Chapter The Need for a Theory of Argument Structure. THE STANDARD APPROACH The approach to argument diagramming which we call standard was originated, ...

Given immunity’s general role in the organism’s economy—both in terms of its internal environment as well as mediating its external relations—immune theory has expanded its traditional formulation of preserving individual autonomy to one that includes accounting for nutritional processes and symbiotic relationships that require immune tolerance. When such a full ecological alignment is adopted, the immune system becomes the mediator of both defensive and assimilative environmental intercourse, where a balance of immune rejection and tolerance governs the complex interactions of the (...) organism’s ecological relationships. Accordingly, immunology, which historically had affiliated with the biology of individuals, now becomes a science concerned with the biology of communities. With this translocation, the ontological basis of the organism is undergoing a profound change. Indeed, the recent recognition of the ubiquity of symbiosis has challenged the traditional notions of biological individuality and requires a shift in the metaphysics undergirding biology, in which a philosophy of the organism must be characterized by ecological dialectics “all-the-way-down.”. (shrink)

Biology above the level of the individual organism ? population ecology and genetics, community ecology, biogeography and evolution ? requires the study of intrinsically complex systems. But the dominant philosophies of western science have proven to be inadequate for the study of complexity:(1)The reductionist myth of simplicity leads its advocates to isolate parts as completely as possible and study these parts. It underestimates the importance of interactions in theory, and its recommendations for practice (in agricultural programs or conservation and environmental (...) protection) are typically thwarted by the power of indirect and unanticipated causes rather than by error in the detailed description of their own objects of study.(2)Reductionism ignores properties of complex wholes; the effects of these properties are therefore seen only as noise; this randomness is elevated into an ontological principle which leads to the blocking of investigation and the reification of statistics, so that data reduction and statistical prediction often pass for explanation.(3)The faith in the atomistic nature of the world makes the allocation of relative weights to separate causes the main object of science, and makes it more difficult to study the nature of interconnectedness. (shrink)

A study in philosophical methodology aimed at providing a clear view of the scope and limits of philosophical inquiry.

My effort to address the comments made by the two distinguished scholars, consists of three steps. I will start with a brief resume of Hegel’s dialectical logic, to provide a scaffold for the debate. Subsequently, I will address the comments made. In the case of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, I will focus on his reference to Althusser. In the case of Bart Gremmen, I will focus on the dialectics of biology, notably on his reference to Mendel. Finally, I will address the (...) tension between the conceptual and the empirical dimension of philosophical scholarship. (shrink)

Elements comprising a set of building blocks for a feminist reconstruction of citizenship might include: a critical synthesis of citizenship as a status and a practice; strengthening the inclusive side of citizenship (within and across nation-states); the principle of differentiated universalism, addressing tensions between an analysis grounded in difference and the universalism standing at the heart of citizenship; and a challenge to the binary thinking that constrains the articulation of women's claims to citizenship.

A hierarchical ordering of approaches afflicts environmental thinking. An ethics of individualism unjustly overrides social/political philosophy in environmental debates. Dialectics helps correct this imbalance. In dialectical fashion, a synthesis emerges between conflicting approaches to dialectics and to nature from: Marxism (Levins and Lewontin), anarchism (Bookchin), and Native Americanism (Black Elk). Conflicting (according to Marxists) and cooperative (according to anarchists) forces both operate in nature. Ethics (anarchist), political theory (Marxist), and spirituality (Native American) constitute the interconnected interpretative domains of (...) a dialectically informed ecophilosophy. In a world painted too often in blacks and whites, ecological dialectics colors the picture a more realistic gray. (shrink)

As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates African-American (...) subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois’s Hegelian concept of ‘double consciousness’, as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system. (shrink)

Scoring rules measure the deviation between a credence assignment and reality. Probabilism holds that only those credence assignments that satisfy the axioms of probability are rationally admissible. Accuracy-based arguments for probabilism observe that given certain conditions on a scoring rule, the score of any non-probability is dominated by the score of a probability. The conditions in the arguments we will consider include propriety: the claim that the expected accuracy of _p_ is not beaten by the expected accuracy of any other (...) credence _c_ by the lights of _p_ if _p_ is a probability. I argue that if we think through how a non-probabilist can respond to pragmatic arguments for probabilism, we will expect the non-probabilist to accept a condition _stronger_ than propriety for the same reasons that the probabilist gives for propriety, but this stronger condition is incompatible with the other conditions that the probabilist needs to run the accuracy argument. This makes it unlikely for the probabilist’s argument to be compelling. (shrink)

Pragmatics and dialectics are two disciplines which have been amongst the first and most important partners for argument studies in the exploration of the complex realm of communication. Treating argumentation as a construct consisting of premises and conclusion allows for investigating some interesting properties of the phenomenon of reasoning, but does not capture a variety of aspects related to the usage of natural language and dialogical context in which real-life argumentation is typically embedded. This special issue explores some of (...) the fascinating research questions which emerge when we move beyond logic into the territory of the pragmatics and dialectics of argument. (shrink)

