While much of the recent literature on mechanisms has emphasized the superiority of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation over laws and nomological explanation, paradigmatic mechanisms—e.g., clocks or synapses—actually exhibit a great deal of stability in their behavior. And while mechanisms of this kind are certainly of great importance, there are many events that do not occur as a consequence of the operation of stable mechanisms. Events of natural and human history are often the consequence of causal processes that are ephemeral and (...) capricious. In this paper I shall argue that, notwithstanding their ephemeral nature, these processes deserve to be called mechanisms. Ephemeral mechanisms share important characteristics with their more stable cousins, and these shared characteristics will help us to understand connections between scientific and historical explanation. (shrink)

A reflection on the ephemeral instant, and the construction within it of both past and future. The person as a tension between what no longer is and what is yet to come. What is existence, if not the effort of will to offer oneself in time turned into history? If not the striving to attain impossible permanence?

Founding our analysis on the Geneva-Brussels approach to quantum mechanics, we use conventional macroscopic objects as guiding examples to clarify the content of two important results of the beginning of twentieth century: Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen’s reality criterion and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. We then use them in combination to show that our widespread belief in the existence of microscopic particles is only the result of a cognitive illusion, as microscopic particles are not particles, but are instead the ephemeral spatial and local manifestations of (...) non-spatial and non-local entities. (shrink)

Many philosophers have claimed that, unlike vision and audition, olfaction either fails to be representational or is, in various respects, representationally impoverished. In particular, some have argued that olfaction cannot by itself, without being supplemented by other sensory or recognitional capacities, represent material objects and is at best confined to the representation of odours. Construed phenomenologically, I argue that these claims are false, at least for some olfactory experiences and some types of olfactory object. I also suggest that the requirements (...) placed on representation by an implicit or explicit focus on vision should be challenged. Finally, I show how the temporality, ephemerality, and valence that characterize much olfactory experience actually contribute to its representational richness and uniqueness. (shrink)

The historic material culture produced by American Cold War nuclear weapons testing includes objects of scientific inquiry that can be generally categorized as being either ephemeral or enduring. Objects deemed to be ephemeral were of a less substantial nature, being impermanent and expendable in a nuclear test, while enduring objects were by nature more durable and long-lasting. Although all of these objects were ultimately subject to disappearance, the processes by which they were transformed, degraded, or destroyed prior to their disappearing (...) differ. Drawing principally upon archaeological theory, this paper proposes a functional dichotomy for categorizing and studying the historical trajectories of nuclear weapons testing technoscience artifacts. In examining the transformation patterns of steel towers and concrete blockhouses in particular, it explores an associated loss of scientific method that accompanies a science object's disappearance. (shrink)

This chapter proposes an extension of Georges Canguilhem's historical analysis toward contemporary concepts of milieu as flexible and dissipative territories, and as "adaptive landscapes" of living organisms such as the monarch butterfly and common swift. The chapter deploys and develops an understanding of certain vital processes in Canguilhem's account of milieu, by charting the experience to be found in various migration landscapes which cannot be understood independently of their taking place over time (and certainly not in abstraction). This is reflected (...) in the second section where an account of dissipative images is given as a way of thinking the ephemerality of structures whose ramifications occlude the ongoing radiance of their energy. This much can be seen, as the chapter concludes, in the work of Gemma Anderson whose drawings of mitosis and epigenetic landscapes contemplate, through a set of visual "notes," how we might begin to both think and render energy fluctuations. We can thus visualize migratory patterns not as a series of fixed points but in a way that might help us to see "sky" as a unique, dynamic milieu of lived time and space. (shrink)

Johnson et al. make a persuasive case that qualitative, story-like reasoning plays a crucial role in everyday thought and decision-making. This commentary questions the cohesiveness of this type of reasoning and the representations that generate it. Perhaps narratives do not underpin, but are ephemeral products of thought, created when we need to justify our actions to ourselves and others.

