David Weissman

Cities are conspicuous among settlements because of their bulk and pace: Venice, Paris, or New York. Each is distinctive, but all share a social structure that mixes systems (families, businesses, and schools), their members, and a public regulator. Cities alter this structure in ways specific to themselves: orchestras play music too elaborate for a quartet; city densities promote collaborations unachievable in simpler towns. Cities, Real and Ideal avers with von Bertalanffy, Parsons, Simmel, and Wirth that a theory of social structure is empirically testable and confirmed. It proposes a version of social justice appropriate to this structure, thereby updating Marx’s claim that justice is realizable without the intervention of factors additional to society’s material conditions.

Categories for an Urban Ontology

Cities, Real and Ideal

Traces the history of mind-body dualism. Lost Souls examines the origins and consequences of the philosophic idea that mind and body are distinct. The author traces mind-body dualism from Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, and Proclus through Descartes and Kant to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Carnap, and Quine. Mind’s separation from body has dominated philosophic thinking for millennia, yet most mental activities are now explained in physical terms. What are the implications if mind is material and mortal? Considering both philosophic and scientific ideas about mind, David Weissman explores our options. Rejecting the claim that the character and existence of other things are an effect of the ways we think about or perceive them, he reexamines such topics as meaning and truth, human significance, self, and society. He argues that philosophers have the rare opportunity to renew inquiry by invoking the questions that once directed them: What are we? What is our place in the world? What concerns are appropriate to being here? David Weissman is Professor of Philosophy at City College of New York and the author of several books, including, most recently, A Social Ontology.

The Philosophic Origins of a Cultural Dilemma

Lost Souls

Moral and social philosophers often assume that humans beings are and ought to be autonomous. This tradition of individualism, or atomism, underlies many of our assumptions about ethics and law; it provides a legitimating framework for liberal democracy and free market capitalism. In this powerful book, David Weissman argues against atomistic ontologies, affirming instead that all of reality is social. Every particular is a system created by the reciprocal causal relations of its parts, he explains. Weissman formulates an original metaphysics of nature that remains true to what is known through the empirical sciences, and he applies his hypothesis to a range of topics in psychology, morals, sociology, and politics. The author contends that systems are sometimes mutually independent, but many systems, and human ones especially, are joined in higher order systems, such as families, friendships, businesses, and states, that are overlapping or nested. Weissman tests this schematic claim with empirical examples in chapters on persons, sociality, and value. He also considers how the scheme applies to particular issues related to deliberation, free speech, conflict, and ecology.

A Social Ontology

Meaning (significance) and nature are this book’s principal topics. They seem an odd couple, like raisins and numbers, though they elide when meanings of a global sort—ideologies and religions, for example—promote ontologies that subordinate nature. Setting one against the other makes reality contentious. It signifies workmates and a coal face to miners, gluons to physicists, prayer and redemption to priests. Are there many realities, or many perspectives on one? The answer I prefer is the comprehensive naturalism anticipated by Aristotle and Spinoza: "natura naturans, natura naturata." Nature naturing is an array of mutually conditioning material processes in spacetime. Each structure or event—storm clouds forming, nature natured—is self-differentiating, self-stabilizing, and sometimes self-disassembling; each alters or transforms a pre-existing state of affairs. This surmise anticipated discoveries and analyses to which neither thinker had access, though physics and biology confirm their hypothesis beyond reasonable doubt. Hence the question this book considers: Is reality divided:nature vrs. lived experience? Or is experience, with all its meanings and values, the complex expression of natural processes?

On Nature and Meaning

Spinoza’s Dream

This book shows how idealism is a consequence of the intuitionist method. Idealism develops from mental content inspected by mind, or as mind characterizing itself. Weissman declares that the idea of an independent world, of a nature whose character and existence are independent of mind, cannot be recovered until we repudiate the intuitionist method. This psycho-centric ontology has been pervasive in Western philosophy since Parmenides and Plato. Intuition and Ideality characterizes its varieties, dialectical cycles, and idealist consequences. What is required is a method that is speculative and testable--a method that makes speculation responsible by testability. Weissman characterizes such a hypothetical method, and he describes some of the categorical features that are discovered in the world as this alternative method is used.

Intuition and Ideality

This book describes a realist, fallibilist alternative when intuitionism and its psychocentric ontology are rejected. Weissman proposes an agenda for metaphysical inquiry and also a method for testing metaphysical claims. Arguing that science and metaphysics are successive refinements of the maps and plans used in practical life, he affirms that metaphysics is to complete our self-understanding by locating us within a world we have not made. This book is a sequel to Intuition and Ideality which surveys the many versions of intuitionismintuitionism as it prescribes that reality be identified with mind itself or with the things set before our inspecting mind.

Hypothesis and the Spiral of Reflection

Philosophic attention shifted after Hegel from Kant’s emphasis on sensibility to criticism and analyses of the fine arts. The arts themselves seemed as ample as nature; a disciplined science could devote as much energy to one as the other. But then the arts began to splinter because of new technologies: photography displaced figurative painting; hearing recorded music reduced the interest in learning to play it. The firm interiority that Hegel assumed was undermined by the speed, mechanization, and distractions of modern life. We inherit two problems: restore quality and conviction in the arts; cultivate the interiority—the sensibility—that is a condition for judgment in every domain. What is sensibility’s role in experiences of every sort, but especially those provoked when art is made and enjoyed?

Sensibility and the Sublime

This book describes a realist, fallibilist alternative when intuitionism and its psychocentric ontology are rejected. Weissman proposes an agenda for metaphysical inquiry and also a method for testing metaphysical claims. Arguing that science and metaphysics are successive refinements of the maps and plans used in practical life, he affirms that metaphysics is to complete our self-understanding by locating us within a world we have not made. This book is a sequel to Intuition and Ideality which surveys the many versions of intuitionism--intuitionism as it prescribes that reality be identified with mind itself or with the things set before our inspecting mind.

Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction

David Diamond

The team of Diamond and Weissman have been writing movies and mentoring filmmakers for decades. In this practical guide, they take the aspiring writer by the hand and guide them through the logistics and tools of writing an attention-grabbing, audience-pleasing screenplay. Readers will learn the interests and needs of managers, agents, producers, executives, financiers, directors, and actors. Diamond and Weissman attribute their phenomenal success to a career-long focus on the motives and priorities of film sponsors and benefactors. Whether it's a theatrical release or a streaming movie, a major, big-budget tent pole or an intimate, character-driven indie drama, Diamond and Weissman apply their time-tested approach. This fresh way of thinking will resonate with writers, industry professionals, and cinephiles excited to peek under the hood at what makes their favorite films tick. Bulletproof is the rare screenwriting instructional penned by authors with both massive credits and decades of business experience. It is poised to take its place as one of the must-reads of the genre.

David Weissman

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