According to anti-atomism, we represent color properties (e.g., red) in virtue of representing color relations (e.g., redder than). I motivate anti-atomism with a puzzle involving a series of pairwise indistinguishable chips. I then develop two versions of anti-atomism.

In Plato’s eponymous dialogue, Timaeus, the main character presents the universe as an (almost) perfect sphere filled by tiny, invisible particles having the form of four regular polyhedrons. At first glance, such a construction may seem close to an atomistic theory. However, one does not find any text in Antiquity that links Timaeus’ cosmology to the atomists, while Aristotle opposes clearly Plato to the latter. Nevertheless, Plato is commonly presented in contemporary literature as some sort of atomist, sometimes as supporting (...) a form of so-called ‘mathematical atomism’. However, the term ‘atomism’ is rarely defined when applied to Plato. Since it covers many different theories, it seems that this term has almost as different meanings as different authors. The purpose of this article is to consider whether it is correct to connect Timaeus’ cosmology to some kind of ‘atomism’, however this term may be understood. Its purpose is double: to obtain a better understanding of the cosmology of the Timaeus, and to consider the different modern ‘atomistic’ interpretations of this cosmology. In short, we would like to show that such a claim, in any form whatsoever, is misleading, an impediment to the understanding of the dialogue, and more generally of Plato’s philosophy. (shrink)

The influential French chemist Marcelin Berthelot spoke against the use of Dalton's atomic theory and Avogadro's hypothesis in the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper argues that Berthelot conceded that atomism might be acceptable as a system of conventions, but he feared the power of such conventions in constructing a realistic picture of atoms which was not warranted empirically. Equally, Berthelot's anti-atomism was a last-ditch effort to assert the place of chemistry within the tradition of (...) natural history and to deny the possible reduction of chemical science to the laws of nineteenth-century physics. (shrink)

Pierre Duhem’s (1861-1916) lifelong opposition to 19th century atomic theories of matter traditionally has been attributed to his conventionalist and/or positivist philosophy of science. Relatively recently, the traditional view has been challenged by the new claim that Duhem’s opposition to atomism was due to the precarious state of atomic theories at the beginning of the 20th century. In this paper, I present some of the difficulties with both the traditional and the new interpretation of Duhem’s opposition to atomism, (...) and provide a new framework in which to understand Duhem's rejection of atomic hypotheses. I argue that although not positivist, instrumentalist, or conventionalist, Duhem’s philosophy of physics was not compatible with belief in unobservable atoms and molecules. The key for understanding Duhem’s resistance to atomism during the final phase of his career is the historicist arguments he presented in support of his ideal of physics. (shrink)

The heated debates and severe conflicts between the atomists and the anti-atomists of the latter half of the nineteenth century are well known to the historian of science. The position of Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev towards these nineteenth century debates on atomism will be studied in this paper. A first attempt will thus be offered to reconcile Mendeleev’s seemingly contradictory comments and ambiguous standpoints into one coherent view.

This article initially presents Ernst Mach's anti-realist or instrumentalist stance that underpin his opposition to atomism and reveal his idea that science should be based totally on objectively observable facts. Then, the details of Mach's phenomenalist arguments which recognize only sensations as real are revealed. Phenomenalist thought is not compatible with the idea of realism, which evaluates unobservable entities such as atom, molecule and quark as mind-independent things. In this context, Mach considers the atom as a thought symbol (...) or a metaphysical fiction. This results in the idea that the existence of matter or entity is not independent of the perceiving minds, which is considered Mach’s subjective idealism. As a result of these arguments, the article argues that it would not be wrong to associate Mach's thoughts with solipsism, a radical form of subjective idealism. -/- Bu makalede ilk olarak Ernst Mach’ın atomun varlığına ilişkin itirazının temelini oluşturan ve bilimin sadece gözlemlenebilir olgulara dayandırılması gerektiği yönündeki düşüncelerini ortaya koyan anti-realist ya da enstrümantalist görüşlerine yer verilmektedir. Ardından Mach’ın enstrümantalist tavrının alt metninde bulunan ve yalnızca duyumları gerçek olarak kabul eden fenomenalist argümanlarının ayrıntıları serimlenecektir. Fenomenalist düşünce atom, molekül ve kuark gibi gözlemlenemeyen varlıkları zihinden bağımsız şeyler olarak değerlendiren realizm düşüncesi ile uyuşmamaktadır. Bu bağlamda yapılan incelemeler, Mach’ın atomu bir düşünce sembolü ya da metafiziksel bir kurgu olarak değerlendirmesine ve dış dünyadaki varlıkların var olmasını, onların bir zihin tarafından duyumsanması koşuluna bağlaması ile sonuçlanmaktadır. Makalede Mach’ın öznel idealizmi olarak ele alabileceğimiz bu argümanlarının radikal bir sonucu olarak onun düşüncelerini solipsizm ile ilişkilendirmenin yanlış olmayacağı sonucuna varılmaktadır. (shrink)

According to François Laruelle, French thought has been unduly influenced by corpuscular or atomist thinking, yet Laruelle has himself employed key atomist terms—in particular, that of the clinamen or swerve—in framing his own style of thought. This essay looks at this tension between atomism and anti-atomism in Laruelle’s thought, taking the measure of his contribution to a larger stream of postwar French thinking about the relevance and stakes of ancient atomism. Its contention is that Laruelle subtly (...) but really outlines a quantum theoretical resumption of ancient atomist philosophy—one that deserves closer attention and comparative study in the larger context of French philosophical interest in the atomists. A first section of the paper briefly describes Laruelle’s general project, along with his claim that he differs from his contemporaries because he uniquely escapes the dangers of what he calls corpuscular thought. A second section addresses the apparent tension between Laruelle’s claim to produce a non-corpuscular thinking and his consistent recent use of the atomist image of the clinamen, ultimately arguing that Laruelle sides with the clinamen against two forms of corpuscularity supposedly avoided by the clinamen itself but nonetheless usefully embodied in atomist thought. The final section of the paper draws up in preliminary terms a comparison between Laruelle’s understanding of his relationship to atomism and that of his contemporaries, focusing in particular on Alain Badiou. (shrink)

