This book is a consideration of Hegel’s view on logic and basic logical concepts such as truth, form, validity, and contradiction, and aims to assess this view’s relevance for contemporary philosophical logic. The literature on Hegel’s logic is fairly rich. The attention to contemporary philosophical logic places the present research closer to those works interested in the link between Hegel’s thought and analytical philosophy, Koch 2014, Brandom 2014, 1-15, Pippin 2016, Moyar 2017, Quante & Mooren 2018 among others). In (...) this context, one particularity of this book consists in focusing on something that has been generally underrated in the literature: the idea that, for Hegel as well as for Aristotle and many other authors, logic is the study of the forms of truth, i.e. the forms that our thought can assume in searching for truth. In this light, Hegel’s thinking about logic is a fundamental reference point for anyone interested in a philosophical foundation of logic. (shrink)

Those who wish to defend the role of aesthetic values in science face a dilemma: Either aesthetic language is used metaphorically for what are ultimately epistemic features, or aesthetic language is used literally but it is difficult to see the importance of such values in science. I introduce a new account that gets around this problem by looking to an overlooked source of aesthetic value in science: the relation between form and content. I argue that a fit between the (...) content of a thought experiment, and the way in which that content is formulated, can have important epistemic pay offs through contributing to scientific understanding. (shrink)

A century after the publication of Evgeny Pashukanis's pivotal book General Theory of Law and Marxism, this collection presents a comprehensive account and analysis of his key concept of legal form. Evgeny Pashukanis's General Theory, born amidst the fervour of the first socialist revolution, remains still a crucial reference point in Marxist theories of the law and critical legal theory. Its theoretical depth paved the way for new understandings of the relationship between Marxism and the law. Its crucial virtue (...) continues to be, even after a century, the ability to articulate epochal concerns in the context of a socialist revolution that turned hitherto theoretical problems into dilemmas of practice. This book returns to Pashukanis's main concept: 'legal form'. Through this jurisprudential category Pashukanis aimed to grasp the dependence of the law on the economy, and at the same time, to enquire into the degree to which the law preserves its autonomy from economic relations. In other words, the legal form as a concept conveys both the law's dependence on the economic sphere of exchange and its greatest inherent specificity: the way it translates economic relations into its proper language and set of legal/ideological constructs. The contributions to this volume provide a range of perspectives on how the concept of legal form has been developed and reinterpreted. Including the first English translation of Pashukanis's essay, 'Hegel, State and Law', this collection will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of legal and political theory. (shrink)

Hylomorphism is the theory that objects are composites of form and matter. Recently it has been argued that form is structure, or the arrangement of an object's parts. This paper shows that the principle of form cannot be ontologically exhausted by structure. That is, I deny form should be understood just as the arrangement of an object's parts. I do so by showing that structure cannot play the role form is supposed to in a certain (...) domain of objects, specifically, in mereological simples. Thus, I show that Hylomorphism does not reduce to Structuralism. I also draw out some important consequences from my argument for Hylomorphism in general. (shrink)

This article argues for an interpretation of Aristotle’s biological account of familial resemblance that allows us to read Aristotle’s embryology as employing the same concept of “form” as he employs in his Metaphysics. The dominant view for the last several decades has been that in order to account for the phenomenon of inherited characteristics, Aristotle’s biology must appeal to a “sub-specific” form, one that includes all of the traits that parents pass on to their offspring. That view, however, (...) is not only inconsistent with Aristotle’s essentialist metaphysics, but it also renders the embryological theory internally inconsistent. The interpretation I offer avoids both inconsistencies, and better coheres with what he actually says in Generation of Animals. (shrink)

This volume deals with the connection between thinking-and-speaking and our form of life. All contributions engage with Wittgenstein’s approach to this topic. As a whole, the volume takes a stance against both biological and ethnological interpretations of the notion "form of life" and seeks to promote a broadly logico-linguistic understanding instead. The structure of this book is threefold. Part one focuses on lines of thinking that lead from Wittgenstein’s earlier thought to the concept of form of life (...) in his later work. Contributions to part two examine the concrete philosophical function of this notion as well as the ways in which it differs from cognate concepts. Contributions to part three put Wittgenstein’s notion of form of life in perspective by relating it to phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy and problems in contemporary analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This paper articulates and defends a conception of logical form as semantic form revealed by a compositional meaning theory. On this conception, the logical form of a sentence is determined by the semantic types of its primitive terms and their mode of combination as it relates to determining under what conditions it is true. We develop this idea in the framework of truth-theoretic semantics. We argue that the semantic form of a declarative sentence in a language (...) L is revealed by a (canonical) proof of its T- sentence in an interpretive truth theory for L. We give a precise characterization of sameness of logical form between any two declarative sentences in any two languages in terms of the notion of corresponding proofs in interpretive truth theories for the languages. We illustrate the utility of this approach with a number of examples. We then extend the characterization to non-declaratives in a generalization of truth-theoretic semantics that appeals to fulfillment conditions, of which truth conditions are one variety. On this approach, logical forms are not reified, and the notion of sameness of logical form is treated as conceptually basic. We discuss the relation of this conception of logical form to the project of identifying logical constants, reviewing two approaches, one of which takes topic neutrality as central, the other recursion. We argue that the project of identifying logical constants for the purposes of classifying together valid arguments is largely independent of that identifying logical form of sentences, and urge an ecumenical approach to extending talk of logical constants beyond where it is currently well-grounded. (shrink)

