The Co‐inherence of Natures: An Ontological Extension of Strong Structuration Theory

The Ontology of Relations: A New Dialogue Between Thomas Aquinas and the Social Sciences

This article proposes a newly developed dialogue between Thomistic thought and the social sciences by rethinking the ontological status of the relation. It argues that Thomas Aquinas inaugurated an unfinished ontological revolution when he distinguished a third order of reality, secundum relationem, alongside substance and accident. However, he then focused on the constitutive role of relation within Trinitarian theology and did not develop an ontology of relationality in secular and social life. This latter ontology is now being developed in the social sciences that show how social relations constitute an autonomous ontological reality. This autonomy, however, oscillates between an unfounded naturalism and a cultural relativism characterized by a flat ontology in which social relations are reduced to flows of events. At this point, the author argues, an encounter between Thomistic relational ontology and the social sciences can be fruitful, allowing both to overcome classical substantialism, for which society is a set of naturally sociable individuals, as well as modern constructivist relationism, for which society is a purely autopoietic historical construction. By connecting Thomistic theology, especially Trinitarian relationality, with relational sociology, this paper advances the idea of a social ontology capable of addressing the dilemmas of postmodern society.

Functionalist Intuitions, Uncertainty, and Ontological Politics: Religious Studies for the Anthropocene

Following Hanegraaff’s (2020: 73) claim that pioneers in our field considered it “to be no less than essential for any adequate understanding of the history of human culture and society as such,” this text answers Schilbrack’s (2013) question: “After we deconstruct ‘religion’, then what?” The answer is formulated within the debate over the diplomacy of common world face-to-face challenges of the Anthropocene. Within the functionalist tradition, uncertainty and lack of control defined the situation from which religion and magic ought to originate. They constitute the key characteristic of the Anthropocene as a specific historical condition, too. Their practical handling unleashes the full range of world-making activities and processes that shape ways of inhabiting the environment and thus provides an excellent point of analytical focus that can efficiently do without concepts of both religion and belief.

The Constitution of Society as Duality: The Case of America

The Great Cosmic Silence: What Does the Fermi Paradox Tell About the Future of Humanity?

This article examines how institutional time horizons shape the long‐term survival prospects of human technological civilisation. While research on global catastrophic and existential risks has expanded, the temporal structures of political‐economic institutions remain underexamined. Using the Fermi paradox as a heuristic lens, I argue that the capacity of complex technological societies to sustain long‐term, risk‐minimising and cooperative action represents a civilisational bottleneck. The challenge of organising extended temporal responsibility raises fundamental questions for political economy and international relations. From this perspective, the article considers the institutional conditions required for a cooperative global order capable of safeguarding humanity's future and the flourishing of life. It explores pathways to extend collective time horizons globally, including strengthened long‐term governance frameworks, mechanisms for intergenerational representation and integrated forms of global political authority. The intertwining of questions, for example, through discounting and justice, suggests that new umbrella concepts are needed to translate such analysis into concrete policy or institutional design. The article concludes by discussing ‘temporal socialism’ and processual ‘world statehood’ as demanding yet viable concepts for institutionalising longer‐term policy orientation of the world system.

Beyond Substance: Contemporary Science and the Case for a Generative Relational Ontology

Contemporary science has achieved extraordinary explanatory and predictive success, yet its ontological interpretation remains unsettled. This paper argues that one source of this instability lies in the inherited assumption that reality is fundamentally composed of independently existing substances. While this picture was historically fruitful, it has become increasingly difficult to sustain as a general ontology in light of three converging pressures: the relational and structural character of modern physics, the problem of emergence across levels of organization and the unresolved status of consciousness within physicalist metaphysics. The paper first examines why substance ontology has become unstable as an implicit background framework for scientific interpretation. It then argues that existing post-substance approaches, including ontic structural realism, relational interpretations of physics and process ontology, each capture important aspects of the required shift and contain important resources for moving beyond substance ontology. The present paper does not attempt to adjudicate these traditions as a whole. It instead identifies a specific generative requirement: an adequate post-substance ontology must explain how stable physical, organizational and experiential domains can be jointly situated within a common ontological framework. This requirement is identified as a generative gap in the argument developed here. In response, the paper argues that a post-substance ontology must be not only structural, relational or processual but generative. It must explain how effective objects stabilize, how levels of organization arise, how spacetime coordination becomes available, and how physical structure and conscious experience can belong to the same reality without reduction or fragmentation. The paper develops a generative-projection hypothesis that takes the derivative status of spacetime as its point of entry and introduces a generative domain, projection, invariance and compatibility as conceptual tools for articulating this ontological direction. The hypothesis is presented as preliminary rather than as a completed metaphysical system.

Beyond substance: Egon Bondy’s non-substantial ontology between materialist critique and modern cosmology

This paper examines the key features of the non-substantial ontology developed by Egon Bondy (born Zbyněk Fišer) in his seminal works of the 1960s and offers one of the first systematic introductions to Bondy’s ontological thought in English. The study situates his philosophy within the broader context of the Czech Marxist philosophical movement of the period and explains why ontology became a central concern of Czechoslovak Marxist philosophy during the 1960s. It reconstructs Bondy’s systematic critique of substantial ontological models, showing why, in his view, they inevitably lapse into metaphysical dualism, devalue concrete existence, and ultimately foreclose the possibility of freedom and meaningful existence. In opposition both to the tradition of substantial ontology grounded in self-subsistent individuals and to the Heideggerian ontological tradition, Bondy formulates a processual and relational non-substantial ontology in which reality consists exclusively of hierarchically structured sets, “events,” or “single-units,” and in which the primacy of structure and relations is emphasized. This article, however, goes beyond mere exposition of Bondy’s philosophical system and argues that his contra-intuitive theoretical claims retain considerable relevance for contemporary philosophy and related fields. In particular, the second part of the article demonstrates striking parallels between Bondy’s non-substantial model of ontological reality and certain contemporary cosmological theories, especially the cosmological model developed by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok.