Download or read book The Ethics of Ontology written by Christopher P. Long and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concerned with the meaning and function of principles in an era that appears to have given up on their possibility altogether, Christopher P. Long traces the paths of Aristotle's thinking concerning finite being from the Categories, through the Physics, to the Metaphysics, and ultimately into the Nicomachean Ethics. Long argues that a dynamic and open conception of principles emerges in these works that challenges the traditional tendency to seek security in permanent and eternal absolutes. He rethinks the meaning of Aristotle's notion of principle (arche) and spans the divide of analytic and continental methodological approaches to ancient Greek philosophy, while connecting Aristotle's thinking to that of Levinas, Gadamer, and Heidegger.
Download or read book Ethics without Ontology written by Hilary Putnam and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-30 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brief book one of the most distinguished living American philosophers takes up the question of whether ethical judgments can properly be considered objective—a question that has vexed philosophers over the past century. Looking at the efforts of philosophers from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century, Hilary Putnam traces the ways in which ethical problems arise in a historical context. Putnam’s central concern is ontology—indeed, the very idea of ontology as the division of philosophy concerned with what (ultimately) exists. Reviewing what he deems the disastrous consequences of ontology’s influence on analytic philosophy—in particular, the contortions it imposes upon debates about the objective of ethical judgments—Putnam proposes abandoning the very idea of ontology. He argues persuasively that the attempt to provide an ontological explanation of the objectivity of either mathematics or ethics is, in fact, an attempt to provide justifications that are extraneous to mathematics and ethics—and is thus deeply misguided.
Download or read book World and Life as One written by Martin Stokhof and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-07 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I know of no better book on the Tractatus. It is unique in covering in depth both the ontological-technical aspects and the ethical parts of that work.” —Göran Sundholm, Leyden University This book explores in detail the relation between ontology and ethics in the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, notably the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and, to a lesser extent, the Notebooks 1914-1916. Self-contained and requiring no prior knowledge of Wittgenstein’s thought, it is the first book-length argument that his views on ethics decisively shaped his ontological and semantic thought. The book’s main thesis is twofold. It argues that the ontological theory of the Tractatus is fundamentally dependent on its logical and linguistic doctrines: the tractarian world is the world as it appears in language and thought. It also maintains that this interpretation of the ontology of the Tractatus can be argued for not only on systematic grounds, but also via the contents of the ethical theory that it offers. Wittgenstein’s views on ethics presuppose that language and thought are but one way in which we interact with reality. Although detailed studies of Wittgenstein’s ontology and ethics exist, this book is the first thorough investigation of the relationship between them. As an introduction to Wittgenstein, it sheds new light on an important aspect of his early thought.
Download or read book Heidegger Ethics and the Practice of Ontology written by David Webb and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-11-03 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heidegger, Ethics and the Practice of Ontology presents an important new examination of ethics and ontology in Heidegger. There remains a basic conviction throughout Heidegger's thought that the event by which Being is given or disclosed is somehow 'prior' to our relation to the many beings we meet in our everyday lives. This priority makes it possible to talk about Being 'as such'. It also sanctions the relegation of ethics to a secondary position with respect to ontology. However, Heidegger's acknowledgement that ontology itself must remain intimately bound to concrete existence problematises the priority accorded to the ontological dimension. David Webb takes this bond as a key point of reference and goes on to develop critical perspectives that open up from within Heidegger's own thought, particularly in relation to Heidegger's debt to Aristotelian physics and ethics. Webb examines the theme of continuity and its role in the constitution of the 'as such' in Heidegger's ontology and argues that to address ontology is to engage in an ethical practice and vice versa.
