Is the mathematical function being computed by a given physical system determined by the system’s dynamics? This question is at the heart of the indeterminacy of computation phenomenon (Fresco et al. [unpublished]). A paradigmatic example is a conventional electrical AND-gate that is often said to compute conjunction, but it can just as well be used to compute disjunction. Despite the pervasiveness of this phenomenon in physical computational systems, it has been discussed in the philosophical literature only indirectly, mostly with reference (...) to the debate over realism about physical computation and computationalism. A welcome exception is Dewhurst’s ([2018]) recent analysis of computational individuation under the mechanistic framework. He rejects the idea of appealing to semantic properties for determining the computational identity of a physical system. But Dewhurst seems to be too quick to pay the price of giving up the notion of computational equivalence. We aim to show that the mechanist need not pay this price. The mechanistic framework can, in principle, preserve the idea of computational equivalence even between two different enough kinds of physical systems, say, electrical and hydraulic ones. (shrink)

Taking into account significant developments in the metaphysical thinking of E. J. Lowe over the past 20 years, _More Kinds of Being:A Further Study of Individuation, Identity, and the Logic of Sortal Terms_ presents a thorough reworking and expansion of the 1989 edition of _Kinds of Being_ Brings many of the original ideas and arguments put forth in _Kinds of Being_ thoroughly up to date in light of new developments Features a thorough reworking and expansion of the earlier work, (...) rather than just a new edition Reflects the author's conversion to what he calls 'the four-category ontology,' a metaphysical system that takes its inspiration from Aristotle Provides a unified discussion of individuation and identity that should prove to be essential reading for philosophers working in metaphysics. (shrink)

In the pure powers ontology (PPO), basic physical properties have wholly dispositional essences. PPO has clear advantages over categoricalist ontologies, which suffer from familiar epistemological and metaphysical problems. However, opponents argue that because it contains no qualitative properties, PPO lacks the resources to individuate powers, and generates a regress. The challenge for those who take such arguments seriously is to introduce qualitative properties without reintroducing the problems that PPO was meant to solve. In this paper, I distinguish the core claim (...) of PPO: (i) basic physical properties have dispositional essences, from a hitherto unnoticed assumption: (ii) the dispositional essences of basic physical properties exclusively involve type-causal relations to other basic physical properties. I reject (ii), making room for a structuralist ontology in which all basic physical properties are pure powers, individuated by their places in a causal structure that includes not only other powers, but also physically realized qualitative properties such as shapes, patterns and structures. Such qualities individuate pure powers in the way that non-mental input and output properties individuate realized mental properties in functionalist theories of mind, except that here it is basic physical powers that are individuated by relations to realized non-powers. I distinguish one Platonic and two Aristotelian version of this theory, and argue that the Aristotelian versions require that grounding is not always a relative fundamentality relation, because the powers ground the qualities that individuate them. By considering ontic structural realism, I argue that symmetric grounding is the best way to make sense of relational individuation in structuralist ontologies, and is therefore no additional commitment of the one proposed here. (shrink)

This article searches for a way of theorizing the interconnectedness of processes of individuation, relationality and affect, with the aim of clearing the ground for an approach that establishes the basis of this interconnectedness by reference to mechanisms common to all living things. It establishes a number of shifts that enable us to think the categories and concepts like the individual, the subject, the group, the threshold, relationality, co-implication and so on according to a fundamental decentring, finally breaking with (...) both subject-centredness and its privilege of the individual as model or starting point; the same epistemological shift implies the rejection of the anthropocentric divide between humans and animals, while avoiding species of sociobiologism, pre-formationism, geneticism and other monocausal paradigms. What the new problematic of life enjoins us to rethink are the standpoint of singularity rather than that of the individual, coupled to the standpoint of relationality as a principle enabling us to think the self—other, human—animal, nature—culture and human—world in terms of compossibility and complex becoming. This view about the co-constitution of all life has major implications regarding responsibility for the other and responsibility for the world, grounded in the standpoint of the temporality and historicity of being as existential condition circumscribing the relation to the other. This shift at the level of ontology is explored via an engagement with the work of Simondon and his conceptual apparatus, particularly ideas of psychic and collective individuation, the pre-and transindividual, the associated milieu; this perspective is re-articulated by way of the work of Merleau-Ponty, Haraway’s notion of ‘companion species’, Ettinger’s concept of the ‘I—other plurality’, and cognate concepts that point to a new terrain for theorizing affect. (shrink)

