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1
Fodor, George A. Ontologically Controlled Autonomous Systems. Boston, MA: Springer US, 1998. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5475-2.
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Fodor, George A. Ontologically controlled autonomous systems: Principles, operations, and architecture. Boston, Mass: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998.
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3
Kavouras, Marinos. Theories of geographic concepts: Formal ontological approaches to semantic integration. Boca Raton: Taylor & Francis, 2008.
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4
Chashin, Aleksandr. Sources and forms of modern Russian law. ru: INFRA-M Academic Publishing LLC., 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.12737/1856363.
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The monograph reveals the concept, role and functions of the form of law in the modern Russian legal system. The author turns to the ontological foundations of knowledge of the sources of law. Attention is focused on the legal doctrine and its application as a form of law in modern legal proceedings both in Russia and in a number of neighboring countries. At the same time, judicial acts of a number of foreign states are being introduced into scientific circulation. The theoretical substantiation of the possibility of distinguishing the hypostases of the legal doctrine, considered as a condition for the formation of an open civil society, is given. The primacy of legal doctrine over judicial precedent and legal custom is proved against the background of its subsidiary effect in relation to a normative legal act. A significant part is devoted to the problems of modern codification activities and the prospects for creating a Code of laws of the Russian Federation.
For a wide range of readers interested in legal issues. It can be useful for students, postgraduates and teachers of law schools.
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1971-, Fernández-López Mariano, and Corcho Oscar 1976-, eds. Ontological engineering: With examples from the areas of knowledge management, e-commerce and the semantic Web / Asunción Gómez-Pérez, Mariano Fernández-López, and Oscar Corcho. London: Springer-Verlag, 2004.
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6
McCrudden, Christopher. The Ontological Problem. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198759041.003.0006.
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This chapter deals with the third of three problems that dominate religious litigation, the ontological problem, which arises in two particular respects in the relationship between human rights law and religion. The first respect is in the need to give content to the ‘human’ in ‘human rights’, and we see religions and legal interpretation giving diverse, and sometimes conflicting, answers to this question. One of the contested sites of this conflict is over how we are to understand the idea of ‘human dignity’, which is seen by several religions and by the human rights system as a foundational concept for the understanding of human rights. The second respect in which the ontological problem arises has to do with a specific element in what it means to be human, namely the place of religion in that understanding. Is religion central to our view of what it means to be human, and are protections for religion central, therefore, to the human rights enterprise? Or should we, rather, view religion as marginal, or even contrary to our conception of what it means to be fully human, and query whether religion should be part of human rights protections at all?
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Tzafestas, Spyros G. Systems, Cybernetics, Control, and Automation: Ontological, Epistemological, Societal, and Ethical Issues. River Publishers, 2017.
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8
Chakravartty, Anjan. Knowledge Under Ontological Uncertainty. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190651459.003.0006.
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The first of two forms of ontological uncertainty arising in previous chapters is examined in detail. This first form stems from situations in which our best scientific theorizing or modeling with respect to one and the same target system or phenomenon in the world generates what appear to be mutually inconsistent descriptions. A recent, popular response to the challenge this represents—for anyone hoping for a coherent conception of scientific ontology—is to invoke a form of “perspectivism” regarding these descriptions. However, while certain forms of pluralism may be apt in such cases, perspectivism is not one of them. It is argued that perspectival accounts of ontology are subject to a fatal trilemma. Two forms of non-perspectival pluralism are described, supporting the introduction of a novel, contrastive theory of ontological explanation.
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Mattessich, Richard. Reality and Accounting: Ontological Explorations in the Economic and Social Sciences. Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.
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Reality and Accounting: Ontological Explorations in the Economic and Social Sciences. Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
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11
Seibt, Johanna. Ontological Tools for the Process Turn in Biology. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779636.003.0006.
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The purpose of this chapter is to introduce an outline of general process theory (GPT), a non-Whiteheadian systematic process ontology, and to provide some pointers on how this framework could be applied in philosophy of biology to clarify questions of individuality, composition, and emergence. GPT is a mono-categorial framework based on the new category of more or less generic (non-particular) dynamic individuals called ‘general processes’ or ‘dynamics’. According to GPT, the world is the interaction of (more or less generic) dynamics. The chapter sets out some elements of a non-standard mereology (with non-transitive part relations) on processes and introduces the five-dimensional classification system of GPT. It is shown how the theoretical predicates of homeomereity and automereity can be used to distinguish between developments and ‘non-developmental’ or ‘dynamically stable’ temporally unbounded activities that persist in time by literal recurrence.
