Ingvar Johansson
Philosophy Home Site
My name is Ingvar Johansson. I was born in 1943 in a little Swedish village called
Vegby. It is situated about 100 km east of Gothenburg (on the west coast), in which city I
began my university studies in 1964. At the University of Gothenburg I took my B.A.
(filosofie kandidat) 1966, my M.A. (filosofie licentiat) 1969, and my Ph.D. 1973; and
there I was appointed "Docent" in theoretical philosophy 1974.
In my M.A.-dissertation I discussed problems within the philosophy of perception, but
my Ph.D.-dissertation, A Critique of Karl Popper's Methodology (Scandinavian
University Press 1975), was primarily concerned with philosophy of science. The paper
Ceteris paribus Clauses, Closure Clauses and Falsifiability is an improvement of my
original criticism of Popper's falsifiability thesis (see the link at 3. Philosophy of Physics,
below).
After I had got my Ph.D., I spent some years teaching and writing philosophy at Lund
University (the southernmost university in Sweden). In 1978 I moved to Umeå and its
university (the northernmost one), where I had got a position as an associate professor in
philosophy of science; in 1999 I was appointed professor in theoretical philosophy.
Looking retrospectively, my philosophical interests centre on ontological problems. In
the book Ontological Investigations. An Inquiry into the Categories of Nature, Man
and Society (Routledge 1989) I make an attempt to find and present a modernised realist
Aristotelian theory of categories. Since I am a fallibilist within epistemology, I regard my
"Kategorienlehre" as provisional. However, I think that it is possible to combine a
traditional scientistic view of mind-independent nature with an anti-naturalistic view of
man, that direct realism is true, and that both traditional individualistic and holistic
conceptions of society suffer from indefensible philosophical flaws. I have later on
elaborated in more detail some of the views put forward in the book (see the papers at 1.
Basic Ontology, 2. The Ontology of Social Reality, and 10. Philosophy of Functions,
below).
During the 1990s I spent a lot of time on problems in philosophical anthropology and
ethics, too. At the end of 1994 I delivered a monograph called Is Ought ? to The
Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It is concerned
with the problem whether norms, values, and virtues ("Oughts") can be derived from
factual statements ("Is"). I have later on elaborated in more detail - and published - some
of the views put forward in the manuscript (see the online version of the manuscript and
the papers at 4. Ethics, below).
I have given lectures at other philosophy departments both within and outside Sweden,
and I have written articles on a lot of different philosophical topics in both Swedish and
international journals. I have written the first part, Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of Science, of
the introductory Swedish book Positivism och Marxism (1st ed. 1972; revised 1981 and
1987; 4th ed., Daidalos 1993; the author of the second part is Sven-Eric Liedman,
professor in the History of Ideas). Together with Niels Lynöe (G.P. and Ph.D.) I have
written an introductory philosophy book for medical students, Medicin och Filosofi. En
introduktion (1st ed. 1992; revised and enlarged 2nd ed., Daidalos 1997; also in Danish,
FADL's 1999).
Those who are seriously interested in A Critique of Karl Popper's Methodology can
contact me for a free copy (see e-mail address at the end of this page). Ontological
Investigations has appeared in a second enlarged edition on ontos-verlag (2004). Once, I
amused myself with making a Wittgensteinian Tractatus-like exposition of a lot of the
views argued for in the book; these aphorisms are linked here: Tractate on Reality (1986)
As part of a research project in Umeå, "Medvetande, Materialism och Möjlighet" ("Mind,
Materiallism, and Modality") I have worked on supervenience. The result is linked to
section 9, Supervenience, below. Some papers (especially in section 4, Ethics) are part of
an Umeå project in "Philosophical Anthropology".
Since July 2002, and until the end of February 2008, I will mainly be working at The
Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS). This institute
was founded in April 2002 as part of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of
Leipzig, but since September 2004 it belongs to Saarland University (Saarbrücken). It
comprehends an interdisciplinary research group, with members from Philosophy,
Medicine, Medical Informatics and other disciplines, devoted to theoretically grounded
research in both formal and applied ontology. Its goal is to develop a formal ontology that
will be applied and tested in the domain of medical information science (IFOMIS). All
the papers linked under sections 0 and 10 below, as well as some in sections 1, 2, and 3,
are IFOMIS work.
0. Ontology and Information Science