In the 21st century, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) remains one of the key figures in the field of analytical psychology - and Psychological Types, or The Psychology of Individuation, published in 1921, is one of his most influential works. It was written during the decade after the publication of Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), which effectively ended his friendship and collaboration with Sigmund Freud. Whereas the earlier work had clearly marked Jung's psychoanalytical divergence from Freud it is the Psychology (...) of Types that fully clarifies and presents the nature, quality and characteristics of his analytical psychology. The work, which was in part a consequence of his need to reconcile the competing theories of Freud, whom he regarded as extraverted, and Alfred Adler, whom he saw as introverted, develops his concept of descriptive categories for understanding the human mind in terms of the two essential attitude types: introversion and extraversion. These basic attitudes operate in tandem with four principal interacting functions of consciousness which Jung identifies as sensation and intuition, which are functions of perception, and thinking and feeling, which are functions of judgment. The eight resulting psychological types are then explored, described, identified, characterised and explained in considerable detail, with a soaring range of examples drawn from the whole of human history, culture and experience. In his efforts to explore and illuminate the nature of the unconscious mind and indeed the collective unconscious, he investigates the problems posed by the differing psychological types and how these have manifested from classical and medieval times to the 20th century. His observations range from Aristotle, Socrates and Plato to Tertullian and Origen, and from Abélard and Master Eckhart to Martin Luther and the problem of transubstantiation. Jung takes the listener on an odyssey of human thinking. He considers the problem of types in the works of Schiller and Goethe, and Spitteler and his treatment of the Prometheus myth. He contrasts idealism and realism, the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Nietzsche, and explores a host of philosophical and religious sources from the Bible to Taoism to Brahminism. He considers the nature of the reconciling symbol in Spitteler before analysing the nature of types in modern philosophy, aesthetics and biography, giving detailed consideration to William James' characteristic pairs of opposites and Furneaux Jordan's 'character sketch of the emotional types'. Jung goes on to fully identify and describe the characteristic differences between the extraverted and introverted types and provides an extensive chapter on definitions to fully clarify the meaning of the language he employs and make his meaning more accessible. Authoritatively read by Martyn Swain for Ukemi Audiobooks, Psychological Types is an inexhaustible treasure chest of ideas and creative inspiration worth listening to time and time again. (shrink)

Is the mathematical function being computed by a given physical system determined by the system’s dynamics? This question is at the heart of the indeterminacy of computation phenomenon (Fresco et al. [unpublished]). A paradigmatic example is a conventional electrical AND-gate that is often said to compute conjunction, but it can just as well be used to compute disjunction. Despite the pervasiveness of this phenomenon in physical computational systems, it has been discussed in the philosophical literature only indirectly, mostly with reference (...) to the debate over realism about physical computation and computationalism. A welcome exception is Dewhurst’s ([2018]) recent analysis of computational individuation under the mechanistic framework. He rejects the idea of appealing to semantic properties for determining the computational identity of a physical system. But Dewhurst seems to be too quick to pay the price of giving up the notion of computational equivalence. We aim to show that the mechanist need not pay this price. The mechanistic framework can, in principle, preserve the idea of computational equivalence even between two different enough kinds of physical systems, say, electrical and hydraulic ones. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Basic Actions Action Individuation References Further reading.

This book provides both a historical analysis of the philosophical problem of individuation, and a new trajectory in its treatment. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, as well as C.S. Peirce and the lesser-known Gilbert Simondon, Alberto Toscano takes the problem of individuation, as reconfigured by Kant and Nietzsche, into the realm of modernity, providing a unique and vibrant contribution to contemporary debates in European philosophy.

According to dispositionalism, fundamental properties are dispositions—powers that don’t reduce to other properties, laws, or anything else. As dispositions manifest, natural regularities result, so this view appears to explain the uniformity of nature. However, in this paper I’ll argue that there are types of regularities that can’t be explained by dispositionalism. The basic idea is this. All accounts of fundamental dispositions endow properties with a certain sort of structure. This allows explanations of only those regularities that align with such structures. (...) In this paper, I identify a type of natural regularity that cannot fit dispositionalist structures and show why the possibility of such regularities is problematic. (shrink)

In this interview, Anne Fagot-Largeault discusses with Thierry Bardini her recollections of the life and work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The discussion covers Simondon’s theory of individuation and considers its influences on contemporary thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and François Laruelle. Fagot-Largeault situates Simondon’s thinking within the broader context of 20th-century biological research and the development of life sciences. Informed by her personal association and experiences working with Simondon, her reminiscences shed light on the unique character of Simondon (...) as a person and as a thinker. (shrink)

