Ontological Substance Research Articles

Scott's Ghost-Seeing

Episodes of ghost-seeing radicalize a key device of Walter Scott’s historical novels, in which cultural difference submits to a developmental logic of historical difference. The spectral apparition signals not only the ghost-seer’s imminent death but also a historical extinction, that of the life-world in which supernatural phenomena count as real. This essay considers the complication of this historicist logic in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and The Monastery (1820). In the former, ghostliness is endemic to a time of pure liminality, unmoored from historical purpose: the suspension of the present between a past that fails to pass and a future that fails to arrive empties it of ontological substance. In The Monastery, the ghost rudely resists exorcism by rational explanation. Scott’s White Lady indexes the severity of the historical breach inflicted by the Protestant Reformation: a discontinuity more violent, in its impact upon knowledge, belief and the imagination, than revolutions of dynasties or political systems.

Derrida's Wheel – The Circularity of Political (R)Evolutions

This article investigates the relationship between political revolutions and the evolution of politics. It discusses the circularity within the concept of revolution through Jacques Derrida’s theory of sovereignty as particularly per Rogues – Two Essays on Reason and The Beast and the Sovereign. Derrida’s notions of wheel and ipseity display ontological prerogatives and evolutionary limits of political revolutions possibly coinciding with reversals hard to turn into linear evolutions, excluding rather than reaffirming circularity. Political revolutions show such incapacity to become evolutionary for politics when lacking ontological substance and resting upon formal contingencies such as new techniques. An ‘alturnative’ notion of sovereignty is proposed as a heuristic criterion to gauge political events’ ‘revolutionary’ quality. This undermines the (r)evolutionary nature of political turns, like those associated with the contemporary digitalisation of politics. The Italian Five Stars Movement’s parable is a case in point of digital political turns whose effect is non-evolutionary for politics.

Politik Etnosentris Semu Dalam Kasus Upaya Pemekaran Provinsi (Studi Pada Gerakan Pemekaran Provinsi Cirebon)

This study discusses about the ethnocentric based political movements that are false (pseudo- ethnocentric politics) in the case of deadlock effort for Cirebon Provinces segregation. This study uses the theory of governability, Theory of Social Movements, Theory of ethnocentrism, and the Theory of Rent-Seeking in dissecting the issue of the proposed research regarding the causes of ontological substance of the Cirebon Province segregation movement, how the movement of the expansion is done, the goal of some parties spreading issues about ethnocentric in the period of Cirebon Province divergence movement, and finally as a tool for analysis to uncover the reasons substantially deadlock Keraton Cirebon Elit effort with the P3C Organization in Cirebon and its Provinces movement determinant implications after the deadlock occurred. By using qualitative methods of the literature and collected data through in-depth interviews. Researchers have argued that the conditions of management of the West Java Provincial Government in the category of un-governability was the cause of the ontological substance of Cirebon Province segregation movement. That the derivation is the rise of forms of movement by the elites and activists Provinces Cirebon. The researchers also found, the issue of ethnocentrism used as a propaganda tool in order to strengthen the solidity of the group. And the reason for the deadlock substantive motion Cirebon Provinces is more to the practice of rent-seeking among the position holders involved (central and regional). In this study were also presented regarding the emergence of the idea for transfer the Capitalcity to Cirebon and Majalengka and the movement for divergence the district of Indramayu and Cirebon as a result of the deadlock implikatif (discontinuities) of Cirebon Province segregation movement.

A Naturalistic Approach to the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

Following a brief review of current efforts to identify the neuronal correlates of conscious processing (NCCP) an attempt is made to bridge the gap between the material neuronal processes and the immaterial dimensions of subjective experience. It is argued that this “hard problem” of consciousness research cannot be solved by only considering the neuronal underpinnings of cognition. The proposal is that the hard problem can be treated within a naturalistic framework if one considers not only the biological but also the socio-cultural dimensions of evolution. The argument is based on the following premises: perceptions are the result of a constructivist process that depends on priors. This applies both for perceptions of the outer world and the perception of oneself. Social interactions between agents endowed with the cognitive abilities of humans generated immaterial realities, addressed as social or cultural realities. This novel class of realities assumed the role of priors for the perception of oneself and the embedding world. A natural consequence of these extended perceptions is a dualist classification of observables into material and immaterial phenomena nurturing the concept of ontological substance dualism. It is argued that perceptions shaped by socio-cultural priors lead to the construction of a self-model that has both a material and an immaterial dimension. As priors are implicit and not amenable to conscious recollection the perceived immaterial dimension is experienced as veridical and not derivable from material processes—which is the hallmark of the hard problem. These considerations let the hard problem appear as the result of cognitive constructs that are amenable to naturalistic explanations in an evolutionary framework.

