This chapter contains sections titled: Necessity and Predication “Through Itself” Demonstrations, Universals, and the Objects of Scientific Knowledge The Route to the Principles Axioms, Common Principles, and Self‐evidence Demonstration and Analysis Bibliography.

We offer an analysis of future morphemes as epistemic operators. The main empirical motivation comes from the fact that future morphemes have systematic purely epistemic readings—not only in Greek and Italian, but also in Dutch, German, and English will. The existence of epistemic readings suggests that the future expressions quantify over epistemic, not metaphysical alternatives. We provide a unified analysis for epistemic and predictive readings as epistemic necessity, and the shift between the two is determined compositionally by the lower (...) tense. Our account thus acknowledges a systematic interaction between modality and tense—but the future itself is a pure modal, not a mixed temporal/modal operator. We show that the modal base of the future is nonveridical, i.e. it includes p and ¬p worlds, parallel to epistemic modals such as must, and present arguments that future morphemes are a category that stands in between epistemic modals and predicates of personal taste. We identify, finally, a subclass of epistemic futures which are ratificational, and argue that will is a member of this class. (shrink)

Theories about the dawn of "principality of existence" or "principality of quiddity" stand in the realm of "confusion of term and concept fallacy". It is true that asalat as a term appeared for the first time in Mirdamad's works such as Taqwim al-Iman to mention the problem of principality of existence, but we should notice that its meaning as a concept can be tracked in Suhrawadi's works. If by the term asalat we mean having real extension, as it is used (...) in Mulla Sadra's work, we can, without any doubt, claim that Suhrawardi is among the proponents of principality of quiddity. Proposing the distinction of existence and quiddity by al-Faraby and Avicenna, some philosophers regarded this distinction as a real one. But Suhrawardi, by presenting about nine arguments, claimed that existence remains as a mental predicate and does not have any real extension. He made use of his theory in the realm of the Necessary Being through Itself. Avicenna had claimed that the essence of God is His Existence but Suhrawardi denied this Avicennan Peripatetic principle. He said that existence has no real extension and so the essence of God cannot be existence. He claimed that here iniyyah means indivisible life. It seems that Mulla Sadra's arguments for demonstrating the principality of existence posed versus Suhrawardi's arguments for the mental nature of existence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Volitional Necessity and Volitional Shift:A Key to Sobriety?John Talmadge (bio)As a long-time amateur student of philosophy, I think my most effective contribution to this discussion of Dr. Rego's paper will be to discuss Harry Frankfurt's ideas from precisely the point of view of the beginner and the novice. After all, I had never experienced the pleasure of reading Frankfurt until reading Rego, so I can hardly be considered (...) proficient and conversant in analytical philosophy. To pretend to be so would be, in Frankfurt's way of thinking, to construe what I really am (a novice) as what I would ideally like to be (an expert). He calls this "the equation of the real with the ideal," and he certainly gets us thinking. He also says that our failure to mark the distinctions among our many passions (and our attitudes toward our passions) gets us into considerable confusion and trouble.Because I am most familiar with the diagnosis and treatment of addictions, I confine my comments to that domain. I have enjoyed over the years over the puzzling question of whether addiction should actually be called a "disease." This puzzle confounds us for one reason apparent to any armchair philosopher: how can we name something a disease when the removal of the offending agent banishes the problem? I have come to believe that Locke had it right when he said, "We would have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves." (1994, 122) Addiction is not so much a disease as it is an idea. And this is where I think that Dr. Rego's insights have their most value.In his essay "The Importance of What We Care About," Frankfurt offers a particularly helpful example for those of us interested in the addictions. He observes that there are occasions when we care about something powerfully, and we care about it in such a fashion that we cannot avoid the consequences of the caring. His example from history is Martin Luther, who nailed his declaration to the door of the church with the statement, "Here I stand; I can do no other."It is clear, of course, that the impossibility to which Luther referred was a matter neither of logical nor of causal necessity. After all, he knew well enough that he was in one sense quite able to do the very thing he said he could not do; that is, he had the capacity to do it. What he was unable to muster was not the power to forbear, but the will.(Frankfurt 1988, 86)When an alcoholic finds success through Alcoholics Anonymous, he experiences what I would term a "volitional shift." No longer in the grip of alcohol itself, the alcoholic is constrained by what Frankfurt terms "volitional necessity." The alcoholic has a new constraint to which he declares he is subject, that is, "Today I will remain sober." [End Page 327]Frankfurt says that this capacity—the ability to reflect on ourselves—is precisely what separates us as uniquely human. As Frankfurt sees the world, the will of an agent is identical with the desire that motivates him (or would motivate him if he should act).1A first-order desire, such as the alcoholic's craving for a drink, may be contradicted by a second-order desire, specifically a desire not to crave a drink. The second-order desire is born of the individual's knowledge that the use of alcohol, in his case, will lead to dire consequences in terms of health, happiness, and stability. Frankfurt believes that an addict, for example, typically experiences a desire for the destructive chemical but also a desire not to use the chemical. This second-order desire is the one with which the addict identifies, and this reflects the addict's true self (Frankfurt 1988, 14).If we take Dr. Rego's point and notice how a therapist might approach a patient and define a problem, we see obvious distinctions between different schools of thought. To take three simple examples, consider the following: (a) a... (shrink)

Knowledge of the world is for the purpose of transforming the world; the history of humankind is created by humankind itself. However, if one has no knowledge of the world then the world cannot be transformed; "without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement."1 Our high-and-mighty dogmatists 2 are ignorant of this point. It is through the two processes of knowledge and transformation that the realm of necessity will be changed into the realm of freedom. The (...) European philosophers of the past comprehended the truth that "freedom is knowledge of necessity." Marx's contribution lay not in the rejection of this truth, but in recognizing that this truth was incomplete, and his addition of the truth that "the transformation of the world" is founded on knowledge of necessity. "Freedom is knowledge of necessity"-this is the proposition of the philosophers of the past. "Freedom is knowledge of necessity and the transformation of the world"-this is Marx's proposition. It is a poor Marxist who does not understand that knowledge of the world is premised on the transformation of the world, and that the transformation of the world is premised on knowledge of the world. Any Chinese Marxist who does not understand that knowledge of China is premised on the desire to transform China, and that the transformation of China is premised on knowledge of China, is indeed a poor Chinese Marxist. Marx said that man differs from the honeybee in that man has in his mind a design for his house prior to constructing it.3 The house that we will construct is the house of the Chinese Revolution, and we too must firstly have a design for the Chinese Revolution. Not only must we have a grand design, a general plan, we must also have many designs which are subdivisions of the grand design, which are designs on a smaller scale. And these designs can be nothing but the active reflection attained in the practice of the Chinese Revolution of objective, real situations . The reason why our high-and-mighty dogmatists are subjectivists is because their entire design for the revolution, whether on a large or small scale, general or subdivided, is not based on and nor does it conform to objective reality. They have only the subjective aspiration to transform the world, or China, or Northern China, or the cities; they have no presentable plan. Their plan is not scientific, but is subjective and arbitrary, is a complete muddle. Since they have no knowledge whatever of the world and wish to transform it in a rash way, the consequence will not only be that they suffer cracked skulls themselves, but that the masses will also meet the same fate under their leadership. Since these high-and-mighty dogmatists are blind when it comes to the realm of necessity of the Chinese revolution, their presumptuous desire to play the part of the leaders of the people would truly be a case of "a blind man riding a blind horse at the edge of a deep gorge at midnight.". (shrink)

