Metaphysics Commons^™

Wind In A Dry Glass, Khia Hong

Theses and Dissertations

Khia Hong’s paper unfolds in five sections, tracing the ontological and epistemological inquiries behind her sculptures. When the sculptures stepped down from the pedestal and entered the plane of lived reality, the question “What is sculpture?” expanded into “What is sculpture, the self, and the world?” Through reflections on the self, Hong details how these questions emerge and are addressed in her material encounters.

On The Readership Of Spinoza’S Writing & A Poetics For Thought, Tam Pham

Honors Thesis

This paper invites attention to textual facts and other intricacies in the readership of Spinoza’s writing, which bring to the fore his thinking qua thinking under language, a consideration that seems at least underappreciated, if not misappreciated, by the very readership in question. In so doing, the paper reflects on the possibility—and perhaps necessity—of a poetological purview into a philosophical corpus, in terms of its being written under a sense of Latin as well as of other tongues, generated by and for a thinker to be the linguisticity within which he thinks. To put in differently: if Spinoza were to …

Difference And Alterity: On Hegel And Deleuze, Thomas Szwedska

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a study in ontology. Its central question is: can we think difference without alterity and still think of difference as an essential determination of what something is? I answer that it is possible to ontologically disambiguate difference from alterity. The central thesis of my dissertation is that thinking difference without otherness not only produces meaningful differences, but if we are committed to a complete understanding of what difference is and how it functions, then it is necessary to account for this determination. Thus, I find two cases in the history of philosophy which do think difference without …

New Commandments, Jacob Sussman

Masters Theses

I reach into the earth, pull out mud-encrusted objects, and recombine them to define new meanings. With every object transposed, the past breaks down; new potentials form. “New Commandments” recombines historical symbolism through an intuitive building, destroying, and merging to reimagine or re-establish meaning.

The work critiques rites of passage, masculinity, and stereotypes by deconstructing how histories, ideologies, and preconceptions form.

As a queer person raised in-between Judaism and Christianity, social preconceptions and religious expectations festered my formation. Our choice is taken away at this moment of conception. To take back autonomy, I reimagine historical, and religious symbolism and transmute …

Narratives Of Existence And The Narrative Existence: Ontological Unity In The Border Trilogy And Quantum Theory, Rebecca Leigh Mcintosh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Because the humanities and the sciences approach philosophical questions in contrasting ways, the study of literature and the study of physical science are often viewed as unrelated realms of scholarly inquiry. Science aims to provide a methodological approach for gathering knowledge about the world, while the humanities focus on criticism or analysis of cultural artifacts. However, even though the conceptual frameworks applied in scientific study and literary study are often incompatible or remarkably divergent, their methods for conceptualizing and transmitting ideas are the same, for humanity understands the world and experience of this world through narratives composed of referential metaphors. …

Conventionality And Causality In Lewis-Type Evolutionary Prediction Games, Gordon Purves

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Barrett and others have used Lewis-style evolutionary games to argue that we ought not to trust our scientific languages to inform us about ontology. More specifically, Barrett has shown that in some simple evolutionary contexts the best descriptive languages need not cut nature at its joints, that they may guide action as successfully as possible while simultaneously being deeply conventional. The present article expands upon Barrett’s argument, exploring the space for conventionalism in more metaphysically robust causal evolutionary models. By using evolutionary prediction games, the present article examines the range of metaphysical facts in these models and shows how Barrett’s …

Caducitas And Śūnyatā: A Neoplatonist Reading Of Nāgārjuna, Fabien Muller

Comparative Philosophy

In this paper I am addressing the question whether Nāgārjuna’s doctrine should be understood as a theory that describes reality itself (ontology) or as a theory of our relation to reality (epistemological, logical, psychological, etc.). To answer this question, I propose to compare Nāgārjuna’s concept of emptiness to that of ‘caducity’, a key element in the ontology of Renaissance Neoplatonist philosopher Francisco Patrizi. By showing that these concepts are similar, I argue that Nāgārjuna’s standpoint can be considered as that of ontology.