Aquinas has much to say about individuation over the course of his career. Although certain aspects of his views appear to undergo development, there is one aspect that remains constant throughout—namely, his commitment to assigning both prime matter and quantity an essential role in the individuation of substances. This paper examines the vexed issue of how either prime matter or quantity, as Aquinas understands them, could have any role to play in this context. In the course of doing (...) so, the author attempts to put to rest a number of longstanding worries about the coherence of Aquinas’s views about individuation, as well as to draw out some of his broader commitments in metaphysics and natural philosophy that have yet to be fully appreciated. (shrink)

ABSTRACTScholarship on medieval philosophy has rightfully acknowledged the historical and systematical merit of Avicenna’s thought in all divisions of philosophy. Avicenna however did not...

Within post - Kuhnian, philosophy of science, much effort has been devoted to issues related to conceptual change, such as incommensurability, scientific progress and realism, but mostly in terms of reference, without a fine - grained theory of scientific concepts/senses. Within the philosophy of language and of mind tradition, there is a large body of work on concepts, but the application to scientific concepts has been very tentative. The aim of this paper is to propose a general framework for a (...) theory for the individuation of scientific concepts. The general view about the individuation of concepts favored here is the possession - condition approach: to individuate a concept is to identify its possession conditions. The general metascientific tools for the analysis of scientific theories are model - theoretic, more specifically, structuralist: scientific theories, the entities to which scientifc concepts belong, are model - theoretic theory - nets. The general idea about the content of scientific concepts that inspires this proposal comes from: (i) our grandfathers’ "laws - plus - correspondence rules", (ii) Kuhns "laws applied to exemplars" views and (iii) moderate operationalism. The aim is to show that some clarification can be gained applying the possesion condition appproach to (an expansion of) these three elements using structuralist metascientific tools. First, I briefly present the two main structuralist ideas I shall use: the difference between observability and non - theoreticity, and the notion of theory - net. Second, I informally introduce the five components that come from my reading of the three traditional elements; these components are, or are not, plausible independently of how they will be integrated within a theory of concept - identity. Third, I present the kore of the theory of possession conditions for concept - identity that we shall use for the integration of such components. Finally, I propose the general traits of the possession condition that corresponds to each of these five components, I present some problems and point out some possible ways of dealing with them. (shrink)

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross‐linguistic developmental studies that followImai and Gentner (1997), we examine the question of whether language influences our thought in different forms, like (1) whether the language‐specific construal of entities found in a word extension context (Imai & Gentner, 1997) is also found in a nonlinguistic classification context; (2) whether the presence of (...) labelsper se, independent of the count‐mass syntax, fosters ontology‐based classification; (3) in what way, if at all, the count‐mass syntax that accompanies a label changes English speakers' default construal of a given entity?On the basis of the results, we argue that the ontological distinction concerning individuation is universally shared and functions as a constraint on early learning of words. At the same time, language influences one's construal of entities cross‐lingistically and developmentally, and causes a temporary change of construal within a single language. We provide a detailed discussion of how each of these three ways language may affect the construal of entities, and discuss how our universally possessed knowledge interacts with language both within a single language and in cross‐linguistic context. (shrink)

This book offers a sustained re-evaluation of the most central and perplexing themes of Leibniz's metaphysics. In contrast to traditional assessments that view the metaphysics in terms of its place among post-Cartesian theories of the world, Jan Cover and John O'Leary-Hawthorne examine the question of how the scholastic themes which were Leibniz's inheritance figure - and are refigured - in his mature account of substance and individuation. From this emerges a fresh and sometimes surprising assessment of Leibniz's views on (...) modality, the Identity of Indiscernibles, form as an internal law, and the complete-concept doctrine. As a rigorous philosophical treatment of a still-influential mediary between scholastic and modern metaphysics, their study will be of interest to historians of philosophy and contemporary metaphysicians alike. (shrink)

Not long ago, one of us has clarified and defended a bare particular theory of individuation. More recently, D. W. Mertz has raised a set of objections against this account and other accounts of bare particulars and proffered an alternative theory of individuation. He claims to have shown that 'the concept of bare particulars, and consequently substratum ontology that requires it, is untenable.' We disagree with this claim and believe there are adequate responses to the three arguments Mertz (...) raises against bare particulars. To substantiate this assertion, we clarify the nature of bare particulars as individuators, state Mertz's objections, and respond to them. We conclude that Mertz has failed to show that bare particular theory is untenable. (shrink)

