James L. Anderson analyzed the novelty of Einstein's theory of gravity as its lack of "absolute objects." Michael Friedman's related work has been criticized by Roger Jones and Robert Geroch for implausibly admitting as absolute the timelike 4-velocity field of dust in cosmological models in Einstein's theory. Using the Rosen-Sorkin Lagrange multiplier trick, I complete Anna Maidens's argument that the problem is not solved by prohibiting variation of absolute objects in an action principle. Recalling Anderson's (...) proscription of "irrelevant" variables, I generalize that proscription to locally irrelevant variables that do no work in some places in some models. This move vindicates Friedman's intuitions and removes the Jones-Geroch counterexample: some regions of some models of gravity with dust are dust-free and so naturally lack a timelike 4-velocity, so diffeomorphic equivalence to is spoiled. Torretti's example involving constant curvature spaces is shown to have an absolute object on Anderson's analysis, viz., the conformal spatial metric density. The previously neglected threat of an absolute object from an orthonormal tetrad used for coupling spinors to gravity appears resolvable by eliminating irrelevant fields. However, given Anderson's definition, GTR itself has an absolute object : a change of variables to a conformal metric density and a scalar density shows that the latter is absolute. (shrink)

The Anderson-Friedman absolute objects program has been a favorite analysis of the substantive general covariance that supposedly characterizes Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (GTR). Absolute objects are the same locally in all models (modulo gauge freedom). Substantive general covariance is the lack of absolute objects. Several counterexamples have been proposed, however, including the Jones-Geroch dust and Torretti constant curvature spaces counterexamples. The Jones-Geroch dust case, ostensibly a false positive, is resolved by noting that holes (...) in the dust in some models ensure that no physically relevant nonvanishing timelike vector field exists there, so no absolute object exists. The Torretti constant curvature spaces case, allegedly a false negative, is resolved by testing an irreducible piece of the metric, the conformal metric density of weight -2/3, for absoluteness; this geometric object is absolute. A new counterexample is proposed involving the orthonormal tetrad said to be necessary to couple spinors to a curved metric. The threat of finding an absolute object in GTR + spinors is overcome by the use of an alternative spinor formalism that takes a symmetric square root of the metric (with the help of the matrix diag(-1,1,1,1)), eliminating 6 of the 16 tetrad components as irrelevant. The importance of eliminating irrelevant structures, as Anderson emphasized, is clear. The importance of the choice of physical fields is also evident. A new counterexample due to Robert Geroch and Domenico Giulini, however, finds an absolute object in vacuum GTR itself, namely the scalar density $g$ given by the metric components' determinant. Thus either the definition of absoluteness or its use to analyze GTR's substantive general covariance is flawed. Anderson's belief that all absolute objects are nonvariational (that is, not varied in a suitable action principle) and vice versa is also falsified by the Geroch-Giulini counterexample. However, it remains plausible that all nonvariational fields are absolute, so adding nonvariationality as a necessary condition for absoluteness, as Hiskes once suggested, would likely leave no useful work to the Anderson-Friedman condition of sameness in all models. Simply having only variational fields in an action principle (suitably free of irrelevant fields) might be a satisfactory analysis of substantive general covariance, if one exists. This proposal also resembles the suggestion that GTR is "already parameterized," if one decides to parameterize theories by defining the nonvariational fields in terms of preferred coordinates called clock fields. More questions need to be addressed. Which fields should be tested for absoluteness: only primitive fields (which ones?), or all or some (which?) of their concomitants also? Geroch observes that some kinds of geometric objects, such as tangent vectors, scalar densities, and tangent vector densities of non-unit weight, satisfy the condition of sameness in all models if they merely fail to vanish. If these "susceptible" geometric objects can hardly help being absolute, to what degree are they, or the theories harboring them, responsible for this absoluteness? The answer to this question helps to determine the significance of the Geroch-Giulini counterexample. (shrink)

So far as the criticisms bear merely upon the book, I have little wish to discuss them. The book is there and can speak for itself. Also, after the years which, as the reviewer apologetically remarks, he has allowed to pass, I should have to reread the book to judge of the appropriateness of some of the criticisms. Whatever its merits or defects, the work does what no other has attempted; it indicates how a certain view of deity, held in (...) some approximation by at least a few important philosophers, can defend itself against its rivals, old and new. Many books do something like this on behalf of more conventional and widely-known forms of theism, but not for this form. Ours is also almost the only "book of readings" dealing throughout with ideas of God; and certainly it is the most comprehensive, covering nearly 3000 years, all the great religions, and including substantial selections from anti-theistic or agnostic writers. One criticism at least is acceptable: it was indeed "odd" that so little attention was paid to theistic proofs or arguments. At no very distant time I expect to publish systematic discussions of the various forms of proof. And it was with this in mind that we said in the Introduction that this was "a subject for another occasion." As for interest in the "logical" aspect of thought about God, I had supposed that this was, in a way, the book's main theme. (shrink)

The Anderson-Friedman absolute objects project is reviewed. The Jones-Geroch dust 4-velocity counterexample is resolved by eliminating irrelevant structure. Torretti's example involving constant curvature spaces is shown to have an absolute object on Anderson's analysis. The previously neglected threat of an absolute object from an orthonormal tetrad used for coupling spinors to gravity appears resolvable by eliminating irrelevant fields and using a modified spinor formalism. However, given Anderson's definition, GTR itself has an absolute object (as Robert (...) Geroch has observed recently): a change of variables to a conformal metric density and a scalar density shows that the latter is absolute. (shrink)

