Freedom is generated in at least two distinct ways: as the ability to avoid perceived dangers and pursue perceived goods, and even to pursue complicated plans in those directions, freedom evolves. But as a social and political matter, freedom seems more subject to human will. The best social institutions -- the kind that serve to encourage or constrain freedom of choice -- also appear to be evolutionary products in some sense. Can there be too much freedom? Of course there can. (...) No constraint at all would guarantee personal and social disaster. Individual activity can pose serious dangers to nature and to culture. But how may we ensure that the constraints we may chose to impose our ones that are good for us? What we need to do is to find, as consistently as possible with the necessity that human individuals be able to use their local perception of local opportunity in pursuit of their own interests, a framework that emerges out of human practice; we should take advantage of lessons learned about evolution: those strategies work that are in tune with the forces at work within the niche. In our attempts to solve social problems, we can't afford to take our eyes off the characteristics of the individuals that make up the social world we hope to change. And in my view, here as elsewhere, the smallest intervention is likely to be the best. (shrink)

This article investigates the complex object of the political book. Mobilising Deleuze and Guattari's typology of the book, the article assesses the material properties of four specific books (or sets of books): Mao Zedong's ‘Little Red Book’, Russian Futurist books, Antonin Artaud's paper ‘spells’, and Guy Debord and Asger Jorn's ‘anti-book’ Mémoires. Highly critical of the dominant mode of the political book, what they call the ‘root-book’, Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the troubling religious structures and passions that (...) order its field. Here the book internalises the world as the origin and source of truth and authority – a mode of existence as dear to the avant-garde as it is to religious formations: ‘Wagner, Mallarmé, and Joyce, Marx and Freud: still Bibles.’ But the book also features in Deleuze and Guattari's counter-figure of the ‘rhizome-book’, where they foreground the dynamic materiality of this medium: ‘A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.’ The rhizome-book is an enticing concept for assessing the political book, yet Deleuze and Guattari pay little attention to the specific, concrete attributes of this medium. In focusing on the properties of particular books this article seeks to address that absence, and so contribute to an understanding of the political book that is fully engaged with its material forms. (shrink)

This paper contends that Bacon’s inductive method depends crucially on his general account of matter. I argue that Bacon develops a dynamic form of corpuscularianism, according to which aggregates of corpuscles undergo patterns of change that derive from active inclinations and appetites. The paper claims that Bacon’s corpuscularianism provides him with a theory of material form that enables him to theorize bodily change and possible material transformations. The point of natural histories and experiments is then to (...) find the processes of corpuscular change that correlate with making present or making absent simple natures. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to discussions about the archive, prompted by a concern regarding the modes of scientific production in discursive materials research. The notion of “discursive materials” is understood here, in a broad sense, as verbal productions. In particular, the article aims to establish a theoretical and methodological perspective grounded in materialist discourse theory, specifically in the theoretical hypothesis of interdiscourse as a constitutive exterior that intervenes in the formation and interpretation of all discursive material. On the (...) basis of this hypothesis, the proposal consists of the processual and dynamic construction of discursive archives, the configurations of which will result from analytical work. Accordingly, the article is organized into four sections. Firs, it systematizes and delineates approaches to definitions and archival practices, distinguishing between centripetal and centrifugal conceptions. Second, it articulates the concepts of archive and interdiscourse, problematizing modes of reading and setting out various procedural devices. Third, it addresses the concept of material form. Finally, it characterizes different modes of montage to delineate distinct ways of bringing together discursive materials in scientific research processes and projects. (shrink)

. This paper investigates the mechanisms of knowledge production of twenty-first century robotics-inspired morphology. How robotics influences investigations into the structure, development, and change of organic forms? Which definition of form is presupposed by this new approach to the study of form? I answer these questions by investigating how robots are used to understand and generate new questions about the locomotion of extinct animals in the first case study and in high-performance fishes in the second case study. After (...) having illustrated the landscape of twentieth-century morphology, I will reflect on the definition of form adopted in twenty-first century robotics-inspired morphology as well as on the differences between this approach to the study of form and the so-called nature-inspired disciplines, such as bionics or biomimetics. In the conclusion, I suggest that we are now in a material turn in morphology, characterized by the coexistence of the robotic, the virtual, and the real, which enables an understanding of how the structures and dynamics of shapes change over time. (shrink)

