L’Ontologie des Relations: Relations matérielles, formelles, transcendantales

• Richard Gaskin (Liverpool) & Daniel Hill (Liverpool)
  "Neutral Relations"

On one traditional view, relations hold of objects in an essentially directional way, ordering the relevant relata. We call this view ‘directionalism’. Kit Fine has suggested that this approach is subject to significant metaphysical difficulties, sufficient to motivate seeking an alternative account. He considers two such alternative treatments of relations, which he labels ‘positionalism’ and ‘anti-positionalism’. Of these he endorses the latter. We argue that anti-positionalism is open to decisive objections, and that accordingly directionalism (which turns out not to differ significantly from positionalism) should not be so readily set aside. We conclude with some remarks about the wider implication of this debate.

• Pierre Livet (Ceperc, Aix-en-Provence):
  "Are domain neutrality and stationarity of explicitation sufficient criteria for characterizing formal relations and distinguishing them from transcendental ones?"

The dominant criterion for a relation to be characterized as formal seems now to be that the relation is domain neutral, or possibly that it is invariant between differently structured ontologies, which can themselves be neutral between difference empirical domains. The usual criterion for transcendental relations was that there were necessitated by the essence of their relata (there were internal relations by metaphysical necessity, or, in the Husserlian framework, by transcendental subjective necessity ). If there are domaine neutral, they do not change the ontological structure of the domains. A relation that simply makes explicit the ontology of a domain has a similar property. In order to avoid possible infinite regress - raised by the addition of formal relations to the previous entities of the domain, and iterative reification of relations- we can require a kind of fix point property for this introduction: the combination of the making explicit relation and the entities that it makes explicit is itself stationary - no ontological inflation. Is the stationarity of explicitation a sufficient criterion for a formal relation? Stationarity of explicitation between domains seems a better criterion for formal relations, and the same stationarity for a fundamental ontology (often itself considered as "formal ontology") could be a requirement for transcendental relations.

• Isabelle Pariente-Butterlin (Ceperc, Aix-en-Provence)
  "Ethics from a relational point of view"

I do agree with the idea that a meta-ethical perspective is ethically neutral and I concieve of it as an attempt to classify the different ethical positions. I will develop an aspect of this attempt. In this regard, meta-ethics is linked to the analysis of the relation whose relata are on the first hand, the situation in which the action takes place and on the other hand, the decision taken in this particular situation. The question I will ask is the following : what is the kind of relation whose relata are the situation and the action ? I will suggest the following hypothesis : the difference between the particularist conception of ethics and the universalist one is that the relation both of them conceive between the situation and the action is not the same. In the first one, the relation is conveived as a material one, while in the second case, the relation is conceived of as a formal one. It follows of this distinction that ethical dilemmas, such as the trolley problem, do not seem to me relevant or meaningful from a meta-ethical point of view, for in fact they do compare relations that are ontologically different, for one is a material relation, and the other is a formal one. In this case, an ethical conclusion would have been reached from an ethically neutral and meta-ethical claim.

• Muriel Cahen (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris)
  "Formal and material grounds of temporal relations"

Temporal relations face a dilemma : either they are internal, and then they are grounded, but might be unreal. Either they are external, and then real and contingent, but may seem to be arbitrary. In order to ground temporal relations, I will focus on a kind of temporal relations that seem free from variability : the ones that hold within four-dimensional objects.

I will argue that it is possible to ground them, as all external temporal relations, by analyzing them as the indirect result of a metarelation holding between two direct internal relations between events.

I shall then examine the kind of relation thus involved. While holding that direct relations are material, I will argue that their metarelation cannot be merely material. I will analyse the formal aspect of metarelations involved in temporal relations, and I will show how this formal aspect preserves the externality of temporal relations, while grounding them in internal direct material relations between events. 