James L. Anderson analyzed the conceptual novelty of Einstein's theory of gravity as its lack of ``absolute objects.'' Michael Friedman's related concept of absolute objects has been criticized by Roger Jones and Robert Geroch for implausibly admitting as absolute the timelike 4-velocity field of dust in cosmological models in Einstein's theory. Using Nathan Rosen's action principle, I complete Anna Maidens's argument that the Jones-Geroch problem is not solved by requiring that absolute objects not (...) be varied. Recalling Anderson's proscription of (globally) ``irrelevant'' variables that do no work (anywhere in any model), I generalize that proscription to locally irrelevant variables that do no work in some places in some models. This move vindicates Friedman's intuitions and removes the Jones-Geroch counterexample: some regions of some models of gravity with dust are dust-free, and there is no good reason to have a timelike dust 4-velocity vector there. Eliminating the irrelevant timelike vctors keeps the dust 4-velocity from counting as absolute by spoiling its neighborhood-by-neighborhood diffeomorphic equivalence to (1,0,0,0). A more fundamental Gerochian timelike vector field presents itself in gravity with spinors in the standard orthonormal tetrad formalism, though eliminating irrelevant fields might solve this problem as well. (shrink)

The article examines the meaning of spiritual essence within absolute knowing. The analysis presented will shed light on the logical and phenomenological difference between the object of experience and the object of consciousness. The form of spiritual essence is introduced through a syllogistic structure and seems to determinate the scientific character of absolute knowing. Hegel's conception of syllogism in the Phenomenology is not the one of his mature works, but proves to be more articulate than the syllogism as (...) it was conceived in the Jena period. The syllogistic structure of spiritual essence discloses the logical dimension beneath the phenomenological path. (shrink)

The contemporary theorization of art can be traced in a series of interlocking and antagonistic positions: the dissolution of art into social relations, the tracking of art as the work of objects that recede from our grasp, and the practice of art as instantiating or linking to an immanent plane. I take the question of immanence as central to these debates. This is because immanence implies a superior plane that exceeds specification or determination, and it also traces the problem (...) of capitalism as our horizon of immanence that threatens to absorb any such excess, whether that is artistic, political or ontological. Tracking the problem of immanence, I explore how it rests on the tension of a relation to immanence. Using the work of Gilles Deleuze I analyse this relation as existing in the tension between a moment of excess, often theological, and an immanent relation or fold. Returning to Deleuze's use of the early Sartre we find that Sartre offers a subtly different thinking of relations and immanence through exploring how we are cast out amongst relations and objects. I then use two of Sartre's later essays on art to examine his development of a “situated absolute”: the artwork as the site which condenses and gathers the contradictions of relations and objects into itself, precisely refusing immanence. This, I argue, offers the key to unsettling the coordinates of contemporary art theory by reinstating a thinking of the absolute as positional and at once immersed and antagonistic. (shrink)

This essay continues and develops my interest in the differences between various formulations of ‘the Absolute’ in German Idealism and its renaissance in Speculative Realism. We will look at the various delineations of the absolute such as Schelling’s absolute “causeless ground” of Nature, the delineation of perception and understanding found in Kant’s transcendental “unity of apperception”, the relative-autonomy of objects found in Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, the absolutization of a time which has no bounds in Meillassoux’s (...) definition of ‘hyper-chaos’, and Hegel’s rather ambiguous notion of the ‘Absolute Idea’, which has been referred to both as the universally applicable ideal element in all that is(ontology) and the centripetal movement of either the Subject as that which completes or resolves the unity of substance (“substance as subject” (Hegel, G.W.F, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, 1977. See for instance §37.)) or Earth as expressing an ideality whereby ‘the planet is the veritable prius’ (Hegel, G.W.F., Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Cambridge University Press; New edition (12 Feb. 2015), p. 280.). We will end this essay by relating such formulations and delineations of the Absolute to that of Einstein’s theory of relativity, quantum physics, inflationary theories of the cosmos, and even multiversal theory. (shrink)

I offer a new theory of faultless disagreement, according to which truth is absolute (non-relative) but can still be non-objective. What's relative is truth-aptness: a sentence like ‘Vegemite is tasty’ (V) can be truth-accessible and bivalent in one context but not in another. Within a context in which V fails to be bivalent, we can affirm that there is no issue of truth or falsity about V, still disputants, affirming and denying V, were not at fault, since, in their (...) context of assertion V was bivalent. This theory requires a theory of assertion that is a form of cognitive expressivism. (shrink)

Absolute needs (as against instrumental needs) are independent of the ends, goals and purposes of personal agents. Against the view that the only needs are instrumental needs, David Wiggins and Garrett Thomson have defended absolute needs on the grounds that the verb ‘need’ has instrumental and absolute senses. While remaining neutral about it, this article does not adopt that approach. Instead, it suggests that there are absolute biological needs. The absolute nature of these needs is (...) defended by appeal to: their objectivity (as against mind-dependence); the universality of the phenomenon of needing across the plant and animal kingdoms; the impossibility that biological needs depend wholly upon the exercise of the abilities characteristic of personal agency; the contention that the possession of biological needs is prior to the possession of the abilities characteristic of personal agency. Finally, three philosophical usages of ‘normative’ are distinguished. On two of these, to describe a phenomenon or claim as ‘normative’ is to describe it as value-dependent. A description of a phenomenon or claim as ‘normative’ in the third sense does not entail such value-dependency, though it leaves open the possibility that value depends upon the phenomenon or upon the truth of the claim. It is argued that while survival needs (or claims about them) may well be normative in this third sense, they are normative in neither of the first two. Thus, the idea of absolute need is not inherently normative in either of the first two senses. (shrink)