While the Sorites paradox is often presented in a propositional conditional form, it can be recast using disjunctive, conjunctive, or modus tollens syllogism. This paper challenges Kit Fine’s claim that only the conjunctive form is motivated. All four propositional forms are effective because they express three deeper, first-order principles: (1) the familiar principle of Tolerance, (2) the often-implicit assumption of Monotonicity, and (3) a novel claim I call Local Interdefinability (LI). LI is the thesis – motivated by contextualist (...) empirical observations and by the salience of vague contraries – that for adjacent members of a soritical series, vague contraries (such as “tall” and “short”) function as contradictories. LI lets the conjunctive form proceed without any explicit elimination of double negation. Moreover, Kit Fine’s case against the conditional form loses its force since LI covers the gap between the conjunctive and conditional forms, and his case against the disjunctive form is undermined by the rejection of Monotonicity. The paper concludes that the unity of the Sorites paradox lies above the propositional level. (shrink)

This paper claims that there is no such thing as the correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfil two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and semantics. The first part of the paper outlines the thesis that a unique notion of logical form fulfils both roles, and argues that the alleged best candidate for making it true is unsuited for one of (...) the two roles. The second part spells out a considerably different notion which is free from that problem, although it does not fit the other role. As it will be suggested, each of the two notions suits at most one role, so the uniqueness thesis is ungrounded. (shrink)

Hylomorphists claim that substances—human beings, oak trees, chemical compounds—are compounds of matter and form. If a house is a substance, then its matter would be some bricks and timbers and its form the structure those bricks and timbers take on. While hylomorphism is traditionally presented as a theory of change, it only treats the coming-to-be and passing-away of matter-form compounds. But many hylomorphists understand forms to be entities in their own right, as parts or constituents of substances. (...) So, a neglected question arises: how, when, and from where do forms come to be? I take up the view of one prominent and representative hylomorphist, Kathrin Koslicki, and argue that she cannot answer these questions satisfactorily. I close with a proposal for an account of the generation of forms based on machinery many hylomorphists already accept, namely, causal powers, that points to a deflationary metaphysics of form. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell, in the second of his 1914 Lowell lectures, Our Knowledge of the External World, asserted famously that ‘every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical’ (Russell 1993, p. 42). He went on to characterize that portion of logic that concerned the study of forms of propositions, or, as he (...) called them, ‘logical forms’. This portion of logic he called ‘philosophical logic’. Russell asserted that ... some kind of knowledge of logical forms, though with most people it is not explicit, is involved in all understanding of discourse. It is the business of philosophical logic to extract this knowledge from its concrete integuments, and to render it explicit and pure. (p. 53) Perhaps no one still endorses quite this grand a view of the role of logic and the investigation of logical form in philosophy. But talk of logical form retains a central role in analytic philosophy. Given its widespread use in philosophy and linguistics, it is rather surprising that the concept of logical form has not received more attention by philosophers than it has. The concern of this paper is to say something about what talk of logical form comes to, in a tradition that stretches back to (and arguably beyond) Russell’s use of that expression. This will not be exactly Russell’s conception. For we do not endorse Russell’s view that propositions are the bearers of logical form, or that appeal to propositions adds anything to our understanding of what talk of logical form comes to. But we will be concerned to provide an account responsive to the interests expressed by Russell in the above quotations, though one clarified of extraneous elements, and expressed precisely. For this purpose, it is important to note that the concern expressed by Russell in the above passages, as the surrounding text makes clear, is a concern not just with logic conceived narrowly as the study of logical terms, but with propositional form more generally, which includes, e.g., such features as those that correspond to the number of argument places in a propositional function, and the categories of objects which propositional.... (shrink)