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Kramer, Sina. Multiple Negativity: Negativity and Difference in Hegel’s Science of Logic. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190625986.003.0002.
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Chapter 2 diagnoses the operation of constitutive exclusion in hegemonic or closed systems, using Hegel’s philosophical system as a model. I argue that Hegel’s totalized philosophical system relies on a more radical, heterogeneous negativity and difference that it constitutively excludes. The Science of Logic—and by extension the whole of the Hegelian system—relies on the constitutive exclusion of a multiple negativity that exceeds the logic of determinate negation and contradiction that organizes the Hegelian system. However, while this multiple negativity is necessary to the system, because it cannot be recognized by the system it operates in an epistemological “blind spot.” I show that the ontological account of the Logic is arrived at by means of the disavowal of a multiple negativity with its roots in contingent empirical differences, and that this is an ultimately political operation. This irruption of politics into ontology is the hallmark of constitutive exclusion.
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Ontological Engineering and Mapping in Multiagent Systems Development. Storming Media, 2002.
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14
Balcerowicz, Piotr. Jayarāśi Against the Philosophers. Edited by Jonardon Ganeri. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199314621.013.21.
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Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa (c.800–840), one of the most original Indian philosophers, a skeptic with a strong affiliation to the materialists, launches a devastating project against all philosophical schools: to demonstrate the existence of inherent flaws in any philosophical system one may construct. He does this by demonstrating systemic inconsistencies primarily involving the mutual dependence of our knowledge, on the one hand, and the means and categories, epistemic and ontological, we adopt in order to establish its validity and certitude, on the other. The upshot is that no consistent philosophical system is possible in which its fundamental premises can be proved by a valid, effective procedure. Perhaps the most significant outcome of Jayarāśi’s project is that all philosophical claims are necessarily made within a particular set of beliefs, or a particular closed system, the foundations of which are based on arbitrarily accepted criteria, definitions, and categories.
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Kellner, Menachem. Maimonides on Holiness. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198796497.003.0007.
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Two views of the nature of holiness are outlined in this chapter. According to one, which we may call ontological or essentialist, holy places, persons, times, and objects are ontologically distinct from (and religiously superior to) profane places, persons, times, and objects. This distinction is part of the universe. On the second view, holy places, persons, times, and objects are in no objective way distinct from profane places, persons, times, and objects; holiness is a status, not a quality of existence. It is a challenge, not a given; normative, not descriptive. It is institutional (in the sense of being part of a system of laws) and hence contingent. This sort of holiness does not reflect objective reality, it helps constitute social reality. On this view, holy places, persons, times, and objects are indubitably holy, and must be treated with all due respect, but they are, in and of themselves, like all other places, persons, times, and objects. What is different about them is the way in which the Torah commands that they be treated. It is argued here that Maimonides adhered to the second, non-essentialist, view of holiness.
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Craig, Schlenoff, and National Institute of Standards and Technology (U.S.), eds. An analysis of existing ontological systems for applications in manufacturing and healthcare. Gaithersburg, MD: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Technology Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 1999.
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17
Fodor, George A. Ontologically Controlled Autonomous Systems: Principles, Operations, and Architecture. Springer, 1997.
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(Editor), Adam Farguhar, and Michael Gruninger (Editor), eds. Ontological Engineering: Papers from the 1997 Symposium (Aaai Technical Reports). Amer Assn for Artificial, 1997.
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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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Theories of Geographic Concepts: Ontological Approaches to Semantic Integration. CRC, 2007.
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21
McCrudden, Christopher. Fundamentals of Human Rights Theory. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198759041.003.0007.
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The previous three chapters described three central problems that recur when courts have to deal with religious litigation: the teleological problem, epistemological problem, and ontological problem. All three problems are both the occasion for disputes, and (taken together) exacerbate other disputes, bringing the courts themselves into the fray, preventing them from playing the role of standing above the conflict. So, what is to be done? This chapter proposes a reconstructed practice-dependent theory of human rights that addresses issues of religion. It discusses how human dignity provides a normative foundation for the system of human rights as a whole. The proposed theory accepts that human rights law and human rights practice beyond the legal sphere is pluralistic, and that building this pluralism into human rights theory accurately reflects the diverse nature of human rights, including judicial adjudication and religious narratives within that system.