Following in the hylomorphic tradition of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas holds that all material substances are composed of matter and form. Like Aristotle, Aquinas also recognizes two different types of forms that material substances can be said to possess: substantial forms and accidental forms. Of which form or forms, then, are material substances composed? This paper explores two competing models of Aquinas’s ontology of material substances, which diverge on precisely this issue. According to what the (...) author refers to as the “Standard Model,” Aquinas’s view is that a material substance is composed of prime matter and substantial form. According to the “Expanded Model,” Aquinas’s view is that a material substance is composed of prime matter, substantial form, and all of its accidental forms. After outlining the main claims of each of the two competing models and considering two arguments in favor of the Standard Model, the author offers two arguments in favor of the Expanded Model. He argues that, given the way in which Aquinas argues for God’s simplicity in question three of the Prima pars, and the way in which he consistently describes the difference between an essence and a suppositum, or individual substance, throughout his works, there is good reason to believe that Aquinas thinks that the accidental forms of a material substance are included among its metaphysical parts. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the role of materiality in human cognition. We address issues such as the ways in which brain functions may change in response to interactions with material forms, the attributes of material forms that may cause change in brain functions, and the spans of time required for brain functions to reorganize when interacting with material forms. We then contrast thinking through materiality with thinking about it. We discuss these in terms of their evolutionary (...) significance and history as attested by stone tools and writing, material forms whose interaction endowed our lineage with conceptual thought and meta-awareness of conceptual domains. (shrink)

Human cognition is extended and enacted. Drawing the boundaries of cognition to include the resources and attributes of the body and materiality allows an examination of how these components interact with the brain as a system, especially over cultural and evolutionary spans of time. Literacy and numeracy provide examples of multigenerational, incremental change in both psychological functioning and material forms. Though we think materiality, its central role in human cognition is often unappreciated, for reasons that include conceptual distribution over (...) multiple material forms, the unconscious transparency of cognitive activity in general, and the different temporalities of metaplastic change in neurons and cultural forms. (shrink)

This paper critically examines I.I. Rubin's Essays on Marx's Theory of Value and argues that two different approaches to value theory can be found in that book: a more 'production-centred' value-form theory uneasily co-exists with a 'circulationist' perspective. This unresolved tension, the authors claim, reflects a more general theoretical shortcoming in Rubin's work, namely, a problematic conceptualisation of the inner connection between materiality and social form that eventually leads to a formalist perspective on the value-form. Furthermore, the (...) paper argues that all those antinomies are an expression of the historical and political context underlying Rubin's work, in which Marxism was being codified as state ideology. The political implications of Rubin's formalism are explored through the critical examination of its consequences for the comprehension of the social determinations of the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class. (shrink)

Der Begriff der Form bildet eines der Zentren des Aristotelischen Denkens. Seit langerer Zeit herrscht jedoch Uneinigkeit daruber, was genau Aristoteles darunter verstanden wissen wollte. Die Vorschlage reichen von der Identifizierung der Form mit der Art bis hin zur Behauptung, sie sei ganz im Gegenteil gerade etwas Individuelles, so dass die Form des Sokrates eine andere ware als die Platons. Im Fokus der Auseinandersetzung stehen dabei die sogenannten Substanzbucher (Met. Z, H, ies hat zwar einen guten Grund, (...) weil dort die Theorie der Form und damit die Ontologie des Aristoteles ihren Hohepunkt erreicht, ihr Voraussetzungsreichtum wird jedoch oft unterschatzt. Andreas Gasser versucht daher, die Entwicklung des Form-Begriffs von der fruhen Kategorienschrift bis zu seiner entscheidenden Modifikation durch die Einfuhrung des komplementaren Materie-Begriffs im ersten Buch der Physik nachzuzeichnen und dadurch einer neuen Interpretation der Substanzbucher den Boden z u bereiten. (shrink)

