The purpose of this special issue and the conference that inspired it was to address the issue of conceptual integration in a science of consciousness. We felt this to be important, for while current efforts to scientifically investigate consciousness are taking place in an interdisciplinary context, it often seems as though the very terms being used to sustain a sense of interdisciplinary cooperation are working against it. This is because it is this very array of common concepts that generates a (...) sense of unity among consciousness researchers, despite the fact the concepts mean different things in different disciplines. These Concepts of Consciousness include the following: realism, representation, intentionality, information, control, memory and self. Given this list, we believed we could best approach the issue of potential conceptual integration by addressing each concept from different perspectives and asking the following: how do uses of the concept differ, must these meanings be synthesized in order for there to be a unified science of consciousness, is a unified conceptual scheme necessary to establish an independent science of consciousness, is a unified conceptual scheme possible, if it is not possible, why not, and if it is possible, what might it look like? To this end we invited, for each concept, two scholars who made extensive use of the identified concept in their work. The papers entailed in this special issue constitute the outcome of this effort, and in what follows we offer a brief examination of possible forms of integration the papers seem to collectively suggest. (shrink)

In an educational landscape dominated by discourses and practices of learning, standardized testing, and the pressure to succeed, what space and time remain for studying? In this book, Tyson E. Lewis argues that studying is a distinctive educational experience with its own temporal, spatial, methodological, aesthetic, and phenomenological dimensions. Unlike learning, which presents the actualization of a student’s "potential" in recognizable and measurable forms, study emphasizes the experience of potentiality, freed from predetermined outcomes. Studying suspends and interrupts the conventional (...) logic of learning, opening up a new space and time for educational freedom to emerge. Drawing upon the work of Italian philosopher and critical theorist Giorgio Agamben, Lewis provides a conceptually and poetically rich account of the interconnections between potentiality, freedom, and study. Through a mixture of educational critique, phenomenological description, and ontological analysis, Lewis redeems study as an invaluable and urgent educational experience that provides alternatives to the economization of education and the cooptation of potentiality in the name of efficiency. The resulting discussion uncovers multiple forms of study in a variety of unexpected places: from the political poetry of Adrienne Rich, to tinkering classrooms, to abandoned manifestos, and, finally, to Occupy Wall Street. By reconnecting education with potentiality this book provides an educational philosophy that undermines the logic of learning and assessment, and turns our attention to the interminable paradoxes of studying. The book will be key reading for scholars in the fields of educational philosophy, critical pedagogy, foundations of education, composition and rhetoric, and critical thinking and literacy studies. (shrink)

Aristotelian ideas have in the past been applied with mixed fortunes to quantum mechanics. One of the most persistent criticisms is that Aristotle’s notions of potentiality and actuality are burdened with a teleological character long ago abandoned in the natural sciences. Recently this criticism has been met with a model of the actualization of quantum potentialities in light of Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘spontaneous events’. This presumably restores the nowadays acceptable idea of efficient causation in place of Aristotle’s original doctrine (...) of the ‘four causes’. In this article I challenge the model by arguing that when properly scrutinized Aristotle’s final cause poses no problems for an Aristotelian reading of quantum mechanics. Final causes in fact provide a better ontology for quantum mechanics than spontaneous causation. The idea of ‘spontaneity’ is unanalyzable and therefore of little use in quantum mechanics. In addition, it is ontologically sterile in the context of quantum measurement, as shown by a historical and conceptual review of the role of efficient causation in experimental physics. (shrink)

Placed between constituting and constituted power, homo sacer reveals the state of exception, which through sovereign ban, is kept both inside and outside the law. Agamben’s latest political and legal philosophy is based upon this concept. As the victim of sovereignty, homo sacer unfolds the paradox of sovereign power, criticiz- ing its fundaments and showing the emptiness of law. However, for potentiality which is at the centre of Agamben’s argument, we need to look not only outside sovereignty and sovereign (...) power, but also outside homo sacer. This ar- ticle aims to examine such space, arguing that through absolute potentiality, the fulfilment of law is possible with the content to be focused on reaching conditions of justice and happy life. (shrink)