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Hobson, John M., George Lawson, and Justin Rosenberg. Historical Sociology. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.403.
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Over the past 20 years, historical sociology in international relations (HSIR) has contributed to a number of debates, ranging from examination of the origins of the modern states system to unraveling the core features and relative novelty of the contemporary historical period. By the late 1980s and 1990s, a small number of IR scholars drew explicitly on historical sociological insights in order to counter the direction that the discipline was taking under the auspices of the neo-neo debate. Later scholars moved away from examining the specific interconnections between international geopolitics and domestic social change. A further difference that marked this second wave from the first was that it was driven principally by IR scholars working within IR. To date, HSIR has sought to reveal not only the different forms that international systems have taken in the past, but also the ways in which the modern system cannot be treated as an ontological given. Historical sociologists in IR are unanimous in asserting that rethinking the constitutive properties and dynamics of the contemporary system can be successfully achieved only by applying what amounts to a more sensitive “nontempocentric” historical sociological lens. At the same time, by tracing the historical sociological origins of the present international order, HSIR scholars are able to reveal some of the continuities between the past and the present, thereby dispensing with the dangers of chronofetishism.
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Hazony, Yoram, and Eric Schliesser. Newton and Hume. Edited by Paul Russell. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199742844.013.28.
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Central aspects of Hume’s proposed “system of the sciences” as described in the Treatise are modeled on Newton’s Principia. But, as recent scholarship has suggested, Hume’s Treatise also bears a deeply subversive message with respect to Newtonian science. This chapter offers a revised overview of what Hume takes from Newton and what he rejects: The first part of the chapter argues that in the Treatise Hume adopts a version of Newton’s “analytic and synthetic method” for philosophy, thereby placing a distinctively Newtonian form of explanatory reduction at the center of his own philosophical method. The second part of the chapter, on the other hand, shows that many of the most important aspects of Hume’s argument in Book 1 of the Treatise can be understood as critical of core conceptual and ontological commitments of Newton’s mechanics as developed in the Principia.
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Vossen, Piek. Ontologies. Edited by Ruslan Mitkov. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199276349.013.0025.
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Ontology refers to the storage of information within a domain, to draw common sense inferences. The expressly linguistic nature of this sort of information would translate it into a lexicon. Traditions dealing with knowledge structuring within ontologies, can be positioned depending on their focus on words/concepts, for different purposes. These are, philosophical tradition, cognitive tradition, artificial intelligence tradition, lexical semantics, lexicography, and information science. Ontologically accumulated knowledge bases can be used to inform structural linguistic analysis, as well as partial understanding. However, most current NLP techniques hardly ever perform full language understanding. While NLP generally seems to be shifting towards inferencing systems that exploit common sense knowledge, small-scale information systems can be enhanced by (re)using more general strands of information. Prospects of convergence of different paradigms have also triggered of efforts to standardize ontological contents.
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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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Ratié, Isabelle. Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta on the Freedom of Consciousness. Edited by Jonardon Ganeri. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199314621.013.27.
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The Pratyabhijñā (“Recognition”) system, designed by the Śaiva nondualist Utpaladeva (c.925–975 ce) and expounded by Abhinavagupta (c.975–1025 ce) stands out as one of the greatest accomplishments of Indian philosophy. Engaging in a dialogue with all the rival currents of thought of his time, and claiming that the realization of our identity with God (understood as a single, all-encompassing, and all-powerful consciousness) can be achieved through the mere recourse to experience and reason, Utpaladeva transforms the Śaiva scriptural dogmas into philosophical concepts. His “new path” is aimed at demonstrating that the essence of any individual’s consciousness is none other than the absolute freedom characterizing God’s creativity. While examining Utpaladeva’s use of the concept of freedom in several major Indian controversies (such as the debates over the existence of the self or the ontological status of perceived objects), this article explores his phenomenological attempts to uncover the freedom of consciousness in our most ordinary experiences.