In various texts, Aristotle assigns priority to form, in its role as a principle and cause, over matter and the matter-form compound. Given the central role played by this claim in Aristotle's search for primary substance in the Metaphysics, it is important to understand what motivates him in locating the primary causal responsibility for a thing's being what it is with the form, rather than the matter. According to Met. Theta.8, actuality [ energeia / entelecheia ] in (...) general is prior to potentiality [ dunamis ] in three ways, viz., in definition, time and substance. I propose an explicitly causal reading of this general priority claim, as it pertains to the matter-form relationship. The priority of form over matter in definition, time and substance, in my view, is best explained by appeal to the role of form as the formal, efficient and final cause of the matter-form compound, respectively, while the posteriority of matter to form according to all three notions of priority is most plausibly accounted for by the fact that the causal contribution of matter is limited to its role as material cause. When approached from this angle, the work of Met. Theta.8 can be seen to lend direct support to the more specific and explicitly causal priority claim we encounter in Met. Z.17, viz., that form is prior to matter in its role as the principle and primary cause of a matter-form compound's being what it is. (shrink)

Although the notion of spatiality has always lurked in the background of discussions of literary form, the self-conscious use of the term as a critical concept is generally traced to Joseph Frank's seminal essay of 1945, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature."1 Frank's basic argument is that modernist literary works are "spatial" insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. This argument (...) has been attacked on several fronts. An almost universal objection is that spatial form is a "mere metaphor" which has been given misplaced concreteness and that it denies the essentially temporal nature of literature. Some critics will concede that the metaphor contains a half-truth, but one which is likely to distract attention from more important features of the reading experience. The most polemical attacks have come from those who regard spatial form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern literature and who have linked it with antihistorical and even fascist ideologies.2 Advocates of Frank's position, on the other hand, have generally been content to extrapolate his premises rather than criticize them, and have compiled an ever-mounting list of modernist texts which can be seen, in some sense, as "antitemporal." The whole debate can best be advanced, in my view, not by some patchwork compromise among the conflicting claims but by a radical, even outrageous statement of the basic hypothesis in its most general form. I propose, therefore, that far from being a unique phenomenon of some modern literature, and far from being restricted to the features which Frank identifies in those works , spatial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not on Frank to show that some works have spatial form but on his critics to provide an example of any work that does not. · 1. Frank's essay first appeared in Sewanee Review 53 and was revised in his The Widening Gyre . Frank's basic argument has not changed essentially even in his most avante-garde statements; he still regards spatial form "as a particular phenomenon of modern avante-garde writing." See "Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical Inquiry 4 : 231-52. A useful bibliography, "Space and Spatial Form in Narrative," is being complied by Jeffrey Smitten .· 2. This charge generally links the notion of spatial form with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the imagist movement, the "irrationality" and pessimistic antihistoricism of modernism, and the conservative Romantic tradition. Frank discusses the complex motives behind these associations in the work of Robert Weimann and Frank Kermode in his "Answer to Critics," pp. 238-48. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is the author of Blake's Composite Art, and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. The present essay is part of Iconology: The Image in Literature and the Visual Arts. "Diagrammatology" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Leon Surette responds to the current essay in "‘Rational Form in Literature’". (shrink)

This short piece is a partial translation of the introduction to Gilbert Simondon’s most succinct philosophical reflections on the notions of form, information, and potentials. The material was presented on February 27, 1960, at the Session of the Société française de philosophie. After the abstract and Simondon’s definitions of form, information, and transductive operation, there is a discussion between Simondon and other attendees who were present at his talk, including Paul Ricoeur and Jean Hyppolite, both of whom had (...) been part of Simondon’s viva panel in 1958. The piece represents an interesting moment in the history of philosophy where cybernetics and information theory were problematized by thinkers like Simondon, who thought that the concept of information needed to be expanded and refined to adequately account for processes of individuation, or "ontogenesis.". (shrink)

In Aristotle’s account of change, lacking a form is called privation (Physics I.7 191a14). For example, someone takes on the form of being musical only from previously having the privation of being unmusical. However, he also states that “shape and nature are spoken of in two ways, for the privation too is in a way form” (Physics II.1 193b19). I will demonstrate that these seemingly contradictory statements are not actually in tension. Since all perceptible matter must be (...) enformed, we would have trouble discussing things that have yet to undergo generation, like menstrual fluid, and things that have undergone corruption, like corpses, if we did not cite the privation as a sort of form. I will argue that, given his commitment to hylomorphism, Aristotle is committed to privation being a form in a qualified sense. It cannot be a form in an unqualified sense because privation often spoils the matter such that it can no longer be reformed. The fact of the matter is we cannot draw a bright line between privation and form because the two are contraries and can be said to hold to different degrees at different points on a spectrum. (shrink)

