AN ESSAY ON THE

FOUNDATIONS OF ONTOLOGY
TABLE OF CONTENTS

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INTRODUCTION: ON THE ONTOLOGICAL TURN
I - Transcendental, Critical, Scientific Realism
II - The Two Meanings of the Ontological Turn
III - Representation and its Discontents
IV - The Cunning of Representation: An Outline

- PART I: THE NEW MATERIALISMS CHAPTER I - The New Materialisms: On Parmenidean and
Heraclitean Ontologies
1.1. The Heraclitean Empiricists -Life Against the Concept
1.2. Inorganic Thanatos or the Futility of the Will
1.3. The Normative Kernel of Practicism
1.4. The Parmenidean Rationalists - Dialectics Against Experience
1.5. The First Platonic Dyad - Truth and Doxa; Philosophy and Sophistry
1.6. The Second Platonic Dyad - the Intelligible and the Sensible; Reality and
Appearance
1.7. The Hegelian Axis - Logic as Metaphysics
1.8. The Matheme's Subtractive Power
1.9. Towards a Rationalist Materialism

CHAPTER II - PUNCTURING THE CIRCLE OF CORRELATION

2.1.
2.2.
2.3.
2.4.
2.5.
2.6.

Absolutism, Subjectalism, Correlationism and the Circle of Correlation

Knowing and Thinking
Facticity and Ignorance
The Absolutization of Facticity - Factiality and Finitude
Stove's Gem - Brassier, Concepts and Objects
The Kenotype's Opacity: On the Ontologization of Syntax

- PART II: A PRELUDE TO EPISTEMOLOGY CHAPTER III - A PROMETHEAN KANT

3.1. Philosophical and Scientific Modernity
3.2. A Promethean Kant - Sellars Against Heidegger
3.3. The Myth of the Given

CHAPTER IV - A THOUGHT DISINCARNATE

4.1. What Does it Mean to Think?

4.2. Thinking, Representational Systems, Propositional Content
4.3. Three Levels of Processing - Accordance to Rules, Following Norms, Obeying
Rules
4.4. The Non-Monotonicity of Reason
4.5. The Priority of the Sentential
4.6. Sensibility and Perception, Sentience and Sapience
4.7. Looks-Talk and Seeing-Talk vs. Is-talk / Seeming and Being

CHAPTER V - ANTI-PLATO: DEFLATING THE ABSTRACT

WORLD
5.1.
5.2.
5.3.
5.4.
5.5.

The Empiricist Kernel of Correlationism

Shaving Plato's Beard - Signification and Abstract Entities
What is a Category?
Truth, Observation, Modality and the Refutation of Skepticism
A Short Plea for Logocentrism

- PART III: A PRELUDE TO METAPHYSICS CHAPTER VI - FUNCTION EMBODIED: PICTURING AND

CONVERGENCE REALISM
6.1.
6.2.
6.3.
6.4.

The Flat Voice - The Dispensability of Attributes

Picturing as Map-Making: Orientation, Coordination, Representation
Pictorial Adequacy: Truth Across Conceptual Structures
Convergence Realism - Towards a Stereoscopic View of Man in the World

CHAPTER VII - THE REALITY OF APPEARANCES

7.1.
7.2.
7.3.
7.4.
7.5.

The Absoluteness of the Scientific Image

Granularity and Homogeneity: Form and Content
Sensations in the Manifest Framework and the Limits of Phenomenology
Events and Processes - An Ontological Sketch
Sensing and Thought as Part of the Physical World