Proposals for rigorously explicating the concept of confirmation in probabilistic terms abound. To foster discussions on the formal properties of the proposed measures, recent years have seen the upshot of a number of representation theorems that uniquely determine a confirmation measure based on a number of desiderata. However, the results that have been presented so far focus exclusively on the concept of incremental confirmation. This leaves open the question whether similar results can be obtained for the concept of (...) class='Hi'>absolute confirmation. This article closes the gap by providing a representation theorem for absolute confirmation measures. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to propose and defend an absolute principle of truthmaking, a maximalist one according to which every truth is made true by something in the world beyond itself. I maintain that an absolute principle must be true, that any weakened version is straightforwardly contradictory or incoherent. I criticize one principle of truthmaking (in terms of bald necessity) and articulate one in terms of the relation in virtue of. I then criticize other principles of (...) truthmaking in light of the latter, for I contend that in virtue of has a role in the theory of truthmaking that is essential and ineluctable. That all true representations have a truthmaker as defined by the principle I articulate is the absolute principle of truthmaking I defend. The crux of the paper is the arguments I present in defense of this absolute principle. In defending it against familiar objections to maximalism, an account of the truthmakers that seem to ground all true representations emerges. I maintain that such truthmakers are simple facts. With the absolute principle and its corollary account of truthmakers, this paper contains the core of a comprehensive theory of truthmaking. (shrink)

Readers of Hobbes have often seen his Leviathan as a deeply paradoxical work. On one hand, recognizing that no sovereign could ever wield enough coercive power to maintain social order, the text recommends that the state enhance its power ideologically, by tightly controlling the apparatuses of public discourse and socialization. The state must cultivate an image of itself as a mortal god of nearly unlimited power, to overpower its subjects and instil enough fear to win obedience. On the other hand, (...) by drawing explicit attention to the ideological and partly illusory bases of the state’s power, Leviathan, itself construed as a political intervention designed to appeal to a broad English readership, appears to undermine the very program it recommends. Indeed, many have argued that Leviathan’s substantive political-philosophical doctrine is flatly at odds with the authority that Hobbes claimed for himself in order to advance that doctrine. The paradox, I argue, is only an apparent one. Precisely because Hobbes believed that in practice no one could ever become the mortal god that sovereignty requires, i.e., that the seat of sovereignty could never actually be securely occupied and fully represented by a mere mortal, he sought constantly to remind his readers of the precariousness of earthly sovereignty by pointing to its illusory basis. Far from seeking to undermine the sovereign, however, this reminder was designed to enhance readers’ fears, especially the fear that, despite the security they may enjoy today, the slightest misstep may lead them straight into the horrors of the state of nature. Hobbes’s purpose was, in other words, to enhance the sovereign’s power, not by enhancing our fear of him, but of his absence. Ironically, this is also in part why Hobbes insisted on the individual’s inalienable right of self-defence, an insistence that has puzzled many of his readers, given Hobbes’s obvious wish to defend absolute, unlimited sovereignty. Its political function is not to provide a covert justification for resistance theories. Rather, by reminding his readers of their right but doing so while addressing them as isolated atoms whose resistance would be hopeless, Hobbes sought to remind each one of the ultimate impossibility of securely filling the seat of sovereignty, without encouraging anyone actually to resist the most promising pretender. Like God-talk, Hobbes’s representations of sovereign power do not ultimately comprise descriptive propositions at all: they are expressions of praise and honour designed to help create the very thing they purport to describe. Hobbes was keenly aware that indivisible state sovereignty is an ideological construct whose terms are never ever fully realized in practice. (shrink)

Statistical analysis is often used to evaluate the strength of evidence for or against scientific hypotheses. Here we consider evidence measurement from the point of view of representational measurement theory, focusing in particular on the 0-points of measurement scales. We argue that a properly calibrated evidence measure will need to count up from absolute 0, in a sense to be defined, and that this 0-point is likely to be something other than what one might have expected. This suggests the (...) need for a new theory of statistical evidence in the context of which calibrated evidence measurement becomes tractable. (shrink)

Neural structural representations are cerebral map- or model-like structures that structurally resemble what they represent. These representations are absolutely central to the “cognitive neuroscience revolution”, as they are the only type of representation compatible with the revolutionaries’ mechanistic commitments. Crucially, however, these very same commitments entail that structural representations can be observed in the swirl of neuronal activity. Here, I argue that no structural representations have been observed being present in our neuronal activity, no matter the spatiotemporal scale of (...) observation. My argument begins by introducing the “cognitive neuroscience revolution” (Sect. 1 ) and sketching a prominent, widely adopted account of structural representations (Sect. 2 ). Then, I will consult various reports that describe our neuronal activity at various spatiotemporal scales, arguing that none of them reports the presence of structural representations (Sect. 3 ). After having deflected certain intuitive objections to my analysis (Sect. 4 ), I will conclude that, in the absence of neural structural representations, representationalism and mechanism can’t go together, and so the “cognitive neuroscience revolution” is forced to abandon one of its commitments (Sect. 5 ). (shrink)

This paper examines the absolutist grounds for denying an agent's responsibility for what he allows to happen in 'keeping his hands clean' in acute circumstances. In defending an agent's non-prevention of what is, viewed impersonally, the greater harm in such cases, absolutists typically insist on a difference in responsibility between what an agent brings about as opposed to what he allows. This alleged difference is taken to be central to the absolutist justification of non-intervention in acute cases: the agent's obligation (...) not to do harm is held to be more stringent than his obligation to prevent (comparable) harm, since as agents we are principally responsible for what we ourselves do. The paper's central point is that this representation of the absolutist response to acute cases- as grounded in a difference in responsibility for what we do as opposed to what we allow- involves a misleading theoretical inversion. I argue that the absolutist justification of non-intervention in acute cases must depend on a direct defence of the nature and the stringency of the moral norm with which the agent's non-intervention complies. The nature and stringency of this norm are basic to attribution of agent responsibility in acute cases, and not the other way around. (shrink)