Scurvy And The Ontology Of Natural Kinds, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Some philosophers understand natural kinds to be the categories which are constraints on enquiry. In order to elaborate the metaphysics appropriate to such an account, I consider the complicated history of scurvy, citrus, and vitamin C. It may be tempting to understand these categories in a shallow way (as mere property clusters) or in a deep way (as fundamental properties). Neither approach is adequate, and the case instead calls for middle-range ontology: starting from categories which we identify in the world and elaborating their structure, but not pretending to jump ahead to a complete story about fundamental being.

Nietzsche, Foucault, Power: A Study Of Paradox And Ontology In Nietzsche, Nicholas R. Ray

Honors Thesis

This thesis investigates a paradox at the heart of Nietzsche and utilizes Foucault as an instrument to understand this dilemma. The paradox is the synthesis of Nietzsche's doctrine of perspectivism and his ontological doctrine of the will to power. Put simply his doctrine of perspectivism says there can be no ontological facts yet Nietzsche articulates the will to power as an ontological matter of fact. This thesis explores the "First Essay" of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals to demonstrate the existence of this paradox. Further, I will conduct a Foucauldian cross-examination to further flesh out this paradox, where and why it …

Ontological Functionalism: You Are An Abstract Computer, William L. Farlow

Honors College Theses

The Following thesis explores the application of machine-state functionalism in ontology. I take the position that physical things are explainable in terms of a Turing machine originating in abstracta and can, therefore, be reduced to abstracta.

Against Monetary Functionalism: A Social Ontology Of Money, James Payne

Honors Program Theses

This paper explores the concepts of individualism and holism in social ontology through an analysis of the ontology of money by integrating insights from the Critical Realist tradition as well as the distinction between metaphysical grounds and anchors. In doing so it examines alternative explanations of money's ontology like the paradigmatic approach of John Searle. The results of the inquiry are then connected in relation to the models of social explanation in mainstream economics.

How To Distinguish Qualities And Dispositions, Seth Reed

Theses

There is an intuitive difference between a qualitative and a dispositional predicate. Qualitative predicates seemingly refer to inherent features of an object, while dispositional predicates point outward to possible interactions. Attempts to further spell this distinction have proven difficult, however. Past approaches have either started from metaphysical assumptions or compared paradigmatic cases of each side-by-side. In this paper I offer a new approach to solving this puzzle. Starting with a qualitative or dispositional predicate of a property, we can examine how that differs from a predicate of the other kind that applies, in virtue of that property, to the same …

Returning The Radiant Gaze: Visual Art And Embodiment In A World Of Subjects, Beth Carruthers

The Goose

Drawing on the latter thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as on the ideas of other contemporary philosophers and theorists, this essay considers the denigration of vision from Plato to twentieth-century anti-ocularism, and argues for the reclamation of vision and visual perception as sensuous, embodied interplay between humans and world, self and other—an opening to wonder and more sensitive human-world relations. It does so through a phenomenological exploration of the process of art-making, and consideration of the role and value of artworks and images in the world. This essay is first and foremost an enquiry. As such it promises no …

Thinking Between Deleuze And Merleau-Ponty, Judith Wambacq

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty is the first book-length examination of the relation between these two major thinkers of the twentieth century. Questioning the dominant view that the two have little of substance in common, Judith Wambacq brings them into a compelling dialogue to reveal a shared, historically grounded concern with the transcendental conditions of thought. Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze propose an immanent ontology, differing more in style than in substance. Wambacq’s synthetic treatment is nevertheless critical; she identifies the limitations of each thinker’s approach to immanent transcendental philosophy and traces its implications—through their respective relationships with Bergson, Proust, Cézanne, …

Fictionalism, Semantics, And Ontology, Gordon Purves

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This article expands upon the argument of a previous work which defended a variational account of scientific fictions. Specifically, I show that this understanding of scientific fictions can provide guidance for realist interpretations of scientific theories and models. Depending on a model's variational properties, different ontological commitments are appropriate, providing a principled way for a realist to moderate her views according to the structural properties of a given model. This reasoning is then applied the Lee-Yang theory and Kubo-Martin-Schwinger statistics, two foundational models in quantum statistical mechanics. The Lee-Yang theory is analyzed in a way that permits a robust realist …

Human-Nonhuman Chimeras, Ontology, And Dignity: A Constructivist Approach To The Ethics Of Conducting Research On Cross-Species Hybrids, Jonathan M. Vajda

