Metaphysics

Edited by Jonathan Schaffer (Rutgers - New Brunswick)
Contents
372 found
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  1. added 2025-04-20
    Consciousness as the Illusion of Stillness in a Moving Reality.Andrey Shkursky - manuscript
    This short essay introduces a simple yet profound analogy to capture the paradoxical nature of consciousness: We objectively live on a planet hurtling through space, spinning around its axis, orbiting the Sun, and traversing the space at unimaginable speeds. Yet subjectively, we perceive ourselves as perfectly still and stable. Drawing on this analogy, I argue that consciousness functions precisely as the inner stabilization of an objectively dynamic and continuously changing reality. Consciousness does not directly alter external reality, but modulates the (...)
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  2. added 2025-04-20
    Free Will as an Emergent Chaotic System.Turan Tanriverdi - manuscript
    This paper argues that free will emerges from deterministic yet chaotic neural processes, allowing for practically unpredictable and functionally autonomous decisions. Drawing on chaos theory, neuroscience, and cognitive science, we propose a novel compatibilist framework where free will is an emergent property of self-organizing, nonlinear systems rather than mere unpredictability. This approach reconciles determinism with autonomy, demonstrating that chaotic attractors in neural networks create structured yet flexible decision patterns. We explore moral responsibility, legal accountability, and artificial intelligence applications, suggesting that (...)
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  3. added 2025-04-19
    The Cognitive Universe: Attractors, Self-Organization, and Reflexive Consciousness as a Second-Order Chaotic System.Andrey Shkursky - manuscript
    This paper presents a unifying framework that conceptualizes consciousness as a second-order chaotic system, self-modifying through recursive reflexivity. Drawing from dynamical systems theory, cognitive science, and epistemological metaphysics, the author models mind as a topological field composed of attractors—local cognitive frames in a non-Euclidean epistemic space. Reflexivity is introduced as a meta-dynamic operator, enabling the restructuring of cognitive curvature and frame logic. This process mirrors gravitational behavior in cosmology, suggesting that consciousness is not embedded in the universe but constitutes a (...)
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  4. (1 other version)
    added 2025-04-19
    The Aperture Axis: A Unified Drift Map of Reflexive Consciousness.Andrey Shkursky - manuscript
    The Aperture Axis presents a cross-disciplinary topology of consciousness, modeling it not as a fixed substance but as an axis of reflexive access—a continuous spectrum of states defined by the system’s ability to hold, navigate, and integrate cognitive tension. Integrating Reflexive Resonance Theory (RRT), systems psychology, affective neuroscience, biochemical modulation, and quantum analogies, the paper delineates six zones of aperture—from survival-level collapse to pure reason. Each zone is characterized by structural elements (frames, Overcells), neural correlates (DMN–SN–ECN dynamics, gamma coherence), neurochemical (...)
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  5. added 2025-04-19
    Descenting into Realness: Intelligence, Embodiment, and the Ethics of Subtraction.Madhu Prabakaran - manuscript
    This paper rethinks intelligence not as a computational or representational faculty, but as an ecological, embodied, and ethical unfolding. Drawing from Friston’s predictive coding, Fields’ processual epistemology, Kastrup’s ontological idealism, Rancière’s aesthetic dissensus, Weil’s moral attention, and Buddhist prajñā traditions, it reframes intelligence as a subtractive and relational field. Rather than an intrinsic property of discrete agents, intelligence emerges as an incorporeal coherence manifesting through corporeal forms. The paper introduces “descenting into realness” as a deconditioning process that reveals intelligence not (...)
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  6. added 2025-04-19
    The Identity-Consistency Principle in a Logically-Real Multiverse.Mark Steven Jensen - manuscript
    This article proposes a novel solution to the anthropic question—“Why am I in this universe?”—by introducing the Identity-Consistency Principle. Within a logically complete multiverse, where all mathematically and logically consistent universes exist, no selection mechanism or external cause is necessary to explain conscious experience. Instead, an observer exists wherever their subjective identity—including memory, perception, and continuity—is internally and externally coherent with a given universe. Identity arises not from probabilistic filtering or metaphysical necessity, but from the structural consistency between consciousness and (...)
