In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Pictures of Music Education by Estelle R. JorgensenPaul WoodfordEstelle R. Jorgensen, Pictures of Music Education. Indiana University Press, 2011Estelle Jorgensen has long been a mainstay of the philosophy of the music education community, having served as founding chair of the Philosophy of Music Education Special Research Interest Group of the National Association of Music Educators (formerly the Music Educators National Conference) and founding co-chair of the International (...) Society for the Philosophy of Music Education along with Frede V. Nielsen whose work is the focus of this special issue. She remains editor of the Philosophy of Music Education Review, one of the premiere professional journals in the field of music education, and general editor of the Indiana University Press book series Counterpoints: Music and Education, which has published several of her books, including the current one, Pictures of Music Education (2011), that is the subject of this review. Over the course of her career, she has also contributed many chapters to other leading professional books and to the success of international symposia as host and frequent keynote speaker. One could easily continue to enumerate Jorgensen’s many contributions to the profession, but owing to lack of space it will suffice to simply observe that the field of music education would not be what it is today had it not been for her leadership, mentorship, and commitment to building a community of scholars. It is thus a pleasure to have been invited to review the aforementioned book, which [End Page 209] ventures into “the ground between metaphor and model,” the tension between the figurative and literal, to define music education as fundamentally imaginative and open-ended.1Among the advantages of conceiving of the nature of music education as involving a dialectical tension between various metaphors and derived models, Jorgensen recounts, is that the former, because figurative, evocative, and overlapping, allow for the kinds and degrees of ambiguity and slippage that are necessary for the exercise of imagination leading to more open and productive conversation about ideas. Models, on the other hand, are by definition more literal and thus more subject to direct criticism because intended to represent reality in ways that can be empirically tested through application to practice. Indeed, models make systematic assessment and critique of ideas possible. As Jorgensen continues, models serve to simplify “difficult ideas in terms that can be readily grasped, studied, and tested,” which is particularly important to the credibility of the music teaching profession in the eyes of today’s politicians and the public.2 Nevertheless, and for the obvious reason that what Jorgensen refers to as metaphoric models are derived from metaphors and thus bear some similarity, their boundaries can be “fuzzy.”3 As already suggested, it is here, in the fertile ground between metaphor and model, that Jorgensen thinks the most creative and productive thinking about music education philosophy and practice can occur as scholars and teachers recognize and grapple with, and perhaps celebrate, the various tensions and paradoxes found therein. This approach is intended by her as an alternative to the either/or grand narratives that have in the past stifled conversation by reducing philosophy, research, and pedagogy to a search for “the ‘one’ … true or best way, or ‘high road’ to music education.”4 Jorgensen’s own purpose is more modest, and potentially more liberating, which is to open “other fruitful avenues for understanding the ways in which people come to know music.”5The book consists of fourteen chapters in all, each one, with the exception of the introductory and concluding ones, dedicated to a specific metaphor and its chosen derived model that has been “systematically teased out” before being analyzed for its potential strengths and weaknesses when applied to music education.6 Owing to limited space, it is not practical here to address all of the metaphors and models that Jorgensen presents for the reader’s consideration, but it behooves me to provide a short list in order to facilitate discussion of the overall aims of the book. They are: boutique and consumption; village and community; artist and apprenticeship; revolutionary and transgression; factory and production; garden and growth; therapist and healing; court and... (shrink)

Until fairly recently a common way of doing history of science was to pick up an important strand of contemporary scientific thought and to trace its origin back to the philosophical tangle of the scientific revolution. This approach conveniently by-passed the breakdowns of once useful and pervasive theories, and neglected the long intellectual journeys along devious routes. History of science read like a success story; the pioneers who failed were neither dismissed nor excused; they were simply ignored. The historian knew (...) what he was hunting for and he was careful to limit his search to areas where his quarry was sure to be found. This method, which has been dubbed the precursor-view, stands in contrast—albeit, not in opposition—to the contextual method, which aims at a better understanding of the actual thought-processes of the early scientists. On this second view, history of science must not only account for present theories in the light of past developments, it must also assess old theories in terms of the scientist's conceptual framework, and judge them against the background of the world picture of his age. This may lead the historian down the blind alleys of the past, chasing spurious attempts at explaining the nature of physical reality, but it can clear the ground for a less anachronistic interpretation of the emergence of modern science and the actual process of discovery. History of science acts as a winnowing fork, but we cannot suppose that the discoverer himself always separated the wheat from the chaff, and we must be ever wary of equating the dream with the task. (shrink)

We present a novel reductive theory of type-identity physicalism, which is inspired by the foundations of statistical mechanics as a general theory of natural kinds. We show that all the claims mounted against type-identity physicalism in the literature don’t apply to Flat Physicalism, and moreover that this reductive theory solves many of the problems faced by the various non-reductive approaches including functionalism. In particular, we show that Flat Physicalism can account for the appearance of multiple realizability in the special (...) sciences, and that it gives a novel account of the genuine autonomy of the kinds and laws in the special sciences. We further show that the thesis of genuine multiple realization, which is compatible with all forms of non-reductive approaches including functionalism, implies what we call token-dualism; namely the idea that in every token there are non-physical facts, which may either be non-physical properties or some non-physical substance. In other words, we prove that non-reductive kinds necessarily assume non-reductive tokens, i.e., token dualism. Finally, we show that all forms of non-reductive approaches including functionalism imply a literally multi-leveled structure of reality. (shrink)

By questioning the validity of some of our basic concepts, such as space, object, and causality, quantum physics contributes quite decisively to the dramatic changes now taking place in our world picture. Veiled Reality provides a detailed view of the reasons why such a questioning arises, a survey of the corresponding conceptual and theoretical problems, and a comprehensive, up-to-date account, useful to scientists and epistemologists alike, of the various ways present-day physicists tackle these problems.The book deals with the (...) E.P.R. reality criterion, local causality, and quantum measurement including relativistic quantum collapse, decoherence theories, consistent histories approaches, and ontologically interpretable theories. Questions bearing on the connection between counterfactuality and realism, intersubjective agreement, and limits of the bearing of the verbs “to have” and “to be,” follow naturally from the analysis and are thoroughly examined. Finally, distinguishing between empirical reality and a veiled independent reality whose only knowable features are structural yields a clue to a plausible interpretation of current physics.Accessible to readers with only very elementary background in modern physics, Veiled Reality offers nonspecialists, including students in physics and philosophy, easy access to basic problems in the foundation of physics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ignorance, Knowledge, and Omniscience: At and Beyond the Limits of Faith and Reason after Shinran:Reflections on The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity, and Science, with Special Attention to Dennis HirotaAmos YongAlthough published in the series Religion, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, Paul Numrich's edited volume is really about epistemology in religion and science, in particular about human knowing in Buddhist and Christian traditions shaped by the world of science (...) on the one hand, and how such knowing might also inform scientific knowledge on the other hand.1 The panoply of positions is presented by both Buddhist and Christian thinkers.From the Buddhist side, the following arguments are sketched:• that religion and science are complementary modes of knowing and that "understanding the true nature of the physical world" opens up "the way to enlightenment" (Trinh Xuan Thuan).2• that Buddhism is both continuous with (and hence deserving of serious consideration amidst) the epistemic discourses of modernity in many respects and yet also discontinuous with (and hence capable for critically interrogating) modernity's epistemology in other respects as well (David L. McMahan).3• that a Shin Buddhist approach to human knowledge—which in this chapter is brought into dialogue with Martin Heidegger's (1889-1976) notion of truth—opens up to a Kuhnian philosophy of science that emphasizes how paradigmatic shifts occur when new perspectives replace older frameworks (Dennis Hirota).4• that the questions raised by theoretical and quantum physics provide a scientific framework for discussing fundamental epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical questions that Buddhists and Christians might otherwise disagree about (Mark T. Unno).5From the Christian side, the following theses are explored: [End Page 201]• that boundary constraints confront not only working scientists but also Buddhists and Christians, and that these constraints can thus serve as a springboard for a science and religion "trilogue" (Paul O. Ingram).6• that the mystery of creative becoming (God, in traditional Christian terms) is the dynamic backdrop to the ongoing human quest for knowledge (Gordon D. Kaufman).7• that it is at the boundaries of knowledge that genuine creativity occurs (not only scientific creativity but also theological creativity emerges, i.e., the apophatic tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy or the theory of coincidentia oppositorum of Nicholas of Cusa [1401-1464]), and where, as a result of such creative approaches, distinct fields of inquiry open up and different domains of knowledge emerge (Antje Jackelén).8• that theological discourse is paradoxical precisely because such discourse marks the fluid boundaries demarcating sense and nonsense (Tom Christenson).9And, befitting a volume on the encounter between religion (i.e., Buddhism and Christianity) and science, there is a concluding chapter from a physicist on the limits of scientific knowledge that both is encouraged by the gains made by science (presuming a critical realist approach to science's modeling of reality) and yet also is honest about there being much more to learn on small and big questions (John R. Albright).10The foregoing summaries do not do justice to the complexity and sophistication of the chapters in the book. However, they provide a broader context for my interactions with Dennis Hirota's chapter on Shinran's (1173-1263) epistemology and its implications for both religious and scientific knowledge. As an evangelical Christian, I am particularly intrigued by the challenges confronting a Shin Buddhist approach to the sciences, even as I am hopeful that such a consideration will precipitate creative insights both for the Buddhist-Christian encounter and for the religion-science dialogue. I am all the more motivated since I have long been convinced that the religion-science dialogue has been dominated by generically religious approaches and that it is time for more particularistic or even confessional positions to be registered in the discussion.11 I am optimistic that the specificity of the Shin tradition will provide both complementary and contrasting perspectives to the contemporary Buddhist encounter with science that has so far been dominated by the broadly Tibetan approaches of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (1935-) and those in his circle of dialogue partners,12 and that this will in turn open up new trajectories—even initiate new paradigms, as Hirota suggests—for the Buddhist... (shrink)

The book of Bergson underlying the present study appeared in 1896. It is entitled “Matter and Memory” and is a philosophical disquisition into the relation and mutual limitations of organic life and inert matter. Bergson proposes to deal with this very general problem under the special aspect of a theory of the functioning of the human brain and the mechanism of ordinary memory. Such use of the inductive method, which starts from a special problem in order to arrive (...) at results that might be generalized later, might endear him to the exact scientist who has a healthy skepticism toward pure generalities. But let us for a moment remain in the realm of generalities in order to better circumscribe the subject: Few people would agree to an entirely mechanistic interpretation of organic life; hence there should be some point in biology at which the deviations from pure mechanism appear explicitly and in their fulness. For the present we shall adopt an intentionally oversimplified mode of expression. Let us say that mechanistic description is causal and that as our analysis progresses we must eventually arrive at a point where we can no longer trace the causal chains in their entirety. At that point we must replace causal “classical” physics by quantum mechanics and form our pictures of microscopic realities of organic matter in terms of the latter. Some of the pertinent problems have been pointed out by the present writer among others, following earlier suggestions by Niels Bohr. Suffice it here to say that certain processes of the atomic scale going on in a complex system such as the organic tissue essentially escape detailed observation that would allow us to determine the continuity of an entirely causal nexus. It is possible to make such observations, but they result in physical destruction of the very coherence of the organic tissue upon which the biological functioning depends. Bohr describes this condition by the term “generalized complementarity.” We cannot enter into a discussion of these problems here; let us adopt deliberately the oversimplified and somewhat vague expression that at some point indeterminacies become significant in the microscopic processes that take place in the organic body. We shall try to limit ourselves in this paper to the simplistic notion of a multiplicity of indeterminate events inserted into the play of molecular reactions that constitute the functioning of the organism from the viewpoint of the physicist and chemist. (shrink)

