Ilya Prigogine was not a systematic author: his ideas, covering a wide arch of areas, are dispersed in his many writings. In particular, his philosophical thought has to be reconstructed mainly on the basis of his works in collaboration with Isabelle Stengers: La Nouvelle Alliance ( 1979 ), Order out of Chaos ( 1984 ), and Entre le Temps et l’Éternité ( 1988 ). In this paper I undertake that reconstruction in order to argue that Prigogine’s position, when read in (...) the light of Putnam’s internalist realism, can be characterized as an ontological pluralism. The main aim of this work is to show the striking parallelism between the philosophical views of Prigogine and Stengers and those of Hilary Putnam in Reason , Truth and History ( 1981 ). This task will lead me to critically review Prigogine’s general scientific program: the attempt to establish the foundations of objective irreversibility. (shrink)

The general question to be considered in this paper points to the nature of the world described by chemistry: what is macro-chemical ontology like? In particular, we want to identify the ontological categories that underlie chemical discourse and chemical practice. This is not an easy task, because modern Western metaphysics was strongly modeled by theoretical physics. For this reason, we attempt to answer our question by contrasting macro-chemical ontology with the mainstream ontology of physics and of traditional metaphysics. In particular, (...) we introduce the distinction between stuff-ontology, proper of chemistry, and individual-ontology, proper of physics. These two ontologies differ from each other in the basic categories of their own structures. On this basis, we characterize individual-ontology in such a way that the features of stuff-ontology will arise by contrast with it. (shrink)

Traditional discussions about the arrow of time in general involve the concept of entropy. In the cosmological context, the direction past-to-future is usually related to the direction of the gradient of the entropy function of the universe. But the definition of the entropy of the universe is a very controversial matter. Moreover, thermodynamics is a phenomenological theory. Geometrical properties of space-time provide a more fundamental and less controversial way of defining an arrow of time for the universe as a whole. (...) We will call the arrow defined only on the basis of the geometrical properties of space-time, independently of any entropic considerations, “the global arrow of time.” In this paper we will argue that: (i) if certain conditions are satisfied, it is possible to define a global arrow of time for the universe as a whole, and (ii) the standard models of contemporary cosmology satisfy these conditions. (shrink)

According to Zurek, decoherence is a process resulting from the interaction between a quantum system and its environment; this process singles out a preferred set of states, usually called “pointer basis”, that determines which observables will receive definite values. This means that decoherence leads to a sort of selection which precludes all except a small subset of the states in the Hilbert space of the system from behaving in a classical manner: environment-induced-superselection—einselection —is a consequence of the process of decoherence. (...) The aim of this paper is to present a new approach to decoherence, different from the mainstream approach of Zurek and his collaborators. We will argue that this approach offers conceptual advantages over the traditional one when problems of foundations are considered; in particular, from the new perspective, decoherence in closed quantum systems becomes possible and the preferred basis acquires a well founded definition. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the formalisms for decoherence originally devised to deal just with closed or open systems can be subsumed under a general conceptual framework, in such a way that they cooperate in the understanding of the same physical phenomenon. This new perspective dissolves certain conceptual difficulties of the einselection program but, at the same time, shows that the openness of the quantum system is not the essential ingredient for decoherence. †To contact the authors, please write to: (...) Mario Castagnino, CONICET-IAFE, Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, Casilla de Correos 67, Sucursal 28, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina; Roberto Laura, IFIR-Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Av. Pellegrini 250, 2000 Rosario, Argentina; Olimpia Lombardi, CONICET-Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, C. Larralde 3440, 6°D, 1430, Buenos Aires; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

According to Zurek, decoherence is a process resulting from the interaction between a quantum system and its environment; this process singles out a preferred set of states, usually called “pointer basis”, that determines which observables will receive definite values. This means that decoherence leads to a sort of selection which precludes all except a small subset of the states in the Hilbert space of the system from behaving in a classical manner: environment-induced-superselection (einselection) is a consequence of the process of (...) decoherence. The aim of this paper is to present a new approach to decoherence, different from the mainstream approach of Zurek and his collaborators. We will argue that this approach offers conceptual advantages over the traditional one when problems of foundations are considered; in particular, from the new perspective, decoherence in closed quantum systems becomes possible and the preferred basis acquires a well founded definition. (shrink)