Continua in Biological Systems (2007)
Four Kinds of "Is_A" Relations (2006)
 Mereology and Philosophy (for discussion)
 Mereology and Ordinary Language - Reply to Varzi (2006)
 Bioinformatics and Biological Reality (2006)
 Inference Rules, Emergent Wholes and Supervenient Properties (2006)
 Qualities, Quantities, and the Endurant-Perdurant Distinction in Top-Level
Ontologies (2005)
 Ontologies and Concepts. Two Proposals (2004)
1. Basic Ontology

Formalizing Common Sense: an operator-based approach to the Tibbles-Tib
problem (2007)
 (review of E. J. Lowe) The Four-Category Ontology (2006)
 Roman Ingarden and the Problem of Universals (forthcoming)
 Identity Puzzles and Supervenient Identities (2006)
 Truthmaking: A Cognition-Independent Internal Relation with Heterogeneous
Relata (2004)
 (review of E. Tegtmeier) Time and Existence (2001)
 (abstract) Presuppositions for Realist Interpretations of Vectors and Vector
Addition (2001)
 Determinables as Universals (2000)
 Pattern as an Ontological Category (1998)
 The Unnoticed Regional Ontology of Mechanisms (1997)
 (abstract) Physical Addition (1996)
 (abstract) Intentionality and Tendency: How to make Aristotle up-to-date (1992)
 (abstract) Marty on Grounded Relations (1990)
2. The Ontology of Social Reality

How Do Non-Joint Commitments Come Into Being? An Attempt at Cultural
Naturalism (2006)
 Money and Fictions (2005)
 How Philosophy and Science may Interact. Searle and De Soto - A Case Study
(forthcoming)
 (review of the anthology) Social Facts & Collective Intentionality (2003)
 Searle's Monadological Construction of Social Reality (2003)
 Perception as the Bridge Between Nature and Life-World (1998)
3. Philosophy of Physics

 The Ontology of Temperature (2004)
Planck's Constant and Necessarily Time-Extended Phenomena (1999)
 Ontological Aspects of Natural Science (1991)
 Ceteris paribus Clauses, Closure Clauses and Falsifiability (1980)
4. Ethics

The Concept and Ontology of Justice (2006)
 Respect for Logic (2006)
 Species and Dimensions of Pleasure (2001)
 (abstract) Hume's Surprise and the Logic of Belief Changes (1999)
 Hume, Kant and the Search for a Modern Moral Philosophy (1999)
(in Swedish) Postmodernismen, det goda livet och människans begär (1995)
 Is Ought ? (1994)

5. Philosophy of Language

 Performatives and Antiperformatives (2003)
Impossible Descriptions, Superfluous Descriptions, and Mead's "I" (1998)
 (in Swedish) Språkets verklighet och verkligheten (1990)
 (in Swedish) Semantik till vardags och till döds (1989)
 Levels of Intension and Theories of Reference (1986)
6. Rationality

Pluralism and Rationality in the Social Sciences (1991)
 (in Swedish) Förnuftets pris (1989)
7. Philosophy of Sports

(in Swedish) Göran Greider i Ivar Lo:s idrottsfientliga fotspår (1999)
 Philosophical Anthropology Instead of Nationalism (1998)
 (in Swedish) Att idrott skall vara så svårt att förstå (1994)
8. History of Philosophy

Hume's Scottish Kantianism (2002)
9. Supervenience

 Identity Puzzles and Supervenient Identities (2006) (same as under 1)
Inference Rules, Emergent Wholes and Supervenient Properties (2006) (same as
under 0)
 Hare's Supervenience Revisited and Re-explicated (2002)
 Critical Notice of Armstrong's and Lewis' Concepts of Supervenience (2002)
 Hartmann's Nonreductive Materialism, Superimposition, and Supervenience
(2001)
 The Asymmetries of Property Supervenience (2002)
10. Philosophy of Functions

 Functions as Physical Dimensions (ppt, 2006)
The Constituent Function Analysis of Functions (2006)
 Functional Anatomy: A Taxonomic Proposal (2005)
 On the Transitivity of the Parthood Relations (2004)
 Functions, Function Concepts, and Scales (2004)
Ingvar.Johansson@philos.umu.se and Ingvar.Johansson@ifomis.uni-saarland.de
Department of Philosophy - Umeå University and Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science Saarland University