The New Ontological Principle

Michel Bitbol

Cord Friebe

Both bosons and fermions satisfy a strong version of Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII), and so are ontologically on a par with respect to the PII. This holds for non-entangled, non-product states and for physically entangled states—as it has been established in previous work. In this paper, the Leibniz strategy is completed by including the (bosonic) symmetric product states. A new understanding of Pauli’s Exclusion Principle is provided, which distinguishes bosons from fermions in a peculiar ontological way. Finally, the program as a whole is defended against substantial objections.

Travis Norsen

Vinícius Carvalho da Silva

What is the Philosophy of Nature that we can infer from the Contemporary Physics? For Werner Karl Heisenberg, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932, the ontology of modern science, based on materialism, mechanism and determinism may no longer be the basis for the new physics. This requires a new ontology-based, where anti-realism, followed by a pure formalism, appears as the basic principle of a new Philosophy of Nature.

Qiaowei Sun

Abstract Traditional philosophy has long enshrined "determinacy" as the essential attribute of Being, while relegating "indeterminacy" to the status of a temporary defect of human cognition, a vague state awaiting elimination. The revolutionary development of quantum mechanics has thoroughly shattered this millennia-old cognitive presupposition: the superposition state of microscopic particles is not an "undetermined intermediate state," but an intrinsic property of Being itself; wave-particle duality is not a random mutation of particles, but the determinate manifestation of the same indeterminate ontological substance, emerging within different observational relations. This paper proposes a fundamentally new ontological principle: determinacy is the skeleton of Being that emerges from and is anchored by indeterminacy; indeterminacy, in turn, is the primordial matrix from which determinacy is generated, described, and manifested. These two dimensions do not exist in a relation of sequential dependence or hierarchical subordination, but constitute a reciprocal generative structure in which they define each other in opposition and emerge simultaneously in dynamic interaction. Taking quantum mechanical superposition and wave-particle duality as its core empirical evidence, this paper demonstrates the universal penetrative power of this ontological principle, and points out that eliminating indeterminacy is not the core task of philosophy; rather, modern philosophy must urgently break free from the shackles of traditional paradigms and return to the dynamic, authentic state of Being itself in order to reconstruct cognition. Keywords: Determinacy; Indeterminacy; Reciprocal Emergence in Opposition; Emergence; Manifestation; Desire/Contradiction; Ontology

Yukio-Pegio Gunji, Keisuke Ito, Yoshiyuki Kusunoki