Der Begriff der Form bildet eines der Zentren des Aristotelischen Denkens. Seit langerer Zeit herrscht jedoch Uneinigkeit daruber, was genau Aristoteles darunter verstanden wissen wollte. Die Vorschlage reichen von der Identifizierung der Form mit der Art bis hin zur Behauptung, sie sei ganz im Gegenteil gerade etwas Individuelles, so dass die Form des Sokrates eine andere ware als die Platons. Im Fokus der Auseinandersetzung stehen dabei die sogenannten Substanzbucher (Met. Z, H, ies hat zwar einen guten Grund, (...) weil dort die Theorie der Form und damit die Ontologie des Aristoteles ihren Hohepunkt erreicht, ihr Voraussetzungsreichtum wird jedoch oft unterschatzt. Andreas Gasser versucht daher, die Entwicklung des Form-Begriffs von der fruhen Kategorienschrift bis zu seiner entscheidenden Modifikation durch die Einfuhrung des komplementaren Materie-Begriffs im ersten Buch der Physik nachzuzeichnen und dadurch einer neuen Interpretation der Substanzbucher den Boden z u bereiten. (shrink)

The crudest form of materialism will be taken as the basis of argument. If it can successfully evade the objections of some philosophers, then a more refined doctrine will be even less troubled.

This inaugural lecture, delivered on 17 November 2021 at the University of Neuchâtel, addresses the question: Are material objects analyzable into more basic constituents and, if so, what are they? It might appear that this question is more appropriately settled by empirical means as utilized in the natural sciences. For example, we learn from physics and chemistry that water is composed of H2O-molecules and that hydrogen and oxygen atoms themselves are composed of smaller parts, such as protons, which are (...) in turn composed of yet smaller parts, such as quarks, and so on. While the question at the center of this lecture might thus appear to fall more appropriately into the empirical domain of natural science, I argue that metaphysics in fact has an important role to play in determining how best to answer the question before us. More concretely, I propose that the Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism, when appropriately interpreted, provides the best metaphysical answer to the question of whether and how material objects are analyzable into more basic constituents. Hylomorphism holds that those entities to which this doctrine applies are, in some sense, compounds of matter (“hylē”) and form (“morphē” or “eidos”). Thus, the title of this lecture, “Form, Matter, Substance”, refers to the claim that lies at the center of the doctrine of hylomorphism, as applied to the domain of material objects, namely that sensible substances are the result of combining matter and form in the right sort of way; or, for short, “form + matter = substance”. I begin in Section II by providing some historical background which brings out Aristotle’s motivations for proposing the doctrine of hylomorphism in the context of his analysis of change. Section III turns to some of the main features of the contemporary hylomorphic theory I have defended especially in Koslicki (2008) and Koslicki (2018). Section IV discusses some challenging questions concerning artifacts which arise for both hylomorphic and other approaches to the metaphysics of concrete particular objects. Section V concludes by summarizing why, as contemporary metaphysicians, we should prefer a hylomorphic theory over its competitors as an analysis of concrete particular objects that is compatible with our current scientific understanding of the world. (shrink)

This book offers an original new account of one of Aristotle's central doctrines. Freudenthal He recreates from Aristotle's writings a more complete theory of material substance which is able to explain the problematical areas of the way matter organizes itself and the persistence of matter, to show that the hitherto ignored concept of vital heat is as central in explaining material substance as soul or form.

This article defends a new sense of “formalism” in philosophy and the arts, against recent materialist fashion. Form has three key opposite terms: matter, function, and content. First, I respond to Jane Bennett’s critique of object-oriented philosophy in favor of a unified matter-energy, showing that Bennett cannot reach the balanced standpoint she claims to obtain. Second, I show that the form/function dualism in architecture gives us two purely relational terms and thus cannot do justice to the topic of (...) form. Third, I argue against Greenberg, Heidegger, and McLuhan that content cannot be trivialized in favor of deeper form. I close with a new conception of mimesis as performance rather than as the fabrication of copies. The form underlying any work’s content is provided by the spectator herself as the only real object that does not withdraw from the aesthetic scene. (shrink)

