Values and Ontology

Values and Ontology
Author: Beatrice Centi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2013-05-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3110325527

The articles in this volume discuss the relation between values and ontology, focusing on the significance of ontology for ethics and aesthetics, i.e., themes which due to the raising interest in ontology come to play a central role in contemporary philosophical debate. The contributors address the questions of whether and in which sense values can be considered to be real, whether it is possible to experience them, and in which sense we can speak about their objective validity. These topics – which were also discussed by early phenomenologists like Brentano, Meinong, Ehrenfels, proponents of Gestalt psychology like Köhler, by Husserl, and by French phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty – are approached by both historical and systematic analysis.

Ethics without Ontology

Ethics without Ontology
Author: Hilary Putnam
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2005-11-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 067426651X

In this brief book one of the most distinguished living American philosophers takes up the question of whether ethical judgments can properly be considered objective—a question that has vexed philosophers over the past century. Looking at the efforts of philosophers from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century, Hilary Putnam traces the ways in which ethical problems arise in a historical context. Putnam’s central concern is ontology—indeed, the very idea of ontology as the division of philosophy concerned with what (ultimately) exists. Reviewing what he deems the disastrous consequences of ontology’s influence on analytic philosophy—in particular, the contortions it imposes upon debates about the objective of ethical judgments—Putnam proposes abandoning the very idea of ontology. He argues persuasively that the attempt to provide an ontological explanation of the objectivity of either mathematics or ethics is, in fact, an attempt to provide justifications that are extraneous to mathematics and ethics—and is thus deeply misguided.

Monstrous Ontologies: Politics Ethics Materiality

Monstrous Ontologies: Politics Ethics Materiality
Author: Caterina Nirta
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1648892191

While the presence of monsters in popular culture is ever-increasing, their use as an explicit or implicit category to frame, stigmatise, and demonise the other is seemingly on the rise. At the same time, academic interest for monsters is ever-growing. Usually, monstrosity is understood as a category that emerges to signal a transgression to a given order; this approach has led to the demystification of the insidious characterisations of the (racial, sexual, physical) other as monstrous. While this effort has been necessary, its collateral effects have reduced the monstrous to a mere (socio-cultural) construction of the other: a dialectical framing that de facto deprives monstrosity from any reality. 'Monstrous Ontologies: Politics, Ethics, Materiality' proffers the necessity of challenging these monstrous otherings and their perverse socio-political effects, whilst also asserting that the monstrous is not simply an epistemological construct, but that it has an ontological reality. There is a profound difference between monsters and monstrosity. While the former is an often sterile political and social simplification, the end-product of rhetorical and biopolitical apparatuses; the latter may be understood as a dimension that nurtures the un-definable, that is, that shows the limits of these apparatuses by embodying their material excess: not a 'cultural frame', but the limit to the very mechanism of 'framing'. The monstrous expresses the combining, hybridising, becoming, and creative potential of socio-natural life, albeit colouring this powerful vitalism with the dark hue of a fearful, disgusting, and ultimately indigestible reality that cannot simply be embraced with multicultural naivety. As such, it forces us towards radically changing not the categories, but the very mechanisms of categorisation through which reality is framed and acted upon. Here lies the profound ethical dimension that monstrosity forces us to acknowledge; here lies its profoundly political potential, one that cannot be unfolded by merely deconstructing monstrosity, and rather requires to engage with its uncomfortable, appalling, and revealing materiality. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, PostDocs, and academics alike in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, humanities, sociology and social theory, criminology, human geography, and critical legal theory.

The Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency

The Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency
Author: William Andrew Rottschaefer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1998
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780521592659

Brings findings and theories in biology and psychology to bear on ethics.

Scientific Ontology

Scientific Ontology
Author: Anjan Chakravartty
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2017
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190651458

Though science and philosophy take different approaches to ontology, metaphysical inferences are relevant to interpreting scientific work, and empirical investigations are relevant to philosophy. This book argues that there is no uniquely rational way to determine which domains of ontology are appropriate for belief, making room for choice in a transformative account of scientific ontology.