Christopher Peacocke has presented an original version of the perennial philosophical thesis that we can gain substantive metaphysical and epistemological insight from an analysis of our concepts. Peacocke's innovation is to look at how concepts are individuated by their possession conditions, which he believes can be specified in terms of conditions in which certain propositions containing those concepts are accepted. The ability to provide such insight is one of Peacocke's major arguments for his theory of concepts. I will critically examine (...) this "fruitfulness" argument by looking at one philosophical problem Peacocke uses his theory to solve and treats in depth. Peacocke (1999, 2001) defines what he calls the "Integration Challenge." The challenge is to integrate our metaphysics with our epistemology by showing that they are mutually acceptable. Peacocke's key conclusion is that the Integration Challenge can be met for "epistemically individuated concepts." A good theory of content, he believes, will close the apparent gap between an account of truth for any given subject matter and an overall account of knowledge. I shall argue that there are no epistemically individuated concepts, and shall critically analyze Peacocke's arguments for their existence. I will suggest more generally that the possession conditions of concepts and their principles of individuation shed little light on the epistemology or metaphysics of things other than concepts. My broader goal is to shed light on what concepts are by showing that they are more fundamental than the sorts of cognitive and epistemic factors a leading theory uses to define them. (shrink)

How many senses do humans possess? Five external senses, as most cultures have it—sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste? Should proprioception, kinaesthesia, thirst, and pain be included, under the rubric bodily sense? What about the perception of time and the sense of number? Such questions reduce to two. 1. How do we distinguish a sense from other sorts of information-receiving faculties? 2. By what principle do we distinguish the senses? Aristotle discussed these questions in the De Anima. H. P. Grice (...) revived them in 1967. More recently, they have taken on fresh interest as a result of a collection of essays edited by Fiona Macpherson. This entry reviews some approaches to these questions and advances some new ideas for the reader’s consideration. It proposes that the senses constitute an integrated learning system, membership in which answers question 1. It also proposes that the modalities can be distinguished from one another in two ways, by the means of information pick-up and by the kinds of activity that a perceiver undertakes to make use of them. (shrink)

In chapter IX of the Principles, Anne Conway claims that her metaphysics is diametrically opposed to those of Descartes and Spinoza. Scholars have analyzed her rejection of Cartesianism, but not her critique of Spinoza. This paper proposes that two central points of Conway’s metaphysics can be understood as direct responses to Spinoza: (1) the relation between God, Christ, and the creatures in the tripartite division of being, and (2) the individuation of beings in the lowest species. I will argue (...) that Conway, in criticizing Spinoza’s identification between God and nature, defends a paradoxical monism, and that her concept of individuation is a reductio ad absurdum of Spinoza’s criterion of identity in the individuation of finite modes. (shrink)

Alan Sidelle's Necessity, Essence, and Individuation is a sustained defense of empiricism—or, more generally, conventionalism—against recent attacks by realists. Sidelle focuses his attention on necessity a posteriori, a kind of necessity which contemporary realists have taken to support realism over empiricism. Turning the tables against the realists, Sidelle argues that if there are in fact truths necessary a posteriori, it is not realism, but rather empiricism which provides the best explanation for them.

Article en hommage à Jacques English dans lequel je propose une réflexion générale sur le thème des objets intentionnels en examinant un aspect de la solution proposée par Husserl dans son manuscrit de 1894 sur les objets intentionnels qui concerne le statut ontologique des objets de pensée et leur temporalité. J’aborde cette question par le biais de l’individuation des contenus intentionnels et leur temporalité dans les manuscrits de Bernau publiés dans le volume XXXIII des Husserliana . Je m’intéresse en (...) particulier au sens que prend le principium individuationis dans la cinquième partie de ces manuscrits de Husserl qui s'intitule «De la phénoménologie de l’individuation : la temporalité des objets d’expérience, des objets imaginaires et des objets idéaux». (shrink)

In _Always More Than One_, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work toward the notion of "choreographic thinking." Here, she uses choreographic thinking to explore a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established categories. Manning connects (...) this to the concept of "autistic perception," described by autistics as the awareness of a relational field prior to the so-called neurotypical tendency to "chunk" experience into predetermined subjects and objects. Autistics explain that, rather than immediately distinguishing objects—such as chairs and tables and humans—from one another on entering a given environment, they experience the environment as gradually taking form. Manning maintains that this mode of awareness underlies all perception. What we perceive is never first a subject or an object, but an ecology. From this vantage point, she proposes that we consider an ecological politics where movement and relation take precedence over predefined categories, such as the neurotypical and the neurodiverse, or the human and the nonhuman. What would it mean to embrace an ecological politics of collective individuation? (shrink)