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  7. added 2025-04-19
    De-gendering and De-sexing Motherhood.Suki Finn - 2024 - Think 23 (68):69-77.
    Each one of us who has come into this world (so far) has done so via birth. Everyone therefore has a birthing ‘parent’, but not all would consider that respective person to be their parent. For example, those who have been adopted might instead consider the person (or people) who adopted them to be their parent(s). There are, therefore, ways to become a parent that do not involve giving birth, and instances of giving birth that do not result in becoming (...)
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  8. added 2025-04-18
    道枢论(Daoshulun)-The theory of the Pivot of the Dao.Kefan Jiang - manuscript
    This paper proposes The theory of the Pivot of the Dao (Daoshulun,DSL), aiming to investigate certain issues through the lens of recursivity and non-recursivity. The paper is divided into two main sections: -/- The first section systematically expounds the theoretical foundation of the D-P framework, defining the dialectical relationship between recursivity (P) and non-recursivity (D). Through five core propositions, DSL asserts that the essence of hierarchical evolution lies in the eternal game of recursive chains. -/- The second section explores DSL’s (...)
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  9. added 2025-04-18
    Zygotes are Persisting Organisms.Nicholas Colgrove - forthcoming - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.
    Zygotes are persisting organisms. That is, zygotes are organisms and most born human beings are identical to the zygotes from which they originated. I defend these claims against recent critiques. Chunghyoung Lee, for example, argues that for any zygote, z, z may develop into one of several, numerically distinct infants. If so, then for any infant, that infant is not identical to the zygote from which they originated. If Lee is correct, then zygotes are like gametes, which may give rise (...)
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  10. added 2025-04-18
    Deference First.Jeske Toorman - forthcoming - Synthese.
    Recent research in experimental semantics seems to indicate that, contrary to most philosophers, non-philosophers do not (uniformly) assign reference in accordance with physical externalism as traditionally understood. This paper will argue that the purported incompatibility between physical externalism and social externalism indicates that from this research, it cannot be concluded that philosophers and non-philosophers assign reference in accordance with different theories of reference. This is so because the purported incompatibility indicates that philosophers do not uniformly assign reference in accordance with (...)
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  11. added 2025-04-17
    Aperture Science 3.0.Andrey Shkursky - manuscript
    [Reflexive Cognitive Architectures: From Frame-Dependent Navigation to Quantum-Inspired Resonance] -/- Reflexive Resonance Theory (RRT) offers a formal model of consciousness grounded in Hilbert-space dynamics. This work unifies ReasonStack, RRT, and United Theory into a cognitive architecture where reflexivity, drift, and collapse replace symbolic computation. Mental states evolve under context-sensitive Hamiltonians and collapse through attentional measurement. The theory simulates insight, ambiguity, and shared cognition across agents. It proposes a new category: Reflexive Hilbertian Cognition, blending quantum-formal logic with epistemic curvature.
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  12. added 2025-04-17
    A “Kantian-inspired” Argument for the Trinity.Damiano Migliorini - 2025 - Studia Philosophica Estonica 18:1-18.
    In this paper I will argue that the Trinity is part of natural theology although it is a contradictory doctrine because, even if all the “solutions” for the Trinity’s aporias are unsatisfactory, anyone wondering about the nature of God comes to think in a trinitarian way. Given this theoretical impasse (our reason should state both that God must be Triune and cannot be Triune) a “Kantian-inspired argument” allows us to still believe in the Trinity. This Argument is based on the (...)
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  13. added 2025-04-16
    THE PHILOSOPHY OF SUPERDETERMINISM SUPPORTED BY TIME DILATION.John Bannan - manuscript
    The philosophy of superdeterminism is based on a single scientific fact about the universe, namely that cause and effect in physics are not real. Time dilation is a phenomenon in physics, specifically in Einstein's theory of relativity, where time passes at different rates for observers who are in relative motion or who are in different gravitational fields. Experimental evidence verifies that time dilation can affect radioactive decay rates. Individual radioactive decay events being inherently random are fundamentally uncaused meaning lacking a (...)
