there is shared set of problems at issue, shared points of reference within the philosophical literature, and a shared understanding of what philosophical argument is. But philosophical insight might also emerge from the kind of dialogue in which a developed metaphysics that conforms to certain standards of inferential argument confronts a way of thinking that is metaphysical in a looser sense. A substance-based ontologist can be led to reflect on whether the world has to be cut up as she does by studying Aztec...

Thinking Through Phenomena: Theatre Phenomenology in Theory and Practice

Thinking Through Phenomena: Theatre Phenomenology in Theory and Practice Andrew Sofer (bio) THEATRE AND PHENOMENOLOGY: MANUAL PHILOSOPHY. By Daniel Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017; pp. 210. KINESTHETIC SPECTATORSHIP IN THE THEATRE: PHENOMENOLOGY, COGNITION, MOVEMENT. By Stanton B. Garner Jr. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018; pp. 290. PERFORMANCE AND PHENOMENOLOGY: TRADITIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS. Edited by Maaike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015; pp. 264. PERFORMANCE PHENOMENOLOGY: TO THE THING ITSELF. Edited by Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly-Renaudie, and Matthew Wagner. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; pp. 358. Phenomenology, a philosophical method founded by Edmund Husserl, brackets Kant’s things-in-themselves (noumena) in order to describe phenomena as they appear to human consciousness. Phenomenologists ask: How do we get behind our prefabricated concepts to what Husserl notoriously calls “the things themselves”?1 Theatre [End Page 389] also frees us from habitual perceptions and ontological presuppositions—what Husserl labels the “natural attitude.” And as Jacques Derrida and others have noted, something remarkably like Husserl’s famous phenomenological reduction (epochē) takes place in theatre when the houselights go down.2 Struck by this consonance, between 1980 and the mid-’90s first-wave theatre phenomenologists pioneered a versatile alternative to semiotic, materialist, and poststructuralist criticism that illuminated such topics as role-playing onstage (Bruce Wilshire); settings and furniture in Chekhov (Bert O. States); dramatic action (Alice Rayner); and the visual field in Beckett’s late plays (Stanton B. Garner Jr.).3 Meanwhile Phillip Zarrilli launched his decades-long exploration of the intercultural phenomenology of acting.4 In the past decade or so, second-wave theatre phenomenology has flourished both within and alongside the emergent fields of performance philosophy and performance as research.5 Two strains, roughly speaking, have emerged. The first pursues generalizable truths about aesthetic experience and favors the methodology and/or aims of classical phenomenology, however contested (Paul Ricoeur wittily defines phenomenology as “the sum of Husserl’s work and the heresies issuing from it”).6 As Stuart Grant usefully frames this approach, “[p]henomenology claims access to a fundamental-transcendental level of cognition, perception, intersubjectivity and being which would apply to all humans.”7 Some thinkers ally with recent cognitive neuroscience, which promises to validate or at least complement phenomenological insights (thereby inverting Husserl’s [End Page 390] original contention that science needs phenomenology, a science of sciences, to undergird its own shaky metaphysical assumptions).8 Classical phenomenology as a philosophical tradition suffers from a reputation for Teutonic obscurity, as well as from charges of white male essentialism and the denial of difference; that Heidegger became a Nazi who turned against his teacher Husserl did phenomenology’s reputation no favors. A second strain of contemporary theatre phenomenology privileges historically and/or culturally marginalized experiences, together with more personal modes of elucidation such as auto-ethnography and performative writing. Skeptical of transcultural human truths and transcendental perceptual structures, this camp overlaps with critical phenomenology: a broad movement that draws from feminist, critical race, disability, and queer and trans theories.9 In practice, many scholars have a foot in both camps; as far back as 2001, Garner observed that theatre phenomenology has been “a hybridized, dialogic investigation decidedly different from the ‘pure’ or transcendent phenomenology of its Husserlian origins.”10 The four books under consideration here span the full spectrum between hardline classicism and subjective experimentalism. Designed as an introductory textbook for theatre-makers, Daniel Johnston’s inviting and breezily written Theatre and Phenomenology: Manual Philosophy tends toward the latter, albeit placing its do-it-yourself pedagogical program within a traditionalist conceptual framework. Johnston takes up Heidegger’s investigation of what makes humans Dasein, creatures for whom Being occurs as a problem. For Johnston, phenomenology holds that “knowing is not the primary way in which humans experience the world” (103); freed from metaphysics, Heidegger’s “manual philosophy” (the phrase comes from Lucian of Samosata) returns us to things as we find them in the moment. As a practical philosophy, theatre exemplifies aletheia (truth) as process or Ereignis (“Event”): not a representation of some offstage world, but a process that brings Heideggerian Being itself into view. Phenomenology offers [End Page 391] student actors (and others) curious about their own...

