Relational Ontology

We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history , people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of human activity has become increasingly defined by motion. 1 We have entered a new historical era defined in large part by movement and mobility and are now in need of a new historical on-tology appropriate to our time. The observation that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was marked by an increasingly " liquid " and " mobile modernity " is now something widely recognized in the scholarly literature at the turn of the century. 2 Today, however, our orientation to this event is quite different. Almost twenty years into the twenty-first century we now find ourselves situated on the other side of this heralded transition. The question that confronts us today is thus a new one: how to fold all that has melted back up into new solids. 3

Les défis historiques provoquent constamment la dynamique d’une pensée nouvelle, capable de réélaborer le rapport à l’autre et qui rappelle donc un thème classique de la philosophie, celui du rapport entre unité et multiplicité.
Le lieu d’une ontologie trinitaire n’est pas un espace fermé et fortifié qui exclut. Il est bien plutôt un lieu des lieux, un lieu qui est tel – c’est-à-dire trinitaire – dès lors qu’il s’ouvre continuellement, se laisse visiter et bousculer par d’autres lieux, autrement dit, d’autres points de vue et perspectives. Plus encore, ce lieu est trinitaire dans la mesure où il sait accueillir et héberger l’autre non pas en faisant des compromis ou en minimisant les différences, mais en libérant et en partageant le sens le plus authentique de l’autre, son apport le plus spécifique et sa beauté la plus singulière.
Une réflexion stimulante, qui appelle à des pratiques nouvelles au quotidien.

El teólogo australiano Denis Edwards (1943-) propone la comprensión del ser de Dios como radicalmente relacional. De ahí que la realidad es también ontológicamente relacional. Si el ser de Dios es ser relacional, entonces cabe pensar que lo que Dios crea únicamente existe gracias a que eso creado está en relación con el creador en cuanto ser relacional; por lo tanto, el ser mismo de los entes es relacional.

[published in Routledge's "Philosophy and Method in the Social Sciences" series]

This study starts from a simple premise:  human practices are a fundamental constituent — arguably “the” fundamental constituent — of social reality.  It then poses the following question:  What would social scientists’ research look like if they took this insight quite seriously?

That, of course, would depend on what practices are in fact like:  what their generic features are, how they are constituted, how they might be identified and characterised and explained, how they function in concrete contexts, how they might change across time and space.  These are the kinds of questions that this book tries to tackle, insisting that their answers hold important implications for the effective practice of social science.

The book thus attempts to build a philosophical infrastructure for the empirical study of practices in the social sciences and humanities.  At the same time, it also tries to explore the implications of this ontology of human practices for issues in social theory and in the philosophy of the social sciences.  The book thus stands at the intersection of the philosophy of social science, social theory, and the social sciences.

In Latin America, indigenous peoples’ demands have revolved around political and territorial autonomy and self-determination. However, these have recently evolved to demands for environmental selfdetermination, due to processes of extractivism and global environmental transformations. These situations have led indigenous peoples to propose new demands and rights, which call for a cultural vision of environmental justice that includes indigenous peoples’ rights and nonhumans’ and territorial rights under their own conceptions of ancestral law and justice. Under these perspectives, environmental justice should be understood as an ethical, political, territorial, and reciprocal action with the nonhumans from indigenous territorial and cultural principles. These have emerged as part of spatial, environmental, and territorial alternatives incorporating cultural principles centered around five axes: the positioning of other relationships with the nonhumans (relational natures), horizontal and vertical territorial politics (relational spacialities), relationship between men and women under other categories of gender, life practices based on their knowledge, and environmental autonomy and self-determination. All this, according to their identity and political dynamics, so that it leads to what can be termed as a relational indigenous environmental justice, which involves expanding our notions of environmental justice

Joseph Sverker explores the division between social constructivism and a biologist essentialism by means of Christian theology. For this, Sverker uses a fascinating approach: He lets critical theorist Judith Butler, psycholinguist Steven Pinker, and systematic theologian Colin Gunton interact. While theology plays a central part to make the interaction possible, the context is also that of the school and the effect of institutions on the pupil as a human being and learner.

