Marina P. Banchetti (also: Banchetti-Robino)

: The concepts of intention and intentionality were particularly significant notions within the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic medieval philosophical traditions, and they regained philosophical importance in the twentieth century. The theories of intention and intentionality of the medieval Islamic philosopher and physician Ibn Sina and the phenomenological philosopher and mathematician Edmund Husserl are examined, compared, and contrasted here, showing that Ibn Sina's conception of intention is naturalistic and, in its naturalism, is influenced by the medical professional culture to which Ibn Sina belonged. As well, Husserl's anti-naturalistic conception of intentionality is influenced by his background as a mathematician and by his desire to ground mathematics and the empirical sciences in a truly scientific philosophy. In conclusion, an argument is presented for the superiority of the Husserlian transcendentalist account of intentionality over the Avicennian naturalistic account, on the grounds that the latter falls prey to psychologism and reductionism, the two specters that according to Husserl must haunt all naturalistic accounts of consciousness.

This paper critiques Dagfinn Follesdal's influential interpretation of the Husserlian noema as a Fregean sense. Though other philosophers have argued that Follesdal's interpretation is mistaken, this paper demonstrates that the origin of the error is a fundamental misunderstanding, on Follesdal's part, of Husserlian terminology. The paper also examines the views of David Woodruff Smith and Ronald McIntyre who, influenced by Follesdal, mistakenly read the Husserl of the "Ideas" as a linguistically motivated philosopher. The paper concludes that, if Follesdal and his followers were correct, certain methodological implications would follow for Husserlian phenomenology that would lead to its demise

Henry Sidgwick sought to interpret F.H. Bradley’s ethics, as presented in Ethical Studies, in fundamentally Aristotelian terms. Sidgwick “found it ‘natural’ to think of self-realization as the ‘realization or development into act of the potentialities constituting the definite formed character of an individual’.” In this paper, I want to demonstrate that, rather than giving the work of Bradley an Aristotelian interpretation, as Sidgwick sought to do, one should focus on studying the Hegelian influences on and the historicist aspects of Ethical Studies. Bradley’s account of the self to be realized is far from approaching Aristotle’s account. First of all, Bradley never speaks in terms of actual and potential character, and he certainly would not accept Sidgwick’s claim that the potentialities constitute the definite formed character of an individual. There is nothing Aristotelian in Bradley’s talk of history and evolution, nor in his holistic doctrine of ethical relativism.

Although Boyle has been regarded as a champion of the seventeenth century Cartesian mechanical philosophy, I defend the position that Boyle’s views conciliate between a strictly mechanistic conception of fundamental matter and a non-reductionist conception of chemical qualities. In particular, I argue that this conciliation is evident in Boyle’s ontological distinction between fundamental corpuscles endowed with mechanistic properties and higher-level corpuscular concretions endowed with chemical properties. Some of these points have already been acknowledged by contemporary scholars, and I actively engage with their ideas in this paper. However I attempt to contribute to the debate over Boyle’s mechanical philosophy by arguing that Boyle’s writings suggest an emergentist, albeit still mechanistic, notion of chemical properties. I contrast Boyle’s views against those of strict reductionist mechanical philosophers, focusing on the famous debate with Spinoza over the redintegration of niter, and argue that Boyle’s complex chemical ontology provides a more satisfactory understanding of chemical phenomena than is provided by a strictly reductionist and Cartesian mechanical philosophy

: In his book Monad and Thou: Phenomenological Ontology of the Human Being, Japanese philosopher Hiroshi Kojima proposes to redefine the I-Thou relation, first extensively investigated by Martin Buber, and to reconcile the notions of ‘individuality’ and ‘community’ in terms of his new phenomenological ontology of the human being as monad. In this essay, Kojima’s ideas are examined concerning the monad and intersubjectivity, and it is shown how these ideas can be extended and brought to bear on issues concerning human encounters with the environment and, in particular, to nonhuman animals.

The 16th and 17th centuries marked a period of transition from the vitalistic ontology that had dominated Renaissance natural philosophy to the Early Modern mechanistic paradigm endorsed by, among others, the Cartesians and Newtonians. This paper focuses on how the tensions between vitalism and mechanism played themselves out in the context of 16th and 17th century chemistry and chemical philosophy. The paper argues that, within the fields of chemistry and chemical philosophy, the significant transition that culminated in the 18th century Chemical Revolution was not a transition from vitalism to full-blown mechanism. Rather, chemical philosophy shifted from a vitalistic theory of matter and spirits to a naturalistic, physicalistic, and corpuscularian conception of chemical properties and reactions. Despite being naturalistic, physicalistic, and corpuscularian, however, this theory was not fully mechanistic. Special attention is paid to the contributions made by Paracelsus, Sebastien Basso, Jan Baptista van Helmont, and Robert Boyle to this ontological transition.