Mark Evan Bonds makes a distinction between two concepts of absolute music: as repertory, and as ‘regulative concept’. This paper explores the distinction, and distinguishes further two debates associated with these two concepts: one about the value of absolute music in the repertory sense, the other about the extent to which music is ‘absolute’ in the sense of lacking expressive or representational content. It ends with a proposal about how reflection on the first debate can help provide (...) a resolution of the second. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

In the pair of articles of which this is the first, I shall present a set of problems and philosophical proposals that have in recent years been associated with the term “relativism”. All these problems and proposals concern the question of how we should represent thought and speech about certain topics. The main issue here is whether we should model such mental states or linguistic acts as involving representational contents that are absolutely correct or incorrect, or whether, alternatively, their correctness (...) should be thought of as varying with some (more or less surprising) factor. In this, first, article, I shall discuss the general issue of relativism about representational content. I shall claim that there are legitimate ways of attributing contents that are absolute truth-bearers, and there are also equally legitimate ways of attributing relativistic representational contents. In the companion piece “Relativism 2: Semantic Content”, I look in more detail at the more specific question whether semantic contents (i.e. the contents assigned to linguistic utterances in the semantics of natural language) should be construed in an absolutist or a relativist way. (shrink)

Newton's arguments for the immobility of the parts of absolute space have been claimed to licence several proposals concerning his metaphysics. This paper clarifies Newton, first distinguishing two distinct arguments. Then, it demonstrates, contrary to Nerlich ([2005]), that Newton does not appeal to the identity of indiscernibles, but rather to a view about de re representation. Additionally, DiSalle ([1994]) claims that one argument shows Newton to be an anti-substantivalist. I agree that its premises imply a denial of a (...) kind of substantivalism, but I show that they are inconsistent with Newton's core doctrine that not all motion is the relative motions of bodies, and so conclude that they are not part of his considered views on space. The Arguments The Identity Argument 2.1 Identity of indiscernibles for individuals 2.2 Identity of indiscernibles for worlds and states 2.3 Representation de re Kinematic Relationism Conclusion CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The following paper argues that J.G. Fichte, despite his apparent philosophical neglect of art and aesthetics, does develop a strong, original, and coherent account of art, which not only allows the theorization of modern, non-representative art forms, but indeed anticipates Nietzsche and Heidegger in conceiving of truth in terms of art rather than scientific rationality. While the basis of Fichte’s philosophy of art is presented in the essay “On Spirit and Letter in Philosophy,” it is not developed systematically either in (...) this text or anywhere else in his writings, but must be reconstructed through a broad consideration of all his works, including, above all, his political and economic writings. For Fichte, the art-work does not exist as an object possessing “aesthetic value” and which can, in turn, be possessed, consumed, and enjoyed through the subjective act of aesthetic experience. Rather, it involves a mode of praxis which, grounded in a radical and original power of imagination, creatively discloses possibilities for future forms of existence, experience, and political community that cannot be theoretically anticipated. While Fichte cannot himself theorize specific forms of art, since the art that concerns him belongs to the future, we can, however, retrospectively try to understand non-representational painting and non-mimetic dance as concrete realizations of Fichte’s art-work of the future. In this way, Fichte’s philosophy of art ultimately suggests an alternative to Heidegger’s understanding of the work of art as a projective institution of truth. Fichte suggests that the human body, rather than human language, is the fundamental medium of art. (shrink)

It has sometimes been held that instrumental music on its own, without text or program, is a kind of ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’ music, having no significant truck with extra-musical reality. While bird calls and canon shots might get countenanced, nothing in the vein of a philosophical worldview, a rich narrative, or a socio-political subtext is going to make the formalist’s strict cut. There has been considerable discussion in the analytic aesthetics of music about these issues and about closely-related ones (...) concerning musical expression and representation. But the discussion has focused almost exclusively on music’s *capacities* as a medium, or on our perceptual or imaginative capacities as listeners, in an effort to see how all of this might transpire. But as I will be arguing in this paper, this sort of approach, despite all its illuminating work, does not directly address one of the most important questions on the table between the partisans on different sides of the ‘pure’ music debate. And this question is the fundamentally normative one concerning *how this allegedly ‘pure’ instrumental music is to be appropriately appreciated.* When we appreciate this sort of instrumental music in content-involving ways, where our thoughts go beyond its basic and fairly uncontroversial expressive or representational features, is our mode of musical appreciation thereby deficient, or somehow ‘in the wrong,’ aesthetically-speaking? I argue that it needn’t be, and I further argue to the surprising conclusion that the answer to this normative question doesn’t crucially turn on whether music *possesses* the relevant content. Once we get this normative question in view, we should recognize a broader range of appropriate ways to engage with instrumental music, beyond the restrictive ideal of ‘pure’ listening that has thus far been championed by musical formalists. Then, in the final part of the paper, I shift gears to consider whether the sort of extra-musical content at issue is really as far-fetched as opponents can make it seem. I argue that it isn’t, and that this can be seen by looking to comparable sorts of content in the paradigmatically representational arts. (shrink)