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Adams, Zoe. Labour and the Wage. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198858898.001.0001.
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The book uses a Marxian inspired social ontological framework, and a genealogic method to explore the relationship between labour law, the market, and capitalist social relations. It advances a constitutive conception of the law–market and law–society ‘relationship’ that stresses law’s contradictory roles in the emergence and reproduction of capitalist social relations—and, relatedly, in the emergence, and reproduction, of the (capitalist) market, and explores this role in depth through a genealogical analysis of the social category of the wage. Tracing the evolution of the wage through legal discourse and the shifting repertoire of legal concepts (the ‘wage’, the ‘salary’, ‘remuneration’) through which it has been denoted over time, the book sheds new light on the problems of low pay and under-inclusive employment status, and on the role of the legal system in perpetuating, and potentially constituting, these problems. Spanning from the Norman conquest to the present day, and exploring issues as diverse as the decasualization of the docks; sweated labour; the truck system; tax credits, tips, and minimum wages, the book provides one of the most in-depth and comprehensive analyses of the wage to date, while, at the same time, offering a number of practical suggestions for labour law reform.
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Burazin, Luka. Legal Systems as Abstract Institutional Artifacts. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198821977.003.0006.
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This chapter claims that legal systems are abstract institutional artifacts and that as such they existentially or ontologically depend on collective intentionality in the form of (a we-mode) collective recognition. It argues that this recognition, as a social practice accompanied with its participants’ particular attitude toward it, constitutes a social norm by which a group of people collectively imposes an institutional status of officials or make it the case that an institutional status of legal system exists. It further claims that legal systems often emerge gradually from standing rudimentary pre-legal practices which may be said to create the context in which social norms of recognition can emerge. Finally, it argues that the actual existence of a legal system depends on whether or not the content of collective recognition was largely successfully realized, which is manifested precisely in people actually using a legal system, i.e., in their social (legal) practices.
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Lærke, Mogens. Leibniz’s Encounter with Spinoza’s Monism, October 1675 to February 1678. Edited by Michael Della Rocca. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195335828.013.013.
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This article is concerned with Leibniz’s reading of Spinoza’s substance monism. It focuses on a particular period in Leibniz’s philosophical development, from October 1675 to February 1678. This period spans from the time Leibniz, in his De summa rerum papers, developed a rudimentary system in several aspects reminiscent of Spinozism, to the time he first read Spinoza’s Opera posthuma in early 1678. The article reconstructs a decisive shift in Leibniz’s attitude towards Spinoza’s substance monism that took place around 1677. Around 1675–1676, when Leibniz first heard of Spinoza’s philosophy from Tschirnhaus, Leibniz was playing with the option of a monist system where all things are conceived as modes of a single substance. He was also considering a parallelist metaphysical structure where explanatory parallelism between thought and extension is grounded in ontological parallelism. When Leibniz changed his intellectual setting in late 1676—moving from Paris to Hanover—his intellectual attitude toward Spinoza also changed, maybe in part as a result of his exchanges with the Danish catholic Nicolas Steno. In his critical comments on the first book of Ethics, from early 1678, Leibniz developed a comprehensive critique of Spinoza where he put to use and tested some of his own most recent philosophical discoveries. I thus show how he used his theory of predication to challenge Spinoza’s theory of attributes, and how he used the principle equipollence of the full cause and the entire effect to challenge Spinoza’s theory of causation and refute substance monism.
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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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Janssen-Lauret, Frederique, ed. Quine, Structure, and Ontology. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864288.001.0001.
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Contemporary work on ontology, logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language still owes much to W.V. Quine. Nevertheless his views are now often dismissed because of mistaken or overly simplified conceptions of his philosophy. The development of his views over time are often overlooked, and in particular the growing importance of a kind of structuralism to his system as it evolved. This volume provides a fuller, richer picture of Quine’s views and their development. It is the first to investigate Quine’s views on structure and how it permeates and shapes his attitude to a range of philosophical questions. It includes contributions by world-famous philosophers and experts in a range of subfields including philosophical logic, philosophy of language, history of philosophy, mathematics, philosophy of time, and set theory. Chapters by Michael Resnik, Frederique Janssen-Lauret and Fraser MacBride, John Collins, Jaroslav Peregrin, and Paul Gregory explore whether Quine’s structuralism is epistemological, language-based, or ontological. Greg Frost-Arnold, Robert Sinclair, and Gary Kemp and Andrew Lugg explore Quine’s views on structure from a historical point of view. Nathan Salmón, Gila Sher, Marianna Antonutti Marfori, and Natalja Deng consider Quine’s views on the structure of logic, language, and theories in relation to contemporary philosophy, specifically ontology, the philosophy of logic and mathematics, philosophy of set theory, and philosophy of time.