Some philosophers hold that sentences with the word good have a uniform form. On this view, many of the apparent syntactic and semantic differences between (say) That is a good knife, Xavier is good with children and It is good to have pets are illusory. A difficulty in evaluating uniformity theses is that they are often not formulated in a linguistically precise way. I provide an interpretation where uniformity theses treat good as taking the same arguments at some syntactic (...) or semantic level. I then defend the view that the motivation for uniformity theses is weak, and I develop a strategy for opposing them. One version of this strategy is deployed, drawing on under-appreciated data about tough-adjectives. I argue that there is better motivation for alternative analyses of good, namely ‘non-uniformity contextualism’ and ‘relativism’. The resulting picture is one where the apparent syntactic and semantic differences between good-constructions are genuine. (shrink)

A critical study of the concept of form in Adorno’s writings on art and literature. Adorno’s Poetics of Form is the first book-length examination of the elusive deployment of the concept of form in Adorno’s writings on art and literature, and the first monograph to offer a comprehensive account of the relation of these writings to his broader philosophical project. It examines form within the constellation of concepts that exist around it, considering how it appears when (...) seen in conjunction with and in opposition to content, expression, genre, and material. Illuminated from these angles, form is revealed as the site of a complex web of dynamic conceptual interactions. The book thus offers a resolution to a problem in Adorno’s work that has remained unsolved for several decades, and in doing so sets out the consequences of Adorno’s poetics for literary and critical theory today. (shrink)

This dissertation advances the thesis that modern political freedom has an aporetical relation to the possibility of its own foundation. In the first volume, I examine how Machiavelli establishes the internal relation between political freedom and historical contingency that gives rise to the non-foundational concept of political freedom in early modernity. Far from reducing politics to the activity of providing secure foundations for the state, Machiavelli elaborates a conception of politics torn by the antinomical tasks of giving political freedom its (...) reality in the "form" of the state, and of restoring the anti-realist character of this ungroundable freedom in the "event" of the republic. These two irreducible poles of modern political life correspond to the basic political difference between the process of securing rule and the affirmation of a space of no-rule, where a common political existence is led in the absence of domination. ;The second volume illustrates how the historicist and anti-foundational character of modern political freedom can illuminate the situation of late modernity, viewed politically. The first trait of this situation is revealed by the problematic, yet inescapable, synthesis of political philosophy and philosophy of history. By exploring the reasons for, and the limits of, this synthesis I provide a new interpretation of the complementary ideas that freedom has a history and that history is the history of freedom in view of elaborating a postmetaphysical concept of political freedom. The second trait of the situation of modernity consists in the permanent possibility of situating politically the validity of norms, thereby putting into question the link between morality and metaphysically consolidated principles. Focusing on the contemporary debate over the tension between the validity of a norm and its application to a given situation, I argue that the erosion of metaphysical grounds for the determination of what is right corresponds to the priority assigned to political freedom over justice. This priority is manifest by the fact that, in the situation of modernity, the very difference between fact and norm is drawn on the site of politics conceived as an uncircumventable conflict of interpretations. (shrink)

In developing the concept of assemblages, Gilles Deleuze draws at least some inspiration from Gilbert Simondon’s concept of information. While his acknowledgement of Simondon’s influence is almost entirely positive, Deleuze explicitly distances himself from the concept of information in order to avoid its link to the field of cybernetics. However, a Deleuzian informational ontology could instead be leveraged as an alternative to cybernetics. Drawing on the Spinozan link between the work of Deleuze and Simondon, it is possible to develop a (...) hybrid informational ontology. This system can not only offer a different approach to information, data and technology than the essentialist concept of information embraced by cybernetics, but also aligns well with recent research in the biological sciences that has disrupted a long-held concept of individuals as entirely separate and autonomous. Shifting away from the Platonic Form to a Deleuzian/simondonian in-formation furthers the post-human project aimed at understanding processes of subjectivation at multiple scales, including the micro (biome) and macro (city, population, planet). (shrink)

Musical systems develop associations over time between aspects of musical form and concepts from outside of the music. Experienced listeners internalize these connotations, such that the formal elements bring to mind their extra-musical meanings. An example of musical form-meaning mapping is the association that Western listeners have between the major and minor modes and happiness and sadness, respectively. We revisit the emotional semantics of musical mode in a study of 44 American participants (musicians and non-musicians) who each evaluated (...) the relatedness of 96 melody-word pairs. Among the tonal melodies, we manipulated mode (major and minor) and timbre (clarinet and flute) while systematically controlling for other musical factors including pitch register and melodic contour. Similarly, among the English words, we manipulated word affect (happy and sad) while systematically controlling for other lexical factors including frequency and word length. Results demonstrated that participants provided a higher proportion of related responses for major melodies paired with happy words and minor melodies paired with sad words than for the reverse pairings. This interaction between mode and word affect was highly significant for both musicians and non-musicians, albeit with a larger effect for the former group. Further interactions with timbre suggested that while both clarinet and flute conveyed happiness when in the major mode, the clarinet was somewhat more successful than the flute at conveying sadness in the minor mode. Debriefing questionnaires suggested that the majority of the participants, including all of the non-musicians, had no awareness of the major-minor manipulation, and instead directed their attention to register and contour. We argue that the affective character of the major and minor modes is but one example of form-meaning mapping in music, and suggest further exploration of the roles of timbre, register, and contour in conveying musical emotions. (shrink)