Exhibitions are embodied knowledge, and the processes of making exhibitions are also in themselves knowledge production practices. Science and technology exhibitions are therefore doubly of interest to historians of science: both as epistemic agents and as research methods. Yet both exhibitions and exhibition-making practices are ephemeral, as is the subsequent experience of the visitor. How can we research, interrogate, and understand both the productive creation of exhibitions and the phenomenologies and epistemologies of their reception and impact? “Exhibition histories” has become (...) a significant field of late, most closely associated with research on art exhibitions but also extending to world and trade fairs, and now increasingly crossing over into histories of science and technology. It is not an easy task: the range of exhibition archive materials includes – but is not limited to – 35mm slides, architectural blueprints, models, drawings, briefs, memos, budgets, press films, reviews, and personal accounts. This primary material is distributed unevenly across public and organized repositories, closed commercial archives, the personal papers of designers, often embargoed national bureaus of information, and more. Further, the experience of visiting an exhibition leaves far fewer traces to follow, requiring the researcher to do different kinds of things with the same widely varied material. This paper proposes methodologies for historians of science and technology wishing to understand the spatialization of science in exhibition contexts, the impacts of science exhibitions, and the more elusive phenomenological aspects of the exhibition visitor experience. Historians of science must accurately historicize context while researching both along and against the grain of archival material left by the making of exhibitions, as well as understanding the embodied trajectories of visitors. The practice of making exhibitions can also offer the researcher critically valuable insights into what to look for – and what may be absent – in archival records. (shrink)

This article examines the tension in Hannah Arendt’s thought between the creativity of political action and the worldlessness of labour in light of fieldwork with feminist activists in Mexico City. Drawing from my ethnographic research, I explore how labour and action are knitted together in the feminist practice of accompanying women who seek safe abortion in the city. Bringing Arendt’s thought into dialogue with anthropologies of illness experience as well as the reflections of my interlocutors in the field, I shift (...) from an approach to the situation of abortion as a decision-making event, to ask other questions about autonomy and dependency, freedom and necessity, mortality and political life. I argue that what is interesting about Arendt’s conceptualisation of the labouring body is not that she separates ‘bare life’ from the political sphere of ‘men’, but rather that it alerts us to the uncertain way our life is implicated with others. In conclusion, I argue that feminist accompaniment networks foster an ephemeral relation of care between activists and women in situations of abortion, one that invites us to re-imagine the temporality of political action and to ask, again, what it is to make a new world versus make this world livable. (shrink)

The question of beauty continues to engage humans, especially intellectuals, who inquire into its quintessence and the sources from which it derives. Does beauty consist in attaining geometric harmony of structure and shape, or in achieving numerical proportion in audio and visual? Or, does beauty transcend all that, to crystalize into an absolute essence that conforms to high values as justice, truth, and goodness? How long does beauty last? Does it terminate at the terrestrial realm or transcend to the celestial? (...) What kind of beauty is essential for the attainment of transcendence and eschatological happiness? Beauty is two-sided, one is transient, the other eternal. This essay examines the concept of beauty in Arabic poetical compositions of Muslim mystics, and explores how they construe beauty and identify its locus vis-à-vis transcendence between ephemerality and eternality as seen in the poems by Ibn al-Farîd and al-Tilimsânî. The former perceives God’s name and attributes as embodiment of absolute beauty, and everything in the universe, as manifestations of the beauty, while the latter argues that every beauty in the universe derives from God’s absolute beauty. (shrink)

Vision is organized around material objects; they are most of what we see. But we also see beams of light, depictions, shadows, reflections, etc. These things look like material objects in many ways, but it is still visually obvious that they are not material objects. This chapter articulates some principles that allow us to understand how we see these ‘ephemera’. H.P. Grice’s definition of seeing is standard in many discussions; here I clarify and augment it with a criterion drawn from (...) Fred Dretske. This enables me to re-analyse certain ephemera that have received counter-intuitive treatments in the work of Kendall Walton (photographs), Brian O’Shaughnessy (light), and Roy Sorenson (occlusions). (shrink)

