The history of philosophy risks a self-opacity whereby we overestimate or underestimate our proximity to prior modes of thinking. This risk is relevant to assessing Hegel’s appropriation by McDowell and Priest. McDowell enlists Hegel for a quietist answer to the problem with assuming that concepts and reality belong to different orders, viz., how concepts are answerable to the world. If we accept Hegel’s absolute idealist view that the conceptual is boundless, this problem allegedly dissolves. Priest enlists Hegel for a dialetheist (...) answer to the problem with assuming that truth and falsity are mutually exclusive, viz., how certain sentences are both true and false. If we accept Hegel’s dialectical view that certain contradictions are necessary, this problem allegedly dissolves. For both McDowell and Priest, we find a true friend in Hegel. I argue that McDowell’s and Priest’s appropriations of Hegel overestimate Hegel’s affinity with quietism and dialetheism. McDowell reads Hegel as a quietist who silences metaphysical claims and the skeptical questions they raise against commonsense, but neglects Hegel’s adaptation of ancient skepticism against commonsense. Priest reads Hegel as a dialetheist who subordinates formal logic to dialectical logic by affirming the truth of certain contradictions, but neglects Hegel’s commitment to resolving contradictions for the sake of truth qua whole. I diagnose their misreadings in terms of what Hegel regards as the three moments of logic and argue that while McDowell jumps to its third moment, Priest stalls at its second moment. According to Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, logic has three “moments”: the abstractive moment of the understanding, which “stops short” at fixed categories; the negative moment of dialectic, which discovers the “genuine nature” of the categories, viz., that each “passes over, of itself, into its opposite”; and the positive moment of speculation, which grasps the “unity” of categories through the “dissolution” of their inner opposition. Hegel warns that if these moments are “kept separate from each other […] they are not considered in their truth”. I suggest that quietist and dialetheist readings of Hegel fail to consider truthfully the unified moments of his logic. In his quietist critique of metaphysics, McDowell enlists Hegel to dissolve the problem with assuming the duality of concept and reality. But McDowell helps himself directly to the third moment of logic, where the unity of the categories, and hence the boundlessness of the conceptual, would be fully articulated. Since he arrives at the third moment prematurely, ignoring its prior moments, he obscures its truth (§1). In his dialetheist critique of formal logic, Priest enlists Hegel to dissolve the problem with assuming the duality of truth and falsity. But Priest restricts himself gratuitously to the second moment of logic, where contradictions within the categories are not yet resolved. Since he stalls at the second moment, severed from its final moment, he obscures its truth (§2). I argue we can extricate Hegel from quietist and dialetheist misreadings only if we grasp the truth of the three moments of logic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 138-152 [Access article in PDF] Respecting the Rupture: Not Solving the Problem of Unity in Plato's Phaedrus James L. Kastely Plato's Phaedrus is a particularly instructive example of the double nature and status of rhetoric, for it embodies a tension at the heart of rhetoric. The first half of the dialogue presents three examples of rhetorical practice, while the second develops a theoretical (...) justification of rhetoric as an art. Thus, the dialogue would seem to offer a productive negotiation of the practice/theory tension. What makes the dialogue interesting, however, is the fact that this negotiation does not occur. The dialogue does not bring theory and practice into a harmonious relation, for there is a troubling discontinuity between its two halves, and rhetorical practice feels fractured. The exploration of eros that had occupied the first half of the dialogue is abandoned before the beginning of the second half, and then, following a logic that is at best associational, Socrates and Phaedrus explore the standards that should govern the practice of rhetoric. The infelicity of this transition raises a question: why did Plato structure the Phaedrus in such a way that it emphasized the dissonance between the two halves of the dialogue? To pose the question this way, however, is to go in a direction different from many of the best contemporary interpretations of the dialogue, which either argue that the dialogue is unified (Griswold 164) or suggest that the dissonance between its two halves reflects a shift in Plato's approach to philosophy (Kahn 373; Nehamas 352). In contrast, I will argue that the rupture in the dialogue is thematically purposive, for it points to an inescapable schism within rhetoric that makes rhetoric philosophically interesting.Socrates' second speech, his palinode to Eros, is a rhetorical tour de force that closes the first half of the dialogue. The importance of the palinode, however, is not limited to its role as an exemplary rhetorical performance, [End Page 138] for it also plays a crucial role in resolving the problem of erotic madness that organizes the intellectual drama of the first half. It would seem reasonable to expect that such an important and powerful moment in the dialogue would, at the very least, play a significant role in the philosophical discussion that composes the dialogue's second half. But that doesn't happen. While Socrates does refer to the palinode in his theoretical discussion of rhetoric, he makes little use of it, and, more important, he is silent on the subject of eros. Both the dramatic organization of the second half of the dialogue and its theoretical discussion cooperate to turn the rhetorical triumph of the palinode into a problem. Why has eros been abandoned as a philosophic topic, and what does this abandoning imply about the erotically grounded rhetoric that Socrates practiced and defended?To make matters worse, Socrates himself dismisses the palinode as a serious effort. He characterizes the speech as little more than a pleasant game, one that is not without value only because "these two certain forms (of gathering and dividing) were stated by chance" (265c). Far from viewing the palinode as possessing philosophical significance, Socrates appears to value it principally for its being a so-so example of a work of rhetoric that has been shaped by dialectic. While it is hard not to take Socrates' dismissal of the seriousness of the speech as partially disingenuous (just prior to his dismissal, he refers to the palinode as serious and reverent [265b]), he also does seem to mean what he says. Whether he is being straightforward or ironic does not finally matter because in either case the problem that occupies him and Phaedrus in the first half has disappeared from the dialogue. And that creates a problem: for if the philosophic issues of the first half of the dialogue drop out, then the dialogue is not coherent.This incoherence is especially troubling given Socrates' explicit endorsement of coherence as an important rhetorical value. In fact, when he begins his... (shrink)

It is common to hold that our conscious experiences at a single moment are often unified. But when consciousness is unified, what are the fundamental facts in virtue of which it is unified? On some accounts of the unity of consciousness, the most fundamental fact that grounds unity is a form of singularity or oneness. These accounts are similar to Newtonian views of space according to which the most fundamental fact that grounds relations of co-spatiality between various points (...) (or regions) of a space is the fact that these points (or regions) are parts of the same single space. In this paper, I sketch and defend an alternative account of unity of consciousness. Very roughly, the view holds that experiences are unified when they are connected in the right way. In this respect, the view is analogous to Leibnizian views of space according to which the oneness of space emerges from certain conditions over spatial relations. The Leibnizian alternative has significant implications for our understanding of the metaphysics of conscious experience, the cognitive architecture of the mind and our assessment of the conditions under which unity of consciousness breaks. (shrink)

1 See for example, E. J. Lowe, The Possibility of Metaphysics, pp. 51-3, 210-220, and David Lewis, The Plurality of Worlds on the notion of concrete object. 2 The properties that are constituents of a particular should be intrinsic properties, though it need not be assumed that all its intrinsic properties are constituents. The notion of intrinsic property is easier if a sparse view (as opposed to an abundant view) of properties is assumed. A sparse view requires a criterion for (...) being a property, such as a causal principle (Shoemaker) or the related Eleatic principle (Armstrong). Intrinsic properties should be real properties. Such a criterion should rule out conjunctive properties, disjunctive properties, and negated properties. On the hand, it could be stipulated that these are not intrinsic properties. Those that believe in abundant properties should use the criterion to divide properties into two classes (natural and non-natural); intrinsic properties would then be located in the first class. Extrinsic properties are properties that an object possesses in virtue of other objects, their properties, and relations that involve them. If these other objects were to disappear all intrinsic properties would be unaffected. Intrinsic properties are non-relational in the sense that an object does not possesses them in virtue of other objects, their properties, and relations between them. However, intrinsic properties can be relational when an object possesses a (monadic) property in virtue of relations between its parts. Paradigmatic intrinsic properties are the mass, charge, magnetic moment, and spin of the electron as normally understood. (shrink)