Beyond Subjectivity and Representation extensively explores a connection in the thinking of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty in relation to the interconnections among perception, creation, truth, and value in a way that allows the work of each author to shed light upon the others' ideas. Deborah Carter Mullen develops a non-dualistic notion of truth and value rooted in embodied, earthly existence, and considers them as ongoing happenings of metamorphosis rather than as static ideas. This idea of metamorphosis leads to an (...) understanding of the relationships among self, other, and world as temporal happenings of the flesh. In an intertwining relationship with one another, I and other, I and world, past, present, and future are considered occurrences of the moment that are redefined in each perception and in each expression, as each questions and responds to the other, creating a "mirror-play of flesh." Mullen proposes that reversibility and metamorphosis give rise to an aesthetic sense of truth and values that are not absolute, but truths that happen as they are expressed and values that occur as they are lived. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Racine, Oedipus, and Absolute Fantasies*Mitchell Greenberg (bio)Tout mythe se rapporte à l’origine. Toute question d’origine ne saurait ouvrir que sur un mythe [Every myth points back to an origin. Any questioning of origins necessarily opens onto myth].—Jean-Paul Valabrega, Phantasme, mythe, corps et sensAinsi l’itinéraire de la psychanalyse freudienne est-il celui d’une recherche qui... se fait attentive à ce qui du corps réside dans les mots, s’inscrit dans les (...) traces, reste gravé en mémoire au point de n’apparaître que comme réminiscence [Thus the itinerary of Freudian psychoanalysis would be a quest for... what of the body resides in words, is inscribed in traces, or remains engraved in memory to such an extent that it only can reappear as reminiscence].—Pierre Fédida, “L’anatomie dans la psychanalyse”Something happened in the seventeenth century. Somethings in this particularly conflicted period radically altered the ways in which human subjectivity was created and internalized to produce what in our late twentieth century we have come to call modernity. Despite the different and often contradictory inflections we like to give it, it now seems fairly certain that there was a “crisis of the seventeenth century,” a crisis that was traumatic and that was marked, most significantly for our purposes at least, by an altering of subjective sensibility.In an ever-crescendoing leitmotiv from Machiavelli to Montaigne, from Richelieu to Louis XIV, from Olivares to James I, we hear echoing across Europe the same strident clamor. An anxious, pervasive suspicion that the order of things was out of kilter, that in fact the world was sinking into disorder, seems to dominate European thought in the first half of the century. 1 The fear of chaos, especially in societies whose past has been grounded in rigid hierarchical structures, is obviously exacerbated in periods of great [End Page 40] social change. Nevertheless, if we are to believe those political theorists influenced by the work of Freud, this fear, although enflamed by real experience of social unrest, reaches well beyond the actuality of a particular historical event and finds its terrifying power in the most archaic strata of the human psyche. “All civilization,” writes Eugène Enriquez,is a struggle against chaos. Not against chaos as it might or might not have actually existed in prehistoric times, but against the phantasm of a primordial chaos, of a primeval disorder, of an immixture, of the undifferentiated, against an ordinary violence.... Chaos is the constantly retreating horizon in front of which all social organization and institutions are constructed. It returns us to our ancestral fear. We embrace any and all protection against it.[101]The stately image of Classical France, therefore, an image to which we have become accustomed by almost two hundred years of academic history and which finds its most paradigmatic icon in the tragic production of Racine, tends to obscure a reality of almost constant social and religious trauma. For the purposes of my discussion, I would like to return to Racine, who is perhaps the most prominent representative of the aesthetic and ethical tradition of classicism, which, perfected in France in the mid-1600s, will go on to colonize European ethics and aesthetics into the eighteenth century. Despite the radical changes wrought by political, industrial, philosophical, and psychoanalytical revolutions, classicism, through its corollary myth of the unitary ego, continues to haunt our own inabilities to live unneurotically the various drives, contradictions, identifications, and projections that continually tell us that we are not one but many.A central paradox exists at the heart of any discussion of Racinian dramaturgy. While the tragic dilemma of Racine’s theater is profoundly anchored in the passionate, forbidden sexuality of its characters, passions that are inextricably tied to the desiring body, this body is absent, banished from the lexical construction of the Racinian text. How are we to understand the conundrum of a theater that, more than any other, presents incestuous sexual desire and its frustration as the enchafed crucible of tragedy, when the crucible itself has been exiled from the field of representation? In its plots and peripeteia, Racine’s theater ingeniously reconfigures how his protagonists... (shrink)

Three experiments explored online recognition in a nonspeech domain, using a novel experimental paradigm. Adults learned to associate abstract shapes with particular melodies, and at test they identified a played melody’s associated shape. To implicitly measure recognition, visual fixations to the associated shape versus a distractor shape were measured as the melody played. Degree of similarity between associated melodies was varied to assess what types of pitch information adults use in recognition. Fixation and error data suggest that adults naturally recognize (...) music, like language, incrementally, computing matches to representations before melody offset, despite the fact that music, unlike language, provides no pressure to execute recognition rapidly. Further, adults use both absolute and relative pitch information in recognition. The implicit nature of the dependent measure should permit use with a range of populations to evaluate postulated developmental and evolutionary changes in pitch encoding. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the Timaeus, Plato explicitly defines time as “the moving image of eternity”. This proposition affirms actually that time reflects the eternal that embodies the rational and lawful principle – namely the logos of proportionality – in the motion and change of visible objects in the universe. In other words,time determines the principle that every mutable being must follow to participate in the rational and nomological order of existence; the absolute logos which is given by God is hence intrinsic (...) to time. This idea of time is echoed by the theories of Augustine and Husserl. Both philosophers inherited some of Plato’s metaphysical views, and each of them developed a distinctive theory of the relations between Being, time, and the absolute logos. This paper attempts to compare their theories and to defend the following claim: Augustine fo-cuses on the immutable representation of time which is regarded as the image or reflection of God’s absolute logos, and explains temporal phenome... (shrink)

