Metaphysics...

by Maria Odete Madeira

The term metaphysics (ta meta ta physika) refers to the branch of philosophy that studies the first causes, principles and origins of all things. Causes, determinations, reasons and respective foundations are approached within metaphysics. 

As a science of the first principles and the first causes of all existing things, metaphysics is an archeology (arche). As science of the being as being it is ontology.

Metaphysics is irreducibly a philosophical concept about the first causes, principles and origins of all existing things, one must stress that we are not addressing anything that is outside the Cosmos/Order. Indeed, every physical object is also a metaphysical object, in its connection with its origin and foundation.

Whenever a cosmologist is talking about the first causes and the first principles of the Cosmos/Order, inquiring about the nature of the laws of physics, or upon the foundations of physics he/she is in a metaphysical inquiry, metaphysics plays an important part in today's cosmology, a fact that is undeniable and widely known throughout the scientific community. When one does research about the foundations of science one is also within a metaphysical context of discourse.

Defining Knowledge - About Intentionality

by Maria Odete Madeira

Aristotle introduced the concept of intentionality, when he worked in the problem "relation/knowing", having concluded that the mode of reference of a particular individual's idea to the object constituted the intentionality of the individual's idea.

The medieval scholastics returned to the concept proposing, for it, the expression "intendere arcum in" (the act of pointing an arrow towards something). Intentionality, in the philosophical sense of the term, simply means an aboutness, that should be interpreted as a directedness towards something.

The mechanism of intentionality applies to any entity that may be considered as an agent dispositionally gifted of a strategically operative internal structure. The origins of life can be traced to the origins of agency, the biological activity possesses, foundationally, in its adaptive nature an intentional drive, as the organism actively addresses (is directed towards) the environment and its own survival.

The self-replicating macromolecules, the thermostats, the amoebas, the mice, the bats, people and, even, chess playing computers are intentional systems (Dennett). In a more general sense any complex adaptive system is an intentional system (Holland; Gell-Mann; Damásio).

All living organisms, both those that are made up of a single cell, as well as those that are made up of billions of cells are systematically formed by spatialized intentional structures, temporally permanent, strategically committed to their survival, limited by borders, in permanent interface with the environment, depending, the individuality of each organism, upon the existence of that border.

A living organism such as an amoeba, being alive, it is strongly committed to keep on living. Being a creature with no brain, certainly it is not aware of the intentions of its organism in the same way that an organism with a brain may know its organism's intentions, nonetheless, the tiny creature exhibits in a very dynamic and effective form of intentionality in the way it is able to maintain the chemical profile of its internal milieu, while, around it, in the external environment, everything changes quickly. As Lewontin stressed, all living organisms have the ability to act in function of time and of regulating biological rates which, in mathematical discourse, is equivalent to stating that they also make integral and differential calculations.

Defining Knowledge II

by Maria Odete Madeira

We can talk about the knowledge as an existent, in itself and by itself, trying to define it, as such, or we can talk about the knowledge, from its production or its creation.Any production of knowledge is supported by an organizing activity that acts intentionally according to rules and whose objective is the resolution of problems and its own replication. The discovery of the double helix, by Watson and Crick, allowed one to apply, to the notion of living organization, the cybernetic scheme of a machine governed by an informational program, inscribed in the structure of the molecules of DNA, that organizes and runs all the cellular activity. In this way, a living organization can be signaled and referred to as a self-cognitive, self-organizing and self-replicating agent that is capable, through exchanges with the environment, of concentrating in itself the flows of order that prevent its disaggregation. "Being, doing and knowing are inseparable" (Morin).The access to knowledge, as well as any attempt of definition, can only be made, through the activity of the organizations, of the agents, of the beings or entities, or of the subjects, this, if we wish to have definitions of knowledge disambiguated, plausible and empirically verifiable.

Defining Knowledge

by Maria Odete Madeira

If one makes the assumption that all living systems are cognitive systems, then all the living processes, as such, are cognitive processes (Maturana and Varela), with empirical evidence in the cellular organization (Morin).The value attributed to cognition imposes that one should know something about the term cognition, itself, whose Latin root is cognitio (cognoscere), and whose Greek root is gignwskw and gnwsiz, and in Sanskrit is jnana with the (co)meaning of conjoint captation and comprehension. The Indo-European common trunk allows the relation between the term gnwsiz and the term genesiz, which allows, equally, the signaling and codification, in the definition of the term cognition, of a constitutive genetic sense that attributes to it a replicative value. In this way, each cognitive act envisions its own replication.In this sense, it is pertinent and consistent the statement that the knowledge is a presence or existence (ousia, dasein) that proposes and exposes something or some thing (Heidegger), thus understood, the knowledge is aletheia (entbergung, to come to presence).