Analytic Metaphysics Research Papers

The relevance of analytic metaphysics has come under criticism: Ladyman & Ross, for instance, have suggested do discontinue the field. French & McKenzie have argued in defense of analytic metaphysics that it develops tools that could turn... more

While it is widely accepted that human vision represents objects, it is less clear which of the various philosophical notions of ‘object’ adequately characterizes visual objects. In this paper, I show that within contemporary cognitive... more

The main goal of the paper is to sketch an ontological model of visual content at the low- and medium-level of visual processing, relying on psychological conceptions of vision. It is argued that influential cognitive models contain... more

According to the traditional view, visual objects can be characterized as bundles of features and locations. This initially plausible idea is contested within the contemporary psychology and philosophy of perception, where it is claimed... more

The paradigmatic examples of what we call nowadays ‘mere Cambridge changes’ are relational properties. If someone is on the left of a table at t-1 and on the right of this table at t, the table does not undergo a physical change, but it... more

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- by Aurélien Robert
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- 74
  History, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy

My aim in this article is twofold. First, I hope to show that, despite its seeming rehabilitation, metaphysics as systematic, speculative philosophy is no less threatened. Second, I will argue that metaphysics as systematic, speculative... more

Analytic metaphysics has recently discovered biology as a means of grounding metaphysical theories. Long-standing metaphysical puzzles are being reconsidered in the light of biological perspectives or concepts. These include the problems... more

Analytic metaphysics has recently discovered biology as a means of grounding metaphysical theories. Long-standing metaphysical puzzles are being reconsidered in the light of biological perspectives or concepts. These include the problems of personal identity and material constitution, which are increasingly being addressed by appeal to a biological understanding of identity. This development within metaphysics is in significant tension with the growing tendency amongst philosophers of biology to regard biological identity as a deep puzzle in its own right: recent studies especially of symbiosis and of the evolution of multi-cellular organisms, and the inherently dynamical character of living systems as revealed by systems biology and developmental biology, pose manifold and intricate challenges for a satisfying account of biological identity, ruling out an appeal to any unproblematic notion thereof. In this introductory chapter, we describe these challenges but also the need for an appreciation of the metaphysical questions and implications lurking in the background. Taken together, these observations demonstrate the importance of a dialogue between metaphysics and the philosophy of biology, which the present collection of essays aims to initiate. 1. Biological Identity in Metaphysics and in the Philosophy of Biology Our world seems populated by individual things that keep their identity over time. The car in which I will soon go home is the same that brought me to the office in the morning. The pebble which lies on the windowsill in my kitchen is the one which I collected at the seaside yesterday, and the rubber plant next to it was some years ago given to me as a birthday present. I also don't have the slightest doubt that the dog happily welcoming me now is the same dog that I left alone at home a few hours earlier. And, not least, I'm pretty sure that I myself was the very same person on all the various occasions just mentioned. However, as so often in philosophy, what seems natural and straightforward at first glance, on closer consideration turns out to raise a host of problems. Am I really the same as, say, ten years ago? Haven't I changed quite a lot since then? At any rate, I have aged; and the same is sadly true for my car which is at risk of failing the upcoming MOT test. How is it possible to stay the same while changing? What does it take for persons and cars to persist through time? Is persistence tantamount to numerical identity or to some weaker relation, say, relations of continuity? And if the latter, relations between what? As has famously been noted in discussions of identity, self-identity is not a relation between two things, but a necessary truth about one thing. But then, once we move away from strict self-identity, how much continuity exactly is needed for identity through time and how are we to handle hypothetical branching cases? Philosophers are a long way from agreeing on how to answer these questions; in fact, the debate on personal identity in analytic metaphysics is (in)famous for its notoriously aporetic character; and the corresponding debate about the persistence criteria of artefacts fares no better

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- by Anne Sophie Meincke (Spann) and +1
  John Dupré
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- 16
  Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science

The influence of Aristotle has been growing lately in analytic metaphysics. Different positions concerning properties, natural laws, causal powers, modality, persistence in time and, even, in meta-metaphysics have been characterized as... more

Contemporary philosophers have studied food and its consumption from several disciplinary perspectives, including normative ethics, bioethics, environmental ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and aesthetics. Many questions... more

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- by Nicola Piras and +2
  Andrea Borghini
  Donatella Donati
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- 3
  Metaphysics, Philosophy of Food, Analytic Metaphysics

The paper is a survey of contemporary quidditism, understood as two interrelated metaphysicalpositions — recombinatorial quidditism, which is an account of the nature of possibilities, andindividuation quidditism,... more

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- by Karol Lenart
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- 6
  Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Universals, Individuation

According to dispositional realism, or dispositionalism, the entities inhabiting our world possess irreducibly dispositional properties - often called 'powers' - by means of which they are sources of change. Dispositionalism has become... more

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- by Anne Sophie Meincke (Spann)
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- 15
  Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ontology, Philosophy of Science

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- by Nicola Piras
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- 4
  Metaphysics, Mereology, Material Constitution, Analytic Metaphysics