For statesmen, friendship is the lingua franca of politics. Considering the connections between personal and political friendship, John von Heyking’s The Form of Politics interprets the texts of Plato and Aristotle and emphasizes the role that friendship has in enduring philosophical and contemporary political contexts. Beginning with a discussion on virtue-friendship, described by Aristotle and Plato as an agreement on what qualifies as the pursuit of good, The Form of Politics demonstrates that virtue and political friendship form (...) a paradoxical relationship in which political friendships need to be nourished by virtue-friendships that transcend the moral and intellectual horizons of the political society. Von Heyking then examines Aristotle’s ethical and political writings – which are set within the boundaries of political life – and Plato’s dialogues on friendship in Lysis and the Laws, which characterize political friendship as festivity. Ultimately, arguing that friendship is the high point of a virtuous political life, von Heyking presents a fresh interpretation of Aristotle and Plato’s political thought, and a new take on the most essential goals in politics. Inviting reassessment of the relationship between friendship and politics by returning to the origins of Western philosophy, The Form of Politics is a lucid work on the foundations of political cooperation. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben and Ludwig Wittgenstein seem to have very little in common: the former is concerned with traditional ontological issues while the latter was interested in logics and ordinary language, avoiding metaphysical issues as something we cannot speak about. However, both share a crucial notion for their philosophical projects: form of life. In this paper, I try to show that, despite their different approaches and goals, form of life is for both a crucial notion for thinking ethics and (...) life in-common. Addressing human existence in its constitutive relation to language, this notion deconstructs traditional dichotomies like bios and zoé, the cultural and the biological, enabling both authors to think of a life which cannot be separated from its forms, recognizing the commonality of logos as the specific trait of human existence. Through an analogical reading between both theoretical frameworks, I suggest that the notion of form-of-life, elaborated by Wittgenstein to address human production of meaning, becomes the key notion in Agamben's affirmative thinking since it enables us to consider the common ontologically in its relation to Human potentialities and to foresee a new, common use of the world and ourselves. Giorgio Agamben e Ludwig Wittgenstein parecem ter muito pouco em comum: o primeiro se ocupa de questões ontológicas tradicionais, enquanto o segundo estava interessado na Lógica e na linguagem corrente, evitando os problemas metafísicos como algo de que não podemos falar. No entanto, ambos partilham um conceito crucial para seus projetos filosóficos respectivos: forma de vida. Este artigo tento mostrar que, apesar de seus diferentes enfoques e objetivos, a noção de forma de vida é fundamental no momento de pensar a ética e a vida em-comum. Abordando a existência humana em sua relação constitutiva com a língua, essa noção desconstrói dicotomias tradicionais como bios e zoe, o cultural e o biológico, permitindo-lhes pensar uma vida que não pode ser separada de suas formas, e reconhecendo o caráter comum do logos como o traço específico da existência humana. Através de uma leitura analógica entre ambos quadros teóricos, sugiro que a noção de forma-de-vida, elaborada por Wittgenstein para abordar a produção humana de significados, tornase o conceito-chave do pensamento afirmativo de Agamben, já que nos permite considerar o comum ontologicamente em sua relação com as potencialidades humanas e vislumbrar um uso novo e comum do mundo e de nós mesmos. (shrink)

Nietzsche sometimes praises the drive to order—to simplify, organize, and draw clear boundaries—as expressive of a vital "classical" style, or an Apollonian artistic drive to calmly contemplate forms displaying "epic definiteness and clarity." But he also sometimes harshly criticizes order, as in the pathological dialectics or "logical schematism" that he associates paradigmatically with Socrates. I challenge a tradition that interprets Socratism as an especially one-sided expression of, or restricted form of attention to, the Apollonian: they are more radically disparate. (...) Beyond strengthening the case for this basic point, I develop a distinctive account of what, exactly, distinguishes the Apollonian-classical and Socratic forms of order. To this end, I advance interrelated interpretations of Apollonian-classical simplicity and the "cold" calm that it elicits, by contrast to superficially similar Socratic phenomena. This illuminates Nietzsche's broader ambivalence toward science, in part by clarifying the nature and value of an idealized Apollonian science. (shrink)

The Description for this book, Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding, and Gibbon, will be forthcoming.

