Ontological Status Research Articles

Objective embodiment of logic: from computational machines to life and intelligence?

The subject of article is a critical analysis of the objectification of logic and, in particular, the idea of its embodiment in the living. The question of the essence and boundaries of the concept of bio-logic is raised and considered. The problem of logics's embodiment raises from its fuzzy ontological status. The novelty of the study lies in that it shows that the solution of the question of bio-logic directly depends on the question of the essence of logics as such, the views on which has gone through strong transformations during its history. Idea of logic's objectivization has became possible due to not only conceptual philosophical constructions, but also the computational revolution, which made practical implementation of logical principles in the functioning of computing machines possible. Concept of logic has subtly expanded and transformed into the idea of orderliness and algorithmicity. It is shown that such an expansive interpretation of the logical is not applicable to biosystems, because they are living totalities, where everything is reciprocal and continuously interconnected. Even such computationally similar systems as the genome and the brain turn out to be autopoietic entities that nonlinearly create themselves without following formal rules. Paradoxically, the intelligence, which was considered the cradle of logic, also turns out to be flexible and adaptive, because it is also rooted in biology. The vital fundament of living intelligence prevents its artificial modelling through logico-computational and algorithmic phenomena. Main conclusion is that question of bio-logic depends on the optics of considering logic as such, and is also associated with bio-ontology, an understanding of the essence of life. Our analysis shows that there are not sufficient grounds to recognize the existence of a special biological logic immanent to living things, which, however, has potential as a philosophical and scientific metaphor.

Focalization, Subjectivity, and Magic(al) Realism in “Night in the Woods”

The main aim of our analysis is to consider the use and function of focalization in Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall, 2017) and the resulting magic(al) realism subjectivity of perception and fluidity of the gameworld in the framework of post-classical narratology. Our suggestion is that the specific ludonarrative features and functions of the game and its playable protagonist, Mae Borowski, pose questions pertaining to the ontological status of the gameworld, making it an in-between, undetermined magic(al) realism space. Taking into account the conventional formulas and themes utilized in the game, it has already been discussed as an American story following the tradition of the so-called Rust Belt Gothic. This approach, albeit highly accurate, fails to exhaust the possibility that the events presented in the game, specifically in the fourth act, are only subjectively perceived by the protagonist/focalizer, Mae Borowski. In our text, we discuss the potential markers of subjectivity present in the game, with a focus on the game music and soundscape.

From Humans to Androids to Holograms: the Persistence of Character in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Voyager

Over the years, posthuman, AI-based characters have become fairly common in the Star Trek franchise, and the very question of their ontological status and of their relationship with the various human, humanoid or alien crews they work with is explored and evolves within the different series. My contention here is that this questioning can be seen as a mise en abyme of the concept of character in a posthumanist culture and lead to “a renewed interrogation of character” (Anderson, Felski and Moi 14). I shall concentrate on two of these main recurrent “characters,” the android officer Lt. Commander Data in The Next Generation and the holographic Doctor in Voyager. After a brief examination of some of the most thought-provoking societal and ethical issues dealt with in the franchise from its very beginning through human characters such as Lieutenant Uhura in the original series, I shall analyse how, from the late 1980s, with the rapid spread of AI in all fields of society, non- humanoid characters like Data and then the Doctor have incarnated (so to speak!) the passionate debate notably in posthumanism studies about “the measure of a character,” a take on the title of one of the most famous episodes of The Next Generation.

“Their Is No Such Thing as a Machine That Acts Outside of Relations With Humans”

Starting with her early works on “Talk with Machines” (1986, republished in 2021) and her books Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (1987) and Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007a), Lucy Suchman not only opened up a new domain of scientific interest in humans and technology, but also showed how the scope of human machine relations needs to be reconceptualized. With her most recent works (2023a, 2023b), she not only widens the perspective on the contexts for machine usage, particularly by the military, but she also gives insights on how to conceptualize AI in terms of its ontological status and its agency. Discussing the relevance of the concept of autonomy for relations between humans and machines, Lucy Suchman clearly positions herself in the debate and demonstrates how we need to reconfigure and address so-called machine autonomy.