In a comparison of the principles of special relativity and of quantum mechanics, the former theory is marked by its relative economy and apparent explanatory simplicity. A number of theorists have thus been led to search for a small number of postulates - essentially information theoretic in nature - that would play the role in quantum mechanics that the relativity principle and the light postulate jointly play in Einstein's 1905 special relativity theory. The purpose of the present paper (...) is to resist this idea, at least in so far as it is supposed to reveal the fundamental form of the theory. It is argued that the methodology of Einstein's 1905 theory represents a victory of pragmatism over explanatory depth; and that its adoption only made sense in the context of the chaotic state state of physics at the start of the 20th century - as Einstein well knew. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problem of time in modern science, where in recent years there have been major changes related to the latest discoveries in the field of the foundations of quantum theory. The author refers to works of K.-F. von Weizsacker (which works are not well-known in Russian-speaking field). Weizsacker deploys a large-scale program of building modern physics, while starting (not only as a physicist, but also a professional philosopher) with questions of philosophical interpretation of postulates of (...) modern physics, especially quantum mechanics. His key thesis is that time in physics is fundamentally distinct, which represents the whole physics as an integral scientific discipline. Weizsacker comes from physical and philosophical reflections, that give a special value to his work. Analyzing the conclusions of theoretical physics, namely the issues of substantiation of statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, and, above all, quantum mechanics, Weizsacker comes to the key idea of the structure of time in the substantiation of physical theory. The author in this conclusion disagrees with the opinion of most modern physicists that time has a subjective character, and the modus of the past, present and future reflects its essential character. The allocation of the time structure requires special logic. Such a logic is temporal and quantum. Starting from temporal logic, introducing the concept of possibility and probability, he comes to the substantiation of quantum mechanics. Being modal logic, it is based on the concept of possibility and probability. Key concept for Weizsacker is a binary alternative (Uralternative), closely related to the principle of superposition in quantum mechanics. By introducing the concept of certain alternatives, essentially actualized alternatives, Weizsacker shows how one can get the theory of relativity with its space-time structure. Further, he shows that based on its structure, you can get the theory of relativity. The space-time structure in this case is secondary, relational, as understood by Leibniz, Mach, and Einstein. (shrink)

Roy Wood Sellars (1880–1973) is often reduced to his role as father of Wilfrid Sellars. This is unfair because during the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, Roy Wood was one of the leading figures of the then prevailing American realist movement. In the present paper, I will focus on one particular facet of R. W. Sellars’ philosophical approach: his continual examination of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. I shall primarily reconstruct his discussion of Einstein’s theory, as it can be (...) found in his seminal The Philosophy of Physical Realism (1932). In contrast to authors such as Bertrand Russell or Émile Meyerson, Sellars refused to interpret special relativity in a realist vein. In his view, it should be seen as an “ars mensurandi” and thus being interpreted purely operationally. As with Einstein himself, the concept of simultaneity was his paradigm case in point. However, Sellars opined that besides the physical (mensurational) concepts of time and simultaneity there also exists an ontological understanding of these notions. “Real” time and “absolute” simultaneity are, according to Sellars, the indispensable non-relativistic counterparts to Einstein’s respective relativistic conceptions. They are to be interpreted realistically since they prove, Sellars maintains, to be explanatory regarding events in Einstein-Minkowski’s world. In the course of the paper, I shall compare this view with the one defended by Henri Bergson. Furthermore, Sellars’ later approach from the 1940s and ‘50s will be briefly considered and critically discussed by confronting it with more recent attempts at ontologically ‘grounding’ special relativistic kinematics. (shrink)

This wide ranging discourse covers many disciplines of science and the human condition in an attempt to fully understand the manifestation of time. Time's Paradigm is, at its inception, a philosophical debate between the theories of 'Presentism' and 'The Block Model', beginning with a pronounced psychological analysis of 'free will' in an environment where the past and the future already exist. It lays the foundation for the argument that time is a cyclical, contained progression, rather than a meandering voyage into (...) infinity, bringing into question the validity of a commensurate 'Big Bang'. Following, the proposal widens to encompass physics. It tackles clock rates and time dilation, acausality and the nuisance of a universal clock, and demonstrates that conscious consideration creates the present moment - time's flow - separating the solid state past and future whose reality is devoid of space. Arguments relating to Quantum Physics theory, including the Uncertainty Principle and a Superposition of States, lend credibility to key areas involving cognitive awareness. It is posited that defined points in time and space prohibit progress in linear models for progression. Thus motile paradoxes can be resolved with the absence of infinities; temporal perception, it is concluded, being the result of uncertainty. Time's Paradigm takes the bold step of asking us to consider a tangible dimension of time, representing an intimate extension of our three, known spatial dimensions. Chaos theory is briefly introduced leading to the configuration of a fractal fourth dimension of time whose assumption demands only one direction of flow. Further, it asks whether our universe is expanding or contracting. It considers the simple physics of bodies contracting in a fourth dimension of time (UC), and how that marries comfortably with standard scientific models such as Special Relativity. The rate at which matter is contracting in the universe is illustrated in a reduction factor of 1.618... coinciding with Fibonacci's Ratio and countering Time Dilation. Lastly the more complex aspects of relativistic velocities are tackled together with the conundrum of Zero Velocity and The Speed of Light being attributes of the same event in Cyclical Space-Time, and ultimately, the prospect of superluminal velocities by interaction with parallel time-zones in a multi-layered block universe. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The individual-community relationship has always been one of the most fundamental topics of social sciences. In sociology, this is known as the micro-macro relationship while in economics it refers to the processes, through which, individual actions lead to macroeconomic phenomena. Based on philosophical discourse and systems theory, many sociologists even use the term "emergence" in their understanding of micro-macro relationship, which refers to collective phenomena that are created by the cooperation of individuals, but cannot be reduced to individual actions. (...) "Emergence" theories attempt to explain the nature of society as a complex system by examining how individuals and their relationships lead to the creation of integrated and macro-social phenomena such as markets, educational systems, cultural beliefs, and shared social practices. As a prelude to activity, every researcher has to answer the question from the methodological point of view, how is it possible to study the behavior of social groups and how can we gain knowledge about the laws related to social groups? Anyone who deals with humanities and social sciences or any reality and phenomenon that affects human beings, inevitably deals with the reality that is emerging. In fact, emergence occurs when one level of reality emerges radically from another level. Examples of emergent levels of reality include how the mind emerges from the body; or the way society emerges from human beings. Therefore, when there is an emerging factor, different scientific disciplines should be used, because it is inevitable to talk about social affairs, psychology and neurobiology, as well as physical and even chemical. -/- INTRODUCTION Since its beginning in the 19th century, sociology has faced the fundamental question of what a social phenomena stands for? At a glance, sociologists deal with the study of social groups, collective behavior, institutions, social structures, social networks, and social dynamics, and ultimately all such phenomena are composed of individuals. Therefore, social phenomena seem to have no independent ontological status, and in this case, sociology is ultimately about reducible individuals. Different approaches about the micro-macro relationship, using the concept of "emergence", argue that although collective phenomena are created by individuals, they cannot be reduced to individual action. The term "emergence" is used to distinguish "emergent results" from " Procedural results". Results are called Procedural that can only be calculated by adding or subtracting the causes that act together. On the contrary, they are emergent outcomes that are qualitatively novel compared to the causes from which they originate. An example of such emergent results is mental characteristics that emerge from neural processes, but are not considered among the characteristics of neural processes of components - which are their origin. Philosophical debates about emergentism and reductionism focus on the mind-brain relationship, but as many philosophers have noted, they can be generalized to apply to any hierarchical set of features. The cognitive revolution reactivated a 19th century controversy between theorists of Identity and dualism. The theorists of Identity believe in reductionist materialism and elimination of metaphysics, according to which the mind is nothing more than the biological, while the dualists believe that the mind and the brain are distinct from each other. Emergence has been considered as a third way between the theories of Identity and dualism. -/- METHODOLOGY Interdisciplinarity Is fundamentally indicated by the dominance of open systems as well as social and emerging systems at different levels. Therefore, as long as we are facing a new emergentism, there will necessarily be different fields and an interdisciplinary method. The commonality of social sciences and cognitive sciences on the issue of emergence provides the possibility of interaction and exchange of concepts between these two for deeper research. Therefore, in this research, apart from the concepts of Subvenience and downward causation, we have used multiple realization and wildly disjunctive, which are used to explain the emerging concept in cognitive sciences, including neurobiology, psychology, and philosophy. For analytical and interdisciplinary approaches, after examining the concepts of subvenience, and wildly disjunctive, Individualistic and collectivist emergentism have been reviewed. And then their adequacy is criticized and evaluated in meeting strong emergence conditions. -/- FINDINGS Philosophers of the mind have been able to define the conditions of irreducibility and downward causation, which are essential for strong emergence, by using the principle of subvenience with the help of multiple realization and wildly disjunctive principles. Therefore, by definition, emergentist individualism suffers from the problem of how to explain downward causality and irreducibility, and emergentist collectivism faces the challenge of reification. The analysis of the challenges facing the two methodological approaches of individualism and collectivism leads us to three unresolved issues about the emerging phenomenon, which are realism, downward causality, and mechanism. Despite the differences in the stances of these two approaches regarding the aforementioned triple problems, individualists and collectivists both agree that some social characteristics are reducible; and some others are irreducible due to their complexity, the determination of which, depends on the case study of the mechanism of emergence of each social characteristic. -/- CONCLUSION An emergence that is consistent with reductionism is called a weak emergence. And strong emergence includes the principle of irreducibility and downward causality. According to strong emergence, the characteristics of social phenomena have downward causal power, which cannot be reduced to the causal forces. The principle of subvenience, together with multiple realization and wildly disjunctive, can provide the conditions of irreducibility and downward causality, which are essential conditions of strong emergence. Based on the philosophical analysis of two methodological approaches, individualist and collectivist, it can be concluded that emergentist individualism suffers from the problem of how to explain downward causality and irreducibility, and reification collectivism faces the challenge of reification. The analysis of the problems faced by these two approaches leads us to three unresolved issues, which are realism, downward causality, and mechanism. individualist emergentists acknowledge the existence of emergent social characteristics, but despite this, they believe that these characteristics are not real but merely analytical constructs that require explanation based on individuals and their mutual actions. But collectivists argue that emergentism yields a categorical ontology and supports social realism. They accept the dependence of social characteristics on individuals, but claim that social entities and structures are ontologically independent. Individualists and collectivists both agree that some social characteristics are reducible; and others are irreducible due to their complexity; and the only way to recognize this is to engage in empirical studies of the mechanisms and temporal processes of "emergence" that create social characteristics. -/- NOVELTY The newness of this compact article is as follows: a) Presenting an interdisciplinary approach using the analysis of philosophy of cognitive sciences, including the philosophy of mind, neurobiology and psychology to formulate the issue of social emergence; b) Criticizing individualist and collectivist methodological approaches to the issue of social emergence and explaining the sufficiency and shortcomings of both in providing weak and strong emerging conditions; c) Explaining and categorizing the challenges facing methodological approaches in explaining the phenomenon of social emergence, in three categories: realism, downward causality, and mechanism. BIBLIOGRAPHY Beckermann, A., Flohr, H., & Kim, J. (eds.) (1992). Emergence or reduction? Essays on the prospects of nonreductive physicalism. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bhaskar, R. (1979). The possibility of Naturalism. New York: Routledge. Bhaskar, R., Danermark, B. & Price, L. (2018). Interdisciplinarity and wellbeing: A critical realist general theory of interdisciplinarity. London and New York: Routledge. Blau, P.M. (1981). Introduction: diverse views of social structure and their common denominator. In Blau, P.M. & Merton, R.K. (eds.), Continuity in Structural Inquiry (pp. 1–23). Beverly Hills: Sage. Blau, P.M. (1987). Microprocess and macrostructure. In K.S. Cook (ed.), Social Exchange Theory (pp. 83–100). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Brooks, R.A., & Maes, P. (eds). (1994). Artificial life IV; proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Coleman, J. S. (1987). Microfoundations and macrosocial behavior. In: J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen, R. Munch, & Neil J. Smelser (Eds.). The Micro-Macro Link (pp. 153–73). Berkeley: University of California. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Elster, J. (1985). Making sense of Marx. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fodor, J.A. (1974). Special sciences (Or: The disunity of science as a working hypothesis). Synthese, 28(2), 97–115. Fodor, J.A. (1989). Making mind matter more. Philosophical Topics, 17, 59-79. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hempel, C.G. (1965). Aspects of scientific explanation and other essays in the philosophy of science. New York: The Free Press. Horgan, T. (1993). From supervenience to superdupervenience: meeting the demands of a material world. Mind, 102, 555-586. Humphreys, P. (1997). How properties emerge”. Philosophy of Science, 64, 1-17. Kim, J. (1999). Making sense of emergence. Philosophical Studies, 95, 3–36. Kincaid, H. (1997). Individualism and the unity of science. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Lewis, D.K. (1986). The plurality of worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nigel, G., & Conte, R. (eds.) (1995). Artificial societies; The computer simulation of social life. London: UCL Press. O’Connor, T. (1994). Emergent properties. American Philosophical Quarterly, 31, 91-104. Popper, K.R. (1968). Conjectures and refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row. Sawyer, R. K. (2001). Emergence in sociology: contemporary philosophy of mind and some implications for sociological theory. American Journal of Sociology, 107, 551-585. Sawyer, R. K. (2004). The mechanisms of emergence. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34, 260–282. Sawyer, R. K. (2005). Social emergence: societies as complex systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sawyer, R.K. (2003). Nonreductive individualism: Part 2, Social causation. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 33, 203–224. Winch, P. (1993). The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy‭ (SAMT, Trans.). Tehran, Iran: SAMT. (shrink)

