"Byron Kaldis' Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences is a triumph. The entries are c... more "Byron Kaldis' Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences is a triumph. The entries are consistently good, the coverage is amazing, and he has managed to involve the whole scholarly community in this field. It shows off the field very well, and will be a magnificent resource for students and others." Stephen Turner, USF, USA
“Like all good works of reference this Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences is not to be treated passively: it provides clear and sometimes controversial material for constructive confrontation. It is a rich resource for critical engagement. The Encyclopedia conceived and edited by Byron Kaldis is a work of impressive scope and I am delighted to have it on my bookshelf.”
David Bloor, Edinburgh, UK
"Project Description:
This encyclopedia is purposefully interdisciplinary, the goal being to con... more "Project Description:
This encyclopedia is purposefully interdisciplinary, the goal being to convey a clear sense of how philosophy looks at the social sciences and thereby delineate a detailed picture of how exactly the two are interrelated. Though the theme of this relationship has had its own history and received some academic treatment in the past, there are now fast-developing novel areas at the interface between philosophy and certain modern areas of social-scientific research spawning out of AI and Cognitive Studies and their sub-fields that demand a totally new and rather more complex perspective. It is becoming increasingly apparent that both traditional philosophical branches (like philosophy of mind) as well as traditional social-scientific ones get linked up to each other via such developments in the area of cognition (c.f. evolutionary psychology and genetics) that have outmoded, old-fashioned, rigid divisions between the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, advances in social-scientific research, such as rational choice theory, statistical or stochastic models of decision-making, or mathematical modeling of action, have in turn impacted upon philosophy. The philosophical searchlight has always been turned on the sciences, but whereas the philosophy of the physical and biological sciences is a well-covered field in terms of textbooks, especially in recent years, the philosophical exploration of the social sciences has remained relatively patchy or partitioned into sub-fields of social sciences (e.g. philosophy of economics) without a unified and detailed treatment like the one this encyclopedia proposes to provide."
Aristotle and Kant on contemplation, ethics and politics
Aristotle and Kant are usually considered to be the representatives of antiquity and modernity, r... more Aristotle and Kant are usually considered to be the representatives of antiquity and modernity, respectively, and especially of the two contrasting views on the human good and morality in the Western tradition. The difficulty is that there does not seem to be any way of reconciling Kantian ethics which is dominantly formal with the Aristotelian doctrine that complete happiness involves contemplation of what is eternal and non-contingent whereas the domain of ethics and politics is the science of the contingent. It is possible, however, to advance towards a rapprochement of the two philosophers by looking at two areas, that of the role of contemplation and that of the connection between ethics and politics. This paper is divided into two parts focusing on these two areas and argues for a Kantian extension of what the Aristotelian contemplating person can accomplish in ethics and politics.
100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy, 2011
Leibniz’s Arguments for the existence of petites perceptions in his Nouveaux essais sur l’entende... more Leibniz’s Arguments for the existence of petites perceptions in his Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (1704
Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences
""Byron Kaldis' Encyclopedia of Philosophy and... more ""Byron Kaldis' Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences is a triumph. The entries are consistently good, the coverage is amazing, and he has managed to involve the whole scholarly community in this field. It shows off the field very well, and will be a magnificent resource for students and others." Stephen Turner, USF, USA “Like all good works of reference this Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences is not to be treated passively: it provides clear and sometimes controversial material for constructive confrontation. It is a rich resource for critical engagement. The Encyclopedia conceived and edited by Byron Kaldis is a work of impressive scope and I am delighted to have it on my bookshelf.” David Bloor, Edinburgh, UK "
The thesis pursued in this dissertation raises and examines a specific philosophical problem, ess... more The thesis pursued in this dissertation raises and examines a specific philosophical problem, essential to the study of the ontology of the social world. This problem has its origin in the question: 'how is is possible that the social world is constituted as a. unified totality or complex whole?'. It is argued that the defining feature of a viable theory of social holism is that it is able to posit this metaphysical kind of problem. In this sense, the holist discourse that provides the terms for expressing the meaningfulness of this problem or the conditions of its legitimacy is, equivalently, an attempt to answer it, giving the form of the social world as an ontological domain. Thus this thesis discloses what is here proposed as the formal ontology of social reality and investigates the cluster of issues relevant to this. The study consists of three related stages (Parts). Part One spells out the formal mode of ontological inquiring and lays down the metatheoretical validity of holism. On the one hand, the principal idea is that the introduction of certain principles of relationality and of the "moment/whole" problematic establishes the basis of a non-extensional constitution of the social world; it is essential that individuals have the formal character of "entelechial Leibnizian monads" being in conceptual communication. On the other hand, the status of holist categories and commitments involves a transcendental mode of reasoning on the metaphysics of the social world. Part Two examines the three necessary moments of the conceptual communication in virtue of which individuals are constituted as essentially social persons. The first concerns the cluster of sociocultural concepts, the second the possibility of meaningful linguistic expression and the third the intentionality of thought. It is argued that by means of this notion of entelechial social personhood the categories of the 'individual' and the 'social' are integrated so that: a 'fact' about the individual's mind is not something enclosed within it, and the 'social' is not an empirically given environment 'containing' or causally influencing the mind. Part Three completes this holist non-extensional/non-atomic ontology by incorporating the semantics of the language of events characterizing the complex form of social states of affairs. Social events are shown to be complex wholes irreducible to their subjects. Furthermore, the temporal identity of the social world in the course of historical change depends on the reality of events; the interconnection of social events instantiates an intensional nexus of relations between ineliminable social properties.
O problema da forma nas ciências. Ernst Cassirer e as analogias metodológicas nas ciências da cul... more O problema da forma nas ciências. Ernst Cassirer e as analogias metodológicas nas ciências da cultura e na biologia
Must the concept of the State be divided? : political and ethical challenges
Resumo Este artigo analisa a medida em que algumas discussões recentes na teoria política e socia... more Resumo Este artigo analisa a medida em que algumas discussões recentes na teoria política e social têm sido bem sucedidas em fornecer discursos que legitimam a ruptura de fronteiras nacionais/estatais (internas e externas). Isto está claramente evidente na Europa de hoje, uma Europa mista de estados grandes e pequenos. Duas das mais publicamente disseminadas discussões incluem por um lado o debate tão familiar sobre a globalização e por outro a própria teoria política, onde os temas são ou controvérsias sobre o nacionalismo e autodeterminação, ou o multiculturalismo, os direitos de grupos, a chamada política da diferença e a noção emergente da sociedade civil e associações civis.
During the last couple of decades, a number of public policy and university initiatives triggered... more During the last couple of decades, a number of public policy and university initiatives triggered a drastic increase in neuroscientific research. The advances in neuroscience increased public awareness and gave rise to a “brain turn” for many disciplines in the humanities. In turn, traditional thematic areas are being approached through a more brain-oriented perspective, while new collaborations across traditionally non-neighbouring disciplines are being established. For instance, the debate about knowledge acquisition has very recently taken a new form and researchers in fields as diverse as Cognitive Science, Neuroscience and Education have started to show interest in combining their efforts with an end of promoting a systematic account of improving current learning and educational practices. However, researches in brain sciences and education are still only tenuously interconnected. This special issue brings together papers highlighting the prospects and challenges of recent adva...
Uploads
Books by Byron Kaldis
“Like all good works of reference this Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences is not to be treated passively: it provides clear and sometimes controversial material for constructive confrontation. It is a rich resource for critical engagement. The Encyclopedia conceived and edited by Byron Kaldis is a work of impressive scope and I am delighted to have it on my bookshelf.”
David Bloor, Edinburgh, UK
This encyclopedia is purposefully interdisciplinary, the goal being to convey a clear sense of how philosophy looks at the social sciences and thereby delineate a detailed picture of how exactly the two are interrelated. Though the theme of this relationship has had its own history and received some academic treatment in the past, there are now fast-developing novel areas at the interface between philosophy and certain modern areas of social-scientific research spawning out of AI and Cognitive Studies and their sub-fields that demand a totally new and rather more complex perspective. It is becoming increasingly apparent that both traditional philosophical branches (like philosophy of mind) as well as traditional social-scientific ones get linked up to each other via such developments in the area of cognition (c.f. evolutionary psychology and genetics) that have outmoded, old-fashioned, rigid divisions between the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, advances in social-scientific research, such as rational choice theory, statistical or stochastic models of decision-making, or mathematical modeling of action, have in turn impacted upon philosophy. The philosophical searchlight has always been turned on the sciences, but whereas the philosophy of the physical and biological sciences is a well-covered field in terms of textbooks, especially in recent years, the philosophical exploration of the social sciences has remained relatively patchy or partitioned into sub-fields of social sciences (e.g. philosophy of economics) without a unified and detailed treatment like the one this encyclopedia proposes to provide."
Papers by Byron Kaldis