In order to understand what underlies the division between nature and nurture, or biology and the social in school, Sverker develops new central concepts such as a kenotic personalism, a weak ontology of relationality, and a relational and performative reading of evolution. He argues that most fundamental for what it is to be human is the person, vulnerability, bodiliness, openness to the other, and dependence.

Sverker concludes that the division between constructivism and essentialism discloses a deeper divide, namely that between fundamentally vulnerable persons on the one hand and constructed independent individuals on the other.

In 2009, the year aft er Japanese electronics manufacturer JVC (Japan Victor Company), creator of the VHS format (Video Home System), ceased production of the last line of stand-alone VHS video recorders (Broadcast Engineering 2008), I undertook an artist's residency at VIVO Media Arts in Vancouver, Canada-part of an eight-month stay, dwelling in the city with my partner and son-to consider the aesthetic qualities of VHS video as a dwindling feature of home-video practices. I was interested particularly in the qualities of degraded VHS image and sound with respect to the circularity of relations between the materiality of VHS technology, the engineered recordings it has potentiated, the practices these have both aff orded, and the transformative eff ects of such practices on its materiality as they are evidenced in degrading picture and sound quality. My focus was drawn to the phenomenon of video rental as a spatial practice bound up with the material particularities of home-video technology and as a context of its intensive use associated with increased 'wear and tear' . With the generous assistance of VIVO and Limelight Video, my family's neighbourhood video library, my residency developed around a single rental VHS tape with respect to this idea.

The concept of sustainable lifestyles is said to have reached the limits of its usefulness. As commonly understood, it impedes an effective response to our increasingly complex world, and the associated societal challenges. In this context, the emerging paradigm of relationality might offer a way forward to renew our current understanding and approach. We explore this possibility in this study. First, we systematize if, and how, the current dominant social paradigm represents a barrier to sustainable lifestyles. Second, we analyze how a relational approach could help to overcome these barriers. On the basis of our findings, we develop a Relational Lifestyle Framework (RLF). Our aim is to advance the current knowledge by illustrating how sustainable lifestyles are a manifestation of identified patterns of thinking, being, and acting that are embedded in today’s “socioecological” realities. The RLF revitalizes the field of sustainable lifestyle change, as it offers a new understanding...

In this essay I act as an art theorist/critic as well as philosopher. The two notions of the Harmanian object that I get most out of at present is its strange formulation of unity (the possibility of a real, unified and intentional object) and a notion of the objects withdrawal or withheld nature (which I crudely turn into the notion of absence - as that which is not present in our ongoing re-formulations of objects). Now, it seems to me that through my brief research into O.O.O inspired artworks, such artworks show the opposite inclination; 1) to revitalise the lurking horrific reality of objects in everyday life (presence). 2) that we must go to the farthest depths of the universe to acquire ‘objects’ that appear alien to humans or could be hypostatised to exist without, before or after humans (difference). I have no interest in these aesthetic concerns (I do not find a piece of the moon any more or less philosophically complex than a sandwich).  Both are more than the relations of access we infer from them, both are more than the components made-up of them, and both exceed their outward effects. Also, I would argue that positioning the object outside of thought and/or human existence in this way is an idealist experiment analogous to the question “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”. O.O.O is not a human-world philosophy nor is it a philosophy of human skepticism, it is a philosophy of multiple individual objects (and also, I don't even know how my own body or thoughts exist, let alone a tree in the woods).
I think it is possibly more difficult to illustrate the notions of unity and absence in Harman’s work in art, than that of difference and presence. I have attempted to do so through two artworks. One is Vito Acconci’s ‘Room Piece’ (1970) and the other is John Stezaker’s ‘Mack’ (2007).