Exploring materialism and social relationships in modern culture Material Culture and Mass Consumption offers an in-depth exploration of objects, objectification, ideology, and materialism in modern society. Drawing from Hegel, Marx, Munn, and Simmel, the discussion delves into the physicality of the material world and attempts to understand materialism as a form of cultural expression. Targeting mass production as the root of mass consumption, rather than the result, this book positions material goods at odds with genuine social (...) interaction and questions these relationships from the abstract to the intensely specific. (shrink)

"The doctrine of materialism is one of the perennial and most controversial ideas in the arts and sciences. Throughout history it has aroused strong passions, and in the Sixteenth and Twentieth centuries was a doctrine over which people were persecuted and killed. Yet it has been equally aligned with empirical, enlightened and tolerant thinking. This book explores the fascinating and important philosophy of materialism in an engaging and thought-provoking way. Opening with an overview of the ideas of some of the (...) most important materialists, including Lucretius, Epicurus, Hobbes and Hume up to Darwin and Marx, Brown and Ladyman show how materialism's origins were twofold: it was an early form of scientific explanation but also an intellectual outlook, or belief-system, about the world in general. They then explain how materialism's beginnings as imaginative vision of the true nature of things faced a major challenge from modern physics, in the form of quantum theory and the general theory of relativity. This posed major questions for materialism: how could it be reconciled with unobservable entities and new discoveries about the nature of space and time? As the authors show, out of this challenge materialism did not die but re-emerged - as the new doctrine of physicalism. Drawing on colourful examples throughout - from modern physics, the nature of the mind, and atheism - the authors argue that whilst materialism may not have all the answers, its humanism and staunch belief in observation, evidence and experiment remains our best hope in a fragmented and hyper-specialised world"--. (shrink)

What is the relation between the material, conventional symbol structures that we encounter in the spoken and written word, and human thought? A common assumption, that structures a wide variety of otherwise competing views, is that the way in which these material, conventional symbol-structures do their work is by being translated into some kind of content-matching inner code. One alternative to this view is the tempting but thoroughly elusive idea that we somehow think in some natural language (such (...) as English). In the present treatment I explore a third option, which I shall call the "complementarity" view of language. According to this third view the actual symbol structures of a given language add cognitive value by complementing (without being replicated by) the more basic modes of operation and representation endemic to the biological brain. The "cognitive bonus" that language brings is, on this model, not to be cashed out either via the ultimately mysterious notion of "thinking in a given natural language" or via some process of exhaustive translation into another inner code. Instead, we should try to think in terms of a kind of coordination dynamics in which the forms and structures of a language qua material symbol system play a key and irreducible role. Understanding language as a complementary cognitive resource is, I argue, an important part of the much larger project (sometimes glossed in terms of the "extended mind") of understanding human cognition as essentially and multiply hybrid: as involving a complex interplay between internal biological resources and external non-biological resources. (shrink)

The point of departure of this article is the trend towards hybridisation in new technology development, which makes classical dichotomies between machines, human life and the environment obsolete and leads to the post-human world we live in today. We critically reflect on the post-human concept of the hybrid world. Although we agree with post-humanists that human life can no longer be opposed to machines but appears as a decentralized human-technology relation, alliance or network that constitutes a hybrid world, we ask (...) for a limit to hybridisation. After rejecting the concept of metabolism as such a limit, we explore the concept of the responsive conativity of material entities. The principle of conativity of material entities provides a materialist perspective on metabolism, which enables us to conceive material entities as self-assertive material entities that are differentiated from the environment. The principle of responsivity of material entities provides a materialist perspective on the post-human world in which material entities are responsive to each other and form alliances and networks. We propose to differentiate between the conativity and responsivity of material entities and propose the conativity of matter as a limit to hybridisation in the post-human world. (shrink)