The Hilltop Review

Developments in biological technology in the last few decades highlight the surprising and ever-expanding practical benefits of stem cells. With this progress, the possibility of combining human and nonhuman organisms is a reality, with ethical boundaries that are not readily obvious. These inter-species hybrids are of a larger class of biological entities called “chimeras.” As the concept of a human-nonhuman creature is conjured in our minds, either incredulous wonder or grotesque horror is likely to follow. This paper seeks to mitigate those worries and demotivate reasonable concerns raised against chimera research, all the while pressing current ethical positions toward their …

"A Return To Reality": Mark Hansen's Metaphysics: Towards A New Relationality Of Twenty-First-Century Media, Sandra Moyano Ariza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is framed in the recent turn to speculation in philosophy which aims to develop new ontologies that deprivilege the human and human cognition, in turn claiming the capacity of all entities to hold agency in experiential processes. New philosophical scholarship is seeing the resurgence of an old problematic within this turn: the ontological debate of substances vs. relations. The study is structured around these two positions, represented by Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology which claims the essence of all entities and Steven Shaviro's understanding of relationality through Whitehead's structure of experience and becoming, respectively. These two positions will help …

Theories Of Properties And Ontological Theory-Choice: An Essay In Metaontology, Christopher Gibilisco

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation argues that we have no good reason to accept any one theory of properties as correct. To show this, I present three possible bases for theory-choice in the properties debate: coherence, explanatory adequacy, and explanatory value. Then I argue that none of these bases resolve the underdetermination of our choice between theories of properties.

First, I argue considerations about coherence cannot resolve the underdetermination, because no traditional theory of properties is obviously incoherent. Second, I argue considerations of explanatory adequacy cannot resolve the underdetermination, because every traditional theory of properties lacks the theoretical resources to adequately explain resemblance, …

A Black Art: Ontology, Data, And The Tower Of Babel Problem, Andrew J. Iliadis

Open Access Dissertations

Computational ontologies are a new type of emerging scientific media (Smith, 2016) that process large quantities of heterogeneous data about portions of reality. Applied computational ontologies are used for semantically integrating (Heiler, 1995; Pileggi & Fernandez-Llatas, 2012) divergent data to represent reality and in so doing applied computational ontologies alter conceptions of materiality and produce new realities based on levels of informational granularity and abstraction (Floridi, 2011), resulting in a new type of informational ontology (Iliadis, 2013) the critical analysis of which requires new methods and frameworks. Currently, there is a lack of literature addressing the theoretical, social, and critical …

Book Reviews: Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’S Like To Be A Thing By Ian Bogost, Jet Plane: How It Works By David Macaulay, Andvibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things By Jane Bennett, Nathaniel A. Rivers

Criticism

In this review essay, I review Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (2012) and Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) alongside David MacAuley’s Jet Plane: How It Works (2012), which is devoted to a child’s experience of airplanes. While composed for different audiences in traditionally discrete contexts, all three books do critical, speculative work in providing explicit articulations and implicit performances of alternative ontologies from which Critical Air Studies might benefit.

Exploring Consciousness Through The Qualitative Content Of Equations, Ashok Narasimhan, Menas C. Kafatos

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The majority of the focus on equations in physics has been on the mathematical and computational aspects. Here we focus on the qualitative content of what the relationships expressed in equations imply. In some sense, we are asking foundational questions about the ontology of equations.

Naturalism, Causality, And Nietzsche's Conception Of Science, Justin Remhof

Philosophy Faculty Publications

There is a disagreement over how to understand Nietzsche’s view of science. According to what I call the Negative View, Nietzsche thinks science should be reconceived or superseded by another discourse, such as art, because it is nihilistic. By contrast, what I call the Positive View holds that Nietzsche does not think science is nihilistic, so he denies that it should be reinterpreted or overcome. Interestingly, defenders of each position can appeal to Nietzsche’s understanding of naturalism to support their interpretation. I argue that Nietzsche embraces a social constructivist conception of causality that renders his naturalism incompatible with the views …

Nietzsche's Conception Of Truth: Correspondence, Coherence Or Pragmatist?, Justin Remhof

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Nearly every common theory of truth has been attributed to Nietzsche, while some commentators have argued that he simply has no theory of truth. This essay argues that Nietzsche’s remarks on truth are better situated within either the coherence or pragmatist theories of truth than the correspondence theory. Nietzsche’s thoughts conflict with the correspondence framework because he believes that the truth conditions of propositions are constitutively dependent on our actions.