We approach the physics of \emph{minimal coupling} in general relativity, demonstrating that in certain circumstances this leads to violations of the \emph{strong equivalence principle}, which states that, in general relativity, the dynamical laws of special relativity can be recovered at a point. We then assess the consequences of this result for the \emph{dynamical perspective on relativity}, finding that potential difficulties presented by such apparent violations of the strong equivalence principle can be overcome. Next, we draw upon our discussion (...) of the dynamical perspective in order to make explicit two `miracles' in the foundations of relativity theory. We close by arguing that the above results afford us insights into the nature of special relativity, and its relation to general relativity. (shrink)

This study dissects Chaplin's method of conveying a story through visuals in his 1921 silent movie, 'The Kid,' emphasizing scene analysis and plot introduction. A detailed discussion of sequences allows the research to illustrate how Chaplin makes meaning, creates a narrative, and establishes emotion solely through visual motion without words. The study uses several theoretical approaches, including film semiotics, narrative theory, and visual composition analysis. This paper examines how Chaplin employs framing, editing, mise-en-scène, and physical comedy to construct a (...) highly symbolic and emotionally rich picture. Special emphasis should be placed on how Chaplin uses both comic and dramatic scenes hand in hand, sometimes even in the same scenes. Key sequences analyzed include the opening scene, which efficiently introduces the main character and presents the setting; the separation scene, an emotionally charged sequence of a man being left by his wife; and the dream sequence, a fantastic sequence in which Chaplin breaks the laws of practical reality to develop character psychology and depth of themes. The paper also explores how Chaplin develops visual motifs and employs repeated actions to unify the narrative and chart the character's growth. Moreover, it discusses how the film's visual analysis and symbolism respond to early twentieth-century social concerns such as poverty and the position of children. As such, this research is pertinent to exploring the silent film narrative and its legacy through analyzing Chaplin's visual strategies. 'The Kid' illustrates that this was the pinnacle of the silent film genre and how complex narrative and character development can be conveyed without using words. Moreover, this research reveals Chaplin's creative processes. It contributes to understanding the potential of visual narrative in Cinema, proving the significance of the silent film language in developing film language. (shrink)

Ever since the now infamous comments made by Hermann Minkowski in 1908 concerning the proper way to view space-time, the debate has raged as to whether or not the universe should be viewed as a four-dimensional, unified whole wherein the past, present, and future are equally real or whether the views espoused by the possibilists, historicists, and presentists regarding the unreality of the future (and, for presentists, the past) are best. Now, a century after Minkowski’s proposed blockworld first sparked debate, (...) we seek a more conclusive argument in favor of the eternalist picture of space-time. Utilizing an argument based on the relativity of simultaneity in the tradition of Putnam and Rietdijk and novel but reasonable assumptions as to the nature of “reality”, we will show that the past, present, and future are equally real, thus ruling out presentism and other theories of time that bestow special ontological status to the past, present, or future as untenable. Finally, we will respond to our critics who would suggest that: 1) there is no metaphysical difference between the positions of eternalism and presentism, 2) the present must be defined as the “here” as well as the “now”, or 3) presentism is correct and our understanding of relativity is incomplete because it does not incorporate a preferred frame. We call eternalist response 1 deflationary since it purports to dissolve or deconstruct the age-old debate between the two views and response 2 compatibilist because it does nothing to alter special relativity (SR) arguing instead that SR unadorned has the resources to save presentism. Response 3 we will call incompatibilism because it adorns SR in some way in order to save presentism a la some sort of preferred frame. We will show that neither move 1 nor 2 can save presentism and move 3 is not well motivated at this juncture except as an ad hoc device to refute eternalism. (shrink)

Anthropology is the study of the origin of the man. It is basically concern with the concept of _Homo__ __sapiens_, and it is scientifically questioning what are human physical traits as well how do men behave and the variation among different groups of human with his social and cultural dimensions. Ontology is a subfield in traditional philosophy which is mainly focuses on the nature of being, existence or reality as such. There are some similarities and differences among these (...) two areas. However when we deeply study the philosophical basis of the anthropology it is proof that it was derived from ontology. Anthropology discusses the social and cultural world or the physical entity of human nature. Ontology focuses the invisible aspect of human nature along with the ultimate reality. Therefore, it has a metaphysical aspect of human being; this philosophical notion has in fact, contributed to the development of the subject of anthropology. The present modern day has given very little attention to this philosophical combination of ontolog y to anthropology, rendering further investigation into the philosophical roots of anthropology. This research paper seeks to evaluate the relationship between ontology and anthropology by paying attention to the ontological arguments about the concept of man and human nature within Greek and modern western thoughts, in comparing with modern anthropological arguments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Paradox of Education:A ConversationHumberto R. Maturana and Bernhard PoerksenResponsibility of the TeacherPoerksen: Immanuel Kant writes in his essay Über Pädagogik that the wide field of education is governed by a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, we want free and self-determined individuals to leave our schools; on the other, we impose a syllabus on the future individuals, force them to attend schools, punish their failures, and persecute their (...) noncompliance. There is, if we follow Kant, an inescapable relationship of tension between the goals and the means of educational efforts: They contradict each other. Would you agree?Maturana: No. Education, the commentary of an observer, is the process of transformation resulting from the co-existence with adults. We become the adults we have been living with. This means: If freedom and self-determined thinking are the goals of educational activity, then we have to live together in a way that is supported by the mutual respect for the autonomy of the other. In my view, the paradox formulated by Kant does not exist at all. The way of life, the manner of living together, shapes and transforms people. If you want to teach autonomy and reflection, you cannot use force as a method but must create an open space for communal reflection and action. There must be no contradiction between goals and means.Poerksen: Surely, there must also be constraints? It must be laid down when everybody has to be present, what the task is, who the teacher is, who has authority.Maturana: Compulsion will emerge if the teachers do not succeed in presenting their material in a thrilling way and in making school an attractive place of being together. Their failure will lead to force.Poerksen: The teacher is totally responsible for everything that may happen in school. Is this not an exaggerated claim?Maturana: No. If a teacher behaves respectfully, if he does not intimidate his pupils, if he listens, encourages cooperation and reflection, then a special form of interaction will emerge. The way of living practiced by the teacher, including the goals of teaching, will be the source of profitable learning for the pupils. This also implies that three questions and tasks must be sorted out cooperatively in education. First it seems necessary to me to debate the educational ideal to be chosen—what should the future adults be like when leaving the school one day? Should they be democratically minded and responsibly acting citizens? Or are they to be authoritarian and commandeering hierarchs, lords who feel superior to everyone else? It is then necessary to anchor a way of life in the school that permits acting and thinking according to that ideal. Finally, there is the essential task of preparing the teachers for their job in such a [End Page 25] way as to do justice to the desired goals—to enable them to live what they have to achieve.Poerksen: This would mean that teaching has nothing to do with the stepwise elimination of ignorance, as is commonly thought. The transmission of knowledge is secondary. The primary requirement is a way of life that corresponds with one's ideals, a particular form of living together, out of which the material topics will arise in due course.Maturana: Exactly. The children do not learn mathematics in school; they learn how to live together with a mathematics teacher. Perhaps they will one day carry on this enjoyable and exciting kind of being together independently—and become mathematics teachers or mathematicians themselves. Teachers do not simply transmit some content; they acquaint their pupils with a way of living. In the process, the rules of arithmetic, the laws of physics, or the grammar of a language will be acquired. My claim is: Pupils learn teachers.Poerksen: What about children who systematically refuse to cooperate? What is to be done with them? The classical answer is, of course: bad marks, relegation, exclusion from the winning circles.Maturana: The so-called difficult children about whom teachers keep complaining often only struggle to be seen and accepted, while the whole world expects them to behave in a calculable manner and to adapt to strange demands. Asking... (shrink)

In this work we present a construction of coherent states based on ”complexifier” method for a special type of one dimensional nonlinear harmonic oscillator presented by Mathews and Lakshmanan. We will show the state quantization by using coherent states, or to build the Hilbert space according to a classical phase space, is equivalent to departure from real coordinates to complex ones.

This book was planned as a joint work by the two authors, but the death of Nogar in 1967 left Deely to carry out the original plan alone. The purpose of the book is to challenge the reader to think about the evidence for an evolving world and the impact of such a world on diverse areas of human concern. The authors have assembled nineteen articles written by fifteen different authors. Introducing each article is an essay which places it in (...) the context of the whole work. An extensive introductory essay by the authors shows that the development of evolutionary science has offered a model alternative to that presented by mathematical physics. Tracing the historical and philosophical origins of these two models, the editors suggest that the static world view going back to Aristotle is not the only conclusion which can be drawn from the great philosopher’s work. Rather, this world view depends on emphasizing his work on the apparently non-changing heavens; another picture would have emerged had more emphasis been placed on the dynamism of the living world. Unfortunately, the involved structure of this introductory essay may dissuade some readers from pondering its important insights. (shrink)

In this work, a neo-classical relativistic mechanics theory is presented where the spin of an electron is an inherent part of its world space-time path as a point particle. The fourth-order equation of motion corresponds to the same covariant Lagrangian function in proper time as in special relativity except for an additional spin energy term. The theory provides a hidden-variable model of the electron where the dynamic variables give a complete description of its motion, giving a classical mechanics (...) explanation of the electron’s spin, its dipole moments, and Schrödinger’s zitterbewegung, These features are also described mathematically by quantum mechanics theory, of course, but without any physical picture of an underlying reality. The total motion of the electron can be decomposed into a sum of a local spin motion about a point and a global motion of this point, called here the spin center. The global motion is sub-luminal and described by Newton’s Second Law in proper time, the time for a clock fixed at the spin center, while the total motion occurs at the speed of light c, consistent with the eigenvalues of Dirac’s velocity operators having magnitude c. The local spin motion is an inherent perpetual motion, which for a free electron is periodic at the ultra-high zitterbewegung frequency and its path is circular in a spin-center reference frame. In an electro-magnetic field, this spin motion generates magnetic and electric dipole energies through the Lorentz force on the electron’s point charge. The electric dipole energy corresponds to the spin-orbit coupling term involving the electric field that appears in the corrected Pauli non-relativistic Hamiltonian, which has long been used to explain the doublet structure of the spectral lines of the excited hydrogen atom. Pauli’s spin-orbit term is usually derived, however, from his magnetic dipole energy term, including also the effect of Thomas precession, which halves this energy. The magnetic dipole energy from Pauli’s and Dirac’s theory is twice that in the neo-classical theory, a discrepancy that has not been resolved. By defining a spin tensor as the angular momentum of the electron’s total motion about its spin center, the fundamental equations of motion can be re-written in an identical form to those of the Barut–Zanghi electron theory. This allows the equations of motion to be expressed in an equivalent form involving operators applied to a state function of proper time satisfying a neo-classical Dirac–Schrödinger spinor equation. This state function produces the dynamic variables from the same operators as in Dirac’s theory for the electron but without any probability implications. It leads to a neo-classical wave function that satisfies Dirac’s relativistic wave equation for the free electron by applying the Lorentz transformation to express proper time in the state function in terms of an observer’s space-time coordinates, showing that there is a close connection between the neo-classical theory and quantum mechanics theory for the electron’s dynamics. (shrink)

This paper presents a minimal formulation of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, by which is meant a formulation which describes the theory in a succinct, self-contained, clear, unambiguous and of course correct manner. The bulk of the presentation is the so-called “microscopic theory”, applicable to any closed system S of arbitrary size N, using concepts referring to S alone, without resort to external apparatus or external agents. An example of a similar minimal microscopic theory is the standard formulation of classical mechanics, which (...) serves as the template for a minimal quantum theory. The only substantive assumption required is the replacement of the classical Euclidean phase space by Hilbert space in the quantum case, with the attendant all-important phenomenon of quantum incompatibility. Two fundamental theorems of Hilbert space, the Kochen–Specker–Bell theorem and Gleason’s theorem, then lead inevitably to the well-known Born probability rule. For both classical and quantum mechanics, questions of physical implementation and experimental verification of the predictions of the theories are the domain of the macroscopic theory, which is argued to be a special case or application of the more general microscopic theory. (shrink)