This article consists of three parts: the first part presents a synthetic outline of intellectual tendencies in post-Renaissance thought (hermeticism, alchemy, kabbalistics), which generated the iconic turn (emblematics, iconology). Its essence boils down to the integral relationship of the motto (lemma), the engraving (imago), and the poetic text (subscription). The second part is a more detailed analysis of one of the illustrations contained in the first volume of the German edition of Jacob Böhme’s works from 1682 (Amsterdam). The epoch, aesthetic (...) tastes prevailing at that time and the Theosophical content of the work allow us to read this illustration from the point of view of iconology. The third part is devoted to two issues. First, one of the central themes in German idealism was the discussion around the notion of the absolute: whether the absolute can be grasped in concepts (Hegel) or in internal intuition (Schelling). Romanticism was dominated by a tendency to a subjective and speculative approach to the absolute. The philosophy and art of Romanticism was modeled on, among others, medieval German mysticism and Böhme’s theosophy, seeking in these sources the best representation of what is unrepresentable, i.e., the absolute. Secondly, philosophical and artistic Romanticism developed a new type of imagery–language images. The dilemma that resulted from the discussion in German idealism–the notion or inner vision, from the modern point of view, should be solved by a compromise: word and image. (shrink)

Not only the classical cognitive pattern but also the classical phenomenological pattern gives rise to a problem concerning the qualitative dimension. This problem is essentially related to the notion of matter, conceived as residual with respect to the notion of form: the sensorial hyle is residual with respect to the intentional form; plena are residual with respect to the extension, and physical matter is also residual with respect to the broad ensemble of connections where the physical thing is inscribed. The (...) residual component which characterizes the notion of matter is simply the other side of the absolute predominance of form. This predominance gives rise to the same problem in the context of phenomenology and in philosophy of mind: the problem of the ontological status of qualitative states. This issue is a crucial one and, in order to be solved, requires a radical change of perspective. In the context of phenomenology this change depends on the concept of enactive, embodied and situated mind. This notion implies a temporal paradigm; it alludes to a dynamic, non-static pattern; that is, it alludes not to projective notions, but to notions which are agentive and, ultimately, evolutive. (shrink)

Writing and reading are closely related and are thus likely to have a common orthographic representation. A fundamental question in the literature on the production of written Chinese characters concerns the structure of orthographic representations. We report on a Chinese character handwriting pedagogical corpus involving a class of 22 persons, 232 composite character types, 1,913 tokens, and 13,057 stroke records, together with the inter-stroke interval, which reflects the parallel processing of multilevel orthographic representation during the writing execution, and (...) 50 orthographic variables from the whole character, logographeme, and stroke. The results of regression analyses show that orthographic representation has a hierarchy and that different representational levels are active simultaneously. In the multilevel structure of orthographic representation, the representation of the logographeme is absolutely dominant. Writing and reading have both commonalities and individual differences in their orthographic representations. The online processing of the logographeme unit probably occurs at the ISI before the initial stroke of the current logographeme, which may also cascade to the first subsequent logographeme. In addition, we propose a new effective character structure unit for describing orthographic complexity. (shrink)

The object of this thesis is the examination of the concept of political representation in the corpus of Hobbes, Locke, Hegel and Marx. Through the method of textualreconstruction I foreground the concept’s salience in their writings. Political representation constitutes a unitary political society as the basis of representative government by entrusting to a separate part of the political community the exercise of the legislative and executive functions on behalf of the political society. Hobbes’s author-actor model grounded the concept (...) of political representation by introducing the act of the transfer of will to a representative by authorisation. Thereby he established the problematic relationship of permanently alienated, absolute, representative power acting in the name of the political community. Locke conceptualised political representation in a way that restored to political society the power to determine the legitimacy of its representative government in case the latter transgressed the norm of acting for the public good of society. Hegel, in turn, assigned to political representation the crucial function of integrating civil society into the power system of the state thus securing the identity of subjective and objective freedom in the rational state, though political representation bestows only formal freedom to civil society’s involvement in the affairs of the state. For Marx, the relationship of political representation makes the representative polity appear as a democratically governed political society within which individual freedom and the public good are secured. This is vitiated by the rift between political society/state and civil society. Marx censures liberal and republican theory for ignoring the primacy of civil/bourgeois society over the representative political society. As a consequence,he argues,the representative polity is not a form of self-government but other-determined and neither freedom nor the public good are realised. Instead, under the regime of private property, money assumes the authorial function of organising social exchange and human relations, shaping the representative polity after its own image, and thus it renders democracy as popular sovereignty a lie. (shrink)

To address the rising concern that algorithmic decision-making may reinforce discriminatory biases, researchers have proposed many notions of fairness and corresponding mathematical formalizations. Each of these notions is often presented as a one-size-fits-all, absolute condition; however, in reality, the practical and ethical trade-offs are unavoidable and more complex. We introduce a new approach that considers fairness—not as a binary, absolute mathematical condition—but rather, as a relational notion in comparison to alternative decisionmaking processes. Using US mortgage lending as an (...) example use case, we discuss the ethical foundations of each definition of fairness and demonstrate that our proposed methodology more closely captures the ethical trade-offs of the decision-maker, as well as forcing a more explicit representation of which values and objectives are prioritised. (shrink)

Recently, philosophy of language has swept through the community of Hegel scholarship. Since the early 1980s, Hegel scholars, such as John McCumber, Willem De Vries, Rodney Coltman, John Russon, Frank Schalow, Irene Harvey, and Henry Sussman, have imputed to Hegel the notion that the problems of philosophy are problems of language. What these readings ignore is that theessential systematic obstacle in Hegel is representation, not language as such. Hence, any Hegelian resolution of philosophical problems involves the speculative overcoming of (...) representation, rather than the reformation of language, as is clear in the transition from “Revealed Religion” to “Absolute Knowing” in the Phenomenology. By tracing seriously the implications of the fact that the completion of revealed religion is “absolute knowing” and that the limiting form of revealed religion is representation, I will show that representation is the dominant problem throughout the Phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper discusses the relationship between the views of James and Royce on representation and their attempts to explain the "possibility of error," views which are, I argue, closer than many have thought. Appreciating where they do differ will point not only to an unstressed problem with Royces' argument for the Absolute but also to some unappreciated features of how James' account of truth ties in with his account of epistemic justification.