Epistemological Realism And Onto-Relations, Max Lewis Edward Andrews

Liberty Theological Review

The traditional concept of knowledge is a justified true belief. The bulk of contemporary epistemology has focused primarily on that task of justification. Truth seems to be a quite obvious criterion—does the belief in question correspond to reality? My contention is that the aspect of ontology is far too separated from epistemology. This onto-relationship of between reality and beliefs require the epistemic method of epistemological realism. This is not to diminish the task of justification. I will then discuss the role of inference from the onto-relationships of free invention and discovery and whether it is best suited for a foundationalist …

Toward Explaining The Gap : How A Particular View Of Explanation Underwrites The Explanatory Gap, Kimberly Van Orman

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In my dissertation, I consider a common argument for the existence of an unbridgeable explanatory gap between materialism and conscious experience which purports to show that we can determine a priori that conscious experience cannot possibly be explained by a materialist theory. The claim is: no matter what we might yet learn about the brain (or the world), we know enough right now about materialism and explanation to know that an explanation of conscious experience is beyond our reach. I argue that three well-known examples of this position (Jaegwon Kim, David Chalmers, and Joseph Levine) rely on a very narrow …

Everything Is Flat: The Transcendence Of The One In Neoplatonic Ontology, Joshua Packwood

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation research addresses the relationship between the One and everything else in Neoplatonic metaphysics. Plato is vague in describing this distinction and thus much of late antiquity attempts to fill in the gaps, as it were. The potential difficulty, however, is that the hierarchy of existence in late antiquity is susceptible to being understood as postulating a being that is "beyond being." To avoid this difficulty, I propose an interpretation of Dionysius the Areopagite to show that being is, by definition, intelligible and thus finite and limited. Since the first principle is that which is infinite it therefore cannot …

Identifying Pathway Proteins In Networks Using Convergence, Kathryn Dempsey Cooper, Hesham Ali

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

One of the key goals of systems biology concerns the analysis of experimental biological data available to the scientific public. New technologies are rapidly developed to observe and report whole-scale biological phenomena; however, few methods exist with the ability to produce specific, testable hypotheses from this noisy ‘big’ data. In this work, we propose an approach that combines the power of data-driven network theory along with knowledge-based ontology to tackle this problem. Network models are especially powerful due to their ability to display elements of interest and their relationships as internetwork structures. Additionally, ontological data actually supplements the confidence of …

Identifying Modular Function Via Edge Annotation In Gene Correlation Networks Using Gene Ontology Search, Kathryn Dempsey Cooper, Ishwor Thapa, Dhundy Raj Bastola, Hesham Ali

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Correlation networks provide a powerful tool for analyzing large sets of biological information. This method of high-throughput data modeling has important implications in uncovering novel knowledge of cellular function. Previous studies on other types of network modeling (protein-protein interaction networks, metabolomes, etc.) have demonstrated the presence of relationships between network structures and organization of cellular function. Studies with correlation network further confirm the existence of such network structure and biological function relationship. However, correlation networks are typically noisy and the identified network structures, such as clusters, must be further investigated to verify actual cellular function. This is traditionally done using …

A Component Based Formal Ontology Model, A Method For Evaluating Such A Model, And The Results Of An Application Of That Method, Charles Tumitsa

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

For systems to truly communicate effectively, more than just data interchange is necessary. The systems must achieve conceptual interoperability, which implies communicating with understanding.

The LCIM (Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model) describes a number of levels of interoperability, each of which shows systems with an increased amount of conceptual understanding of the other systems they are communicating with. The lowest levels of this model, technical and syntactic interoperability, are achieved (and there are many existing examples) via data exchange in a number of different ways. Research has shown, however, that to attain higher levels of conceptual understanding, that there must …

Understanding Imperfection, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

Because of their inherent abstraction, systems ideas are not themselves sufficient for gaining scientific knowledge or solving practical problems, but they can be a source of insights into the universality of imperfection, insights which can contribute to a new scientific world view. Systems theory offers a metaphysics, or more precisely an ontology, of imperfection. Through it, we can heed Spinoza's injunction, “Not to lament, not to curse, but to understand.”