Ficta and Virtuality: An Ingardenian Ontology of Virtualized Ficta

In my paper, I establish an Ingardenian phenomenological ontology of “virtualized ficta”, i.e., fictional entities introduced to virtual gaming. The first Section of my paper provides an ontology of virtualized ficta, focusing primarily on their ‘‘existential moments’’. But in order to have a firm grasp of the ontological aspects grounding the virtual work, it’s important to engage its strata. This is what I attempt to do in Section 1.2. Virtualized ficta’s intentional dependencies are strongly manifest in what I call the ‘‘strata of the virtual work’’. That is, I repurpose Ingarden’s strata of the literary work, the picture, and the film to showcase that virtualized ficta, from the bottom up (i.e., from their pure ontology to aesthetics) are purely intentional entities. In short, I argue for a purely intentional account of virtualized ficta as ficta-made-virtualia, whose ontological status is determined by the creative acts of game developers and gamers.

«Утрата середины»: онтологический аспект

The article examines the problem of the ontological status of the average and the question of the possibility of overcoming the growing polarization in various aspects of human existence. The main idea of the article is to affirm a special existential “localization” of the average in relation to opposing positions. It is noted that the intermediate position is not a simple “arithmetic mean” of two opposites. The topos of the average is located (established) in the dimension of the action of transcendence, which is ahead of any opposites. In turn, this action itself is conceptualized as a non-substantial “core” of subjectivity. It is the reactualization of subjectivity, which is subject to “exposure” and problematization in modern philosophy, that acts as a condition for overcoming polarization. The act of transcending opens up the semantic dimension of language and thinking, creating an environment for possible dialogue between opposing positions.

СУЩЕСТВОВАНИЕ В НАСТОЯЩЕМ КАК ОНТОЛОГИЧЕСКАЯ ПРОБЛЕМА

The purpose of the article is to develop an ontological understanding and interpretation of the existence of real world objects in the present mode, to determine the essence, properties and ontological status of the Present. The author identifies and analyzes contradictions in various approaches to understanding being and reality in the present. The essence of the problem is the contradiction of the idea of the inactivity of the moment of the present time, which gives rise to its denial («there is no present») and the procedural representation of being, the idea of the duration of the processes, the course of the movement, which, as it is customary to think, in the present. The study is conducted mainly within the framework of realistic ontology, which recognizes the authenticity of the existence of real material things and social objects as single integrations. A phenomenological approach is also used to identify the forms and methods of the primary pre-reflexive given reality of the Present to human consciousness. At the same time, the methods of research are representation, comparison, ontological analysis, interpretation and reinterpretation of various interpretations of the Present and time as a whole. The article presents various interpretations of the essence of the Present. The theoretical contradictions of the concept of the idle Present, presented as one state of existence and its inconsistency with reality, are revealed and shown. The argument is given to the impossibility of realizing the existence of things and the world as a whole on the basis of the idea of the idle Present. The author justifies the idea of the existence of the Past in the present on the basis of a synthesis of various interpretations of the interpenetration of the reality of these temporary modes. The dilemma of the ratio of competing ideas about the inactivity of the Present and the movement taking place in it is solved by the provision that in the Present not a particular state of the world continues (lasts), but the process of changing these states itself, which «moves» the Present to the last place in the non-spatial temporal order of successive states. Scientific novelty in solving the problem is manifested in justifying the modification of the idea of being in the Present within the framework of the dynamic concept of time by the provision on various forms and methods of the existence of the Past in the Present. The author concludes that such synthesis is possible and necessary.