Download or read book Monstrous Ontologies Politics Ethics Materiality written by Caterina Nirta and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the presence of monsters in popular culture is ever-increasing, their use as an explicit or implicit category to frame, stigmatise, and demonise the other is seemingly on the rise. At the same time, academic interest for monsters is ever-growing. Usually, monstrosity is understood as a category that emerges to signal a transgression to a given order; this approach has led to the demystification of the insidious characterisations of the (racial, sexual, physical) other as monstrous. While this effort has been necessary, its collateral effects have reduced the monstrous to a mere (socio-cultural) construction of the other: a dialectical framing that de facto deprives monstrosity from any reality. 'Monstrous Ontologies: Politics, Ethics, Materiality' proffers the necessity of challenging these monstrous otherings and their perverse socio-political effects, whilst also asserting that the monstrous is not simply an epistemological construct, but that it has an ontological reality. There is a profound difference between monsters and monstrosity. While the former is an often sterile political and social simplification, the end-product of rhetorical and biopolitical apparatuses; the latter may be understood as a dimension that nurtures the un-definable, that is, that shows the limits of these apparatuses by embodying their material excess: not a 'cultural frame', but the limit to the very mechanism of 'framing'. The monstrous expresses the combining, hybridising, becoming, and creative potential of socio-natural life, albeit colouring this powerful vitalism with the dark hue of a fearful, disgusting, and ultimately indigestible reality that cannot simply be embraced with multicultural naivety. As such, it forces us towards radically changing not the categories, but the very mechanisms of categorisation through which reality is framed and acted upon. Here lies the profound ethical dimension that monstrosity forces us to acknowledge; here lies its profoundly political potential, one that cannot be unfolded by merely deconstructing monstrosity, and rather requires to engage with its uncomfortable, appalling, and revealing materiality. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, PostDocs, and academics alike in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, humanities, sociology and social theory, criminology, human geography, and critical legal theory.
Download or read book Ontological Entanglements Agency and Ethics in International Relations written by Laura Zanotti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the relevance of ontological commitments for epistemology and methodology in International Relations have been the subject of growing debate for several years, the implications for ethics and political agency of embracing an ontology of entanglement have remained unexplored. This work focuses on the importance of addressing the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the discipline of International Relations. There is increased awareness of the limits of abstract principles as ways of adjudicating real life political and ethical choices regarding International Intervention and international development for both practitioners and scholars. The work challenges IR prevailing ontological imaginaries rooted upon Newtonian physics and argues that non-substantialist ontological positions nurture a political ethos that privileges ‘modest’ engagements of practical solidarity and weights political choices with regard to the consequences and distributive effects they may produce in the context where they are made rather than based upon their universal normative aspirations. While the book is firmly rooted in metatheory, Zanotti also highlights the easiness with which political failures are dismissed as unintended consequences and argues that the current crisis in Syria, and genocides in Srebrenica and Rwanda have shown that advocating abstract ethical principles, be they the Responsibility to Protect, impartiality, or following rules can lead to disaster and can foster violent and exclusionary practices. She also exemplifies how an alternative ethos can be practiced through the example of an international NGO in Haiti. Highlighting the need for critically re-thinking the way we conceptualize political agency and validate ethics, this work will be of interest to scholars of International Relations theory, ethics and critical security studies.
Download or read book Hans Jonas s Ethic of Responsibility written by Theresa Morris and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Articulates the fundamental importance of ontology to Hans Jonass environmental ethics. Despite his tremendous impact on the German Green Party and the influence of his work on contemporary debates about stem cell research in the United States, Hans Jonass (19031993) philosophical contributions have remained partially obscured. In particular, the ontological grounding he gives his ethics, based on a phenomenological engagement with biology to bridge the is-ought gap, has not been fully appreciated. Theresa Morris provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of Jonass philosophy that reveals the thread that runs through all of his thought, including his work on the philosophy of biology, ethics, the philosophy of technology, and bioethics. She places Jonass philosophy in context, comparing his ideas to those of other ethical and environmental philosophers and demonstrating the relevance of his thought for our current ethical and environmental problems. Crafting strong supporting arguments for Jonass insightful view of ethics as a matter of both reason and emotion, Morris convincingly lays out his account of the basis of our responsibilities not only to the biosphere but also to current and future generations of beings.