A careful reading of the initial posing of the issue to be debated with Protagoras and of its subsequent restatement when the debate resumes after a break will show that Socrates employs three distinct formulae, only the first of which answers at all closely to the term "Unity of the Virtues" which has been commonly used in the scholarly literature as a label for the position which Socrates upholds in the debate. The other two formulae, perfectly distinguishable from the (...) first, I shall call the "Similarity" and "Biconditionality" Theses. I shall discuss the three Theses seriatim. But let me emphasize from the start that they are not treated in the text as logically disjoint tenets, but as successive moments in the elucidation of a single doctrine. That is how Protagoras himself understands them. At no point does he try to drive a wedge between them or play off one against another. He accepts them as complementary expressions of a theory which he rejects and combats as a whole. (shrink)

The historical and typological failure to represent in writing the phenomenon of the moment--light, wonder, love, unity, god, etc.--has repeatedly turned into the success of performance: writing. An examination of the various textualizations of the moment reveals it as a signifier that empties itself of the meaning it is supposed to signify, while instead it generates ever new meaning. Therefore the historical and typological textualizations of the moment of epiphany, dialectical change, recollection, deferral, etc., must be read as a (...) genealogy and an economy . This reading of the moment consists in a three-part discussion of philosophical and literary texts on epiphany in Plato and Dante, on the romantic moment in Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Wordsworth, and on the post/modern moment in Heidegger, Adorno, Nietzsche, Derrida, Goethe, Musil, and Beckett. The romantic moment deserves special attention because of its instability in foregrounding presence and absence. An intimate relationship can be seen between the romantic moment of instability and the post-modern moment of a regulated instability which ultimately shows that the romantic/post-modern moment constitutes the momentum of all previous periods and textualizations of the moment. This examination of the genealogical and economic shapings of the moment reveals it as a rhetorical device. In terms of a politics of semiotics the moment always performatively subverts its political representation. (shrink)

This is the first of three essays which use Edmund Husserl's dependence ontology to formulate a non-Diodorean and non-Kantian temporal semantics for two-valued, first-order predicate modal languages suitable for expressing ontologies of experience (like physics and cognitive science). This essay's primary desideratum is to formulate an adequate dependence-ontological account of order. To do so it uses primitive (proper) part and (weak) foundation relations to formulate seven axioms and 28 definitions as a basis for Husserl's dependence ontological theory of relating (...) class='Hi'>moments. The essay distinguishes between dependence v. independence, pieces v. moments, mediate v. immediate pieces and moments, maximal v. non-maximal pieces, founded v. unfounded qualities, integrative v. disintegrative dependence, and defines the concepts of the completion of an object, the adumbrational equivalence relation of objects, moments of unity which unify objects, and relating moments which relate objects. The eight theorems [CUT90]-[CUT97] show that relating moments of unity provide an adequate account of order in terms of primitive (proper) part and (weak) foundation relations. (shrink)

Of all the sciences, philosophy is the most concrete and comprehensive. The sense of cold, remote spaces which it is apt to generate in us is the result of this very width and concreteness. The philosopher has to condense the many-sided variety of human life and express it through the symbols of a common language. The symbols are at best only semi-transparent.ness descends upon him the moment they become opaque. Philosophy, in fact, is useless to us unless we can see (...) through it. If we cannot, the fault may be ours. If it is the philosopher's, then his failure is a failure to be wide enough or concrete enough. He needs above all to be sympathetically sensitive to the wide range of human interests, because it is this as a whole that he is bidden to systematize. He must give a single answer, and for that he must formulate a single question. Therefore his first problem is to discover the unity of problems. (shrink)

In this dissertation I examine the ontological and systematic basis of Hegel’s social and political philosophy. I argue that the structures of the will, discussed in paragraphs five through seven of the Philosophy of Right, present the key for understanding the goal and the argumentative structure of that work. Hegel characterizes the will in terms of the oppositions between the universal and the particular, the infinite and the finite, and the indeterminate and the determinate. Ultimately, he argues that we must (...) grasp the will as the unity of these oppositional moments. The Philosophy of Right presents an extended attempt to grasp this unity. -/- In order to central problem presented by the structure of the will, I argue that we must first recognize the will as the highest instantiation of the more general structures that constitute the notion. On my interpretation, the term ‘notion’ designates Hegel’s doctrine of substance. More specifically, this term presents his conception of substance in terms of categories normally associated with human subjectivity, in terms of representation and purposive action. -/- The will presents the highest or truest instantiation of the notion. Various notions can be ranked along a spectrum in accordance with their degree of success at resolving the basic problem facing all objects – namely the problem of integrating or essentially relating identity and difference through self-constituting activity. The unification of identity and difference presents the central problem or paradox of Hegel’s philosophy. It is a paradox that takes many forms. In this dissertation, I show how change, the structure of judgment, and the nature of the object all exhibit this paradox. I also show how Hegel’s doctrine of the notion develops as a direct response to this paradox. Additionally, I argue that Hegel’s account of the structure of the will – as the unity of the universal and the particular, the unity of the infinite and the finite, and the unity of the indeterminate and the determinate – presents the highest manifestation of the paradox that arises when we seek to explain the unity of identity and difference. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to consider Hegel's unity, which is "the Unity of Identity and Difference" Or to examine and explain the "unity of seemingly contradictory features in a single coherent whole" in the light of the main problem of Hegel's philosophy, that is, the overcoming of divisions or dualities, as the solution of her philosophy. Unity (Einheit) is an important ideal, goal and end for Hegel's philosophical system. Hence, in his entire philosophical system (...) and in different periods of his intellectual life, the traces of the search for unity are always obvious, from the beautiful artistic unity in Greece to his desired unity, which is a rational, speculative, philosophical, absolute and Mediated unity. For him, the whole of philosophy is nothing but the study of the definition of unity and its realization in society. A unity that, instead of eliminating or absorbing another, tries to preserve and eliminate pluralities and differences by accepting and recognizing another in a single coherent whole. A unity in which differences and dualities do not disappear but are preserved as necessary and inevitable moments. Unity that is not the result of direct intuition but the product and result of passing through different stages and an intersubjective matter. For Hegel, it is not atomism and excessive individualism in the modern world that lead to rupture, not mere mystical and abstract unions that wipe out all differences, but the unity of the whole in which All distinctions are preserved. (shrink)

Every year, the member Churches of the World Council of Churches (WCC) are called to actively participate in the meetings organized in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. From my perspective, these moments are an extraordinary opportunity to share in the richness of the Orthodox tradition, which means an act of confession and authentic witness. In the first part, I will present critically the canonical synthesis of the Orthodox, the concept of “Ecumenical Eucharist” and of Lima Liturgy, (...) followed by the recommendations of the Special Commission for Orthodox participation in the WCC regarding confessional and interconfessional common prayer. Then, this article will make a historical presentation of the week of prayer. It is very important to know how this initiative started and how it was accepted at the beginning and over the years. At least in Romania, where we have an Orthodox majority, this week has become a controversial issue produced by those who are against ecumenical dialogue. A special attention is for the actual practice approved by the Romanian Patriarchate. Finally, the article will present the statements of the new Orthodox documents and it will end with some conclusions about this moment of common Christian witness. (shrink)

Every year, the member Churches of theWorld Council of Churches (WCC) are called to actively participate in the meetings organized in theWeek of Prayer for Christian Unity. From my perspective, these moments are an extraordinary opportunity to share in the richness of the Orthodox tradition, which means an act of confession and authentic witness. In the first part, I will present critically the canonical synthesis of the Orthodox, the concept of “Ecumenical Eucharist” and of Lima Liturgy, followed by (...) the recommendations of the Special Commission for Orthodox participation in the WCC regarding confessional and interconfessional common prayer. Then, this article will make a historical presentation of the week of prayer. It is very important to know how this initiative started and how it was accepted at the beginning and over the years. At least in Romania, where we have an Orthodox majority, this week has become a controversial issue produced by those who are against ecumenical dialogue. A special attention is for the actual practice approved by the Romanian Patriarchate. Finally, the article will present the statements of the new Orthodox documents and it will end with some conclusions about this moment of common Christian witness. (shrink)

Of all the sciences, philosophy is the most concrete and comprehensive. The sense of cold, remote spaces which it is apt to generate in us is the result of this very width and concreteness. The philosopher has to condense the many-sided variety of human life and express it through the symbols of a common language. The symbols are at best only semi-transparent.ness descends upon him the moment they become opaque. Philosophy, in fact, is useless to us unless we can see (...) through it. If we cannot, the fault may be ours. If it is the philosopher's, then his failure is a failure to be wide enough or concrete enough. He needs above all to be sympathetically sensitive to the wide range of human interests, because it is this as a whole that he is bidden to systematize. He must give a single answer, and for that he must formulate a single question. Therefore his first problem is to discover the unity of problems. (shrink)

