A realist social ontology of religion

Jonathan Z. Smith famously pointed out that the concept of ‘religion’ is not universal but emerged only in the modern West. Several scholars have drawn from Smith the non-realist implication that the existence of religion apart from that concept is an illusion. The word ‘religion,’ they say, does not refer to something out there in the world. In this article, the author argues that Smith’s point is open to a realist interpretation according to which religion exists in the world, as a transhistorical and transcultural reality, even apart from the concept. To make this case, the author outlines and responds to non-realist positions that draw on genealogical, deconstructive, and linguistic arguments, as well as to the alternative proposal that ‘religion’ is simply a heuristic device. In short, the goal of this article is to argue that a realist social ontology provides the better understanding of the central theoretical term in our field.     

Dewey’s Social Ontology: A Pragmatist Alternative to Searle’s Approach to Social Reality

Dewey’s social ontology could be characterized as a habit ontology, an ontology of habit qua second nature that offers us an account of intentionality, social statuses, institutions and norms in terms of habituations. Such an account offers us a promising alternative to contemporary intentionalist and deontic approaches to social ontology such as Searle’s. Furthermore, it could be the basis of a social ontology better suited to explain both the maintenance and the transformation of social reality.     

Ontologies and Construals in Lexical Semantics

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework of lexical meaning, broadly along the lines of Cognitive Semantics (Langacker 1987a). Within the proposed model, all aspects of meaning are to be explained in terms of properties of ontologies in conceptual space, i.e. properties of content ontologies and schematic ontologies and construals which are imposed on the conceptual structures on the occasion of use. It is through the operations of construals on ontological structures that different readings of lexical expressions arise. Lexical meanings are dynamic and sensitive to contextual demands, rather than fixed and stable. In a dynamic, usage-based model like this, polysemy and multiple readings emerge as a natural consequence of the human ability to think flexibly. Another more specific purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the usefulness of ontologies in linguistic research in general and semantic modelling in particular.     

Quality Instances and the Structure of the Concrete Particular

In this paper, I examine a puzzle that emerges from what J. P. Moreland has called the traditional realist view of quality instances. Briefly put, the puzzle is to figure out how quality instances fit into the overall structure of a concrete particular, given that the traditional realist view of quality instances prima facie seems incompatible with what might be called the traditional realist view of concrete particulars. After having discussed the traditional realist views involved and the puzzle that emerges from their juxtaposition, I propose an alternative realist view of quality instances which resolves the puzzle. In short, the puzzle is solved by treating the distinction between a concrete particular and its quality instances as a distinction of reason, and by adopting the view that the individuating element of a concrete particular must also serve as its unifying element – a view which Moreland, one of traditional realism’s most stalwart contemporary defenders, rejects.     

Widows, women, and the bioethics of care.

Widows, women, and the bioethics of care must be understood within an authentic Christian ontology of gender. Men are men and women are women, and their being is ontologically marked in difference. There is an ontology of gender with important implications for the role of women in the family and the Church. The Christian Church has traditionally recognized a role for widows, deaconesses, and female monastics, which is not that of the liturgical priesthood, but one with a special relationship to care and therefore with particular implications for health care and a Christian bioethics of care in the twenty-first century. In the shadow of early male mortality, women as wives should turn to support their husbands and as widows to support those in need. Widows, in becoming authentic Christian monastics, can bring into the world an icon of rightly ordered women providing rightly ordered Christian care for those in need. They can enter the moral vacuum created by misunderstandings of the place of women and the service vacuum created by a disappearance of religious nuns in Western health care facilities with a presence that is at one with the Church of the Fathers.     

The Donkey Problem

The Donkey Problem (as I am calling it) concerns the relationship between more and less fundamental ontologies. I will claim that the moral to draw from the Donkey Problem is that the less fundamental objects are merely conventional. This conventionalism has consequences for the 3D/4D debate. Four-dimensionalism is motivated by a desire to avoid coinciding objects, but once we accept that the non-fundamental ontology is conventional there is no longer any reason to reject coincidence. I therefore encourage 4Dists to become even more radical—embrace the Donkey Problem’s conventionalism and deflate the debate between 3Dists and 4Dists.

VIRTUAL REALITY,ONTOLOGY, AND VALUE

Abstract: This article raises the question of how the ontological status of virtual objects bears on their intrinsic value. If virtual objects are unreal or less real than physical objects, does it mean that they will have less intrinsic value? If they have intrinsic value, what are the explanations for this value, and how do they relate to the ontological status of the virtual objects? First, the article reviews recent work concerning the ontological status of virtual reality and virtual objects. Second, it argues that in some cases the ontological status of virtual objects does undermine the value placed in them, in that the objects can fail to have the properties that ground the value attributions made to them, while in other cases their ontological status is not important. Finally, the article relates the grounding of value attributions to philosophical theories of value, in particular, perfectionism and hedonism.     

Physicalism and sparse ontology

A major stumbling block for non-reductive physicalism is Kim’s disjunctive property objection. In this paper I bring certain issues in sparse ontology to bear on the objection, in particular the theses of priority monism and priority pluralism. Priority pluralism (or something close to it, anyway) is a common ontological background assumption, so in the first part of the paper I consider whether the disjunctive property objection applies with equal force to non-reductive physicalism on the assumption that priority monism is instead true. I ultimately conclude that non-reductive physicalism still faces a comparable problem. In the second part, I argue, surprisingly enough, that what I call ‘fine-grained reductionism’, a particular version of which Kim proposes as an alternative to non-reductive physicalism, may work better in the monist framework than the pluralist one. I conclude that issues in sparse ontology, therefore, are more relevant to the debate about physicalism than one may have thought.