RésuméL'atomisme dukalāms'est constitué en opposition à la philosophie naturelle aristotélicienne desfalāsifa. Dans laPhysiqueduShifā', Avicenne s'en est livré à une réfutation détaillée et fondée sur de nombreux arguments. Ces derniers ont donné lieu à une réponse fort discrète chez al-Ghazālī, dont l'obédience aukalāmétait au mieux évanescente. Une réponse plus développée semble avoir été le fait d'al-Shahrastānī, encore qu'on n'en puisse retracer que les grandes lignes en raison du manque de sources transmises. Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, qui est passé dans son développement intellectuel (...) par une phase avicennienne, donc par une adoption vigoureuse des arguments anti-atomistes d'Avicenne, suivie d'une phrase critique à l'égard de la philosophie du maître, ne se borne pas à fournir une réponse détaillée aux arguments d'Ibn Sīnā, mais construit de nouveaux arguments en faveur de l'atomisme dukalām. (shrink)

This article documents the general tendency of seventeenth-century natural philosophers, irrespective of whether they were atomists or anti-atomists, to regard space, time and matter as magnitudes having the same internal composition. It examines the way in which authors such as Fromondus, Basson, Sennert, Arriaga, Galileo, Magnen, Descartes, Gassendi, Charleton as well as the young Newton motivated their belief in the isomorphism of space, time and matter, and how this belief reflected on their views concerning the relation between geometry and (...) physics. Special attention is paid to the fact that most of the authors mentioned above regarded rarefaction and condensation, on the one hand, and acceleration and deceleration, on the other hand, as analogous phenomena, which consequently had to be explained in similar terms. (shrink)

Theoretical thinking in modern sociology is still dominated by a morked anti-individualistic orientation. This paper examines the influence that Parsons’ critique of utilitarian social thought had on the formation and justification of this methodological view. Since then the utilitaristic (economic) tradition is held to demonstrate the fundamental weakness of individualistic sociological approaches in general: the failure to grasp the importance of emergent properties of social systems. It is argued that Parsons’ critique rests on a by far too restrictive Interpretation (...) of utilitaristic (economic) thinking which led to a false identification of social-scientific individualism with sociological atomism. (shrink)

This paper argues that, for Ockham, the parts of the continuum exist in act in the continuum: they are already there before any division of the continuum. Yet, they are infinitely many in that no division of the continuum will exhaust all the existing parts of the continuum taken conjointly. This reading of Ockham takes into account the crucial place of his new concept of the infinite in his analysis of the infinite divisibility of the continuum. Like many of his (...) fellow anti-atomists, Ockham stresses that the concept of a potential infinite seems to contradict Aristotle’s modal logic, in particular the central assumption that there is no potency that will never be realized. Ockham, like other fourteenth-century anti-atomists, tried not only to refute atomism, but also to propose an analysis of the infinite divisibility of the continuum that is not incompatible with their modal logic. (shrink)

My research in metaphysical realism and analytic metaphysics consists mainly in attacks on analytic metaphysics. My reason for this is a result of the fact that I am a mereological nihilis t, a blob theorist , an atomist (philosophic atomist), and a specific sort of conceptualist (see below). The variety atomism I argue for is similar to the traditional atomism of some of the ancient Greek and ancient..

This dissertation may be viewed as an exposition of the philosophical implications of a single eight-character sentence from the works of the Tiantai Buddhist monk Siming Zhili , the literal meaning of which may be rendered: "Other than the devil there is no Buddha, other than the Buddha there is no devil." A context in which to effectively interpret the significance of this claim is provided by examining the Chinese philosophical tradition with an eye for three closely related themes: notions (...) that do not share the arguably common-sense assumption that "good" and "bad" are mutually exclusive categories; concepts of holism ; and the conception of intersubjectivity as a primary, constitutive and ultimate component of experience. The work begins with introductory chapters laying out the nature of the problem, its parameters and implications, and the methodological limitations bearing on the investigation to follow. The next portion consists of an examination of ideas of value paradox, holism and intersubjectivity as they are developed by pre-Qin thinkers, including Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi Mozi, Laozi and Zhuangzi. The study culminates in an examination of the disputes over the Tiantai doctrine of "the evil inherent in the Buddha-nature" , beginning with its background in Indian and earlier Chinese Buddhism, and reaching its zenith in Zhili's notion of "the ultimacy of the dung beetle," as predicated on an assertion of an uncompromising identity between value and anti-value , a thoroughgoing omnicentric holism, and an insistence on the all-pervasiveness and ultimacy of constitutive intersubjectivity. By rendering these initially counterintuitive notions coherent, it is hoped that an alternative view of human experience, premised on omnicentric holism rather than atomism or unicentrism, on intersubjectivity rather than objectivity or subjectivity, and on value paradox rather than value dichotomy, will come into focus, thereby providing an additional resource to our arsenal of possible approaches to the world. (shrink)