I propose a unified reading of Kant's third critical work, The Critique of Judgment, as a sustained argument that "purposiveness without a purpose" is the a priori, transcendental principle of judgment, a "subjective" yet necessary condition for the practice of judging and for the possibility of experience. I argue that Kant's principle of purposiveness is a temporal-formal structure of the subject's judging activity, a structure of anticipation that unites present and past moments as "towards" the future. Such purposiveness is (...) a necessary principle of judgment, I argue, for it enables the judging subject to unify the contingent, heterogeneous information "given" in experience not only as homogeneous but also as empirically heterogeneous. For Kant, we must be able to judge purposively without a purpose, if we are to be able to form empirical concepts or understand particulars in our experience. But purposiveness is a "merely subjective" principle, according to Kant, because it guides the subject's activity but does not and cannot characterize objects or ground objective claims. The function of purposiveness as a principle by which the judging subject can unify the heterogeneous as heterogeneous is, I argue, exhibited in the unity we attribute to organisms in teleological judgment, and instantiated most purely or clearly in the act of aesthetic appreciation. Thus for Kant, in aesthetic experience the subject reveals its nature as projectively temporal, utterly distinct from objects, governed by anticipation and history, not chronology and mechanism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Unity of Plato’s Sophist: Between the Sophist and the PhilosopherRosamond Kent SpragueNoburo Notomi. The Unity of Plato’s Sophist: Between the Sophist and the Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xxi + 346. Cloth, $64.95.Any corrective to what might be called the "Piecemeal Plato" of the fifties and sixties is to be welcomed; Notomi's contribution to this endeavor is interesting and, I believe, basically sound. (...) As a result of treating the Sophist as a unity, rather than yielding to the temptation to extract philosophically enticing bits, he concludes that "the basic problem of the Sophist is how to distinguish the sophist from the philosopher" (163). Definitional inquiry is suspended in the important Middle Part (236d-264b) in order to deal with the difficulties concerning appearance, image, falsehood, and what is not; Plato is then able to proceed, in the second Outer Part, to the definition of the sophist in terms of the distinction between apparition-making and likeness-making: the sophist is an apparition.Much attention is of necessity devoted to the enigmatic sixth definition of the sophist (the "sophist of noble lineage") in the first Outer Part. Notomi thinks that Plato's initial strategy in the task of distinguishing the sophist from the philosopher was to allot the role of the philosopher to Socrates. But, Notomi writes, "this strategy might undermine his very attempt to secure philosophy... since people often took Socrates for a major sophist" (60-1). The Sophist therefore abandons confrontation with particular historical sophists (as in mainly earlier dialogues) in favor of a more abstract analysis in which Plato appears to be "casting serious doubt on the figure of Socrates as a philosopher" (63). "We have encountered the sophist who appears to be Socrates, and here the appearances of the sophist and the philosopher become the real issue in the Sophist" (68).It is just at this point that Notomi, who follows Proclus in attaching importance to the prologue, where the philosopher is recognized as divine, seems to shy away from a conclusion for which he has really prepared the ground, namely, that the Eleatic visitor takes on the role of the philosopher. He does write that "the visitor from Elea... leads the dialogue in a more constructive manner" (i.e., than Socrates does) (63), but he could well say something much stronger. A passage which would have been much to his purpose as combining the notion of the philosopher with that of appearance, especially to the young, has been missed out; I am thinking of 265d where the visitor, having divided production into divine and human, asks Theaetetus for an important decision: are we to say, of mortal animals and so on, "that nature gives birth to them as a result of some spontaneous cause without intelligence, or shall we say that they come from a cause which, working with reason and art, is divine and proceeds from divinity?" Here Theaetetus makes a remarkable reply: "Perhaps because I am young, I often shift from one belief to the other, but at this moment, looking at your face [eis se blepô] and believing you to hold that these things have a divine origin, I too am convinced" (Cornford). In other words, the face of the visitor has something of the god-like in it, an appearance that Plato has appropriately expressed by using the verb blepô, which, with its compound apoblepô, is his verb of choice for looking at the Forms. I think that the author (perhaps made uneasy by the visitor's place of origin) has not really followed out the implications of his view that "serious doubt" has been cast on the figure of Socrates [End Page 585] as a philosopher. If not Socrates, who then? Eristic may have come out of Elea, but so did the concept of being suitable for Platonic metaphysics, and this latter is by no means unassociated with Socrates in the dialogues, as Notomi quite correctly observes. Perhaps the Eleatic visitor is either Plato himself or else a Socrates made young and beautiful.There is much more in this book than these remarks would imply. A study of Platonic... (shrink)

Corporate management is torn between either focusing solely on the interests of stockholders or taking into account the interests of a wide spectrum of stakeholders. Of course, there need be no conflict where taking the wider view is also consistent with maximising stockholder wealth. In this paper, we examine the extent to which a conflict actually exists by examining the relationship between a company's positive and negative corporate social responsibility activities and equity performance. In general, we find little evidence to (...) suggest that managers taking a wider stakeholder perspective will jeopardise the interest of its stockholders. However, our findings do suggest that the market is not only influenced by the independent CSR activities, but also the totality of these activities and that the facets that they value do vary over time. It seems that most recently, the market has valued most firms that satisfied minimum requirements in the areas of diversity and environmental protection but were most proactive in the area of employee-relations. (shrink)

Mishel Fuco not only influenced the consciousness of modern West, but changed the modus of thinking, the way of perception of many traditional notions, transformed the opinions about the reality, history, person. Philosopher’s principle research programme which attaches the entirety to his works is “archeology of knowledge” programme, the search of human knowledge’s original layers. Let us mark that all Fuco’s works in 1960s are devoted to main aim: to clear up the conditions of historical origin of different mental aims (...) and social institutions in the culture of the Modern Time. Though in the whole this common aim remained for Fuco invariable, but the level on which he realizes his research search is changing constantly and rather logically. Relations of power, and to be more exact,accumulations of power and knowledge, social and cognitive which define all the aggregate of specific possibilities of culture in each given historical period. More than that the philosopher offers the particular prospects of sight of modern society and precisely totality of power relations, its ubiquitous nature and specific productivity which produces itself in each moment in any point or rather in any attitude from one point to another. From Fuco’s point of view the power is everywhere and not because it involves everything but because it comes from everywhere. The power is productive in that degree in which it is not associated with one definite imperious instance but pierces all kinds of activity in society, putting on its indelible stamp, developing under definite angle and due to this factit causes products, produced by them. The power induces and at the same time determines the fact which appears as a result of its inducement. The thirst of supremacy, which surrounds the individual and is focused on it as on the center of its use of force, comes out as a defining sign. It should be noticed that Fuco’s conception of power is not reduced to the understanding it as anonymous impersonal net of relations, piercing all society. It is supplemented by power treatment,coming out in “designed” look of definite imperious structure or imperious institute. (shrink)

One of the major problems (or sometimes pseudo-problems) that archaeologists and historians encounter in the study of ancient cultures is the need to differentiate and to identify the sources of the various concepts, techniques, institutions, forms, designs, motifs, etc., that, at any given moment of time, form the constituent elements of the culture or cultural product to which they have turned their attention; or—to pose the question in its proper framework—to analyse the process of cultural formation inherent in the subject (...) of their study. Such considerations have a special significance for archaeologists, whose essential concern is with the often incomplete assemblages of material remains left behind by the cultures and civilizations of the past, and whose central task is to enumerate and reconstitute the structures and processes that were operative in the societies in question. The study of acculturation—culture change, cultural diffusion, “stimulus diffusion,” culture contact, etc.—has been part of the theoretical and empirical concerns of anthropologists and sociologists since some decades ago, and the subject of an old and now almost abandoned debate. While the terminology of the social sciences concerned with living societies can also be found in archaeological and historical discussion, such concerns have had inadequate application in the fields of archaeological and historical practice. What has dominated and, to a great extent, continues to dominate historical studies is what we might call “the ‘theory’ of influence” and its corollary, “the migration hypothesis.” Thus, it would not be an exaggeration to say that one of the leading aspects of the study of a past society or culture is the concern with the “parent” culture(s) which influenced it, or the search for the location of its “migratory origins.” While this is especially true of studies relating to the societies of the Third World, it is not exclusively so—as we see, for instance, in the case of European prehistory. The immediate epistemological sources of such approaches are not difficult to identify, being principally located in 19th century diffusionism and, as we shall see shortly, in colonial ideology. (shrink)

