Reality can be studied at different levels, so forms of “levelism” have often been advocated in the past.[^1] In the 1970s, levelism nicely dovetailed with the computational turn and became a standard approach both in science and in philoso…In this paper, I agree with Heil and Schaffer that ontological levelism is probably untenable. However, I shall also argue that epistemological levelism should be retained as a fundamental and indispensable method of conceptual analysis, if…Floridi, L. (2004b). The informational approach to structural realism. final draft available as IEG—Research Report 22.11.04, http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/floridi/pdf/latmoa.pdf.
Floridi, L. (2004c). On the logical unsolvability of the gett…
John Heil
philosopher · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Heil appears in the course readings as a key interlocutor in debates over ontological levelism—the claim that reality divides neatly into hierarchical levels of organization. He's cited alongside Schaffer as someone whose critiques of strict levelism have shaped contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics, pushing theorists to distinguish between ontological and epistemological forms of analysis. His work matters here because it unsettles the computational paradigm's tendency to model complex systems as cleanly stratified, forcing the course to think more carefully about how AI and cybernetic systems actually relate to their physical substrates and conceptual frameworks.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Jonathan Schaffer 2Immanuel Kant 1Allen Newell 1Daniel Dennett 1David Marr 1Herbert Simon 1Hilary Putnam 1John Foster 1Mihajlo Mesarovic 1Ned Block 1Paul Oppenheim 1William Wimsatt 1Brian Flinn 1Charles Antony Richard Hoare 1Colin L. Foster 1Friedrich Nietzsche 1Ian Hayes 1Jeff W. Sanders 1Jeroen van den Hoven 1Jifeng He 1John Weckert 1Luciano Floridi 1Massimo Negrotti 1Murray Gell-Mann 1Rex Welshon 1Steven D. Hales 1