This paper argues that Epicurus held a non-reductionist view of mental states that is in the spirit of Davidson's anomalous monism. We argue for this conclusion by considering the role that normative descriptions play in the peritropē argument from "On Nature" 25. However, we also argue that Epicurus was an indeterminist. We can know that atoms swerve because we can know that we make choices that are up to us and this is incompatible with the ancestral causal determination of mental (...) states by atomic processes. Epicurus escapes the traditional criticism of indeterminist libertarians because the swerve is not meant to explain how choices may be free. The anti-reductionist stance on the mental means that nothing about atomic processes could possibly explain any particular mental event. Moreover, because of the practical and therapeutic nature of Epicurean philosophy, it is not necessary that Epicurus provide an explanation of how the swerve subserves freedom of choice. We know all that we need to know for eudaimonia when we know that some choices are up to us. (shrink)

In the present article, the role of Gestalt concepts in clarifying the issues of perception is evaluated. Grounded in anti-atomism, Gestalt assumed organizing forces intrinsic to perception. Insofar these were identified with singularity preference, Gestalt is criticized for having failed to distinguish between perception and thought.

This article deals with the first Latin reception of Pseudo-Aristotle’s On Indivisible Lines and its impact on the medieval debate about the continuum. Robert Grosseteste’s and Albert the Great’s references to this pseudo-Aristotelian text show that it could be regarded as a source for where to find information about the indivisibilist tenet, as well as an expansion of Aristotle’s anti-atomistic critiques scattered throughout his authentic works. The use of On Indivisible Lines made by Henry of Harclay and Adam of (...) Wodeham confirms this trend: the reading of this text could be twofold according to the tenet defended. While Henry argues against Pseudo-Aristotle to defend indivisibilism, Adam expands on pseudo-Aristotelian arguments to show the incongruities implied by indivisibilism. (shrink)

Frege appears to hold both that thoughts are internally articulated, in a way that mirrors the semantic articulation of the sentences that express them, and that the same thought can be analyzed in different ways, none of which has to be more fundamental than the others. Commentators have often taken these theses to be mutually incompatible and have tended to polarize into two camps, each of which attributes to Frege one of the theses, but maintains that he is only apparently (...) committed to the other. This paper argues that there are good exegetical and philosophical reasons for reconciling the two theses; that this reconciliation can be achieved by rejecting an assumption shared by the two opposite camps of the exegetical debate, i.e., the assumption that essential articulatedness implies unique articulation; and finally, that this crucial assumption can be resisted by appreciating Frege’s anti-atomistic and ‘organic’ conception of the internal complexity of thoughts. (shrink)

This paper pursues a question about the spatial relations between the three types of matter posited in Margaret Cavendish’s metaphysics. It examines the doctrine of complete blending and a distinctive argument against atomism, looking for grounds on which Cavendish can reject the existence of spatial regions composed of only one or two types of matter. It establishes, through that examination, that Cavendish operates with a causal conception of parts of nature and a dynamic notion of division. While the possibility (...) of unmixed spatial regions is found to be consistent with both the doctrine of complete blending and Cavendish’s anti-atomism by themselves, it is finally ruled out by a consideration of her theory of place. In fact, the geometrical question of the spatial relations between types of matter that drives the paper is ultimately exposed as illicitly mathematical from the perspective of Cavendish’s metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper develops the metaphysical hypothesis that there are irreducibly collective pluralities, pluralities of objects that do not have a singular object among them. A way to formulate this hypothesis using plural quantification will be proposed and the coherence of irreducibly collective existence will be defended. Furthermore, irreducibly collective existence will be shown to allow for bottomless scenarios that do not involve things standing in relations of parthood. This will create logical space for an anti-atomistic form of mereological nihilism.

In this paper I build a case for considering the pioneering behaviourist philosopher Grace de Laguna as one of the grandmothers of analytic philosophy. I argue against the ‘Great Men’ narrative of analytic philosophy as composed of Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein and their followers, and in favour of a more inclusive ‘movement’ narrative of analytic philosophy as a broad and varied movement with an anti-idealist and naturalistic orientation aimed at fitting around novel development in the sciences, including Einsteinian physics and (...) psychology. I compare de Laguna’s prescient early views to Whitehead’s; both share an anti-idealist but also anti-atomist solution to the problem of perception, and both oppose the bifurcation of nature, with de Laguna expressing these views before Whitehead did. I conclude that while both opposed the narrower project of logical atomism, both count as ancestors of the wider analytic movement. (shrink)

It is remarkable how similar today's mind-body debates are to the philosophical critiques of biological science, such as Henri Bergson's Vitalism at the turn of the last century. Philosophers like Bergson became famous arguing that science could never account for life. One reason was that living creatures could not be decomposed into fundamental units, in spite of the empirical finding that all animate things consist of basic cells with remarkably general properties in a bewildering profusion of variation. Today we know (...) that each of those cells has nearly identical DNA-RNA mechanisms, and that, to give one example, humans have about 50% of DNA in common with such creatures as yeast and C. elegans, the tiny worms that is now almost completely defined in genotype and phenotype. The cell and its genetic machinery can plausibly be called the atom of life. So Bergson's anti-atomism was wrong in large part. Indeed, had we followed his advice about 1900, we would still be living in the first great industrial age. (shrink)