A comprehensive study of German materialism in the second half of the nineteenth century is long overdue. Among contemporary historians the mere passing references to Karl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Buchner as materialists and popularizers of science are hardly sufficient, for few individuals influenced public opinion in nineteenth-century Germany more than these men. Buchner, for example, revealed his awareness of the historical significance of his Kraft und Stoff in comments made in 1872, just seventeen years after its original appearance. (...) A philosophical book which has undergone twelve big German editions in the short span of seventeen years, which further has been issued in non-German countries and languages about fifteen to sixteen times in the same period, and whose appearance (although its author was entirely unknown up to then) has called forth an almost unprecedented storm in the press,... such a book can be nothing ordinary; the world-calling it enjoys at present must be justified through its wholly special characteristics or by the merits of its form and content. ' Vogt, Moleschott and Buchner explicitly held that their materialism was founded on natural science. But other materialists of the nineteenth century also laid claim to the scientific character of their own thought. It is likely that Marx and Engels would have permitted their brand of materialism to have been called scientific, provided, of course, that 'scientific' was understood in their dialectical meaning of the term. Socialism, Engels maintained, had become a science with Marx. (shrink)

This polemical work presents to the English-speaking world one of the most original philosophical thinkers to have emerged within post-war Europe. Sebastiano Timpanaro is an Italian classical philologist by training, an author of scholarly studies on the nineteenth-century poet Leopardi, and a Marxist by conviction. With great force and wit, On Materialism sets itself against what it sees as the virtually universal tendency within western Marxism since the war, to dissociate historical materialism from biological or physical materialism. Whereas the philosophical (...) legacy of the later Engels has been decried by most prominent Marxists since the 1920s, Timpanaro eloquently defends its essential purpose and relevance, by unfashionably re-emphasising the permanent weight of nature within history. In doing so, he returns to the heritage of Lucretius and Leopardi, and argues for a more consistent materialism that is at once more pessimistic and more hedonistic than any other contemporary version of Marxism. Timpanaro emphasises the insuperable limits of frailty and mortality as unalterable conditions of society whose transformation is the goal of revolutionary socialism. Timpanaro vigorously attacks what he regards as the widespread entente between a diluted Marxism and a fashionable idealism in the west, whether in the form of an “existentialist” or a “structuralist” union of the two. The aversion of the former to the work of Darwin and Engels receives a spirited refutation, no less than the indulgence of the latter towards the work of Saussure or Levi-Strauss. A special introduction written for this English edition deals with the phenomenon of the recent revival of “vulgar materialism” in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the fields of psychology and anthropology, and its relationship to racism. On Materialism will be one of the central focuses of cultural and intellectual controversy within and beyond Marxism in the next decade. (shrink)

Hylomorphism is a metaphysical theory that accounts for the unity of the material parts of composite objects by appeal to a structure or ‘form’ characterizing those parts. I argue that hylomorphism is not merely a plausible or appealing solution to problems of material composition, but a position entailed by any coherent metaphysics of ordinary material objects. In fact, not only does hylomorphism have Aristotelian defenders, but it has had independent lives in both East and West. -/- (...) I review three contemporary hylomorphic theories appeal to ‘structure’ to explain the unity of material objects. Each, however, accepts a controversial principle: that substances can have other substances as proper parts. Such a principle is implausible and severely threatens the coherence of the theory. -/- I begin by showing that Thomas Aquinas’ account of form, which does not accept that substances can have other substances as parts, gives us a more coherent version of hylomorphism. Then I argue Zhu Xi, a Song dynasty Confucian thinker, developed a non-Aristotelian hylomorphism. Unlike Aristotelians, Zhu Xi’s metaphysics was formed in opposition to Buddhist versions of skepticism and gives us reasons to think that anyone who holds a view of objects stronger than Buddhists is committed to forms. In conclusion, I show directly, by appeal to some of those same considerations from Zhu Xi, why it is that all those who believe there are unified material objects will appeal to something like a substantial form. The traditional hylomorphic picture of material composition, then, remains a plausible framework for contemporary metaphysicians – and for good reason. (shrink)