Seng Zhao’s “Prajñā is Without Knowledge”: Collapsing the Two Truths from Critique to Affirmation

This essay explores one of the first distinctively Sinitic reappropriations of Madhyamaka epistemology: Seng Zhao’s essay “Prajnā is Without Knowledge.” Seng Zhao’s work is here read as a deliberate collapse of the traditional Madhyamaka Two Truths into two simultaneous aspects of sagely wisdom, rather than a diachronic means-end relation, arriving at a crypto-Zhuangzian “trivialist” conclusion aimed at undermining epistemological bivalence at its roots. For Seng Zhao, because nothing can be established as true, nothing can be excluded as false. Here the understanding of Emptiness has become not the exclusion of all views, but the inclusion of all views. This is rooted in Seng Zhao’s view that, to use Jan Westerhoff’s terms, the denial of substance-svabhāva is always also implicitly the denial of essence-svabhāva. Seng Zhao move from Emptiness as exclusion to Emptiness as inclusion, and from denial of ontological substance to denial of mutually exclusive determinateness, sets the agenda for the distinctive developments of classical Chinese Buddhist philosophy to come.

Progetto e diritto perfetto

In his Il rovescio del diritto, Francesco Galgano, a master of civil law, played with the term “diritto” (law, right), pointing out that it was the only noun whose opposite does not exist. It is not an Italian peculiarity, because Recht, right, droit do not accept opposites as well and it is a serious matter. The law, in fact, as a complex of commands and norms whose disregard is punished, does not allow a “counter-right”. It is ontological substance: if the rules are serious, it is not given an opposite, negative substance. The right “is” in itself, and the rules can be respected or violated but the “non-norm” or the contrary of the norm cannot exist. It is true that law does not have the monopoly of rules (there are also more intimately strong rules, such as ethical and faith-based, and impassable rules, such as those of physics), yet it is true that it is the only one who has the power to make black out of white, unjust out of the just, false out of the true and when it does so, it contains within itself the contradiction and makes it its own. It is the right to be, when it wants, itself and the opposite of itself.

Love and Responsibility: A New Understanding of Leadership

The purpose of the study is to investigate the importance of substance for the disclosure of ontological evidence. The methodology is inspired by Gadamer's hermeneutic philosophy and involves clinical application research using a deductive approach. This means that leaders in a clinical context were taught and participated in a discussion about a theoretical model of leadership with caring science and ontological substance. The result shows that the leaders' attention and focus were primarily directed toward administration, finances, and outer structures. Caring science and ontological substance contributed toward disclosing ontological evidence, and leadership emerged as caring, love, inner responsibility, guilt, and vulnerability. In this study, substance has been combined with teaching and group discussion as a methodical approach. Substance is the guiding issue and has been shown to lead to truth. The method is in a true sense nothing without substance.

Law as a Linguistic Instrument Without Truth Content? On the Epistemology of Koskenniemi's Understanding of Law

The most significant merit of Martti Koskenniemi’s legal epistemology consists in decisively radicalizing the “linguistic turn” in jurisprudence. This radicalization entails the claim that law should be understood not only as a specific language, but as a language without truth content, regardless of whether this truth is assumed to have universal or even only contextual validity. The innovative potential of Koskenniemi’s approach becomes even more evident if we consider it in the light of a short overview of the main strands of legal philosophy. However, the most far-going assertion of Koskenniemi’s legal philosophy – namely that legal propositions do not contain any inherent truth content, nor do they refer to an external source of reliable validity – is also its most contestable tenet. Indeed, the most recent philosophy of language maintains that neither language in general, nor the language of the law in particular, can be regarded as devoid of truth content. As a consequence, the legal professional cannot be just allowed to use the law as an instrument at the service of his/her preferences, but should justify his/her position by resorting to the linguistic content in which law, without assuming a metaphysical or ontological substance, is lastly rooted.