This is a book review of Barbara Vetter's Potentiality. -/- Philosophy is most intriguing when it teaches us seeing differently. Barbara Vetter’s book Po- tentiality & Possibility (OUP 2014) offers us precisely that: a new orthodoxy when it comes to our view of dispositions, possibility, and, most of all, potentiality. And it does so commendably well with the clarity of expression and the precision we often miss in the literature on causal powers and the like. -/- Vetter writes (...) on page 228: “This book is meant to be the beginning of a debate, not its end.” It is a pleasure and honour to be part of that beginning. Let us start. -/- A first big part of her book aims to show that the standard semantic and/or metaphysical inter- pretation of dispositional predicates and/or dispositions fails and that it ought to be replaced by her potentiality metaphysics. The first half of this commentary, 1., concerns consequences this view has. -/- A second huge part of Vetter’s project is to analyse possibility in terms of potentiality. This will be the focus of the second part, 2., of this review. (shrink)

Quantum contextuality and its ontological meaning are very controversial issues, and they relate to other problems concerning the foundations of quantum theory. I address this controversy and stress the fact that contextuality is a universal topological property of quantum processes, which conflicts with the basic metaphysical assumption of the definiteness of being. I discuss the consequences of this fact and argue that generic quantum potentiality as a real physical indefiniteness has nothing in common with the classical notions of possibility (...) and counterfactuality, and that also it reverses, in a way, the classical mirror-like relation between actuality and definite possibility. (shrink)

This volume congregates articles of leading philosophers about potentials and potentiality in all areas of philosophy and the empirical sciences in which they play a relevant role. It is the first encompassing collection of articles on the metaphysics of potentials and potentiality.

It is commonly assumed that persons who hold abortions to be generally impermissible must, for the same reasons, be opposed to embryonic stem cell research [ESR]. Yet a settled position against abortion does not necessarily direct one to reject that research. The difference in potentiality between the embryos used in ESR and embryos discussed in the abortion debate can make ESR acceptable even if one holds that abortion is impermissible. With regard to their potentiality, in vitro embryos are (...) here argued to be more morally similar to clonable somatic cells than they are to in vivo embryos. This creates an important moral distinction between embryos in vivo and in vitro. Attempts to refute this moral distinction, raised in the recent debate in this journal between Alfonso Gómez-Lobo and Mary Mahowald, are also addressed. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the importance of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of potentiality for rethinking education. While potentiality has been a long-standing concern for educational practitioners and theorists, Agamben’s work is unique in that it emphasizes how potentiality can only be thought of in relation to impotentiality. This moment of indistinction—what I refer to as im-potential—has important implications. First, I argue that if potentiality and impotentiality are separated from one another, the result is a stratified educational (...) system where some students are commanded to actualize their potentiality in the form of standardized tests while others are abandoned by the system. Second, thinking im-potentiality enables us to move beyond problematic formulations of learning and rediscover the uniqueness of studying. Here, I offer a brief example of study through an analysis of ‘Tinkering Schools’, an alternative program founded by Gever Tulley in San Francisco. And finally, without a concept of im-potentiality, the discourse of the ‘child genius’ becomes commodified as a power to be harnessed and actualized in the name of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. Only through a return to im-potentiality can we reclaim Genius and its relationship to the question of educational freedom. (shrink)

