Books on the topic 'Ontological Power'
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1
The human being in history: Freedom, power, and shared ontological meaning. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003.
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Dei, Hctor Daniel. The human being in history: Freedom, power, and shared ontological meaning. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004.
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3
Freedom, equality, power: The ontological consequences of the political philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. New York: P. Lang, 1999.
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4
García, Bonard Iván Molina. Ontological Branding: Power, Privilege, and White Supremacy in a Colorblind World. Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2022.
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5
Colbert, James G. The Human Being in History: Freedom, Power, and Shared Ontological Meaning. Lexington Books, 2003.
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6
Corry, Richard. Power and Influence. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198840718.001.0001.
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This book investigates the metaphysical presuppositions of a common—and very successful—reductive approach to dealing with the complexity of the world. The reductive approach in question is one in which we study the components of a complex system in relative isolation, and use the information so gained to explain or predict the behaviour of the complex whole. So, for example, ecologists explain shifts in species population in terms of interactions between individuals, geneticists explain traits of an organism in terms of interactions between genes, and physicists explain the properties of a gas in terms of collisions between the particles that make up the gas. It is argued that this reductive method makes substantive metaphysical assumptions about the world. In particular, the method assumes the existence of causal powers that manifest ‘causal influence’—a relatively unrecognized ontological category of which forces are a paradigm example. The success of the reductive method, therefore, is an argument for the existence of such causal influence. The book goes on to show that adding causal influence to our ontology gives us the resources to solve some traditional problems in the metaphysics of powers, causation, emergence, laws of nature, and possibly even normative ethics. What results, then, is not just an understanding of the reductive method, but an integrated metaphysical world view that is grounded in a novel ontology of power and influence.
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Edwards, Douglas. From Truth to Being. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198758693.003.0007.
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This chapter explores the connections between truth pluralism and ontological pluralism, and develops the features of a global pluralism, which includes pluralism about truth and existence. It begins by noting that some motivations for truth pluralism can also be applied to ontological pluralism, before demonstrating how a method similar to the argument in Chapter 5 for truth pluralism can also be used to give an argument for ontological pluralism. It then discusses how the views complement each other, and how ontological pluralism can add to our understanding of domains by highlighting differences between the ways things exist. Once the pluralist metaphysical picture is up and running, its explanatory power is demonstrated by comparing it to global deflationism. In doing so, further problems for global deflationism are exposed.
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Chakravartty, Anjan. Saving the Scientific Phenomena. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198796572.003.0003.
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To a great extent, the recent renaissance in the metaphysics of science has been spurred by an interest in the nature of causal powers (dispositions, capacities, tendencies, etc.). In particular, a number of authors have made realism about powers a cornerstone of their interpretations of scientific knowledge (for example, in developing accounts of scientific realism, inter alia). Against the backdrop of an admiration for the explanatory power of powers in this domain, this paper strikes a cautionary note. Is the existence of irreducible powers a commitment that is entailed by taking scientific practice seriously? I consider two approaches to this question: the first concerning the putative requirement of dispositional properties in the context of scientific explanation; the second concerning the putative requirement of these properties in the context of scientific abstraction. Neither, I contend, entails an ontological commitment to powers. This negative, interim conclusion suggests that inferences to the existence of causal powers in scientific contexts are ultimately independent of the science adduced; rather; they are a function of substantive philosophical commitments regarding time-honored disputes between realists and empiricists more generally, about issues such as how trade-offs between ontological commitment and explanatory capacity are properly made. In the philosophical domain, however, the realist has an advantage. For realism about powers better accords with an arguably scientistic consideration of the identities of scientific properties. Thus, interim conclusion notwithstanding, it would seem that powers can do something important for the philosopher of science after all.
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Richardson, Henry. Authoritative Input. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190247744.003.0004.