Absolute motion—motion relative to space itself—is detectable in the classical non-Euclidean geometries. Although this claim can be conveyed with a simple thought experiment, I argue that it was out of sight to the people who were best placed to take note of it in the nineteenth century, when non-Euclidean geometry was a central object of study. This is a perplexing state of affairs, and in the first part of this paper I offer an explanation for it. A central component (...) of this explanation involves the shift from spatial to spatiotemporal thinking that had to wait for Einstein’s development of the theories of relativity in the early twentieth century. In the second part of this paper, I discuss how significant this lacuna was. If the possibility of detecting absolute motion had been recognized, it would have impacted all of the major positions in the philosophy of geometry. Indeed, some figures would have responded to it by claiming that space must be necessarily Euclidean after all. (shrink)

This paper is about two topics: metaepistemological absolutism and the epistemic principles governing perceptual warrant. Our aim is to highlight—by taking the debate between dogmatists and conservativists about perceptual warrant as a case study—a surprising and hitherto unnoticed problem with metaepistemological absolutism, at least as it has been influentially defended by Paul Boghossian (Fear of knowledge: against relativism and constructivism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006a) as the principal metaepistemological contrast point to relativism. What we find is that the metaepistemological commitments (...) at play on both sides of this dogmatism/conservativism debate do not line up with epistemic relativism nor do they line up with absolutism, at least as Boghossian articulates this position. What this case study reveals is the need in metaepistemological option space for the recognition of a weaker and less tendentious form of absolutism, what we call “environment relativism”. On this view, epistemic principles are knowable, objective, and they can serve as the basis of particular epistemic evaluations, but their validity is relative to the wider global environment in which they are applied. (shrink)

The debate about the relation between science and truth is manifestly epistemological, but latently and fundamentally metaphysical. Popper's theory of verisimilitude provides us with a striking example. According to Popper, science aims at bringing us nearer to 'absolute, objective truth'; the growth of scientific knowledge is seen as a never ending realisation of that ultimate aim. This thesis of verisimilitude can be interpreted in two ways. In the first interpretation the thesis appears as a correct, but formal and even (...) trivial statement. Here the thesis that science aims at bringing us nearer to truth is as unilluminating as the thesis that moral endeavor aims at bringing us nearer to the Moral Good or that artistic endeavor aims at bringing us nearer to Aesthetic Beauty. According to the second interpretation, however, the thesis has a more substantial and metaphysical meaning. Here it consists of three different claims : 1. scientific endeavor points to something which is beyond and actual or humanly possible scientific achievement; 2. it is in this relation with something transcendent that the ultimate purpose of science is to be sought; 3. the relation between actual science and its transcendent should be seen as a part-whole relation, i.e. the transcendent goal should be represented as the ideal of total intelligibility. In this article the first and second claim are accepted; the third is rejected. One should accept the idea (put forward by Einstein ) that science points to a mystery beyond science. One should beware, however, of equating the sense of mystery with an anticipation for yet hidden information, inaccessible to us, but 'quoad se' accessible to reason. Science's transcendent mystery should be viewed in a more radical way. That is to say, the relation between actual science and its transcendent mystery is analogous to the relation between, on the one hand, the information contained in and derivable from a (good) poem and, on the other hand something else which is poetically suggested, yet does not consist in hidden information. What is evoked by poetry and science, is not even in principle translatable in terms of an informative content. Therefore the ultimate goal of science is not the ideal of knowing everything with the clarity and precision of science ; it is rather the awareness of a mystery which does not even exist as the sort of intelligible content scientific theories attempt to mirror. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Apparent Knowing and Its Absolute Ground Discovery and Structure of the Self Absolute Knowing as Science of the Self References.

Sebastian Rödl: Self-Consciousness and Objectivity. An Introduction to Absolute Idealism. Cambridge (MA) und London 2018. Harvard UniversityPress. 208 S.

Although "objectivity" is a term used widely in many areas of public discourse, from discussions concerning the media and politics to debates over political correctness and cultural literacy, the question "What is objectivity?" is often ignored, as if the answer were obvious. In this volume, Allan Megill has gathered essays from fourteen leading scholars in a variety of fields--history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, history of science, sociology of science, feminist studies, literary studies, and accounting--to gain critical understanding of the idea of (...) objectivity as it functions in today's world. In diverse essays the authors provide fascinating studies of objectivity in such areas as anthropological research, corporate and governmental bureaucracies, legal discourse, photography, and the study and practice of the natural sciences. Taken together, Megill argues, this volume calls for developing a notion of "objectivities." The absolute sense of objectivity--that is, objectivity as a "God's eye view"--must be supplemented, and in part supplanted, by disciplinary, procedural, and dialectical senses of objectivity. This book will be of great interest to a broad range of scholars as it presents current thinking on a topic of fundamental concern across the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. _Contributors._ Barry Barnes, Dagmar Barnouw, Lorraine Code, Lorraine Daston, Johannes Fabian, Kenneth J. Gergen, Mary E. Hawkesworth, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Evelyn Fox Keller, George Levine, Allan Megill, Peter Miller, Andy Pickering, Theodore M. Porter. (shrink)