Spinoza developed a highly interesting metaphysical theory of nature and individuality. In this paper, I endeavor to bring forward some ideas on how Spinozistic views on extended substance, physical world, and individuality can be approached using the concept of power as the basis of interpretation. Jonathan Bennett's ‘field metaphysical’ interpretation of Spinoza's doctrine of one extended substance has generated much discussion, and forms the other starting point of my paper. I believe that the field metaphysical interpretation enables one to deal (...) with the central questions concerning physical individuation — individuality and the persistence of individual being — in a rather novel way. My main question is this: what follows if physical individuals are seen as parts of a unified field of extended power? (shrink)

The metaphysical problem of individuation requires an answer to two different but intimately related questions: 1) How are we to characterize individuality ontologically? To what ontological category or logical type does individuality belong? 2) What sort of distinction is there between the individuality and nature of an individual, e.g., a real distinction, a modal distinction, a distinction of reason, or some other distinction My purpose in this article is to clarify a bare particular account of individuation and respond (...) to objections that have been raised against bare particulars as individuators. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to promote what I call ‘the embedded thesis’ as a general constraint on how moral reasons behave. Dancy’s reason holism will be used as a foil to illustrate the thesis. According to Dancy’s reason holism, moral reasons behave in a holistic way; that is, a feature that is a moral reason in one context might not be so in another or might even be an opposite reason. The way a feature manages to switch its (...) reason status is by the help of a so-called enabler/disabler. The enabler in itself is not part of the reason, according to Dancy’s reason holism, for it can be either present or absent while the reason feature is present. To put the idea somewhat differently, Dancy’s reason holism presupposes what I call ‘reason individuation’, the view that features that function as reasons can be individuated from those that function as enablers. Yet, reason individuation cannot hold, or so I will argue, due to what I call ‘the embedded thesis’. According to the embedded thesis, the feature that serves as a moral reason in a context cannot be individuated independently from its embedded context while still retaining its reason status. If I am right about the embedded thesis, this will take the wind out of the sails of Dancy’s reason holism. More importantly, it will constitute, I argue, a general constraint on how moral reasons behave. (shrink)

I show that the indeterminacy problem for computational structuralists is in fact far more problematic than even the harshest critic of structuralism has realised; it is not a bullet which can be bitten by structuralists as previously thought. Roughly, this is because the structural indeterminacy of logic-gates such as AND/OR is caused by the structural identity of the binary computational digits 0/1 themselves. I provide a proof that pure computational structuralism is untenable because structural indeterminacy entails absurd consequences - namely, (...) that there is only one binary computational digit. I conclude that accounting for individuation is a more important desiderata for a theory of computation than even that of triviality. -/- . (shrink)

본 논문은 『비극의 탄생』을 모든 문화적 형성의 기본 문제라 할 수 있는 개체화 문제의 관점에서 재독해하고자 한다. 『비극의 탄생』의 재독해를 통해 드러날 수 있는 개체화의 가장 기본적인 사항은 개체와 개체화의 과정은 서로 구조적으로 분리되지 않는다는 점이다. 니체는 개체적 주체와 이 주체가 개체화되는 과정을 분리시키는 사고방식을 비판한다. 보다 구체적으로, 본 논문은 ‘디오뉘소스적-아폴론적’이라고 부를 수 있을 이 개체화 과정의 구조가 ‘개체를 발생시키는 개체화’와 ‘개체 속에서 지속적으로 이루어지는 개체화’의 기본적인 두 차원으로 이루어져 있음을 보여줄 것이다. 전자의 차원은 불연속성과 비가역성을 기초로 하는 상징과 비유의 (...) 메커니즘을 통해 구성되고, 후자의 차원은 직접적 긍정과 탈주체화를 특징으로 하는 변신(變身)의 과정을 중심으로 한다. 두 차원은 개체화라는 하나의 과정의 두 측면을 이룬다. (shrink)

Obsessed by the cases where things go wrong, we pay too little attention to the vastly more numerous cases where they go right, and where it is perhaps easier to see that the descriptive content of the expression concerned is wholly at the service of this function [of identifying reference], a function which is complementary to that of predication and contains no element of predication in itself (Strawson [1974], p. 66).An earlier version of the paper was written during an enjoyable (...) year spent as a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. (shrink)