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This chapter shows that the input stage of the moral community’s exercise of its moral authority arises from the delimited moral power of duty-holders (alone or in concert with the correlative right-holders) to specify their duty. To establish this claim, the chapter defends the Specificatory Theory of dyadic rights and duties. Like H. L. A. Hart’s Will Theory (and unlike Joseph Raz’s Interest Theory and Leif Wenar’s Kind-Desire Theory), this theory sets out to explain the existence of ontologically correlative rights and duties. It argues that these arise when the social division of moral labor addresses responsibilities regarding individuals’ monadic moral rights to specific individuals. These individuals are called upon intelligently to specify the content of their duty—a fact that explains ontological correlativity. This theory is shown to deal better with counterexamples than the Will Theory and to well support the requirements of the input stage.
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Bucher, Taina. Conclusion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190493028.003.0007.
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When conceptualizing the power and politics of algorithms it is important to blend an understanding of their material substrates with an understanding of the multiple ways of perceiving, feeling, acting, and knowing which congeal around algorithms as an object of social concern. The concluding chapter revisits some of the key questions of the book and looks at how algorithmic power and politics can be understood if power and politics are not necessarily about imposing force from above. The chapter serves to summarize the key contributions of the book in terms of: (1) providing an understanding of algorithms that is not committed to one ontological position, but instead sees algorithms in terms of a multiple and variable ontology, (2) helping to identify forms of algorithmic power and politics and (3) offering a theoretical framework for the kinds of work that algorithms do and the landscapes they help to generate.
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Heiden, Gert-Jan van der. Contingency and Skepticism in Agamben’s Thought. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474412094.003.0016.
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Gert-Jan van der Heiden’s “Contingency and Skepticism in Agamben’s Thought” articulates an encounter between Sextus Empiricus and Giorgio Agamben. Contrary to the usual epistemological reading of ancient skepticism, van der Heiden points out the ontological import of skeptical problems. Van der Heiden focuses especially on how skeptical and quasi-skeptical terms (such as ἐποχή and οὐ μᾶλλον, the Platonic εὐπορία, and the Pauline καταργεῖν) underlie Agamben’s ontology of contingency and potentiality. Thus van der Heiden uncovers a peculiar potentiality of the skeptic. The skeptic has the power to withhold assent, to refuse to affirm or to deny any particular belief; this is the habit of skeptical thinking itself, a power that is not subordinated to any sort of actuality.
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Ehret, Charles. The Flow of Powers. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198806035.003.0003.
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In thirteenth-century philosophical psychology, it is commonly held that the powers of the soul, responsible for a living being’s various operations, “flow” from the soul’s essence. The phrase is used systematically by Albert the Great, who imports it from Avicenna. It suggests that the soul, considered as a separate substance, is ontologically distinct from its powers. This is how Albert understands Avicenna, and how modern interpreters understand both Avicenna and Albert. The aim of this paper is to call into question such an understanding, as a reading of Avicenna and as a philosophical doctrine. It argues that an ontological distinction between the soul and its powers isn’t intended in Avicenna, and isn’t successfully established in Albert. It further argues that psychological emanation yields such a distinction only in Aquinas, where the soul is no longer considered a separate substance, but a material form.
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Scholte, Jan Aart. Social Structure and Global Governance Legitimacy. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198826873.003.0005.
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This chapter considers how—alongside and in combination with individual and institutional sources—social structure can shape legitimacy beliefs vis-à-vis global governance. The discussion has two main parts: the first metatheoretical and the second theoretical. The metatheoretical part examines broad ontological, epistemological, and methodological issues regarding social structure, its power, its changes, and its spaces—all as these matters relate to legitimacy dynamics around global governance. The second part then explores a range of possible specific social-structural sources of legitimacy vis-à-vis global governance institutions. These postulated world-ordering forces include norms, hegemonic states, capitalism, discourses, modernity/postmodernity, and social hierarchies. Throughout, the chapter assesses promises as well as challenges of incorporating social-structural sources into empirical research on legitimacy in global governance.
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Meretoja, Hanna. Narrative Hermeneutics. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190649364.003.0002.