SKOS concepts and natural language concepts: An analysis of latent relationships in KOSs

The vehicle to represent Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOSs) in the environment of the Semantic Web and linked data is the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS). SKOS provides a way to assign a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to each concept, and this URI functions as a surrogate for the concept. This fact makes of main concern the need to clarify the URIs’ ontological meaning. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between the ontological substance of KOS concepts and concepts revealed through the grammatical and syntactic formalisms of natural language. For this purpose, we examined the dividableness of concepts in specific KOSs (i.e. a thesaurus, a subject headings system and a classification scheme) by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques (i.e. morphosyntactic analysis) to the lexical representations (i.e. RDF literals) of SKOS concepts. The results of the comparative analysis reveal that, despite the use of multi-word units, thesauri tend to represent concepts in a way that can hardly be further divided conceptually, while subject headings and classification schemes – to a certain extent – comprise terms that can be decomposed into more conceptual constituents. Consequently, SKOS concepts deriving from thesauri are more likely to represent atomic conceptual units and thus be more appropriate tools for inference and reasoning. Since identifiers represent the meaning of a concept, complex concepts are neither the most appropriate nor the most efficient way of modelling a KOS for the Semantic Web.

Hermeneutik der Minne: Liebesdichtung und religiöser Diskurs bei Dante und Petrarca

AbstractAn important characteristic of Italian minne-poetry in the late Middle Ages is the negotiation of the Sacred and the Profane. Nonetheless, Dante and Petrarch, the most important representatives of Italian minne-poetry, enter this negotiation in very different ways. Dante proposes to align mundane minne-poetry - as a form of minne-theology - with sacralization; with that, Dante seems to be in perfect harmony with his epoch, commonly referred to as Christian or theocentric Middle Ages. But looking more closely, Dante’s sacralization of courtly love reveals itself to be an outrageous provocation of Christian orthodoxy: Dante’s minne-poetry presents itself as a supplement to the Gospel’s promise of Salvation, and thus obviously competes with the institutionalized religion. Petrarch, very much concerned to be perceived as the one to overcome the ‘Dark Ages’ represented by Dante and from there as the founding authority of what we call Renaissance, quotes Dante’s sacralization of the courtly love in order to cancel demonstratively its claim to ontological substance. Different to Dante, Petrarch avoids all heretic appearance by presenting the divinization of the minne-lady as a mere phantasm which is finally recognized as the result of a morally erroneous conception of love. Therefore with Petrarch, Christian orthodoxy is not overtly contested. This paradoxically clears the way for a genuine worldly poetry in which art itself gains the aura of the sacred: thus with Petrarch, the will to balance religion and love becomes a driving force of secularization.

An essay on phonetic and semantic neologisms in scientific language

Science has the commitment to formulate pertaining neologisms coherently with the new acquisitions derived from the basic and applied research. The elaboration of scientific neologisms has to be phonetically done on a semantic basis dictated by the ontological substance or formal phenomenology of the object discovered. The article explains the reasons for which it is advisable to avoid a linguistic formulation based on merely phonetic abstractions.

Ruling the Future? Heretical Reflections on Technology and Other Secular Religions of Sustainability

AbstractI argue that the quest for sustainability in Western societies has been shaped by the secular religion of technology. Technological endeavor and moral reflection have been held apart in this quest, with the result that reformist and transformative approaches to sustainability often overlook articles of modern faith in technology. Instrumentalist appeals to eco-efficiency and environmentalist appeals to nature implicitly invest technology with transcendent significance. In response, I rely upon accounts of practical reason in outlining a secular strategy for constituting sustainability as practical moral endeavor. Characterizing this endeavor as faithfulness in the task of sustaining a good world, I suggest that skillful handling of the moral and ontological substance of technology is the very essence of sustainability.

On the Categories of Substance and Function in Chinese Philosophy

Editorial note [from the editors of Zhongguo shehui kexue]: This essay takes the position that the categories ti (substance) and yong (function) are a pair of categories that suffice to express the characteristics of the mode of theoretical reasoning and thought of the Chinese people. It posits that these categories, or rather, this category [in the sense that the two are symbiotic and intertwined] is a product of the development of Chinese philosophy itself. The fundamental connotations of this category of ti-yong are: first, it is a relationship between reality and its effects, functions, and character; second, it is a relationship between ontological substance (essential nature) and phenomenon. In [the history of China's ancient and modern philosophy], a set of complex and interlocking struggles has developed around this category of ti-yong between materialism and idealism, between dialectics and metaphysics, and [these struggles] have left us with very rich experiences and lessons in the area of theor...