A common view is that relativism requires tolerance. We argue that there is no deductive relation between relativism and tolerance, but also that relativism is not incompatible with tolerance. Next we note that there is no standard inductive relation between relativism and tolerance—no inductive enumeration, argument to the best explanation, or causal argument links the two. Two inductive arguments of a different sort that link them are then exposed and criticized at length. The first considers relativism from the objective point (...) of view ‘of the universe’, the second from the subjective point of view of the relativist herself. Both arguments fail. There is similarly no deductive relation between absolutism and tolerance—neither entails the other—and no inductive connection of any sort links the two. We conclude that tolerance, whether unlimited or restricted, is independent of both relativism and absolutism. A metaethical theory that says only that there is one true or valid ethical code, or that there is a plurality of equally true or valid ethical codes, tells us nothing about whether we should be tolerant, much less how tolerant we should be. (shrink)

Renaissance philosopher, mathematician, and theologian Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) said that there is no proportion between the finite mind and the infinite. He is fond of saying reason cannot fully comprehend the infinite. That our best hope for attaining a vision and understanding of infinite things is by mathematics and by the use of contemplating symbols, which help us grasp "the absolute infinite". By the late 19th century, there is a decisive intervention in mathematics and its philosophy: the philosophical (...) mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918) says that between the realm of the finite and the absolute infinite, there is an intermediate realm partaking in properties in a certain sense of both the finite and the infinite: the transfinite realm. Like the finite, the transfinite realm is a realm of mathematical objects, numbers, and knowledge. Like the absolute infinite, the transfinite is a form of infinity insofar as transfinite sets and numbers transcend any finite number. Echoing Cusanus and neo-Platonism, Cantor says that the transfinite sequence of all ordinals is a symbol of the absolutely infinite, that is, God. This paper considers how the doctrine of symbolism and the philosophers' different commitments to the laws of logic, especially the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), enables these thinkers to articulate a transcendental apophatic approach to divinity. (shrink)

The doctrine of God’s absolute simplicity denies the possibility of real distinctions in God. It is, e.g., impossible that God have any kind of parts or any intrinsic accidental properties, or that there be real distinctions among God’s essential properties or between any of them and God himself. After showing that some of the counter-intuitive implications of the doctrine can readily be made sense of, the authors identify the apparent incompatibility of God’s simplicity and God’s free choice as a (...) special difficulty and associate it with two others: the apparent incompatibilities between essential omnipotence and essential goodness, and between perfect goodness and moral goodness. Since all three of these difficulties are associated with a certain understanding of the nature of God’s will, the authors base their resolution of them on an account of will in general and of God’s will in particular, drawing on Aquinas’s theory of will.Taking creation as their paradigm of divine free choice, the authors develop a solution of the principal incompatibility based on three claims: God’s acts of choice are both free and conditionally necessitated; the difference between absolutely and conditionallynecessitated acts of will is not a real distinction in God; and the conditional necessity of God’s acts of will is compatible with contingency in the objects of those acts. The heart of their solution consists in their attempt to make sense of and support those claims.The authors extend their solution to cover the two associated apparent incompatibilities as well.The article concludes with observations on the importance of the doctrine of God’s absolute simplicity for resolving problems in religious morality and in the cosmological argument. (shrink)

Epistemic absolutism is an orthodox view that propositional knowledge is an ungradable concept. Absolutism is primarily grounded in our ungradable uses of “knows” in ordinary language. This paper advances a thorough objection to the linguistic argument for absolutism. My objection consists of two parts. Firstly, arguments for absolutism provided by Jason Stanley and Julien Dutant will be refuted respectively. After that, two more general refutation-strategies will be proposed: counterevidence against absolutism can be found in both English and non-English languages; the (...) linguistic argument for absolutism is subject to a methodological mistake as the linguistic usages of “knows” cannot accurately reflect its conceptual nature. Therefore, we should give epistemic gradualism, as opposed to absolutism, a more serious consideration. (shrink)