ABSTRACT. Associationist psychologists of the late 19th-century premised their research on a fundamentally Humean picture of the mind. So the very idea of mental science was called into question when T. H. Green, a founder of British idealism, wrote an influential attack on Hume’s Treatise. I first analyze Green’s interpretation and criticism of Hume, situating his reading with respect to more recent Hume scholarship. I focus on Green’s argument that Hume cannot consistently admit real ideas of spatial relations. I then (...) argue that William James’s early work on spatial perception attempted to vindicate the new science of mind by showing how to avoid the problems Green had exposed in Hume’s empiricism. James’s solution involved rejecting a basic Humean assumption—that perceptual experience is fundamentally composed of so-called minima sensibilia, or psychological atoms. The claim that there are no psychological atoms is interesting because James supported it with experimental data rather than (as commentators typically suppose) with introspective description or a priori argument. James claimed to be the real descendant of British empiricism on grounds that his anti-atomistic model of perception fortified what Green had perhaps most wanted to demolish—the prospect of using empirical, scientific methods in the study of mind. (shrink)

There is a popular view that Descartes and Pascal were antagonists. I argue instead that Pascal was a Cartesian, in the manner of other Cartesians in the seventeenth century. That does not, of course, mean that Pascal accepted everything Descartes asserted, given that there were Cartesian atomists, for example, when Descartes was a plenist and anti-atomist. Pascal himself was a vacuuist and thus in opposition to Descartes in that respect, but he did accept some of the more distinctive and (...) controversial aspects of Cartesianism, including his mechanistic philosophy and the consequent view that animals are automata. (shrink)

This paper explores Cavendish’s argument for what she calls “animate matter.” Her commitment to the ubiquity of animate matter, styled “Cavendish’s animism,” is presented as the conclusion of an inference to the best explanation of nature’s order. The reconstruction of Cavendish’s argument begins with an examination of the relationship between God’s creation of our world and the order produced through nature’s wise governance of her parts. Cavendish’s materialism and anti-atomism are presented as ingredients in her final account of (...) God’s ordering of the world by making it a self-moving whole. On the present account of Cavendish’s metaphysics, this self-moving whole then freely produces the regular motions that constitute its ordering of itself, as a distinct ordering beyond God’s initial act of creating our world. The depth of Cavendish’s commitment to the animistic elements of her materialism—or in other words, the extent to which her system is genuinely animistic—is then considered. (shrink)

David Hume’s and later Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on concepts are generally presented as standing in stark opposition to each other. In a nutshell, Hume’s theory of concepts is taken to be subjectivistic and atomistic, while Wittgenstein is metonymic with a broadly pragmatistic and holistic doctrine that gained much attention during the second half of the 20th century. In this essay, I shall argue, however, that Hume’s theory of concepts is indeed much more akin to the views of Wittgenstein and his (...) epigones than many, including Wittgenstein himself, probably might have suspected. As I try to show, Hume anticipates many themes central to Wittgenstein’s writings on language and meaning, and actually takes initial steps towards both an anti-subjectivistic and anti-atomistic psychology and epistemology. (shrink)

Résumé Le débat holisme-réductionnisme se structure autour de trois domaines sémantiques : l 'ontologie, la méthodologie et l'épistémologie. Généralement, une méthodologie analytique s'accompagne d'une ontologie atomiste et de la réduction des lois et théorie des niveaux d'organisation supérieurs aux lois et théorie des niveaux inférieurs. Par contre, une ontologie holiste, relationnelle peut s'accorder au concept d'émergence. En conséquence dans l'élaboration des lois et théories d'un phénomène appartenant à un niveau donné la prise en compte du niveau d'organisation supérieurs se révélera (...) déterminante. Les propositions philosophiques anti-mécanicistes de précurseur tels que Bradley, S. Alexander, A.N. Whitehead, C.L. Morgan, D.C. Broad, même en restant au niveau d'une forme de proto-émergentisme représentent le fondement épistémologique à partir duquel s'est développée une méthodologie véritablement émergentiste. Abstract The holism-reductionism debate is structured around three areas of semantics: ontology, methodology and epistemology. As a general rule, an analytical methodology goes with an atomist ontology, and the reduction of laws and theories from the higher levels of organisation to the laws and theories of lower levels. On the other hand, a holistic and relational ontology can be in unison with the concept of emergence. As a consequence, in elaborating laws and theories of a phenornenon of a given level, taking into account that the higher level of organisation will be determinant. The philosophical and anti-mechanistic propositions of precursors such as F. Bradley, S. Alexander, A.N. Whitehead, C.L. Morgan, D.C. Broad, even remaining at the level of a kind of proto-emergentism represent the epistemological basis on which a true emergentist methodology has been developed. (shrink)

Moral Internalism is the claim that it is a priori that moral beliefs are reasons for action. At least three conceptions of 'reason' may be disambiguated: psychological, epistemological, and purely ethical. The first two conceptions of Internalism are false on conceptual, and indeed empirical, grounds. On a purely ethical conception of 'reasons', the claim is true but is an Externalist claim. Positive arguments for Internalism — from phenomenology, connection and oddness — are found wanting. Three possible responses to the stock (...) Externalist objections are uncovered and overturned. In so doing a close relation between Internalism and Behaviourism is revealed, and some stock anti-behaviouristic arguments are co-opted for Externalism. The likely dependence of Internalism on an Atomistic Associationism is uncovered and criticised. Internalism is seen as being ultimately a type of Ethical Determinism. Finally, a sketch of an Anti-Associative Externalism is given whereby the notion of self determination of action is put forward as an account of moral motivation fit to resist both the internalist and the belief-desire psychology premises of the stock non-cognitivist argument. (shrink)