Frege on the Ontological Presuppositions of Scientific Discourse

According to the standard conception of ontological commitment, which goes back to Quine, we are ontologically committed to acknowledge those and only those entities whose existence is a condition for the truth of our theories. Frege has sketched, in the context of his critique of the idealist interpretation of scientific language, a more complete approach according to which we are committed to accept also those entities whose existence is a condition for successful communication in science. He argued that we must acknowledge a Platonic realm of objective senses because the existence of such entities is a condition for communicating non-trivial scientific discoveries. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct and defend Frege’s approach. The main thesis defended is that, although Frege’s analysis of ontological commitment is largely obsolete, his general approach to derive our ontological commitments from both the truth and the success conditions of scientific discourse is correct.

A car wash: post-truth politics, Petrobras and ethics of the real

PurposeThe study draws upon three accounts to examine post-truth politics and its link to accounting. In studying Petrobras, a Brazilian petrochemical company embroiled in a corruption scandal, the authors draw upon a politics of falsity to understand how different depictions of similar events can emerge. The authors depict Petrobras' corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures during the period of corruption juxtaposed against the Brazilian Federal Police investigation (the Lava Jato/Car Wash Operation) and Petrobras' response to the allegations of institutional corruption.Design/methodology/approachThe data set consisted of 56 Petrobras reports including Annual Reports, Financial Statements, Sustainability Reports and Form 20-Fs from 2004 to 2017, information disclosed by the Brazilian Federal Police concerning the Lava Jato Operation and media reports concerning Petrobras and the corruption scandal. The paper employs a discourse analysis approach to depict and interpret the accounts.FindingsThrough examining the connection between ontic accounts and ontological presuppositions, the authors illustrate a post-truth logic underpinning accounting, due to the interpretive, contestable and contingent nature of accounting information. Consequently, the authors turn to the “ethics of the real” as a response, as citizen subjects must be cautious in how they approach accounting and CSR disclosures.Originality/valueRather than relying on simplistic true/false dualities, the authors argue that the “ethics of the real” provides a courageous position for citizen subjects to interrogate the organisation by recognising the role of discourse and disclosure expectations on organisations in a post-truth environment. The study also illustrates how competing, contingent accounts of the same timeframe and events can emerge.

Veblen, Marshall and neoclassical economics

Alfred Marshall is often depicted as a pioneer of neoclassical economics almost as if this is a label he embraces and promotes. Yet neoclassical economics is not a category Marshall deploys but a term Thorstein Veblen introduces in characterising Marshall. Veblen coins the term neoclassical to identify an ontological discrepancy in the work of a specific group of his contemporaries, a prominent figure among whom is Marshall. Veblen’s view is that Marshall and other neoclassicals discern features of social reality that suggest a tentative recognition of a causal processual social ontology of the type Veblen associates with modern evolutionary approaches and yet also remain staunchly committed to a taxonomic conception of science underpinned by a quite different set of ontological presuppositions. Veblen’s assessment of Marshall is brief and assertive. In this paper it is argued that the ontological discrepancy interpretation of Marshall, that Veblen first sketched, can convincingly be filled out, has substantial merit and is of importance in developing an adequate appreciation of Marshall.