Adorno´s critique of absolute idealism is beset with considerable hermeneutical errors. Adorno does not fail to notice, however, that Hegel addressed many of the open questions of transcendental idealism and tried to solve them. For example, Adorno recognizes that Hegel criticized Kant and Fichte precisely because they both ultimately advocated a formal conception of subjectivity; Hegel unceasingly stressed instead the importance of the intrinsic unity of subject and object. Furthermore, Adorno acknowledges that Hegel rejected the pure identity of the (...) I as the starting point of the system and claimed that the different conceptions of reality developed by the human mind are based on the successive contradictions of the objects with their own concepts – for Adorno this is the reason why Hegel was able to expound his philosophy on the basis of the thoughts of the subject in the Phenomenology of Spirit and from the determinations of the object in the Science of Logic. Adorno explicitly recognizes that the attempt to develop dialectics from both sides, that is, from the subject and the object, was an advance of Hegel over earlier idealists. Adorno, finally, accepts that, although Hegel characterizes subjectivity as absolute, objectivity plays a decisive role in his philosophy. With Hegel, according to Adorno, idealism reaches its maximum strength and its highest elevation. Now, despite recognizing the advantages of Hegel´s approach Adorno nonetheless maintains that absolute idealism ultimately rests on the radicalization of transcendental idealism, as a further expansion of its basic principle. Hegel disagreed with transcendental idealism, but he did not abandon its main project of deriving all determinacy from subjective thought; he therefore did not contest the priority of the subject. Although Adorno recognizes the value of many of the solutions that Hegel offers to solve the theoretical tensions within transcendental idealism, he thinks that those solutions do not actually resolve these tensions – in Adorno´s eyes they simply cannot be solved within the idealistic paradigm. It is not unfair to say that Adorno misunderstands Hegel´s absolute idealism as a heterodox attempt to further develop Fichte´s philosophical program in a divergent way (especially as it is presented in the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre). Adorno´s supposedly ‘immanent’ critique of absolute idealism is in fact based on a highly controversial interpretation of Hegel´s approach, which is to resolve those problematic claims of Kant´s and Fichte´s variants of idealism that Adorno himself considers untenable. (shrink)

In this paper I raise three questions regarding the status and function of Absolute Knowing in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. First, can Hegel’s Absolute Knowing be understood as an epiphany? Secondly, how does epiphany make sense of the teleological elements that activate and mobilise the movement towards Absolute Knowing? And thirdly, how does such an interpretation shift the focus from a closed reading of Hegel’s text – that views Absolute Knowing as consummately realised – to an (...) open reading that keeps the Absolute within its purview, but also seeks to foreground its aporias? I pursue these questions through an examination of the key constituents of knowledge: the subject of knowledge, its object, and the process through which knowledge is attained. (shrink)

In _Objektiver und absoluter Geist_ nach Hegel Oehl and Kok offer an extensive selection of papers by established Hegel scholars exploring the wide spectrum of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit from the viewpoint of the distinction between objective and absolute spirit.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and defend an absolute principle of truthmaking, a maximalist one according to which every truth is made true by something in the world beyond itself. I maintain that an absolute principle must be true, that any weakened version is straightforwardly contradictory or incoherent. I criticize one principle of truthmaking (in terms of bald necessity) and articulate one in terms of the relation in virtue of. I then criticize other principles of (...) truthmaking in light of the latter, for I contend that in virtue of has a role in the theory of truthmaking that is essential and ineluctable. That all true representations have a truthmaker as defined by the principle I articulate is the absolute principle of truthmaking I defend. The crux of the paper is the arguments I present in defense of this absolute principle. In defending it against familiar objections to maximalism, an account of the truthmakers that seem to ground all true representations emerges. I maintain that such truthmakers are simple facts. With the absolute principle and its corollary account of truthmakers, this paper contains the core of a comprehensive theory of truthmaking. (shrink)

Historically associated with military service, conscientious objection has become a significant phenomenon in health care. Mark Wicclair offers a comprehensive ethical analysis of conscientious objection in three representative health care professions: medicine, nursing and pharmacy. He critically examines two extreme positions: the 'incompatibility thesis', that it is contrary to the professional obligations of practitioners to refuse provision of any service within the scope of their professional competence; and 'conscience absolutism', that they should be exempted from performing any action contrary to (...) their conscience. He argues for a compromise approach that accommodates conscience-based refusals within the limits of specified ethical constraints. He also explores conscientious objection by students in each of the three professions, discusses conscience protection legislation and conscience-based refusals by pharmacies and hospitals, and analyzes several cases. His book is a valuable resource for scholars, professionals, trainees, students, and anyone interested in this increasingly important aspect of health care. (shrink)

The absolute self-evidence of consciousness is due to the fact that the object of consciousness is present or immanent in it. We may therefore formulate the absolutely certain starting point of philosophy as follows: knowledge about an object immanent in consciousness is absolutely certain in so far as it is the actual testimony of the object about itself, and does not go beyond that which is present in consciousness. The criterion of the absolute certainty of such knowledge is (...) self evidence, i.e. the fact that it consists entirely of what is present in consciousness. To doubt such knowledge is absurd because it is not a copy of the object, it is not a symbol of it, but simply and directly contains the object itself as known. I designate the act of the immediate contemplation of objects by the term intuition. According to the epistemological theory which I began to work out in 1903 all our trustworthy knowledge is obtained by means of such immediate observation of objects as they are in themselves; I therefore call my theory of knowledge Intuitivism. (shrink)

According to Fine’s famous take on the infamous McTaggartian paradox, realism about tensed facts is incompatible with the joint acceptence of three very general and seemingly plausible theses about reality. However, Correia and Rosenkranz have recently objected that Fine’s argument depends on a crucial assumption about the nature of tensed facts; once that assumption is given up, they claim, realists can endorse the theses in question without further ado. They also argue that their novel version of tense realism, called dynamic (...) absolutism, is to be preferred over its rivals. I argue in this paper that dynamic absolutism does not constitute a genuine alternative for realists about tense. (shrink)