ABSTRACT On 22 January 2001, the UK became the first country to approve of embryonic stem cell research by passing the Human Fertilisation (Research Purposes) Regulations 2001, which legislated new research purposes for which early embryos can be used, in addition to those approved by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. Legal advisory committees, most notably the Chief Medical Officer's Expert Group and the House of Lords’ Select Committee, have offered various reasons, which can also be found in the (...) ethics literature, to justify this change. Those examined here are the views that: 1. Early embryos lack relevant qualities (or ‘the argument from lack of qualities’) and 2. Early embryos only have a potentiality to become humans with moral status (or ‘the argument from potentiality’). The validity of these arguments is questioned and a case is made for egalitarian speciesism. Embryos have moral status (used here in the restricted sense of the status possessed by all members of the class of beings which deserve the greatest moral significance in equal measure). They have more value than the value that should be assigned to nonhuman beings from the start of fertilisation. Current UK legislation on embryo research is immoral. (shrink)

Discussions about the use and derivation of pluripotent human embryonic stem cells are a stumbling block in developing public policy on stem cell research. On the one hand there is a broad consensus on the benefits of these cells for science and biomedicine; on the other hand there is the controversial issue of killing human embryos. I will focus on the compromise position that accepts research on spare embryos, but not on research embryos ('discarded-created-distinction', from now on d-c-d). I will (...) point out that this viewpoint is hard to maintain. The main focus is that the 'revealed beliefs' of its defenders are inconsistent with their 'professed beliefs', more specifically with their main argument, i.e. the potentiality argument. I will point out that (1) the defenders of d-c-d actually grant a relative moral status to the human embryo, (2) this moral status is dependent on internal and external criteria of potentiality, (3) potentiality seen as a variable value that also depends on external criteria cannot justify d-c-d, and (4) an approach to human embryonic stem cell-research that would also allow the use of research embryos is more compatible with the feelings, attitudes and values of those who currently defend d-c-d and, therefore, could lead to a broader consensus and to actions that alleviate individual human suffering. (shrink)

Stereotypes about exotic peoples and animals of the Orient shaped popular origin stories about COVID-19 in media reports. Outbreak narratives centred on the seafood market in Wuhan began to fall apart as new evidence was published by medical doctors, virologists, and epidemiologists. No viruses in bats or pangolins have been found that are direct ancestors of SARS-CoV2, the virus responsible for COVID-19 symptoms. Viruses are also being transformed as they interact with the human institutions, infrastructures and behaviours that facilitate their (...) spread. Epidemiological growth curves are shaped by national and foreign capital, cosmopolitanism, aspirations for independence and ongoing interdependence, the discourse of power and the discourse of resistance, as well as coexistence and violence. In reckoning with SARS-CoV2, we need to anticipate disruptive surprise of viral emergence rather recursively search for origins. Departing from Foucault’s foundational insights, this article gestures towards genealogies of possible viral futures. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe paper addresses the ways in which the cultural, the affective and the political intersect, counter and/or feed upon one another in the context of contemporary terror. Initially, buildin...

The notion of a capacity in the sense of a power to bring about or undergo change plays a key role in Aristotle’s theories about the natural world. However, in Metaphysics Θ Aristotle also extends ‘ capacity ’, and the corresponding concept of ‘activity’, to cases where we want to say that something is in capacity, or in activity, such and such but not, or not directly, in virtue of being capable of initiating or undergoing change. This paper seeks to (...) clarify and confirm a certain view of how Aristotle wishes us to see the relationship between the two uses of ‘ capacity ’ and ‘activity’. To that end, I consider also Aristotle’s employment of the terms in the De Anima, which sheds light on the key examples which direct the discussion in Metaph. Θ. (shrink)

The status of learning styles theory in educational studies is uncertain as we inhabit the liminal phase between the theory’s death as proclaimed by educational psychologists who avow to have disproven it and whatever afterlife will follow. At this moment, with both past and future in view, that we have an opportunity to reflect on the foundational assumptions of the theory. Engaging in the growing community of Agambenian philosophy of education and the ongoing dialogue around educational potentiality, this article (...) approaches learning styles theory as a paradigm of educational Megarianism. In this frame, the error of the learning styles theorists was not in the construction of a particular typology, but in the metaphysical approach to pedagogy. The reflection upon learning styles as paradigm also contributes a paradigmatic case of educational Megarianism to the discussion of potentiality in Agambenian philosophy of education. (shrink)