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The chapter delineates narrative hermeneutics as a framework for exploring the ethical complexities of the relationship between life and narrative and discusses the interconnections between the ethical and ontological assumptions underlying different conceptions of narrative. It outlines a broad Nietzschean-hermeneutic conception of interpretation and proposes three interconnected advantages of privileging this approach in theorizing narrative, experience, subjectivity, and their interrelations. It allows one to (1) understand how narrative relates to experience without seeing their relationship as dichotomous or identifying them with each other, that is, how they exist in a tensional but reciprocal relationship, best understood in terms of an interpretative continuum; (2) articulate how life does not form one coherent narrative but is instead a process of constant narrative reinterpretation; and (3) understand the relationship between narrative webs and the individual subjects entangled in them as fundamentally dialogical and as entwined with practices of power.
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Lorino, Philippe. Postface: A few lines of temporary, exploratory, and practical conclusion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198753216.003.0011.
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The potential to process more abundant data through more sophisticated algorithms reinforces the expectation that situations can be controlled. However, what slips through the net of massive data processing and sophisticated algorithms is a distilled concentrate of radical novelty, puzzling uncertainty, and tangled complexity, for which we might be little prepared since ordinary riddles are increasingly systematically solved by systems and not by us. More than ever, we need to consider situated action as a central object of study, taking seriously its disruptive power and complexity. Pragmatism teaches us how to use sophisticated models without ever forgetting that they are not ontological representations but semiotic mediations, that novelty always pops up when least expected, that there is no susbtitute for life experience, and that others are always the challenging expression of otherness. Governing (rather than controlling) collective action is therefore an endless and often challenging collective meaning-making effort.
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Leftow, Brian. Anselm's Argument. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192896926.001.0001.
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Anselm stated the first modal “ontological” argument for a perfect being’s existence. The argument’s key premise is that necessarily, if anything is a perfect being, it necessarily exists. The modalities here are what we now call metaphysical, broadly logical, or absolute. Anselm’s modal metaphysics is based on power and prevention. Despite this, it is adequate to these modal concepts. Anselm’s Argument defends all premises of Anselm’s argument but the claim that possibly there is a perfect being. In particular, it blocks all extant objections to the key premise. It also provides two arguments for it. One contends that existing necessarily is equivalent to lacking three “less-makers,” and so a perfect being would exist necessarily. The other contends that there is no viable way fully to explicate a perfect being’s contingency. In some possible worlds with no perfect being, a perfect being would possibly exist. But there is (the book argues) no adequate metaphysical account of what would make a perfect being possible in those worlds.
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Nagasawa, Yujin. Maximal God. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198758686.001.0001.
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Perfect being theism is a version of theism that says that God is the greatest possible being. Although perfect being theism is the most common form of monotheism in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, its truth has been disputed by philosophers and theologians for centuries. Maximal God proposes a new, game-changing defence of perfect being theism by developing what the book calls the ‘maximal concept of God’. Perfect being theists typically maintain that God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being but, according to Maximal God, God should be understood rather as a being that has the maximal consistent set of knowledge, power, and benevolence. The book argues that once we accept the maximal concept, we can establish perfect being theism on two grounds. First, we can refute nearly all existing arguments against perfect being theism simultaneously. Second, we can construct a novel, strengthened version of the modal ontological argument for perfect being theism. The book concludes that the maximal God concept provides the basis for a unified defence of perfect being theism that is highly effective and economical.
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O'Donnell, S. Jonathon. Passing Orders. Fordham University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823289677.001.0001.