With its myriad of relationships, my study considers the Laich-Kwil-Tach enlivened world in which multiple beings bring meaning and understanding to life. Through exploration of Laich-Kwil-Tach ontology I engage with the theoretical concepts of animism, historical ecology and political ecology, in what I call relational ecology. Here, I examine the divide between the relational world and what Western ontology considers a natural resource; fish. Through an analysis of ethnographic texts I work to elucidate the 19th-century human-fish relationship and through collaboration with Laich-Kwil-Tach Elders, based on Vancouver Island on the Northwest Coast of North America, I seek to understand how the 19th-century enlivened world informs 21st-century Laich-Kwil-Tach ontology. In this ethnographic and ethnohistorical account of the relationship between Laich-Kwil-Tach people and fish I grapple with the question of how, within a framework of ontological difference, we can better understand foundations of Indigenous rights and find ways to respect and give agency to multiple forms of knowledge in practice. In the spirit of reconciliation, decolonization and a renewed understanding of ontological multiplicity we are challenged to create analytical frameworks that include both human and nonhuman interests and relationships. Doing so requires engagement with any number of ontological propositions and it requires a confrontation with hegemonic ontological assumptions inherent in the Western scientific, bureaucratic and legal paradigms. By accepting western-based science as one among many ways of producing knowledge, space is made for other forms of knowledge. In the process we are better able to respect Indigenous land and marine tenure systems, as well as the Indigenous right to maintain a long-standing and on-going relationship with other beings and all that this entails.

This text comprises a critical discussion of assemblage theory and its application to burial studies. In recent research, burials have been viewed as fluid and indeterminate assemblages that 'become' in varied ways depending on different perceptions (concepts and ideas) and apparatuses (e.g. excavation tools and measuring instruments). The past and the present are thus mixed in potentially ever-new configurations which run the risk of replacing epistemological relativism with ontological fluidity. It is argued here that the hypothetical mutability of burial assemblages can be reduced significantly by addressing the varying speed and degree of the involved processes of integration and disintegration. By doing this, the main focus is shifted to the animacy of such processes and how they may have been understood and utilized in burials. Using both general and specific examples, it is argued that cremation burials can be studied as carefully compiled amalgamations that utilize the properties and animacies of different materialities to deal with death, corpses and the afterlife.

This is a proof, you can find the final version here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774320000116
It is Open Access.

El problema de la unidad temática en la obra de Gilbert Simondon es una de las cuestiones más discutidas en la literatura sobre el autor. La hipótesis de lectura que plantea la presente tesis ofrecería, por primera vez, una solución verdaderamente satisfactoria a este problema. Se recupera la unidad programática de los textos, el programa de la axiomatización de la ontogénesis, y partiendo de la imagen que encierra el esquema del modulador, el paradigma elemental de la filosofía de la individuación, se elabora una noción paradigmática que permite interpretar esta unidad en comunicación con la unidad anterior en una unidad de génesis, la génesis de esa axiomatización como el esbozo de una teoría de los campos morfogenéticos. La propia elucidación de la noción de relación, entendida como interfaz, abre esta vía. Como resultado de esta investigación, con la invención de un acto enciclopédico que conjugaría los diferentes modos del pensamiento, se pone a punto una máquina de aprendizaje. La filosofía de Simondon se convertirá entonces en una tecnología epistemológica, una razón filosófica abocada a la búsqueda de nuevos paradigmas, y también en una metafilosofía, en cuanto deviene filosofía de la historia de la filosofía. Se rehabilita así un pensamiento ucrónico, retrofuturista, creando las condiciones para un simondonismo que sea tan contemporáneo como es extemporáneo.

The shared life philosophy of the Vā or socio-spatial relations has been presented as social,. The Vā, simply defined as relational spaces or space-between, is theorized as a philosophy underpinning identity formation. It enables the reinforcement and strengthening of relationships with self, within community and the wider world. Traditionally, the multiple complexities of the various aspects of the Vā played out solely as abstract spaces within real-time and place. This chapter explores the notion of the digital Vā within cyber places and spaces using Facebook as an example of the use of social media by Pacific communities. It presents the core question, are we digitizing the Vā? A family intergenerational case-study is used as an exploratory entry point to demonstrate shifting boundaries of acceptability of the kinds of conversations that take place in social media. Drawing from the theoretical lens of values theory, these reflections pose key questions for Pacific youth for whom eCulture and cyber-identity form a critical component of their identity formation which plays out in real-place and time.