This is the second in a sequence of three essays which axiomatize and apply Edmund Husserl's dependence ontology of parts and wholes as a non-Diodorean, non-Kantian temporal semantics for first-order predicate modal languages. The Ontology of Intentionality I introduced enough of Husserl's dependence-ontology of parts and wholes to formulate his account of order as effected by relating moments of unity, and The Ontology of Intentionality II extends that axiomatic dependence-ontology far enough to enable its semantic application. Formalizing the (...) compatibility [Vereinbarkeit] relation implicated in Husserl's notorious doctrine of impossible meanings, the essay introduces a compatibility restriction on relations to formulate Husserl's distinction between singular [einheitliche] and plural [mehrheitliche] objects, using plural relating moments to define first-order versions of Husserl's notions of relation complexes (i.e. Sachverhalte), abstracta of n-ary relation complexes, categorial relations, abstract eide as unifications of categorial relations, semantic domains as completions of abstract eide, and material regions as semantic domains which are compatibility upper bounds of categorial relations. These concepts will enable the formal dependence-ontological noetic semantics for two-valued, first-order modal languages introduced in the sequel Two-Valued Logics of Intentionality, the third essay in the sequence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 597-600 [Access article in PDF] Andrew Haas. Hegel and the Problem of Multiplicity. SPEP Studies in Historical Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Pp. xxxii + 355. Paper, $29.95. Jon Stewart. The Unity of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Systematic Interpretation. SPEP Studies in Historical Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Pp. xv + 556. Cloth, $69.95. In his study, (...) The Unity of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Systematic Interpretation, Jon Stewart not only analyzes Hegel's Phenomenology in chapter-by-chapter fashion but he also provides a compelling argument as to why even individual sections of the book can only be interpreted in the context of the unity of the work as a whole. [End Page 597]Stewart views the Phenomenology as a continuation of Kant's project in the first Critique, claiming that Kant did not go far enough in uncovering and justifying the necessary conditions of understanding. Thus, Stewart sees the Phenomenology as a transcendental argument. Like Kant, Hegel is concerned with truth and objectivity but in each subsequent chapter of the Phenomenology, according to Stewart, Hegel takes the reader through a different determination of objectivity.Perhaps most important is Stewart's view of Hegel's notion of "Absolute Knowing," the last section of the Phenomenology. Eschewing theological or metaphysical interpretations or interpretations according to which history comes to an end or some type of divine knowledge is attained, Stewart impressively argues that, for Hegel, absolute knowing means that self-consciousness has finally arrived at the point at which all of the conditions for cognition have been unpacked and that self-consciousness sees these conditions in their necessary systematic and developmental unity. As such, "Absolute Knowing" is merely backward looking; self-consciousness comes to realize all of the forms that knowledge has taken in the past and how this past relates to the way in which self-consciousness cognizes at present. Thus, the Phenomenology, on Stewart's view, is a ladder from common sense to science; it completes a deduction of the categories of thought—universality, particularity, and individuality—that are present in all forms of human thinking in all time periods.At the beginning of this work, Stewart summarizes Hegel's life and works, as well as discusses the Kantian background of Hegel's project as a whole. The subsequent chapters of his book parallel the major divisions in the Phenomenology. Each chapter and each of the various subsections within the chapters—again always paralleling Hegel's work—begins with a brief overview of what Stewart sees as the goal toward which Hegel is progressing in the particular section of the Phenomenology. He then provides an account of the "Notion" or paradigm of truth that Hegel presently criticizes. Accordingly, the author addresses the dialectic by which the particular Notion is sublated or overcome. It is in this section that Stewart explicitly sets out whenever possible the In-Itself, the For-Itself, and the In-Itself-For-Itself moments of the dialectic. Stewart always makes an explicit attempt at discussing what is at issue in the dialectical moment, say, either an irreconcilable split between immediacy and mediacy or between universal and particular. Finally, he ends each chapter or subsequent section with a review of what Hegel has done and how this, then, leads into the next section of the work.In the course of this study, Stewart admirably argues for why the Phenomenology should not be regarded as a "patchwork," by convincingly demonstrating the intricate unity of Hegel's Phenomenology. He shows how Hegel always returns to a similar structure—using, in fact, the very same categories—even in some of the parts of the book that scholars or certain schools of interpretation have tended to dismiss. In the chapter of his book that addresses the first formal chapter of the Phenomenology, "Consciousness," Stewart argues that each of the three subdivisions in the chapter focuses on, respectively, 1) being, 2) the one and the many, and... (shrink)

That Wilfrid Sellars claims that the framework of persons is not a descriptive framework, but a normative one is about as well known as any claim that he makes. This claim is at the core of the famous demand for a synoptic image that closes, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” makes its appearance at key moments in the grand argument of, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” and is the capstone of Sellars’ engagement with Kant in, Science (...) and Metaphysics. Whereas mere things can be subject to ought-to-be rules—e.g. a clock ought to chime on the hour—to be a person, as Sellars understands it, is to be subject to ought-to-do rules—e.g. one ought to wind one’s clocks to chime on the hour. Prima facie, though, there is more to being a person than just being subject to ought-to-do rules. For example, on at least some common ways of using ‘person’ to be a person is to have a unified consciousness, i.e. to be a single subject of a manifold of experience persisting through time. Arguably, that is what Kant takes a person to be. What I hope to show here is that it is what Sellars takes a person to be too. I.e. the exciting twist here is that as Sellars sees it being a single subject of experience persisting through time is being subject to a particular kind of ought-to-do rules, namely, those concepts-qua-inferential-rules that are the means by which we represent the world of causally-related objects existing in space and persisting through time. I take Sellars’ reasons for holding this set of theses to be essentially Kantian, and so my procedure for explicating them will be to trace a single philosophical thread through both Kant’s and Sellars’ thinking surrounding these issues. I begin with the historical problematic to which Kant’s Transcendental Deduction is intended as an answer. By what right does one apply the pure a priori concepts of the understanding? As the necessary means for representing the analytic unity of apperception, i.e. for representing oneself as the single subject of experience persisting through time. That leads to a consideration of the question of what the temporally-discursive experiences are of which one is supposed to be the single subject, and what the nature of the relation is of these experiences to such a subject. Here Sellars provides the answer. The question is ill formed. There is no relation of experiences to a subject because experiences are not themselves things. Rather, ‘an experience’ is a nominalization of the verb ‘experiencing’, which is itself a description of the act of a person. That thesis, then, brings us squarely to the question of what the framework of persons is, and why Sellars is so confident that it is an ineliminable feature of any future iteration of the synoptic image of the world. The answer to the latter question is that descriptive images themselves (scientific or manifest) are constituted by the rules that govern them, and it is only persons that can be subject to such rules. So, in the end, we return to Kant’s claim in the Transcendental Deduction that our representation of a world of causally-related objects existing in space and persisting through time is the means by which one represents oneself as the single subject of experience persisting through time. The descriptions that the scientific image provides are only possible, and necessary, because of what Kant would call their “ultimate principle”: the framework of persons. (shrink)