This study examines the complex relation between spatial experience and aesthetic experience. It is argued that spatial experience specifically in the context of everyday spaces makes it possible to experience them aesthetically as well. A wide selection of research ranging from environmental and philosophical aesthetics to architectural theory, psychology, human geography, and other relevant disciplines is employed in order to achieve a more detailed picture of how spatial experience is formed in the first place. This experience is described mainly in (...) terms of phenomenology but is then related to other ways of understanding experiences and their prerequisites. -/- Different notions of space and spatiality and a more comprehensive articulation of the relation of perception to spatial experience, sensory perception, and how senses contribute to spatial experience are in the focus of attention at the beginning of the study. Different experiential layers that can be distinguished within the space which is closest experienced are explored. Interaction with environment is discussed and the notion of preaesthetic is presented to clarify the relation between the two different types of experiences. Following this, the notion of preaesthetic is studied against eminent notions such as aesthetic attitude and aesthetic engagement that show elements that have traditionally been considered to either lead to or define aesthetic experiences. -/- This study shows that the effect that spatial experience has on revealing aesthetic potentialities in everyday environments is far more complicated than has previously been understood. Due to its contingent qualities, spatial experience sometimes leads to "failed" aesthetic experiences even in situations where there is obvious aesthetic potentiality. Even though there are some overlapping qualities in spatial and aesthetic experiences, they cannot thus be equated, as has more or less been done in different branches studying the topics of art and architectural experiences, for example. In the final part of the study, some possible directions for future research are pointed out and the application possibilities of these new developments in aesthetic theory are presented by short case studies, in which a closer look is taken into a chosen set of urban everyday spaces. (shrink)

Philosophical Papers, Volume 41, Issue 1, Page 129-147, March 2012.

Orthodox quantum mechanics is built upon psychophysical collapse events that are the close analogs, within contemporary physical theory, of the the Whiteheadian actual occasions, with their mental and physical poles. This article describes the way in which these events enter into quantum theory, and mediate the emergence of actuality from potentiality.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Account of Change in Physics III.1–3 Some Problems for This Account of Change Notes Bibliography.

All politics (i.e., a collective organised thought-practice), if it is to be emancipatory, must exhibit a dialectic of expressive and excessive thought. The absence of the dialectic implies the absence of a politics. The same point can be made by stressing that, in emancipatory politics, thought and practice are indistinguishable. The dialectic here concerns an emancipatory politics latent in excluded popular African traditions. Such latency means that a potentiality for dialectical thought often already exists within African traditions. Yet it (...) can only be activated in struggle. I show through three examples separated by long periods of time, that Africans—or more accurately some Africans—have successfully activated existing potentials into emancipatory politics by thinking against and beyond the oppressive particularities of interests, place and identity embedded in dominant cultures (such as those typical of civil society today) and have thus emphasised the centrality of universal humanity in the politics of emancipation. (shrink)

Through both an historical and philosophical analysis of the concept of possibility, we show how including both potentiality and actuality as part of the real is both compatible with experience and contributes to solving key problems of fundamental process and emergence. The book is organized into four main sections that incorporate our routes to potentiality: (1) potentiality in modern science [history and philosophy; quantum physics and complexity]; (2) Relational Realism [ontological interpretation of quantum physics; philosophy and logic]; (...) (3) Process Physics [ontological interpretation of relativity theory; physics and philosophy]; (4) on speculative philosophy and physics [limitations and approximations; process philosophy]. We conclude that certain fundamental problems in modern physics require complementary analyses of certain philosophical and metaphysical issues, and that such scholarship reveals intrinsic features and limits of determinism, potentiality and emergence that enable, among others, important progress on the quantum theory of measurement problem and new understandings of emergence. (shrink)