This article examines some of S. Lem’s statements about his philosophical and worldview positions regarding the mysterious nature of language and the linguistic sign, the connection between language, mind and reality. The main goal of the paper is to understand what texts on the philosophy of language the Polish thinker read and what attitude he has formed towards them. Lem is the follower of an analytical intellectual culture that focuses on the naturalistic worldview and the consequences of the “linguistic turn” (...) in Western philosophy. For Lem, language is not only an interesting philosophical object, but also a complex precise instrument of his own creative thinking. In this regard, the philosophy of language for a writer cannot be based only on logical-linguistic atomistic methodology. Lem seeks in his contemporary interdisciplinary methods ways to combine realistic and anti-realist positions. Many concepts, such as “the effect of semantic transparency”, “polymorphic language model”, “variation model” are quite correlated with modern theories of language and require additional philosophical comments. (shrink)

Duhem is often described as an anti-realist or instrumentalist. A contrary view has recently been expressed by Martin (1991) (Pierre Duhem: Philosophy and History in the Work of a Believing Physicist (La Salle, IL: Open Court)), who suggests that this interpretation makes it difficult to understand the vantage point from which Duhem argues in La science allemande (1915) that deduction, however impeccable, cannot establish truths unless it begins with truths. In the same spirit, the present paper seeks to establish (...) that Duhem is at any rate not the kind of anti-realist he is often presented as being, and that his views are like those Quine sees fit to call realist. An interpretation of Duhem's views on explanation and precision in science, and their bearing on the epistemological status of theory, is advanced which leads naturally into his critique of conventionalism. His attitude towards atomism, which should not be judged from a post-1925 perspective, is considered part of the unified view he strove after and appropriately called Duhem's physicalism, standing in contrast to the kind of reductionist conception usually associated with atomism. (shrink)

In this challenging and provocative book, Steve Fuller contends that our continuing faith in science in the face of its actual history is best understood as the secular residue of a religiously inspired belief in divine providence. Our faith in science is the promise of a life as it shall be, as science will make it one day. Just as men once put their faith in God's activity in the world, so we now travel to a land promised by science. (...) In "Science", Fuller suggests that the two destinations might be the same one. Fuller sympathetically explores what it might mean to live scientifically. Can science give a sense of completeness to one's life? Can it account for the entirety of what it is to be human? And what does our continuing belief in scientific progress say about us as a species? In answering these questions, Fuller ranges widely over the history of science and religion - from Aristotle and the atomists to Dawkins and the neo-Darwinists - and takes a close look at what science is, how its purpose has changed over the years, and what role religion and in more recent years atheism have played in its progression. Science, argues Fuller, is now undergoing its own version of secularization. We are ceasing to trust science in its institutional forms, formulated by an anointed class of science priests, and instead we are witnessing the emergence of what Fuller calls Protscience' - all sorts of people, from the New Age movement to anti-evolutionists, claiming scientific authority as their own. Fuller shows that these groups are no more anti-scientific than Protestant sects were atheistic. Fearless and thought-provoking, Science questions some of our most fundamental beliefs about the nature and role of science, and is a distinct and important contribution to debates about evolution, intelligent design, atheism, humanism, the notion of scientific progress, and the public understanding of science. (shrink)

The world is configured in ways that seem systematically hospitable to life forms, especially the human race. Is this the outcome of divine planning or simply of the laws of physics? Ancient Greeks and Romans famously disagreed on whether the cosmos was the product of design or accident. In this book, David Sedley examines this question and illuminates new historical perspectives on the pantheon of thinkers who laid the foundations of Western philosophy and science. Versions of what we call the (...) "creationist" option were widely favored by the major thinkers of classical antiquity, including Plato, whose ideas on the subject prepared the ground for Aristotle's celebrated teleology. But Aristotle aligned himself with the anti-creationist lobby, whose most militant members—the atomists—sought to show how a world just like ours would form inevitably by sheer accident, given only the infinity of space and matter. This stimulating study explores seven major thinkers and philosophical movements enmeshed in the debate: Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, the atomists, Aristotle, and the Stoics. (shrink)

Phenomenology since Husserl has always had a problematic relationship with empirical science. In its early articulations, there was Husserl's rejection of ‘the scientific attitude’, Merleau-Ponty's distancing of the scientifically-objectified self, and Heidegger's critique of modern science. These suggest an antipathy to science and to its methods of explaining the natural world. Recent developments in neuroscience have opened new opportunities for an engagement between phenomenology and cognitive science and through this, a re-thinking of science and its hidden assumptions more generally. This (...) is so partly because of the shortcomings of conventional mechanistically-conceived science in dealing with complex and dynamic phenomena such as climate change, brain plasticity, the behaviour of collectives, the dynamics of various microbiological processes, etc. But it is also due to recent phenomenological scholarship focussed on the ‘embodied’ phenomenology of Husserl's Ideen II and Merleau Ponty's later ontology of nature which have helped to extend the insights of phenomenology beyond the narrowly ‘human’ to an understanding of nature (which includes the human) more generally. Thus recontextualised, phenomenology is well placed to examine some of the assumptions that give rise to the reductionism and associated scientism which has characterised conventional science in its approach to the study of natural processes. In light of this, it might be suggested that the ‘anti-science’ of early articulations of phenomenology is more a hostility to the underlying assumptions of science as conventionally understood than to science itself e that it is scientism rather than science that is targeted. In this paper, I aim to show how a phenomenological naturalism might be seen as a necessary step towards the development of a non-reductionist and non-scientistic approach to scientific inquiry. A key to this is a reconceptualization of nature as inclusive of meanings and of mind. It is a conception developed by Merleau-Ponty, especially in his later ontology of nature, and one that is shared by American pragmatist philosopher of science, C.S. Peirce (1839e1914). For both philosophers, meaning must be understood in terms of an ontology which is relational rather than atomistic, and dynamic or processual rather than static and substance-based. For Merleau-Ponty this is an experientially-derived ontology; for Peirce it is a more conceptually-based one. In this paper, I explore this connection between these two philosophers in two stages. The first is by reference to Peirce's theory of signs or semiotics. More specifically, I look at the application of this theory to the study of biological processes as developed in Peirce-inspired biosemiotics. In the light of this, I suggest that Merleau-Ponty's account of intentional relations in nature might be articulated as semiotic relations, and can serve as a philosophical basis for a non-reductive biological science. I then turn to questions relating to the ontology of nature. I explore Merleau-Ponty's experientially-based “ontology of flesh” and Peirce's distinctive form of naturalism to show affinities at this ontological level. These affinities consist in commitments to a reality that includes possibility, meaning, temporality, and final causation e that is, an ontology which is far more inclusive than that of conventional positivistic science. Peirce's broader scientific metaphysics enables us to extend Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological naturalism beyond the biological to the physical sciences. Whilst Merleau-Ponty's ontology of nature provides the experiential basis necessary for a critique of scientism, Peirce establishes the relevance of that ontology for a re-conceived empirical science. (shrink)