This is a technical treatise for the scientific-minded readers trying to expand their intellectual horizon beyond the straitjacket of materialism. It is dedicated to those scientists and philosophers who feel there is something more, but struggle with connecting the dots into a more coherent picture supported by a way of seeing that allows us to overcome the present paradigm and yet maintains a scientific and conceptual rigor, without falling into oversimplifications. Most of the topics discussed are unknown even to (...) neuroscientists, biologists, philosophers, and yet are based on the findings published in their own mainstream peer reviewed literature or on deep insights of the scientific, philosophical and spiritual giants of the past. -/- A scientific, philosophical, and spiritual overview of the relationship between science and spirituality, neuroscience and the mystery of consciousness, mind and the nature of reality, evolution and life. A plaidoyer for a science that goes beyond the curve of reason and embraces a new synthesis of knowledge. The overcoming of the limitations of the intellect into an extended vision of ourselves and Nature. A critique of physicalism, the still-dominant doctrine that believes that all reality can be reduced to matter and the laws of physics alone. A review and reassessment of the old and new philosophical and metaphysical ideas which attempts to bring closer Western and Eastern traditions where science, philosophy, consciousness, Spirit and Nature are united in a grand vision that transcends the limited conventional scientific and philosophical paradigm. A possible answer to the questions of purpose and meaning and the future evolution of humankind beyond a conception that posits a priori a purposeless and meaningless universe. A report of the new scientific discoveries of a basal intelligence in cells and plants, on the question if mind is computational, the issue of free will, the mind-body problem, and the so called ‘hard problem of consciousness’. An essay on ancient as modern philosophical conceptions, from the One of Plotinus, the God of Spinoza until the recent revival of panpsychism or the universal consciousness. A journey into quantum physics from the perspective of philosophical idealism and an invitation to adopt new ways of seeing that might help us to transform our present understanding, expanding it into an integral cosmology, with a special emphasis on the spiritual and evolutionary cosmology of the Indian seer Sri Aurobindo. -/- Not just a philosophical and metaphysical meditation but, rather, an appeal to work towards a change of consciousness, a widening of our perspective towards a new way of seeing beyond a purely mechanistic worldview to avoid a social, environmental and economic collapse. Humans are transitional beings that will have to make a choice: relapse into a pre-rational state or evolve towards a new trans-rational species supported by an ideal of human unity in diversity as the expression of a spiritual evolutionary process, the call of the Spirit on Nature. (shrink)

A philosophy of management that incorporates the big picture of human experience, all levels, and degrees of awareness in relationship with the world, will better develop and sustain an environment conducive to creative contributions that meet organizational goals. Quantum physics reveals the nature of reality to be connection and creativity engaged in a process of actualizing possibilities. Human beings participate in this process of actualization, as both observer-creator and experiencer of the universe through multiple domains of knowing – (...) a collaborator in Alfred North Whitehead’s panexperientialism. Whitehead’s God of process, the primordial field of creative possibilities, and the consequent nature which holds all the experiences of every actualization, supports human consciousness, as it self-actualizes by engaging and integrating the experience of external and internal events and their effects on awareness. Through understanding the participatory nature of consciousness with God and the world as experienced, deep meaning emerges for human life. Tapping into this deeper meaning through a philosophy of management that acknowledges the full human experience, including the embedded spiritual connection to the creative energy that is God, strengthens an organization’s vision, mission and contributions to a community. This brief overview traces a path toward a preliminary framework for a philosophy of management based on God and the ideas of connection, creativity and process. (shrink)

Thought experiments in the history of science display a striking asymmetry between chemistry and physics, namely that chemistry seems to lack well-known examples, whereas physics presents many famous examples. This asymmetry, I argue, is not independent data concerning the chemistry/physics distinction. The laws of chemistry such as the periodic table are incurably special, in that they make testable predictions only for a very restricted range of physical conditions in the universe which are necessarily conditioned by the contingences of (...) chemical investigation. The argument depends on how ‚thought experiment’ is construed. Here, several recent accounts of thought experiments are surveyed to help formulate what I call ‚crucial’ thought experiments. These have a historical role in helping to judge between hypotheses in physics, but are not helpful in chemistry past or present. (shrink)

Comment: This translation contains a correction of an argument in the original English edition, a correction that was subsequently made in the 1999 English Paperback edition, The correction is described below in the final paragraph. Differences in language can seriously restrict one's access to, and knowledge of, the philosophical work that's being done in other countries, and before the publication in 1997 of my book Time, Tense, and Causation, I was not aware of the depth of interest, in Italy, in (...) analytical philosophy in general, and metaphysics in particular. Since that time, however, I've had the opportunity of talking to, and corresponding with, Italian philosophers who are currently working very intensely on problems in the philosophy of time. I very much enjoyed those discussions, and so I'm very pleased indeed that my book has now been translated into Italian. -/- The introduction to the book will provide readers with quite a detailed overview of my approach to the philosophy of time, and of the main theses that I am defending. But perhaps it will be helpful here if I try to sketch, very briefly, the big picture. -/- The central issue in the philosophy of time concerns the choice between tensed and tenseless accounts of the nature of time – or, as I prefer to express it, between dynamic and static conceptions of reality. According to tensed (or dynamic) accounts, there are significant ontological differences between the past, the present, and the future – either because the world contains intrinsic tensed properties of passiveness, presentness, and futurity, or else because the past, the present, and the future are not all equally real. In contrast, according to tenseless (or static) views of the nature of time, there are no intrinsic tensed properties, and the past, the present, and the future are all equally real. In this book, I defend a dynamic view of time dash specifically, one according to which, while the past and the present are now real, the future is not. This view has, of course, a very long history, with a version of it having been defended by Aristotle in his famous discussion of the sea battle tomorrow, in which he argued that, although it is now true – indeed necessarily so – that either there will be a sea battle tomorrow or there will not be one, it is not now true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, and not now true that there will not be one. Only when tomorrow comes will the world contain states of affairs that make one of these propositions true, and the other false. -/- But while this general view of the nature of time has a very long and distinguished history – and also seems, intuitively, quite appealing – it has become clear, especially in this century, that it is exposed to very strong objections – objections moreover, that come not merely from philosophy, but also from contemporary physics, and especially from Einstein's special theory of relativity. One of the main challenges accordingly, for any defense of a tensed or dynamic view of time, is to show that those objections can be answered. -/- In grappling with those objections, however, one thing that emerged very clearly was that some theses that defenders of tensed approaches to time have traditionally viewed as absolutely essential must be abandoned as unsound. The result is that. I was led to a view of the nature of time that is, in many respects, intermediate between tenseless views of time and traditional tensed approaches. In particular, advocates of traditional tensed views almost always maintain that the simplest temporal facts are themselves inherently tensed: they consist of facts such as, for example, that is certain apple is now red. But I maintain that, on the contrary, the simplest temporal facts, rather than being intrinsically tensed, are facts to the effect, for example, that a certain apple is now red at time t. On this fundamental issue, then, I agree with those who accept a tenseless or static view of time, since they too hold that the simplest tensed facts ¬– and indeed all tensed facts – are not tensed facts. How, then, does my approach to the nature time differ from a tenseless or static approach? The answer is that I also maintain that, although basic tensed facts are not inherently tensed, the world is nevertheless a dynamic one, since every present moment is a point at which things come into existence. Events, therefore, are not merely actual or nonactual – as is maintained by advocates of tenseless approaches to time. Rather an event is actual as of some time, and not actual as of other times. One needs, therefore, a temporally indexed notion of actuality, according to which an event is not actual until the time at which it occurs, and given that notion, one can explain, in a straightforward fashion, what it is for events to lie in the past, the present, and the future, and in the way that entails that the past and the present are real, but the future is not. -/- One task, as I have said, is to show that the many objections that have been advanced against dynamic conceptions of the world dash by philosophers – such as McTaggart, Quine, Smart, Putnam, and Mellor – can be answered. But even if, as I claim, this can be done, one is still left, of course, with the question of what positive reason there is, if any, for accepting a tensed or dynamic view of the world. -/- The argument that I develop in response to this question centers upon the concept of causation, and here I argue, first, that there are decisive objections to reductionist approaches to causation; secondly, that it is possible to set out a very plausible realistic account of the nature of causation; and, thirdly, that the crucial postulates that are involved in that account can only be satisfied in a dynamic world – indeed only in a dynamic world in which the past and the present are real, but the future is not. -/- This way of defending the view that our world is a dynamic one also has implications for some other issues – in particular, issues connected with the subtle and very difficult metaphysical question of the relation between time and causation. Thus, after setting out the above argument, I attempt to show that if causation can exist only in a dynamic world, then one can both demonstrate that backward causation is logically impossible and defend the view that the direction of time is to be defined in terms of the direction of causation, rather than vice versa. -/- Finally, a comment on the text. It involves one major change from the original English edition – namely in sections 4. 6.2 and 4.7. The change in those sections involves the crucial part in my argument both for the claim that our world is one where the past and present are real, but the future is not, and for the claim that backward causation is logically impossible. It was pointed out to me by Kenji Murota, a graduate student of philosophy at Keio University, that there was a problem in my original formulation of that argument. I'm grateful to him for his incisive criticism, and I'm pleased that I've had the opportunity of correcting that argument in the present edition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:88 Reviews EPISTEMOLOGY OFMODERNISM WILLIAM R. EVERDELL History/ St. Ann'sSchool Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA [email protected] Ann Banfield. The Phantom Table:Woolf,Fry,Russelland the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge U.P., 2000. £35.00; US$49.95. In Virginia Woolf's difficult masterpiece, The Waves(1931),each of several separate interior monologues-"streams of consciousness" in the American critical idiom-is separated from the next by an interpolated "Interlude". The interior monologues are assigned co different characters, bur (...) the Interludes are rendered from no perspectiveat all, verymuch like the "Time Passes"chapter of Woolf's earlier and better known novel, Tothe Lighthouse (1927).The passive voice and the demonstrative and indefinite pronotms are essential, removing from the scene not only the characters' points of view, but the author's as well. Numbered among the consequences of the new twentieth-century technique of interior monologue, the Interludes can be accepted today as one more trick of literary "Modernism", but for Woolf it was new, and the task of preventing any of her Interludes from becoming just another report from the rypical "omniscient narrator" of Victorian fiction was one of the most demanding she ever set herself as a writer. Like her friend the Post-Impressionist critic Roger Fry, she wanted to analyze the world outside the self into its smallest sensible elements, then show human selvesasthey formed by accumulating the experience of these myriad, random, discontinuous components, and finally to recombine these components in their two kinds, selvesand sense-able things, into a meaningful whole-a work of art. Rejecting both the idealism of Bradley and the British philosophical generation of the 1890sand the naive positivist materialism coming out of the 1850s, Bertrand Russell eventually settled on an ontology most philosophers call "realist " in that it rejected the view that the world accessible to the senses was no more than a mental construct and considered it naive to assign the origin of subjectivity to matter. The material world was, Russell thought, actually external -"out there". He did think, however,that all we knew of the external world was what wassensed by the sensesand pictured by the mind. He alsoconcluded (in essayslike "The Relation of Sense-data to Physics"written in 1910-17)d1at both that world and what we knew of it was presented in very small parts, and Reviews 89 analyzable down to them, or, in other words, that both ontology and epistemology were atomized. Each mind, with its senses, occupied, he thought, one of an infinite number of occupied and unoccupied "perspectives", each of which Lmiquely focused che "sensibilia"-whatever was perceived in che external world-like a Leibnizian monad. Machemacicallogic, on which Russell set che highest store, would be able, he thought, to bring together perspectives by providing a minimal secof cruchswhich, though abscracc,were objective in che sense chaccheywere noc private and could be agreed to by all. Something similar though rougher mighc be done for chesensibilia in cheworld "ouc chere" by che science of physics. Did Virginia Woolflearn from Bertrand Russell?To a latcer-dayacademic ic sounds too urrerly improbable, for che simple reason (obvious to academics) chat anyone who has made icto the upper levelsof English literature must have chosen cheseparticular heights to scale because the trail was so blessedlyfreeof chosenasry mathematical burrs and logical reazles,and the air so filledwith che pure chatter of French phenomenologisrs, that no hiker would ever have to struggle with analytical philosophy again. Lessmetaphorically, the separation of departments of literature from those of philosophy has come so close to divorce chat few in U.S. English Departments can make head or cail of che graduate thesis that one of Russell's philosophy students wrote on F.H. Bradley, and fewer still can trace the term "objective correlative" used by thac student (who was in fact T. S. Eliot) back to an early work of Husserl. Meanwhile, ic is taken for granted by those in Philosophy that there are no ideas worth discussing in Woolf, or, indeed, in any other novelise,greacthough she may be, Lmlessone is to descend from ontology and epistemology to the foothills of ethics and politics, or worse, aesthetics. (Among... (shrink)