Typology of philosophical worldviews. Problems of the naturalistic worldview

The article proposes a typology of philosophical worldviews: naturalistic, pantheistic and transcendental. The naturalistic worldview, which includes positivism and materialism, is analyzed in detail. On the basis of historical-philosophical and epistemological consideration, the metaphysical nature of the category "matter" is determined. It is shown that in materialism this category is hypertrophied to the status of a pseudo-absolute. It is noted that the logic of historical, philosophical and spiritual development inevitably leads to the formation of the concept of the Absolute, realizing the principle of monism in the interpretation of the fundamental basis of being. This process is considered on the example of ancient hylozoism, through the crisis of atomistics going to the dualism of Plato (idea and matter) and Aristotle (form and matter), removed in the dialectic of Hegel. It is shown that if we proceed from materialistic axiomatics, it is impossible to solve such cardinal philosophical problems as an adequate definition of the ontological status of the category of matter, the establishment of the cause of movement, the creation of theodicy, the explanation of the existence of freedom, the justification of morality and humanism. The unresolved nature of these problems in materialism leads to the need to form other types of philosophical worldviews: pantheistic and transcendental, which have a pronounced metaphysical character, however, although they proceed from the concept of the Absolute, they think it fundamentally differently. In the future, the authors plan to publish articles devoted to the consideration of pantheistic and transcendental types of philosophical worldviews.

Seeing Again, Seeing Anew: Documentary Reenactments in Contemporary Israeli Cinema

Abstract: This article examines the various forms of reenactment in contemporary Israeli documentary cinema. It argues that current documentary reenactments challenge—along the axes of nationalism, gender, class, and ethnicity—the traditional distinctions between past and present, documentary and fiction, reference and representation. They offer the possibility of bringing the past into the present, and simultaneously awarding a new aesthetic form to the historical event appearing on the screen for the first time. The reenactments give presence to the past, while at the same time showing the impossibility of returning to it in its entirety. They put into question the very borders of documentary cinema as well as raising ethical issues about the ontological status of documentary "truth." Moreover, through reenactments, contemporary documentaries aspire to retrieve lost voices and bodies, forgotten testimonies and histories of Israeli society's Others, and to give them new visual form so that they can find new listeners.

Re-opening the Royal Road: The Unquiet War Dead of the Northern Marianas Islands

This article explores intersecting experiences of landscapes of death in the Northern Marianas islands, in the shadow of brutal battles during World War II. My discussion builds upon prior work on how the human body registers personal and historical trauma. I emphasize that in East Asian and Pacific contexts, “the body” is often best understood as extending into the immediate spatial environs, to include topography, air and water flows, and floral and faunal entities. Ritual process of healing this traumatized somatized land-person continuum revolve around reworking the body-landscape matrix, reconfiguring the ontological status of those who perished under horrific circumstances.

Ways of Genesis for an Individual's Ontological Status in an Archaic Culture (on Ukrainian Folklore Materials)

The problems of philosophical comprehension of the spiritual aspect of the culture of this ethnic group at the archaic stage of its development are among the least studied. The article examines the important and practically untouched issue in our literature of identifying the stages of the genesis of the collective self-consciousness of the ancestors of Ukrainians through their understanding of their ontological status. Cognition of this aspect of the spiritual world of ancestors is carried out through the analysis of the most archaic genres in our folklore—spells and ritual actions. The logical stages of a person's understanding of their place and purpose in the world are distinguished through the analysis of their awareness of relations with the highest spiritual forces. In the context of the pagan worldview, the earliest form of self-awareness of an individual through their relationship with the highest spiritual beings was the position of subjection, worship to these beings, as evidenced by the texts of spells that have reached our time and fragments of rituals. By dominating over nature and mastering social relations, a person begins to realise themselves as a being stronger than evil spiritual forces, and in healing magic (in the texts of spells) appear motives of threats to evil spirits, orders to them, and this is a manifestation of a new stage of awareness by a person about their ontological status. In the process of the cultural-historical transition of the ancestors of Ukrainians from paganism to Christianity, there can be distinguished several stages of awareness of changes in the ontological status of the individual. Christianity in the spiritual world of the individual initially appears only as an external surround of the pagan worldview paradigm – Christian characters appear in the form of altered pagan spirits and gods, while the ontological status of a person remains unchanged. At the next stage, Christianity absorbs pagan plots and characters, filling them with Christian values. Later in the spells, the subject weakens his participation in the fight against evil forces, giving this role to the Christian characters. The genesis of the ontological status here is contradictory: a person feels under the care of powerful Christian forces, which strengthens the processes of historical self-affirmation, and at the same time is completely dependent on these forces, weakening the feeling of being an autonomous being.