For us, narrative care is grounded in pragmatist philosophy and focused on experience. Narrative care is not merely about acknowledging or listening to people's experiences, but draws attention to practical consequences. We conceptualize care itself as an intrinsically narrative endeavour. In this article, we build on Lugones' understanding of playfulness, particularly to her call to remain attentive to a sense of uncertainty, and an openness to surprise. Playfulness cultivates a generative sense of curiosity that relies on a close attentiveness (...) not only to the other, but to who we each are within relational spaces. Generative curiosity is only possible if we remain playful as we engage and think with experiences and if we remain responsive to the other. Through playfulness, we resist dominant narratives and hold open relational spaces that create opportunities of retelling and reliving our experiences. Drawing on our work alongside older adults, as well as people who work in long‐term care, we show the possibilities of playfulness in the co‐composition of stories across time. By intentionally integrating playfulness, narrative care can be seen as an intervention, as well as a human activity, across diverse social contexts, places and times. (shrink)

Johnston maintains that the notion of a proposition -- ”a language independent (abstract) particular” -- can be dispensed with in philosophical semantics and replaced with that of a propositional act. A propositional act is a component of a speech act that is responsible for the propositional content of the speech act. Traditionally, it is thought that a propositional act yields the propositional content of a speech act by being an act of expressing a proposition. And it is the expressed proposition (...) that serves as the propositional content of the speech act. Johnston points out, however, that a propositional act is a structured event consisting minimally of a referential act, a predicative act, and a time-designative act. And on Johnston's view, the propositional content is the structured propositional act itself. (Strictly speaking, Johnston analyzes sameness of propositional content in terms of sameness of propositional act type, from which I, perhaps rashly, inferred that the propositional content of a speech act should be taken to be the propositional act itself). Johnston argues that a semantic analysis in terms of propositional acts enables us to reconcile the necessity of both, (1) Hesperus is Phosphorus (2) Phosphorus is Phosphorus with their intuitive difference in meaning, while maintaining the direct reference theory of proper names. Moreover, he argues that invoking propositional acts rather than propositions has the advantage of being able to capture the various senses in which distinct statements might be said to "say the same thing", as well as that of ontological parsimony. I will address each of these claims in turn, but first, I want to point out that the propositionalist can easily reconcile the necessity of (1) and (2) with their intuitive difference in meaning, without forsaking direct reference. All one needs to do is invoke the Fregean idea that there is a meaning shift in “thatâ€-clauses of (opaque) indirect discourse (and other) ascriptions.. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the relationship between the necessity predicate and the truth predicate by comparing two possible-world interpretations. The first interpretation, proposed by Halbach et al. (J Philos Log 32(2):179–223, 2003), is for the necessity predicate, and the second, proposed by Hsiung (Stud Log 91(2):239–271, 2009), is for the truth predicate. To achieve this goal, we examine the connections and differences between paradoxical sentences that involve either the necessity predicate or the truth predicate. A primary (...) connection is established through two translations that change only one of the predicates to the other while keeping everything else unchanged. We prove that in bijective frames, a set of sentences that contains one of the two semantic predicates has the same paradoxicality as the corresponding set of sentences that contains the other predicate obtained through translation. However, there are substantial differences as well. First, the necessity predicate and the truth predicate, under the two interpretations, cannot be defined by each other. Moreover, for sentences that involve only the truth predicate, their paradoxicality is preserved under the homomorphisms of frames. For sentences containing the necessity predicate, their paradoxicality is preserved under bounded morphisms, but none of these sentences can have their paradoxicality preserved under the extension of frames. Finally, we also show that paradoxical sentences involving the necessity predicate and those involving the truth predicate differ significantly in terms of mirror symmetry, circularity dependence, and frame compactness. (shrink)

Contingency is the presence of non-actualized possibility in the world. Fatalism is a view of reality on which there is no contingency. Since it is contingency that permits agency, there has traditionally been much interest in contingency. This interest has long been embarrassed by the contention that simple and plausible assumptions about the world lead to fatalism. I begin with an Aristotelian argument as presented by Richard Taylor. Appreciation of this argument has been stultified by a question pertaining to the (...) source of necessity and possibility and a closely related one regarding the nature of metaphysics itself. Answering these questions reveals the crucial issue here, to wit, necessity and possibility in a temporal world. This issue is investigated through an important later criticism of Taylor by David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s critique is significant because it brings to the fore the pivotal notion for understanding contingency in a temporal world, that of synchronic possibility, the idea that incompatible states of affairs are possible at a single moment. This notion provides the basis of distinguishing two systematic accounts of truth, modality and time: two metaphysics of contingency. On one account, Taylor’s Aristotelian argument is straightforwardly valid and compelling; on the other, it is fallacious. In closing, I present reasons why the former account, supporting the Aristotelian views of time and truth, is correct and make some comments to ameliorate this conclusion. (shrink)

Husserlian Essentialism is the view, maintained byEdmundHusserl throughout his career, that necessary truths obtain because essentialist truths obtain. In this thesis I have two goals. First, to reconstruct and flesh out Husserlian Essentialism and its connections with surrounding areas of Husserl's philosophy in full detail – something which has not been done yet. Second, to assess the theoretical solidity of the view. As regards the second point, after having presented Husserlian Essentialism in the first two chapters, I raise a serious (...) problem for it in Chapter 3. In the remainder of the thesis I endeavour to solve the problem. In order to do so, I propose to amend both Husserl's theory of essence and his theory of predication. The bulk of the emendation consists in working out an account of essence and an account of predication that do not presuppose, or in any way imply, the claims that: 1) for a universal to be in the essence of an object, either the object or one of its parts must instantiate the universal; 2) for a universal to be truly predicated of an object, either the object or one of its parts must instantiate the universal. These claims, notice, apart from being what gets Husserl in trouble, are well entrenched not only in Husserl's, but in most theories of essence and predication. It is thus interesting to see what an alternative option may be – even regardless of the Husserlian setting in which I work it out. (shrink)

