Materialism

The folds of a-topia (or a materialist take on Utopia)

by Constantinos Miltiadis

short paper, extended version of a competition entry. The original was written with Demetris Shammas, Vasiliki Nikoloutsou, Isavella Ines Oikonomopoulou and Daphne Oikonomopoulou

The paper tries to construct and oppose a material ontology to utopian or idealistic architectural intentions The paper tries to construct and oppose a material ontology to utopian or idealistic architectural intentions

Tutto in questa vita: considerazioni sull’etica e la morale dei Cārvāka/Lokāyata [forthcoming]

by Krishna Del Toso

Eyes Wide Shut: Diderot's Le Rêve de d'Alembert

by Kate Tunstall

in James Fowler, New Essays on Diderot (Cambridge, 2011)

Misyurov D.A. Dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas // Credo New. 2012. №2

by Dmitry Misyurov

The article suggests dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas: formula with... more The article suggests dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas: formula with dominant and the non-dominant elements; universal formula; formula with symbolic weight of elements; tautological formula. For example, it suggests an opportunity to use the dialectical formulas for modeling and artificial intelligence creation, etc.

The Material Soul: Strategies for Naturalising the Soul in an Early Modern Epicurean Context

by Charles Wolfe

Longer draft (April 2012) of a paper co-authored with Michaela Van Esfeld, forthcoming in shorter form in D. Kambaskovic-Sawers, ed., Conjunctions: Body and Mind, Sexuality and Spirit from Plato to Descartes. Dordrecht: Springer.

We usually portray the early modern period as one characterised by the ‘birth of subjectivity’ with Luther and... more We usually portray the early modern period as one characterised by the ‘birth of subjectivity’ with Luther and Descartes as two alternate representatives of this radical break with the past, each ushering in the new era in which ‘I’ am the locus of judgements about the world. A sub-narrative under the heading ‘the mind-body problem’ recounts how Cartesian dualism, responding to the new promise of a mechanistic science of nature, “split off” the world of the soul/mind/self from the world of extended, physical substance – a split which has preoccupied the philosophy of mind up until the present day. We would like to call attention to a different constellation of texts – neither a robust ‘tradition’ nor an isolated ‘episode’, somewhere in between – which have in common their indebtedness to, and promotion of an embodied, Epicurean approach to the soul. These texts follow the evocative hint given in Lucretius’ De rerum natura (III, 327-330) that ‘the soul is to the body as scent is to incense’ (in an anonymous early modern French version); in other words they neither assert the autonomy of the soul, nor the dualism of body and soul, nor again a sheer physicalism in which ‘psychic’ or ‘intentional’ properties are reduced to the basic properties of matter. Rather, to borrow the title of one of these treatises (L’âme matérielle), they seek to articulate the concept of a material soul. By reconstructing some elements of the tradition of a corporeal, mortal and ultimately material soul, at the intersection of medicine, natural philosophy and metaphysics, including sections devoted to Malebranche and Willis, but focusing primarily on texts including the 1675 Discours anatomiques by the Epicurean physician Guillaume Lamy; the anonymous manuscript from circa 1725 entitled L’âme matérielle, which is essentially a compendium of texts from the later seventeenth century such as Malebranche and Bayle, along with excerpts from Lucretius; and materialist writings such Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’Homme-Machine (1748), we seek to articulate this concept of a ‘material soul’ with its implications for notions of embodiment, the nature of mental states, and selfhood.