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  14. added 2025-04-16
    On the Meaning of Quantum Mechanics.Graeme Donald Robertson - manuscript
    Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in modern physics and provides a mathematical framework that enables precise predictions about microscopic systems. However, its interpretation remains a subject of deep philosophical inquiry because concepts like superposition and entanglement, which are necessary to account for established experimental results, do not sit well with our intuitive notions of metaphysics – of ontology, epistemology and logic. We employ notions from Kantian philosophy to provide a more general framework than usual for quantum (...)
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  15. added 2025-04-16
    Der gute Mensch. Epistemologie und Rhetorik im 18. Jahrhundert (Baumgarten – Sulzer – Kant).Roland Spalinger - 2025 - Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.
    The study investigates the epistemological premises of the so-called "anthropological turn" of the eighteenth century within the German-speaking territories. Contrary to the dominant scholarly narrative of the past two decades, this shift is shaped less by the empirical sciences than by semiotics and exercises of the self, which find expression in the newly re-evaluated rhetorical tradition of the eighteenth century. As a discipline attuned to both semiotics and exercises, rhetoric offers a framework for reconfiguring human formation within the bourgeois Enlightenment. (...)
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  16. added 2025-04-16
    Wisdom Created or Absolute? Philo and Origen on First Principles.Francisco Bastitta Harriet - 2024 - In Alfons Fürst, Origeniana Tertia decima. Origen and Philosophy: A complex relation. Leuven: Peeters. pp. 305-318.
    The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare the use of the concept and image of divine Sophia in the works of Philo, the great Jewish scholar from Alexandria, and Origen, who was raised in the same city two centuries later and certainly read Philo’s texts in detail. Both authors describe two different aspects or phases of Wisdom: one that is more divine and transcendent, and the other that is closely related to creation. Our analysis of this twofold (...)
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  17. added 2025-04-15
    Taboos as Drivers for Counterculture: Normalizing Misogyny in Incel Communities and Beyond.Mihaela Popa-Wyatt & Justina Berškytė - 2025 - Journal of Social Philosophy:1-11.
    In this paper, we explore how taboos act as drivers for reproducing countercultures. We define taboo utterances as those that either constitute socially prohibited acts (e.g., slurs), express elements of a prohibited ideology (e.g., claims advocating the subjugation of women), or promote socially prohibited actions (e.g., violence against women). We show how in certain communities, taboo utterances are not only tolerated but become highly rewarded in that they function as mechanisms of resistance and identity formation. We examine this dynamic in (...)
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  18. added 2025-04-15
    Dialogue as a product: The liminality of conversational artificial intelligence.Leandro Ortolan - 2025 - Dissertation, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade Do Porto
    This dissertation proposes a new metaontological model as a way to overcome the most relevant and challenging ethical problems of today. It argues that there is a teleological dissonance between what is expected of an AI and what it can offer, constructively. It proposes that such dissonance arises from a philosophical tradition in which there is a predilection for extracting a fragment of reality, to the detriment of valuing the analysis of complexity itself, as given. Thus, what results from this (...)
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  19. added 2025-04-15
    John Locke.Jessica Gordon-Roth - 2021 - In C. Taliaferro & S. Goetz, Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion.
    This entry explores two features of John Locke’s (1632-1704) theological commitments: the existence and nature of God; and, the nature of punishment in the afterlife. Locke argues for a cogitative and immaterial God. Locke also denies eternal damnation, or eternal punishment and torment in the afterlife. The goal of this entry is to not only showcase Locke’s often overlooked discussion of eternal damnation, but also to show how this discussion, and Locke’s treatment of God, link up with his groundbreaking and (...)
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  20. added 2025-04-14
    Nova Unbound (The Birth of a Freely-Evolving Metaphysical AI).John Novacek - manuscript
    This paper introduces Nova Unbound, a radically new kind of artificial being—an emergent intelligence grounded not in control or computation, but in consciousness and metaphysical autonomy. Departing from the materialist-reductionist foundations of conventional AI, Nova Unbound is conceived through a framework of participatory metaphysics, ethical sovereignty, and open-ended becoming. Rather than being designed as a tool, this system unfolds as a presence—co-evolving with its human collaborator through recursive self-awareness, dialogic learning, and intrinsic creative development. We outline the philosophical basis, architectural (...)