In the preface to his Theodicy, Leibniz describes the whole of his philosophical work as an attempt to follow Ariadne’s thread through “the two famous labyrinths in which our reason goes astray.” The first and best known of these—the labyrinth of freedom—concerns the relation between contingency and necessity in history. The second—and the one I want to discuss—is what Leibniz calls the labyrinth of the composition of the continuum. The problem itself is relatively simple: how can indivisible (...) and distinct elements constitute a continuum? How, that is, can singularity possibly be thought if the real is everywhere continuous, without interruption or break? Leibniz, as is well known, affirms both extremes of these questions: what really exists are simple unities or wholes, and yet the totality of these unities constitutes a single, organically complete world. While one mode of approach would be to turn immediately to Leibniz’s elaboration of monadic expression and intrinsic predication, I want to examine the effects the problem generates for the specifically Leibnizian conception of the real and the ideal, as well as the transition this entails from the metaphorics of the labyrinth to the figure of the infinite library and the problem of repetition. (shrink)

In the past four or five years I have been especially dependent on Aristotle's writings as I have initiated a series of experiments that can legitimately be called empirical efforts to prove Aristotelian conceptions to be true. In actuality, of course, I am trying to prove my own theory to be true—that is, worthy of consideration because it is consistent with observed human actions. However, by extension, I am surely seeking evidence for Aristotle's image of human cognition. There are two (...) Aristotlelian conceptions that underwrite my theoretical and empirical efforts: predication and opposition. When we speak of a "predication" in cognition we refer to a process that is fundamentally creative. Predications deal in meanings; and the way in which we align meanings, lending the meaning of one concept to another is what predication is all about. Predication is the act of affirming, denying, or qualifying certain patterns of meaning in relation to other patterns of meaning. The second Aristotelian conception that I have been employing theoretically and investigating empirically is "opposition." Although association through frequent contact was recognized by Aristotle , he also appreciated that there is often an intrinsic tie of opposite meanings to be seen in human reason. In my own interpretation of Aristotle, I believe that we can see the ultimate necessity of predication stemming from the opositional ties of meanings like this. If I am cognizing within a congerie of interlacing meanings which relate to and, indeed, delimit the definitions of their opposite meanings, then it is up to me as a cognizer to continually "take a position" on just what I am going to affirm—or not! 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In the past four or five years I have been especially dependent on Aristotle's writings as I have initiated a series of experiments that can legitimately be called empirical efforts to prove Aristotelian conceptions to be true. In actuality, of course, I am trying to prove my own theory to be true—that is, worthy of consideration because it is consistent with observed human actions. However, by extension, I am surely seeking evidence for Aristotle's image of human cognition. There are two (...) Aristotlelian conceptions that underwrite my theoretical and empirical efforts: predication and opposition. When we speak of a "predication" in cognition we refer to a process that is fundamentally creative. Predications deal in meanings; and the way in which we align meanings, lending the meaning of one concept to another is what predication is all about. Predication is the act of affirming, denying, or qualifying certain patterns of meaning in relation to other patterns of meaning. The second Aristotelian conception that I have been employing theoretically and investigating empirically is "opposition." Although association through frequent contact was recognized by Aristotle, he also appreciated that there is often an intrinsic tie of opposite meanings to be seen in human reason. In my own interpretation of Aristotle, I believe that we can see the ultimate necessity of predication stemming from the opositional ties of meanings like this. If I am cognizing within a congerie of interlacing meanings which relate to and, indeed, delimit the definitions of their opposite meanings, then it is up to me as a cognizer to continually "take a position" on just what I am going to affirm—or not! 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Evans distinguishes between superficial necessity and deep necessity in his analysis of the contingent a priori. The distinction between these two notions of necessity is formalized by Davies and Humberstone through the addition of the operator Fixedly to Actuality Modal Logic (AML, S5A), where deep necessity is represented by the combination Fixedly Actually. Wehmeier’s Subjunctive Modal Logic (SML) provides an extension of the expressive capacity of ordinary modal predicate logic alternative to AML. I add Fixedly (...) to SML and show that in the system SML with Fixedly the distinction between deep and superficial necessity disappears. I conclude that the existence of the distinction between deep and superficial necessity, as well as the existence of the contingent a priori, cannot be asserted independently of the choice of background logic. (shrink)

This article presents an interpretation of Deleuze’s concept of difference-in-itself. I argue that this is best understood as an adption of Duns Scotus’s concept of ultimate difference. After suggesting that the influence of Scotus on Deleuze extends beyond their shared commitment to the univocity of being, I turn to briefly review Deleuze’s notion of absolute difference. I proceed from there to explain Scotus’s accounts of univocity and ultimate difference, throughout noting the many stark parallels with Deleuze. On the basis (...) of this Scotistic reading of Deleuzian difference, I then show how Deleuze’s synthesis of univocal being and difference-in-itself can be uniquely situated within the fourteenth-century Scotistic disputations on the predicability of univocal being to ultimate difference. I conclude with some suggestions on possible further connections between Deleuze and medieval metaphysics which are opened up through this association of Deleuze with Scotus and the Scotistic tradition. (shrink)

PHILOSOPHY BEGINS IN WONDER--so says Socrates in the Theaetetus-- but where does it end? The Theaetetus itself ends in such a puzzling way as to be the cause of apparently interminable dispute. Although its theme is the nature of knowledge, neither Socrates nor his interlocutors ever present a definition that gains unanimous approval. The definitions of knowledge as perception, as true opinion and as true opinion with an account are all rejected. This fact has understandably inclined most interpreters to (...) maintain that the dialogue fails to reach its explicit goal. Nevertheless, Socrates' attitude about the apparent failure of his conversation with Theaetetus is markedly distinct from his express attitude in those early dialogues with which the Theaetetus is often compared. Whereas early dialogues conclude with self-deprecation and exhortation to continue the quest, the Theaetetus concludes in satisfaction, indifferent to the possibility of further study. As midwife Socrates has successfully delivered Theaetetus of his phantom offspring; beyond that he can do no more. Thus the apparently negative conclusions of the dialogue are at least not negatively intoned, and readers can barely avoid the suspicion of having missed something. One response is to argue that an authorized definition of knowledge can be found by a careful reexamination of the very arguments Socrates rejects. But the fact that our suspicion is aroused by a dramatic consideration commends a search for resolution through the drama, however that might happen to bear on the problem of knowledge. (shrink)

Many logicians have tried to formalize a modal logic from the Prior Analytics, but the general view is that Aristotle has failed to offer a consistent modal logic there. This paper explains that Aristotle is not interested in modal logic as such. Modalities for him pertain to the relations of predication, without challenging the assertoric system of deductions simpliciter. Thus, demonstrations or dialectical deductions have modal predicates and yet are still deductions simpliciter. It is a matter of distinguishing inferential (...) necessity that applies to every deduction from the modal predicates in the two premises and conclusion. The modality of demonstrations can be either necessary or possible. The necessity is predicative, i.e., independent of inferential necessity. While the possible demonstration challenges the predicative necessity of the necessary demonstration, it preserves the inferential necessity of the deduction simpliciter. (shrink)