Download or read book The Incorporeal written by Elizabeth Grosz and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy has inherited a powerful impulse to embrace either dualism or a reductive monism—either a radical separation of mind and body or the reduction of mind to body. But from its origins in the writings of the Stoics, the first thoroughgoing materialists, another view has acknowledged that no forms of materialism can be completely self-inclusive—space, time, the void, and sense are the incorporeal conditions of all that is corporeal or material. In The Incorporeal Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ideal is inherent in the material and the material in the ideal, and, by tracing its development over time, she makes the case that this same idea reasserts itself in different intellectual contexts. Grosz shows that not only are idealism and materialism inextricably linked but that this "belonging together" of the entirety of ideality and the entirety of materiality is not mediated or created by human consciousness. Instead, it is an ontological condition for the development of human consciousness. Grosz draws from Spinoza's material and ideal concept of substance, Nietzsche's amor fati, Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence, Simondon's preindividual, and Raymond Ruyer's self-survey or autoaffection to show that the world preexists the evolution of the human and that its material and incorporeal forces are the conditions for all forms of life, human and nonhuman alike. A masterwork by an eminent theoretician, The Incorporeal offers profound new insight into the mind-body problem
Download or read book Values and Ontology written by Beatrice Centi and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The articles in this volume discuss the relation between values and ontology, focusing on the significance of ontology for ethics and aesthetics, i.e., themes which due to the raising interest in ontology come to play a central role in contemporary philosophical debate. The contributors address the questions of whether and in which sense values can be considered to be real, whether it is possible to experience them, and in which sense we can speak about their objective validity. These topics – which were also discussed by early phenomenologists like Brentano, Meinong, Ehrenfels, proponents of Gestalt psychology like Köhler, by Husserl, and by French phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty – are approached by both historical and systematic analysis.
Download or read book Heidegger s Moral Ontology written by James D. Reid and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heidegger's Moral Ontology offers the first comprehensive account of the ethical issues that underwrite Heidegger's efforts to develop a novel account of human existence. Drawing from a wide array of source materials from the period leading up to the publication of Being and Time (1919–1927), and in conversation with ancient, modern, and contemporary contributions to moral philosophy, James D. Reid brings Heidegger's early philosophy into fruitful dialogue with the history of ethics, and sheds fresh light on such familiar topics as Heidegger's critique of Husserl, his engagement with Aristotle, his account of mortality, the role played by Kant in the genesis of Being and Time, and Heidegger's early reflections on philosophical language and concepts. This lively book will appeal to all who are interested in Heidegger's early phenomenology and in his thought more generally, as well as to those interested in the nature, scope, and foundations of ethical life.
Download or read book Theory and Applications of Ontology Philosophical Perspectives written by Roberto Poli and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-08-28 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ontology was once understood to be the philosophical inquiry into the structure of reality: the analysis and categorization of ‘what there is’. Recently, however, a field called ‘ontology’ has become part of the rapidly growing research industry in information technology. The two fields have more in common than just their name. Theory and Applications of Ontology is a two-volume anthology that aims to further an informed discussion about the relationship between ontology in philosophy and ontology in information technology. It fills an important lacuna in cutting-edge research on ontology in both fields, supplying stage-setting overview articles on history and method, presenting directions of current research in either field, and highlighting areas of productive interdisciplinary contact. Theory and Applications of Ontology: Philosophical Perspectives presents ontology in philosophy in ways that computer scientists are not likely to find elsewhere. The volume offers an overview of current research traditions in ontology, contrasting analytical, phenomenological, and hermeneutic approaches. It introduces the reader to current philosophical research on those categories of everyday and scientific reasoning that are most relevant to present and future research in information technology.