181 "Es ist gleich tödlich für den Geist", schreibt Friedrich Schlegel im 53. Athenäum-Fragment, "ein System zu haben, und keins zu haben. Er wird sich wohl entschließen müssen, beides zu verbinden." 1 Auch Fundamentaltheologen (und nicht minder die Dogmatiker) stehen vor der ‚Systemfrage': Können Sie noch den Eindruck erwecken eine in sich geschlossene Totalität theologischer Spekulation zu präsentieren? Ist eine theologische Systematik, welche alles Differierende, Anstößige und Leidvolle, das sich in der erfahrbaren Welt findet, aufgehoben und vollständig integriert hat, nicht erschlichen? Mindestens ebenso fraglich ist, ob die verloren gegangene gesellschaftliche Verbindlichkeit und Plausibilität des Christentums durch ein emphatisches Bekenntnis einzelner oder charismatisch eingestimmter Gruppen substituiert werden kann. Der Kölner Fundamentaltheologie Hans-Joachim Höhn ist in seinem jüngsten Buch 2 von solchen vermeintlichen Gewissheiten weit entfernt. Problematisch ist ihm gerade "jener theologische Sprachgestus, der bekenntnisstark daherkommt und meint, sich damit jede dogmatische Vollmundigkeit erlauben zu können", wie Höhn schon in seiner Studie Der fremde Gott konstatierte 3 . Im Verlauf der Neuzeit scheint Gott ‚arbeitslos' geworden zu sein: Zur "Erklärung innerweltlicher Abläufe und Sachverhalte" ist er nicht notwendig (29f); als Instanz, moralische Normen zu begründen und den Verstoß gegen sie zu sanktionieren, wurde er ebenfalls überflüssig; mit dem Übergang von einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis in eine funktionale Erkenntnistheorie erübrigt sich der Rekurs auf Gott nicht minder (28, 48). Die Rede von Gott scheint überflüssig zu sein, bestenfalls eine unverbindliche Beschäftigung in den wegen ihrer mangelnden Produktivität verdächtigen Augenblicken der Muße, seit der Frühaufklärung aber auch beargwöhnt als Residuum von Unwissenheit, Fanatismus und unerhellter Herrschaft.

Hällbildsforskningen har av tradition fokuserat på bildernas föreställande och symboliska egenskaper. Motiven har därmed främst setts som representationer av något annat – kosmologi, ideologi, reella eller föreställda världar – man har sällan sett dem som materiella uttryck i sig.
I denna bok utforskas en delvis annan utgångspunkt som betonar produktion och bildernas effekter. Perspektivet förskjuts därmed från människans bruk av bilder som symboler till vad bilder i sin fysiska form gör och hur de kan sägas bidra till utvecklingen på en plats.

Köp ett tryckt exemplar här: https://widget.publit.com/webbshop_4180/page/1

The dissertation’s aim is to explore the everyday relevance media artifacts have for young children. It discusses and further develops analytical concepts that are committed to taking the children’s perspectives on possibilities and limitations of such artifacts seriously. These conceptual developments are rooted in the author’s participation in a daycare practice in Berlin, Germany. The daycare’s situational approach precisely attempted to draw on the children’s everyday life experiences so as to engage in problem-oriented learning projects, on media artifacts and beyond.

When analyzing the situated problems the children experienced in relation to both the pedagogical-educational arrangement of the daycare as well as subjectively relevant media artifacts, it emerges that their personal struggles are connected to broader societal contradictions. For instance, their problems with specific artifact-arrangements are interrelated with the staff’s, the parents’, and the researcher’s struggles. Children’s struggles with media artifacts are therefore not analyzed in isolation, but as part of the daycare’s sociomaterial interplay.