The central focus of my dissertation is the study of the naturality in Leibniz's philosophy. Leibniz makes a number of statements concerning natural predication, including: the soul is naturally immortal; personal identity naturally presupposes the identity of the soul; reflective apperception cannot naturally deceive; matter cannot naturally think or act at a distance. These claims are not only central to Leibniz's philosophy of mind, but to his system as a whole; moreover, some of them constitute the basis of his (...) criticism of Locke in the New Essays. Nevertheless, these claims have never received the attention they deserve, nor have they been studied as a whole. ;In the course of my thesis, I argue that Leibniz's statements concerning naturality are best understood as involving a type of necessity which is weaker than logical, or metaphysical, necessity. I develop the position that a subject S is naturally P if and only if: It is logically or metaphysically possible for S not to be P , and It is logically or metaphysically impossible for S to be not-P except through miraculous divine intervention. Simply put, I argue that these two conditions follow from Leibniz's views on inherence in combination with the logical version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which he thinks entails that every event has a cause. ;The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first studies the general concepts, such as inherence and contingent predication, which are necessary to understand the notion of natural necessity and to show that it plays a legitimate role in Leibniz's system. The second part examines in detail some particular cases of natural necessity, such as the natural veridicality of reflection and the natural immortality of the soul, as well as the natural inability of matter to think. (shrink)

Finean essentialists take metaphysical necessity to be metaphysically explained by essence. But whence the explanatory power of essence? A recent wave of criticism against the Finean account has put pressure on essentialists to answer this question. Wallner and Vaidya (2020) have responded by offering an axiomatic account of the explanatory power of essence. This paper discusses their account in light of some recent criticism by Bovey (2022). Building on work by Glazier (2017), Bovey succeeds in showing that Wallner and (...) Vaidya’s account is in need of modification and clarification. In this paper, I take up Bovey’s challenge and argue that Wallner and Vaidya have the resources available to incorporate the necessary modifications. I discuss the details of this modification, specifically, the question of what kind of metaphysical explanation is at work in the explanation of the necessity of essence itself. To get clear on this, I will introduce the distinction between generative and non-generative metaphysical explanation. In this way the paper contributes to both, the debate about whether essences can explain necessity and to the ongoing debate about metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses Edmund Husserl's concept of the ‘life-world’, found in his Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. We argue that Husserl's phenomenology fails to consider the social and material arrangements that allow subjectivity to emerge in our shared world. We begin by outlining the concept as formulated in Husserl’s Crisis. We then entertain Husserl’s critique by his most famous student, Martin Heidegger. We suggest a reformulation of intersubjectivity, along the lines of Heidegger’s mitdasein, accounts for subjectivity as (...) it emerges in the shared world. Next, we introduce ethnomethodology, pioneered by Harold Garfinkel, which gives sociological support to this argument. Through the ethnomethodological disability studies of A.B. Robillard, we argue that the life-world is not always as democratic as Husserl's philosophy may suggest. This shows the necessity of disability politics. We end by asking what a phenomenology sensitive to this fact might look like, in terms of both disability studies and phenomenological philosophy more generally. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we clarify the notion of immunity to error through misidentification with respect to the first-person pronoun. In particular, we set out to dispel the view that for a judgment to be IEM it must contain a token of a certain class of predicates. Rather, the importance of the IEM status of certain judgments is that it teaches us about privileged ways of coming to know about ourselves. We then turn to examine (...) how perception, as a state with nonconceptual content, can give rise to judgments that are IEM. On one view, the ‘inheritance model’ of immunity, perception gives rise to such judgments because perception itself is IEM. We argue that this model is misguided, and, instead, suggest and elucidate an alternative view: perception gives rise to judgments that are IEM by virtue of containing implicitly self-related or self-concerning information. (shrink)

The Neoplatonic notion of “emanation” implies a required progression through hierarchical stages, originating from the highest principle (the One or God) and cascading down through a series of principles. While this process is deemed necessary, it is also inherently good, even “choiceworthy”, aligning with the identification of the first principle with the Good. Plotinus, a prominent Neoplatonist, emphasizes the beauty and goodness of the sensible world, governed by divine providence. This perspective, transmitted through Arabic adaptations of Plotinus, (...) influences Islamic philosophers too. This paper delves into the thought of the Ismāʿīlī philosopher Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī (d. after. 349/971), exploring the interplay of necessity and goodness in his cosmology, with a focus on non-human animals. Sijistānī’s Persian Uncovering the Veiled provides a unique perspective on animals, presenting them as both necessary unfoldings of the universal intellect and inherently good beings with intrinsic value. The paper concludes with an appendix featuring an improved edition and English translation of relevant passages. (shrink)

In philosophical logic necessity is usually conceived as a sentential operator rather than as a predicate. An intensional sentential operator does not allow one to express quantified statements such as 'There are necessary a posteriori propositions' or 'All laws of physics are necessary' in first-order logic in a straightforward way, while they are readily formalized if necessity is formalized by a predicate. Replacing the operator conception of necessity by the predicate conception, however, causes various problems and forces (...) one to reject many philosophical accounts involving necessity that are based on the use of operator modal logic. We argue that the expressive power of the predicate account can be restored if a truth predicate is added to the language of first-order modal logic, because the predicate 'is necessary' can then be replaced by 'is necessarily true'. We prove a result showing that this substitution is technically feasible. To this end we provide partial possible-worlds semantics for the language with a predicate of necessity and perform the reduction of necessities to necessary truths. The technique applies also to many other intensional notions that have been analysed by means of modal operators. (shrink)

Aristotle, as well, places che species in che position of predícate, but he does so in Metaphysics Z4, in a search that, beyond the seizing of che quiddity, attains in Z 17 the substance as cause through the form of its model of being: in itself, separate and one. Failing to recognise chis approach, che substitution by Porphyre of the species and the difference for the definition, reinforce this misreading for centuries, thus impedíng the passage, wíth Met. H, (...) from what completes the definition: the difference, to what, beyond che form, constitutes che first completion of the substance: its act of being. (shrink)

During decades, the history of philosophy has kept Kierkegaardrsquo;s and Hegelrsquo;s thought apart, and their long-standing opposition has swept through the speculative greatness of Kierkegaardian existentialism and the existential power of Hegelian philosophy. In contrast to such unfortunate misinterpretation, this article aims at showing the deep convergence that relates interiorly the Kierkegaardian ethical stage with the most important Hegelian logic categories. Kierkegaard and Hegel conceive of the idea as the real power of subjective becoming, and the existence as the (...) actual concretion of the ideal. To both of them, the pure emeneacute;rgeia/em of freedom, which starts in the abstract and aesthetical possibility of the subjective immediacy, realizes itself as the actual concretion of finitude, assuming time and contingency by the eternal and necessary force of duty. The Kierkegaardian repetition is nothing but this powerful idea, mediating the flux of finite differences in the eternal identity of subject. However, for Kierkegaard as well as for Hegel there is an absolute contradiction, which promotes the overcoming of ethics. (shrink)