Although the number of articles on Sartre’s aesthetic is great, book-length treatments of the subject in any language are rare. In English, we have been practically limited to Eugene Kaelin’s important study of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty published ten years ago. This work by George Bauer provides a valuable complement to Kaelin’s theoretical analysis. The book consists of seven chapters and an appendix which treat of Sartre’s pronouncements on art and the artist as expressed in his novels and plays as well (...) as in his art and literary criticism, genre by genre and artist by artist. Philosophically, the most interesting portion of the book is probably the introductory chapter presenting an eleven-page synopsis of the elements of Sartrean aesthetics: the separation of prose from poetry with its attendant problem of committed literature, the work of art as imaginary object, and the aesthetic significance of Sartre’s distinction between existence and being. It is this last element which Bauer exploits as he examines Sartre’s repeated strictures against artists who confuse the being of the art object with physical being or who flee the responsibility of human existence for some "project of being." If art is not "reality" for Sartre, neither is it a legitimate means of escape. Because his evaluations involve reference to content as well as form, Sartre’s criticism has assumed a sociopolitical posture from the very start. The overall impression left by Bauer’s work is that Sartre’s art criticism involves the often inconsistent application of relatively few criteria to quite select works of the artists in question in accord with a general theory of human freedom. Despite the occasional brilliance and unfailing intelligence of the judgments so produced, Sartre’s method leaves him vulnerable to the charge of unfairness and inadequacy. Readers desiring an extended analysis of Sartre’s general aesthetic theory will still find Kaelin’s book indispensable. Physically, this is a most attractive volume, featuring thirty-two prints as well as a Calder cartoon of Sartre on its cover.—T. R. F. (shrink)

The difficulty about the naive realism which most people take for granted and which some empirical philosophers try to defend is that its proponents, in seeking to preserve the objective world of common sense, virtually read out of the picture the contribution of the perceiving subject and all that is involved in the relatedness of sense experience. The visual phenomena of perspective, distortion and hallucination, and the dependence of all other sense experience upon varying physiological factors in the percipient (...) make it well nigh impossible to believe that everything is just what we observe it to be; and the physicist's account of a world of electrical charges symbolized by mathematical formulae deals in conceptual terms which transcend sensual imagery. The resort to the sense-datum theory was but a desperate attempt on the part of philosophers to preserve the plain man's view of reality, though it left wholly obscure the relationship between the world of common sense experience and that of physical science, as well as positing a fantastic multiplication of entities corresponding to everything that could be observed under any circumstances. (shrink)

The contemporary view of the fundamental role of time in physics generally ignores its most obvious characteric, namely its flow. Studies in the foundations of relativistic mechanics during the past decade have shown that the dynamical evolution of a system can be treated in a manifestly covariant way, in terms of the solution of a system of canonical Hamilton type equations, by considering the space-time coordinates and momenta ofevents as its fundamental description. The evolution of the events, as functions of (...) a universal invariant world, or historical, time, traces out the world lines that represent the phenomena (e.g., particles) which are observed in the laboratory. The positions in time of each of the events, i.e., the time of their potential detection, are, in this framework, controlled by this universal parameter τ, the time at which they are generated (and may proceed in the positive or negative sense). We find that the notion of thestate of a system requires generalization; at any given τ, it involves information about the system at timest(τ) ≠ τ. The correlation of what may be measured att(τ) with what is generated at τ is necessarily quite rigid, and is related covariantly to the spacelike correlations found in interference experiments. We find, furthermore, that interaction with Maxwell electromagnetism leads back to a static picture of the world, with no real evolution. As a consequence of this result, and the requirement of gauge invariance for the quantum mechanical evolution equation, we conclude that electromagnetism is described by a pre-Maxwell field, whose τ-integral (or asymptotic behavior as τ → ∞) may be identified with the Maxwell field. We therefore consider the world of events in space time, interacting through τ-dependent pre-Maxwell fields, as far as electrodynamics is concerned, as the objective dynamical reality. Our perception of the world, through laboratory detectors and our eyes, are based onintegration over τ over intervals sufficiently large to obtain an aposteriori description of the phenomena which coincides with the Maxwell theory. Fundamental notions, such as the conservation of charge, rest on this construction. The decomposition of the common notion of time into two essentially different aspects, one associated with an unvarying flow, and the second with direct observation subject to dynamical modification, has profound philosophical consequences, of which we are able to explore here only a few. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:If “Reality is the Best Metaphor,” It Must Be VirtualMarguerite R. Waller (bio)What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?—Doug Coupland, Microserfs... we can look forward to a richly textured and complex cyberspace, where we are at all times human, and can become bits of pixel dust flying through a virtual landscape.—3-D, multiuser, interactive, on-line virtual reality producer“Avatars (...) are Next,” the June 1996 issue of Wired announces on its cover, above a glossy foldout of Bill Gates in bathing trunks floating on a lemon yellow air mattress in a sensuous Hockney-blue swimming pool. “Mr. Bill goes Hollywood! Special Gatesfold Issue,” reads the caption underneath the (photomontaged) naked torso. The United States Congress’s attempt in February 1996 to conceptualize the Internet as an incitement to indecent sexual conduct (in Section 507 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the so-called Computer Decency Act) is clearly the lampooned subtext of this juxtaposition of sexualized body with the concept of the avatar. The antithesis of sensuous, avatars are bandwidth-conserving, virtual figures that take the place of users’ physical bodies in the three-dimensional, interactive, multiuser virtual environments that software developers in 1996 insist will be the telos of the development of the World Wide Web. The Wired cover implies that the nerd community finds Congress’s association of digital media with sex ridiculous (however flattering they may find it to be constructed as sexually dangerous). Not unusually, sexuality is being invoked by the state as a justification for extending its own reach (and the corporate interests it represents).But the sex/gender politics of Net free speech advocates are not necessarily more progressive. As feminist commentator Laura Miller argues in “Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier,” the metaphor of a frontier beyond the jurisdiction of Congress, deployed by opponents of federal regulation, draws upon a conventional construction of gender that threatens to reinscribe women as victims, reinforcing “the power imbalance between the sexes, with its roots in the concept of women as property, constantly under siege and requiring the vigilant protection of their male owners” [53]. The unintended consequence of this conceptualization, she worries, is that “the threat of regulation is built into the very mythos used to conceptualize the Net by its defenders” [50].My worry, therefore, embraces both sides of the debate over free speech on the Net. The skirmish between Big Brother and the software pioneers seems to be shaping up rhetorically as a classic fraternal competition “between men” (Sedgwick). We may read it as a contest between fundamentally congruent “male” subject positions, both of which incline to disempower “female” subject positions and both of which stand to increase their [End Page 90] own political and economic capital by the appearance of a conflict. The power-producing relationality at play in this turf war, however, simultaneously threatens to subvert the claims of each position to its own, independent ontology. Both parties, therefore, can be expected compulsively to deny their relational status. John Perry Barlowe insists, in his “Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace”: “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter. There is no matter here.”It is this more subtle metaphysical issue, the occlusion of relation, implicated in but not reducible to, the constructions of sexuality and gender deployed by both Netizens and Congresspeople, that I find the most pressing issue in designs, uses, and discussions of cyberspace. I will argue that, in fact, the current wave of Internet development (both practically and discursively) is in some sense driven by a desire to make cyberspace safe for essentialist subjectivities of whatever ideological/political persuasion. I will unfold this argument in terms of a certain notion of addiction. My interest is not “cyberaddiction” per se, in the sense of individuals who spend what they or their associates consider too much time on-line, but rather the construction of cyberspace—both rhetorically and electronically—as a clean, clear realm in which we can transcend positionality while remaining (or becoming more fully) “ourselves.” I am not, that... (shrink)

Laws of mechanics, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, gravitation and relativity are derived as “related mathematical identities” based solely on the existence of a joint probability distribution for the position and velocity of a particle moving on a Riemannian manifold. This probability formalism is necessary because continuous variables are not precisely observable. These demonstrations explain why these laws must have the forms previously discovered through experiment and empirical deduction. Indeed, the very existence of electric, magnetic and gravitational fields is predicted by these (...) purely mathematical constructions. Furthermore these constructions incorporate gravitation into special relativity theory and provide corrected definitions for coordinate time and proper time. These constructions then provide new insight into the relationship between manifold geometry and gravitation and present an alternative to Einstein’s general relativity theory. (shrink)

Process physics2 is, like all physics, a model of reality. However, unlike traditional substance-based versions, process physics implements many process philosophical concepts, perhaps most notably, the notion of internal relations. It argues that the universe can best be understood in terms of selfreferential semantic information that is remarkably similar to mathematical stochastic neural networks research in biology. It argues that information patterns generate new information through causal efficacy and, ultimately, internal integration, generating self-organising patterns of relationships. These patterns or (...) relations have an intrinsic value inherent in their self-actualisation and thereby experience a subjective unity in response to influences from the totality of their past. The result is an internally related self-organising stream of experiences that provides a defining essence objectively distinguishable in abstraction and as exhibiting all the characteristics of a quantum space and quantum matter. In process physics, therefore, quantum phenomena emerge where no prior assumption regarding their existence is made or prescribed at the start. Rather, they are internally generated as an inherent feature of an experientially becoming reality, growing in size over time and thus having an observable key feature — i.e. a ‘defining essence’ — of an expanding universe. Reality itself is now understood — and modeled — as having a primitive form of self awareness. By this we mean that it has, in the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s words, prehensions of other actualities as objects in terms of their ‘provocation of some special activity within the subject’.3 In more biologically complex information systems these ultimately lead to experiential integration as conscious discrimination of contrasts in prior experiences. Reality is, ultimately, not about the identification of isolated individuals through externality, but related individuals through internality. The purpose of this paper is to arrive at a point whereby we might apply these ultimate principles of reality to management. To do this, we shall start by considering Whitehead’s own renderings of management issues, before turning to the use management studies has or has not made of his work. In the light of this discussion, we shall question the principle of deconstructive postmodernism that underpins this body of work. We shall then ask whether and to what extent Whiteheadian principles might help explain organisations as ‘event fields’ 4 within which ‘persons-in-communities’5 reside. This will then allow us to consider organisations in terms of a process reinterpretation of physics. In so doing, we shall uncover a final contradiction, between Whitehead’s understanding of organisation and his principles concerning the application of metaphysics, to which we shall at least indicate a solution. (shrink)

Those inclined to positions in the philosophy of time that take tense seriously have typically assumed that not all regions of space-time are equal: one special region of space-time corresponds to what is presently happening. When combined with assumptions from modern physics this has the unsettling consequence that the shape of this favored region distinguishes people in certain places or people traveling at certain velocities. In this paper I shall attempt to avoid this result by developing a tensed (...) class='Hi'>picture of reality that is nonetheless consistent with ‘hypersurface egalitarianism’—the view that all hypersurfaces are equal. (shrink)