The dissertation explores and analyzes this interplay, so as to conclude that sociomaterial arrangements must be understood as inextricably intertwined with the process of conducting everyday life. Sociomaterial arrangements such as media artifacts are maintained and transformed by all practice participants. They all contribute in unique ways to upholding and changing jointly shared arrangements through conflictual collaboration, irrespective of their age. Daycare and other learning institutions should therefore systematically promote collaborative explorations of media-related struggles across age thresholds.

This article considers the recent reemergence of the category of animism in the anthropological study of religion, a concept that has once again become fashionable after a long period of scholarly disuse. This " new animism, " as it is called by many of its proponents, seeks to move away from the original animism that was the basis for much Victorian thought on indigenous religions and which rested upon now largely discredited social evolutionist paradigms. I discuss this renewed interest in indigenous animism in terms of its place within recent intellectual history, especially the growing engagement with the global environmental crisis among scholars in the humanities. I argue that the new animism is only selectively " indigenous " in its promotion of non-Western ontologies, and suggest that it is ultimately best understood as a kind of analytical metaphor rather than an objective category of religious practice that exists out there in the world.

The principal issues concerning the foundations of physics are how to solve the puzzle of the apparent discrepancy between the theoretical frameworks of classical spacetime physics and quantum microphysics as well as, in particular, how to clarify the meaning of the notion of a ʻmechanical stateʼ. I argue that the element that constantly produces the so-called quantum paradoxes is a straightforward, classical, i.e. nonrelational and noncontextual interpretation of a quantum state, which at a single point makes almost all quantum effects, such as the delayed-choice entanglement swapping, classically deviant or obscure. Quantum theory, above all, demands a radical generalization of the principle of relativity, and the relational quantum events (q-events) are extremely different from the classical non-relational (spacetime) c-events. However, this theoretical shift is hard to implement without significant remodelling of the ontological convictions concerning the preferred interpretation of mechanics itself, which is commonly founded on the invariant ʻelements of realityʼ (evolving-in-time atomic states of affairs) scheme and substantialist imagery. This is a strong argument in favor of structural approaches in fundamental physics and a purely time-symmetric formulation of quantum mechanics.

681] 2 La originalidad de la tendencia en investigación antropológica denominada estructuralismo, puede decirse que descansa, paradójicamente, en el hecho que ha contribuido en gran medida a hacer desaparecer la originalidad ficticia asignada al conocimiento antropológico por la teoría espontánea del conocimiento. El riesgo de subestimar o sobreestimar (las dos alternativas no son mutuamente excluyentes) la originalidad de esta tendencia, que razonablemente merece menos el nombre de estructuralismo que las matemáticas o la físicas modernas, se debe al hecho de que sus principios, que ha despertado nuevamente o constituido expresamente su forma específicamente antropológica, son diametralmente opuestos a la teoría espontánea del conocimiento del hombre y de la sociedad. Por consiguiente, cuando la antropología se comprometió a encontrar en sí misma los principios que en última instancia son los de cualquier teoría del conocimiento científico, tuvo que superar obstáculos epistemológicos que no son comparables con los que se enfrentan las ciencias naturales. Para evaluar adecuadamente la contribución teórica del estructuralismo, debemos introducir, en oposición a las formas usuales de pensamiento, una clara distinción entre la teoría del conocimiento sociológico y la teoría del sistema social. La teoría del conocimiento sociológico, como el sistema de principios y reglas que gobiernan la producción de todas las proposiciones sociológicas científicamente fundadas, y de ellas solas, es el principio generador de todas las teorías parciales de lo social y, por lo tanto, el principio unificador del discurso propiamente sociológico, que no debe confundirse con una teoría unitaria de lo social. En otras palabras, un discurso sociológico, [682] por ejemplo una teoría de las transacciones matrimoniales o de la difusión cultural, es científico únicamente en la medida en que hace uso de principios epistemológicos y lógicos de la teoría del conocimiento social, esto es, de una meta-ciencia sociológica, de acuerdo a un sistema de relaciones y de

This chapter focuses on Pacific island ways of negotiating knowledge. It begins from the premise that the researcher as learner, seeking knowledge (data), needs to learn how to negotiate access to a particular knowledge base in various indigenous contexts. Numerous Pacific island scholars assert that a decolonisation of research is needed to cater for the fact that Pacific indigenous peoples view and engage in the world differently.