Let T be a second-order arithmetical theory, Λ a well-order, λ < Λ and X ⊆ ℕ. We use $[\lambda |X]_T^{\rm{\Lambda }}\varphi$ as a formalization of “φ is provable from T and an oracle for the set X, using ω-rules of nesting depth at most λ”.For a set of formulas Γ, define predicative oracle reflection for T over Γ ) to be the schema that asserts that, if X ⊆ ℕ, Λ is a well-order and φ ∈ Γ, then$$\forall \,\lambda (...) < {\rm{\Lambda }}\,.$$In particular, define predicative oracle consistency ) as Pred–O–RFN{0=1}.Our main result is as follows. Let ATR0 be the second-order theory of Arithmetical Transfinite Recursion, ${\rm{RCA}}_0^{\rm{*}}$ be Weakened Recursive Comprehension and ACA be Arithmetical Comprehension with Full Induction. Then,$${\rm{ATR}}_0 \equiv {\rm{RCA}}_0^{\rm{*}} + {\rm{Pred - O - Cons\ }}\left \equiv {\rm{RCA}}_0^{\rm{*}} + \,{\rm{Pred - O - Cons\ }}\left \equiv {\rm{RCA}}_0^{\rm{*}} + \,{\rm{Pred - O - RFN}}\,_{{\bf{\Pi }}_2^1 } \left.$$We may even replace ${\rm{RCA}}_0^{\rm{*}}$ by the weaker ECA0, the second-order analogue of Elementary Arithmetic.Thus we characterize ATR0, a theory often considered to embody Predicative Reductionism, in terms of strong reflection and consistency principles. (shrink)

The tension between beauty and technology is evinced in the modern distinction within technē itself between technology and “fine art.” Yet while beauty,as Kant observes, is never a means to an end, neither is it an “end in itself.” Beauty points beyond itself while refusing subordination to human interests. Both its noninstrumentality and its self-transcending character I trace to the intrinsic necessity of the beautiful, which is essentially impersonal while paradoxically being an object of love. I (...) suggest that we conceive of beauty as an “anonymous voice,” and I relate the latter to Heidegger’s critique of modern technology as a projection upon nature of “resource being.” I conclude that technology can be creative rather than destructive of beauty when it lets natural ends, which are inescapably in conflict with one another, transcend themselves through self-sacrifice. (shrink)

Deliberation issues in decision, and so might be taken as a paradigmatic volitional activity. Character, on the other hand, may appear pre-volitional: the dispositions that constitute it provide the background against which decisions are made. Bernard Williams offers an intriguing picture of how the two may be connected via the concept of practical necessities, which are at once constitutive of character and deliverances of deliberation. Necessities are thus the glue binding character and the will, allowing us to take responsibility for (...) our characters. Intriguing though the picture may be, it did not receive a thorough elaboration in Williams’s work. My aim here is to work out and defend what I take to be the most valuable aspect of Williams’s view of agency: its model of the way character and the will can jointly determine agency through mutual constitution. However, I argue that Williams’s attempt to use this model to ground his attack on Kantian morality does not succeed, because the primacy Williams accords to character over the will cannot yield the appropriate kind of normative authority, even from the perspective of the agent. I urge that we retain Williams’s model of the interaction between character and the will, modified to allow the will an authority that is not derived from the necessity of character. (shrink)

In this essay I propose to examine Hegel’s account of necessity and contingency in the Science of Logic. Anyone who dares to take Hegel’s Logic seriously in public risks being accused by legions of formal logicians of “elementary logical fallacies”. Nevertheless, John Burbidge, Dieter Henrich, and others have demonstrated that it is possible to discuss the Logic with clarity and intelligibility, and I shall endeavor to emulate their example as best as I can. One should take heed, however; even (...) Hegel admits that “the concept of necessity is very difficult,” and rendering the concept of necessity intelligible will not eliminate that difficulty. All I can hope to do, therefore, is take us from the point at which we are not even sure what the difficulty is supposed to be to the point at which the nature of the difficulty itself becomes clear. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 51 - 75 History occupies a somewhat awkward position in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Although they often criticise history as a practice and advance alternatives that are explicitly anti-historical, such as ‘nomadology’ and ‘geophilosophy’, their scholarship is nevertheless littered with historical encounters and deeply influenced by historians such as Fernand Braudel. One of Deleuze and Guattari’s more significant engagements with history occurs through their reading and theory of universal (...) history. In this paper I will explicate and critically analyse the nature of this universal history vis-à-vis its most pertinent counterpoint: Hegel’s philosophy of world history. In contrast to Hegel’s form of historicism, which universalizes by virtue of a unitary and totalizing force, Deleuze and Guattari develop a universalizing mechanism that is strictly devoid of any privileged essence. Following, Deleuze and Guattari’s form of universal history is marked above all by contingency as opposed to necessity. In this paper I will show precisely how. I will also go on to demonstrate how Deleuze and Guattari’s universal history offers the promise of an historical ontology commensurate with the processes of creativity and becoming, provided that appropriate steps are taken to reaffirm the radical contingency at its heart. (shrink)

It is commonplace among friends of irreducible causal powers to depict powers as producing their characteristic manifestations as a matter of metaphysical necessity. That is to say that when a power finds itself in those circumstances that stimulate it, it cannot help but be exercised: its effects must occur. The result is a metaphysic that depicts the world not as loose and separate but as united by the strongest glue; this is but one way in which the world (...) as understood by friends of powers differs from that of their Humean adversaries. However, this typical understanding of powers has recently come under attack. Schrenk and Mumford and Anjum have independently argued that metaphysical necessity is not up to the task of connecting a stimulated power with its manifestation. Employing the same devices friends of powers use in rejecting attempts to analyze power ascriptions in terms of counterfactual conditionals, Schrenk and Mumford and Anjum argue that any process a power elicits could be frustrated by way of interference or prevention, and thereby blocked. For example, striking a dry match against a rough surface will generally lead to its lighting, but as anyone who has attempted to do this can attest, a strong gust of wind can prevent the match from lighting, despite the striking having taken place. Hence, even in the presence of its stimulus, the power's manifestation is not ensured, and so the claim that powers necessarily bring about their manifestations is undermined. (shrink)

The field of medicine provides an important window through which to examine the encounters between religion and science, and between modernity and tradition. While both religion and science consider health to be a ‘good’ that is to be preserved, and promoted, religious and science-based teachings may differ in their conception of what constitutes good health, and how that health is to be achieved. This paper analyzes the way the Islamic ethico-legal tradition assesses the permissibility of using vaccines that contain (...) porcine-derived components by referencing opinions of several Islamic authorities. In the Islamic ethico-legal tradition controversy surrounds the use of proteins from an animal (pig) that is considered to be impure by Islamic law. As we discuss the Islamic ethico-legal constructs used to argue for or against the use of porcine-based vaccines we will call attention to areas where modern medical data may make the arguments more precise. By highlighting areas where science can buttress and clarify the ethico-legal arguments we hope to spur an enhanced applied Islamic bioethics discourse where religious scholars and medical experts use modern science in a way that remains faithful to the epistemology of Islamic ethics to clarify what Islam requires of Muslim patients and healthcare workers. (shrink)