In this essay, we argue that there exist obvious parallels between questions that inform philosophy of chemistry and the so-called hard problem of consciousness in philosophy of mind. These include questions regarding the emergence of higher-level phenomena from lower-level physical states, the reduction of higher-level phenomena to lower-level physical states, and 'downward causation'. We, therefore, propose that the 'hard problem' of consciousness should be approached in a manner similar to that used to address parallel problems in philosophy of chemistry. Thus, our contribution begins by scrutinizing the ways chemists and quantum chemists think about and use different levels of organization and chemical relations and relata and then investigates the problem of 'downward causation' as it relates to the question of emergence. We demonstrate that the science of the transformation of 'substances', namely chemistry, enables us to go beyond substantialism and to develop, instead, a non-substantialist account of levels of reality. Similarly, the 'hard problem' of consciousness will require that we transcend traditional emergentism and its substantialist conception of mind. As with chemical phenomena, mental phenomena must be examined in terms of the relationality of wholes and parts, and this will require the development of a mereology that explains how parts and wholes may co-define each other. Like the non-classical and non-transitive mereology that has been proposed for quantum chemistry, an extended mereology for philosophy of mind must be one that entangles the whole, its parts, and the environment, thus rendering 'downward causation' into a relational concept. This proposal is neither a reductionist analysis that only needs the parts to define the whole, nor a merely holistic description within which the whole is necessary to define the parts. Rather, we propose that the parts, the whole, and the environment co-define each other so that our understanding of parts, wholes, and environment as independent concepts must itself be altered.

This essay proposes to discuss the manner in which Jan Baptista van Helmont helped to transform the Neoplatonic notions of vital spirit and of ferment by giving these notions an unambiguously chemical interpretation, thereby influencing the eventual naturalization of these ideas in the work of late seventeenth century chymists. This chemical interpretation of vital spirit and ferment forms part of Helmont’s hybrid ontology, which fuses a corpuscular conception of minima naturalia with a non-corporeal conception of semina rerum. For Helmont, chemical alterations involve the minima as physical units but also depend upon ferments that are contained in the semina, which function as formative spiritual agents. Helmont’s nuanced ontology ultimately contributes to the development of modern corpuscularian theory by explaining many chemical reactions in fundamentally corpuscular terms, as the addition and subtraction of particles.

This paper defends an interpretation of Husserl''s theory of language, specifically as it appears in the Logical Investigations, as an example of a larger body of theories dubbed ''language as calculus''. Although this particular interpretation has been previously defended by other authors, such as Hintikka and Kusch, this paper proposes to contribute to the discussion by arguing that what makes this interpretation plausible are Husserl''s distinction between the notions of meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment, his view that meaning is instantiated through meaning-intending acts of transcendental consciousness, and his view that the content of meaning-intending acts is ideal meaning simpliciter. As well, the paper argues that the phenomenological method of reduction itself presupposes the notion that reality as such can be reached by subtracting the influence of the language of the natural attitude and its ontological commitments and it, thus, presupposes the conception of language as a reinterpretable calculus

This dissertation gives what I consider to be the proper account of Edmund Husserl's theories of intentionality and meaning. This account stresses that meaning is the content of intentional acts of consciousness and thus establishes the necessary connection between meaning and consciousness. ;I also maintain that the two leading interpretations of Husserl's concept of the noema, the traditional interpretation of Aron Gurwitsch and the more recent interpretation of Dagfinn Follesdal, are unsatisfactory because each ignores some fundamental aspect of Husserl's concept of the noema. Furthermore, I argue that Follesdal's misleading interpretation of the noema as a Fregean Sinn renders the connection between meaning and consciousness contingent and has facilitated the view, advanced by some recent commentators, that Husserl was primarily a linguistically motivated philosopher. ;I argue that, since for Husserl, the connection between consciousness and meaning is necessary, rather than contingent, no theory of meaning can be developed without first doing a phenomenological study of consciousness itself and of its essential characteristic, intentionality. ;In addition to this, I defend Husserl from criticisms raised against him by Martin Heidegger, Johannes Daubert, and George E. Oberlander. These criticisms are based upon misinterpretations of Husserl. I also consider a possible criticism against Husserl which might be raised by an adherent of Hilary Putnam's position that "meanings are not in the head". If meanings were mind-dependent, Putnam argues, communication would be impossible. I argue that the impossibility of communication does not follow from Husserl's position that meanings are mind-dependent. I demonstrate how Husserl accounts for communication by explaining that a speaker's intentions are intuited by a hearer when that speaker uses expressions to communicate his intentions. ;To conclude, I maintain that, because of the insightfulness of Husserl's theories of intentionality and meaning, it is imperative that phenomenologists go beyond the mistakes of the past and work to formulate an interpretation more faithful to Husserl's intentions

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marks a period of transition between the vitalistic ontology that had dominated Renaissance natural philosophy and the Early Modern mechanistic paradigm endorsed by, among others, the Cartesians and Newtonians. This paper will focus on how the tensions between vitalism and mechanism played themselves out in the context of sixteenth and seventeenth century chemistry and chemical philosophy, particularly in the works of Paracelsus, Jan Baptista Van Helmont, Robert Fludd, and Robert Boyle. Rather than argue that these natural philosophers each embraced either fully vitalistic or fully mechanistic ontologies, I hope to demonstrate that these thinkers adhered to complicated and nuanced ontologies that cannot be described in either purely vitalistic or purely mechanistic terms. A central feature of my argument is the claim that a corpuscularian theory of matter does not entail a strictly mechanistic and reductionistic account of chemical properties. I also argue that what marks the shift from pre-modern vitalistic chemical philosophy to the modern chemical philosophy that marked the Chemical Revolution is not the victory of mechanism and reductionism in chemistry but, rather, the shift to a physicalistic and naturalistic account of chemical properties and vital spirits