Sensibility as vital force or as property of matter in mid-eighteenth-century debates

by Charles Wolfe

draft version (2011); forthcoming in Henry Martyn Lloyd, ed., Sensibilité: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation)

Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount... more Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount case of a higher-level, intentional property, not a basic property. Diderot famously made the bold and attributive move of postulating that matter itself senses, or that sensibility (perhaps better translated ‘sensitivity’ here) is a general or universal property of matter, even if he at times took a step back from this claim and called it a “supposition.” Crucially, sensibility is here playing the role of a ‘booster’: it enables materialism to provide a full and rich account of the phenomena of conscious, sentient life, contrary to what its opponents hold: for if matter can sense, and sensibility is not a merely mechanical process, then the loftiest cognitive plateaus are accessible to materialist analysis, or at least belong to one and the same world as the rest of matter. This was noted by the astute anti-materialist critic, the Abbé Lelarge de Lignac, who, in his 1751 Lettres à un Amériquain, criticized Buffon for “granting to the body [la machine, a common term for the body at the time] a quality which is essential to minds, namely sensibility.” This view, here attributed to Buffon and definitely held by Diderot, was comparatively rare. If we look for the sources of this concept, the most notable ones are physiological and medical treatises by prominent figures such as Robert Whytt, Albrecht von Haller and the Montpellier vitalist Théophile de Bordeu. We then have, or so I shall try to sketch out, an intellectual landscape in which new – or newly articulated – properties such as irritability and sensibility are presented either as an experimental property of muscle fibers, that can be understood mechanistically (Hallerian irritability, as studied recently by Hubert Steinke and Dominique Boury) or a property of matter itself (whether specifically living matter as in Bordeu and his fellow montpelliérains Ménuret and Fouquet, or matter in general, as in Diderot). I am by no means convinced that it is one and the same ‘sensibility’ that is at issue in debates between these figures (as when Bordeu attacks Haller’s distinction between irritability and sensibility and claims that ‘his own’ property of sensibility is both more correct and more fundamental in organic beings), but I am interested in mapping out a topography of the problem of sensibility as property of matter or as vital force in mid-eighteenth-century debates – not an exhaustive cartography of all possible positions or theories, but an attempt to understand the ‘triangulation’ of three views: a vitalist view in which sensibility is fundamental, matching up with a conception of the organism as the sum of parts conceived as little lives (Bordeu et al.); a mechanist, or ‘enhanced mechanist’ view in which one can work upwards, step by step from the basic property of irritability to the higher-level property of sensibility (Haller); and, more eclectic, a materialist view which seeks to combine the mechanistic, componential rigour and explanatory power of the Hallerian approach, with the monistic and metaphysically explosive potential of the vitalist approach (Diderot). It is my hope that examining Diderot in the context of this triangulated topography of sensibility as property sheds light on his famous proclamation regarding sensibility as a universal property of matter.

Evald Ilyenkov, "Materialism Is Militant and Therefore Dialectical" (translation)

by Evgeni V. Pavlov

The Material-Cultural Turn: event and effect.

by Dan Hicks

Cite this paper as: Hicks, Dan 2010. The Material-Cultural Turn: Event and Effect. In Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford: OUP, pp. 25- 98.

The full references are provided in the bibliography for the published volume.

Reality Chunking

by David Roden

Review of Manual Delanda, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason, London: Continuum, 226 pp. Forthcoming in Deleuze Studies.

Elsewhere Collaborative: Museum Collections

by Stacey Marie Garcia

The global ‘order’, socioeconomic status and the economics of African identity

by Caroline Kamau

Kamau, C. & Rutland, A. (2005).

Chronic elitism within Africa has created a two‐tier milieu in which those Africans who are in a position to take... more Chronic elitism within Africa has created a two‐tier milieu in which those Africans who are in a position to take advantage of the global economic system often do so at the expense of other Africans. The effects of social class and indicators of individual economic mobility on African identity were thus examined. 213 Kenyans participated in this questionnaire‐based study for structural equation analysis. The main finding was that socioeconomic status (SES) positively predicts individual economic mobility, which then negatively influences African identity concepts, and that the significance of economic concepts for African identity depends on social class. For example, in the high SES group, materialism and cynicism about Africa's future economic global prospects were found to have a negative effect on commitment to the national economy and African identity. The general implication is that anti‐group economic behaviour in Africa (e.g. corruption, worker exploitation) is attributable to individual mobility, as well as to intra‐national and global economic structures.