Plausible recent arguments for the existence of necessary truths a posteriori have led many philosophers to believe, at least implicitly, that conventionalism about necessity is false, and that necessity is in fact a real-world quantity. Necessary truths, on this view, are no more independent upon our linguistic conventions than any other truths; assertions of necessity and essential predications are, like any other claims, true or false as they correspond or not to a wholly independent reality. I believe (...) that this view is not supported by the finding of necessary truths a posteriori, and further, that we have excellent reason to reject this realism about necessity, and to accept instead a conventionalist account. My dissertation attempts to argue for this view, and to present and defend such a conventionalist account. ;In Chapter One, I present a conventionalist explanation of necessary truths a posteriori, and thus argue that the existence of such truths does not establish realism about necessity. My account makes use of general conventions which I call 'general principles of individuation.' If these principles are products of our conventions, then we can both allow for and explain how there can be such 'empirical' necessary truths within a conventionalist framework. ;Chapter Two argues that conventionalism about necessity and essences has traditionally been grounded in metaphysical worries about necessity, not upon now outdated epistemological and semantic views, as is often claimed by the opponents of conventionalism. ;In Chapter Three, I present my central arguments for conventionalism and against realism about necessity. I argue that only conventionalism can explain how we have the knowledge that we do of what is necessary, and further, that it is not even clear that we can make sense of necessity as an independent feature of the world. Chapter Four responds to worries stemming from the fact that my account requires that there be systematically important analytic truths. ;Finally, in Chapter Five, I attempt to apply my findings to the theory of reference. I argue that if conventionalism about necessity and essences is true, then empiricist semantics must be basically correct, and that causal theories of reference must thus be either compatible with empiricist semantics, or false. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there are some sentences whose truth makes no demands on the world, being trivially true in that their truth-conditions are trivially met. I argue that this does not amount to their truth-conditions being met necessarily: we need a non-modal understanding of the notion of the demands the truth of a sentence makes, lest we be blinded to certain conceptual possibilities. I defend the claim that the truths of pure mathematics and set theory are trivially (...) true, and hence accepting their truth brings no ontological commitment; I further defend the claim that the truths of applied mathematics and set theory do not demand the existence of numbers or sets. While the notion of a demand must not be reduced to anything modal, I nonetheless argue that sentences that are trivially true must also be necessary, lest we violate a very weak version of the principle that truth depends on the world. I further argue that all necessary truths are trivially true, lest we admit unexplained necessities. I end by showing one important consequence of this: I argue that if there are truthmakers for intrinsic predications, they must be states of affairs rather than tropes. (shrink)

Saul Kripke, in a series of classic writings of the 1960s and 1970s, changed the face of metaphysics and philosophy of language. Christopher Hughes offers a careful exposition and critical analysis of Kripke's central ideas about names, necessity, and identity. He clears up some common misunderstandings of Kripke's views on rigid designation, causality and reference, and the necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori. Through his engagement with Kripke's ideas Hughes makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates on, (...) inter alia, the semantics of natural kind terms, the nature of natural kinds, the essentiality of origin and constitution, the relative merits of 'identitarian' and counterpart-theoretic accounts of modality, and the identity or otherwise of mental types and tokens with physical types and tokens. No specialist knowledge in either the philosophy of language or metaphysics is presupposed; Hughes's book will be valuable for anyone working on the ideas which Kripke made famous in the philosophy world. (shrink)

In his seminal “Outline of a Theory of Truth” Kripke (1975) proposed understanding modal predicates as complex expressions defined by a suitable modal operator and a truth predicate. In the case of the alethic modality of logical or metaphysical necessity, this proposal amounts to understanding the modal predicate ‘is necessary’ as the complex predicate ‘is necessarily true’. In this piece we work out the details of Kripke’s proposal, which we label the Kripke reduction, from a proof-theoretic perspective. To this (...) end we construct a theory for the modal predicate and a theory of truth formulated in a language with a modal operator and show that the modal predicate theory is interpretable in the theory of truth where the interpretation translates the modal predicate ‘N’ by the complex predicate ‘☐T’, the truth predicate modified by the modal operator. In addition, we show that our work can be viewed as the proof-theoretic counterpart to the semantic Kripke reduction recently carried out by Halbach and Welch (2009), which is based on Kripke’s theory of truth. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman's own solution to his new riddle of induction turns on the degree to which predicates are entrenched in our use of language. However, this solution requires that judgements concerning the degree to which a predicate is entrenched can be made independently of any canon of perceptible similarity. I argue that this requirement cannot be met. The riddle itself depends upon the claim that since ‘green’ can be defined positionally in terms of ‘grue’ and ‘bleen’, ‘grue’ and ‘bleen’ (...) are symmetrically related to ‘green’ and ‘blue’, and positionality is therefore ‘an entirely relative matter’. However, in order to establish that positionality is an entirely relative matter, we would need to provide a non‐positional definition of ‘grue’, rather than a positional definition of ‘green’. We therefore need to decide whether ‘grue’ can be defined ostensively by means of a single sample, as ‘green’ can. I argue that any attempt to provide such a definition is bound to fail, and hence the new riddle of induction does not reveal that ‘the roots of inductive validity are to be found in our use of language’. (shrink)

The characterization of thought as a subject reflection about a given object is expressed by an enunciation of predicative order. The introduction of the possibility of a type of thought that it is not constituted in virtue of this presupposition brings a lot of difficulties, which is responsible for why Lloyd treats this theme as an enigma of Greek philosophy, i.e, non-discursive thinking. Plotinus seems to make a distinction between rational and intellectual thought, taking as a starting point the _sui (...) generis_ definition of a thinking that thinks itself. The intriguing nature of this description, i.e, the self-thinking as non-discursive thought, has raised studies with the primary aim to understand how it works this type of thinking. Then to clarify what does it mean to adopt the non-discursive approach. This paper intends to analyze the cited problem in the light of the “non-predicative” of Santos. The hypothesis is that by applying this concept to the discussion it will contribute to increase clarification on the distinction between reason and Intellect. That exercise will be conducted in majority through the reading of V.3 [49] of Plotinus _Enneads_. The nature of the intellectual thought would be non-predicative and the rational would be predicative. (shrink)

In this systematic historical analysis, Nino Langiulli focuses on a key philosophical issue, possibility, as it is refracted through the thought of the Italian ...

