Gabriel Donoso Umaña

Can Gilles Deleuze be read as a naturalist philosopher within analytic philosophy of science? This position has recently been defended by Manuel DeLanda. In order to examine it critically, I first delimit a minimalist conception of ontological naturalism, understood as a broad commitment to the ontology inherited from our best scientific theories and to criteria of intersubjective evaluability. I then reconstruct, following DeLanda, the Deleuzian notions of multiplicity, virtuality, event, and individuation, showing that they can be understood as theoretical resources for thinking real dynamic processes. On this reading, Deleuzian ontology leads to a processual and anti-essentialist realism sensitive to scientific modelling. However, this reading depends on a selective reconstruction which is philosophically fertile but exegetically problematic, and whose explanatory yield diminishes where scientific mediation becomes more tenuous. I conclude by arguing that Deleuze can be accepted as a sui generis ontological naturalist, but that this is insufficient to make his philosophy of science especially useful when set against clearer, more revisable, and more fully integrated analytic naturalist alternatives within contemporary scientific practice. [Abstract prepared specifically for PhilPapers]

Ecosystems are routinely evaluated in terms of degradation, resilience, recovery, and restoration success, yet the conceptual status of ecosystemic health remains unresolved. This paper examines whether health can be ontologically attributed to ecosystems. We first characterise ecosystems as complex biological systems whose organisation depends not merely on the presence of organisms, but on structured networks of trophic, mutualistic, symbiotic, competitive, and biogeochemical interactions. We then adopt an ecological account of health according to which health is understood as the capacity to endure and adapt to environmental perturbations. Against this background, we ask whether ecosystems possess the forms of regulation required for health in the strict biological sense. Our conclusion is qualified. Although ecosystems exhibit adaptive capacities associated with their complex organisation, current evidence does not warrant attributing to them the specialised biological regulation required for organismic health in the strict sense. Even so, the concept is not merely decorative, as it offers a theoretically disciplined and empirically tractable framework for ecological restoration by shifting attention from species counts alone to the recovery of interactional organisation, functional relations, and adaptive capacity under disturbance.

I maintain that philosophy of science regains its public legitimacy when it connects its internal progress with effective forms of impact. To that end, I first reconstruct the genealogy of its institutional retreat in the twentieth century and its subsequent re-emergence as a socially engaged practice. I then integrate recent evidence on the actual pathways of academic influence to show that philosophical impact is primarily relational rather than bibliometric. Against that background, I argue that the most fertile internal metric for assessing philosophical progress is an increase in structural understanding: the capacity to articulate maps of dependence among concepts, phenomena, and practices that enable epistemic co-ordination and support reliable decision-making. Finally, I propose a professional ethics for the contemporary philosopher of science built around four operational principles—epistemic integrity, horizontal collaboration, social responsibility, and institutional transparency—each accompanied by indicators and evaluative metrics beyond citation counts. The result is a normative framework that offers institutional guidance for measuring and demanding impact.

This thesis investigates whether acids can be regarded as a natural kind, critically assessing Pieter Thyssen’s microessentialist proposal—which identifies acidity with the presence of an accessible LUMO orbital—and advancing the Homeostatic Property Cluster Theory (HPC theory) as an alternative. It situates the discussion within the broader debate between essentialism and conventionalism in the philosophy of chemistry, emphasizing microessentialism’s limitations in addressing multiple realization cases and the context dependence of reactivity. The methodology involves conceptual analysis, critical literature review, and a comparative study of chemical theories. Findings indicate that the LUMO, rather than being an invariant empirical microstructure, is a theoretical representation dependent on specific models, undermining its role as a defining essence. In contrast, HPC theory accounts for acids as clusters of co-occurring properties causally sustained by mechanisms such as proton dissociation or electronic vacancy, without requiring structural uniformity. The study concludes that acids qualify as natural kinds in a weak realist, pluralist, and accommodationist sense, grounded in scientific practice and justified by their explanatory and inferential success, thereby preserving objectivity without reducing chemistry to microphysics.

“Assemblage theory” is the name given to the philosophical proposal of the philosopher Manuel DeLanda, one of the less explored strands within the realist turn in twenty-first-century philosophy. His proposal offers conceptual clarification and enrichment for undertaking, with due depth, the ontological examination of the real, providing a powerful ontology for use in the study of the social as well as of the entities of the sciences in a generic sense, insofar as it does not undermine the autonomy of entities while nonetheless not denying their relations with others, taking as its conceptual axis the Deleuzian notion of assemblage. DeLanda’s work contributes to blurring the oft-invoked division between analytic and Continental philosophy, seeking to generate an encounter between scientists and philosophers and defending a realist and materialist philosophy on the basis of sources traditionally associated with postmodernity. The present paper undertakes a survey of its most general aspects.

This chapter examines whether teleological vocabulary can retain scientific legitimacy in biology without positing intentional purposes or sui generis properties. From a naturalistic standpoint, I defend a modest conception of teleology as the organisational directionality of complex physical systems far from equilibrium towards states of viability, where such directionality is statistically robust and counterfactually stable. To develop this claim, I connect autopoiesis and the organisational closure of constraints with teleodynamics, organic memory, the thermodynamics of self-replication, and selected orientors of ecosystem development. I argue that these resources allow biological ends to be understood as patterns of organisation, dissipation, and response that channel system dynamics towards continued viability. This naturalisation preserves the explanatory value of teleological language in biology and ecology without introducing any additional finalistic ontology; however, it does not by itself ground a strong form of biological normativity. [Abstract prepared specifically for PhilPapers]

Elemer Nemesszeghy, S. J. (1925-2007), a Hungarian philosopher living in Chile between 1956 and 1971, taught Mathematical logic for fifteen years in a country that lacked a local tradition in the field. Despite his contributions, his figure has been omitted by both the historiography of logic and Chilean intellectual history. This article seeks to reconstruct Nemesszeghy’s philosophical and logical trajectory and to characterize his work from a historical-philosophical point of view. To this end, it analyzes his intellectual formation within the framework of the Central European neo-scholastic tradition, his links with the Lwów–Warsaw school and the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie of Louvain, and his institutional contributions to the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. The article examines in detail his academic production, both solo and co-authored. From these texts, the technical and philosophical character of his production, its critical reception and its theoretical limitations are evaluated. It is argued that, although his work was neither propositional nor original in a strong sense, it constitutes a significant contribution to logical education in Chile and an early example of local appropriation of Mathematical logic. Finally, the structural and historiographical reasons that explain the relative oblivion of his figure are discussed, placing his legacy in the broader framework of the intellectual history of the formal sciences in the country.