A Discriminative Ontology for Future Selves

The article presents a critique of the commonly held assumption about the practical advantage of endurantism over perdurantism regarding the problem of future-directed self-concern of a person. The future-directed self-concern of a person crucially depends on the possibility of the right differentiation of diverging futures of distinct persons, therefore any theory of persistence that does not entail a special nonbranching relation of a person to only their future self seems to be counterintuitive or unrealistic for practical purposes of personal persistence. I argue that this pragmatic rationale about future-directed self-concern is equally challenging for both theories of persistence. Moreover, I indicate, that both of these theories fall and stand on the practical feasibility of hidden ontological presuppositions about specific second-order notions of concerns of persons for their future.

Kartezjusz — Lyotard — Dukaj. „Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość” jako propozycja oświecenia po uznaniu końca paradygmatu wielkich narracji

The paper explores the philosophical statements emerging from the plot of Jacek Dukaj’s science-fiction novel Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość [The Perfect Imperfection]. The argument of the article states that the Polish novel proposes a complete philosophical model of possible ways of imagining the future which is unique, yet fully coherent with the Enlightenment paradigm.
 After recapitulating the most important arguments of the mid-century’s discussion about the end of the grand narratives and brief recall of most canonical texts of the period of the Enlightenment, the author analyses ontological presuppositions hidden after the structure of the fictional world created by Dukaj. The novel appears to fully acknowledge the Cartesian dualistic model of the human being (which strongly separates its biological and mental roots) and sets plots in times when all biological limitations have been transgressed. Despite that, both optimistic scenarios of eighteenth-century utopians and catastrophic visions of twentieth-century sci-fi authors have never been fulfilled and the fictional world of the twenty-ninth century appears to be just the same as ours in its core, despite being totally different in terms of its phenomenological appearance.

Ungrounding Homo Ludens: on Agamben and Modern Sports

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that the central ontological presupposition in the philosophy of sport is the ‘sport-as-play’ paradigm. In reconstructing its archaeological origins, a normative narrative is uncovered in which ‘play’ represents a creative and ‘lusory’ social practice, governed by game rules. In the philosophy of sports discourse, Homo Ludens is considered as the ideal, virtuous and innocent character, free from repressive, work-related duties or constraints. In the early works of Giorgio Agamben (1942), the conceptual pair play—ritual offers a contemporary frame of reference, rigorously different from our Homo Ludens ideal. In Agamben’s later works, the provocative Homo Sacer concept can hardly be more opposite to the utopian Homo Ludens paradigm. As Agamben states, political power in late modernity is based on a so-called ‘state-of-exception’, in which ‘bare life’ (as expressed in Homo Sacer) at first is excluded from society, but then again reincluded as an exception, in order to realize law and order. In this paper, I introduce philosophical archaeology as a promising new method in the philosophy of sport, debunking our prevailing Homo Ludens discourse. I argue that modern sports in our times—inadvertently—more and more seem to function as a ‘state-of-exception’, strengthening bio-political power.

When Bodies Speak Differently: Putting Judith Butler in Conversation with Mahatma Gandhi on Nonviolent Resistance

This article puts political philosopher Judith Butler in conversation with Gandhi, on the topic of nonviolent resistance. More particularly, we compare them on a systematic philosophical level. Although we focus on Gandhi’s more activist side, by delving into the ontological presuppositions that Butler and Gandhi share, we can do some justice to how his activism is firmly rooted in a faith-based understanding of the world. We discuss four themes in each of which they complement each other: namely, the ontological roots of the nonviolent imperative; their rejection of an instrumental view of violence; nonviolent resistance seen as communicative action; and nonviolence viewed as a way of life. This discussion shows that while they have very different starting points and vocabularies, and while some tensions remain, there is much scope for cooperation, solidarity and alliance between religious and nonreligious practitioners of nonviolent resistance.