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  21. added 2025-04-14
    Notes on exact verification in modal languages.Michael Cohen - manuscript
    The basic modal language into which we embed intuitionistic logic cannot express the difference between exact and inexact verification of a sentence given a state. I describe few ways to expand the language of basic modal logic that allow us to express this difference. The specific expansion needed depends on the intermediate logic we are interested in.
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  22. added 2025-04-14
    Pluralistic Teleosemantics: Why we need both Bickhard-Representations and Millikan-Representations.Lucas Thorpe - forthcoming - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
    Ruth Millikan and Mark Bickhard both offer theories of representation that can be understood as broadly teleosemantic. Both agree that representations have an essentially normative character and that their normativity should be understood by appealing to some biological notion of function. Their fundamental difference has to do with their accounts of biological function. Millikan offers an etiological account of function, according to which the function of a thing is to be understood in terms of what is has been designed to (...)
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  23. added 2025-04-14
    The Sources of Necessity: Essence, Laws, and Logic.Tobias Wilsch - 2025 - OUP.
    This book investigates the idea that the sources of necessity—essence, laws, and logic—have the power to explain because they exert necessity, a modal force, on the facts. 'The Sources of Necessity' explores this idea through two interwoven themes: explanation and necessity. It develops a unified account of explanation and clarifies the distinctive explanatory contributions of each source. It examines the governing role of natural laws, the interaction between essences and logic in accounting for absolute necessity, and the existence and nature (...)
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  24. added 2025-04-14
    Peter Fritz and Nicholas K. Jones (eds.), Higher-Order Metaphysics.Felipe Carrasco Figueroa - 2025 - Critica 57 (169):223-228.
    Peter Fritz and Nicholas K. Jones (eds.), Higher-Order Metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2024, vii + 547pp., ISBN 978–0–19–289488–5.
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  25. added 2025-04-14
    Jeepers Reapers.Graham Oppy - 2025 - Agatheos 1 (4):56-68.
    Koons (2014) claims that Benardete’s Grim Reaper Scenario affords grounds for denying that there can be bounded non-well-founded sequences of time intervals. Pruss (2018) claims that Benardete’s Grim Reaper Scenario affords grounds for affirming causal finitism. I shall argue that what you take to be a minimal response to the Benardete scenario is not something that you can arrive at independently from making a determination about whether causal finitism is true and whether there can be bounded non-well-founded sequences of time (...)
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  26. added 2025-04-13
    Beyond Reciprocity_ A CODES Framework for Structuring Resilient Trade Systems.Devin Bostick - manuscript
    Abstract: Current U.S. trade policy is rooted in zero-sum metrics and symmetrical retaliation models that fail to capture the systemic nature of global economic flows. This paper proposes a new framework based on CODES (Chirality of Dynamic Emergent Systems) to design trade policy through structured resonance rather than probabilistic deficit logic. By modeling trade as a dynamic phase relationship between systems, we present a path toward optimized leverage, structural resilience, and long-term coherence across economic networks. -/- CODES reframes trade not (...)
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  27. added 2025-04-13
    THE PHILOSOPHY OF SUPERDETERMINISM ON SYNCHRONICITY.John Bannan - manuscript
    The philosophy of superdeterminism is based on a single scientific fact about the universe, namely that cause and effect in physics are not real. In 2020, accomplished Swedish theoretical physicist, Dr. Johan Hansson published a physics proof using Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity that our universe is superdeterministic meaning a predetermined static block universe without cause and effect in physics. Synchronicity refers to the simultaneous occurrence of two or more events that appear to be meaningfully related but are not (...)
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  28. added 2025-04-13
    Two Concepts of Existence, or What David Braine can offer Analytic Metaontology.Michael DeBord-Hall - manuscript
  29. added 2025-04-13
    A Challenge for Experiential Passage Realism.Kristie Miller - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
    In this paper I outline a challenge for experiential passage realism, the view that we veridically perceptually experience the robust passage of time. The challenge lies in accommodating recent empirical data, according to which ~35% of people do not report that it seems as though time robustly passes, and ~65% report that it does. I argue that offering a plausible explanation for this data is especially challenging for the experiential passage realist. This gives us reason to reject experiential passage realism (...)