The religious materiality of the world in the novel The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen

The article discusses the novel The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen’s applying elements of selected posthumanist theories, mainly object-oriented ontology (G. Harman, T. Morton) and new materialism (J. Bennett). It considers the assumption that in the novel, the ontological status of human beings as well as material objects is fluid, as both play the role of a prop and the entity manipulating the prop. The author focuses on the main character’s religious cognitive perspective and her relations with her (im)material surroundings. An attempt is made to point out certain similarities between the religious worldview and the posthumanist approach. To this end, the author discusses several issues related to the dualistic categories of material vs. immaterial, rational vs. irrational, as well as human vs. non-human.

The Concept of Miracle in Religious Discourse (Semantic Features of Russian and Chinese Cultures in the Perspective of Intercultural Communication)

The relevance of studying the processes of religious consciousness comes from the importance to ensure more coordinated interaction of scientific communities in intercultural communication. The PRC remains one of the key partners of the Russian Federation and partnership requires deeper understanding of the counterpart. This paper analyses social phenomena classified as miracles in Russian and Chinese cultures from the perspective of intercultural communication. To achieve this goal, the authors 1) highlight key theoretical approaches to the study of the semantics of miracle; 2) systematize the available data on key concepts and denotations of the semantics of miracle in Russian culture and supplement existing approaches; 3) establish the key features of the semantics of miracle in Chinese culture; 4) outline approaches to creating a sketch of a universal semantic model of a miracle as an invariant of two cultures; 5) identify the capabilities and boundaries of this model. The research materials included corpuses of national folklore traditions, legal documents, literary and theological works, and scientific (mainly religious) studies. The methodological framework was formed by the approach of N. Luhmann, who defined religion as a variety of forms of the universal anthropological phenomenon of observing of the unknown. Distinguishing descriptions of the first (naive), second (expert) and third (philosophical-synthetic) order, represented by the corresponding languages L1, L2 and L3, allowed to identify the terms traditionally related to the sphere of religion (L1) and to trace their descriptions (L2) and reflection in L1 and L2 within the framework of philosophical and theological writings (L3). As a result, several historically specific interpretations of the concept and the denotations behind it have been identified. They include both universal similarity and local features determined by the historical development of Russian and Chinese societies. For Russia, these features are inextricably linked with the influence of Christianity, where a distinction is made between elitist theological forms and mass believes, often referred to as superstitions. The main lexemes marking the miraculous in Chinese are 奇迹 (qíjì), reflecting the phenomenon of the amazing, surprising; 神迹 (shénjì), applied to the miraculous, God-like, spiritual, but not witches or sorcerers; 妙 (miào) as an aesthetic perception of a miracle, including an incomprehensible mystery; 灵 (líng) marks the supernatural, emanating from the earthly principle yin, therefore associated with folk witchcraft and sorcery. It has been established that in both Russian and Chinese culture, miracle is always combined with a certain worldview (L1), with a complex of ontological statements (L2). Experts (L3) typically turn to the prism of religious disciplines and/or teachings that analyze the correspondence of worldview, ontological constructs and lived religious experience. The sketch of the universal semantic field that makes up the intersecting concepts of Russian and Chinese cultures, obtained as a result of the research, needs further clarification by turning to the sociology of religion and the psychology of religion.