Janum Sethi investigates Kant’s application of hylomorphism to the theory of self-consciousness, as evident in the distinction she draws between transcendental and empirical apperception. According to Sethi, the standard reading of this distinction overlooks that it is drawn in terms of a distinction between transcendental and empirical unity of apperception, which can be traced to the distinct natures of the two faculties that produce these unities: whereas the former is brought about according to the rational laws of the understanding, the (...) latter is a result of the psychological laws of the imagination. In light of this, Sethi argues that the two types of apperception amount to a subject’s awareness of two cognitively essential aspects of herself: namely, her spontaneity and her receptivity – that is, of her capacity to receive the material for cognition through the senses and of her capacity to impart a certain form to this material through the use of the understanding. (shrink)

As two parts of one overarching legal positivist project, it is likely assumed that the constitutive elements of Joseph Raz’s analysis of the rule of law are compatible with his thinking on the nature of legal authority. The aim of this article is to call this assumption into question by reading Raz in light of the core, if under-recognised, preoccupation of the jurisprudence of Lon Fuller: namely, the latter’s concern to illuminate the relationship between the distinctive form of law (...) and human agency. This not only opens up a new engagement between Raz and Fuller that was far from exhausted within debates about law and morality, but also reveals tensions between Raz’s analysis of the rule of law and his analysis of legal authority that proponents of Raz’s legal positivism need to address. (shrink)

In a living body, the substantial form, the essence, and the soul play very similar, but non-identical, metaphysical roles. This article explores the similarities and differences to clarify basic points of Thomistic metaphysics.

Terence Nichols recently pointed to three examples from modern science that seem to refute Aquinas’ doctrine of the unicity of substantial form: water in man, organ transplants, and the genetic material received from one’s parents. These examples are intended to demonstrate the quasi-independent existence of parts from the substantial form of the whole. Nichols proposes modifying Aquinas’s hylomorphism by adding a third category of form, which can be called subsidiary forms, subsidiary wholes, or holons. In simpler terms, (...) a holon is a semi-autonomous whole within a larger whole. Nichols’ overall argument suggests that we revise Thomistic metaphysics to account for these scientific findings. I argue that Nichols’ suggestion is unwarranted for two reasons. First, Aquinas argues that holons are a logical impossibility within his metaphysical framework. Second, while Nichols rejects the virtual presence of forms, this does not demonstrate a failure of the Thomistic account of substances within larger wholes. (shrink)

From the point of view of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Raymond Ruyer's work appears to bear out two distinct tendencies of unequal appeal. On the one hand, Ruyer appears to be an anti-Aristotelian thinker of formation, rejecting any hylomorphic account of the production of reality. However, and notably despite his serious commitment to the work of the sciences of his day, he remains wedded to the ultimately conservative Leibnizian principle of closure. Nowhere is this dichotomy more striking than in (...) his account of human society. The aim of this paper is to show how his positive account of form finds a significant and convincing extension in Deleuze and Guattari's notion of social surface or socius in Anti-Oedipus. (shrink)

This study aims to explain the form of a traditional house made of bamboo in Makassar culture; the components of the traditional houses made of bamboo and their respective functions; and socio-cultural dimensions of the shape and structure traditional house constructed of bamboo in Makassar culture. To discuss these problems, we used the Saussure’s Structural Linguistics approach and Levi Strauss’ Structural Anthropology. Both are elaborated into cultural semiotics. The data collection methods used were field surveys accompanied by technical documentation, (...) interviews, and records. Data were analyzed qualitatively. Results of the research indicate that the traditional house form made of bamboo in Makassar culture is generally divided into three parts, either vertically or horizontally. Vertically, the upper part is called pammakkang ‘attic’; the middle part is called kale ballak ‘house body’; and the bottom is called siring ‘underneath.’ Horizontally, the front is called paddaserang ri dallekang ‘vestibule’; the middle section is called paddaserang ri tangnga ‘living room’; the backside is called paddaserang ri boko ‘back room.’ The components of the upper, middle, and lower houses show opposition to each other. However, these components are logically related and related to one another so as to form a meaningful social and cultural construction. The shape and structure of traditional houses in Makassar culture is influenced by socioeconomic and socio-cultural factors. (shrink)

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)

Many assume that Plato's Form of the Good is a final cause. This might be true if one assumes an Aristotelian definition of final cause; however, I argue that if one adopts Plato's conception of final causation as evidenced in the Phaedo and Timaeus, the claim that the Form of the Good is a final cause for Plato is untenable.

