Aug 2026· Global Philosophy· Vol 36· 0 citations· 43 references
Abstract
A characteristic form of progress in the natural sciences consists in replacing one theory of a domain with another that posits a radically different ontology. I call such episodes “ontological breakthroughs”. They are possible because many natural phenomena can be individuated and re-identified through empirical procedures, enabling reference to remain stable even when explanatory categories change. Drawing on Wilhelm Dilthey, I argue that the situation is different in the human sciences. There, phenomena are individuated interpretively, and their identification cannot be detached from the conditions under which they become intelligible. This interpretive tether, I suggest, helps explain why progress in the human sciences does not take the form of ontological breakthroughs.
The existence of middle-sized systems in the universe is far from accidental; it carries significant consequences for our understanding of both physics and metaphysics, bearing on the epistemic assumptions of the former and the role of causality in the latter. By examining how science actually engages with individual...
Contemporary science has achieved extraordinary explanatory and predictive success, yet its ontological interpretation remains unsettled. This paper argues that one source of this instability lies in the inherited assumption that reality is fundamentally composed of independently existing substances. While this picture...
In this article the problem of the so-called ‘coinciding objects’, i.e. the question whether a substantially homogeneous thing is something ontologically different from the corresponding ‘piece of stuff’ it is made of or not, is examined from a pragmatical and language-analytical point of view. Instead of recurring to...
This volume presents a dialectic-idealist overview of natural language and natural (non-artificial) thinking. Pauli Pylkkö’s view is thoroughly non-classical and takes ambiguity and contradictoriness as vital and inalienable properties of all speaking and thinking. The main function of a sentence is to change the meani...
Following Hanegraaff’s (2020: 73) claim that pioneers in our field considered it “to be no less than essential for any adequate understanding of the history of human culture and society as such,” this text answers Schilbrack’s (2013) question: “After we deconstruct ‘religion’, then what?” The answer is formulated wit...
Milan Fujda· Method & Theory in the S...· 0 citations
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