Realism Materialism Art (RMA) introduces a diverse selection of new realist and materialist philosophies and examines their ramifications in the arts. Encompassing neo-materialist theories, object-oriented ontologies, and neo-rationalist philosophies, RMA serves as a primer on “speculative realism,” considering its conceptual innovations as spurs to artistic thinking and practice and beyond. Despite their differences, these philosophical positions propose that thought can and does think outside itself, and that reality can be known without its being shaped by and for human comprehension. Today’s (...) realisms and materialisms explicitly challenge many of the dominant assumptions of cultural practice and theoretical inquiry, opening up new domains of research and artistic inquiry. Cutting across diverse thematic interests and modes of investigation, the 35 essays in RMA offer a snapshot of the emerging and rapidly changing set of ideas and practices proposed by contemporary realisms and materialisms. The book demonstrates the broad challenge of realist and materialist approaches to received disciplinary categories and forms of practice, capturing their nascent reworking of art, philosophy, culture, theory, and science, among other fields. As such, RMA expands beyond the primarily philosophical context in which realism and materialism have developed. (shrink)

Recent influential interpreters have argued that the philosophy of body that prevails in Leibniz's writings from the 1680' s to about 1704 is both more Aristotelian and less idealistic than the ' monadology' of his last years. It is argued here that the Aristotelian terminology of matter and form which is undoubtedly prominent in the work of Leibniz's ' middle years' was understood by him in a sense that is consistent with the monadology. The monadology is foreshadowed, moreover, in (...) important arguments against the Cartesian thesis that extension is the essence of corporeal substance. Leibniz can be seen as a sort of realist in physics, in contrast with occasionalists. But what is important in that contrast is not so much the reality of matter, as the reality of form, which Leibniz interpreted in terms of the active powers of soul-like substances. (shrink)

This article suggests an iconic turn in cultural sociology. Icons can be seen, it is argued, as symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form, allowing the abstractions of cognition and morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shape. Meaning is made iconically visible, in other words, by the beautiful, sublime, ugly, or simply by the mundane materiality of everyday life. But it is via the senses that iconic power is made. This new approach (...) to meaning is compared with others — with materialism, semiotics, aestheticism, moralism, realism, and spiritualism. (shrink)

Fortunately, there is heat; and Freudenthal is keen to promote it as an overlooked central factor in Aristotle’s theory of material substance. He begins in agreement with the many scholars who argue that Aristotle’s theory of the four elements underdetermines the plain fact that there are organic substances which exhibit both synchronic and diachronic unity. He goes further than most, however, by arguing that left unaugmented Aristotle’s account of the four basic elements would positively preclude the existence of these (...) forms of unity. For Aristotle embraces the Presocratic picture of the four elements as engaged in “endemic strife”, so constituted that their natural propensities lead them to separate and dissolve rather than to unite and synthesize. Thus, for example, each of the four elements has a natural direction, which ought to result in fire and air ever moving upward and away from earth and water, which will move downward if unimpeded. Hence, as Aristotle himself recognizes, some agent force is required to hold the four elements together when they are mixed. (shrink)

This paper presents a reading of Metaphysics Z.10–11 according to which both chapters outline two main definienda: forms and material substances or compounds, each of which is governed by its own peculiar constraints. Forms include formal parts alone; furthermore, they are the main definable items and enjoy the strictest possible unity. However, this does not preclude Aristotle from upgrading material compounds (whose essence is stated in hylomorphic terms) to the status of definable items in their own right. Z.10 (...) explains this contention by making the compound’s sensible functional matter dependent on its form. This dependence affords the resulting compound an unusually tight form-matter relationship, strong enough to ensure its definability, despite falling short of the highest kind of unity that only forms display. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMaterialism is the view that everything that is real is material or is the product of material processes. It tends to take either a ‘cosmological’ form, as a claim about the ultimate nature of the world, or a more specific ‘psychological’ form, detailing how mental processes are brain processes. I focus on the second, psychological or cerebral form of materialism. In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the French materialist philosopher Denis Diderot was one of the first (...) to notice that any self-respecting materialist had to address the question of the status and functional role of the brain, and its relation to our mental life. After this the topic grew stale, with knee-jerk reiterations of ‘psychophysical identity’ in the nineteenth-century, and equally rigid assertions of anti-materialism. In 1960s philosophy of mind, brain–mind materialism reemerged as ‘identity theory’, focusing on the identity between mental processes and cerebral processes. In contrast, Diderot’s cerebral materialism allows for a more culturally sedimented sense of the brain, which he described in his late Elements of Physiology as a ‘book – except it is a book which reads itself’. Diderot thus provides a lesson for materialism as it reflects on the status of the brain, science and culture. (shrink)

