Personal Ontology

What are we? Are we, for example, souls, organisms, brains, or something else? In this book, Andrew Brenner argues that there are principled obstacles to our discovering the answer to this fundamental metaphysical question. The main competing accounts of personal ontology hold that we are either souls (or composites of soul and body), or we are composite physical objects of some sort, but, as Brenner shows, arguments for either of these options can be parodied and transformed into their opposites. Brenner also examines arguments for and against the existence of the self, offers a detailed discussion of the metaphysics of several afterlife scenarios - resurrection, reincarnation, and mind uploading -- and considers whether agnosticism with respect to personal ontology should lead us to agnosticism with respect to the possibility of life after death.

Many discussions of personal identity frequently ignore the basic metaphysical nature of human people. 'What Are We?' explains the question's meaning, considers in detail the main possible answers to it, and suggests how the problem might be solved.

Presents the main competing accounts of personal ontology: that we are either souls, or we are composite physical objects of some sort.

Many discussions of personal identity frequently ignore the basic metaphysical nature of human people. 'What Are We?' explains the question's meaning, considers in detail the main possible answers to it, and suggests how the problem might be solved.

This edited volume examines women's voices in phenomenology, many of which had a formative impact on the movement but have be kept relatively silent for many years. It features papers that truly extend the canonical scope of phenomenological research. Readers will discover the rich philosophical output of such scholars as Edith Stein, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and Gerda Walther. They will also come to see how the phenomenological movement allowed its female proponents to achieve a position in the academic world few women could enjoy at the time. The book explores the intersection of social ontology, phenomenology, and women scholars in phenomenology. The papers offer a fresh look at such topics as the nature of communities, shared values, feelings, and other mental content. In addition, coverage examines the contributions of Jewish women to the science, who were present at the beginning of the phenomenological movement. This remarkable anthology also features a paper on Gerda Walther written by Linda Lopez McAlister, former editor of the feminist journal Hypatia, who had met Walther in 1976. This book features work from the conference “Women Phenomenologists on Social Ontology,” held at the University of Paderborn. Overall, it collects profiles and analysis that unveil a hidden history of phenomenology.

This book is a collection of articles authored by renowed Polish ontologists living and working in the early part of the 21st century. Harking back to the well-known Polish Lvov-Warsaw School, founded by Kazimierz Twardowski, we try to make our ontological considerations as systematically rigorous and clear as possible – i.e. to the greatest extent feasible, but also no more than the subject under consideration itself allows for. Hence, the papers presented here do not seek to steer clear of methods of inquiry typical of either the formal or the natural sciences: on the contrary, they use such methods wherever possible. At the same time, despite their adherence to rigorous methods, the Polish ontologists included here do not avoid traditional ontological issues, being inspired as they most certainly are by the great masters of Western philosophy – from Plato and Aristotle, through St. Thomas and Leibniz, to Husserl, to name arguably just the most important.

This book grew out of the First Symposium on the Personal Web, co-located with CASCON 2010 in Markham, Ontario, Canada. The purpose of the symposium was to bring together prominent researchers and practitioners from a diverse range of research areas relevant to the advancement of science and practice relating to the Personal Web. Research on the Personal Web is an outgrowth of the Smart Internet initiative, which seeks to extend and transform the web to be centred on the user, with the web as a calm platform ubiquitously providing cognitive support to its user and his or her tasks. As with the preceding SITCON workshop (held at CASCON 2009), this symposium involved a multi-disciplinary effort that brought together researchers and practitioners in data integration; web services modelling and architecture; human-computer interaction; predictive analytics; cloud infrastructure; semantics and ontology; and industrial application domains such as health care and finance. The discussions during the symposium dealt with different aspects of the architecture and functionality needed to make the Personal Web a reality. After the symposium the authors reworked their presentations into draft chapters that were submitted for peer evaluation and review. Every chapter went through two rounds of reviewing by at least two independent expert reviewers, and accepted chapters were then revised and are presented in this book.