In my response, I initially defend my preference for classical Critical Theory, emphasizing its continued relevance in capitalist modernity, stressing that the epistemological approach does not imply dogmatism with regards to scientific theory or Historical Materialism, just as it does not imply closure with regards to political democracy. When it comes to the dialectics of the classics, I also defend an epistemological approach, arguing that the dialectics aiming for truth implies critique and negativity. However, confronted with the duality (...) of transcendental ideas and historical relativity, I express my confidence in human intuition. Following Hegel, determinate negation must sublate the intuitively conceived universality to a new conception that contains the result of the negation. Finally, I do not see how the conceptual aporias of general economy can be solved by the current political degrowth project. Still, politics is what we need more of, namely social democracy. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for a treatment of rights to be treatment against power with some concession to the responsibilities that a tutelary of rights enjoys. We owe it to legal philosophers of the Scholastic persuasion who recognized rights as the entitlements that allow a person to fulfill duties— whether these arise from nature or from contract. In this sense rights were subordinate to and enjoyed for the sake of duties that one had. One may debate this way of putting (...) things, but it had the marked advantage of clarity and showed the internal connection between rights and duties. Also in the scholastic anatomy of rights, there was such a thing as the “term” of the right—he against whom the right could be claimed, and therefore he or she upon whom a duty was incumbent to desist from transgressing the right of the tutelary. In this sense a “right to” was concomitantly “power against,” but power, in the sense of claim or entitlement. For the power to enforce, one had to look to what scholastic philosophers called the “title” of the right—and this could be natural law, positive law that, of course, included contracts. I do not think that this was bad at all, but I would like to pick up the subject today by paying attention to two leading figures: Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

This paper formally explores the common ground between mild versions of epistemological coherentism and infinitism; it proposes—and argues for—a hybrid, coherentist–infinitist account of epistemic justification. First, the epistemological regress argument and its relation to the classical taxonomy regarding epistemic justification—of foundationalism, infinitism and coherentism—is reviewed. We then recall recent results proving that an influential argument against infinite regresses of justification, which alleges their incoherence on account of probabilistic inconsistency, cannot be maintained. Furthermore, we prove that the Principle of Inferential Justification (...) has rather unwelcome consequences—formally resembling the Sorites paradox—as soon as it is iterated and combined with a natural Bayesian perspective on probabilistic inferences. We conclude that strong versions of foundationalism and infinitism should be abandoned. Positively, we provide a rough sketch for a graded formal coherence notion, according to which infinite regresses of epistemic justification will often have more than a minimal degree of coherence. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 4 Seiten: 76-105.

This paper discusses some recent developments in the Marxian theory of value, called value-form theory, which have gone along with a methodological shift from a linear logic and historical dialectics to a dialectical logic and systematic dialectics. In order to appreciate these developments within the Marxian paradigm, it is useful to make two introductory remarks: first, on some peculiarities of Marxian discourse and, second, about discrepancies in Marx's Capital.

The aim of this book is to understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean by "art." Stephen Zepke argues that art, in their account, is an ontological term and an ontological practice that results in a new understanding of aesthetics. For Deleuze and Guattari understanding what art "is" means understanding how it works, what it does, how it "becomes," and finally, how it lives. This book illuminates these philosophers' discussion of ontology from the viewpoint of art-and vice versa-in a thorough questioning (...) of aesthetic criteria as they are normally understood. (shrink)

Reproduced from Robert J.C. Young, Torn Halves. Pages: 256. ISBN: 0-7190-477-3 ; 0-7190-4776-5. Price: 14.99 ; 40.00.

In his recent work The Myth of Dialectics John Rosenthal presents a forceful polemic against Hegel and Marxists sympathetic to the Hegelian legacy. The methodology Hegel employed, his metaphysical assertions, his rejection of the principles of formal logic, and the political implications of his standpoint, are all fundamentally incompatible with Marx’s perspective, according to Rosenthal. While Rosenthal grants that Marx did make use of Hegelian motifs in his theory of value, even this is not to Hegel’s credit: the very (...) perversity of Hegel’s thought made it useful for the comprehension of the perversity of capital. In this paper I argue that a close and reasonably charitable reading of Hegel’s Logic reveals a quite different picture of his methodology and ontological commitments from that presented by Rosenthal. While there are profound substantive differences between the Hegelian and Marxian 1 perspectives on capitalist society, it is not the case that Hegel’s Logic is homologous with capital. The Logic provides helpful conceptual resources for a critique of capital. In the final section of the paper five areas are briefly sketched in which Hegelian dialectical logic remains of contemporary interest. (shrink)

After the First Conference, the situation with regard to the relation between natural scientists and philosophers improved considerably in the sense that, as we can see, philosophers, by their work on questions of methodology, are helping natural scientists more and more, while natural scientists are giving increasing attention to the results of the work of philosophers, and are becoming interested in the philosophical conclusions following from their research and in general problems of philosophical significance.

Good and evil are the most general ethical categories from which we can get our bearings in the fundamental philosophical and normative problems of ethics. In the contemporary scholarly literature the interpretation of the good is multifunctional. Good is regarded as a model of morality, as the most general moral requirement or most general moral evaluation, and finally as a practical norm, i.e., a requirement embodied in moral experience, as a unity of the objective and subjective in moral actions. The (...) history of ethical thought was bound to reach this broad, all-embracing conception of the good, indeed, that was the way it went, mastering the content of the category of the good, bit by bit, focusing attention now on one, now on another of its aspects. Hence the most general explanation of the good as a synonym for morality has not at all been the same throughout the different stages in the history of ethical thought. Good, like evil, and like all other ethical categories, had a different compass and different sets of attributes in diverse ethical systems. One must also consider that until modern times, there had never existed a single categorial term to designate morality as a whole. As O. G. Drobnitskii noted, the words "good and evil," "justice," "virtue," and "manners" were often preferred to the concept "morals"; and moreover, each of these words was used to designate not only the particular phenomena within moral philosophy but the entire domain of morals in general. (shrink)