Gestalt Therapy techniques are considered to be powerful tools for the remobilization of human growth and change. I will attempt to show that the power of these techniques lies in the fact that they are effective ways of dealing with our "internalizations". I will first briefly review object relation theory and then discuss gestalt techniques as they pertain to internal objects.

Our understanding of being (ontology) affects how we imagine and build the world. This includes the way we build institutions, we do politics, and we shape our economy. This insight lies at the heart of the deep dive conversation we invite you to. The living process, which some of us call commoning, brings its operational and ethical logic to every sphere-political and economic. It does so at every level that it reaches-micro, meso and macro.

This invitation-only Deep Dive offers twenty people from different disciplines and geographic regions the opportunity to form a common understanding and community around the importance of relational ontologies to societal transformation. We will host a conversation that will weave together various strands of knowledge from philosophers, political scientists, economists, commoners, anthropologists, patterns experts, systems thinkers, and sustainability scientists. We will discuss how society (across sectors) might be designed around a relational ontological shift.

There will be a balance of discussion, practice, and process-oriented sessions, offering space to create, share, and enact the integration we all seek. There will also be opportunities to explore cases that illustrate what a relational ontological shift looks like across various cultural and sectoral contexts. The meeting will finish with agenda-setting exercises that outline how the community we create can grow in concrete outcome-oriented projects.

The entry begins with a definition of geography and with a description of what the discipline shares with the other social sciences and what makes it distinctive among them. Terminological clarifications are provided with regard to the relationship between human geography and physical geography, and between human geography and urban geography. After a brief history and overview of human geography’s engagement with social theory, the entry offers a discussion of the politicization of contemporary human geography and of how this phenomenon is reflected in theory building and concept development.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0464

The dominant mode of societal operation in today’s world, in its pursuit of the good life through economic growth and consumption, is destroying the planet’s ecosystems and accelerating towards an inhospitable climate regime, with mixed results for even short-term human well-being. This pathological mode of societal operation is based in discredited worldviews. However, important aspects of a coherent, updated worldview have not been articulated and thus have not been integrated into the efforts of scholarship to steer society away from collapse and toward sustainable, desirable futures. In particular, there is a need for an explanatory framework that makes sense of seemingly incompatible perspectives on the human being (e.g., between the natural and social sciences) and on human well-being (WB; e.g., between hedonic and other perspectives)—and that situates human WB in the context of planetary WB. This thesis lays the foundation of such a framework. Previous researchers taking a complex-systems approach have argued convincingly that self-regulatory capacity is the underlying basis of WB, providing a key premise for this thesis. I synthesize evolutionary, neurobiological, psychological, and social lines of investigation into a coherent, broadly consistent understanding of the development and dynamics of self-regulatory capacity, focusing on various interdependent levels of regulation (e.g., physiological, psychological, and social) and showing many of their impacts on WB. With the help of predictive processing models of perception, this thesis explores how self-regulatory dynamics are affected by the qualities of three key relationships fundamental to the human situation: relationship with one’s body (embodiment), relationship with other humans (sociality), and relationship with the more-than-human world (terrestriality).

This work suggests a number of conclusions. First, all three of these relational contexts (embodiment, sociality, terrestriality) are fundamental to both our existence and our well-being. It follows that any coherent worldview must account for these dynamic interrelations. Second, human well-being may be proximally defined by the capacity for integrated, non-defensive functioning, which is a developmental achievement dependent on supportive conditions. Third, beyond material sufficiency, the most important factors for WB seem to be attentional, collective, and mutualistic, rather than consumptive, individual, and rival.