The collection of Edmund Husserl's sketches on time-consciousness from the years 1893-1917, edited by Rudolf Boehm and published as Volume X in the Husserliana series, affords significant new material for the study of the evolution of Husserl's thought. Specifically, the sketches suggest that in the course of analyzing the consciousness of temporal objects Husserl became convinced that a distinction must be drawn between an ultimate or absolute flow of consciousness and the immanent temporal objects or contents -- (...) sense-data, appearances of external things, acts of wishing, judging, etc. -- constituted or known within that flow. Further, the texts indicate that the emergence of the absolute dimension was connected with the development during this period of two distinct interpretations of the constitution of time-consciousness. Husserl apparently worked out the first of these during the years 1901-1907, and only towards the end of this period did the notion of an absolute consciousness, absent in earlier texts, make its appearance. And no sooner did it emerge than Husserl undertook a critique of his first interpretation which ultimately culminated in its rejection. In the new position which then appeared, around 1909, the absolute flow of time-constituting consciousness, and its distinction from temporal objects both immanent and transcendent, was unequivocally affirmed. We propose now to discuss this evolution and the emergence and nature of the absolute flow of consciousness. (shrink)

Abstract: Kant follows a substantial tradition by defining judgment so that it must involve a relation of concepts, which raises the question of why he thinks that single-term existential judgments should still qualify as judgments. There is a ready explanation if Kant is somehow anticipating a Fregean second-order account of existence, an interpretation that is already widely held for separate reasons. This paper examines Kant's early (1763) critique of Wolffian accounts of existence, finding that it provides the key idea in (...) his mature model of existential judgment, which is in fact sharply opposed to the Fregean strategy. By relating this to Kant's theory of judgment in general—in particular, to his claim for an isomorphism between the assertoric function of judgment and the category of existence—a preliminary case is made that absolute positing, far from being a marginal special case, accomplishes the primary function of judgment. This argument shows the importance of distinguishing between contexts in which Kant is treating judgment as a vehicle for inference (e.g. pure general logic) and contexts in which he is treating it, more robustly, as the cognition of an object. (shrink)

On 30 June 2021, Ohio state Governor, Mike DeWine, signed a Bill which would enact the state's budget for the next two years. In addition to its core funding imperatives, the Bill also contained an amendment significantly expanding entitlements of health care providers to conscientiously object to professional duties to provide controversial health care services. This amendment has been heavily criticised as providing the means to allow health care providers to discriminate against a wide range of persons by denying them (...) access to often contested services such as abortion and contraception. In this paper, we examine the implications of this amendment and situate it in relation to other legislative actions intended to guarantee absolute rights to conscientious objection. In doing so, we argue that the entitlements extended to health care providers by these Bills are overly broad and ignore their potential to allow significant harm to be caused to clients. We then argue that if health care providers should have rights to conscientiously object, then any legislation intended to protect such rights should be limited, specific, and parsimonious. Where it is not, the ideological liberty of HCPs treads dangerously on the physical freedom of their clients. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a lively debate over whether absolute velocity is measurable in Newtonian mechanics. Middleton and Murgueitio Ramírez (Australas J Philos 99(4): 806–816, 2021)—‘MMR’ henceforth—challenge the orthodox view that absolute velocity is unmeasurable in Newtonian mechanics by pointing out that, under a plausible counterfactual analysis of measurement, absolute velocity is measurable in at least one Newtonian world. MMR’s arguments have been criticized by Jacobs (Australas J Philos 100(1): 202–206, 2022) and Luc (Erkenntnis 89: 3309–3327, 2024), (...) with Murgueitio Ramírez (Philos Compass 19(6), 2024) subsequently responding to both objections. In this paper, I present a novel response to MMR’s original argument that avoids the problems faced by Jacobs’s and Luc’s accounts. I argue that MMR’s reply to another potential objection to their account, which they call ‘the relevance objection’, is unconvincing. Building on a crucial clarification about this objection, I propose a revised counterfactual account of measurement, under which absolute velocity remains to be unmeasurable in Newtonian mechanics. (shrink)

We contrast two Universe-outlooks and universality-sources. The first—localism—runs bottom-up and is in the vein of modern iterative set theory, generating ever more sets but all limited unities and barring an ur-Universe taken as a primary—the prime-object/unity. This contrasts with an absolutely infinite Universe-first outlook, globalism, inspired by some remarks on Cantor but later exiled by Zermelo. The metaphysics is now all top-down, and all sets (e.g. large cardinals) are regarded as generated fragments. The role of the (Godel-central) reflection principle is (...) dissected.? (shrink)

This chapter considers what happens when absolute value points us in one direction but relative value pulls us in the opposite direction—when, for example, there is a conflict between doing what is bad for someone and doing what is assumed to be absolutely good. If absolute goodness is an important reason-giving property, we would expect that sometimes we should do something because it is absolutely good, even though we thereby bring about what is bad for someone. If the (...) goodness (period) of an option we are considering is large enough, it should provide a reason that is sufficiently strong to justify undertaking actions that we recognize to be harmful. But it is doubtful that doing what is bad for someone can be justified in this way—and the explanation is that absolute goodness (and badness) are not genuine reasons. (shrink)

IntroductionKraut defines absolute goodness as follows: for something to be absolutely good is for its goodness to be unrelated to the needs or interests of any individual.See Richard Kraut, Against Absolute Goodness, pp. 4ff. Let’s allow goodness to apply broadly to objects, states of affairs and events. Treat x as a variable ranging over these categories. Then, to say that x is absolutely good in this sense is to say that a world containing x is better than (...) a world in which x is absent, whether or not x contributes, in that world, to the satisfaction of anyone’s needs or interests. For example, to say that the Bamiyan Buddhas are absolutely good is to claim that a world in which all sentient life has be.. (shrink)