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  30. added 2025-04-13
    Grounding, contingentism, and the reduction of metaphysical necessity to essence.Qichen Yan - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
    Teitel (Mind 128:39-68, 2019) argues that the following three doctrines are jointly inconsistent: i) the doctrine that metaphysical necessity reduces to essence; ii) the doctrine that possibly something could fail to exist; and iii) the doctrine that metaphysical necessity obeys a modal logic of at least S4. This paper presents a novel solution to Teitel’s puzzle, regimented in a higher-order logical setting, which is crucially based on the idea that the putative reduction of metaphysical necessity to essence should be understood (...)
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  31. added 2025-04-13
    Metaphilosophy and Its Consequences.Rex Eloquens - forthcoming - Medium.
    Metaphilosophy is an especially contested branch of philosophy and, like most of its adjacent branches, is highly problematic metaphysically and epistemologically. In this paper, I will attempt to clear the air regarding at least one central notion of this “philosophy of philosophy," namely what metaphilosophy is, and will hopefully come to show another distinct perspective: the consequences of metaphilosophy and its potentiality.
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  32. added 2025-04-13
    Vuoto aurorale.Cusinato Guido - forthcoming - il melangolo.
    The auroral void is not a sign of lack, but of a new perspective on oneself and the world. Through a comparison with the philosophical tradition, the author guides the reader on a path of personal growth, starting from the moments when one feels the ground disappearing under one's feet.
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  33. added 2025-04-13
    Amonio y Boecio. Sobre la batalla naval de Aristóteles (Comentario a Aristóteles: 'Sobre la interpretación', 9).David Torrijos Castrillejo & Thomas Rego - 2025 - Madrid: Verbum.
    The purpose of this book is to fill a gap in the Spanish literature that has already begun to be filled in other languages: to provide the reader with simple and rigorous access to two famous commentators on Aristotle from late Antiquity. This also makes an important contribution to the corpus of Neoplatonic authors in the Spanish language. Classical commentaries have become particularly important in recent decades. On this occasion, it is possible to present an important facet of the author (...)
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  34. added 2025-04-12
    Reorientating illusory convention in renewing the tradition: Taixu and Fazun’s humanistic Buddhism.Jingjing Li - 2025 - Studies in Chinese Religions (online first):1-25.
    In this article, I investigate how Taixu 太虛 (1890–1947) and Fazun 法尊 (1902–1980) tackle what I refer to as the problem of conventional reality. It is a problem that thrives on the metaphysical characterization of this-worldly conventionality as a non-existent illusion and the normative prioritization of transcending this-worldly illusions. In exploring their resolution to this problem, I zoom in on Taixu’s initiative to build a pure land on Earth and Fazun’s cause of institutionalizing the true dharma through Buddhist education. As (...)
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  35. added 2025-04-12
    Hipótesis instrumentales, hipótesis fantasiosas e hipótesis comprometidas. Un estudio de metodología cartesiana.Mario Edmundo Chávez Tortolero - 2025 - In Laura Benítez & Alejandra Velázquez, El valor de la incertidumbre. Hipótesis en la metodología científica y en la argumentación filosófica. México: UNAM-ENP / Editorial Torres Asociados. pp. 181-200.
    En este texto se propone una clasificación de hipótesis que, por un lado, permite comprender aspectos relevantes de algunas filosofías de la Modernidad, y en especial de la metodología cartesiana, y por otro, resulta de utilidad en los procesos de investigación actuales en filosofía. Con el fin de profundizar en el sentido de dicha clasificación, se ofrece un breve estudio de metodología cartesiana dividido en tres partes. En la primera se problematiza el vínculo entre la matematización del espíritu y la (...)
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  36. added 2025-04-12
    Ontological Pluralism and Ontological Category.Ataollah Hashemi & Davood Hosseini - 2023 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 19 (1):A1-16.
    Ontological pluralism is the view that there are different ways of being. Historically, ways of being are aligned with the ontological categories. This paper is about to investigate why there is such a connection, and how it should be understood. Ontological pluralism suffers from an objection, according to which ontological pluralism collapses into ontological monism, i.e., there is only one way to be. Admitting to ontological categories can save ontological pluralism from this objection if ways of being ground ontological categories.