For the past two decades, Einstein's Hole Argument (which deals with the apparent indeterminateness of general relativity due to the general covariance of the field equations) and its resolution in terms of "Leibniz equivalence" (the statement that pseudo-Riemannian geometries related by active diffeomorphisms represent the same physical solution) have been the starting point for a lively philosophical debate on the objectivity of the point-events of space-time. It seems that Leibniz equivalence makes it impossible to consider the points of the space-time (...) manifold as physically individuated without recourse to dynamical individuating fields. Various authors have posited that the metric field itself can be used in this way , but nobody so far has considered the problem of explicitly distilling the "metrical fingerprint" of point-events from the gauge-dependent elements of the metric field. Working in the Hamiltonian formulation of general relativity, and building on the results of Lusanna and Pauri (2002), we show how Bergmann and Komar's "intrinsic pseudo-coordinates" (based on the value of curvature invariants) can be used to provide a physical individuation of point-events in terms of the true degrees of freedom (the "Dirac observables") of the gravitational field, and we suggest how this conceptual individuation could in principle be implemented with a well-defined empirical procedure. We argue from these results that point-events retain a significant kind of physical objectivity. (shrink)

_A deeply personal yet broadly relevant exploration of the ephemeral life of the classic in art, from the eighteenth century to our own day An _Economist_ Book of the Year, 2024_ Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten (...) artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true. Where does the idea of the timeless classic come from? And how has it become so fiercely contested? By recovering disputes about works of art from the eighteenth century to the close of the twentieth, Gurstein takes us into unfamiliar aesthetic and moral terrain, providing a richly imagined historical alternative to accounts offered by both cultural theorists advancing attacks on the politics of taste and those who continue to cling to the ideal of universal values embodied in the classic. As Gurstein brings to life the competing responses of generations of artists, art lovers, and critics to specific works of art, she makes us see the same object vividly and directly through their eyes and feel, in all its enlarging intensity, what they felt. (shrink)

This paper introduces and applies a structured methodology for comparing the philosophical writing capabilities of four frontier Large Language Models (LLMs): Claude Sonnet 4.0, ChatGPT 4.1, Gemini 2.5, and Grok 3. The LLMs were tasked with producing an extended scholarly article on the concepts of the ephemeral and the ineffable, including extensive references and tables, working from a user-provided bibliography. The comparison methodology evaluates outputs based on: (1) Structural Completeness and Adherence to Prompt; (2) Depth and Breadth of Philosophical Exploration; (...) (3) Coherence and Logical Flow of Argumentation; (4) Use of Scholarship and Citations from the provided sources or internal knowledge; and (5) Clarity and Precision of Language. Application of this methodology reveals significant variations in the LLMs’ approaches. Sonnet and Gemini produced extensive, deeply structured articles, effectively utilizing the provided bibliography to support their discussions. ChatGPT and Grok offered more concise treatments, also drawing on the provided sources. All LLMs successfully incorporated tables and addressed the core concepts, but differed in the nuance of their comparisons and the diversity of philosophical perspectives engaged. The study highlights the LLMs’ current strengths in synthesizing information and structuring academic-style texts, while also underscoring differences in their depth of engagement with complex philosophical ideas and their strategies for selecting and integrating scholarly sources. The findings con- tribute to understanding LLM capabilities in scholarly domains and suggest avenues for future research in human-AI collaboration and AI evaluation in the humanities. (shrink)

This concluding chapter proposes an alternative interpretation of Theodor W. Adorno's unfinished Aesthetic Theory in which he reconsiders some of the philosopher's central aesthetic concepts, such as aesthetic autonomy, from the perspective of those moments when Adorno's writing appears to destabilize the work of art and, by extension, the philosophical claims that his theories generally are held to make on behalf of the aesthetic. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, initially shunned or attacked when it was posthumously published in 1970, has become increasingly (...) his most widely and carefully read work. While the interpreters are still in disagreement about the appropriate reading of the text, there is largely consensus about its significance as the culmination of Adorno's œuvre and its importance for the contemporary debate on aesthetics. (shrink)

