Javier Pérez Jara

Materialism has been the subject of extensive and rich controversies since Robert Boyle introduced the term for the first time in the 17th century. But what is materialism and what can it offer today? The term is usually defined as the worldview according to which everything real is material. Nevertheless, there is no philosophical consensus about whether the meaning of matter can be enlarged beyond the physical. As a consequence, materialism is often defined in stark exclusive and reductionist terms: whatever exists is either physical or ontologically reducible to it. This conception, if consistent, mutilates reality, excluding the ontological significance of political, economic, sociocultural, anthropological and psychological realities. Starting from a new history of materialism, the present book focuses on the central ontological and epistemological debates aroused by today’s leading materialist approaches, including some little known to an anglophone readership. The key concepts of matter, system, emergence, space and time, life, mind, and software are checked over and updated. Controversial issues such as the nature of mathematics and the place of reductionism are also discussed from different materialist approaches. As a result, materialism emerges as a powerful, indispensable scientifically-supported worldview with a surprising wealth of nuances and possibilities.

This paper starts briefly presenting the “ontological pillars” above which Gustavo Bueno’s philosophical materialism stands as a discontinous materialism. After this, I analyze some important philosophical problems related to the ontological idea of discontinuity, such as the classical problems about Diodorus Cronus’ Master Argument and the future contingents, the “relationship between the brain and the mind”, and the ontological structure of death. Finally, this paper analyzes the utility of offering a new tipology of the main types of ontological discontinuities that we can find in reality. Since Bueno’s philosophy holds the discontinous structure of matter, my paper defends the convenience of solving these problems in the future in order to expand the philosophical capacity of this worldview.

This book provides an up-to-date revision of materialism’s central tenets, its main varieties, and the place of materialistic philosophy vis a vis scientific knowledge. Materialism has been the subject of extensive and rich controversies since Robert Boyle introduced the term for the first time in the 17th century. But what is materialism and what can it offer today? The term is usually defined as the worldview according to which everything real is material. Nevertheless, there is no philosophical consensus about whether the meaning of matter can be enlarged beyond the physical. As a consequence, materialism is often defined in stark exclusive and reductionist terms: whatever exists is either physical or ontologically reducible to it. This conception, if consistent, mutilates reality, excluding the ontological significance of political, economic, sociocultural, anthropological and psychological realities. Starting from a new history of materialism, the present book focuses on the central ontological and epistemological debates aroused by today’s leading materialist approaches, including some little known to an anglophone readership. The key concepts of matter, system, emergence, space and time, life, mind, and software are checked over and updated. Controversial issues such as the nature of mathematics and the place of reductionism are also discussed from different materialist approaches. As a result, materialism emerges as a powerful, indispensable scientifically-supported worldview with a surprising wealth of nuances and possibilities.

Despite the central presence of materialism in the history of philosophy, there is no universal consensus on the meaning of the word “matter” nor of the doctrine of philosophical materialism. Dictionaries of philosophy often identify this philosophy with its most reductionist and even eliminative versions, in line with Robert Boyle’s seventeenth century coinage of the term. But when we take the concept back in time to Greek philosophers and forward onto our own times, we recognize more inclusive forms of materialism as well as complex interplays with non-materialist thought about the place of matter in reality, including Christian philosophy and German idealism. We define philosophical materialism in its most general way both positively (the identification of reality with matter understood as changeability and plurality) and negatively (the negation of disembodied living beings and hypostatized ideas). This inclusive approach to philosophical materialism offers a new light to illuminate a critical history of the concept of matter and materialism from Ancient Greece to the present that is also attentive to scientific developments. By following the most important connections and discontinuities among theoretical frameworks on the idea of matter, we present a general thread that offers a rich and plural, but highly cohesive, field of investigation. Finally, we propose building on rich non-reductionist materialist philosophies, such as Mario Bunge’s systemic materialism and Gustavo Bueno’s discontinuous materialism, to elaborate powerful theoretical alternatives to both physicalism and spiritualism.