The presented papers are very interesting. They differ and complement one another… . Orlova's presentation is a model of structuralization, scientific rigor, extreme precision, and clarity. Shemanov's paper provides a philosophical basis for culturology. I asked what place culturology occupies in the field of knowledge. It turned out that to answer this question it is first necessary to present the system of manifestations of a society's life activity and only then, when we have the matrix, can we compare our (...) idea of culture with it in order to make it relevant to that matrix. This is to correlate the patrix and the matrix. But since there are no generally accepted schemata of society, no developed schemata of its cognitive activity, I had to work on my own. I offer two schemata but, in view of the time limit, I will only indicate certain items of this context so as to make it clear what I am talking about and from what premises I proceed. There are several premises. The first is the main problem that must be borne in mind in any theorizing. How is our material existence correlated with the realization of our creative potential, our subjectivity? This is the problem of man's spiritual development. It would appear to be a truism. But it is necessary to find a philosophical expression for this problem. This means to find a formula, because if a study is not summed up in a formula it has to be continued. The philosophical equivalent of the problem of existence is: existence determines consciousness, consciousness reflects existence. This is a contribution of Marxism. It would seem that those who theorized about the active nature of consciousness, thought, and the subjective factor have all the advantages, since that was all they worked on and spoke of the primacy of consciousness. Why, then, have they not discovered the formula of the correlation between material existence and creative subjectivity? Because then there is a clash of two paradigms, and formal logic comes into force, stating that it is necessary to make a choice, for there is no third way. We want to construct a philosophical equivalent of the activity of consciousness and say what role it plays. As long as we simply say that it plays a huge or important role, or that consciousness has a reverse effect, our research has not been completed. If existence determines consciousness, then thought, in turn, makes reality similar to itself. Consequently, I distinguish existence and reality. But whence this distinction? If we go back to the definition that matter is a philosophical category for denoting objective reality, then it becomes clear that objective reality is that which exists outside and independently of us. If we have different words-outside of us and independently of us-then this is a substantial difference. Even so perspicacious an analyst as Freud separated these concepts with a comma. So I tried to separate them vertically and horizontally. Vertically, we have that which is in reality and, horizontally, that which exists independently of us. We obtain a definite square. Existence-consciousness-activity-reality. Everything else is purely technical. Here is the genesis of the matrix. This leads to many consequences. Superimposing this schema on the matrix, I obtained a fairly clear picture. They turn out to be relevant to each another. We get varieties of knowledge such as intuitive or, if we think in binary oppositions, the instinctive is opposed to the distantive variety, and first of all science, because it knows not directly, but through mediation. Instinctive knowledge is instantaneous, one-time knowledge. Here the logic of common sense and other things operates. And then, when we correlate activity and reality, we have the objective and subjective varieties. Corresponding to these varieties, as a result of cognition we acquire knowledge: intuitive-direct, distantive-mediated, subjective-procedural, and objective-object-oriented. If we take such characteristics as the bases of cognitive varieties, the means of knowledge, the forms of knowledge, cognitive approaches, and objects of knowledge, we get a special table. Mendeleev had a table of chemical elements; I have a table of social elements consisting of twenty-eight squares. In a division into so many categories, if there is a logical mistake, there must be a flaw somewhere. I do not detect any flaws here, and this indicates that such a division is not fortuitous: the table reflects a law. There are also other premises such as "we are in the world, and the world is in us." We are in the world physically, while the world is in us mentally. We live surrounded by nature, but also at the price of nature. My schemata are based on these presuppositions. Consequently, one cannot counterpose the achievements of philosophical materialism and idealism. At this stage they must be not opposed, but synthesized, united. This is to dismiss the claim of every doctrine that it is absolute. If we see the relatively rational in each doctrine and join them together, we shall get a contemporary synthetic philosophy that works. I was able to show how this methodology works, in this case, with this example. In analyzing such an urgent social phenomenon as conflict, I found that conflict situations can be broken down into elements. Now I know how to order the sides in a conflictual situation, how they are correlated. And when there is a link with a schema of categories, then things work well. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to compare two models of reality construction and their applicability to explain the various effects of the digitalization process. The evolution of the constructivist ideas about reality is reconstructed in the context of the dispute among realists and constructivists, which was one of the most significant events in the epistemology and philosophy of science of the 20th century. The author points out the differences between the intellectual and the social construction of (...) class='Hi'>reality, and carries out a comparative analysis of the philosophical theories and concepts describing the aforementioned alternatives. The intellectual construction of reality, which often takes place in theoretical physics at different stages of its development, is also analyzed. Particular consideration is given to the philosophic-scientific contexts generated by the sociology of knowledge, the theory of speech acts, and the actor-network theory. The article also shows a distinction between the construction and the constitution of reality. The constitution of reality within various types of non-theoretical thinking, fixed using the means and methods of phenomenological philosophy of science, allows identifying and describing the main contexts through which the word reality acquires significance and is endowed with meaning in the present-day intellectual and social practices. Special attention is paid to the concepts of virtual reality and digital reality. The features of the intellectual construction of virtual reality are described. The difference between the intellectual and the social construction of digital reality is substantiated as between two alternative practices, which determine the meaning, and the prospects of digitalization. This distinction may be of particular interest to those who design digital platforms and implement digitalization in various areas of human life and society, especially in as education, legal procedure, management, economics, and business. Today, when partly spontaneous, partly controlled digitalization is taking place in these spheres, the results of this study make it possible not only to understand the logic of the changes taking place but also to apply forecasting and planning methods actively, i.e., constructing the digital reality. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 6–21. The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet , 1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. But this reference to Garcia’s youthfulness is not a form of condescension: by publishing a complete system of philosophy in the grand style, he has already done what none of us (...) in the older generation of speculative realists has done so far. His book is sophisticated, erudite, rigorous, imaginatively rich, and abundant in worldly wisdom– despite the author’s conclusion that wisdom does not exist. The quality and scope of Forme et objet took few observers by surprise, since Garcia has been treated as an emerging philosopher to watch across half a decade of Parisian oral tradition. But Garcia was not just the subject of rumor, being already well known to the French public as a writer of fiction. His debut novel, La meilleure part des hommes , 2 was awarded the 2008 Prix de Flore 3 and has already appeared in English as Hate: A Romance . 4 His follow-up novel, Mémoires de la jungle , 5 made clever use of a chimpanzee narrator. Nor was Garcia only published as a novelist before last November: his philosophical study L’Image 6 had already appeared when the author was just twenty-six, a year before he was crowned by the muses at the historic Café de Flore. And then in 2011, just months before the appearance of Forme et objet , Garcia published a widely distributed work entitled Nous, animaux et humains , 7 with its focus on Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about animals. Given this prolific and versatile track record, an optimistic scenario might envisage the young Garcia as one of those combined literary/philosophical talents who appear intermittently in France across the centuries: Jean-Paul Sartre is merely the most famous recent case. While more time is needed to see how Garcia will channel his impressive mental energies, Forme et objet displays such breadth of insight that its author has a good chance to emerge as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. If we accept Aristotle’s dictum that the peak mental age is fifty-one, then to read Garcia’s massive book is to gain some idea of what European philosophy might look like in the futuristic-sounding 2030’s. The present article is confined to Forme et objet . At 486 pages, the work is obviously daunting in size. Indeed, it is even longer than it sounds, given that many of its early sections are printed in a smaller typeface to designate them as supplemental commentary to the main flow of the argument. But while the length of the book reportedly led to delays in French publication, and will probably slow the inevitable appearance of an English translation, the length of the book should not deter interested readers– much of it results from Garcia’s teacherly writing style. Whereas Quentin Meillassoux’s prose displays an arctic economy of means, Garcia’s style is reminiscent of the repeated lessons of oral classroom proceedings. Rarely is the reader given fewer than three or four chances to master an idea before the author moves on to the next. In practice, the style feels welcoming rather than long-winded. Otherwise, the structure of Forme et objet is surprisingly simple. There is a useful Introduction of less than twenty pages. Then comes Book I: Formally , running to approximately 135 pages. Here Garcia outlines the most basic features of a thing “no matter what it is,” or n’importe quoi , an everyday phrase that Garcia shapes into a technical term. This part of the book feels at times like a more amiable version of Hegel’s Science of Logic , a parallel emphasized further by the threefold articulation of its theme: 1. Thing; 2. Thing and World; 3. Being and Understanding. This is followed by the much longer Book II: Objectively , totaling more than 300 pages. It contains sixteen essay-like meditations on specific kinds of objects—including time, animals, humans, history, gender, and death. Here each chapter rolls smoothly into the next, making this second part of the book feel more like a different work of Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit . But these are merely analogies. Garcia is no Hegelian, even if the book contains a few dialectical flourishes that seem to reflect his early enthusiasm for the Frankfurt School. Forme et objet ends with a six-page Coda, followed by the usual page of acknowledgments. In what follows, I will briefly summarize each of these four parts of the book before ending with some more general remarks. Before doing so, it will be useful to situate Garcia biographically (as much as I am able) and philosophically. Though Toulouse is his native city, his formative years were spent largely in Algeria, where his family has deep roots. During our sole private conversation, Garcia mentioned that his parents are professors of literature. 8 As a student of philosopher Garcia flourished so early that many of his current ideas date to his teenaged years: “There are sentences in Forme et objet that I wrote when I was seventeen,” he said in response to a question on that cold night on the Canal St.-Martin. I recalled that remark when reading his brilliant account, late in the book, of the central role of adolescence in contemporary culture. While many prodigies blow through their formal academic training without serious obstruction, Garcia’s student memories are rich in tales of isolation and struggle, though equally rich in gratitude for a half-dozen or so exceptional teachers who provided the intellectual space he needed: Meillassoux and Alain Badiou are simply two of the most prominent figures on that list. Though there are many points of agreement between Garcia’s philosophical position and my own, he not only reached his position years before reading my work, 9 he arrived along a rather different path: not through phenomenology, but via the Frankfurt School, which may be one of the reasons for his profound fascination with aesthetics. Garcia’s cultural background is as broad as one could wish: he is no less informed about punk rock and European football leagues than about the spiritualist roots of Bergson’s philosophy. Curious about everything and contemptuous towards nothing, Garcia can be expected to write insightfully on dozens of topics in the years to come. Given that his philosophy is so personally tantalizing in its agreements and disagreements with my own, and given the great internal richness of Forme et objet itself, the present review is no better than a first effort at coming to terms with the challenges posed by this minstrel from the rising generation. This is especially intriguing for older Generation X’ers like me, since confrontation with the younger generation is one of the many themes treated insightfully in Garcia’s book. 1. Introduction Garcia begins in defense of a so-called “flat ontology,” in which all things are equally things. While Roy Bhaskar 10 used this term pejoratively to refer to anti-realist philosophies that flatten everything onto an epistemic plane of human access, Manuel DeLanda 11 (an admirer of Bhaskar) reversed it into the positive principle that all realities are equally realities. Similar notions can be found in the “absistence” of Alexius Meinong, 12 the “irreduction” of Bruno Latour, 13 and my own critique 14 of the undermining/overmining pair. Also noteworthy is Levi Bryant’s use of the term “flat ontology” throughout The Democracy of Objects 15 and his earlier essay “The Ontic Principle.” 16 But for Garcia, flatness is only one face of the cosmos, and one that he ultimately declares to be rather impoverished. Even so, he always remains an advocate of a flat ontology. Insofar as everything is equally something, no matter what it is ( n’importe qui ), everything is equally a thing, equally solitary in its relation with world. This is why his book abounds in those long lists of random, ontologically equivalent entities that Ian Bogost has playfully termed “Latour Litanies.” 17 The first litany in Garcia’s book runs as follows: “We live in this world of things, where a cutting of acacia, a gene, a computer-generated image, a transplantable hand, a musical sample, a trademarked name, or a sexual service are comparable things.” (7) Yet Garcia is frankly dualistic; his flat ontology only lasts until page 159 and the end of Book I (entitled “Formally”), which deals entirely with things that are equally things. Thereafter Garcia turns his attention from things to objects, which are not flat in the least, but engage in hierarchical relations with one another. In agreement with both DeLanda and the speculative realists, Garcia proclaims that his book “proposes to put to the test a thought about things rather than a thought about our thought about things .” (8) Just as ducklings are “imprinted” (9) after hatching and treat the first creature they see as their mother, philosophers are imprinted by the idea with which they begin. Hence, philosophies that begin with human access will never truly find their way back to things. This makes Garcia rather suspicious of twentieth century philosophy, since “the twentieth century—to which in some way this work proposes to bid adieu—has been a period of theorizing modes of access to things rather than things...” (9) Among other possible benefits of the philosophy of things that Garcia proposes, it is fully able to account for thought as a special variant of things, while the reverse is not possible.(10) In Book I of Forme et objet , Garcia’s “things” are so flat, so de-determined, that he is forced to renounce some of the most basic features ascribed to things by most realists. As he tells us in his foreboding third footnote: “We will maintain that the solitude [of things] is less than unity, less than identity, and that it does not imply acceptance (any more than refusal) of the principle of non-contradiction.” (11) In a contemporary world cluttered with too many things, Garcia’s flat and formal plane provides us with some breathing room: “The formal plan of thought enables or re-enables us to cut short all accumulation—whether of knowing, experience, or action—by a simplicity, an impoverished surface...” (13) As Garcia says elsewhere in responding to a Deleuzian critic of the book, his starting point in flat ontology is designed to obstruct the claims of both analytic philosophy and Hegelianism: “Hence, this work seeks to protect each thing—real, imaginary, inconsistent, contradictory—both against Ockham’s Razor and against the Aufhebung or dialectical process.” 18 Yet contrary to the equalizing spirit of many flat ontologies, “we will add to our formal ontology of the equal, an objective ontology of the unequal.” (13) But initially, Garcia joins all flat ontologists in holding that everything is irreducible: “this irreducibility, which we will term the ‘chance’ of each thing... also marks the refusal of a positive thought that reduces things exclusively to natural things, or social things, or historical things, etc.” (15) This irreducible “chance” of a thing emerges as an important technical term in the book, always paired with its inverted brother, the “price to pay” ( prix à payer ). On pages 17-19, we find the only diagrams in the book. What they illustrate is that Garcia wishes to avoid two equally dangerous extremes. The first is the philosophy of substance, featuring the thing-in-itself as a mighty river fed by attributes as if by subordinate tributary streams. This model can be found in many of the classic thinkers of West and East alike. In it, “there is obviously a hierarchization between that which is dragged towards something other than itself, and this other which serves it as an ontological support while supporting its proper being.” (16) For Garcia, the second extreme worth avoiding is the philosophy of events: “One thus conceives trajectories of being, identified as events, facts, powers, intensities, or intentionality. These vectors of being come first, bearing and supporting being, displacing it, but without ever finding a stopping point, a buffer, an objective consistency.” (17) The first model gives us a thing too wrapped up in itself, too compact . This word “compact” (the French and the English are the same) is another technical term for Garcia. But if the “compact” model of things leads us to something more than things, the philosophy of events gives us less than things, by dissolving them into a play of vectors. Garcia’s alternative lies midway between these two extremes: Being enters the thing, being comes out of it. And a thing is nothing other than the difference between the enters and the being that comes out. Thus, the circuit of being is never halted. In the thing, there is never the thing-in-itself. And the thing is never in-itself, but outside of itself. Nonetheless, being is not eventally “pollinated” by vectors: it possesses an objecting halting-point... (19) This single idea is the key to Garcia’s book: the thing is neither a self-contained durable lump nor some sort of evental flux. Instead, the thing is the difference between its various components and its relations with its environment. Or stated differently: “the price to pay for this disposition is a circulation of being that systematically distinguishes two senses of things: that which is in the thing , and that in which the thing is , or that which encompasses it and that which it encompasses,” (19) translating comprendre here as “encompass.” 19 In a beautiful description of a piece of black slate, Garcia sums up the various minerals, qualities, and shapes that compose [ comprend ] it, and calls them “that which is in the thing,” (20) noting that this tells us nothing about “that in which [the slate] is”—namely, all the various situations in which the black slate can be found. Instead, the slate is the difference between these two: the most characteristic principle of Garcia’s philosophy. 2. Formally Book One of Forme et objet , “Formally,” is concerned with the formal equality of all things in a flat world. “Two questions mark the boundaries of reflection: of what is everything composed [ composé ], and: what do all things compose?” (27) Looking downward, we wish to know what everything is made of; looking upward, we want to know the ultimate result of the combination of all things. Here we must turn our attention to the thing n’importe quoi— no matter what it is. (30) Anything with finite qualities is obviously too specific to be relevant to global ontological questions. To an equal degree, something possessing all qualities (think of Whitehead’s God) 20 would not be n’importe quoi either, since it would still be too definite, even if incredibly vast. The same holds for contradictions, since these all differ from each other. The square circle, the non-white black white, and the non-city city are all too distinct to count as the thing no matter what it is. The n’importe quoi must be devoid of all specific qualities, including contradictory ones. In one of the more intriguing points in his book, so reminiscent of Meinong, Garcia proclaims that “the ‘no matter what it is’ is neither a reality nor an abstract construction, nor both of these at once; the ‘no matter what it is’ is simply the plane of equality of that which is real, that which is possible, that which is inexistent, that which is past, that which is impossible, that which is true, that which is false, that which is bad.”(39-40) Since everything has two faces, it would be a grievous mistake to focus on just one of them at the expense of the other, as physicalism or materialism do when reducing the world to minuscule physical underpinnings. For scientistic materialism, “it is either atoms, particles, or fields of force... which are the things.” (47-48) Moreover, “these more-than-things are accompanied by less-than-things: for example, ideas or facts of consciousness are determined by the state of matter and are not autonomous things, but manifestations reduced to secondary effects of material processes...” (48) On this point, Garcia’s position is in complete accord with my own critique of undermining and overmining. 21 Where we disagree is that Garcia is more deeply suspicious of the notion of substance, which I view as salvageable with a few needed changes, while Garcia sees this operation as hopeless: “A substance, in the history of philosophy, is the more-than-thing par excellence.” (51) Another agreement between our positions is visible when Garcia claims (correctly, in my opinion) “that it is vain to distinguish between things which are material and those which are not.” (52) Yet we also find an even more important disagreement, since for Garcia withdrawal cannot be the quality of a thing. Instead, the absence of a thing is simultaneous with it, embodied in all that is not it– the absence of the sculpture of a woman is to be found in the mold that appears at the same time as it, and thus withdrawal must be viewed as an “event” rather than as something pertaining to an object. For Garcia, nothing withdraws beyond access. Since we must distinguish between “that which is something” and “that which something is,” and since the former is identified with “no matter what it is is” and the latter with “ not no matter what it is,” we can say that “everything is thus a milieu, a fragile link between ‘no matter what it is’ and ‘ not no matter what it is.’” (62) And here we find Garcia’s critique of the thing-in-itself: “A thing is never defined en bloc . We can affirm that a thing is this or that, but that does not suffice. It is still necessary to state precisely that which is this thing .” (62) Stated differently, “something is not in itself : for that which is in the thing is not the thing, and that in which the thing is is not the thing.” (62) And here Garcia and I, facing the same evidence, draw opposite conclusions. For me, the fact that nothing can be identified with either its components or its concrete location means that the thing must be something in-itself distinct from both of these. Yet for Garcia, to be in-itself would mean to be identified with just one of these two extreme terms, and hence the thing can only be the difference between them. Garcia is equally suspicious of the classical tendency to view “unity” as a property of the thing, since in his eyes unity is too relational a property to belong to things. (65) While specific things are situated determinately with respect to other things, we are still speaking here about the thing no matter what it is, and this can be viewed only in terms of solitude, which all things share: a human being, a hand, or a chair or all equally things insofar as they are on their own , not insofar as they are one . (64) A thing is alone, and relates only to the one thing that is not another thing: world. In a striking parallel to my own argument for a partial revival of occasionalism, Garcia tells us that “the things communicate only by their solitude: it is because everything is equally on its own in the world that things can be together, enmeshed in one another.” (67) Alone in their solitude, things all relate to world, which serves as a mediator allowing them to become mixed up in one another. As we have seen, one reason that nothing can be in itself is because everything is in something else. For Garcia, “to be in something and to be something are equivalent.” (69) Stated more broadly, “being is thus the difference between the two aspects of each thing: that which is it, and that which it is.” (70) And even more vividly: “a thing is almost like a sack: there is that which one puts in the sack and that which remains outside the sack.” (70) But not quite like a sack, “since a thing is not a thin skin or film. Instead, a thing is comparable to a sack that is immaterial and without thickness: it is nothing other than the difference between that which is this thing and that which thing is, between content and container.” (71) Nothing can be in-itself because everything is two selves at once. For example, we cannot say that our self is defined by our consciousness: “Everything has a self because nothing is in itself. The self is not the quality of that which is related to itself (which is conscious, for example) or which thinks itself related to itself. Nonetheless, for an entity called ‘conscious’ to be related to itself, it is necessary that this very relation should be another thing than the self to which it is related.” (71) Consciousness cannot be the self, precisely because it is other than that of which it is conscious. Nothing is able to grasp itself. The self is “the function by which being and composition [ compréhension ] are mutually excluded...” (72) The self is “the point of shadow of everything that projects some light...” (72) The in-itself faces two opposite dangers: “For something to be in-itself is to be a self. Something which is a self flies out through one of its two sides... Stated differently, being in-itself is simply the possibility of a double failure.” (73) The in-itself can be termed compact : “There remains to us a means of thinking that which does not fully enter into the world, though without exiting from it. This means is what we call the compact.” (76) In a sense, the compact is the opposite of the world. For in the case of the world, everything enters it and it enters nothing; as for the compact, it enters the world (since it is something, after all) while nothing enters it. (77) The compact marks the presence of the impossible in the world. (78) It is not impossible, but possible only on the condition that it fails. (78) The time has come to speak of where a thing is located. “The sole condition of a thing is that of being in another thing than itself, and thus in another thing than something.” (78) A condition is “that which determines something, that which forms something, that in which something is.” (78) As for humans, “the condition of someone is his situation; my social condition is that which socially determines me, my place and my function...” (79) More generally, “to be conditioned is to find oneself reduced to that in which one is.” (79) Everything is conditioned, but nothing is reducible to this condition. To determine the condition of something is to determine in what it is. A thing is located in that which contradicts it, just as a statue exists in its mold, which is precisely that which it is not. Since the thing is finite and definite, its condition or form must be infinite and indefinite. That in which all things are is the world, which Garcia also terms “the whole.” (81) “To try to be in-itself is to attempt to remain outside the world. And indeed, to try to be in-itself is only a path of entry into the world.” (83) For Garcia, “the world is not the pre-existent container of the things it contains, a priori , nor the construction by the mind of a fictional ensemble of all things, a posteriori .” (85) Instead, the world is simultaneous with all things; the two always go together. The world cannot be a determinate world, such as the physical universe or mathematical space, since these are already too specific and limited. “Every determinate world, which is in fact a universe , is a ‘big thing’ [ grosse chose ]: it is a set, however vast, of composite things which itself embodies a thing.” (85) Every determinate world is really just a “big thing.” Stated differently, “it is nothing other than a balanced milieu between the things that compose it and the thing that it composes.” (85) We generally picture the world as a physical univer. (shrink)