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Demonization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape. Passing Orders interrogates this centrality through an analysis of evangelical “spiritual warfare” demonologies in contemporary America, which envision the world as built on a clash of divine and demonic forces in which humanity is enmeshed. Situating spiritual warfare in the context of American exceptionalism, ethnonationalism, and empire-management, it exposes the theological foundations that justify the dehumanizing practices of the current US political order—queer- and transphobia, Islamophobia, antiblackness, and settler colonialism. The book argues that demonologies are not merely tools of dehumanization but ontological and biopolitical systems that create and maintain structures of sovereign power, or orthotaxies: models of the “right ordering” of reality that create uneven geographies of space and stratify humanity into hierarchies of being and nonbeing. Demonologies constitute and consolidate these geographies and stratifications by enabling the framing of other orders as passing orders—as counterfeit, transgressive, and transient. But these orders are unwilling to pass on, instead giving structure to deviant desires that resist sovereign power. Demonstrating these structures of resistance in demonologies of three figures—the Jezebel spirit, the Islamic Antichrist, and Leviathan—Passing Orders explores how demons exceed their designated role as self-consolidating others to embody alternative possibilities that unsettle orthotaxic claims over territory, time, and truth. Ultimately, it reimagines demons as a surprising source of political and social resistance, reflecting fragile and fractious communities bound by mutual passing and precarity into strategic coalitions of solidarity, subversion, and survival.
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Ramelli, Ilaria L. E. Divine Power in Origen of Alexandria. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198767206.003.0011.
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This chapter argues for the internal unity of ‘pagan’ and Christian Platonic investigations into the topic of divine powers, by focusing on Origen of Alexandria’s doctrine, his sources (Justin and Bardaisan of Edessa, but also Ps. Aristotle’s De mundo, Philo, Pantaenus, and Ammonius Saccas), and his aftermath (mainly in Gregory of Nyssa’s thought) as a case study. Comparisons with Plotinus and a focus on Christ-Logos enrich the analysis. Within this framework, it offers a remarkably thorough discussion, which traces the interwoven threads of the idea of dunamis as an epinoia in Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and others, linking it to broader ontologically based impulses to apophaticism.
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Potter, Vincent G. Charles S. Peirce. Fordham University Press, 1996. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823217090.001.0001.
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In recent years, Charles Sanders Peirce has emerged as one of America's major philosophical thinkers. His work has invited philosophical reflection about those basic issues that inevitably confront us as human beings, especially in an age of science. Peirce's concern for experience, for what is actually encountered, means that his philosophy forms a reflective commentary on actual life and on the world in which it is lived. This book argues that Peirce's doctrine of the normative sciences is essential to his pragmatism. No part of Peirce's philosophy is bolder than his attempt to establish esthetics, ethics, and logic as the three normative sciences and to argue for the priority of esthetics among the trio. The book shows that Pierce took seriously the trinity of normative sciences and demonstrates that these categories apply both to the conduct of man and to the workings of the cosmos. It combines sympathetic and informed exposition with straightforward criticism and deals with the gaps and inconsistencies in Peirce's thought. It shows that Peirce was above all a cosmological and ontological thinker, one who combined science both as a method and as result with a conception of reasonable actions to form a comprehensive theory of reality. Peirce's pragmatism, is not a glorification of action but rather a theory of the dynamic nature of things in which the “ideal” dimension of reality has genuine power for directing the cosmic order, including man, toward reasonable goals.
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Edwards, Douglas. The Metaphysics of Truth. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198758693.001.0001.
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What is truth? What role does truth play in the connections between language and the world? What is the relationship between truth and being? The Metaphysics of Truth tackles these fundamental philosophical questions and develops a distinctive metaphysical worldview. Moreover, it does so in a climate where the traditionally central issue of the nature of truth has diminished in significance due to the rise of deflationary and primitivist views, which deny that there are interesting and informative things to say about truth. This book responds to these views, and demonstrates the importance of the metaphysics of truth with regard to both the study of truth itself, and metaphysical debates more generally. It also develops a detailed pluralist metaphysical approach, which starts with the diversity of different subject areas, and holds that there are different relationships between language and the world in different areas, or ‘domains’. A pluralist approach is constructed that explains what domains are; how different domains are individuated; which metaphysical frameworks apply in different domains; and how truth plays a key role in the picture. The picture is extended to incorporate ontological pluralism—the idea that there are different ways of being—which increases the explanatory power of the view. Particular focus is given to important domains that have not yet received a great deal of attention in debates about truth, namely the institutional and social domains, which connects work on the metaphysics of truth and being to key issues in social construction.
