Benjamin Christensen

In this essay, I argue for a poetics of truth locatable in the thinking of Heidegger and Schelling. Truth is taken to be an event; the poetics of truth then developed is offered as a way of realizing a rethinking of truth which takes a phenomenological point of departure. Truth, as an event, takes place; this taking place opens a space to take place in and the work of art is offered as an example of just that. The overall argument for a poetics of truth follows Schelling in his assertion that the highest purpose of science is to return to the ocean of poetry; this return, I argue, can be routed through Heidegger’s philosophy of dwelling.

In lieu of the sum-zero scenarios of either wholly individualist or holist depictions of social entities, some social ontologists and philosophers of social science have recently called for gradualist approaches able to account for variances in ontological reducibility between specific instances of social phenomena. The precise formal tools needed for this type of approach are, however, currently lacking. In this paper, I propose a new approach to social ontology that utilizes Integrated Information Theory (IIT) in order to provide a suitable formal language for gradualist descriptions and analyses of social entities. In line with the operational physicalism of IIT, social entities are stipulated as causally irreducible to their parts to the degree that differences are made by and to them over and above the differences made by and to their parts.