Common sense and philosophical tradition agree that mind makes a difference. What we do depends not only on how our bodies are put together, but also on what we think. Explaining how mind can make a difference has proved challenging, however. Some have urged that the project faces an insurmountable dilemma: either we concede that mentalistic explanations of behavior have only a pragmatic standing or we abandon our conception of the physical domain as causally autonomous. Although each option has (...) its advocates, most theorists have sought a middle way that accommodates both the common-sense view of mind and the metaphysical conviction about the physical world. This volume presents a collection of new, specially written essays by a diverse group of philosophers, each of whom is widely known for defending a particular conception of minds and their place in nature. Contributors include Robert Audi, Lynne Rudder Baker, Tyler Burge, Donald Davidson, Fred Dretske, Ted Honderich, Jennifer Hornsby, Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ruth Garrett Millikan, H. W. Noonan, Philip Pettit, Ernest Sosa, and Robert Van Gulick. (shrink)

When I was an undergraduate in Oxford, we were taught economics almost as though it were a natural science. The subject matter of economics might be different from physics, but only in the way that the subject matter of chemistry or biology is different from physics. The actual results were presented to us as if they were scientific theories. So when we learned that savings equals investment, it was taught in the same tone of voice as one teaches that (...) force equals mass times acceleration. And we learned that rational entrepreneurs sell where marginal cost equals marginal revenue in the way that we once learned that bodies attract in a way that is directly proportional to the product of their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. At no point was it ever suggested that the reality described by economic theory was dependent on human beliefs and other attitudes in a way that was totally unlike the reality described by physics or chemistry. Some years ago, when I published The Construction of Social Reality, I was aware that it had implications for the ontology of economics, but I was not aware that there had already been an important revival of the tradition of institutional economics. It would be an understatement to say that I welcome this interest in institutions; I enthusiastically support it. But I think that in the institutional literature there is still an unclarity about what exactly an institution is. What is the ontology, the mode of existence, of institutional reality? This article tries to add to this discussion. Economics as a subject matter, unlike physics or chemistry, is largely concerned with institutional facts. Facts about money and interest rates, exchange and employment, corporations and the balance of payments, form the very heart of the subject of economics. When Lionel Robbins, in a classic work, tells us that “Economics is a study of the disposal of scarce commodities,”2 he takes for granted a huge invisible institutional.... (shrink)

The pedagogic intention of this unusual book is to present a unified picture of the whole of Plato, taking his metaphysical position with a seriousness rare in Anglo-American Plato-scholarship. The substance of the work depends on three claims. First, eide are not postulated or secondary entities, alongside sensibles. For Findlay, it is the eide which are ultimately real; the proper characterization of the being of sensibles is as "parasitic" on the original entities, the eide. There is a gradation of (...) being, and eide rather than sensibles are the measure. Beneath the full reality of the eide lies the partial or relative non-being of sensibles, and then the absolute non-being which Findlay identifies with the chora of Timaeus 52b. Above the reality of eide are their principles: the One, and the Dyad. Second, Findlay claims that even from the earliest dialogues in which the eide are suggested, Plato envisioned but did not complete a program of mathematizing the eide, and of using this mathematicization to account for the relation between the principles of eide and the sensible instantiations of the eide. This program, Findlay says, had to do with establishing ratios between eide, but is not described further than this. Third, as an exegetic requirement, Findlay has stated that this Prinzipienlehre is fully consistent with, and elucidated and supported by, the reports of Aristotle and of his commentators, especially Syrianus. This is, of course, the "unwritten doctrine" to which the title of the book alludes. Perhaps the greatest value of the work is that it challenges the prevalent interpretative opinion, supported by Professor Cherniss’ "almost superhuman scholarship," that the Aristotelian reports are distortions of Plato, and thus to be discounted, while the "real Plato" is in the dialogues alone. (shrink)

