In this text, Ian Hacking offers his reflections on the philosophical uses of history. The focus is the historical emergence of concepts and objects.

In this text, Ian Hacking offers his reflections on the philosophical uses of history. The focus is the historical emergence of concepts and objects.

In this history of materials, the authors link chemical science with chemical technology, challenging our current understandings of objects in the history of science and the distinction between scientific and technological objects. They further show that chemits' experimental production and understanding of materials changed over time, first in the decades around 1700 and then around 1830, when mundane materials became clearly distinguished from true chemical substances.

"A wide-ranging study of the 'way of ideas' and its metaphysics, culminating in a bold reinterpretation of Berkeley."

A historical-conceptual account of the different genres, technologies, modes of inscription, and innate powers of expression by which something becomes evident. In this book, Ronald Day offers a historical-conceptual account of how something becomes evident. Crossing philosophical ontology with documentary ontology, Day investigates the different genres, technologies, modes of inscription, and innate powers of expression by which something comes into presence and makes itself evident. He calls this philosophy of evidence documentarity, and it is through this theoretical lens that he examines documentary evidence (and documentation) within the tradition of Western philosophy, largely understood as representational in its epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, and politics. Day discusses the expression of beings or entities as evidence of what exists through a range of categories and modes, from Plato's notion that ideas are universal types expressed in evidential particulars to the representation of powerful particulars in social media and machine learning algorithms. He considers, among other topics, the contrast between positivist and anthropological documentation traditions; the ontological and epistemological importance of the documentary index; the nineteenth-century French novel's documentary realism and the avant-garde's critique of representation; performative literary genres; expression as a form of self evidence; and the “post-documentation” technologies of social media and machine learning, described as a posteriori, real-time technologies of documentation. Ultimately, the representational means are not only information and knowledge technologies but technologies of judgment, judging entities both descriptively and prescriptively.

What is musical ontology? Why should we as philosophers address it, if ever? These questions constitute the Ariadne’s thread running throughout this whole work. The number of papers, volumes and essays that have recently been dedicated to the topic of art and musical ontology is so vast that trying to get a grip on the debate seems like trying to find ones bearings without a compass. This book is a guide to help hapless readers find their way through this philosophical jungle. It is constructed on three levels: the presentation of the debate on musical ontology, a meta-ontological inquiry and a sort of meta-meta-ontological overview, in which both the ontological and the meta-ontological are examined. It does not contain any apology for musical ontology, nor any attempt to definitively get it off the hook. The approach is aporetic, in the spirit of an open investigation in which more questions than answers are posited. But this is the whole point. If this study manages to provide the readers with the necessary theoretical tools to answer these questions for themselves, it could be considered a success.