This PhD responds to a two fold problem with the philosophy of design and the practice of design. The philosophical problem is stated as the discrepancy between a dominant philosophical framework that orders the world according to eternal essences and the actual conditions of the world in which we exist: the conditions of becoming and of flux. Commencing with a critique of the western metaphysical tradition of statics this research project proposes that we need to find a way of describing (...) an evolutionary model of practice, and by so doing to provide a revitalised narration of process. Consequently, the PhD explores the meanings of process through a critical examination of an ensemble of projects created by the author. Within this framework, a number of questions are posed in order to explore the proposition of a process practice. These questions are: What is process? How does one think process? Indeed, how do we get to grasp change? What are the consequences of process thinking on the practices of design, their fields of operation, and their productions? And, how can the thematising of process contribute to the design of the constructed environment, as well as reconfigure the practices of design? This thematising of process is argued to involve a necessary address to the constitutive and interrelated characteristics of process: space/time, movement, change, form and matter. Such an address is also seen to problematise the status of the object, the paradigms of representation, the modes of creation, the economies of exchange, and the structures of community, and to offer a modality of practice which would re-imagine the forms of social exchange to offer an ethical alternative to the tyranny of supply and demand, and thereby reconfigure the potential for dwelling. Making an overview of the discourses and practices engaging with theories of becoming, this thesis argues that almost all of these re-inscribe statics and that consequently the practice of design seems to drag behind our understanding of the world. Through a meditation on dis/appearance, in which the dynamics of being and becoming and the restless ambiguity of the gap are examined, the work establishes a process vocabulary, and makes clear through a material practice, the domains of process thinking, its inclinations, and the kinds of operations and procedures that flourish there. Foregrounding the fertile character of process practice, the PhD then proceeds to introduce notions of the movement-form, the duration-form, the transformational-form, the geometry of encounter, and to argue for physical form as an in-movement poise. Advocating new modes of approach and of attentiveness, and demonstrating new generative methods, this PhD argues that process thinking is not simply an operational stance, but an ethical position that identifies a field of care, and that consequently the design practices be expanded by taking seriously the relationship between process thinking and place making. Thus, this thesis concludes by advocating a mode of place making which, rather than reproduce planned environments as systems of control, configures place as the discursive contested place of encounter and exchange. (shrink)

Stollenwerk, Daniel J In this essay on the social encyclical Caritas in Veritate, the author looks at Pope Benedict XVI's defense of reason in an age that has lost its faith in reason. Benedict insists we are faced with a choice between being closed within immanence - which leads to an irrational rejection of meaning and value - or open to reason that leads to the transcendent. Pope Benedict, the author concludes, is a contemporary apologist, claiming that Christianity is not (...) only the most reasonable of worldviews, but also necessary for the very survival of humanity. (shrink)

This introductory chapter gives a detailed overview of current debates and questions in the philosophy of perceptual ephemera. The chapter begins by identifying the notion of ‘the ephemeral’ that connects the contributions to the volume; the notion of ‘the insubstantial’ rather than the notion of ‘the fleeting’ or ‘short-lived’. Various ontological and phenomenological questions associated with ephemera and with perceptual experience of the ephemeral are then distinguished. The authors go on to identify a number of more specific themes in the (...) philosophy of the ephemeral, and provide a brief introduction to how the contributors to this collection engage with these themes. The authors attempt to make a case for the view that reflection on ‘ephemera’ and ‘the ephemeral’ may enrich and challenge prevailing approaches in contemporary philosophy of perception. (shrink)

"The dramatic monologue, as perfected by Robert Browning in the Victorian era, represents not merely a literary genre but a distinct philosophical event; a suspension of historical time wherein the speaking subject is caught in a perpetual state of "inoperativity," revealing the fissures between intent and execution, spirit and matter, theology and desire"...This study uses Agamben's tropes and John Caputo's understanding of a weak God to interrogate Browning's 'The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church'. Since this essay is (...) mainly for students; there is provided a glossary of key terms; sudden veerings into Maslow and Lacan. This has been done to provide as much information as is possible within one essay without a candidate having to refer to multiple sources if she has to take her exams at short notice. But the central argument is based primarily on Agamen's works. (shrink)