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Corcho, Oscar, Asuncion Gomez-Perez, and Mariano Fernandez-Lopez. Ontological Engineering: With examples from the areas of Knowledge Management, e-Commerce and the Semantic Web. First Edition (Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing). Springer, 2004.
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Hauswald, Rico, and Lara Keuck. Indeterminacy in medical classification: On continuity, uncertainty, and vagueness. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/med/9780198722373.003.0005.
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This chapter aims to clarify the terminology of and relations between ontological, epistemological, and semantic aspects of indeterminacy in medical classification systems. Although classifications of diseases and mental disorders are often characterized as having blurred boundaries, there is no consensus on what exactly this means. The following clarification may remedy this shortcoming: from an ontological point of view, disease entities are found to be discrete or continuous, depending on whether realisation gaps occur. From an epistemological perspective, the certainty of a classification depends on how controversial the assessment of its validity is throughout contexts and how much different legitimate interests of classification users vary. Finally, as semantic categories, medical classifications can be defined precisely or vaguely. The chapter analyses how the ontological, epistemological, and semantic levels are interrelated and how the proposed terminological clarifications may help to disentangle discussions about the validity of medical classifications.
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Chudakova, Tatiana. Mixing Medicines. Fordham University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823294312.001.0001.
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After the collapse of state socialism, Russia’s healthcare system, much like the rest of the country’s economic and social sphere, underwent massive restructuring, while the public saw the rise to prominence of a variety of nonbiomedical therapies. Formulated as a possible aid to a beleaguered healthcare infrastructure, or as questionable care of last resort, “traditional medicine” in post-socialist Russia was tasked with redressing—and often blamed for—the fraught state of the body politic, while biomedicine itself became increasingly perceived as therapeutically insufficient. The popularization of ethnically and culturally marked forms of care in Russia presents a peculiar paradox in a political context often characterized by a return to robustly homogenizing state policies. In a context where displays of cultural, religious, and ethnic difference are tightly woven with anxieties about Russia’s status as a modern state, the rise of a therapeutic sphere that tended toward multiplicity, fragmentation, bricolage, and a certain ontological agnosticism in the treatment of bodies and subjects appears, at the very least, counterintuitive. Mixing Medicines is an ethnography of therapeutic life at the peripheries of the state, set in the Siberian region of Buryatia that unexpectedly finds itself at the forefront of projects of medical integration via a local tradition of “Tibetan medicine.” The book follows the therapeutic encounters between traditional healing and the different regulatory modalities that seek to incorporate it, exploring how projects of medical integration in Siberia articulate competing conceptualizations of universality, regional belonging, national inclusion, and the ethics of caring for bodies and subjects.
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Humphreys, Paul. Causation and Reduction. Edited by Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock, and Peter Menzies. Oxford University Press, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199279739.003.0031.
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When considering the relations between causation and reduction one must distinguish between, on the one hand, issues about how causation operates within and between systems that stand in various reductive relations to one another; and on the other hand, issues concerning whether causation itself is amenable to a reductive treatment. These two issues are intertwined and each must be treated with sympathy for the other. There are two basic types of reduction. Ontological reduction concerns reductive relations between the objects themselves whereas linguistic or conceptual reduction deals with reductive relations between our representations of those objects. For the great majority of the last century, both causation and reduction were treated linguistically or conceptually, but in recent years there has been a significant shift towards directly ontological treatments of each.
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Burazin, Luka, Kenneth Einar Himma, and Corrado Roversi, eds. Law as an Artifact. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198821977.001.0001.