Based on a brief overview of the history of ontology and on some philosophical problems of virtual reality, a new approach to virtuality is proposed. To characterize the representational technologies in the Internet age, I suggest that Aristotle’s dualistic ontological system be complemented with a third form of being: virtuality. In the virtual form of being actuality and potentiality are inseparably intertwined. Virtuality is potentiality considered together with its actualization. In this view, virtuality is reality with a measure, a reality (...) which has no absolute character, but which has a relative nature. This situation can remind us the emergence of probability in the 17th century: then the concept of certainty, now the concept of reality is reconsidered and relativized. Currently, in the descriptions of the world created by representational technologies, there are two coherent worldviews with different ontologies: the world is inhabited by actual and potential beings—or all the beings in the world are virtual. (shrink)

This is a first attempt to formalize the language required for analysis of purposive organizations or systems into the subordinate systems of which they organically consist. The authors take a philosophic position midway between Atomism and the Absolute; like Aristotle, they take a finite, complex individual as the ultimate referent of explanation. The sole primitive is "s///tOx," interpreted as "upon analytic dissection, the system t organized by [the property] x." It is claimed without argument that the relationship is independent (...) of who, so to speak, is doing the dissecting. This paper is welcome as a first attack on a difficult problem, although it does not pay off in the production of non-trivial theorems or in clarification much beyond that afforded by technical English.--N. D. B. Jr. (shrink)

This chapter explores Simone de Beauvoir's relation to Hegel's philosophy beyond her adaptation of the master and slave dialectic to the question of woman's historical relation to man. It focuses on her reading of the Hegelian Absolute, which underlies her rejection of the patriarchal representation of the female alterity as absolute, as manifested in the eternal myth of the feminine. Through a survey of Simone de Beauvoir's early intellectual history, it shows that the idea of the (...) class='Hi'>Absolute is more important for Simone de Beauvoir than it is generally acknowledged in the philosophical literature on her. She interprets the Absolute as the idea of freedom, which unfolds itself in historical reality, and from which women cannot be excluded as persons. On personalist grounds, she argues that women's acquisition of political and moral status as persons is a necessary implication of the Absolute, if the Absolute has to overcome the unhappy consciousness the consciousness falls into in patriarchal myths. (shrink)

Even though there do seem to be moves towards interdisciplinary rapprochement in most of the essays collected here, I am not sure that the editor's goal of "breaking down the absoluteness of the relativist/antirealist positions of the literary camp and the objectivist/realist positions of the scientific one" is accomplished. Analytically inclined philosophers may well find it eye-opening to discover first hand what Levine details in his excellent essay: that the literary theorists proceed by assuming anti-realism to be the received position (...) and a commonsense starting position. Although there is talk about the problem of theoretical entities, only Livingston seems to be primarily concerned with this notion, treating the aesthetic object as a theoretical entity because of the radically differing interpretations typically proposed for a literary work. Most of the literary theorists' contributions seem to be concerned with the problems engendered by representative realism. Thus the early placement of Churchland's clear description of connectionism is apt. Rorty's observations in his short comment on Scholes, that contextual or holistic accounts of meaning such as those of Davidson and Derrida actually undercut anything interesting to be made of the connection between reality and representation, seem devastating to the presuppositions of the literary theorists. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: I relate the aesthetic mediation of reason and the identity of religion and mythology found in the Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism to Hegel’s account of the transition from the ancient Greek religion of art to the revealed religion (Christianity) in his theory ofabsolute spirit. While this transition turns on the idea that the revealed religion mediates reason more adequately in virtue of its form (i. e., representational thought), I argue that Hegel’s account of the limitations of religious representational (...) thought, when taken in conjunction with some of his ideas concerning Romantic art, suggests that he fails to demonstrate the necessity of the transition in question, thus undermining the triadic structure (i. e., art, religion, philosophy) of his theory of absolute spirit.RÉSUMÉ: Dans cet article, jelais un lien entre, d’une part, la médiation esthétique de la raison et l’identite de la religion et de la mythologie formulées dans le premier programme systématique de l’idéalisme allemand et, d’autre part, le récit que fait Hegel de la transition menant de la religion grecque antique de l’art à la religion révélée (la chrétienté) dans sa théorie de l’Esprit absolu. Bien que cette transition repose sur l’idée que la religion révélée médiatise la raison plus adéquatement grâce à sa forme (la pensée représentationnelle), je soutiens que, si on considère parallèlement à ses idées sur l’art romantique les explications que donne Hegel au sujet des limitations de la pensée représentationnelle religieuse, ces explications laissent apercevoir qu’il échoue à démontrer la nécessité de la transition en question, ce qui a pour effet de faire s’effondrer la structure ternaire art, religion, philosophie de sa théorie de l’Esprit absolu. (shrink)