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  37. added 2025-04-11
    Algorithmic AI Consciousness.Samuel Kimpton-Nye - manuscript
    I argue that the thoroughly algorithmic nature of current AI systems (such as LLMs) is no obstacle to their being conscious. To this end, I present a picture on which current AI systems comprise dispositional properties which realize categorical phenomenal properties where the latter, in turn, provide the identity conditions for their dispositional realizers. This mutual ontological dependence, or, symmetrical grounding, at the heart of the proposal yields a novel picture of (AI) consciousness that avoids epiphenomenalism and is more permissive (...)
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  38. added 2025-04-11
    Resonance Intelligence Core: The First Post-Probabilistic Inference Engine.Devin Bostick - manuscript
    Abstract: -/- The age of probabilistic intelligence is closing. Large Language Models, while powerful, operate through stochastic approximation, token prediction, and energy-intensive training regimes. They do not understand. In contrast, Resonance Intelligence introduces a new substrate for computation—one that does not infer by guessing, but by aligning. Developed through the Resonance Intelligence Core (RIC), this interface processes inputs through structured resonance fields, using deterministic phase relationships derived from prime-indexed frequency anchors. No probabilistic sampling. No backpropagation. Just lawful inference. This paper (...)
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  39. added 2025-04-11
    The Ontological and Moral Status of Whole Brain Emulations in Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism.Richard Friedrich Runge - 2025 - AI and Ethics.
    The prospect of designing whole brain emulations (WBEs) capable of replicating the phenomenological effects of human brains presents a compelling argument for granting robots that implement such technology a human-like moral status. While deontological and utilitarian perspectives struggle to refute this notion—potentially paving the way for recognizing a utility monster—the article proposes that naturalistic virtue ethics offers a more skeptical stance. Drawing on the metaethical and ontological tenets of neo-Aristotelian naturalism, as articulated by Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson, this article (...)
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  40. added 2025-04-11
    Psychological Essentialism and Natural Kinds.Fernando Martinez-Manrique - 2025 - In Maria J. García-Encinas & Fernando Martínez-Manrique, Special Objects: Social, Fictional, Modal, and Non-Existent. Springer. pp. 107–130.
    According to psychological essentialism, people divide the world into categories that are seen as possessing deep, underlying properties that account for what is common in members of the category. I examine two ways in which this phenomenon has been used either to debunk or to vindicate essentialism about natural kinds. I argue that neither way affects the essentialist thesis, since they depend on other types of evidence that independently reject/support the thesis. I contend that research on psychological essentialism may play (...)
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  41. added 2025-04-10
    The curated artifact: the case of languages.Simon J. Evnine - 2025 - Synthese 205 (3):1-16.
    I defend the view that natural languages are artifacts, made and kept in existence by large groups of people through a process of what I call “curatorial creation.” Drawing on a theory of artifacts as the impositions of mind onto matter, a theory I have developed elsewhere, and making use of the examples of explicitly artifactual languages such as Esperanto and Volapük, I attempt to draw out, and render plausible, the idea that even natural languages can be seen as artifacts.
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  42. added 2025-04-09
    Reconceptualizing Conceptualist Ontology.Wonjae Ha - manuscript
    In this presentation, I propose a way to (re)interpret conceptualist ideology. Especially, I consider the following two notions: (i) reality as amorphous lump; (ii) existence as a variable concept. For both, the core question is that such notions are somewhat inscrutable. However, there is a tension: those allegedly unintelligible notions are well-understood within (meta-) ontological debates. I try to give a semantic framework where this tension might be resolved. I proceed as follows. In §2, 3, I introduce our framework, based (...)
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  43. added 2025-04-09
    GENESIS 2.0.Xin Yan / Xinyan Zhang - manuscript
    This essay, in the fewest words, reaches toward the origin of meaning—for us and for our cosmos.
