This paper aims at contributing to such a development by illustrating the potential and the results of an experimental framework for the investigation of combat with bronze weaponry (swords in this paper), which offers a viable compromise between
actualism and variable control.
mostly unstated ontological
actualism. Taken together the historical
The very long term (what philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, whose thinking and enthusiastic reception are among the symptoms of prehistoric historicity today, calls "ancestrality") (3) is the product of Darwinism and of the nineteenth-century geological school known as
actualism. It is a supposedly nonmetaphysical time, devoid of beginning and end; it's presentism at a geological scale.
The present proposal has some similarities with
actualism, defended by Jackson and Pargetter ("Oughts, Options, and
Actualism").
But as Regina Brown and I argued in "The social value of candidate HIV cures:
actualism versus possibilism," published in 2016 in the Journal of Medical Ethics, these benefits are at best incompletely realized and often poorly distributed.
One of the arguments that motivates
actualism is a challenge to the principle of agglomeration over conjunction--the principle according to which if you ought to run and you ought to jump, then you ought to run and jump.
Chapter 1, "Philosophy and Revolution," examines Vincenzo Cuoco's concept of the "passive [read: failed Neapolitan] revolution," Vincenzo Gioberti's Catholic philosophy, Gentile's "
Actualism," the reception of Hegel in Italy, and the concept of "Renaissance shame" first broached in the Introduction as intellectuals of the Risorgimento disparaging the Renaissance as merely a cultural movement obsessed with literary form "to the detriment of the patria" (p.
Those who believe that all things are causally determined (by antecedent events and the causal laws connecting the past to the present) may believe that they are committed to
actualism about capacities--that is, to the view that nothing besides the actual was ever possible.
The topics are a historical overview; model skepticism and modal expressivism; modalism; modal realism; ersatzism; model fictionalism and modal agnosticism; the new modal
actualism; necessities, necessary existents, and their bounds.
He argues that his account offers advantages over both mono-dimensional
actualism and wellbeing consequentialism because of the introduction of three separate moral dimensions: individual wellbeing, equality and risk.
If so, the church would be seen in terms of
actualism rather than in terms of essentialism.
Unfortunately, I won't have space to say anything about Rayo's epistemology of mathematics (Chapter 4) or his favorite version of
actualism (Chapter 6), despite their intrinsic interest.