This article develops the hypothesis that the performing arts—unlike visual, musical, or pictorial arts—constitute an essential limit to digitalization. Their irreducible requirement of embodied co‑presence (Phelan 1993; Fischer‑Lichte 2008), their ephemeral temporality (Phelan 1993; Schneider 2011), and their intersubjective structure of meaning‑making position them as a privileged site of resistance to algorithmic rationality. Drawing on classical Greek theater, philosophical anthropology, and contemporary analyses of digital temporality (Stiegler 1998; Crary 2013; Chun 2016), the article argues that theatrical action reactivates the political, (...) existential, and communal dimensions of human coexistence. In an era of pervasive digital communication and surveillance (Zuboff 2019; Crawford 2021), the performing arts re‑emerge as forms of subversive rupture that recreate free public time and reassert the primacy of lived experience. (shrink)

In the absence of continuing selves or persons, Buddhist philosophers are under pressure to provide a systematic account of phenomenological and other features of conscious experience. Any such Buddhist account of experience, however, faces further problems because of another cardinal tenet of Buddhist revisionary metaphysics: the doctrine of impermanence, which during the Abhidharma period is transformed into the doctrine of momentariness. Setting aside the problems that plague the Buddhist Abhidharma theory of experience because of lack of persons, I shall focus (...) on problems that arise because of its allegiance to momentariness and explore some responses on behalf of the Abhidharma Buddhist philosophers. I address two challenges to the Buddhist view in this paper. The first, which I will call the “Phenomenological Challenge”, primarily concerns the temporal properties of what is represented in conscious experience. The second, which I will call the “Metaphysical Challenge”, concerns the temporal properties of conscious representation itself. (shrink)

In this article, we illuminate how a consumption practice in an ephemeral religious organization subverts systems of economic inequality that otherwise prevail in, and structure, society. Drawing on a rich ethnographic study in Pakistan, we show how the practice of food consumption in the Tablighi Jamaat —an Islamic organization originating in South Asia that is practiced intermittently by its followers—represents temporal spaces of egalitarianism. Within these temporal spaces, entrenched economic hierarchies that are salient in organizing Pakistani society are challenged. We (...) found that while the fundamental principles of the Tablighi Jamaat advocate for subversion of the economic hierarchies that propagate myriad inequalities by demarcating local Muslims into spheres of different social and economic classes, it is in the practice of food consumption when ethical transgression from these hierarchies are rendered most intelligible. Finally, we consider the implications of this study to the emerging field of Islamic business ethics. (shrink)

The skin is always and already a serietl of planes which signify race, gender, age and such. Tattooing creates a new surface of potential significance upon the body. Tattooing can call into question concepts of volition in reference to the power to inscribe and define one's subjectivity through one's own skin, and the social defining of the subject. Skin is the involution or event between subject and object, will and cultural inscription, the social and the self. Feminists, particularly corporeal feminists, (...) have attempted to think ways in which the female flesh may be recognized and self-defined without risking essentialism through reification of the meaning of ‘woman's body’. Thinking a tattooed female body thus resonates with some of the risks and benefits feminism has found in theorizing a marginalized body. Using Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard and other major influences on corporeal feminists, this article explores ways in which significance is sought in skin, and possible configurations of skin and world, which challenge the desire to read the flesh as a legible incarnation of subjectivity. (shrink)

This brief article presents the everyday cultural use of the Snapchat instant messaging application for video chats as an exemplary case of the challenges confronting studies of cinematics in an epoch marked by the rise in network societies of ubiquitous mobile and social media and technics. It proffers and begins to detail the argument that snap video chats cannot be denigrated as mere ‘shorts’ but must be approached as spatiotemporally and experientially complex.