Download or read book Castoriadis s Ontology written by Suzi Adams and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first systematic reconstruction of Castoriadis's philosophical trajectory. It critically interprets the shifts in his ontology by reconsidering the ancient problematic of human institution(nomos) and nature(physis), on the one hand, and the question of beingand creation, on the other.Unlike the order of physis, the order of nomos has played no substantial role in the development of Western thought. The first part of the book suggests that Castoriadis sought to remedy this by elucidating the social-historical as the region of being that eludes the determinist imaginary of inherited philosophy. This ontological turn was announced in his 1975 magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society.With the aid of archival sources, the second half of the book reconstructs a second ontological shift in Castoriadis's thought that occurred during the 1980s. The author argues that Castoriadis extends his notion of ontological creationbeyond the human realm and into nature. This move has implications for his overall ontology and signals a shift toward a general ontology of creative physis
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza s Ethics written by Olli Koistinen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-31 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its publication in 1677, Spinoza's Ethics has fascinated philosophers, novelists, and scientists alike. It is undoubtedly one of the most exciting and contested works of Western philosophy. Written in an austere, geometrical fashion, the work teaches us how we should live, ending with an ethics in which the only thing good in itself is understanding. Spinoza argues that only that which hinders us from understanding is bad and shows that those endowed with a human mind should devote themselves, as much as they can, to a contemplative life. This Companion volume provides a detailed, accessible exposition of the Ethics. Written by an internationally known team of scholars, it is the first anthology to treat the whole of the Ethics and is written in an accessible style.
Download or read book Ontology and the Art of Tragedy written by Martha Husain and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ontology and the Art of Tragedy is a sustained reflection on the principles and criteria from which to guide one's approach to Aristotle's Poetics. Its scope is twofold: historical and systematic. In its historical aspect it develops an approach to Aristotle's Poetics, which brings his distinctive philosophy of being to bear on the reception of this text. In its systematic aspect it relates Aristotle's theory of art to the perennial desiderata of any theory of art, and particularly to Kandinsky's.
Download or read book Ontology Revisited written by Ruth Groff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Groff's argument runs counter to the familiar anti-metaphysical habit. Social and political philosophy, she maintains, is not as metaphysically neutral as it may seem. Even the most deontological of theories connects up with an attendant set of philosophical commitments regarding what kinds of things exist, as a fundamental ontological matter, and what they are like. These are topics of interest not just to social and political philosophers, but to social scientists and to philosophers of social science as well. "Ruth Groff has broken new ground in demonstrating the connection between social and political thought and the ontology of causal powers. Her account of the structure of Humean thinking about agency is excellent. Especially significant is the role that she assigns to Kantianism in the analysis that she develops. She moves effortlessly between contemporary metaphysics, political theory, critical social theory, and the history of modern philosophy, offering trenchant insights along the way into the work of thinkers ranging from Hume himself to Mill, Adorno, and Martha Nussbaum, and into debates over agent causation and emergence. There is even a discussion, in the final chapter, of Spinoza. This is big-picture philosophy at its best: rigorous and exacting at the level of detail; original, compelling and systematic in the whole." - Stephen Mumford, Professor of Metaphysics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham
Download or read book The Ontology of Becoming and the Ethics of Particularity written by M. C. Dillon and published by . This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: M. C. Dillon (1938–2005) was widely regarded as a world-leading Merleau-Ponty scholar. His book Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (1988) is recognized as a classic text that revolutionized the philosophical conversation about the great French phenomenologist. Dillon followed that book with two others: Semiological Reductionism, a critique of early-1990s linguistic reductionism, and Beyond Romance, a richly developed theory of love. At the time of his death, Dillon had nearly completed two further books to which he was passionately committed. The first one offers a highly original interpretation of Nietzsche’s ontology of becoming. The second offers a detailed ethical theory based on Merleau-Ponty’s account of carnal intersubjectivity. The Ontology of Becoming and the Ethics of Particularity collects these two manuscripts written by a distinguished philosopher at the peak of his powers—manuscripts that, taken together, offer a distinctive and powerful view of human life and ethical relations.
Download or read book Ontology and Ethics written by Adam C. Clark and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent scholarship in a number of disciplines has explored the relationship between ontology and ethics. The essays in this collection indicate what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) has to contribute to this discussion. By engaging the breadth of his academic and pastoral writings, these essays retrieve Bonhoeffer's theology for a contemporary audience. They do so by critically clarifying and extending key concepts developed by Bonhoeffer across his corpus and in dialogue with Hegel, Heidegger, Dilthey, Barth, and others. They also create dialogues between Bonhoeffer and more recent figures like Levinas, Agamben, Foucault, and Lacoste. Finally, they take up pressing, contemporary ethical issues such as globalization, managerialism, and racism.