The following draws out a few points that suggest an inner coherence in the midst of the rich diversity of questions Avtar Brah addresses. One critical factor is that Brah's work appears at a specific historical ‘moment’ — a simultaneously political, historical and theoretical conjuncture — the diasporic. The diaspora — as an emergent space and an interpretive frame — unpicks the claims made for the unities of culturally homogeneous, racially purified identities, and constitutes the moment of the problematic of (...) the subject — when critical thought comes face to face with the perplexing interface between the social and the psychic. Brah confronts the necessarily complex and contradictory specificities of differentiated subjectivities in the diasporic frame within a distinct ‘methodology’ — analytic and interpretive. The very structures ‘out there’, which have so often been thought of as determining, are understood as themselves providing frameworks of meaning, as having an internal psychic and discursive dimension. Avtar Brah is one of the few who have begun to capture such a double inscription through ongoing research. Such is particularly evident in ‘The Scent of Memory’, and it is through a reading of that essay that Brah's distinct ‘methodology’ is presented — an approach which is sensitive to the always already contradictory condition of ‘reality’. What I suggest of Brah's ‘methodology’ is that it is a practice that has significant consequences for the meaning and value placed on social contexts, for the ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ of information and knowledge in interpretation and analysis, a practice that we might call diasporic reasoning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Convention for Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Biomedicine: Convention on Human Rights and BiomedicineCouncil of EuropePreambleThe Member States of the Council of Europe, the other States and the European Community signatories hereto,Bearing in mind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948;Bearing in mind the (...) Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 4 November 1950;Bearing in mind the European Social Charter of 18 October 1961;Bearing in mind the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966;Bearing in mind the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data of 28 January 1981;Bearing also in mind the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 20 November 1989;Considering that the aim of the Council of Europe is the achievement of a greater unity between its members and that one of the methods by which that aim is to be pursued is the maintenance and further realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms;Conscious of the accelerating developments in biology and medicine;Convinced of the need to respect the human being both as an individual and as a member of the human species and recognising the importance of ensuring the dignity of the human being; [End Page 277]Conscious that the misuse of biology and medicine may lead to acts endangering human dignity;Affirming that progress in biology and medicine should be used for the benefit of present and future generations;Stressing the need for international co-operation so that all humanity may enjoy the benefits of biology and medicine;Recognising the importance of promoting a public debate on the questions posed by the application of biology and medicine and the responses to be given thereto;Wishing to remind all members of society of their rights and responsibilities;Taking account of the work of the Parliamentary Assembly in this field, including Recommendation 1160 (1991) on the preparation of a Convention on bioethics;Resolving to take such measures as are necessary to safeguard human dignity and the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual with regard to the application of biology and medicine;Have agreed as follows:Chapter IGeneral provisionsArticle 1. (Purpose and object)Parties to this Convention shall protect the dignity and identity of all human beings and guarantee everyone, without discrimination, respect for their integrity and other rights and fundamental freedoms with regard to the application of biology and medicine.Each Party shall take in its internal law the necessary measures to give effect to the provisions of this Convention.Article 2. (Primacy of the human being)The interests and welfare of the human being shall prevail over the sole interest of society or science.Article 3. (Equitable access to health care)Parties, taking into account health needs and available resources, shall take appropriate measures with a view to providing, within their jurisdiction, equitable access to health care of appropriate quality. [End Page 278]Article 4. (Professional standards)Any intervention in the health field, including research, must be carried out in accordance with relevant professional obligations and standards.Chapter IIConsentArticle 5. (General rule)An intervention in the health field may only be carried out after the person concerned has given free and informed consent to it.This person shall beforehand be given appropriate information as to the purpose and nature of the intervention as well as on its consequences and risks.The person concerned may freely withdraw consent at any time.Article 6. (Protection of persons not able to consent)1. Subject to Articles 17 and 20 below, an intervention may only be carried out on a person who does not have the capacity to consent, for his or her direct benefit.2. Where, according to law, a minor does not have the capacity to consent to an intervention, the intervention may only be carried out with the authorisation of his or her representative or an authority or a person or... (shrink)

The contemporary individual is immersed in a reality characterized by a rapid sequence of stimuli and actions and he is often unable to fully live the present moment. Several authors in the field of psychology have discussed on the individual’s ability to live his own experience in the present moment, each highlighting some peculiar aspects and potential of this concept within their models. The major aim of the present article is to discuss these different psychological perspectives moving from more traditional (...) models such ad Gestalt psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis to contemporary approaches such as Mindfulness-based Cognitive therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and to highlight some points of convergence between such approaches and Chiara Lubich’s thought. In fact Lubich investigated the concept of the present moment from a spiritual perspective, drawing on the life experience inspired by the charisma of unity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Search for Unity in Diversity: The "Permanent Hegelian Deposit" in the Philosophy of John DeweyFrank X. RyanJames A. Good A Search for Unity in Diversity: The "Permanent Hegelian Deposit" in the Philosophy of John Dewey Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. xxx + 288 pp.Among the revelations of Dewey's rare moments of autobiographical reflection, none has generated more curiosity and investigative zeal than his 1930 (...) claim to have "drifted" from Hegel in the decade following his move from Michigan to Chicago in 1894. Beginning with Morton White's Origin of Dewey's Instrumentalism (1943), biographers have divided on the question of whether Dewey's later philosophy was more strongly influenced by William James's experimental psychology or F. J. E. Woodbridge's Aristotelian naturalism. Despite their differences, both approaches are essentially empirical and realistic, and thus the majority of sympathetic commentators have agreed that Dewey was a realist, albeit of a decidedly unorthodox stripe. For them the notion that Dewey retained any significant commitment to idealism, given its virtual eradication at the beginning of the twentieth century, would damage his influence and legacy.It has been something of a puzzle, accordingly, that in the same autobiographical essay Dewey alludes to a "permanent Hegelian deposit." For years Richard Rorty has claimed this differentiates a "good" Dewey committed to "social flourishing" from a "bad" Dewey prone to metaphysical dalliance. But the first systematic inquiry into Dewey's enduring Hegelianism is John R. Shook's Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality (2000). Shook argues convincingly that Dewey never abandoned idealism, but rather transformed it into an experimental naturalism by doing away with both "mind-stuff" and equally noxious "things-in-themselves." In many ways James Good's A Search for Unity in Diversity is a bookend to Shook's project, though Good further differentiates Anglo-American Neo-Hegelianism from Hegel himself. According to Good, Dewey endorsed a Humanistic/Historicist interpretation of Hegel rooted in the reciprocal engagement of individuals and societies, rather than the supernatural and architectonic absolute championed by Neo-Hegelians such as T. H. Green, and F. H. Bradley. With [End Page 216] top-notch scholarship and scrupulous attention to detail, A Search for Unity in Diversity is both an excellent intellectual biography and a penetrating plea for a radical reinterpretation of Dewey's contribution to philosophy. I'll briefly sketch the historical account before addressing the more controversial claims about the "permanent Hegelian deposit."Even readers familiar with the half-dozen book-length treatments of Dewey's development will find this account refreshing and informative. Good's professional credentials as a historian shine as he recreates the rough and bustling Burlington of Dewey's youth. In the 1870s, German idealism was considered the epitome of political liberalism and progressive education, and Dewey's journey toward the "inclusive philosophical idea" of the social began in an environment swirling with the crosscurrents of Kant, Hegel, and Schelling. At the White Street Congregational Church, Lewis Barstow preached a liberal orthodoxy that was essentially "man-building" (102), and Good presents a convincing case for the likelihood that even in boyhood Dewey never viewed God as an aloof law-giver or cosmic architect, but as a process unifying the individual and the social within a natural world of unlimited potential. At the University of Vermont Dewey encountered a struggling rural college transformed into the first bastion of American transcendentalism by James Marsh, who inspired a "Burlington philosophy" that rejected atomistic empiricism for a holistic integrity of knowing and doing, facts and values, and pure and practical reasons (57–59).In noting the influence of the "St. Louis Hegelians" upon Dewey, most biographers have focused on W. T. Harris, the prominent founder of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy who published Dewey's earliest submissions and offered encouragement that led to his pursuit of graduate work at Johns Hopkins. Good augments this familiar tale with fascinating depictions of equally influential yet lesser-known Hegelians such as H. C. Brokmeyer, Denton Snider, and Thomas Davidson. At a time when European Hegelianism was polarized between, on the one hand, reactionary apologists for traditional Christianity and Prussian militarism and, on the other, radical... (shrink)

William of Poitiers began his career as a knight before studying in the schools of Poitiers and entering the Church. He became a chaplain in the household of William the Conqueror, and was able to give a first-hand account of the events of 1066-7. The Gesta Guillelmi, his unfinished biography of the king, is particularly important for its detailed description of William's campaigns in Normandy, the careful preparations he made for the invasion of England, the battle of Hastings and the (...) establishment of Norman power after the Conquest. It is a mine of information of military tactics and the conduct of war in the eleventh century. Though written from the point of view of the Norman court, it gives what is probably the most authentic account of these momentous events. This edition, by the late R. H. C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall, with facing-page English translation of the Latin text, provides the first complete English translation, as well as a full historical introduction and detailed notes. (shrink)

Attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias -the leading ancient commentator on Aristotle -the Quaestiones exemplify the process through which Aristotle's thought was organized and came to be interpreted as "Aristotelianism." This volume of R.W. Sharples's translation, together with his earlier translation of Quaestiones 1.1-2.15, makes the Quaestiones available in its entirety for the first time in a modern language. The Quaestiones are concerned with problems of physics and metaphysics, psychology and divine providence. Readers interested in Aristotle's psychological views will find the (...) second half of the Quaestiones particularly valuable. Ten of the problems discussed involve issues raised in Aristotle's On the Soul, including the unity of apperception and the transition from first to second actuality in the act of contemplation. An additional twelve problems relate to aspects of physical theory such as infinity, necessity, and potentiality. Quaestio 2.21 concerns divine providence and helps supplement our knowledge of Alexander's position. A study of the Quaestiones also suggests how interpretations of Aristotle were influenced by doctrines of Hellenistic philosophy. Translated first into Arabic and then into Latin, excerpts from the Quaestiones played a significant role in the transmission of ancient Greek philosophy to the medieval world. (shrink)

In 1913, in a draft for a new Preface for the second edition of the Logical Investigations, Edmund Husserl reveals to his readers that "The source of all my studies and the first source of my epistemological difficul­ties lies in my first works on the philosophy of arithmetic and mathematics in general", i.e. his Habilitationsschrift and the Philosophy of Arithmetic: "I carefully studied the consciousness constituting the amount, first the collec­tive consciousness (consciousness of quantity, of multiplicity) in its simplest and (...) higher levels (consciousness of sums, sums of sums etc.). I immediately separated proper (intuitive) and symbolic consciousness, in the characteriza­tion of the former I hit the radical difference of categorial consciousness [...] and sensuous consciousness of unity." Later on, in the Third Investigation, Husserl makes some very specific claims, that are of considerable importance to assess the development of his early works and their relation to his later phenomenology: "This first work of mine (an elaboration of my Habilitationsschrift, [...], 1887) should be compared with all assertions of the present work on compounds, moments of unity, complexes, wholes and objects of higher order. I am sorry that in many recent treatments of the doctrine of "Gestalt-qualities", this work has mostly been ignored, though quite a lot of the thought-content of later treatments by Cornelius, Meinong etc., of questions of analysis, apprehension of plurality and complexion is already to be found, differently expressed, in my Philosophy of Arithmetic. I think it would still be of use today to consult this work on the phenomenological and ontological issues in question, especially since it is the first work that attached importance to acts and objects of higher order and investigated them thoroughly." Hence, at the time of the Ideas, Husserl retrospectively considers his first works4 as being still relevant for phenomenological issues. Not only does Husserl advance a very interesting priority claim with respect to Von Ehrenfels’ development of the notion of Gestalt and Meinong’s development of Gegenstandstheorie, but also a strong affirmation of continuity and coherence of his position from 1887 all the way up to 1913, encompassing the alleged “revolution” in his position from psychologism to anti-psycho­logism in the 1890s. Indeed, according to much of the recent secondary literature, in 1894, right in the middle of the ten “incubation” years between the Philosophy of Arithmetic and the Logical Investigations, Frege’s destruc­tive review would have converted Husserl to antipsychologism practically overnight. This gives us two conflicting interpretations: on the one hand, Husserl himself in 1913 still seems to approve of the Philosophy of Arithmetic and even considers it to contain valuable phenomenological material, on the other, it is routinely dismissed by much of the secondary literature as hope­lessly psychologistic. So which one is it: do we have a phenomenological arithmetic or a psychologistic arithmetic in Husserl’s first book? On balance, I think that Husserl in his Philosophy of Arithmetic developed a position that does not fall prey to the exaggerated and poorly aimed critiques of Frege, while at the same time, as a descriptive psychology of the genesis and constitution of number, it can certainly be considered as providing phenome­nologically meaningful analyses, though of course not made from within an explicitly transcendental phenomenological framework. (shrink)

Trafficking in persons is often referred to as a global problem that can only be resolved through collaborative action involving the entire global community. Since the early 2000s, the United Nations (UN) has spearheaded efforts to lead the global anti-trafficking campaign and advocate for the humane treatment of trafficked persons. This paper examines the effects of various legal documents and advocacy campaigns to argue that, for the present moment, the UN-led anti-trafficking collaboration fails on both counts—end trafficking and provide protection (...) and support to trafficked persons. It further argues that the global anti-trafficking unity is maintained at the expense of solving the actual problem: identifying someone to blame and criminalize takes precedence over resolving socio-economic conditions, which are often at the root cause of trafficking. An extreme emphasis on criminality and morality, while well aligned with states’ anti-immigration objectives and public outcries against illegal migration and prostitution, also leads to further ostracization of those in need of protection and options for reintegration. (shrink)

In 1968, the Harvard criteria equated irreversible coma and apnea with human death and later, the Uniform Determination of Death Act was enacted permitting organ procurement from heart-beating donors. Since then, clinical studies have defined a spectrum of states of impaired consciousness in human beings: coma, akinetic mutism, minimally conscious state, vegetative state and brain death. In this article, we argue against the validity of the Harvard criteria for equating brain death with human death. Brain death does not disrupt somatic (...) integrative unity and coordinated biological functioning of a living organism. Neurological criteria of human death fail to determine the precise moment of an organism’s death when death is established by circulatory criterion in other states of impaired consciousness for organ procurement with non-heart-beating donation protocols. The criterion of circulatory arrest 75 s to 5 min is too short for irreversible cessation of whole brain functions and respiration controlled by the brain stem. Brain -based criteria for determining death with a beating heart exclude relevant anthropologic, psychosocial, cultural, and religious aspects of death and dying in society. Clinical guidelines for determining brain death are not consistently validated by the presence of irreversible brain stem ischemic injury or necrosis on autopsy; therefore, they do not completely exclude reversible loss of integrated neurological functions in donors. The questionable reliability and varying compliance with these guidelines among institutions amplify the risk of determining reversible states of impaired consciousness as irreversible brain death. The scientific uncertainty of defining and determining states of impaired consciousness including brain death have been neither disclosed to the general public nor broadly debated by the medical community or by legal and religious scholars. Heart-beating or non-heart-beating organ procurement from patients with impaired consciousness is de facto a concealed practice of physician-assisted death, and therefore, violates both criminal law and the central tenet of medicine not to do harm to patients. Society must decide if physician-assisted death is permissible and desirable to resolve the conflict about procuring organs from patients with impaired consciousness within the context of the perceived need to enhance the supply of transplantable organs. (shrink)

Anselm’s 'Proslogion' is, as he says in its Preface, 'unum argumentum', a single line of reasoning, that builds toward the following: “that God is truly,” “that he is the highest good who needs no other,” and that he is the one “whom all things need so that they may be and may be well.” This paper attempts to shed light on how Anselm carries out the threefold task that he sets for himself and way in which his procedure brings (...) class='Hi'>unity to the work. Although I do not provide a full account of the unity of the 'Proslogion', I lay the groundwork for such an account by reflecting on the 'Proslogion' in light of the 'Symposium', with a view to bringing a pattern of thinking present in Plato’s work to bear on the 'Proslogion'—an intertextual approach that illuminates aspects of Anselm’s thinking and reveal the rich Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition within which he was working. In the 'Symposium', one discerns a pattern of thinking that consists of three “moments”: a comic moment, a tragic moment, and a philosophic moment. To follow this pattern in one’s inquiry is, as Socrates suggests, to practice 'ta erôtica', “erotics,” the art of erotic thinking. Familiarity with this pattern of erotic thinking helps make sense of Anselm’s thinking in the 'Proslogion', and in this paper I reveal how this is so. (shrink)

