My doctoral investigation intends to clarify the philosophical concept of “neutral entity”. In particular, it aims to find a definition of neutral entities which is consistent with the main ontological and epistemological theses of neutral monism. For this purpose, the thesis undertakes a new method which marries analytic philosophy to history of philosophy (Friedman et al. 2010). The problem of defining neutral entities is analytically formulated under the name of “difficulty of neutrality”. To solve this problem, the investigation applies two main hypothesis and is divided into two parts. The first hypothesis is that (1) neutral entities feature three general properties: being “qualitative”, “subjectless” and “structural”. The second hypothesis is that (2) the movement of neutral monism must be enlarged to include a structural current of itself whose original works are some writings of the early Carnap. The first part of the thesis makes the hypotheses (1) and (2) appliable. The second part develops, gathers and interprets the consequences of their application. This way, my investigation obtains two main results: (I) neutral entities are epistemically elusive and gets to be knowable only according to their structural properties; (II) collections of neutral entities are formally identified with dual sets of lattice representation theorems.

Rappresentazione strutturale delle entità neutrali. Il monismo neutrale da un punto di vista analitico e storico-filosofico

Del Sordo, Caterina
2021

Abstract

My doctoral investigation intends to clarify the philosophical concept of “neutral entity”. In particular, it aims to find a definition of neutral entities which is consistent with the main ontological and epistemological theses of neutral monism. For this purpose, the thesis undertakes a new method which marries analytic philosophy to history of philosophy (Friedman et al. 2010). The problem of defining neutral entities is analytically formulated under the name of “difficulty of neutrality”. To solve this problem, the investigation applies two main hypothesis and is divided into two parts. The first hypothesis is that (1) neutral entities feature three general properties: being “qualitative”, “subjectless” and “structural”. The second hypothesis is that (2) the movement of neutral monism must be enlarged to include a structural current of itself whose original works are some writings of the early Carnap. The first part of the thesis makes the hypotheses (1) and (2) appliable. The second part develops, gathers and interprets the consequences of their application. This way, my investigation obtains two main results: (I) neutral entities are epistemically elusive and gets to be knowable only according to their structural properties; (II) collections of neutral entities are formally identified with dual sets of lattice representation theorems.
Structural Representation of Neutral Entities. Neutral Monism from an analytical and historico-philosophical point of view
2021
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11576/2682643
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