This thesis, by synthesizing a variety of scientific disciplines into a coherent framework for an embedded, complex-systems understanding of whole-person health and well-being, is the first part of a research agenda toward understanding—and achieving—whole-systems well-being, from person to planet.

How to read a text and how to hear a text. How to open words and syllables so that knowledge arises within your own body, within your inner awareness. When you are located in mind alone, when you are located in conceptualness and concrete mind alone, you will be locked in and contained. William Reich described concrete minds as living machines. Concreteness can be described as rigidity, a mode of tense cognitive activity. Strangely enough, concreteness with its compulsiveness, its drivenness can distort the sense of presence and the sense of reality. The concrete mind in its literalness struggles to find the right solution. The literal view can be narrow, highly vigilant and stimulus−stimulation bound. The concrete mind struggles to find the right solution relentlessly. Of course whatever the solution, it never is enough. One becomes stuck in the stimulus of the word and stuck in the signification of the word. The nexus between the signifier and signified is without space and is densely bound.

In this paper, I undertake an analysis of Leibniz’s theory of relations. My main argument focuses on distinguishing the ontological part of this theory from the logical/grammatical part, and showing that several studies of this subject are misplaced. I offer a clarification of the matter, presenting an argument that shows how Leibniz does not provide a unified theory for the two sides of his theory of relations. I proceed to argue about soft and hard reductionism, supporting the former. I show how Leibniz’s “re-writing project” about the elimination of dyadic predicates in the “perfect language” of philosophy fits in the picture of his theory without the implication of a nominalist position. Nevertheless, thanks to the distinguishing argument, I am able to argue for Leibniz’s conceptualism on the ontological side of the theory of relations, without using any logical/grammatical argument. I deploy an analysis of all the core themes in his theory, from compossibility to expressionism, from concogitabilitas to supervenience, showing how Leibniz’s position is neither nominalist nor realist, but rather a medial position that has to be understood in its own complexity.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the overcoming of the influence of Kant's philosophy on the interpretation of Luther's theology gave the impetus to a new shift in the Luther studies. However, it also revealed the importance of the theological intuitions of the Reformer on the current philosophical-theological debate on the possibility of restoring metaphysics and ontology in particular. The study aims to present the ontological dimension and the orientation of some of these intuitions present in Luther's commentary on the Letter to the Romans. This dimension is determined by his conviction that the revelation of the trinitarian God in Christ has shown the truth of being in general, and of human being in particular, the truth of the fact that this being is structurally related but also of the fact that, in the historical space, this relationship has to bring to date and to augment what is happening by means of following the Crucified and Risen Logos of the Creator, and uniting with his Holy Spirit in the communion of believers.

I argue in this essay that the Erich Fromm’s social theory rests on an implicit ontology of social relations that has a set of causal properties and powers. At the core of his critical theory of self and society is an ontological conception of social relations that is in real contrast to the epistemic and communicative model of intersubjectivity championed by Habermas and his paradigm of critical theory. Fromm’s ideas about the ontology of social relations are built from a synthetic reading of Hegel, Marx and Freud and lead to a kind of practical reasoning that can inform an objective ethics. I will extract from Fromm’s writings this theory of an ontology of social relations and then go on to show how this can inform and support a critical theory of ethical judgment.