The construct of the self is important in the domain of memory research. Recent work has shown that person memory is influenced by similarity of social targets to the self. The current experiments investigate self-similarity as defined by traits and political ideology to better understand how memory for social targets is organised. Across three experiments, participants formed positive or negative impressions based on each target’s picture, a trait-implying behavior (Experiments 1 & 2), and/or political ideology (conservative/liberal label in Experiment 2; political-ideological belief statements in Experiment 3) followed by a memory test. Results showed a self-similarity effect dependent on valence in Experiment 1, but not in Experiments 2 or 3 when participants processed ideological information associated with targets. These results suggest that self-similarity has an effect on memory for social targets, but that ideological information disrupts self-focused processing of others, suggesting that ideological information also has a powerful influence on what people remember about others (i.e. social targets).

This chapter has two main complementary goals. First, it analyzes the main ontological ideas of Gustavo Bueno’s discontinuous materialism in contrast with other philosophical systems. Second, it explores some of the main ontological questions and issues still open in this system of thought, while advancing some possible paths of resolution. In order to do this, I follow a double general definition of philosophical materialism. Positively, materialism, in general, names the branch of philosophical worldviews that identify being (i.e. the “ὅντος” of ontology) with matter, understood in its broadest sense as changeability and plurality (partes extra partes). Negatively, materialism denies the existence of disembodied living beings and hypostatized ideas. Within this general framework, I then locate the specific ontological characteristic of discontinuous materialism in the rejection of any attempt to hypostatize any element, property, state or relation of reality. Like the Medusa’s gaze, hypostasizing metaphysics turns parts of the complex interplay of continuities and discontinuities that constitutes reality into stone. I then conduct a comparison between discontinuous materialism and other philosophies, in particular Mario Bunge’s systemic materialism, physicalism, ontotheology, and speculative realism(s). This approach aims at opening new avenues for philosophical research for both metaphysics in general and materialist philosophy in particular.

Bertrand Russell es el último gran filósofo anglosajón del siglo XX. A través de una longeva trayectoria intelectual trató de ofrecer un verdadero mapamundi de la realidad en línea directa con los principales clásicos del pensamiento occidental y los saberes científicos de su tiempo. Sin embargo, la mayoría de estudios existentes acerca de su filosofía suelen realizarse, o bien centrándose en un único periodo, aspecto o dimensión, por lo que resultan generalmente cojos, incompletos o distorsionados, o bien desde una supuesta perspectiva neutral e imparcial, por lo que renuncian a tomar consideraciones filosóficas sobre su figura y legado en nuestro presente. La amplitud del presente libro se ajusta a la extensión y pluralidad de los temas analizados, que oscilan desde las cuestiones clásicas sobre la naturaleza y límites del conocimiento humano, la diferencia entre la ciencia y la filosofía, o la naturaleza de la causalidad, el tiempo y la materia, al estudio de temas antropológicos como los que giran en torno a las religiones y lo sobrenatural, la ética y la política, la guerra, la sexualidad o la liberación de la mujer.

This discussion concerns whether philosophical materialism is false or not. The exchange between Graham Harman and Javier Pérez-Jara goes to the core of the present book: what is materialism, how many varieties are there, and what use are they today? While Harman identifies materialism with reductionism, Pérez-Jara offers a broader definition that includes non-reductionist materialisms. It might seem to be just as a matter of differing definitions. And yet, each approach gives rise to a whole different way of reconstructing the history of philosophy as well as of deciding which are the current available options in metaphysics.

This discussion focuses on whether Mario Bunge’s emergent materialism implies continuism or not. Íñigo Ongay defends that Bunge’s emergent materialism implies continuism. In his response, Javier Pérez-Jara argues that Bunge’s emergent materialism explicitly assumes structural ontological and epistemological discontinuities in the universe. The question is more than a Scholastic one, concerning only a particular system of philosophy, however relevant for current philosophical materialism. Rather, what is at stake is the ability of non-reductionist ontologies to explain (non-miraculous) novelty and plurality.