Ivan Mayerhofer

ABSTRACT The study of digital religion is currently in its fourth wave of research, focusing closely on the interrelation between users and digital religious technologies. In the fields of philosophy, cognitive science and cultural studies, looping effects, or the dynamic process of subject formation as a result of the development and internalisation of new categorisation schemes, have been investigated independently of the development of digital religious technologies. I bring these separate areas of investigation together to understand the way users are transformed by Buddhist meditation apps. By introducing the framework of a subject transformation matrix, I look closely at how meditation apps create value-laden conceptual spaces within which religious subjects are transformed through processes of self-care. Understanding this dynamic relation between users and digital technologies has deep implications for the development of digital religion studies, our understanding of religious subjectivities and the role of religious apps in public spaces.

This paper is concerned with the metaphysics of created repeatable objects, such as musical works and literary fictions. In section 2 we lay out what we take to be intuitive and plausible desiderata for any theory of created repeatable objects. In sections 3 and 4 we proceed with an extended disjunctive syllogism. Created repeatable objects are either concrete universals, concrete particulars, abstract universals, or abstract particulars. We show how accounts that take them to be either one of the latter three fail egregiously. Therefore, we must take them to be concrete universals. In section 5 we offer a brief account of the metaphysical nature of concrete universals and then show how concrete universals can account for the desiderata while avoiding the objections presented against alternative theories.

Este artículo trata el problema de los objetos creados que pueden ser repetidos, como las obras musicales y las literarias. En la sección 2 presentamos una serie de desiderata intuitivos que toda teoría debe satisfacer. En las secciones 3 y 4 presentamos un silogismo disyuntivo extendido. Los objetos en cuestión pueden ser o bien universales concretos, particulares concretos, universales abstractos o particulares abstractos. Mostramos cómo es que las teorías que consideran que son cualquiera de las tres últimas opciones fracasan. Por lo tanto, debemos entender a dichos objetos como universales concretos. En la sección 5 ofrecemos una teoría breve pero detallada de la naturaleza metafísica de los universales concretos para después mostrar cómo esta propuesta permite dar cuenta de los desiderata intuitivos a la vez que se evitan las objeciones presentadas en contra de teorías alternativas.

When we talk about creation, we use the progressive and verbs of creation as in ‘Mary is building a house’. The modal account of the progressive says that a sentence such as ‘Mary is building a house’ is true just in case Mary eventually builds a house in all worlds in which her house-building proceeds normally. Recently, the modal account has come under fire from those who claim that it over-generates modal entailments and those who think the progressive should be treated as a predicate of events. By properly situating the modal account within a contemporary semantic framework for natural language modals, I argue that it gives the best semantic treatment of the progressive.