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In this volume leading scholars from both the continental and analytic schools examine how their respective theoretical positions relate to the artifactual nature of law. It offers a complete analysis of what the claim that law—and its units: legal systems, legal norms, and particular legal institutions—is an artifact, in fact, ontologically entails and what consequences, if any, this claim has for philosophical accounts of law. Examining the artifactual nature of law draws attention to the role that intention, function, and action play in the ontological structure of law, and how these attributes interact with rules. It puts the role of author and authorship at the center of its analysis of legal ontology, and widens the scope that functional analysis can legitimately have in legal theory, emphasizing how the content of law depends on how it is used. Furthermore, the appeal to artifacts brings to the fore questions about the significance of concepts for the existence of law, and makes available new tools for legal interpretation. The notion of artifactuality offers a starting point from which to approach the basic dilemma of whether it is meaningful to search for essential, necessary, and sufficient features of law, a question that in current legal theory is put when deciding what kind of enterprise legal theory is from a methodological point of view, namely whether it is descriptive or prescriptive. This volume unearths insights and observations of value to all those looking to deepen their understanding of how the law is understood and experienced.
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Gisborne, Nikolas, and Andrew Hippisley. Defaults in linguistics. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198712329.003.0001.
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The notion of default and override can serve linguistic analysis in different ways. In the lexicon defaults are used for the resolution of rule competition, to capture lexical blocking, to select the right stem where there are choices, and when used in inheritance systems to provide for instances that do not meet every characteristic of their class allowing exceptionality to be expressed as semi-regularity. Defaults in syntax and semantics play a more organizational, ontological role, expressing markedness in lists of features and their possible values and resolving conflicts that may arise when two sub-systems intersect. The chapters discuss how defaults and overrides can address specific linguistic phenomena, suggest an architecture of the grammar, and assess the role of morphology in language and cognition.
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Nicholson, Daniel J. Reconceptualizing the Organism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779636.003.0007.
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This chapter draws on insights from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to demonstrate the ontological inadequacy of the machine conception of the organism. The thermodynamic character of living systems underlies the importance of metabolism and calls for the adoption of a processual view, exemplified by the Heraclitean metaphor of the stream of life. This alternative conception is explored in its various historical formulations, and the extent to which it captures the nature of living systems is examined. Next, the chapter considers the metaphysical implications of reconceptualizing the organism from complex machine to flowing stream. What do we learn when we reject the mechanical and embrace the processual? Three key lessons for biological ontology are identified. The first is that activity is a necessary condition for existence. The second is that persistence is grounded in the continuous self-maintenance of form. And the third is that order does not entail design.
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Johnson, Tom. Legal History and The Material Turn. Edited by Markus D. Dubber and Christopher Tomlins. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198794356.013.27.
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This chapter considers the implications of the ‘material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences for the study and writing of legal history. It suggests three paths forward for how legal historians might incorporate these insights into their research. These approaches are labelled as ‘categorizing’, ‘materializing’, and ‘filing’. ‘Categorizing’ refers to the possibility of redrawing ontological categories which could open up new ways of understanding law in the past. ‘Materializing’ looks at an analytical approach in which law is understood as a phenomenon composed of the material things it draws into itself. ‘Filing’ looks at the materiality of legal systems, both through their processes of record creation and their performative praxis, focusing attention on the co-constitutive nature of law and its material-bureaucratic apparatus.
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Dowd, Cate. Digital Journalism, Drones, and Automation. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190655860.001.0001.
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Advances in online technology and news systems, such as automated reasoning across digital resources and connectivity to cloud servers for storage and software, have changed digital journalism production and publishing methods. Integrated media systems used by editors are also conduits to search systems and social media, but the lure of big data and rise in fake news have fragmented some layers of journalism, alongside investments in analytics and a shift in the loci for verification. Data has generated new roles to exploit data insights and machine learning methods, but access to big data and data lakes is so significant it has spawned newsworthy partnerships between media moguls and social media entrepreneurs. However, digital journalism does not even have its own semantic systems that could protect the values of journalism, but relies on the affordances of other systems. Amidst indexing and classification systems for well-defined vocabulary and concepts in news, data leaks and metadata present challenges for journalism. By contrast data visualisations and real-time field reporting with short-form mobile media and civilian drones set new standards during the European asylum seeker crisis. Aerial filming with drones also adds to the ontological base of journalism. An ontology for journalism and intersecting ontologies can inform the design of new semantic learning systems. The Semantic CAT Method, which draws on participatory design and game design, also assists the conceptual design of synthetic players with emotion attributes, towards a meta-model for learning. The design of context-aware sensor systems to protect journalists in conflict zones is also discussed.