New animism, as derived from Ojibwe philosophy and articulated by anthropologists of religion, begins in a relational worldview and implies ways of knowing that challenge Cartesian dualism. Opening with a story of my relationship with a weeping birch tree in Ohio, I use the relational epistemology of animism and of feminist theorist Lorraine Code to examine four ways in which my experience with the birch tree, interpreted within an animist-feminist relational worldview, challenges Cartesian dualism. To elaborate animist ways of knowing,

The Author proposes to describe the possible foundations of a Trinitarian theism that may be a philosophically adequate translation of the Johannine declaration: " God is love " , introduced by some contemporary thinkers as a key to resolving some aporias within classic theism. This is done by way of analysis of Trinitarian ontology and relational ontology, for which there is an attempt to provide a shareable phenomenological basis. The paper then goes on to questions of epistemology (hyperphatic theology) linked to the ability of human reason and human language to express the categories introduced in this analysis, categories that are nothing else but a renewed philosophical appreciation of the terminology proper to Trinitarian speculation.

Sommario: L'autore si propone di descrivere i possibili fondamenti di un teismo trinitario che sia una traduzione filosoficamente adeguata dell'affermazione giovannea " Dio è amore " , introdotta da alcuni pensatori contemporanei come chiave di volta per risolvere alcune aporie interne al teismo classico. Il percorso descritto passa attraverso l'analisi dell'ontologia trinitaria e dell'ontologia relazionale, alle quali si tenta di fornire una base fenomenologica condivisibile. Per poi spostarsi su questioni di epistemologia (teologia iperfatica) legate alla capacità della nostra ragione e del nostro linguaggio di esprimere le categorie introdotte nell'analisi, le quali non sono altro che la rivalutazione filosofica della terminologia propria della speculazione trinitaria.

Datos del original: Morfino, Vittorio. "Le cinque tesi della 'filosofia' di Machiavelli". Cur. Riccardo Caporali, Vittorio Morfino y Stefano Visentin. Machiavelli: tempo e conflitto. Milán: Mimesis, 2013: 157-183. Palabras clave: Variación, esencia, virtù, fortuna, ocasión.

This paper draws attention to the somewhat neglected domains of affects, emotions, and subjectivity in the study of the commons. The paper argues that a focus on affective and communicative relations among humans and between humans and more-than-humans can enrich our understanding of the practices of commoning and the processes of becoming a commoner. Using the case of community forestry initiatives in Odisha, India, it illustrates how rural people become commoners through the embodied practices of caring for the forests as a shared common. The paper uses this empirical example and conceptual resources from affect theory and relational ontology to think about the commons as affective socio-nature entanglements and as a nurturing ground for subjectivity. It discusses the implications of attention on the commons and the practices of commoning for enabling the emergence of other-than-capitalist subjectivities.

Our lack of awareness of Being results in bewildering experience. The intrinsic inner radiance, the inner light of Being arises out of primordial luminous spaciousness, the unbound openness of unbound pure potentiality. When this primordial ground of Being is veiled and obscured by the lack of experiential awareness, we can be locked into dualistic experiences, and consequently the non-dual nature of the field of Being is experientially foreclosed. The sense of indivisibility of all phenomena and awareness is experientially foreclosed. The capacity to see into, feel into and see through the lucidity of phenomena as the very field of Being becomes foreclosed and densified. We then live contained in mind alone. There is no experience of the field of Being. Without the field of Being we easily become things and objects both to our self and to others.

We have two ways of knowing. Our mind knows forms, things, both subtle and gross. Faces, hands, buildings, trees, math formulas, mind knows subject and the mind knows otherness. The mind knows dualities, the mind knows me and you, us and them, and this and that. Mind knows time, mind knows the past, the present and the sense of the future. The mind knows things and entities, the mind knows beings, infinite numbers of beings and things. The mind knows difference. The mind thinks conceptually, feels affectively, imagines through imagery, the mind has sense and the mind has memory. The mind knows dualistically.

Among the different understandings of the Spirit in the New Testament, Paul's Spirit language stands out for being at once dynamic and sometimes impersonal—inviting comparison with the Stoic notion of spirit (pneuma) as a substance. Volker Rabens re-examines Paul’s statements about the Spirit in the widest possible contexts and argues that the alleged parallels with Stoic conceptions are at best ambiguous. Paul understands the work of the Spirit relationally, Rabens argues, and it is through intimate relationships that the Spirit transforms and empowers people's lives.