Freedom of conscience is a core element of human rights respected by most European countries. It allows abortion through the inclusion of a conscience clause, which permits opting out of providing such services. However, the grounds for invoking conscientious objection lack clarity. Our aim in this paper is to take a step in this direction by carrying out a systematic review of reasons by midwives and nurses for declining, on conscience grounds, to participate in abortion. We conducted a systematic review (...) of ethical arguments asking, “What reasons have been reported in the argument based literature for or against conscientious objection to abortion provision by nurses or midwives?” We particularly wanted to identify any discussion of the responsibilities of midwives and nurses in this area. Search terms were conscientious objection and abortion or termination and nurse or midwife or midwives or physicians or doctors or medics within the dates 2000–2016 on: HEIN legal, Medline, CINAHL, Psychinfo, Academic Search Complete, Web of Science including publications in English, German and Dutch. Final articles were subjected to a rigorous analysis, coding and classifying each line into reason mentions, narrow and broad reasons for or against conscientious objection. Of an initial 1085 articles, 10 were included. We identified 23 broad reasons, containing 116narrow reasons and 269 reason mentions. Eighty one narrow reasons argued in favour of and 35 against conscientious objection. Using predetermined categories of moral, practical, religious or legal reasons, “moral reasons” contained the largest number of narrow reasons. The reasons and their associated mentions in this category outnumber those in the sum of the other three categories. We identified no absolute argument either for or against conscientious objection by midwives or nurses. An invisibility of midwives and nurses exists in the whole debate concerning conscientious objection reflecting a gap between literature and practice, as it is they whom WHO recommend as providers of this service. While the arguments in the literature emphasize the need for provision of conscientious objection, a balanced debate is necessary in this field, which includes all relevant health professionals. (shrink)

Absolute necessity might be defined as truth at absolutely all possible worlds without restriction. But we should be able to explain it without invoking possible worlds. I consider three alternative definitions of ’it is absolutely necessary that p’ and argue for a generalized counterfactual definition: ∀q(q□→p). I show that absolute necessity satisfies the S5 principle, and argue that logical necessity is absolute. I discuss the relations between logical and metaphysical necessity, explaining how there can be non-logical (...) class='Hi'>absolute necessities, and sketch an essentialist theory according to which necessity is grounded in the natures of things, and discuss some of its consequences, including the necessary existence of certain properties and objects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Absolute and Ordained Power of God in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century TheologyFrancis Oakley[W]e must cautiously abandon [that more specious opinion of the Platonist and Stoick]... in this, that it... blasphemously invades the cardinal Prerogative of Divinity, Omnipotence, by denying him a reserved power, of infringing, or altering any one of those Laws which [He] Himself ordained, and enacted, and chaining up his armes in the adamantine fetters of (...) Destiny.Walter Charleton, The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature : A Physico-Theologicall Treatise (London, 1652)Of the various attributes characteristically ascribed to God in the Christian tradition—goodness, wisdom, omniscience, omnipotence, and the like—it is omnipotence which of recent years has most persistently been the object of focused attention among philosophers and historians alike. That that should be the case with philosophers working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition is not altogether surprising. While it is doubtless a development few would have predicted half a century ago, the years since then have seen something of a recrudescence of interest in a legislative or divine-command ethic. 1 Had that [End Page 437] not itself conspired to make omnipotence an obvious focus of philosophic attention, the deepening contemporaneous preoccupation with modal logic or the logic of possibility would surely have succeeded in so doing. Understood classically as affirming of God the ability to do all things and connoting a virtual capacity for action (as opposed to a power exercised in actuality), omnipotence has proven to be something of a troublesome notion, inviting unrestrained speculation about hypothetical divine action and generating a veritable cat’s cradle of philosophical conundrums concerning the relationship of God’s power to his will, wisdom, goodness, and justice.Medieval theologians and philosophers alike were forced to grapple with these taxing problems, 2 and philosophers of our own era have found them no less directly pertinent to their own logical and ethical concerns. 3 In 1955 Mackie inaugurated what was destined to become an ongoing discussion of omnipotence in the philosophical journals, 4 and such philosophers as Kenny and Keane, Cowan and Wolfe, Dummett, Plantinga, Swinburne, and Geach have been drawn into the fray. Since then, as a result, the pages of Mind, Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and even The Listener have been punctuated by their efforts to grapple with those venerable questions concerning the divine power that had exercised St. Peter Damiani in the mid-eleventh century, brought Abelard to grief a half-century later, and subsequently led Peter Lombard to devote to them a crucial and influential section of his Sentences—whether God of his omnipotence could undo the past, whether he could have made things other than he had, or created a world better than he did, and so on. 5 [End Page 438]While no medievalist can be expected to be anything but gratified by this unexpected testimony to the enduring significance and power of medieval scholastic concerns, those of us interested especially in the intellectual developments of the later-medieval centuries have particular reason to be energized by it. The years since Mackie launched this contemporary philosophical debate have also seen an intensification of interest on the part of historians in the ways in which, during these particular centuries, medieval thinkers themselves came to terms with the implications of the divine omnipotence and dealt with the theological and philosophical puzzles characteristically generated by that notion. Unlike the philosophers, whose concerns have been somewhat more broad-ranging, the historians have focused in particular on a quintessentially scholastic distinction that was developed, it has been said, “as a ‘yes and no’ answer to the question whether God is able to do or arrange things other than he did in creating the orders of nature and grace.” 6 The distinction in question is that between God’s power understood as absolute and as ordained (potentia dei absoluta et ordinata), which the theologians and philosophers of the period deployed as part of their great effort of accommodation between Greek philosophical and biblical notions of the divine, and the historical significance of which the scholarship of the past forty years has served increasingly to vindicate. 7 But while that distinction has been... (shrink)