New hardware such as mobile handheld devices and digital cameras; new online social venues such as social networking, microblogging, and online photo sharing sites; and new infrastructures such as the global positioning system are beginning to establish new practices—what the author refers to as “sociolocative”—that combine data about a physical location, such as a geotag, with a virtual social act. This research investigates the phenomenon of documentary broadcasting, whereby individuals curate lasting descriptions and commentaries about a location for a public (...) audience, often using the photo sharing site, Flickr. Unlike many photographs shared online, the subject of a documentary post is always a place and not the activities nor identity of the broadcaster himself or herself. When presented together as curated narratives, posted images transform Flickr into a virtual public “gallery space” that captures, presents, and preserves aspects of a place that may last longer than the physical location itself. (shrink)

A model of “ephemeral” population structure is presented that applies not only to biological systems in which discrete groups form but also to networks without group boundaries. The evolution of altruistic behaviors is discussed. Nonrandom interaction and nonlinear fitness structures are modeled; together, these factors can produce stable polymorphisms of altruistic and selfish types, as well as bistability. Empirical applications of the model may be found in microbes, marine invertebrates, annual plants, and other organisms.

In this essay, I examine how digital literary works negotiate the relationship between literary form and media under conditions of technical ephemerality. By tracing how digital works mutate across software environments, interfaces, hardware systems, and storage media, the essay approaches digital literature as part of an evolving media ecology and attends to the specific forms of experience and disappearance that emerge from it. Focusing primarily on Agrippa (a book of the dead), Calum Rodger’s videogame-poems, and the monita-shi and AR-shi (...) of the Japanese poet ni_ka—while relating these works to earlier hypertext fiction and later procedural videogames—it argues that impermanence is not merely a threat to digital literature but a constitutive aspect of its formal logic. Rather than treating obsolescence, fragmentation, variability, and platform dependence as external preservation problems, the analysis shows how these works integrate such conditions into the very structure of digital poetics. Across the three cases, ephemerality emerges in technically distinct forms: programmed self-erasure, procedural mediation through interaction and gameplay, and infrastructural erosion. (shrink)

Based on several cases, this article develops a thought inspired by the Journal of Philosophy of Education’s special issue on the Educational Value of Monuments (55.3). The article is a reflection about the locations which make statues able to be transformed materially and semiotically, and which provoke discussion about what is to be learnt by understanding the monument as a fragment and semiophore. I argue that the monument—located in a specific place which makes its contextual meaning—represents fragments, in Latin fractures (...) or cracks, as an expression of the violence inflicted on an imaginary whole. Defining and accepting a monument as a fragment allows us to understand each change that may happen to it—including removal or relocation—as an incentive to learn about the meanings of new wholes and to consciously respond to them. On the one hand, this can effectively stop mimetic pressures to reproduce aggression towards monuments. On the other, it can create a ground for shaping an ethical attitude of co-responsibility for a common world that is not exclusively human. The strictly educational sense of the proposed redefinition of the monument would be to radicalize sensitivity to its inherent feature, which is its fragmentary nature, resulting in the fragility of the heritage it co-creates in the space of commonality. In the proposed understanding of the monument, apart from the emphasis on significant fragmentation, an important role is played by the decisive abandonment of the anthropocentric perspective. In the new perspective of the common world, the monument becomes an ephemeral heritage, and its most current educational value seems to lie there. (shrink)

This paper analyses three concepts of life in Adorno's philosophy and considers the relationship between these concepts and the idea of a speculative materialism. The paper is concerned with Adorno's late concept of metaphysical experience and articulates a response to two key problems for the interpretation of this concept. First, given Adorno's emphasis on a purely negative philosophy, how does transcendence arise? Second, how can we give an experiential content to this idea of transcendence? A response to these two questions (...) is configured through an analysis of three concepts of life; mere life, damaged life and ephemeral life. (shrink)

This book provides a study of Walter Benjamin's first philosophy in two senses: it focuses on his early philosophy as a source of insight into his later works, and it explores his thinking about the nature of truth, method, experience, the relation of body and mind, and the limits of human knowledge. While most attention is paid to Benjamin's later works, his writings from roughly 1914-1925 explore philosophical themes and develop a critical method. This book argues that this early work (...) founds a series of original and lasting questions and insights. Benjamin understands experience as a broken continuum of diverse forms of spiritual expression, each of which is ephemeral. This leads Benjamin to a series of thought figures: the notion of language as a medium of experience; a philosophy of perception based in the natural history of the human body; an emphasis on mimesis as a faculty of creative assimilation; and a discovery of memory as a power for excavation of meaning in past experience. This book demonstrates that the need for a new understanding of the metaphysical structure of experience, as well as a new conception of truth, play a special role in shaping Benjamin's subsequent work. Walter Benjamin's First Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on the thought of Walter Benjamin, 20th-century Continental philosophy, comparative literature, and modern German thought. (shrink)

Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, 264 pp., paper, ISBN 0?631?18693?X Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 256 pp., paper, ISBN 0?631?19267?0 Postmodernity and its Discontents, New York: New York University Press, 1997, 232 pp., paper, ISBN 0?814?71304?1.

The Acting Entity-characterization of mechanisms, defended in the last chapter, is rather broad. It allows for almost all causal goings-on to be mechanisms. Let us call the AE-characterization of mechanisms as formulated in the previous chapter the minimal notion of a mechanism (Glennan 2017). -/- (Minimal Notion) A mechanism for a phenomenon consists of entities and activities organized in such a way that they are responsible for the phenomenon. -/- Something is a mechanism in the minimal sense if it consists (...) of more than one entity, at least one activity, and a certain organization that is crucial for the phenomenon to be produced. An ion channel sitting on the axon membrane is not a mechanism—it consists of only one entity and does not produce any phenomenon. An ion diffusing through this ion channel and thereby producing a voltage gradient is a mechanism in the minimal sense. (...) One problem with the minimal notion is that, since it renders almost all causal goings-on mechanisms, it cannot make sense of the intuitive and theoretically relevant difference between mechanisms such as that leading to Roland Barthes’s death, and mechanisms like the neurotransmitter release mechanism or the action potential mechanism. The difference is of theoretical importance because ephemeral mechanisms cannot be used for the various tasks that the notion of a mechanism is supposed to perform according to the new mechanists (Krickel 2018): first, the minimal notion of a mechanism cannot account for the normativity that is often implied in mechanism-talk. Many mechanisms are said to be able to fail or succeed in bringing about a phenomenon. -/- (...) -/- Second, mechanisms in the minimal sense cannot be used to justify type-level mechanistic explanations. Like the mechanism that led to Roland Barthes’s death, minimal mechanisms might occur only once and, therefore, cannot ground explanations that have general phenomena as their explananda. For example, the mechanism for neurotransmitter release is supposed to explain neurotransmitter release in general rather than in one particular instance. Again, this suggests that the minimal notion of a mechanism is insufficient to account for relevant kinds of mechanisms. -/- In the following sections I introduce a taxonomy of mechanisms that goes beyond the minimal notion. First, I introduce the notion of a functional mechanism: one can distinguish between those mechanisms that fulfill a (biological) function, and those that do not (Garson 2013; Piccinini 2015; Maley and Piccinini 2017). Indeed, combining the notion of a mechanism with that of a function seems to be promising with regard to making sense of the normativity of mechanism-talk: a mechanism that has a certain function is supposed to fulfill that function and might fail to fulfill it. In what follows, I discuss different suggestions for how to characterize functional mechanisms. It will turn out that neither of these notions successfully accounts for the normativity of mechanism-talk unless the second and third sub-types of mechanisms are taken into account. I will call the second type regular mechanism; the third type I will call reversely regular mechanism (Krickel 2018). Both notions rest on the idea that one can distinguish between one-off mechanisms and mechanisms that establish some kind of regularity (Andersen 2012). Regular mechanisms, as I will show, have to be understood as mechanisms that bring about a particular phenomenon more often than they bring about any other phenomenon. Reversely regular mechanisms are mechanisms that bring about a particular phenomenon that is more often brought about by that mechanism than by any other mechanism. I will show how these two notions of regularity together are necessary and sufficient for grounding type-level mechanistic explanations (see also Krickel 2018), and when combined with the functional notion of a mechanism, can solve the problem of accidental goal contributions, which afflicts the most promising account of functions as discussed in the next section. -/- . (shrink)