This study explores several arguments against Spinoza's philosophy that were developed by Henry More, Samuel Clarke, and Colin Maclaurin. In the arguments on which I focus, More, Clarke, and Maclaurin aim to establish the existence of an immaterial and intelligent God precisely by showing that Spinoza does not have the resources to adequately explain the origin of motion. Attending to these criticisms grants us a deeper appreciation for how the authority derived from the empirical success of Newton's enterprise was used (...) to settle debates within philosophy. What I emphasize is that in the progression from More to Clarke to Maclaurin, key Newtonian concepts from the Principia (1687), such as motion, atomism, and the vacuum, are introduced and exploited in order to challenge the account of matter and motion that is presented in Spinoza's Ethics (1677). Building on this treatment, I use the arguments from More and Clarke especially to help discern the anti-Spinozism that can be detected in Newton's General Scholium (1713). Ultimately, the Newtonian criticisms that I detail offer us a more nuanced view of the problems that plague Spinoza's philosophy, and they also challenge the idea that Spinoza seamlessly fits into a progressive narrative about the scientific revolution. (shrink)

This article examines some of S. Lem’s statements about his philosophical and worldview positions regarding the mysterious nature of language and the linguistic sign, the connection between language, mind and reality. The main goal of the paper is to understand what texts on the philosophy of language the Polish thinker read and what attitude he has formed towards them. Lem is the follower of an analytical intellectual culture that focuses on the naturalistic worldview and the consequences of the “linguistic turn” (...) in Western philosophy. For Lem, language is not only an interesting philosophical object, but also a complex precise instrument of his own creative thinking. In this regard, the philosophy of language for a writer cannot be based only on logical-linguistic atomistic methodology. Lem seeks in his contemporary interdisciplinary methods ways to combine realistic and anti-realist positions. Many concepts, such as “the effect of semantic transparency”, “polymorphic language model”, “variation model” are quite correlated with modern theories of language and require additional philosophical comments. (shrink)

On oppose traditionnellement deux approches méthodologiques en sciences sociales : le holisme et l'individualisme. Il est tentant d'identifier cette opposition à celle du structuralisme et de l'atomisme. Ainsi, dans Les institutions du sens, Vincent Descombes propose de récuser l'individualisme méthodologique et de lui substituer une approche « holiste structuraliste », susceptible de permettre d'échapper aux mirages des « entités collectives » aussi bien qu'aux aportes de l'atomisme logique et du psychologisme, en mettant en avant la notion d'institution et celle d'esprit (...) objectif. Cette analyse passe par une critique logique radicale des arguments de Karl Popper en faveur du « nominalisme méthodologique ». On conteste cette présentation des thèses de l'auteur de Misère de l'historicisme, en montrant que sa philosophie n'est en rien un psychologisme et un atomisme, mais qu'elle accorde au contraire une importance capitale à la notion de « causalité structurale » comme à celles d'institution et d'esprit objectif. L'individualisme institutionnel n'est peut-être pas en ce sens un obstacle à la compréhension du problème plus général du tout et des parties. La querelle des sciences sociales et celle des universaux sont décidément solidaires l'une de l'autre. One commonly distinguishes two different approaches in the methodology of the social sciences, namely (methodological) individualism and holism. One can be tempted to identify this opposition to that between atomism and structuralism. For instance, in his book Les institutions du sens, Vincent Descombes argues that we have to substitute for methodological individualism a holistic but not collectivistic approach, so as to be able to escape the illusions of collectivism as well as the traps of logical atomism and of psychologism, putting a premium on the notions of institution and of « objective spirit ». (Similar proposals had been made independently by Philipp Pettit in his The Common MindJ. Descombes' target is mainly Popper's argument against essentialism and holism in The Poverty of Historicism, which he submits to a radical logical criticism. This paper disputes this rendering of Popper's view, which is emphatically anti-psychologistic and not ontologically nominalistic, and which gives a great significance to the very notions of institution, of objective spirit and even of structural causality. His « institutional individualism » is perhaps not a bad tool for handling partially the notorious problem of the hole and the parts. The modern controversy about the methods used in the social sciences and the venerable one about universals are decidely interconnected. (shrink)

structure of a laboratory report (generalized from Italian, Chinese and US sources), we distill a fifth flavor, the givens, whose flip side is the freedoms or tangibles of an experiment. (Stated in terms of computer science, we are trying to find inputs and outputs, but these turn out to be surprisingly vague in chemistry.) Then, in the service of a white-boxing ethos (which sounds less severe than ‘anti black-boxing’), we establish a movable boundary between givens and tangibles, with implications (...) for ‘ontological attitudes’ and for the future of chemistry. Next, in revisiting a 2002 exchange between Schummer and Laszlo, which might be paraphrased as the chemist-as-philosopher versus chemist-as-artisan, we apply a second kind of sliding scale which seems to harmonize the discussion. Finally, on a possibly quixotic note, we look briefly at a third kind of sliding scale, now aimed squarely at ontology itself. For illustrative purposes, we adopt an atomocentric viewpoint (as distinct from atomistic), and assign it the provisional name ‘Fuzzy CH4 Ontology’. (shrink)