Erwin Schrödinger holds a prominent place in the history of science primarily due to his crucial role in the development of quantum physics. What is perhaps lesser known are his insights into subject-object duality, consciousness and mind. He documented himself that these were influenced by the Upanishads, a collection of ancient Hindu spiritual texts. Central to his thoughts in this area is that Mind is only One and there is no separation between subject and object. This chapter aims to bridge (...) Schrödinger’s view on One Mind with the teachings of Dōgen, a twelfth century Zen master. This bridge is formed by addressing the question of how time relates to One Mind, and subject-object duality. Schrödinger describes the experience of One Mind to be like a timeless now, whereas subject-object duality involves a linear continuum of time. We show how these differing positions are unified in the notion of ‘absolute present’, which was put forward in the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō (1871–1945). In addition, we argue that it is in this notion of absolute present that the views of Schrödinger, Dōgen and Nishida meet. (shrink)

Suárez's discussion of time in the Metaphysical Disputations is one of the earliest long treatises on time (extending over sixty pages), and includes detailed arguments supporting the view that physical actions take place within an absolute temporal reference frame. Whereas some previous thinkers, such as John Duns Scotus and Peter Aureole, had made tantalising suggestions that time exists independently of physical changes, their ideas were primarily negative theses in response to perceived problems with the dominant view that time was (...) caused by the celestial motion. Suárez, in contrast, provides a positive thesis based on his revision of traditional, Scholastic metaphysics. He argues that the ordering of earlier and later events can only be understood by conceiving events as existing within the embrace of a?flowing and successive space? which he refers to as?entirely necessary and immutable in its own flux? (omnino necessarium et immutabile in suo fluxu) - something at least very like an absolute temporal reference frame. Yet it would be simplistic to describe Suárez's work on time only in terms of its nascent absolutism, since for him there is a second kind of time, a more properly?real? time, which is an accident of material being. This kind of time is ontologically tied to the most intimate existence of objects, creating a plurality of individual continua of time - one for each distinct being. He calls this kind of time?intrinsic time? (tempus intrinsecum). Suárez's dualistic account of time, in which he proposes an?intrinsic time?, linked to being, which exists within a second order absolute temporal reference frame, or?imaginary succession?, forms a bridge between scholasticism and early modern philosophy providing a foundation for the work of later absolutists like Gassendi and Newton. (shrink)

The contemporary debate over God and abstract objects is hampered by a lack of conceptual clarity concerning two distinct metaphysical views: absolute creationism and divine conceptualism. This confusion goes back to the fount of the current debate, the article “Absolute Creation” by Thomas Morris and Christopher Menzel, who were not of one mind concerning God’s relation to abstract objects. Confusion has followed in their wake. Going forward, theistic philosophers need to distinguish more clearly between a sort (...) of modified Platonism, according to which abstract objects depend ontologically on God, and a sort of divine psychologism, according to which objects typically thought to be abstract are, in fact, concrete mental entities of some sort. (shrink)

This article argues that Kant’s argument from incongruent counterparts in his essay, Directions in Space (1768) yields not the conclusion that space is an objective reality, but rather that it is an absolute and dynamical framework that grounds spatial properties, a view which is neutral with respect to the objective/subjective nature of space. It is suggested that, so construed, Kant’s argument in this essay can be made consistent with his later employment in support of transcendental idealism with regard to (...) space. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Emest Sosa’s defense of Conceptual Relativism: the view that what exists is a function of human thought. My examination reveals that his defense entails an ontology that is indistinguishable from that of the altemative he labels less “sensible,” viz., Absolutism: the view that reality exists independently of our thinking. I conclude by defending Absolutism against Sosa’s objections.

In this essay, I focus on the way Hegel reconciles consciousness and self-consciousness in absolute knowing. What I want to suggest is that in absolute knowing the conscious subject comes to understand itself in terms of these conditions, providing it with the content of a new form of consciousness. It is in conceiving of itself in terms of these objective conditions for knowledge, which supersede the singularity of the self and yet are the conditions for consciousness, that the (...) conscious subject is to be understood as self-transcending. (shrink)

Object-hood is central to Husserl’s work, yet he employs several different notions of object-hood without clarifying the differences; his work thus offers rich and nuanced reflections on object-hood, but in a theoretically underdeveloped, at times even paradoxical, form. This paper aims to develop Husserl’s theory of objects systematically. In order to achieve this I distinguish five object-concepts operative in Husserl’s phenomenology and prove that they are not co-extensional. I also argue that they form a layer in terms of transcendental (...) constitution, one implying the other. I conclude the paper by exploring Husserl’s paradoxical claim that the absolute is not an object. From these considerations, two meta-phenomenological lessons emerge: object-hood is not total ; yet we cannot escape objectification while engaged in phenomenological reflection. (shrink)