Badania nad językowym obrazem świata a semantyka filozoficzna: w poszukiwaniu pokrewieństw

The goal of the paper is to determine the relation between theoretical presuppositions of linguistic worldview studies (LWS) and heterodox strains of philosophical semantics, as well as the connection with the semantic prerequisites of other schools of text linguistics, in particular corpus linguistics. Semantic consequences of the concept of defining in the LWS are presented. It is claimed that they do not pose great constrains on philosophical semantics (e.g. while the concept of stereotype developed by Hillary Putnam needs to be accepted, semantic externalism does not follow). It is proved that LWS are compatible with the concept of meaning-as-use, particularly with semantic inferentialism, as developed by Robert Brandom and Jaroslav Peregrin. The paper also considers the ontological status of meaning reconstructions proposed in the framework of the LWS, as an answer to critiques originating in more traditionalist or minimalist approaches to semantics. It is demonstrated that similar issues occur in other strains of text linguistics, for instance, in corpus linguistics. However, the paper claims that methodological precision and proper choice of a text corpus guarantee results satisfying from the perspective of empirical linguistics.

Art without an Artist: On the Question of the Criteria of Contemporary Art

The article raises the question of the authorship of works of contemporary art, the institutional nature and socio-economic conditions of its production, as well as the spatial and media-aesthetic mediations of its perception. The main research problem is formulated at the intersection of two questions: is everything that artists produce may be considered art? And: are artists the only authors of the works they signed? The problem is the appearance of a commodity form for works of contemporary art, which does not interfere with them, but, on the contrary, becomes a condition for their social and cultural legitimation, recognition in the context of the history of world art, i.e. museumification. In addition, the article discusses: The ontological status of art objects produced by contemporary artists or, more precisely, by the entire industry and contemporary art market; a specific way of their impact on a person, which, as a purely aesthetic, is abstracted from other channels of sensory and existential experience; and: The integral artistic experience of being-with-art or in-art of spectators and artists, its structure and essence. The methodological approach to the phenomenon of contemporary art developed in the article simultaneously criticizes the positions of aesthetic nominalism and realism, relying on the vocabulary and tools of the theory of art by Walter Benjamin and Russian constructivism. As an alternative to the currently dominant criteria for evaluating works of contemporary art (for example, by T. de Duve), the authors propose an original theory of the Russian left avant-garde with the central concepts of the artistic “thing-comrade” and the collective author-producer.

Социальная онтология молодежной субкультуры: теория и практика

The article substantiates the applicability of socio-ontological approaches and methods of theoretical ontology to the study of social reality. A wide range of references to traditional research in this area conducted by sociologists, legal scholars, economists and cultural scientists are provided. From the standpoint of social ontology, the key principles of the flow of some social processes are considered, first of all, the features of the development of youth sub-cultures. Using the classical methodology of categorical analysis, the attributive characteristics of their existence are identified. The examples show how atypical contradictory aspects of a given social phenomenon can be explained, namely, how ideas about non-physical space and time relate to traditional ontological categories; the predominance of processes of "horizontal mobility" in the activities of the subculture was discovered. The intervals of "quantitative stability" are defined as those in which the development of socially dynamic processes of a new quality occurs. Using the categorical pair "identity-difference", the specific features of the manifestation of social inequality in the education and functioning of the youth movement are considered. In the course of modal analysis, the role of the necessary, random and possible in explaining the current status of a social phenomenon, which has a "floating" ontological status, combining an indication of its physical and virtual existence, was revealed. The "problematic" mode of the possible as a way of manifesting the phenomenon of youth sub-culture allows us to point out the possibility of the predominance of "online culture" features in it. Based on the results obtained, prospects for further study and practical work with "complex" social phenomena are identified. It is shown that the prevention and suppression of illegal actions by representatives of youth cultures should be based not only on sociological, legal, etc. data research but also on a deep, comprehensive theoretical and philosophical analysis.