I argue that a modern gloss on Aristotle’s notions of Form and Matter not only allows us to escape a dualism of the psychological and the physical, but also results in a plausible sort of materialism. This is because Aristotle held that the essential nature of any psychological state, including perception and human thought, is to be some physical property. I also show that Hilary Putnam and Martha Nussbaum are mistaken in saying that Aristotle was not a materialist, but (...) a functionalist. His functionalism should instead be given a materialistic interpretation, since he holds that only the appropriate sort of matter can realize the human psyche. Aristotle’s functionalism is therefore best viewed as a “causal functionalism,” in which functional descriptions enable us to find the right sort of material embodiment. By sidestepping dualistic assumptions, Aristotle also avoids having to deal with any further notion of consciousness. (shrink)

This timely collection of essays by leading international scholars across religious studies and the environmental humanities advances a lively discussion on materialism in its many forms. While there is little agreement on what 'materialism' means, it is evident that there is a resurgence in thinking about matter in more animated and active ways. The volume explores how debates concerning the new materialisms impinge on religious traditions and the extent to which religions, with their material culture and beliefs in the (...) Divine within the material, can make a creative contribution to debates about ecological materialisms. Spanning a broad range of themes, including politics, architecture, hermeneutics, literature, and religion, the book brings together a series of discussions on materialism in the context of diverse methodologies and approaches. The volume investigates a range of issues including space and place, hierarchy and relationality, the relationship between nature and society, human and other agencies, and worldviews and cultural values. Drawing on literary and critical theory, and queer, philosophical, theological and social theoretical approaches, this ground-breaking book will make an important contribution to the environmental humanities. It will be a key read for postgraduate students, researchers and scholars in religious studies, cultural anthropology, literary studies, philosophy and environmental studies. (shrink)

Die Begriffe ›Form‹ und ›Materie‹ kommen bei Aristoteles zunächst in seiner Analyse der Veränderung vor. In Physik I 7 beispielsweise erläutert Aristoteles die verschiedenen Sinne, in denen man sagen kann, dass etwas zu etwas wird. Er unterscheidet zwischen einfacher und komplexer Rede: Wenn X Y wird, können X und Y mit je einem Wort bezeichnet warden oder mit einem aus mindestens zwei Wörtern bestehenden Ausdruck.

We propose and defend a form of emergent materialism that, while rejecting both idealism and dualistic metaphysics, does not collapse into physicalism. After critically examining physicalism in its principal variants—reductive and non-reductive, a priori and a posteriori—we characterize our ontological framework as a novel, scientifically informed form of materialism, whose core ontological commitments are developed in this article. Drawing on precise conceptual distinctions, we address foundational issues in materialist ontology that we argue underlie the methodological practices of science (...) across disciplines. Central to our account is the structuring role of emergence, alongside a focus on systems, the hierarchical organization of reality, the nature of laws, and the diverse forms of causality. Within this framework, we propose a “restrictivist” view of natural laws as an alternative to the standard “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist” accounts. On our view, natural regularities—or restrictions—arise as the consequence of the resulting equilibrium among the powers of all existents. (shrink)

According to a standard story, part of what we have in mind when we say that an argument is valid is that it is necessarily truth preserving: if the premises are true, the conclusion must also be true. But—the story continues—that’s not enough, since ‘Roses are red, therefore roses are coloured’ for example, while it may be necessarily truth-preserving, is not so in virtue of form. Thus we arrive at a standard contemporary characterisation of validity: an argument is valid (...) when it is NTP in virtue of form. Here I argue that we can and should drop the N; the resulting account is simpler, less problematic, and performs just as well with examples. (shrink)