Georg Lukács wrote that "there is autonomy and 'autonomy.' The one is a moment of life itself, the elevation of its richness and contradictory unity; the other is a rigidification, a barren self-seclusion, a self-imposed banishment from the dynamic overall connection." Though Lukács' concern was with the conditions for the possibility of art, his distinction also serves as an apt description of the way that Hegel and Hegelians have contrasted their own interpretations of self-determination with that of Kant. But (...) it has always been difficult to see how elevation is possible without seclusion, or how rigidification can be avoided without making the boundaries of the self so malleable that its autonomy looks like a mere cover for the power of external forces. Yeomans explores Hegel's own attempts to grapple with this problem against the background of Kant's attempts, in his theory of virtue, to understand the way that morally autonomous agents can be robust individuals with qualitatively different projects, personal relations, and commitments that are nonetheless infused with a value that demands respect. In a reading that disentangles a number of different threads in Kant's approach, Yeomans shows how Hegel reweaves these threads around the central notions of talent and interest to produce a tapestry of self-determination. Yeomans argues that the result is a striking pluralism that identifies three qualitatively distinct forms of agency or accountability and sees each of these forms of agency as being embodied in different social groups in different ways. But there is nonetheless a dynamic unity to the forms because they can all be understood as practical attempts to solve the problem of autonomy, and each is thus worthy of respect even from the perspective of other solutions."Everyone recognizes the importance of Hegel's critique of Kantian morality as empty, but until now there has not been a fully worked out presentation of how Hegel's views in his discussion of Sittlichkeit actually provide the missing content. Yeomans has finally provided us with a reconstruction of Hegel's mature position that makes good on all the promissory notes that Hegel gives in his famous descriptions of his alternative to Kantian ethics. Yeomans offers a compelling account of Hegel's view of individuality, societal differentiation and its roots in Kantian and Fichtean moral theory. The book will be a major contribution to the scholarship on Hegel's practical philosophy." - Dean Moyar, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University -/- "Yeomans' book is a subtle, detailed and original explication of some key ideas having to do with how Hegel's general philosophy of action relates to his social and political philosophy. It is attentive to Hegel's texts, and it ties its discussions into all the relevant contemporary themes in philosophy. It is very ambitious in its attempt to make Hegel's theory into a real competitor to other views that are currently in wide play in the philosophical world. It will very likely become one of the key texts in the secondary literature on Hegel." - Terry Pinkard, University Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University. (shrink)

This book redraws the intellectual map and sets the agenda in philosophy for the next fifty or so years. By making the theory of signs the dominant theme in Four Ages of Understanding, John Deely has produced a history of philosophy that is innovative, original, and complete. The first full-scale demonstration of the centrality of the theory of signs to the history of philosophy, Four Ages of Understanding provides a new vantage point from which to review and reinterpret the development (...) of intellectual culture at the threshold of "globalization". Deely examines the whole movement of past developments in the history of philosophy in relation to the emergence of contemporary semiotics as the defining moment of Postmodernism. Beginning traditionally with the Pre-Socratic thinkers of early Greece, Deely gives an account of the development of the notion of signs and of the general philosophical problems and themes which give that notion a context through four ages: Ancient philosophy, covering initial Greek thought; the Latin age, philosophy in European civilization from Augustine in the 4th century to Poinsot in the 17th; the Modern period, beginning with Descartes and Locke; and the Postmodern period, beginning with Charles Sanders Peirce and continuing to the present. Reading the complete history of philosophy in light of the theory of the sign allows Deely to address the work of thinkers never before included in a general history, and in particular to overcome the gap between Ockham and Descartes which has characterized the standard treatments heretofore. One of the essential features of the book is the way in which it shows how the theme of signs opens a perspective for seeing the Latin Age from its beginning with Augustine to the work of Poinsot as an indigenous development and organic unity under which all the standard themes of ontology and epistemology find a new resolution and place. A magisterial general history of philosophy, Deely's book provides both a strong background to semiotics and a theoretical unity between philosophy's history and its immediate future. With Four Ages of Understanding Deely sets a new agenda for philosophy as a discipline entering the 21st century. (shrink)

The ideas (i) that skill is a form of knowledge and (ii) that it can be taught are commonplace in both ancient philosophy and everyday life. I argue that contemporary epistemology lacks the resources to adequately accommodate them. Intellectualist and anti-intellectualist accounts of knowledge how struggle to represent the transmission of skill via teaching and learning (§II), in part because each adopts a fundamentally individualistic approach to the acquisition of skill that focuses on individual practice and experience; consequently, learning from (...) an expert’s teaching is rendered at best peripheral (§III). An account of the transmission of skill that focuses on guided practice is shown to be immanent in an anti-individualist account of skill (§IV) that takes seriously the Aristotelian ideas that skills are rational capacities and second natures by developing the thought that doing, teaching, and practising are three moments of an a priori unity: the life-cycle of a skill (§V). (shrink)

H. Arendt developed largely her hermeneutical interpretation of understanding in line with the rethinking of I. Kant’s philosophical heritage. Although she was able to offer a rather original interpretation of the theoretical views of the great German philosopher, her hermeneutic strategy was also influenced by the approaches to their understanding that were proposed by her teachers M. Heidegger and K. Jaspers. Arendt’s hermeneutical teaching proceeds from the need to realize the close unity of practical action and spiritual activity of (...) the human subject - Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa. Accepting the initial position of Heidegger’s metaphysics of finiteness about the “abandonment” of man in the flow of time, Arendt simultaneously follows Jaspers’ call for the need for an existential-hermeneutic interpretation of practical action and the abilities of the spirit by their understanding on the basis of Kant’s legacy. Singling out thinking, will and judgement among the main vectors of self-realization of the spirit, she demonstrates their close relationship with the main types of practical human activity - work, work and action. Analyzing the abilities of the spirit, Arendt emphasizes the major role of thinking, which brings together the processes of knowledge acquisition and meaning creation. It highlights the primacy of the meaning-producing function of the reason in relation to the ability of the intellect to generate true knowledge on the basis of generalization of the data of contemplation. Describing thinking after Kant as a “thing in itself”, Arendt speaks of its involvement in eternity and time in the moment of the present, the ability to generalize the past and design the future. Thinking forms the core of practical reason, which Kant identified with the will, and opens a new horizon of meaning generation in its aspiration to the future. The ability to judge also turns out to be a product of thinking, referring to the past while relying on common sense and imagination. Arendt rightly argues that the “paralysis” of the faculty of judgement, indicating the significance of Kant’s categorical imperative, threatens not only to produce a distorted vision of history, but also the triumph of the “banality of evil” in the sphere of politics. (shrink)

The article aims to concretize the phenomenological account concerning the problem of an auditory image. The author considers auditory imagery as a scientific object and compares different treatments of the problem to fix the potential and advantages of its phenomenological interpretation. In the first stage of the study, the author distinguishes the key characteristics of the image by means the lexical analysis. This is the perceptual (predominantly visual) nature of an image, integrality, and essentiality (image as an idea). In the (...) second stage, the understandings of the mental and auditory imagery in physiology, experimental psychology, music psychology, musicology, and interdisciplinary studies are described. In the third stage, the peculiar phenomenological ways of the comprehension of an auditory image are revealed. The phenomenological interest is to pick out consciousness which perceiving of an image equally from the process of perceiving and from entailing in an image. The specific phenomenological stance is placing an auditory image on the bound of transcendent (the process of perceiving) and immanent (an image that is already perceived). The auditory image is conceived as the unity of Modi of its givenness. Most fecks of this Modi are original, they cannot be transferred into other science scopes: they are the interconnection of all moments of the temporal unfolding, self-organization in the time, self-referentiality, non-semanticity, periodicity/randomness, eventuality, quasi-embodiment (physicality). Solely phenomenological problems are problems of the constitution of an auditory image, its life-horizon, intersubjectivity, and regional matching. The author infers that phenomenology does not conceive auditory image as sustained auditory representation, associated with acoustic memory. Its perceptual nature does not play a key role here. Moreover, the perceptual-semantic duality of the image is not fixed by the phenomenological description. The phenomenological approach is unique because it researches auditory data exhaustively but does not use semantic and referential analysis of them. The main feature of phenomenological description is the focus on the unity of auditory image: All the elements of auditory data are interpreted in their synthesis as the different levels of the unity of hearing image. Thus, the phenomenological approach as a whole is the most promising for comprehending such a dominant quality of the auditory image as integrality. (shrink)

