Ontology Books - Page 16

Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age

Luc Ferry

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Editorial Review:

Can subjective, individual taste be reconciled with an objective, universal standard? In Homo Aestheticus, Luc Ferry argues that this central problem of aesthetic theory is fundamentally related to the political problem of democratic individualism.

Ferry's treatise begins in the mid-1600s with the simultaneous invention of the notions of taste (the essence of art as subjective pleasure) and modern democracy (the idea of the State as a consensus among individuals). He explores the differences between subjectivity and individuality by examining aesthetic theory as developed first by Kant's predecessors and then by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and proponents of the avant-garde. Ferry discerns two "moments" of the avant-garde aesthetic: the hyperindividualistic iconoclasm of creating something entirely new, and the hyperrealistic striving to achieve an extraordinary truth. The tension between these two, Ferry argues, preserves an essential element of the Enlightenment concern for reconciling the subjective and the objective--a problem that is at once aesthetic, ethical, and political.

Rejecting postmodern proposals for either a radical break with or return to tradition, Ferry embraces a postmodernism that recasts Enlightenment notions of value as a new intersubjectivity. His original analysis of the growth and decline of the twentieth-century avant-garde movement sheds new light on the connections between aesthetics, ethics, and political theory.

History As a Visual Art in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance

Karl F. Morrison

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The Metaphysics of Being of St. Thomas Aquinas in a Historical Perspective (Studien Und Texte Zur Geistesgeschichte Des Mittelalters)

Leo J. Elders

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Editorial Review:

Metaphysics, formerly the queen of science, fell into oblivion under the onslaught of empiricism and positivism and its very possibllity came to be denied. Professor Elders traces the history of this process and shows how St. Thomas innovated in determining both the subject of metaphysics and the manner in which one enters this science, particularly in the framework of his Aristotle commentaries. The work then considers being and its properties, its divisions into being in act and being in potency, into the act of being essence, and into substance and the accidents. Finally the causes of being are considered. The work also introduces and surveys the extensive literature of Thomas interpretation of the past 50 years.

Art of Judgement

Howard Caygill

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This original reading of Kant's third critique, "The Critique of Judgement-Power", provides an innovative view of the role of judgement in current theoretical debates, in both the humanities and social sciences. Judgement serves as a focus for interdisciplinary aspirations - spanning theoretical, practical and aesthetic as a site for the exploration of questions of rationality and difference which characterize the "postmodern" condition. This has recognized that judgement is inevitably aporetic and that law and difference are inextricably entwined. This book clarifies some of the issues in the debate through a historical analysis of the third "Critique" which employs both deconstructionist and materialist strategies of interpretation.

Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts)

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A distinguished group of scholars here probes the complex structure of aesthetic responses to nature in a discussion enriched with insights from art history, literary criticism, geography and philosophy. Exploring the interrelation among nature, beauty and art, they show that natural beauty is impregnated with concepts derived from the arts and from particular accounts of nature. The distinction and relation between art and nature are questioned, and the volume culminates in philosophical studies of the role of scientific understanding, engagement and appreciation in aesthetics.

The Ontology of Physical Objects: Four-Dimensional Hunks of Matter (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy)

Mark Heller

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O.K. 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Mark Heller's treatment of the Sorites Paradox in the Ontology of Physical Objects is the most cogent and useful treatment on the subject this year. His ontology of objects as four-dimensional with a temporal element as opposed to three-dimensional and enduring although alluring, begs previous sympathy towards that orientation. Heller's work with Carl Matheson seems to have corrupted his work in metaphysics in a creative although ultimately useless manner.

Editorial Review:

This provocative new book attempts to resolve traditional problems of identity over time. It seeks to answer such questions as "How is it that an object can survive change?" and "How much change can an object undergo without being destroyed?" To answer these questions Professor Heller presents a completely new theory about the nature of physical objects and about the relationship between our language and the physical world. According to his theory, the only actually existing physical entities are what the author calls "hunks," four dimensional objects extending across time and space. This is a major new contribution to ontological debate and will be essential reading for all philosophers concerned with metaphysics.

Dreams, Illusions and Other Realities

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty

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"Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty . . . weaves a brilliant analysis of the complex role of dreams and dreaming in Indian religion, philosophy, literature, and art. . . . In her creative hands, enchanting Indian myths and stories illuminate and are illuminated by authors as different as Aeschylus, Plato, Freud, Jung, Kurl Gödel, Thomas Kuhn, Borges, Picasso, Sir Ernst Gombrich, and many others. This richly suggestive book challenges many of our fundamental assumptions about ourselves and our world."—Mark C. Taylor, New York Times Book Review

"Dazzling analysis. . . . The book is firm and convincing once you appreciate its central point, which is that in traditional Hindu thought the dream isn't an accident or byway of experience, but rather the locus of epistemology. In its willful confusion of categories, its teasing readiness to blur the line between the imagined and the real, the dream actually embodies the whole problem of knowledge. . . . [O'Flaherty] wants to make your mental flesh creep, and she succeeds."—Mark Caldwell, Village Voice

On Being and What There Is: Classical Vaisesika and the History of Indian Ontology

Wilhelm Halbfass

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An Excellent Exploration of Classical Indian Realism 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