Schrift, Akustik, Geld, Raum, Sinn, elektronische Kommunikationsmittel, Zeit, Kunst, Macht. Was kann man an Bestimmtheit von einem Begriff erwarten, der angeblich all dies umgreifen soll - dem Begriff des Mediums in Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme? Die Elemente der Liste scheinen zu verschiedenartig, als dass man sich eine sinnvolle Kategorie vorstellen könnte, die diese Dinge als Exemplare derselben Art vorzustellen in der Lage wäre. Welchen Sinn es machen mag, dass all dies dennoch an unterschiedlichen Stellen in der Theorie Luhmanns als (...) »Medium« unterschieden und bezeichnet wird, kann deutlich werden, wenn man genauer beachtet, welcher Art diese Charakterisierung ist: All diesen Dingen wird nicht einfach das Wesen eines Mediums zugeschrieben. Sie werden vielmehr relativ auf einen bestimmten Kontext und mithilfe einer Unterscheidung von Medium und Form charakterisiert: Sie erweisen sich in Beziehung zu etwas anderem (einer Form) und in einem bestimmten operativen Zusammenhang (relativ auf ein bestimmtes System) als Medium, ohne darum an sich und allein das Wesen eines Mediums zu besitzen. Die Vorzüge einer solchen funktionalen und nicht substanziellen begrifflichen Disposition untersucht der Beitrag. (shrink)

It will be useful to consider briefly how the ideas surrounding “form” work in practice. Such ideas rapidly developed to a high stage of sophistication, subtlety, and complexity, but they did not, I believe, stray from the foundations I have tried to indicate for them. Let us consider the example of Wilhelm Worringer, who, like Alois Riegl, found it preferable to discuss ornament rather than images because ornament is a purer expression of form and therefore provides a less (...) encumbered view into form’s spiritual meaning. Concerning interlace ornament of the first millennium in Northern Europe, Worringer wrote that it is “impossible to mistake the restless life contained in this tangle of lines”; it is “the decisive formula for the whole medieval North.” The “need for empathy of this inharmonious people” requires the “uncanny pathos which attaches to the animation of the inorganic”; the “inner disharmony and unclarity of these peoples … could have borne no clearer fruit.”4 Here forms—mostly lines and edges and their relations—are compared to a natural outgrowth, a fruit, and are interpreted in such a way as to permit the characterization of all peoples among whom artifacts with such forms were made and used. The range of formal style becomes coextensive with the range of the deep principles of the worldview of races, nations, and epochs.It is not necessary to follow the ideas of form and expression to quite the hypertrophied consequences Worringer did, although many authors have done so and many more have done so less systematically. The important thing for my purposes is the pattern of inference from form to historical statements and conclusion. 4. Wilhelm Worringer,ion and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock , p. 77. David Summers is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History of Art at the University of Virginia. The author of Michelangelo and the Language of Art and The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics , he is currently writing a book to be titled The Defect of Distance: Toward a University History of Art. (shrink)

The perception of brightness differences in Ehrenstein figures and of illusory contours in phase-shifted line gratings was investigated as a function of the contrast polarity of the inducing elements. We presented either continuous lines or line-like arrangements composed of aligned dashes or dots whose spacing was varied. A yes/no procedure was used in which naive observers had to decide whether or not they perceived a brightness difference in a given Ehrenstein figure or an illusory contour in a phase-shifted line grating. (...) The results show that brightness differences are perceived to some extent in Ehrenstein figures with inducers of opposite polarity of contrast; however, the percentage of yes response was systematically lower and response times were longer than for figures with inducers of the same polarity. Phase-shifted line gratings with lines of opposite polarity of contrast yielded stronger illusory contours and shorter response times than those with lines of the same polarity. When the sign of contrast was not the same within a given line of induction, neither differences in brightness nor illusory contours were perceived. The results suggest that the mechanisms that lead to apparent differences in brightness are more sensitive to input of the same contrast polarity, the mechanisms generating illusory contours more sensitive to input of opposite polarity. The data are discussed in the light of a multistage approach to illusory form perception and some implications for cortical models of illusory contour integration are discussed. (shrink)

This book represents an effort to understand very old questions about biological form, function, and the relationships between them. The essays collected here reflect the diversity of approaches in evolutionary developmental biology, including not only studies by prominent scientists whose research focuses on topics concerned with evolution and development, but also historically and conceptually oriented studies that place the scientific work within a larger framework and ask how it can be pushed further. Topics under discussion range from the use (...) of theoretical and empirical biomechanics to understand the evolution of plant form, to detailed studies of the evolution of development and the role of developmental constraints on phenotypic variation. The result is a rich and interdisciplinary volume that will begin a wider conversation about the shape of Evo Devo as it matures as a field. (shrink)