Spinoza never discusses the scenario of radical skepticism as it was introduced by Descartes. Why not? This paper argues that he chooses a preventive strategy: instead of taking the skeptical challenge as it is and trying to refute it, he questions the challenge itself and gives a diagnosis of its origin. It is a combination of semantic atomism, dualism and anti-naturalism that gives rise to radical doubts. Spinoza attacks these basic assumptions, opting instead for semantic holism, anti-dualism (...) and naturalism. This crucial shift of basic assumptions prevents radical skepticism from arising. To be sure, local doubts are still possible, but the possibility of global doubt is ruled out. The paper examines this preventive strategy, situating it in the historical context and building a bridge to more recent anti-skeptical strategies. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's path to hermeneutics was different from that taken by most other philosophers. He revisited the hermeneutical tradition sporadically throughout the 1980s. The papers collected in Essays on Heidegger and Others, the fruits of an abortive, abandoned attempt to write a book about him, present an ambivalent view of the philosophers in this tradition. In Rorty's view, a concern with truth is a mere historical accident: a bump on the journey from a religious culture to a literary one. Rorty's (...) approach to social phenomena is also anti‐hermeneutical. Hermeneutical thinkers tend to be suspicious of individualistic or atomistic accounts of human existence. They prefer holistic accounts that see the social dimension of human existence as primary, and individuals as abstractions from it. Hermeneutical philosophers also tend to think that conveying the primacy of the social requires distinctive, inventive language. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's philosophies, from both the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, are explained and developed. Wittgenstein uses a primitive version of recursion theory to develop his attempt at a purely logical metaphysics in the Tractatus. However, due to his implicit materialist assumptions, he could not make the system completely logical, and built in a mystical division of possible worlds into the true and the false. This incoherence eventually lead him to reject logic as a method for doing metaphysics, and indeed to (...) reject metaphysics entirely. I argue that his move from the Tractatus to the Investigations was valid, but only given his materialist assumptions. If he had been willing to drop this unnecessary baggage, recursion would have played a very different role in his system, since he would then have had no need to separate static objects from processes, which he saw as purely mental. F.H. Bradley developed such a nonmaterialist metaphysics in the nineteenth century, but was crippled by a mentalism that Wittgenstein was free of. The anti-mentalism and anti-materialism that Wittgenstein considered as given were not so obvious to his predecessor, Russell, who revolted against Bradley's idealism in much the same way Wittgenstein ended up revolting against Russell's logical atomism. In my view, none of these positions was the right approach, which would require nonmentalism and nonmaterialism. But for some reason, these things (which seem to go together quite naturally to me) have been widely considered to be incompatible. Bradley was appropriately a non-materialist, but suffered from mentalism. Russell and the early Wittgenstein were appropriately nonmentalists, but suffered from materialism. The later Wittgenstein was, I would argue, still an ardent materialist and anti-mentalist, in spite of the fact that he had long since realized the contradictions to which materialism leads; he just had not recognized that it was his materialist assumptions that had lead him there, since these assumptions were so firmly engrained in his thinking as to be invisible.. (shrink)

This dissertation formulates, defends, and exemplifies a semantic approach that I call Cognitive Decompositionism. Cognitive Decompositionism is one version of lexical decompositionism, which holds that the meaning of lexical items are decomposable into component parts. Decompositionism comes in different varieties that can be characterized in terms of four binary parameters. First, Natural Decompositionism contrasts with Artful Decompositionism. The former views components as word-like, the latter views components more abstractly. Second, Convenient Decompositionism claims that components are merely convenient fictions, while Real (...) Decompositionism claims that components are psychologically real. Third, Truth-conditional Decompositionism contrasts with various non-truth-conditional theories, in particular with Quantum Semantics. And fourth, Holistic Decompositionism assumes that decompositions are circular, as opposed to Atomistic Decompositionism, which assumes that some primitive basis ultimately underlies semantic components. Cognitive Decompositionism is the conjunction of the following theses: decomposition is Artful , Psychologically Real , Quantum , and Atomistic . As I substantiate these claims, I will be responding to the anti-decompositionist theories of Fodor, Davidson, and Quine. (shrink)

Memory, funerals, and the communion of the saints: growing old and practices of remembering / M. Therese Lysaught -- God bends over backward to accommodate humankind...while the Civil Rights Acts and the Americans with Disabilities Act require [only] minimum effort / Mary Jo Iozzio -- Radical solidarity: migration as challenge ofr contemporary Christian ethics / Kristin E. Heyer -- Catholic lesbian feminist theology / Mary E. Hunt -- Theology of whose body? Sexual conplementarity, intersex conditions, and La Virgen de Guadalupe (...) / Katie M. Grimes -- Social conscience and politics in the United States of America: reflections / Mary Jo Bane -- Pope Francis, women, and the church for the poor / Lisa A. Fullam -- Floodwaters and the ticking clock: the systematic oppression and stigmatization of poor, single mothers in American and Christian theological responses / Julie A. Mavity Maddalena --What causes inequity? / Dean Baker -- Engaging the U.S. Bishops' pastoral on crime and criminal justice: from atomism to community justice / Robert DeFina and Lance Hannon -- Reconstructing the moral claim of racially unjust mass incarceration / Alison Benders -- The systemic erasure of the Black/dark-skinned body in Catholic ethics / Bryan Massingale -- Anti-blackness and white supremacy in the making of American Catholicism / M. Shawn Copeland -- White privilege / Charles E. Curran -- The Black Lives Matter Movement: justice and health equity / Michael P. Jaycox -- Mujerista theology: a challenge to traditional theology / Ada María Isasi-Díaz -- Faith of our mothers; Catholic womanist God-talk / Diana L. Hayes. (shrink)