To resist the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Palestinian prisoners are smuggling sperm samples out of Israeli prisons to enable their wives to undergo fertility treatment. Bodies and bodily matter figure as central actors in this practice of resistance. In this article, I draw from fieldwork I conducted with Palestinian women and medical staff in the occupied West Bank to examine the tension between carcerality and matter(ing). I argue that bodies and bodily matter are constitutive of the relationship (...) between oppression and resistance. I analyze how Israeli military authorities assign evidentiary status to Palestinian bodies and illustrate how Palestinian families challenge the Israeli carceral system through new modes of embodied resistance. This article demonstrates how intersecting forms of oppression shape and are being shaped by bodies and their materiality. It also suggests that theorizing the materiality of power from Palestine offers new ways of understanding the political work that bodies do. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to defend a version of nonreductive materialism against the epiphenomenalist objection to which Davidson's anomalous monism has often been held to be vulnerable. After considering a number of options for dealing with the objection, I argue that an appeal to the notion of strong supervenience (properly explicated) can both rebut a common form of the "property" ("type") epiphenomenalist objection and provide a grounding for the causal relevance ("efficacy") of mental properties.

Templates travel because they offer a tractable format that can be used for model-building in a variety of domains. It is often because of this quality that a particular template is chosen. But one cannot assume that there are always templates ready to model a new phenomenon, and moreover, templates have also been designed at some point. A critical aspect of this designing process is the choice of the mathematical objects with which one hopes to capture this phenomenon. This means (...) that one has to assess which of the properties of different kinds of mathematical objects and which combinations of them are most appropriate. The selection of these objects is based on whether their properties enable the model to perform its function. This selection of mathematical objects is similar to the selection of materials in mechanical design. (shrink)

First, The doctrine of naturalism, That reality is spatio-Temporal, Is defended. Second, The doctrine of materialism or physicalism, That this spatio-Temporal reality involves nothing but the entities of physics working according to the principles of physics, Is defended. Third, It is argued that these doctrines do not constitute a "first philosophy." a satisfactory first philosophy should recognize universals, In the form of instantiated properties and relations. Laws of nature are constituted by relations between universals. What universals there are, And (...) what relations hold between them, Must be discovered "a posteriori" by scientific investigation. (shrink)

Materialism, and its approach to the body, are often presented as “mechanistic”: as signifying that the properties unique to organic, living embodied agents are reduced to or specified as mechanistically specifiable properties that characterize matter as a whole. Indeed, from Hobbes and Descartes in the seventeenth century to popular automata such as Vaucanson’s in the eighteenth century, this vision of things would seem to be correct. I aim here to correct this inaccurate vision of materialism. On the contrary, the materialist (...) project on closer consideration reveals itself to be significantly focused on “Life” and embodiment, much more intimately connected to what we now call “vitalism” (a case in point being the eighteenth-century Montpellier vitalists), and ultimately an anti-mechanistic doctrine focusing on the uniqueness of organisms—whether we construe this focus in ontological or explanatory terms. To establish this revised vision of materialism I examine texts such as La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1748) and Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream (1769) along with medical entries in the Encyclopédie by physicians such as Ménuret and Fouquet. I argue that there is a specifically materialist approach to the body in early modernity; that it is not strictly mechanistic (or is an outgrowth of a very pluralistic, loosely defined brand of mechanism), but that it retains a claim to be understood as materialist precisely because it is a reductionist, deflationary account of what it is to be in a body. This reconstruction also has implications for current discussions of embodiment: the materialist conceptualization of embodiment does not postulate an organizing center, a Subject which gives the kind of quasi-transcendental status to the flesh we often see, e.g., in phenomenological and post-phenomenological discourses. (shrink)

What is the relationship between mental states and items of material culture, like notebooks, maps or lists? The extended mind thesis offers an influential and controversial answer to this question. According to ExM, items of material culture can form part of the material basis for our mental states. Although ExM offers a radical view of the location of mental states, it fits comfortably with a traditional, representationalist account of the nature of those states. I argue that (...) proponents of ExM would do better to adopt a fictionalist approach to mental states. In so doing, I suggest, they could retain the important insights underlying the extended mind thesis, while avoiding its more problematic consequences. (shrink)