It is shown in the present paper that the transformation relating a parallel transported vector in a Weyl space to the original one is the product of a multiplicative gauge transformation and a proper orthochronous Lorentz transformation. Such a Lorentz transformation admits a spinor representation, which is obtained and used to deduce the transportation properties of a Weyl spinor, which are then expressed in terms of a composite gauge group defined as the product of a multiplicative gauge group and the (...) spinor group. These properties render a spinor amenable to its treatment as a particle coupled to a multidimensional gauge field in the framework of the Kaluza–Klein formulation extended to multidimensional gauge fields. In this framework, a fiber bundle is constructed with a horizontal, base space and a vertical, gauge space, which is a Lie group manifold, termed its structure group. For the present, the base is the Minkowski spacetime and the vertical space is the composite gauge group mentioned above. The fiber bundle is equipped with a Riemannian structure, which is used to obtain the classical description of motion of a spinor. In its classical picture, a Weyl spinor is found to behave as a spinning charged particle in translational motion. The corresponding quantum description is deduced from the Klein–Gordon equation in the Riemann spaces obtained by the methods of path-integration. This equation in the present fiber bundle reduces to the equation for a Weyl spinor, which is close to but differs somewhat from the squared Dirac equation. (shrink)

A theory of relativity, along with its appropriate group of Lorentz-type transformations, is presented. The theory is developed on a metric withR×S 3 topology as compared to ordinary relativity defined on the familiar Minkowskian metric. The proposed theory is neither the ordinary special theory of relativity (since it deals with noninertial coordinate systems) nor the general theory of relativity (since it is not a dynamical theory of gravitation). The theory predicts, among other things, that finite-mass particles in nature (...) have maximum rotational velocities, a prediction highly supported by recent experiments on 14 nuclei, such as 159 Yb that survives fission with angular velocities of up to 0.9 of the predicted value but does not reach it. (shrink)

We discuss the possibilities of determinism in reality, taking under consideration both quantum and classical physics. We present this firstly by questioning the supposed nature of quantum physics as non-deterministic, following the proposal of Penrose: the collapse of the wavefunction interpreted as particular measurements which seem to indicate certain contingency does not actually give the full picture of the reality of the former. In addition to what Penrose suggests, we consider this collapse as part of a bigger (...) deterministic picture. Secondly, we analyse the distinction between this microphysical scenario and our macrophysical experience, in the light of determinism as well. We suggest that this experience can be understood as particular “measurements” similar to what happens in quantum mechanics. For instance, the image of a person with certain identity features is a highlight or particularization of all the possibilities the identity of this person experienced, experiences and will experience through time. The “collapse” is thus linked to individuation, not less real, but incomplete of reality. By linking the domain of quantum physics in a deterministic fashion to the phenomenological or macrophysical realm, we aim to show that a non-contingent character of reality is possible when accepting measurements or particular instances of things as forms of comprehension given by the physical world (thus not just mere subjective interventions). We argue that the complete picture (closer to the wavefunction) cannot give distinctive information (understanding this as differentiation of elements, such as particles in the microphysical domain and a certain colour in the macrophysical one). (shrink)

The present work is motivated by recent experiments aimed to measure the propagation velocity of bound electromagnetic field that reveal no retardation in the absence of EM radiation. We show how these findings can be incorporated into the mathematical structure of special relativity theory that allows us to reconsider some selected problems of classical and quantum electrodynamics. In particular, we come to the conclusion that the total four-momentum for a classical system “particles plus fields” ought to be a present (...) state function of moving charges if EM radiation is negligible. In quantum domain, we analyze novel definition of the momentum operator recently suggested in the study of quantum phase effects. It implies that bound EM field energy and momentum are to be present state functions, too. Being in agreement with reported experiments, these conclusions suggest the necessity to carry out more precise experimental verifications for additional and independent determination of propagation properties of bound EM fields. A scheme of a possible experiment on this subject is also proposed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd Reviews 81 CAUSATION: A PREMATURELY DEPOSED MONARCH? Chad Trainer 1006 Davids Run Phoenixville, pa 19460, usa stratof{[email protected] Huw Price and Richard Corry, eds. Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisited. Oxford: Clarendon P.; New York: Oxford U. P., 2007. Pp. x, 403. isbn: 978-0-19-927819-0. £58 (hb); £19.99 (pb.). us$35 (pb). In 1911 the Aristotelian Society elected Bertrand (...) Russell its president, and in November of 1912 Russell’s presidential address to the Society was “On the Notion of Cause”, which, in addition to being published in the Society’s Proceedings, was later included in Russell’s book Mysticism and Logic. Russell’s address to the Aristotelian Society occurred during an interesting, brief era in the history of physics. This was a stage after the science of gravitational astronomy had beneWted from the use of diTerential equations but before the British physics community was aware of the German physicists’ advances. Less than three years after Russell delivered “On the Notion of Cause”, Einstein revolutionized the Weld of gravitational astronomy; and the quantum physicists were to eventually unearth phenomena that proved to be especially recalcitrant to comprehensive mathematical analysis. At the time of “On the Notion of Cause”, though, physics was understood as providing a thorough account of all the phenomena within its domain. In this address, Russell speaks of how Certain diTerential equations can be found, which hold at every instant for every particle of the system, and which, given the conWguration and velocities at one instant, or the conWgurations at two instants, render the conWguration at any other earlier or later instant theoretically calculable. … This statement holds throughout physics, and not only in the special case of gravitation. But there is nothing that could be properly called “cause” and nothing that could be properly called “eVect” in such a system.… [T]here is merely a formula. (ML, p. 194, Papers 6: 202; my emphasis) Russell further remarked: All philosophers, of every school, imagine that causation is one of the fundamental axioms or postulates of science, yet, oddly enough, in advanced sciences such as gravitational astronomy, the word ‘cause’ never occurs…. To me it seems that … the reason September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd 82 Reviews why physics has ceased to look for causes is that, in fact, there are no such things. The law of causality, … like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. (ML, p. 180; Papers 6: 193). What Russell has in mind here when saying “in advanced sciences such as gravitational astronomy, the word ‘cause’ never occurs” is that it is rash to infer from the observation of particular uniformities that there necessarily is a legitimate apriori category of causality (ML, p. 205; Papers 6: 209). Rather, “the law of causality, as usually stated by philosophers, is false, and is not employed in science” (ML, p. 207; Papersz 6: 210). Huw Price and Richard Corry’s Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisitedz features thirteen chapters from diTerent contributors (except for Huw Price who authors one and co-authors another) who address diTerent aspects of this matter. Price and Corry explain: One key theme of the volume turns on the possibility that in presenting philosophy with a stark choice between Wnding causation in physics and rejecting it altogether, Russell missed an important range of intermediate views. In particular, he missed what, by a natural extension of his own constitutional analogy, we may call the republican option. In the political case, rejecting the view that political authority is vested in our rulers by God leaves us with two choices: we may reject the notion of political authority altogether ; or we may regard it, with republicans, as invested in our rulers by us. Arguably, the republican option exists in metaphysics, too. Causal republicanism is thus the view that although the notion of causation is useful, perhaps indispensable, in our dealings with... (shrink)

In The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene’s metafictional commentary (indicated by the relentless presence of language and literature in the content of the novel) runs parallel to his commentary on the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist. Strikingly, written language, due to its own physical reality and the way in which it is treated in the novel, takes on sacramental characteristics. Both written language and the Eucharist are physical, and both make truth present. Through his use of (...) physical texts to indicate the true nature of each character and by aligning the written word with the Eucharist, Greene offers a complex exploration of the sacramental possibilities of literature and language, ultimately contending that language itself is sacramental. (shrink)

In this paper, we re-examine a series of gedanken welcher Weg (WW) experiments introduced by Scully, Englert and Walther that contain the essential ideas underlying the quantum eraser. For this purpose we use the Bohm model which gives a sharp picture of the behaviour of the atoms involved in these experiments. This model supports the thesis that interference disappears in such WW experiments, even though the centre of mass wave function remains coherent throughout the experiment. It also shows exactly (...) what it means to say ‘that the interference can be restored by manipulating the WW detectors long after the atoms have passed’. It does not support Wheeler’s notion that ‘the past is undefined and undefinable without the observation (in the present)’. (shrink)

Temporal becoming is usually considered the essence of the concept of time. But in our century most physicists and philosophers have defended the view that becoming is dependent on the existence of conscious beings and that there is no ontological difference between past and future. I evaluate these related claims both in light of their conceptual implications and by bringing to bear our best spacetime theories. ;Since a mind-independent becoming should be grounded in an ontological, non-epistemic asymmetry between past and (...) future, I discuss the philosophical motivations for various "non-full views" of the future in contrast to the view that the future is as real as the past. I present the disagreement between these views both in terms of what is and in terms of possession of a definite truth value, thereby distinguishing an ontological and a semantic formulation. A formal definition of the "tree model" of reality allows a clear distinction of the often conflated notions of 'determinate', 'determined' and 'stable', and helps to formulate the differences between the "non-full" views and the "full view" of reality. ;To settle the issue concerning these views, I bring into the discussion the special theory of relativity . I show that oft-discussed arguments against the openness of the future presuppose a clarification of the properties of the relation 'being determinate for', in particular symmetry and transitivity. Within STR, objective becoming can be defended at the cost of relativizing what is determinate to spacetime points, of making the relation of determinedness time-asymmetric, and of denying determinateness to spacelike-related events. ;I conclude by urging that mind-independent temporal becoming can find a more hospitable environment in some isotropic cosmological models of general relativity, a claim that has been unreasonably neglected. If the universe does not present causal anomalies , the proper time of a co-moving 'fundamental particle' can be made common to every other world line. The existence of such a cosmic time would make current scientific talk of 'cosmic evolution' and 'the future of the universe' non-metaphorical. (shrink)

The author begins by recalling how he was led in 1923–24 to the ideas of wave mechanics in generalizing the ideas of Einstein's theory of light quanta. He made himself at that time a concrete physical picture of the coexistence of waves and particles and, in 1927, attempted to give them precise form in his “theory of the double solution.” As other ideas prevailed at the time, he abandoned the development of his conception. But for the past twenty (...) years, once again convinced, like Einstein, that present-day quantum mechanics is only a statistical theory and does not give a true picture of physical reality, he has again taken up his old ideas and developed them considerably. He has in particular introduced an element of randomness into the theory and has thus attained to a “hidden thermodynamics of particles,” the results of which appear to be very interesting. (shrink)

McTaggart distinguished two conceptions of time: the A-series, according to which events are either past, present or future; and the B-series, according to which events are merely earlier or later than other events. Elsewhere, I have argued that these two views, ostensibly about the nature of time, need to be reinterpreted as two views about the nature of the universe. According to the so-called A-theory, the universe is three dimensional, with a past and future; according to the B-theory, the universe (...) is four dimensional. Given special relativity (SR), we are obliged, it seems, to accept (a modified version of) the B-series, four dimensional view, and reject the A-series, three dimensional view, because SR denies that there is a privileged, instantaneous cosmic "now" which seems to be required by the A-theory. Whether this is correct or not, it is important to remember that the fundamental problem, here, is not "What does SR imply?", but rather "What is the best guess about the ultimate nature of the universe in the light of current theoretical knowledge in physics?". In order to know how to answer this question, we need to have some inkling as to how the correct theory of quantum gravity incorporates quantum theory, probability and time. This is, at present, an entirely open question. String theory, or M-theory, seems to evade the issue, and other approaches to quantum gravity seem equally evasive. However, if probabilism is a fundamental feature of ultimate physical reality, then it may well be that the A-theory, or rather a closely related doctrine I call “objectism”, is built into the ultimate constitution of things. (shrink)

Johann Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1774-1845 ) was born in Germany but moved to Holland at the age of 13. After studying at Halle he joined the Kantian movement in Amsterdam as an active member, cooperating with Paulus van Hemert and contributing articles to his Kantian magazine. During his professional career as a marine instructor (1803-11 ), however, he became increasingly critical of Kantianism. As professor of mathematics, physics and philosophy at the University of Utrecht (1816-44) he traded in his former (...) Kantianism for a variant of the common sense philosophy then in favour in the Netherlands. He now regarded Kantianism as a form of scepticism. Accordingly, in his major work, the Contnbution to a Critique of the Truth of Human Knowledge, he propounds an anti-sceptical doctrine of such ‘basic truths’ as are founded on the immediate relevation of our consciousness. Schröder also attempts to reduce the Kantian doctrine of the noumenon to an inconsistent set of propositions, by showing them to be antinomies in the Kantian sense of the term, even using Kant's own dialectical method in proving their contradictoriness ; these contradictory propositions he calls the 'antinomies of the Kantian philosophy'. In a minor work, The Sign Relation as the Basis of Human Knowledge (translated freely), we find reminiscences of Thomas Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind: of the doctrine of sensations suggesting our conceptions of things, of causes being the signs of their effects, of 'the natural language of mankind'. Schröder, in developing these ideas in his own way, presents the sign relation as being fundamental to the construction of our knowledge of both nature and the human soul. Only by taking one thing as the ‘sign’ (signal, symbol, symptom, index, expression, picture, representation etc.) of another can we attain a conception of the world as a coherent whole. Our perception of this relation is partly a matter of innate capacities, partly the result of acquired skill. (shrink)