Between Naturalism and Rationalism: A New Realist Landscape

by Fabio Gironi

A review essay of  Bryant, L., Srnicek, N. and Harman, G. 2011. The Speculative Turn: Continental Realism and Materialism. Melbourne: re.press.

Forthcoming in the Journal of Critical Realism

Theories of Matter

by henry laycock

Journal: Synthese.
Reprinted in Mass Terms: some Philosophical Problems.

DO NOT USE QUICK VIEW - DOES NOT WORK!

Theories of Matter documents the all-pervasive doctrine which I call the Ontology of Objects - a doctrine which claims... more Theories of Matter documents the all-pervasive doctrine which I call the Ontology of Objects - a doctrine which claims that there can be no other ontic category than that of objects (along with their properties and relations). Here this doctrine and its logico-semantic basis are attacked, the influential work of Helen Cartwright is criticized, and it is denied that matter must be re-identifiable.

The Wolf’s Footprints: Indian Materialism in Perspective. A (Annotated) Conversation with Ramkrishna Bhattacharya [FINAL DRAFT]

by Krishna Del Toso

accepted for publication on "East and West" 2010 (forthcoming)

Program Erica Kandela a materializm nieredukcjonistyczny (Eric Kandel's intellectual framework for psychiatry and non-reductive materialism)

by Bartosz Janik

forthcoming, Zagadnienia Filozoficzne w Nauce 51(2012)

In this article I would like to analyze Eric Kandel's intellectual frameworks for psychiatry from non-reductive... more In this article I would like to analyze Eric Kandel's intellectual frameworks for psychiatry from non-reductive materialism's point of view. I would like to briefly introduce Kandel's program to establish its main features and then, after introducing various types of non-reductive materialism, try to focus on incorporation the philosophical view on purely scientific program. The main goal is to show that philosophical component is necessary for holistic approaches to philosophy of mind.

'Another and the Same': Nature and Human Beings in Erasmus Darwin's Doctrines of Love and Imagination

by Maurizio Valsania

C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott, eds., The Genious of Erasmus Darwin, Ashgate 2005

Philosophy & Philosophising: Reconfiguring the Material of Philosophy and Developing (feminine) Subjectivity with Irigaray and Malabou

by Nicola Rubczak

Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay: With a New Translation of Diderot's' Letter on the Blind'and La Mothe Le Vayer's' Of a Man Born Blind'

by Kate Tunstall

The methodological perspective in Vygotsky: the dialetical materialism

by Joao Batista Martins

published in Semina: Cie Soc./Hum., Londrina, v. 15, n. 3, p. 287-295, Sept. 1994.

Some concepts developed by the Soviet Psychology (specially by Vygotsky, Leontiev and Luria) are discussed. Based on... more Some concepts developed by the Soviet Psychology (specially by Vygotsky, Leontiev and Luria) are discussed. Based on the concepts, the historical and dialetic materialism for the children psychological development study are revived

Value Resonance and the Origins of Issue Salience

by Sebastián Valenzuela

Chapter for "Agenda Setting in a 2.0 World: New Agendas in Communication” book, edited by Tom Johnson & Maxwell McCombs for Routledge.

In this chapter, I examine the role of human values on agenda-setting effects by tackling three different aspects.... more In this chapter, I examine the role of human values on agenda-setting effects by tackling three different aspects. First, I elaborate on the theoretical and empirical implications of the values-issues consistency hypothesis, which posits that materialist and postmaterialist values moderate the strength of agenda-setting effects (Valenzuela, 2011). Second, I explore the relationship between values and need for orientation, the key psychological process that researchers have used to explain variations in the size of agenda-setting effects. Lastly, I examine the consequences of values in the agenda setting process for the development of attitudes and behaviors among citizens, also known as media priming effects. The ultimate purpose is to open new venues for research on the psychology of agenda setting.