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Arnellos, Argyris, and Charbel El-Hani. Emergence, Downward Causation, and No Brute Facts in Biological Systems. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198758600.003.0014.
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This chapter explains emergence in biological organizations through a conception of ontological emergence according to which certain types of dynamical organizations possess irreducible properties that are nevertheless derivable from the substrate. The authors concentrate on the ontological dimension of emergence as the irreducibly causal configuration exhibited by all organizations that manifest persistence and stability in their environment. This is a conception of ontological emergence where the locus of novel causal powers is the configuration of constituents into stable dynamic organizations. There is nothing brute to be explained in the emergence of causal properties in a biological organization; all that is needed is the consideration of its organizational characteristics in terms of same-level and inter-level causal interactions, the type of which is of formal causation for interactions among the constituents of the organization and of efficient causation for interactions among the constituents and the micro-properties of their surrounding emergence base.
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Ruokanen, Miikka. Trinitarian Grace in Martin Luther's The Bondage of the Will. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192895837.001.0001.
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Professor Miikka Ruokanen reveals the powerfully Trinitarian and participatory nature of Martin Luther’s conception of divine grace in his magnum opus The Bondage of the Will, largely ignored in the previous research. The study establishes a genuinely new understanding of Luther’s major treatise opening up its ecumenical potential. Luther’s debate with Erasmus signifies not only a disagreement concerning free will, but the dispute reveals two contrasting understandings of the very core idea of the Christian faith. For Erasmus, the relationship of the human being with God is based on the rationally and morally acceptable principles of fair play. For Luther, the human being is captivated by the overwhelming power of unfaith and transcendental evil, Satan; only the monergistic grace of the Triune God and the power of the Holy Spirit can liberate him/her. Ruokanen verifies the Trinitarian vision of salvation “by grace alone” as the center of Luther’s theology. This doctrine has three dimensions: (1) The conversion of the sinner and the birth of faith in Christ are effected by prevenient divine grace; justification “through faith alone,” is the sole work of God’s Spirit, comparable to creation ex nihilo. (2) Participation in the person, life, and divine properties of Christ, as well as participation in his salvific work, his cross, and resurrection, are possible solely because of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the believer. Justification means simultaneously the forensic declaration of the guilty non-guilty on the basis of the atonement by Jesus’ cross, as well as a union with Christ in the Holy Spirit. (3) Sanctification means the gradual growth of love for God and neighbor enabled by the believer’s participation in divine love in the Holy Spirit. Ruokanen’s work offers a crucial modification and advance to the world-renowned Finnish school of Luther interpretation: Luther’s classic use of Pneumatological language avoids the problems caused by using an ontological language.
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Struwig, Dillon. Coleridge’s Two-Level Theory of Metaphysical Knowledge and the Order of the Mental Powers in the Logic. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799511.003.0012.
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Coleridge is presented as a two-level theorist of the innate powers of mind in Chapter 11, which argues that Coleridge distinguishes (1) a transcendental, Kantian sense of the a priori principles of human discursive cognition (comparable to Plato’s mid-level diánoia), from (2) the noëtic, Platonic a priori principles of intellectual intuition (or nóēsis, a higher-level intuitive cognition of ontological, theological, and ethical truths). Drawing on Logic and Opus Maximum, the author demonstrates that Coleridge characterizes Kantian a priori principles as ‘subjectively real’, finite-mind-dependent rules of sense-experience and cognition, and Platonic a priori principles as ‘objectively real’ principles of knowing and being that are dependent upon ‘the transcendent and unindividual’ reason (i.e. God, ‘the absolute Self, Spirit, or Mind’). This ‘two-level’ theory is framed in terms of Coleridge’s Kantian ‘threefold division’ of the human cognitive capacities into sense, understanding, and reason, and their respective a priori operations and contents.