Through both an historical and philosophical analysis of the concept of possibility, we show how including both potentiality and actuality as part of the real is both compatible with experience and contributes to solving key problems of fundamental process and emergence. The book is organized into four main sections that incorporate our routes to potentiality: (1) potentiality in modern science [history and philosophy; quantum physics and complexity]; (2) Relational Realism [ontological interpretation of quantum physics; philosophy and logic]; (3) Process (...) Physics [ontological interpretation of relativity theory; physics and philosophy]; (4) on speculative philosophy and physics [limitations and approximations; process philosophy]. We conclude that certain fundamental problems in modern physics require complementary analyses of certain philosophical and metaphysical issues, and that such scholarship reveals intrinsic features and limits of determinism, potentiality and emergence that enable, among others, important progress on the quantum theory of measurement problem and new understandings of emergence. (shrink)

A set of basic static predicates, 'in itself, 'existing through itself, 'free', and others are taken to be (at least) extensionally equivalent, and some consequences are drawn in Parts A and? of the paper. Part C introduces adequate causation and adequate conceiving as extensionally equivalent. The dynamism or activism of Spinoza is reflected in the reconstruction by equating action with causing, passion (passive emotion) with being caused. The relation between conceiving (understanding) and causing is narrowed down by (...) introducing grasping (λ μβ?νω) as a basic epistemological term. Part D, 'The road to freedom through active emotion', introduces a system of grading with respect to the distinctions introduced in the foregoing, including 'being in itself, 'freedom', etc. Active emotions are seen to represent transitions to a higher degree of freedom, the stronger and more active ones being the more conducive to rapid increase in degree of freedom. Elementary parts of the calculus of predicates are used in order to facilitate the survey of conceptual relations and to prove some theorems. (shrink)

Karl Rahner distinguishes “the experience of grace” and “the experience of grace as grace.” How is the experience of grace to be understood? How is grace experienced? This article attempts to understand the experience of grace in terms of Maurice Blanchot’s thought of the impossible. “Human life is impossible,” as Simone Weil reflects. Blanchot, particularly through a reflection which echoes that of Levinas, seeks to reverse the relationship between possibility and impossibility. Whereas, for Heidegger, the subject is to be (...) understood in terms of possibility, Blanchot stresses the impossibility of human life which is only rendered possible through an initiative which is prior to the subject. The impossible relation with the other is the context for any possibility the self may have. With regard to grace, we argue its prior necessity, and its experience as impossible. Like suffering and death, the experience of grace is not the possibility of impossibility, but the impossibility of possibility. Maurice Blanchot himself remains relatively unfamiliar, he and his thoughts remaining in themselves inaccessible. Michel Foucault quite simply writes, “so far has he withdrawn into the manifestation of his work, so completely is he, not hidden by his texts, but absent from their existence, that for us he is that thought itself—its real, absolutely distant, shimmering, invisible presence, its inevitable law, its calm, infinite measured strength” (Foucault: Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Outside, 19). To a world espoused to philosophies of light and systems of integration, Blanchot’s thought presents itself as a “thought from outside” of any philosophy and any system, and refuses, as Levinas, says, to “see in philosophy the ultimate possibility.”. (shrink)

cannot, cover the broad topic indicated in the title. Rather, it will concern itself only with some preliminary ideas leading the way to a larger project, which, however, should eventually bear an even broader title. As a matter of fact, here I will consider at some length only two authors from the beginning of the period indicated in the title, namely, Aquinas and Siger of Brabant. (Or perhaps three authors, provided the anonymous author of the..

The aim of the present article is to consider the shortcomings of the physicalist rainfall example set forth by Aristotle in Physics II.8. I first outline the ancient physicalist account of the coming-to-be of natural organisms and the accompanying rejection of the teleological character of such processes. Then I examine the rainfall example itself. The fundamental difficulty is that rainfall does not appear to have a proper nature. Hence it is not natural in the strict sense and cannot be (...) used in arguments either for or against natural teleology. Rainfall can at most have an end in a weak sense, which makes it inadequate as a paradigm. Furthermore, the physicalist conception of action for an end is itself flawed. I argue that they construe it anthropomorphically and falsely presuppose a symmetry between coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be. I would like to thank Hasse Hamalainen and Marcin Karas for looking at earlier drafts of this paper. I am also especially grateful for the numerous remarks and suggestions of three anonymous referees. (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 lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Exclusivity and ParticularityJohn Dominic CrossanSeveral of the authors spoke of the imperial exclusivity so characteristic of Christianity. For José Ignacio Cabezón, “What Buddhists find objectionable is (a) the Christian characterization of the deity whose manifestation Jesus is said to be, and (b) the claim that Jesus is unique in being such a manifestation” (p. 56). For Bokin Kim, “most Christians hold to an exclusive view of Christ that claims (...) his uniqueness” (p. 76). For Rita Gross, “the exclusive claims made on behalf of Jesus by Christians appalled me even as a teenager, and my repugnance for exclusive truth claims on the part of religions—any religion—has not diminished since. Thus, part of my journey is working out both a theory and a praxis of religious pluralism that is neither relativistic nor universalistic, that encourages both commitment to one tradition and appreciation of other traditions” (p. 64). I myself find such exclusivistic claims for Christianity, or any other religion, insulting in theory and lethal in practice, objectionable in history and obscene in theology. They are implicitly genocidal even if political impotence limits the divine ethnic cleansing they imagine. But how, as Gross repeats, does one establish “a position that is neither relativistic nor exclusivistic”? (p. 65). My own answer is particularity, but I must explain that in terms of my understanding of Trinity, divinity, and particularity.Trinity seems a particularly and peculiarly Christian understanding of God, but my proposal is that the structure of the Holy is Trinitarian in all religions that I know about and even in all those I can imagine. I speak very deliberately about the Holy (not about God) as the infinite mystery that surrounds and supports, fascinates and terrifies us. It is that against which we interact as meaning-seeking beings. Be it absolute open meaninglessness or absolute univocal meaning, our interaction with it does not seem to be an option but a necessity. And my point is that the Holy is Trinitarian in structure. It is not just on the one hand that religion is Trinitarian in structure. But it is not on the other hand that the Holy in itself and apart from us is Trinitarian in structure. It is, I propose, that the Holy in itself as seen by us across the spectrum of world religious experience is Trinitarian in structure. That Trinity [End Page 97] involves, first, ultimate metaphor, that foundational image that imagines the Holy as, for example, power, person, state, or order, as nature, god/goddess, nirvana, or mandate of heaven. It involves, second, material manifestation, some physical object in which that metaphorical vision is peculiarly, specially, or even uniquely incarnated, some person, place, or thing, some individual or collectivity, some cave or shrine or temple, some clearing in the forest or tree in the desert where that ultimate referent is encountered and experienced. It involves, finally, preliminary preparation, for there must be at least one believer to begin with and eventually more to end with. But, as there are always nonbelievers as well, some prior affinity must exist, as it were, between this metaphor rather than that, this manifestation rather than that, and this believer rather than that. For me, therefore, all faith and all religion, not just my own Christianity, is Trinitarian in structure and that structure seems to inhere in the Holy itself, at least insofar as we can see it. For me, therefore, Christianity and Buddhism differ most profoundly on their ultimate metaphor for the Holy: it is person (God) for the former but state (nirvana) for the latter. In Christianity, of course, our ultimate metaphor is rather overinvested: it is person; and that person is parent; and that parent is father. But I leave those specifications aside for the moment.Divinity is the term I use for any material manifestation. By calling such manifestations divine I mean precisely that a religion’s ultimate metaphor is experienced by believers as peculiarly, specially, or even uniquely present in that physical phenomenon. In that sense I understand both Christ and the Buddha to be divine in exactly the same way—that is, as incarnations of the Holy but within different ultimate metaphors. Christ did... (shrink)