When we examine psychoanalytic theory the burning question that should occupy our time should concern where the complex of ideas that constitute Western civilization originated, how they originated, and whether they have any realistic... more

When we examine psychoanalytic theory the burning question that should occupy our time should concern where the complex of ideas that constitute Western civilization originated, how they originated, and whether they have any realistic correspondence to what we can observe and expreince in nature. I think they do not correspond, and I wonder quite often and quite profoundly if the Western psyche has been interfered with at some remote time in planetary history." (Deloria Jr. 1999b, p. 30) 'Primal Feminine Dominion' "Let me emphasize neolithic man's concentration on organic life and growth: not merely a sampling and testing of what nature had provided, but a discriminating selection and propagation, to such good purpose that historic man had not added a plant or animal of major importance to those domesticated or cultivated by neolithic communities. Domestication in all its aspects implies two large changes: permanence and continuity in residence, and the exercise of control and foresight over processes once subject to the caprices of nature. With this go habits of gentling and nurturing and breeding. Here woman's needs, woman's solicitudes, woman's intimacy with the process of growth, woman's capacity for tenderness and love, must have played a dominating part." (Mumford 1961, p. 12) "Under woman's dominance, the neolithic period is pre-eminently one of containers… It was in permanent containers that neolithic invention outshone all earlier cultures…" (Mumford 1961, p. 16) Whether we accept the notion of a feminine principle associated with love, care, regeneration, resiliency-with the qualities of darkness and the night-or not, and while we should surely reject the patriarchal undertones in Mumford's work, it is clear that Mumford's summation of woman's 'dominating part' clearly illustrates his subjugation to the Artificial Worldview and its assumptions concerning the relationship between order and domination. Femininity, like masculinity, need not play a dominating part… The feminine principle, which, like the masculine principle, exists in all people regardless of their biological identity, can just as easily be seen as playing a reciprocal, harmonious role of power with (power with the order of nature, power with the masculine principle, power with our plant and animal kin, etc.) rather than a domineering role of power over. What is more, the notion of 'permanent containers' is as problematic as the notion of 'permanent dwellings'-better that we say long term rather than permanent, for nothing with a beginning lacks an end… This is the same distinction we have attempted to draw between the quest for life extension and the quest to 'conquer death' (to 'eat death') and thus attain 'permanent life'.

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- by Luke Barnesmoore
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- 184
  Critical Theory, Social Theory, Number Theory, Probability Theory

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- by Luke Barnesmoore
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- 222
  Critical Theory, Philology, Religion, Ancient Egyptian Religion

‘Metaphysics’ is the quest to find the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence. It is about trying to find a decisive and conclusive resolution to the human condition, such that the human condition is fulfilled in some absolute way, and... more

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- by Peter Eastman
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- 32
  Philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Metaphilosophy

In hell, the vale of human suffering, there is an exact place where he, the Moon exists. Haven and hell, God and devil are united in it as the flame and shadow.

"ABSTRACT: This study assumes the subject's pursuit of meaning is generally incapacitating and should be suspended. It aims to demonstrate how such a suspension is theoretically accomplished by utilizing Lacan's formulae of... more

"ABSTRACT:
This study assumes the subject's pursuit of meaning is generally incapacitating and should be suspended. It aims to demonstrate how such a suspension is theoretically accomplished by utilizing Lacan's formulae of sexuation integrated with his work in discourse theory and topology.
Part I places this study into context by examining scholarship from the established fields of hermeneutics, phenomenology, (post)structuralism, aesthetic theory and psychoanalysis in order to extract out their respective theory of meaning. These theories reveal that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation and reaches near crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand this crisis is mollified by the rise of Heideggerian-Gadamerian hermeneutical phenomenology which questions traditional epistemological approaches to the text using a new ontological conceptualization of meaning and a conscious rejection of methodology. On the other hand this crisis is exacerbated when the ubiquitous nature of meaning is itself challenged by (post)structuralism's discovery of the signifier which inscribes a limit to meaning, and by the domains of sense and nonsense newly opened up by aesthetic theory. These historical developments culminate in the field of psychoanalysis which most consequentially delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity.
Part II extends these findings by rigorously constructing out of the Lacanian sexuated formulae a decidedly non-hermeneutical phenomenological approach useful in demonstrating the sexual nature of meaning. Explicated in their static state by way of an account of their original derivation from the Aristotelian logical square, it is argued that these four formulae are relevant to basic concerns of textual theory inclusive of the hermeneutical circle of meaning. These formulae are then set into motion by integrating them with Lacan's four discourses to demonstrate the breakdown of meaning. Finally, the cuts and sutures of two-dimensional space that is topology as set down in L'étourdit are performed to confirm how the very field of meaning is ultimately suspended from a nonsensical singular point known in Lacanian psychoanalysis as objet a. The contention is that by occupying this point the subject frees himself from the debilitating grip of meaning."

One of the main functions of visual system is to construct representations of objects. These ‘visual objects’ are formed by developing the structure of more primitive visual representations. In the course of the article, I define the... more

Analytic Metaphysics

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