There is no doubt that colors play a crucial role in the fine arts. Both the phenomenology and the interpretation of paintings, photographs, and films change dramatically depending on the colors that are used to compose them. A black and white reproduction of a Rothko painting loses one of the central traits of the work. It is similarly a crucial aesthetic choice by photographers or filmmakers to have their work shot in color or in black and white. This choice will (...) constrain the phenomenology of the resulting photographs and films and how viewers will eventually perceive and interpret them. Less clear, however, is the significance, the meaning of colors in the fine arts. In this paper, I argue that colors have no absolute meaning in the arts, but the effect they are supposed to engender in viewers, the significance that colors have in various pieces, will change as we consider different works, even, in some cases, if they belong to the same period. Despite the relatively uniform phenomenology of colors, their meaning varies dramatically in painting, photographs, and films. This makes colors behave in far more conventional ways, that is, representing via conventional codes rather than via recognitional prompts, than we may initially think in light of how relatively stable color phenomenology tends to be. It is, thus, important to distinguish the way colors represent from the way they are present in these various media. And by examining the implications of this distinction, I argue, we obtain a suggestive framework to examine colors in the fine arts. To support this conclusion I examine the meaning and significance of colors in selected paintings, photographs, and films, identifying some similarities but particularly several differences among various works. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: I relate the aesthetic mediation of reason and the identity of religion and mythology found in the Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism to Hegel’s account of the transition from the ancient Greek religion of art to the revealed religion (Christianity) in his theory ofabsolute spirit. While this transition turns on the idea that the revealed religion mediates reason more adequately in virtue of its form (i. e., representational thought), I argue that Hegel’s account of the limitations of religious representational (...) thought, when taken in conjunction with some of his ideas concerning Romantic art, suggests that he fails to demonstrate the necessity of the transition in question, thus undermining the triadic structure (i. e., art, religion, philosophy) of his theory of absolute spirit.RÉSUMÉ: Dans cet article, jelais un lien entre, d’une part, la médiation esthétique de la raison et l’identite de la religion et de la mythologie formulées dans le premier programme systématique de l’idéalisme allemand et, d’autre part, le récit que fait Hegel de la transition menant de la religion grecque antique de l’art à la religion révélée (la chrétienté) dans sa théorie de l’Esprit absolu. Bien que cette transition repose sur l’idée que la religion révélée médiatise la raison plus adéquatement grâce à sa forme (la pensée représentationnelle), je soutiens que, si on considère parallèlement à ses idées sur l’art romantique les explications que donne Hegel au sujet des limitations de la pensée représentationnelle religieuse, ces explications laissent apercevoir qu’il échoue à démontrer la nécessité de la transition en question, ce qui a pour effet de faire s’effondrer la structure ternaire art, religion, philosophie de sa théorie de l’Esprit absolu. (shrink)

This paper argues in the first place that nominalists are right in insisting against ontological realists that semantic universality does not require commitment to universal entities. However, Ockham, in his zeal to get rid of Scotus’s universal entities, swept under the carpet the issue of universal representational content of genuinely universal symbols, conflating it with the mere indifference of the information content of non-distinctive singular representations. Buridan did come up with an abstractionist theory of the formation of genuinely universal representational (...) content to solve the resulting issues, however, the paper argues further, his solution is committed to attributing the sort of “aspectuality” to universal absolute concepts that his Ockhamist semantics denies to them. The conclusion of the paper suggests how Aquinas’s “moderate realism” can provide a consistent solution without the ontological extravaganza of ontological realists, without conflating the mere indifference of singular representation with genuine universality, and without having to deny aspectuality to our quidditative universal concepts formed by abstraction. (shrink)

Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the anthropological and socio-philosophical dimensions of human existence of the older age group given the challenges of pandemic threats caused by COVID-19. To this end, it is planned to solve a number of tasks, among which one should distinguish the following: 1) to investigate the manifestations of age discrimination in the context of the social and labor areas of human existence; 2) to focus on the asymmetry of the behavior of society (...) and the state relative to persons of the older age group in the field of healthcare in the context of a pandemic crisis; 3) to represent the anthropological features of changes in the socialization and activity of older people under the current conditions of globalization-pandemic challenges. Theoretical basis. Despite such a broad representation of the age-related issue in public relations, there are still no practical guarantees that would apply to discriminatory aspects of older age groups in various areas of their manifestation. The synergistic evolution of social reality requires substantive analysis of the issue under the current conditions for the transformation of social life, which is affected by globalization crises caused by the pandemic threats of COVID-19. Originality. The stereotypical assumptions underlying legal policy and established social relations are based solely on the application of chronological age. The novelty is in justifying an individual approach to the elderly through the personification of the personal characteristics of a person. The study of anthropological and socio-philosophical dimensions of the existence of a person of the older age group in the face of the challenges of pandemic threats caused by COVID-19 has made it possible to analyze the destructive nature of age discrimination in the context of the social and labor areas of human existence. As well as focus on the asymmetry of the behavior of society and the state in relation to these persons in the field of health care, and emphasize the anthropological features of changes in the socialization and human activity under the current conditions of globalization-pandemic challenges. Conclusions. External threats to human existence call for special attention to the implementation and protection of human rights, freedoms, individual freedoms, and identity. Pandemic threats have transformed all dimensions of human existence, especially for those groups of society that are less socially protected. The pandemic crisis has created additional grounds for discrimination against older people in various areas of human existence. Equalization of persons by age without personifying the personal characteristics of an individual is discrimination on an age basis, which violates the principles of democracy and humanism in the society, leads to stigmatization of the person, is the cause of the anthropological crisis of a person. (shrink)

I would like to identify a certain weakness which is characteristic, in my view, of the ‘critique of the model of representation’ or of the project of ‘overturning the hegemony of representation’, popular in philosophical circles inspired by Heidegger’s writings. According to Heidegger’s influential interpretation of modernity — which, by the way, is indebted to Hegelian philosophy of history — the logic of the development of modern thought is entirely subordinated to one idea: the idea of absolute (...) domination of the subject as the power of discursive representation. This interpretation provides a unified vision of the history of modernity as the history of increasing relativization of all aspects of reality to the subject and its capacity to represent and to form judgements. This unified picture of modernity constitutes the common point of reference and inspiration for many intellectual enterprises under the banner of deconstruction, hermeneutics, philosophy of difference, and the critique of Enlightenment. The same interpretation is explicitly or tacitly assumed in postmodernist accounts of contemporary culture, according to which our task as post-modern thinkers is to abandon, overthrow, and shatter the model of representation. (shrink)