The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness

The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness
Author: Keith Whitmoyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2017-09-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350003964

Addressing Merleau-Ponty's work Phenomenology of Perception, in dialogue with The Visible and the Invisible, his lectures at the Collège de France, and his reading of Proust, this book argues that at play in his thought is a philosophy of “ontological lateness”. This describes the manner in which philosophical reflection is fated to lag behind its objects; therefore an absolute grasp on being remains beyond its reach. Merleau-Ponty articulates this philosophy against the backdrop of what he calls “cruel thought”, a style of reflecting that seeks resolution by limiting, circumscribing, and arresting its object. By contrast, the philosophy of ontological lateness seeks no such finality-no apocalypsis or unveiling-but is characterized by its ability to accept the veiling of being and its own constitutive lack of punctuality. To this extent, his thinking inaugurates a new relation to the becoming of sense that overcomes cruel thought. Merleau-Ponty's work gives voice to a wisdom of dispossession that allows for the withdrawal of being. Never before has anyone engaged with the theme of Merleau-Ponty's own understanding of philosophy in such a sustained way as Whitmoyer does in this volume.

Social Ontology and Collective Intentionality

Social Ontology and Collective Intentionality
Author: Gerhard Preyer
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2016-12-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3319332368

This volume features a critical evaluation of the recent work of the philosopher, Prof. Raimo Tuomela and it also offers it offers new approaches to the collectivism-versus-individualism debate. It specifically looks at Tuomela's book Social Ontology and its accounts of collective intentionality and related topics. The book contains eight essays written by expert contributors that present different perspectives on Tuomela’s investigation into the philosophy of sociality, social ontology, theory of action, and (philosophical) decision and game theory. In addition, Tuomela himself gives a comprehensive response to each essay and defends his theory in terms of the new arguments presented here. Overall, readers will gain a deeper insight into group reasoning and the "we-mode" approach, which is used to account for collective intention and action, cooperation, group attitudes, social practices, and institutions as well as group solidarity. This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers and graduate students and researchers interested in contemporary philosophy of sociality, sociological theory, social ontology as well as the philosophy of mind, decision and game theory, and cognitive science. Tuomela’s book stands as a model of excellence in social ontology, an especially intractable field of philosophical inquiry that benefits conspicuously from the devotion of Tuomela’s keen philosophical mind. His book is must reading in social ontology. J. Angelo Corlett, Julia Lyons Strobel

The Meaning of the Wave Function

The Meaning of the Wave Function
Author: Shan Gao
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1107124352

Covering much of the recent debate, this ambitious text provides new, decisive proof of the reality of the wave function.

Theory and Applications of Ontology: Philosophical Perspectives

Theory and Applications of Ontology: Philosophical Perspectives
Author: Roberto Poli
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2010-08-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9048188458

Ontology was once understood to be the philosophical inquiry into the structure of reality: the analysis and categorization of ‘what there is’. Recently, however, a field called ‘ontology’ has become part of the rapidly growing research industry in information technology. The two fields have more in common than just their name. Theory and Applications of Ontology is a two-volume anthology that aims to further an informed discussion about the relationship between ontology in philosophy and ontology in information technology. It fills an important lacuna in cutting-edge research on ontology in both fields, supplying stage-setting overview articles on history and method, presenting directions of current research in either field, and highlighting areas of productive interdisciplinary contact. Theory and Applications of Ontology: Philosophical Perspectives presents ontology in philosophy in ways that computer scientists are not likely to find elsewhere. The volume offers an overview of current research traditions in ontology, contrasting analytical, phenomenological, and hermeneutic approaches. It introduces the reader to current philosophical research on those categories of everyday and scientific reasoning that are most relevant to present and future research in information technology.

Ontology Made Easy

Ontology Made Easy
Author: Amie Lynn Thomasson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2015
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199385114

Existence questions have been topics for heated debates in metaphysics, but this book argues that they can often be answered easily, by trivial inferences from uncontroversial premises. This 'easy' approach to ontology leads to realism about disputed entities, and to the view that metaphysical disputes about existence questions are misguided.