Life as Metaphor in Derrida and Fink

This article explains how Derrida’s notion of an originary or generalised metaphoricity can be understood in terms of the analyses presented in Voice and Phenomenon (1967) in response to Eugen Fink’s question of a ‘transcendental logos’ and of the paradoxical ontological status of phenomenological language. Tracing Fink’s impact on Derrida, as well as the key differences between them, the article shows that underlying Derrida’s reappropriation of the phenomenological concept of ‘life’ is an expansion of indicative relations—which in Husserl typify the function of signs within intersubjective communication and modes of judgement characterised by the non-presence of the intended object—to a general feature of the ‘living present’. While for Fink the indicative or metaphorical nature of the transcendental concept of ‘life’ does not threaten the founding unity it serves to name, for Derrida it is this very unity which is undermined by the proliferation of indication at the core of temporal experience.

The Potency of Thought

This publication is the first translation into Russian of a text that is key to understanding Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical project. First presented in the form of a paper at a conference in Lisbon in 1987, this text is known to the general reader under the title “On Potentiality”, published in the English-language collection Potentialities (1999). The translation is based on an expanded and refined version of the text, which was first published in Italian in 2005. The article is a detailed commentary on two key concepts of Aristotle’s philosophy — potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia) — clarifying the relationship between them, which plays a key role in Agamben’s works. Wondering about the ontological status of the statement “I can,” Agamben shows that one of the most important forms of potency (potenza) is the experience of deprivation. Clarifying the mode of existence of this kind of experience leads Agamben to the fundamental aporia of the Aristotelian theory of potency, according to which every capacity/potency is at the same time its own incapacity/impotency. The proposed archaeology of the concepts of Aristotelian philosophy aims to highlight not only the ontological but also the ethical and political problems of the Western tradition of thought rooted in this aporia. Agamben links the proposed solution to the posed problem with the development of a mode (modality) of being that prevents every capacity/potency from being fully exhausted in action (actualization). By reading the Aristotelian doctrine of potency as an archaeology of subjectivity, Agamben lays the foundations for his own concept of form-of-life, which is central to his Homo Sacer project.

Perceptual Phenomena Cannot Be Approached from a Single Perspective.

This article explores the relationship between neurophysiology and phenomenology in the context of ambiguous figures. Divided into three parts, the study investigates new forms of stimulus and experience errors that arise from ambiguous figures. Part 1 discusses the limitations of a single-disciplinary approach and cautions against relying only on neurophysiological explanations for perceptions. A sole reliance on neurophysiological explanations can lead to stimulus and experience errors, as well as to the development of an unfounded mind/body dualism. Part 2 focusses on the stimulus error associated with ambiguous figures. It also shows how the Mona Lisa's ambiguous expression can cause the experience error. Unlike other forms of ambiguous figures, different expressions of Mona Lisa are perceived when seen in different definitions. It is shown how assigning a higher ontological status to one of the expressions because it aligns with our knowledge of the nervous system, as conjectured by some authors, gives rise to the experience error. Part 3 emphasises the importance of complementing neurophysiological interpretations with phenomenological ones for a better understanding of perceptual phenomena. Phenomenology provides constraints and corrections to neurophysiology, whereas neurophysiology informs phenomenology through empirical findings. The theory of levels of reality is introduced as a framework to underlie the connections and dependencies between different perspectives. Using both neurophysiological and phenomenological approaches, a comprehensive understanding of perceptual phenomena emerges, surpassing the limitations of each discipline. This method encourages a holistic view of perception, where neurophysiology and phenomenology coexist, complementing and enriching each other's insights.

Degrees and manners as kinds

Abstract We examine equative constructions in Dutch, comparing it to their counterparts in two other Germanic languages, namely English and German. We observe that there is significant variation in the morphosyntax of equative constructions based on whether what is being compared is a gradable adjective or a verb (e.g. Kim is as tall as Sue and Kim ran as Sue (did)) across the three languages and that the morphosyntax corresponds to meaning differences, determining what exactly can be compared in these constructions. Based on these observations, we propose an account for Dutch equative constructions based on eventuality kinds, which has implications for the semantics of comparison constructions in general in relation to the ontological status of degrees and manners in the grammar.