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…Hughes, P., & Brecht, G. (1976). Vicious circles and infinity: A panoply of paradoxes. London: Cape. Originally published: Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975.
Kant, I. (1998). Critique of pure reason repr. w. corr. (trans: Guyer, P., & Woo…
Paul Oppenheim
philosopher · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Paul Oppenheim appears here primarily through his work on hierarchical organization and "levelism"—the idea that complex systems can be understood by decomposing them into distinct ontological or analytical levels. His framework became foundational to computational and systems-theoretic approaches in the 1970s, enabling researchers to model everything from neural networks to social systems as nested hierarchies. In this seminar's context, Oppenheim's level-based thinking matters because it underwrites how AI systems and cybernetic architectures represent reality as decomposable and recursively tractable—a methodological move that shapes both the technical design of machine learning and philosophical questions about emergence and reduction.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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Allen Newell 2David Marr 2Hilary Putnam 2Allen W. Wood 1Dennis Macko 1George Brecht 1Grover Maxwell 1Herbert Feigl 1Immanuel Kant 1J. A. Scott Kelso 1Jancis Robinson 1Michael Scriven 1Mihajlo D. Mesarovic 1Patrick Hughes 1Paul Guyer 1Roberto Poli 1Ron McClamrock 1Thomas Nagel 1Yasuhiko Takahara 1Zenon W. Pylyshyn 1Daniel Dennett 1Herbert Simon 1John Foster 1John Heil 1Jonathan Schaffer 1Mihajlo Mesarovic 1Ned Block 1William Wimsatt 1