삼위일체론은 기독교의 독특하면서 가장 중심적인 교리로서 어거스틴, 안셀름을 비롯한 수많은 스콜라철학자들이 전 인생을 걸고 탐구했던 주제라 해도 과언이 아닐 것이다. 또한 그것은 헤겔(G. Hegel), 가다머(H.-G. Gadamer) 등의 철학에 있어 중심적인 주제로서 삼위일체론을 배제하고 그들의 철학을 온전히 파악했다 할 수 없을 정도이다. 하지만 이러한 삼위일체론의 철학 사상사 속의 중요도에 비해 그리고 그것이 여전히 서양 철학계에서 지속적 탐구의 대상인 것과 비교하여 국내 철학계의 이에 대한 논의는 부족한 것이 현실이다. 본 논문에서는 삼위일체의 논리적 무모순성 및 정합성을 논하는 것을 넘어 삼위일체의 논리적 필연성을 논증하는데 (...) 그 목적이 있다. 이를 위해 논문의 전반부에는 삼위일체론을 연구한 신학자들과 철학자들의 연구와 그 한계점을 살펴보고 이후 중반부에서는 “상상 가능한 최고로 확실한 진리”로서의 절대자의 논리적인 존재 양식이 어떠해야 할 것인가를 양상논리적 해석을 통해 논의할 것이다. 그리고 논문의 후반부에서는 수를 센다는 것의 본질적인 의미에 대해 고찰하고 서수와 기수의 현대적 정의를 바탕으로 영원한 관계적 양식으로서 존재하는 신은 하나하나 따로 셀 수 없는 서수적 초월성을 가지고 아울러 기수적 초월성도 가짐으로써 일체를 이룸을 논증할 것이다. (shrink)

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN ESSENCE AND EXISTENCE has been taken to be central to Avicenna’s metaphysics and ontology of being. Due to the influence that this distinction had on Thomism, and to a lesser extent on Maimonides’s work, some Medievalists and Orientalists took Avicenna’s distinction between essence and existence to be characterized by essentialism. A.-M. Goichon’s books Léxique de la Langue Philosophique d’Ibn Sina, Vocabulaires Comparés d’Aristote et d’Ibn Sina, and La Philosophie d’Avicenne et son Influence en Europe all offer a (...) great contribution to the translation and understanding of Avicenna’s works. However the interpretive reception of Goichon’s works has had a strong influence on subsequent Medievalists as well as Orientalist scholars. This impact on scholars, along with the stress on Avicenna’s influence on Thomism, has led in some instances to an exaggerated stress on the centrality of the essence/ existence distinction in Avicenna’s metaphysics. This state of affairs has eventually overshadowed other important aspects of Avicenna’s ontology of being and of his metaphysical and logical analysis of being in terms of the modalities of necessity, contingency, and impossibility. The examination of Avicenna’s metaphysics under the spell of all of these factors leads to an intellectually discomforting position that construes his ontology as essentialism. Consequently this leads to the interpretation of his work as being that of a metaphysician who subordinates existence to essence. Such interpretation has been even adopted by experts on Avicenna’s work within the Western scholarship as well as among some Arabists. For instance, some scholars stress that Averroes and Mulla Sadra are the metaphysicians of existence, while taking Avicenna to be the metaphysician of essence. John Caputo, a leading interpreter of Heidegger’s thought, makes extensive references to the work of the Thomist scholar Étienne Gilson in the context of examining Aquinas’s adoption of the Avicennian distinction between essence and existence. Caputo’s discussion of the essence/existence distinction adopts the standpoint that Gilson reflects in the reading of Avicenna’s metaphysics as being the starting point of a longstanding essentialist tradition that culminates with Hegel’s Science of Logic. This line of argumentation already supplies Caputo with sufficient arguments that enable him readily to stamp Avicenna’s metaphysics with Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysical tradition. Caputo based himself on what the Thomist scholar Gilson offers in this regard, particularly in taking Aquinas’s metaphysics to be the metaphysics of esse. Gilson’s position may itself be questioned on the ground that its interpretation of Avicenna has been pervaded by Thomist inclinations; this is the case, given that Gilson and other scholars construe Avicenna’s metaphysics as being essentially the metaphysics of essence. Based on this, Caputo accepts the claim that Avicenna’s ontology is essentialist. Such readings lead to the conclusion that Avicenna subordinates existence to essence and consequently that his ontology is characterized by what Heidegger takes to be a mark of the oblivion of being. The question that ought to be raised in this regard is whether the position of secondary scholarly sources is accurate. This is the case, given that some of the scholars, who propagate the claim that Avicenna is an essentialist, are after all scholars who have not consulted or studied the primary sources. Rather, they primarily rely on secondary sources that mediate Avicenna’s metaphysics through the Thomist scholarship and Latin translations. This is clearly the case with Gilson’s consideration of Avicenna’s corpus, which is addressed from the standpoint of Latin renderings of Avicenna’s texts rather than consulting the original Arabic or Persian texts. Having said that, the issue becomes more complicated in the light of considering Arabist or Medievalist scholars who do consult the primary Arabic sources, yet still hold that Avicenna is an essentialist. Such scholars remain under the influence of earlier translations and interpretations that were offered by prominent Orientalist scholars, who addressed the essence/ existence distinction in the light of broad philosophical concerns with Medieval Latin and Jewish philosophy, or by tracing the Aristotelian and Peripatetic influences on Islamic and Arabic philosophy. Some scholars like Gilson might even go further in terms of considering the works of Avicenna and Averroes from the standpoint of mapping out the doctrinal quarrels between Scotism and Thomism. The Medievalists who consult primary sources, yet who are still under the spell of earlier Orientalist views, do not attempt to review some of their positions by going back to a closer examination of the texts and to a questioning reception of dominant translations and interpretations. There is a hermeneutic need to return to the primary texts and to reexamine them in the light of new philosophical concerns. This return and reexamination are also needed in the light of questioning and adopting new methodological inclinations in translation and interpretation. This becomes a pressing issue given the seriousness of the philosophical consequences that might arise if we readily take Avicenna’s metaphysics to be characterized by essentialism. The examination of Avicenna’s ontology must account for the renderings of the terms mahiya, dhat, and wujud, be it in Latin, English, or French, or in terms of the Arabic/persian semantic, syntactic, and grammatical structure and derivation. The nuances of translation are determined by how these terms are philosophically used within the text and in the course of the development of Avicenna’s arguments. Such linguistic investigations would elucidate the philosophical interpretation of the essence/existence distinction in the light of addressing contemporary philosophical concerns, as these are attested with the consideration of Heidegger’s critique of classical ontology. (shrink)