Neopragmatism has been accused of having ‘an experience problem’. This paper begins by outlining Hume's understanding of perception according to which ideas are copies of impressions thought to constitute a direct confrontation with reality. This understanding is contrasted with Peirce's theory of perception according to which percepts give rise to perceptual judgments which do not copy but index the percept (just as a weather-cock indicates the direction of the wind). Percept and perceptual judgment thereby mutually inform and correct one another, (...) as the perceiver develops mental habits of interpreting their surroundings, so that, in this theory of perception, as Peirce puts it: “[n]othing at all…is absolutely confrontitional”. Paul Redding has argued that Hegel’s “idealist understanding of logical form” ran deeper than Kant’s in recognising that Mind is essentially embodied and located, and therefore perspectival. Peirce’s understanding arguably dives deeper still in distributing across the space of reasons (and thus Being) not just Mind’s characteristic features of embodiedness and locatedness, but also its infinite corrigibility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy: Two Paths of Liberation from the Representational Mode of ThinkingRobert MagliolaZen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy: Two Paths of Liberation from the Representational Mode of Thinking. By Carl Olson. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. 309 pp.Carl Olson's Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy compares two paths of liberation from the representational mode of thinking, namely, (...) Zen Buddhism and postmodern philosophy. Olson is to be commended for encouraging this dialogue, especially since professors of religious studies usually marginalize Gallic postmodern thought. He is also to be appreciated for the enormous effort that must have been required to describe so much material. Olson treats Bataille, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan, Levinas, and Lyotard on the postmodern side; and Dogen, Hakuin, Nishitani, many Chinese Ch'anists, and some Indian Buddhists on the Buddhist side. His method is to arrange the chapters according to topoi such as "Language, Disruption, and Play," "Ways of Thinking," "The Body," and so on, and to treat the pertaining ideas of the individual Buddhist and postmodern authors insofar as applicable.Because Olson's book assembles between two covers the names, selected works, and—at least in a general sense—the "key" ideas of the postmodern movement and their grosso modo similarities/dissimilarities via-à-vis Zen Buddhism, I think it serves an undergraduate readership well enough. The problem is that the book too often performs like a crib sheet in the CliffsNotes manner, reducing so-called "key" ideas to misleading clichés. The book is at its best when it gives an author some length of attention, as it does with Dogen. Rather than reduce my review to a series of sound bites (print bites?) corresponding to Olson's, I shall resort to what hermeneuts call an Auerbachian decoupage, that is, a close analysis of several passages that can be taken as indicative of an author's mode in general. I'll address three interpretations from Olson's book, one of Derrida, one of a Chinese kung-an (koan), and one of Lacan.Within his comparison of Derrida/language/Buddhism, Olson cites (p. 46) a sentence from Derrida's Writing and Difference: "Speech is stolen: since it is stolen [End Page 295] from language it is, thus, stolen from itself, that is, from the thief who has always already lost speech as property and initiative." Olson glosses as follows: "Derrida claims that a speaking subject, representing an irreducible secondary status, is no longer the person who speaks because his/her origin is elusive in an already established field of speech." Because of glosses like this, Derrida is all too often subjected to the ridicule of nonspecialists, who exclaim, "Derrida denies that a person can use speech instrumentally? Aren't his lectures the instruments of his own ideas?" Actually in the section Olson quotes, Derrida is appropriating Lacanian thought and mutating it for Derridean purposes. For Derrida, all life is stretched out in time and diced-out in space in such a way that phenomenological self-identity is an illusion. Physical writing is the best metaphor for this, in that written words (even Chinese ideograms) cannot, in the scientific sense, be perceived in one absolute moment: it "takes time" and it "takes space" to recognize a word, that is, "build" a word-meaning. Derrida calls life a "text" or "writing" because life is like writing: life on the phenomenological level appears holistic (much as a word-meaning appears self-identical, i.e., arising all at once), but life is actually a time/space "drift."1In the sentence Olson quotes, what Derrida means has the following gist: Speech (spoken words) is stolen from language in that it belongs to language as writing and is really writing; and insofar as it is really writing, it is stolen from itself; speech has "always already" been lost to language in that the instrumentality of speech is always undercut by language's nature as writing. Speech is always undercut by an inevitable drift that subverts intentionality and foils our attempts to make speech our absolute "property." This does not mean most of the intention... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Paradox of Kandinsky's Abstract RepresentationKenneth BerryThere is a paradox in the relationship between Kandinsky's use of the terms, "abstract" and "concrete," which is presented in the expression, "Kandinsky's abstract representation." Thisexpression, while being apparently contradictory, may point to a feature underpinning Kandinsky's art, which is pivotal to a proper experience of his work, just as, in Christopher Middleton's view, a poetic language may be pivotal to the (...) formation of cultures.1 Art and cultural artifacts are vital to aesthetic experience and aesthetic education, and both the language of art and other languages are instrumental to this end. However, how may Kandinsky's mature abstraction, being in essence objectless, have any claim to representation, and consequently the higher cultural goals of aesthetic expression and the aesthetic enrichment of society?According to Thomas M. Messer, the position of centrality that Kandinsky has assumed in our understanding of modern art is largely due to his having brought to bear on his art, an instinctive awareness of what constituted the central aesthetic issues of his era.2 Kandinsky's writings in Concerning the Spiritual in Art elaborate on his aesthetic theories, and, in particular, [End Page 99] present the view that paintings should be looked at as a graphic representation of a mood rather than as a representation of objects. Messer observes that, for Kandinsky, abstraction, defined as a mode of painting extending beyond the depiction of recognizable objects, having gradually stripped itself of mimetic vestiges, thus becomes paramount. Michael Carter has similarly pointed out that with the pure forms of absolute abstraction, the non-objective colors and shapes of Kandinsky's paintings were regarded as distillations of the aesthetic properties of the artistic sign3 — separable from any referential aspect of art.4 This aesthetic aspect of Kandinsky's work, which became known as nonfigurative, nonobjective, or nonrepresentational,goes along with the cultural — and, as sculptor Anish Kapoor has remarked, "in the deepest, deepest depths of human history the cultural has always been a motivator of people," and has the power to transform society through finding visual equivalents for an emotional language.5Much has been written about Kandinsky's use of color, but perhaps the primary innovation that he made, as in the case of Barnett Newman, was in the field of drawing. Kandinsky was influenced by Gauguin's idea that drawing was an abstraction from memory after nature, just as Gauguin had been affected by the simplified contours and flattened forms of Puvis de Chavannes. Drawing did not come so easily to Kandinsky as color — he had to work harder at drawing, but in his early improvisations, forms and their outlines as graphic symbols came welling up from the unconscious, and eidetic motifs only had to be copied — almost as the art of calligraphy. Kandinsky's "organic" drawing developed as an urge to nonnaturalistic impulses, and during the period of Point and Line to Plane became almost a grammar of form, saved from mere pedantry by the living forces or visual tensions that made various kinds of line operate not just as contours but as dynamic or restful elements within themselves. In 1913, Kandinsky wrote in his "Reminiscences" that, "painting is a thundering collision of different worlds, intended to create a new world in, and from, their struggles with one another, a new world which is the work of art."6 It is clear from this that the Modernist work of art was intended to be a "new world" operating according to its own universal aesthetic laws.Kandinsky is not just a painter; he is also a visual poet. Poetry, according to Tony Curtis, involves the expression of the intensification of experience — the elevation of banal facts of life into something beyond the merely prosaic — something unique and perceptively heightened.7 It involves both imagination and poetic license to explore both ambiguity and paradox. As Scottish poet Norman MacCaig observed, poetry renders the ordinary extraordinary, seeing the unfamiliar in the familiar.8 Creative analogical thinking such as evinced in Kandinsky's art, often involves breaking free of a clichéd representation.Malcolm Budd has remarked that, in its most exclusive sense, a work... (shrink)