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Anjum, Rani Lill, and Stephen Mumford. Digging Deeper to Find the Real Causes? Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198733669.003.0014.
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Mechanisms are typically thought of as lower level than which they explain; as ‘underlying’ their effects. But this conception is not inevitable and it allies with a reductionist conception of nature. There are cases where the mechanisms of production are plausibly at a higher level of nature than that which they explain, which justifies a position of strong ontological emergence and a commitment to holism. This also vindicates the need for ‘special’ or non-fundamental sciences. But such emergence should not be understood as a ‘brute’ phenomenon. There is no reason why there cannot be a perfectly naturalistic explanation of how parts become transformed through their interaction to produce new powers of their whole.
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Flores, Cristina. ‘Contemplant Spirits’. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799511.003.0013.
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The influence of Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth’s philosophical system on Coleridge’s notion of contemplation is explored in Chapter 12. Coleridge studied Cudworth’s True Intellectual System early in his career, from 1795 to 1797, before his acquaintance with German thought. Flores contends that Coleridge’s theory of contemplative experience has an initial basis in the Cambridge Platonist’s ontological and epistemological tenets. Coleridge’s conversation poems, written during his perusal of Cudworth’s magnum opus, lay the groundwork for a metaphysical theory of contemplation. In these, which he called ‘Meditative Poems in Blank Verse’, Coleridge dramatizes meditative experience as he conceived it at this early stage of his career. Flores establishes a comparison between Coleridge’s early view of contemplative experience, and the related ‘Order of the Mental Powers’ in considering the influence of Cudworth’s philosophical tenets in Coleridge’s Platonist foundations.
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Anjum, Rani Lill, and Stephen Mumford. Dispositionalism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779636.003.0003.
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Since the advent of modern philosophy, causation has been treated as a relation between two separate events. Any worldly dynamism is then provided by the succession of essentially static events. Recent decades have seen a revival of interest in powers, but this has been hampered by an acceptance of many of the presuppositions of modern philosophy, most conspicuously those of Hume. Simply placing powers on top of the static Humean framework will not do. Causal dispositionalism offers a more dynamic notion, where an instance of causation involves a unified process rather than a relation between distinct events. This theory has a number of advantages. It can account for change as well as stability, long- and short-lived processes, genuine complexity and real emergence, non-linear interaction of causes, extreme context-sensitivity, and contrary powers. This is a more plausible framework for understanding causation in biology, ontologically and epistemically.
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Knobloch, Eberhard. Generality in Leibniz’s mathematics. Edited by Karine Chemla, Renaud Chorlay, and David Rabouin. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198777267.013.3.
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This article discusses generality in Gottfried Leibniz’s mathematics. In principle, Leibnizian mathematics has a philosophical-theological basis. From the beginning everything that exists is to be found in an orderly relation. The general and inviolable laws of the world are an ontological a priori. The universal harmony of the world consists in the largest possible variety being given the largest possible order so that the largest possible perfection is involved. After considering the relationship between the value of generality and the harmonies that are at the center of Leibniz’s concern, this article explores his view that generality implies beauty as well as conciseness and simplicity. It also examines how the interest in generality relates to notations, taking the examples of determinants and sums of powers, and to utility and fecundity. Finally, it demonstrates how generality is connected with laws of formation.
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Goodman, Lenn E. Afterword. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198796497.003.0012.
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Romanticism favors feeling over reason, first separating and isolating the two. Taking too narrow a view of reason, both admirers and detractors may regard religion as a blind leap of faith. But a prudent leap needs orientation, moral and epistemic. We need to oriented ourselves ontologically and axiologically if we are to pursue transcendent goals and not mistake emotional intensity for a criterion of truth, confusing violence with power, or freedom with caprice, as if wilfull choices were somehow self-justifying and could create moral or spiritual truths. Echoing Maimonides’ theses thatx reason is humanity’s link to God, and rejecting Kierkegaard’s tendentious misreading of the Binding of Isaac, I defend an ideal of holiness that finds expression in a life uniting the active and practical with the thoughtful and spiritually uplifted and uplifting—seeking holiness not in irrational excesses but in the irenic discoveries of reason.
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Inayatullah, Naeem, and David L. Blaney. Units, Markets, Relations, and Flow: Beyond Interacting Parts to Unfolding Wholes. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.272.
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Heterodox work in Global Political Economy (GPE) finds its motive force in challenging the ontological atomism of International Political Economy (IPE) orthodoxy. Various strains of heterodoxy that have grown out of dependency theory and World-Systems Theory (WST), for example, emphasize the social whole: Individual parts are given form and meaning within social relations of domination produced by a history of violence and colonial conquest. An atomistic approach, they stress, seems designed to ignore this history of violence and relations of domination by making bargaining among independent units the key to explaining the current state of international institutions. For IPE, it is precisely this atomistic approach, largely inspired by the ostensible success of neoclassical economics, which justifies its claims to scientific rigor. International relations can be modeled as a market-like space, in which individual actors, with given preferences and endowments, bargain over the character of international institutional arrangements. Heterodox scholars’ treatment of social processes as indivisible wholes places them beyond the pale of acceptable scientific practice. Heterodoxy appears, then, as the constitutive outside of IPE orthodoxy.Heterodox GPE perhaps reached its zenith in the 1980s. Just as heterodox work was being cast out from the temple of International Relations (IR), heterodox scholars, building on earlier work, produced magisterial studies that continue to merit our attention. We focus on three texts: K. N. Chaudhuri’s Asia Before Europe (1990), Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982), and L. S. Stavrianos’s Global Rift (1981). We select these texts for their temporal and geographical sweep and their intellectual acuity. While Chaudhuri limits his scope to the Indian Ocean over a millennium, Wolf and Stavrianos attempt an anthropology and a history, respectively, of European expansion, colonialism, and the rise of capitalism in the modern era. Though the authors combine different elements of material, political, and social life, all three illustrate the power of seeing the “social process” as an “indivisible whole,” as Schumpeter discusses in the epigram below. “Economic facts,” the region, or time period they extract for detailed scrutiny are never disconnected from the “great stream” or process of social relations. More specifically, Chaudhuri’s work shows notably that we cannot take for granted the distinct units that comprise a social whole, as does the IPE orthodoxy. Rather, such units must be carefully assembled by the scholar from historical evidence, just as the institutions, practices, and material infrastructure that comprise the unit were and are constructed by people over the longue durée. Wolf starts with a world of interaction, but shows that European expansion and the rise and spread of capitalism intensified cultural encounters, encompassing them all within a global division of labor that conditioned the developmental prospects of each in relation to the others. Stavrianos carries out a systematic and relational history of the First and Third Worlds, in which both appear as structural positions conditioned by a capitalist political economy. By way of conclusion, we suggest that these three works collectively inspire an effort to overcome the reification and dualism of agents and structures that inform IR theory and arrive instead at “flow.”
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Florio, Salvatore, and Øystein Linnebo. The Many and the One. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198791522.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Plural logic has become a well-established subject, especially in philosophical logic. This book explores its broader significance for philosophy, logic, and linguistics. What can plural logic do for us? Are the bold claims made on its behalf correct? After introducing plural logic and its main applications, the book provides a systematic analysis of the relation between this logic and other theoretical frameworks such as set theory, mereology, higher-order logic, and modal logic. The applications of plural logic rely on two assumptions, namely that this logic is ontologically innocent and has great expressive power. These assumptions are shown to be problematic. The result is a more nuanced picture of plural logic’s applications than has been given so far. Questions about the correct logic of plurals play a central role in the last part of the book, where traditional plural logic is rejected in favor of a “critical” alternative. The most striking feature of this alternative is that there is no universal plurality. This leads to a novel approach to the relation between the many and the one. In particular, critical plural logic paves the way for an account of sets capable of solving the set-theoretic paradoxes.