In this essay, I ask what form of historical consciousness schools should nurture in students. The two criteria I set up in this regard are plausibility—is the account of history plausible—and practicality—does the form of historical consciousness help young people contribute to the betterment of society. The level of my analysis is that of modernity, a novel interpretation of which I gradually develop. I begin by drawing on Nietzsche to assess three forms of historical consciousness that are on (...) offer: the belief in the old age of humankind, a forward-looking rebellion, and a backwards-looking rebellion. All three are found wanting according to my criteria. I retain from Nietzsche the idea that a certain degree of ‘presentism’ is inevitable in historical consciousness. I then use Paul Ricoeur’s reflections on modernity as a springboard for outlining a different account, which mobilizes the metaphor of modernity as a period of transition akin to adolescence. The form of historical consciousness that is associated with this metaphor is more plausible and practical than the three competitors I assessed. I conclude by defending this account from potential objections. (shrink)

I argue that in Sheridan Hough's book Kierkegaard's Dancing Tax Collector, the distinctive and novelistic literary form is not a playful, whimsical, or otherwise contingent feature, but a structure that's needed to convey the account of Kierkegaardian faith as practical in nature.

Defenders of legislative supremacy against judicial review have primarily invoked various virtues of legislative process – in particular, its deliberative qualities, the diverse perspectives and inputs it allows, and especially, its connection to a principle of democratic equality. However, I argue that such virtues have been overemphasised as justifications for legislative supremacy. Instead, I argue that insufficient attention has been paid to the form of legislation as a justification for giving legislatures the ‘final say’ on issues of fundamental rights. (...) Firstly, I argue that legal philosophy has underemphasised the extent to which legislative form, rather than legislative process, can mediate ‘majoritarian’ rule, and how this undermines the most commonplace arguments for rights-based judicial review of parliamentary legislation. Secondly, I suggest that the same formal attributes give legislation a virtue of political transparency which can be contrasted with the esotericism of constitutional jurisprudence, itself considered as a distinctive species of political domination. (shrink)

This work is an examination of the metaphysical presuppositions involved in the science of organic form. Taking the dichotomy of structuralism versus functionalism in nineteenth century biology as the central subject of my study, I explore a network of unquestioned premises and isolate areas where empirical research programs and underlying metaphysical commitments both inform and hinder each other. ;I begin with the Cuvier-Geoffroy debate of 1830--a debate that clearly articulates the tensions between structuralist and functionalist approaches to organic (...) class='Hi'>form. On the side of functionalism, I am led to confront the rich concept of teleological causality. The concept of teleology, frequently taken to be semantically univocal, in fact unfolds into a cluster of related notions. I begin to demarcate significant differences between "intentional," "heuristic," "cosmic," and "organismic" teleology. On the side of structuralism, I set out to unearth the presuppositions of materialist versus idealist conceptions of structure--showing where naturalists have been both liberated and enslaved by their respective metaphysical commitments. With the basic divisions between structuralist and functionalist drawn, I set out to trace the dichotomy through the paradigm shift from fixism to transformism. ;In Darwin's system the structural/functional tensions become synthesized into complementary principles of causality. Here I explore the underlying presuppositional shifts which enabled Darwin to harmonize the previously intractable oppositions. These shifts include: rethinking teleology without "design," rethinking the archetype as real progenitor, and adopting a pluralistic perspective regarding causal mechanisms. ;The relative success of Darwin's appropriation of structuralism and functionalism leads to a discussion of the dichotomous character of the central subject itself. I argue that at the root of the dichotomous characterization of structure and function lies an impoverished understanding of teleology. I then offer "organicist" teleology as a powerful alternative to the French-Anglo tradition of "intentional" teleology. Presupposing the alternative teleology forms a challenge to the way in which French-Anglo naturalists have understood structural and functional relations. Together with Darwin's causal pluralism, a richer notion of teleology provides a different set of metaphysical assumptions and leads to an alternative model for empirical research programs. (shrink)

Physicalistic theories of psychology are a classic case of scientific imperialism: the explanatory capacity of physics, both with respect to its methods and to its domain, is taken to extend beyond the traditional realm of physics, and into that of psychology. I argue in this paper that this particular imperialistic venture has failed. Contemporary psychology uses methods not modelled on those of physics, embracing first-personal methodology where physics is strictly impersonal. I make the case that whether or not scientific imperialism (...) is in general harmful, in this instance naturalists who reject first philosophy should give up physicalist imperialism. Using only general principles from the philosophy of logic plus accepted physicalist criteria of identity, I show that first-personal psychology embodies a minor but fruitful increase in expressive strength compared to impersonal psychology: the ability to distinguish descriptively indiscriminable posits. (shrink)