The System Of Absentology In Ontological Philosophy

This volume deals primarily with absentology, an ontological and social-scientific epistemological mode, dedicated to the analysis of absence. The book is drawn by manifestations of absence wherever they may be encountered. It deals with three terms, ‘the shadow economy’, ‘corruption’ and ‘pollution’, while constructing a non-realist ontology predicated upon the emptiness of all predicates, as expounded by certain strands of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. According to the absentological viewpoint, there is nothing outside, beyond, below or above relations. Relations exist on their own, enchained within an immense, infinite regress, opening and closing upon one another. Absentology is, by consequence of its nonattachment to phenomena, a form of social inquiry fundamentally alien to each and every social form, and it abandons any illusions about the possibility of an escape from the realm of relationality. This book will appeal to students and academics interested in ontological philosophy.

Over the past few decades, there has been a renewal of scholarly interest in the work of Henri Bergson (1859–1941). At once a commentary and a stark re-evaluation of Bergson’s philosophy, Updating Bergson: A Philosophy of the Enduring Present argues that time should be thought of as a hierarchy of simultaneous durations, the shifting reality of which can be revealed by the philosophical method of intuition. A duration is a perpetually dynamic flow situated in the now. Put simply, for Bergson, change is the substance of things. Nothing exists apart from alteration. Adam Lovasz analyzes Bergson’s philosophy of time, encompassing the three basic types of duration—material, organic, and subjective—and also touches on themes such as relativity, evolution, the problem of materialism and idealism, and the topic of free will. Lovasz connects key questions addressed by Bergson to contemporary scientific debates and paradigms. Shedding new light on the various aspects of Bergson's philosophy, this book is both a provocation and an invitation to think in terms of the enduring present, rather than committing ourselves to a dead past or an absent future.

All except three of the papers in this volume were presented at the colloquium on "L'Ontologie formelle aujourd'hui", Geneva, 3-5 June 1988. The three exceptions, the papers by David Armstrong, Uwe Meixner and Wolfgang Lenzen, were presented at the colloquium on "Properties", Zinal, June 1-3, 1990. It was, incidentally, at the second of these two colloquia that the European Society for Analytic Philosophy came into being. The fathers of analytic philosophy - Moore and Russell - were in no doubt that ontology or metaphysics as well as the topics oflanguage, truth and logic constituted the core subject-matter of their "analytic realism", 1 for the task of metaphysics as they conceived things was the description of 2 the world. And logic and ontology are indissolubly linked in the system of the grandfather of analytic philosophy, Frege. After the Golden Age of analytic philosophy - in Cambridge and Austria - opposition to realism as well as the "linguistic turn" contributed for a long time to the eclipse of ontology. 3 Thanks in large measure to the work of some of the senior contributors to the present volume - Roderick Chisholm, Herbert Hochberg, David Armstrong and Karel Lambert - ontology and metaphysics now enjoy once again the central position they occupied some eighty years ago in the heyday of analytic philosophy.

What is it for any contingent thing to exist? Why does any contingent thing exist? For some time now, the preferred style in addressing such questions has been deflationary when it has not been eliminativist. In its critical half, this book thoroughly analyzes and demolishes the main deflationary and eliminativist accounts of existence, including those of Brentano, Frege, Russell, and Quine, thereby restoring existence to its rightful place as one of the deep topics in philosophy, if not the deepest. In its constructive half, the book defends the thesis that the two questions admit of a unified answer, and that this answer takes the form of what the author calls a paradigm theory of existence. The central idea of the paradigm theory is that existence itself is a paradigmatically existent concrete individual. In this way the author vindicates onto-theology and puts paid to the Heideggerian conceit that Being cannot itself be a being. This work will be of interest to all serious students and teachers of philosophy, especially those interested in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion.

It is no exaggeration to say that of the early 20th century German philosophers who claimed to establish a new ontology, former neo-Kantian turned realist Nicolai Hartmann is the only one to have actually followed through. "Ontology: Laying the Foundations" deals with "what is insofar as it is," and its four parts tackle traditional ontological assumptions and prejudices and traditional categories such as substance, thing, individual, whole, object, and phenomenon; a novel redefinition of existence and essence in terms of the ontological factors Dasein and Sosein and their interrelations; an analysis of modes of "givenness" and the ontological embeddedness of cognition in affective transcendent acts; and a discussion of the status of ideal being, including mathematical being, phenomenological essences, logical laws, values, and the interconnections between the ideal and real spheres. Hartmann’s work offers rich resources for those interested in overcoming the human-centeredness of much 20th century philosophy. Hartmann’s work offers rich resources for those interested in overcoming the human-centeredness of much 20th century philosophy.

This volume is devoted to problems within analytic metaphysics. It defends an ontology and theory of categories inspired by Aristotle, but revised in such a way as to be compatible with modern science. The ontology of both natural and social reality is addressed, starting out from the view that universals exist but only in the spatiotemporal world (immanent realism). In attempting to bring Aristotle's ontology up-to-date, the author relies very much on the thinking of Edmund Husserl, conceiving the cement of the universe as Husserlian relations of existential dependence and regarding intentionality as a non-reducible category in the ontology of mind. The work is thoroughly realistic in spirit, but large parts of it should nonetheless be of interest to conceptualists and nominalists, too.