Danto was not a fan of Dewey, the pragmatist who dominated Columbia's philosophy department for much of the twentieth century. A broad context for what might at first seem their total clash of philosophical temperaments is Danto's embrace of analytic philosophy in a period when classical pragmatism was evolving into the neopragmatism of Richard Rorty. A more specific context is Danto's preference for Cartesian‐inflected forms of atomistic explanation and representationalism, in contrast to Dewey's anti‐dualist and anti‐representationalist holism. In (...) addition, Dewey's vision of art as embodied in human experiences across the modern institutional spectrum contrasts starkly with Danto's more “compartmental” account of the Artworld. Yet despite these differences, both philosophers were also (in Dewey's case since the turn of the twentieth century, in Danto's case in late career) deeply, if differently, indebted to Hegel, who provided a fertile framework for understanding how human beings can at one and the same time be social, self‐interpreting spiritual beings and also natural beings. This fact provides a basis for thinking that while Danto never renounced his lifelong aversion to pragmatism, a subtler strand of Dewey's pervasive influence is present in his later writings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52
eviews WITTGENSTEIN APPROACHED G L Philosophy / U. of Iowa Iowa City,  ,  -@. Brian McGuinness. Approaches to Wittgenstein: Collected Papers. London and New York: Routledge, . Pp. xv, . .. his book is a joy to read. Brian McGuinness is among the foremost Tscholars of Wittgenstein’s life and work. For better than  years, his papers have given (...) perhaps the most clear and authoritative account of the complex intellectual and personal journey of Wittgenstein. The collection of these important papers in one book is an outstanding gift to all who are interested in early analytic philosophy. The papers are not presented diachronically, but topically, starting with McGuinness’s discussions of the interplay between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his conception of himself, as Austrian patriot, as teacher, as Jew, as architect, as penitent. There is much controversy in all of this. It is upsetting to learn that Wittgenstein remarked (likely sometime shortly after the events of Pearl Harbor in ) that “Things will be terrible when the war is over, whoever wins. Of course very terrible if the Nazis won, but terribly slimy if the Allies win” (p. ). In spite of McGuinness’s attempts at charitable explanation, it is hard to excuse this remark. Wittgenstein should have recognized that it was imperative that the Allies win, for surely he could not, by then, have been blind to the pogroms of Nazism (if not the implementation of their Final Solution to the Jewish question). It is just disappointing to discover Wittgenstein’s dalliance with anti-Semitism or with Weininger’s deplorable Sex and Gender. Nonetheless, McGuinness offers a wonderful and balanced portrait of Wittgenstein with a welcome minimum of hyperbole either concerning his genius, achievements and influences, or his eccentricities and failings.  As also in McGuinness’s Wittgenstein, a Life: Young Ludwig (London: Duckworth, and Berkeley : U. of California P., ; reprinted as Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein’s Life, – with a new Preface [Oxford: Clarendon P., ]) russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s.  (winter –): – The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U.  - _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52  Reviews In a second part, the book delves into the origins and nature of Wittgenstein ’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Since the papers in this part do not come diachronically, it would be nice for each to have a date by its title, so that if there is an historical development of McGuinness’s ideas it could be more easily tracked. But evolving or not, the interpretations in McGuinness’s papers are of the very highest quality. I know of no one else who has come closer to unravelling the often cryptic entries in the Tractatus. Though some of McGuinness’s assumptions about Russell’s philosophy are now challenged by new interpretations —in particular, it seems that Russell never held a theory of types of entities —there remain a great many gems in these papers. Among them are the following: Wittgenstein’s conception of solipsism is not Cartesian and epistemic, but concerns the limits of logical form and the proper ethical attitude towards life (p. ); the Notes on Logic were offered as satisfying the dissertation requirement for Wittgenstein’s .. degree (p. ); Wittgenstein included among the “logical constants” such notions as that of a “predicate” and a “dual complex”, not just logical particles such as “not”, “or”, “all” and “some” (p. ); Wittgenstein’s Grundgedanke was independent of his “picture theory” (p. ); Wittgenstein’s “logical atomism” was to be a purified form of Russell’s so that it forms “true logical atomism” with no differences of type and with the unification provided by neutral monism of mental and physical particulars (p. ); Wittgenstein and Russell had similar attractions to Spinozistic ethics, the conception of the world sub specie aeternitatis and the “mystical” as what inspires the scientific attitude (pp. , ); Hertz’s elimination of the concept of “force” in physics was an inspiration for Wittgenstein’s elimination of “classes”, “probability”, and the logical constants (p. ); structured variables were central to Wittgenstein’s Tractarian programme (p. ); Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical analysis has important ties to Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm (pp. , , ). These... (shrink)

Specifically, "A New Argument Against talk is a section of an upcoming article of Brahman Extended Philosophical Atoms" is mine about Mereological Nihilism and Anti-metaphysics concerned with only the following: Quantum Atomism . The article is going Radical Empiricism..