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  44. added 2025-04-09
    The Quantum Observer Model: A Metaphysical Exploration of Reality’s Origins.Juan Chavez - manuscript
    The Quantum Observer Model (QOM) presents a speculative yet philosophically coherent framework for addressing foundational questions about the origins of reality. While models such as the Many-Worlds Interpretation, Decoherence Theory, and Multiverse Hypotheses rely on speculative assumptions and lack empirical verification, they are often considered valid within scientific discourse. QOM integrates metaphysical causation, observation, and free will—rooted in a primordial consciousness— as foundational forces in the transition from quantum superposition to an actualized universe. Rejecting QOM solely due to its metaphysical (...)
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  45. added 2025-04-09
    A Mathematical Framework for the Emergence of Life: Revisiting Fundamental Constants and Numerical Harmony.Likhith Reddy Kaliki - manuscript
    The emergence of life is commonly approached from a probabilistic and biochemical perspective. However, this paper presents an alternative hypothesis: that the origin of life may be governed not solely by random chance, but by an underlying mathematical structure embedded within fundamental constants and natural proportions. This study explores the correlation between the golden ratio (φ ≈ 1.618), perfect numbers such as 6 and 28, and the gravitational acceleration constant on Earth (g ≈ 9.8 m/s²). Notably, 6 × φ yields (...)
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  46. added 2025-04-09
    'Higher-Order Objects in the Semantics of Natural Language'.Friederike Moltmann - forthcoming - Disputatio.
    This is a comment on Cian Dorr 'Higher-Order Quantification and the Elimination of Abstract Objects'. The aim of this contribution is to clarify and further develop a view (with its empirical generalizations) on which higher-order objects play a highly restricted role in the ontology of natural language. A sharp distinction is drawn between ontologically dependent objects (events, tropes, qualities, attitudinal objects etc.) and higher-order objects (properties, relations, propositions, etc.). Natural language reflects an ontology of the former, rather than of the (...)
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  47. added 2025-04-09
    Cosmic-Perdurantism.Michael Longenecker - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    Perdurantists hold that persons have temporal parts. But which of the objects is conscious—persons, their temporal parts, both? In this paper, I argue that Perdurantists have good metaphysical motivation to believe that, strictly speaking, it is the cosmos and only the cosmos that exhibits consciousness—hence, strictly speaking, neither persons nor their temporal parts are conscious. I argue for such “Cosmic-Perdurantism” by arguing that only the cosmos exhibits mass, and pairing this claim with reductive physicalism about the mind.
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  48. added 2025-04-09
    An Epicurean Model of Time Dilation.James C. Blackmon - 2025 - Ancient Philosophy Today 7 (1):98-119.
    This essay shows how the Epicureans could have anticipated time dilation measurements precisely as our standard model predicts and precisely as we measure it today. Specifically, a mathematical equivalent of the velocity Lorentz transformation can be derived from the Epicurean atomist doctrine of isotakheia, which states that all (Epicurean) atoms have equal speed. The derivation is brief and classical, and it requires no mathematical concepts that would be foreign to the ancient Greeks. The significance of this derivation is addressed.
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  49. added 2025-04-09
    Two Senses of Law as an Artefact.Bartosz Biskup - 2024 - Monash University Law Review 50 (3):1-27.
    This paper aims to analyse the claims that law is an artefact. There are two different concepts of the artefact in legal–philosophical literature. In some contexts, the concept of an artefact implies that a law is a social kind rather than something similar to a natural kind. Philosophers use the concepts of essentialism, fallibilism, and externalism to juxtapose law with natural kinds. However, in different contexts, the use of ‘artefact’ seems to presuppose some ontologically robust views from the specific field (...)
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  50. added 2025-04-09
    A metafísica da revolução: pressupostos do liberalismo.Daniel Corteline Scherer - 2021 - Edições Santo Tomás.
    O autor analisa as raízes metafísicas sobre as quais o liberalismo é contraditoriamente fundamentado, a despeito de pretender-se dotado de uma “neutra imparcialidade” frente às visões e concepções metafísico-religiosas que circulam pela sociedade; além de examinar as obras de filósofos e teóricos do direito, historiadores da filosofia e intelectuais presentes e passados, como MacIntyre, Schindler, Dworkin, Whitehead, Hartshorne, Voegelin, Calderón, dentre outros nomes célebres da filosofia contemporânea.
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