• Peter Simons (Dublin)
  "Space, Time and Cause: the Role of Relations"

• François Clémentz (Ceperc, Aix-en-Provence)
  "Of several (more or less) related distinctions between relations"

Since Plato, relations have had remarkably few genuine friends among metaphysicians. With a limited number of (admittedly major) exceptions - Scotus, Mediavilla, Meinong, Peirce, Russell, maybe Armstrong -, most philosophers would either claim that they reduce to monadic properties, or just bluntly deny that they exist all, or at any rate refuse to recognize them as fundamental entities. A typical expression of this view, today, is that true relational truthbearers don’t require the existence of genuinely relational truthmakers.

Yet, many authors would also agree that there are, in fact, different sorts of relations and that the question whether such or such relation R a,b should be granted at least some degree of reality actually depends on which kind of relations it belongs to. Of particular importance, in this respect, is the highly ambiguous Bradley-Russell internal/external distinction. Other relevant distinctions in the vicinity are the Medieval distinction between « categorical » and « transcendental » relations (and, among the former, Scotus’ distinction between « intrinsically » and « extrinsically advenient » relatives), as well as that between « formal / material » relations, or « topic-neutral/ full-blooded » relations, anf so forth.

Taking as a starting-point Kevin Mulligan’s suggestion that we should borrow from the vocabulary of contemporary moral philosophy and distinguish somehow between « thin » and « thick » relational concepts, my paper will attempt to explore the various relationships between these (sub)categories of relations. Incidentally, I shall dispute Mulligan’s view according to which « thick » relational predications have « thin » relations as their truthmakers.

• Luc Schneider (IFOMIS, Saarbrücken)
  "Whatever binds the world’s innermost core together"

There is a special class of basic ties that articulate a particular ontological framework or metaphysic and define its basic categories. These ties are often called "transcendental relations" and can be said to be "formal" in the specific sense of constituting the form of reality as opposed to its matter, i.e. the items of the categories envisaged by the respective metaphysic. The following is a non-exhaustive list of ties that have been considered to be transcendantal relations: instantiation (of universals by particulars), exemplification (of property universals by particular substances), inherence (of moments or tropes in substances), participation (of continuants in occurrents), topological connection (between spatial objects and/or spatial regions), causality (between events and/or between substances), and so on.

Of course, the set of transcendental ties varies from metaphysic to metaphysic. Thus the notion of a transcendental tie has to be clarified independently of any metaphysical framework and of its constitutive parochial assumptions or ontological commitments. I will no more than sketch an attempt at such a formal-ontological account by providing a preliminary classification of transcendental relations which relies to some extent on the notion of truthmaking. Concomitantly I will distinguish the notion of "formal relation" as adopted with respect to transcendental relations from other usages of this ambiguous expression. Moreover I will discuss the issue whether transcendental relations are repeatable or not and argue for adopting transcendental relations both as repeatables (types) and non-repeatables (instances). Finally I will defend the stance that we actually need (at least) two notions of instances of transcendental relations, which to some degree are akin to the traditional concepts of states of affairs and events.

• Javier Cumpa (Complutense, Madrid):
  "A Transcendental “In”: The Molecular Theory of Exemplification"

In this talk, I wish to advocate a species of ontological theory on so-called relation of exemplification that, by opposition to a number of contemporary Aristotelian substance ontologies, could be called transcendental, and in contrast with some recent logical atomistic versions of fact ontology, molecular. One may call this theory, transcendental, because it is defended that in it, since the fundamental bearer of categories are not particulars, but facts, the relation of exemplification is not regarded as between particulars and universals, but as between facts and entities of any empirical categories. Accordingly, an ontological reconstruction of The Principle of Exemplification taking facts to be the fundamental bearers of categories will be accomplished via the defense of six Principles of Categorial Invariance.

This theory, on the other hand, is said to be molecular, for the reason that the ontological residuum of analysis of the relation of exemplification at which this theory arrives is, as a consequence of the previous stage, not a relation between particulars and universals of atomic facts, but the connective & “in” a certain kind of subatomic fact of the molecular sort. This connective, it will be particularly argued for, is that by which facts can be said to be unified or belonging to the category of fact. In order to complete this analysis, three dimensions of the exemplification related to three sorts of fact will be distinguished.