This book is a gem. Not only is the author, Wilhelm Halbfass, a profound scholar of both Western and Indian philosophy, he possess an acute philolosophical mind himself. The book begins with a fascinating exploration of the history of Western Metaphysics, and culminates with the recent controversy over the very meaningfulness of the question of being. While noting that many analytic philosophers think that the classical Western tradition of metaphysics extending back to Plato and Aristotle is based on linguistic confusions, Halbfass makes clear that not all analytic philosophers feel this way, and seems to think that Heidegger's repeated assertion that the moderns neglect Being for the sake of beings, has a point. The introductory chapter concludes by insisting that Western Philosophy has not, by any means, come to a conclusion about the nature, or even the possibility, of Metaphysics, and, therefore, that it would be unseemly for Western Philosophers to approach the Indian Philosophical Tradition from as stance of certainty or superiority.
The next chapter introduces the question of being in Indian Philosophy by tracing the origins of the Indian thought to certain questions and speculations raised in the Vedas. Halbfass makes a strong case for the thesis that the Vedas, in general, raise the question of being with respect to the origina of the universe. Though Halbfass does detect in certain of the early Vedic speculations the roots of the classical Advaitin monistic position, he insists, based on impressive textual evidence, that the Vedic Indians were not so much interested in the original, uniform, state of the world, as in the space the Gods opened up in that state, a space which allows for the existence of contingent beings.

Halbfass next goes on to argue that that the earliest Indian Schools of Philosophy can be distinguished by whether or not they are primarily concerned with origins, and with the evolution of the world of experience from an original and unmanifest nature, or are primarily concerned with "what there is", with the classification of all beings and all possible beings. It is this question of "what there is" which dominated the labors of the earliest Indian Realism, the Vaisesika School. Halbfass devotes several chapters to the explication of the subtle and ingenious categorial scheme of the Vaisesika. In the course of his discussion he makes the intellectual penetration and sophistication of the great Vaisesika and Nyaya philosophers crystal clear to the attentive reader. But he also forcefully states the objections of the anti-realistic Buddhists and Advaitins to the realism of the Vaisesika (noting, along the way, how the Jains tried to mediate between extreme realism and anti-realism), and in concluding the book he notes that the Advaita Vedanta of Sankara posits an ultimate One that is not unlike that which is spoken of in the Vedas as the origin or source of all things. The question of "What There is" thus gets covered over at the end of the dialectic, and there is a return to the question of being.
What I really appreciate about this book, aside from its stylistic clarity and the staggering scholarship it evinces, is the fairness with which Halbfass states the arguments of both the realists and the idealists. It is clear that he himself is torn with respect to which side has won this debate. Persons who like polemics, and want an author to come down on one side or the other of a philosophical argument, will find this book frustrating. But all those who know how difficult it is to find the right answers to the most profound questions, will leave this book enormously stimulated, and will have renewed awe and respect for the philosophical prowess of the ancient Indian masters. I cannot recomment this book highly enough to anyone interested in Indian philosophy or the philosophical debate which has raged, in both the east and the west, between the realists and the idealists.

Parts: A Study in Ontology

Peter Simons

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Discover mereology: the mathematics of the future 4 out of 5 stars.
16 of 16 people found this review helpful.

Mereology is a theory of the relation of part to whole, one that deviates gently from Boolean algebra and set theory. This is the best book on mereology in existence.

Mereology is Boolean algebra with 1 but no 0, set theory with a universal set but no null set, a semilattice closed under meet but not join. Mereology also has interesting affinities to topology. The mathematical implications of all this have yet to be explored.

Mereology was developed in Poland between the wars. It is also central to Nelson Goodman's (1906-98) "Structure of Appearance."
Woodger at Oxford and Tarski at Berkeley were sympathetic to mereology. David Bostock's brilliant 1970s work on the foundations of numbers has an important mereological component.
The late David Lewis wrote a wonderful book, "Parts of Classes" (1991) in which he derived Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory from a handful of very primitive mereological concepts. Mereology will be part of the mathematics of the future, and "Parts" is an excellent place to begin this journey.

Simons is critical of what he calls "classical extensional mereology" (CEM), but the first 100 pages of his book are by far and away the best survey of CEM ever done. To understand Simons's reservations about CEM, you need to understand some nonclassical logics: free, modal, temporal.

If this book has a flaw, it is that it is more in the nature of a giant survey article than a monograph presenting a coherent body of new knowledge. At the very end of the book, however, the author does commit to an elegant and simple mathematical system. Also, the author claims only to be interested in mereology as a theory of material objects situated in time, disdaining mereology as theory of abstract objects. This would appear to rule out mereology as an alternative foundation for mathematics. Nevertheless, I confidently predict that the mental toolbox Simons has created will eventually be applied, very profitably, to abstractions, including foundational mathematics.

Editorial Review:

Although the relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, this is the first full-length study of this key concept. Showing that mereology, or the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology, Simons surveys and critiques previous theories--especially the standard extensional view--and proposes a new account that encompasses both temporal and modal considerations. Simons's revised theory not only allows him to offer fresh solutions to long-standing problems, but also has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of a host of classical philosophical concepts.

On Truth: An Ontological Theory

Eliot Deutsch

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