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Finseth, Ian. Plotting Mortality. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190848347.003.0005.
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In returning to the Civil War, postbellum American writers depended on the literary conventions and mythic structures of meaning by which a vast and violent history could be incorporated into fictional narrative. The result was a struggle between “romantic” and “realist” patterns of meaning that reflected the existential anxieties of American modernity: the sense of epistemological limitation and the dread of ontological purposeleᶊneᶊ. In the former, the war prompts the expreᶊion of nostalgia for a pre-capitalist, premodern, and pre-secular world. In the latter, the war is linked to the rise of complex networks of information, technology, and economics, and seems to embody the disenchanted condition of modernity. The Civil War dead are central to both modes of representation, and yet they resist the systems of mediation by which they are turned into moral exempla, symbolic commodities, and icons of national identity.
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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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Carruth, Alexander, and Sophie Gibb. The Ontology of E. J. Lowe’s Substance Dualism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198796299.003.0010.
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E. J. Lowe’s model of psychophysical causation offers a way of reconciling interactive substance dualism with the causal completeness principle by denying the homogeneity of the causal relata—more specifically, by invoking a distinction between ‘fact causation’ and ‘event causation’. According to Lowe, purely physical causation is event causation, whereas psychophysical causation involves fact causation, allowing the dualist to accept a version of causal completeness which holds that all physical events have only physical causes. But Lowe’s dualist model is only as plausible as the distinction between fact and event causation upon which it rests. In this chapter it is argued that a suitable distinction between fact and event causation is difficult to maintain within most common ontological systems. It is examined whether accepting the four-category ontology that Lowe defends can alleviate the problem, but it is argued that it is not clear that it can.
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Bollington, Lucy, and Paul Merchant, eds. Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human. University Press of Florida, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5744/florida/9781683401490.001.0001.
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Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human curates an important series of case studies of the posthuman imaginaries and nonhuman tropes employed in a broad range of Latin American cultural texts, from the narratives of Las Casas to new media and installation art in contemporary Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. The book’s introduction highlights the ways the figure of the “limit” has functioned as an important site of aesthetic, ontological, and political experimentation and reworking in Latin American cultural production, and underlines the potentialities and possible risks associated with the use of posthuman frameworks in the region. The different chapters examine the ways human borders and boundaries have been tested, undermined, and reformulated in relation to issues including dictatorial violence and drug war necropolitics, ecological storytelling, indigenous thought systems, gender, race, history, and new materialism. The book as a whole marshals a wide range of theoretical frameworks and points to the complex ways Latin American culture intersects with and departs from global formulations of humanism and the posthuman.
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Chandler, Nahum Dimitri. "Beyond This Narrow Now". Duke University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/9781478022121.
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In “Beyond This Narrow Now” Nahum Dimitri Chandler shows that the premises of W. E. B. Du Bois's thinking at the turn of the twentieth century stand as fundamental references for the whole itinerary of his thought. Opening with a distinct approach to the legacy of Du Bois, Chandler proceeds through a series of close readings of Du Bois's early essays, previously unpublished or seldom studied, with discrete annotations of The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches of 1903, elucidating and elaborating basic epistemological terms of his thought. With theoretical attention to how the African American stands as an example of possibility for Du Bois and renders problematic traditional ontological thought, Chandler also proposes that Du Bois's most well-known phrase—“the problem of the color line”—sustains more conceptual depth than has yet been understood, with pertinence for our accounts of modern systems of enslavement and imperial colonialism and the incipient moments of modern capitalization. Chandler's work exemplifies a more profound engagement with Du Bois, demonstrating that he must be re-read, appreciated, and studied anew as a philosophical writer and thinker contemporary to our time.
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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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Harmelen, Frank Van, Davies John, and Dieter Fensel. Towards the Semantic Web: Ontology-Driven Knowledge Management. Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, John, 2007.
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John, Davies, Fensel Dieter, and Van Harmelen Frank, eds. Towards the semantic web: Ontology-driven knowledge management. Chichester, England: J. Wiley, 2003.
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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.”