This paper argues that the dominant mainstream neo‐classical economic theory propounds a world‐view which is based not simply on half‐truths, but on straight lies. This is particularly significant since the influence of the economic world‐view reaches into every realm of social thought. Although overtly grounded in utilitarianism, the basis of neo‐classical thought has undergone two shifts of meaning which have converted the original self‐evident utilitarian presuppositions into an ideology. The first of these alters the utilitarian proposition that ‘we seek satisfaction’ (...) into the statement that ‘we only seek satisfaction’. It follows that human action is motivated by nothing other than selfishness and greed, and that altruism therefore cannot exist: anything that looks like altruism is therefore nothing other than egoism in disguise, and there is no place for ethical reasoning in individual choice. The second shift alters the premise that our goal is ‘maximum satisfaction’ to the assertion that what we seek is ‘maximum monetary gain’. This shift is already present in the writings of Jeremy Bentham, and forms the basis of much subsequent work in economics. In particular, it has facilitated the emergence of what one might term ‘economic imperialism’, i.e. the use of economic theory to analyse social issues – family size, racial discrimination, marriage, education choices, among others. In all of these cases monetary gain is the paramount criterion. For business ethics the most obvious example here is the absolutisation of profit as the sole criterion of business achievements, and of salary as the sole criterion of work choice and worker satisfaction. Both of these premises are then used to demonstrate that it is free competition which will ensure maximum social welfare. This conclusion is both relativistic and reductionistic. In the first place, the necessary conditions for perfect competition can never exist. Nor can ‘optimum social welfare’ be translated into ‘optimum welfare for all’ in an economic world‐view which sees wealth and poverty as the ‘just deserts’ of hard work and laziness respectively. The dominant economic theory is thus explicitly immoral in that it enshrines the absolute sovereignity of the individual and the law of the jungle as social norms. The qualitative measure of human happiness is desire, the quantitative measure is money. From an ethical perspective we must reject the falsity of this world‐view. (shrink)

This paper argues that the dominant mainstream neo‐classical economic theory propounds a world‐view which is based not simply on half‐truths, but on straight lies. This is particularly significant since the influence of the economic world‐view reaches into every realm of social thought. Although overtly grounded in utilitarianism, the basis of neo‐classical thought has undergone two shifts of meaning which have converted the original self‐evident utilitarian presuppositions into an ideology.The first of these alters the utilitarian proposition that ‘we seek satisfaction’ into (...) the statement that ‘we only seek satisfaction’. It follows that human action is motivated by nothing other than selfishness and greed, and that altruism therefore cannot exist: anything that looks like altruism is therefore nothing other than egoism in disguise, and there is no place for ethical reasoning in individual choice.The second shift alters the premise that our goal is ‘maximum satisfaction’ to the assertion that what we seek is ‘maximum monetary gain’. This shift is already present in the writings of Jeremy Bentham, and forms the basis of much subsequent work in economics. In particular, it has facilitated the emergence of what one might term ‘economic imperialism’, i.e. the use of economic theory to analyse social issues – family size, racial discrimination, marriage, education choices, among others. In all of these cases monetary gain is the paramount criterion. For business ethics the most obvious example here is the absolutisation of profit as the sole criterion of business achievements, and of salary as the sole criterion of work choice and worker satisfaction.Both of these premises are then used to demonstrate that it is free competition which will ensure maximum social welfare. This conclusion is both relativistic and reductionistic. In the first place, the necessary conditions for perfect competition can never exist. Nor can ‘optimum social welfare’ be translated into ‘optimum welfare for all’ in an economic world‐view which sees wealth and poverty as the ‘just deserts’ of hard work and laziness respectively.The dominant economic theory is thus explicitly immoral in that it enshrines the absolute sovereignity of the individual and the law of the jungle as social norms. The qualitative measure of human happiness is desire, the quantitative measure is money. From an ethical perspective we must reject the falsity of this world‐view. (shrink)