It should be clear that Lyell's scientific contemporaries would hardly have agreed with Robert Munro's remark that Antiquity of Man created a full-fledged discipline. Only later historians have judged the work a synthesis; those closer to the discoveries and events saw it as a compilation — perhaps a “capital compilation,”95 but a compilation none the less. Its heterogeneity made it difficult to judge as a unity, and most reviewers, like Forbes, concentrated on the first part of Lyell's trilogy. The (...) chapters on glaciation were admired by Lyell's friends but had relatively little appeal to more general readers. His discussion of the species question hedged far too much to please those who accepted the cogency of Darwin's evidence and arguments. This last section of the book blatantly lacks originality or commitment and certainly has no claim to classical status in anthropology.We are left, then, with the first twelve chapters, for it was this portion that dictated the book's title and that amassed the available evidence favoring the antiquity of the human species. Did it do anything more than marshall the evidence that others had discovered? I think not. Lyell could write with style and verve. Principles of Geology is a remarkably readable book. But Antiquity is the work of a geologist, not of a systematic student of man. Despite its occasional touches of power, it never captures the freshness and immediacy of Lubbock's Pre-historic Times nor the theoretical brilliance of E. B. Tylor's Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865).96 Antiquity utilizes little of the comparative method whereby Lyell's contemporaries used data from modern “savagery” to elaborate the possible social functions of the prehistoric remains being uncovered. It contains little social theory and has virtually no integrated framework. Even the first twelve chapters do not really hang together. As Hooker, commenting to Darwin on Lubbock's review, sadly wrote: “Lubbock in [the] N[atural] H[istory] Review, had in a note called attention to Lyell's ... ‘doing injustice’ to Prestwich & Falconer. I modified this expression ‘injustice’ in Lubbock's paper (which was friendly and apologetic). I am deeply sorry for it, but what can one do? I do think Lyell's first XII chapters a complete mess.”97 In another letter to Darwin, Hooker described this first portion of Antiquity as “confused and confusing.”98Part of the problem, of course, lay in the subject's novelty for Lyell and for most of his contemporaries. At a deeper level, however, I believe that the book accurately reflects Lyell's uncertainties about Darwin's work and its implications for man.99 Leonard Wilson's edition of Lyell's Scientific Journals provides a unique insight into Lyell's mind during the years just before he began to write Antiquity.100 Preoccupied with the human implications of evolutionary biology, Lyell was not clear how many of those implications were compatible with his deep convictions about the dignity of man's place in the cosmos. With a certain naiveté, Lyell complained in 1873 that many of his readers had failed to see the “natural connections” among the three portions of Antiquity.101 Connections could indeed be drawn between man's antiquity and his evolutionary origins; Lyell's private Scientific Journals movingly demonstrate that he was well aware of this fact. But he never fully made the connections in his published writings. Antiquity of Man is more appropriately seen as the last gasp of the heroic period in British geology than as the opening salvo in a new, post-Darwinian anthropological synthesis. Between the founding of the Geological Society of London in 1807 and the middle of the nineteenth century, geology was recognized as one of the most exciting and innovative scientific fields in Britain.102 Lyell himself had contributed much to that drama, and by the 1860's he was a public figure of venerable proportions. More then any other man he represented a geology that had extended the boundaries of process, time, and life. The fundamental achievements of Lyell and his colleagues had been assimilated into the wider Victorian consciousness, yet the earlier public debates about “genesis and geology” had left untouched in its essentials the concept of Man as a moral, responsible, created being.103Lyell never abandoned this view of his own species, and in 1863 it was a completely responsible creature which, under the weight of empirical evidence, Lyell admitted had lived on earth far longer than had previously been thought. Certainly this more generous allowance for human existence was constitutive to what Burrow calls the evolutionary social theory of midcentury Britain.104 Unlike Lyell, the younger representatives of this anthropology quietly accepted both man's antiquity and his aboriginal animality. Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology (1855), as well as the other volumes of his grand Synthetic Philosophy, presented as part of the cosmic process the development of human from prehuman beings.105 Tylor's discussion of what in his Researches (1865) he called the “gesture-language” presupposed the gradual and de novo origin of language in early human populations.106 Lubbock's young and polished mind was untroubled by the human implications of Darwin's work, and he cast his Prehistoric Times into such a perfect mold that it and its companionpiece (On the Origin of Civilization, 1870) went through seven editions each between 1865 and World War I, with their original theoretical structures intact. In a way that Lyell could not grasp, Lubbock was intrigued by questions concerning the origins of moral and religious beliefs and did not flinch at the thought of an amoral, atheistic creature as an ancestor.107 Indeed, as the German naturalist Carl Vogt pointed out in his Lectures on Man, translated into English the year after Antiquity, both Darwin's theories and the primitive flint knives of the Stone Age bore witness to a time beyond that imaginable from the condition of the lowest present-day “savage”:From such a low condition [little better than anthropomorphous apes], compared to which that of the so-called savages of the old and new world is a refined civilisation, has the human species gradually extricated itself, in a bitter struggle for existence, which it was well able to maintain, by being gifted with a larger amount of brain and intelligence than that possessed by the surrounding animal world.108The easy integration of biological and social themes was perhaps the distinguishing hallmark of Victorian anthropology of the 1850's and 1860's. After his fashion, Lyell got both themes into Antiquity, but he carefully separated them with a seven-chapter wall of glacial ice. Lyell's anthropology was not that of a thoroughgoing evolutionist like Lubbock, Tylor, or Spencer. For Lyell prehistoric man was not a product of biological evolution. Rude and superstitious he may have been, but he possessed ritual and a belief in a future state, and thus deserved “the epithet of ‘noble,’ which Dryden gave to what he seems to have pictured to himself as the primitive condition of our race: as Nature first made man/when wild in woods the noble savage ran.”109As a systematic argument, Lyell's book was at best a significant failure. As a popularization, it was a success — largely because of the personal stature of its author and the particular moment of its appearance. It helped establish the fact of man's antiquity with a wider Victorian audience, in itself no mean achievement. But Lyell was unable to exploit the fuller implications of his material in the service of a secular science of man. Ironically, he exploited only his colleagues' discoveries. Though the aging Lyell, with failing eyesight but unfailing mental powers, can still be seen as a man of considerable importance, his Antiquity belongs to the carefully circumscribed world of British geology rather than to the less disciplined world of Victorian anthropology. (shrink)

This article explores the development of the theme of the Life-giving Spring in Byzantine iconography. The path towards its establishment was initiated at the moment when a representation rule, an original convention was set. Thereafter, because of its diffusion in time and space, the theme became enriched by particular mentalities and sensibilities of the epochs and the communities that adopted it as a form of devotion for the Virgin Theotokos. As a result, the representations we have known so far are (...) extremely varied. CONTRIBUTION: The final purpose of this approach, as well as its contribution, is to highlight the diverse unity of the iconographic tradition and illustrate both the evolution of the theme in the painting of Romanian church artists and its gradual refinement through the incorporation of diverse nuances and new perspectives. (shrink)

In 1997, Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, one of Bosnia’s leading public intellectuals, was scheduled to lecture on Bosnia at Stanford University but was unexpectedly denied an entry visa by American authorities. This book, first published in Bosnia in 1998, is an expanded version of that lecture. It is an indictment of the partition of Bosnia, formalized in 1995 by the Dayton Accord. It is also a plea for Bosnia’s communities to reject ethnic segregation and restore mutual trust. For the first time, English-speaking (...) readers can hear this important voice of dissent from within Bosnia-Herzegovina. Mahmutćehajić argues for the history and reality of a Bosnia-Herzegovina based upon a model of “unity in diversity.” He shows that ethnic and religious cultures have coexisted in Bosnia for centuries. Partitioning of Bosnia, therefore, should have been unthinkable except that a multi-ethnic, multi-faith Bosnia stood squarely in the way of Croatian and Serbian leaders determined to enact their own nationalist programs. The decisive moment came when the international community accepted the Serb-Croat argument that ancient ethnic hatreds were endemic to Bosnia. At that point, ethnic segregation became not only acceptable but desirable. With the complicity of Western powers, Serbs and Croats proceeded to carve out ethnically cleansed states. Mahmutćehajić examines the reasons why Western liberal democracies have regarded with sympathy the struggles of Serbia and Croatia for national recognition, while viewing Bosnia’s multicultural society with suspicion. As one of Bosnia's former political leaders in the early peace talks, he describes with authority how the parties were often physically aligned during formal talks, with Bosniak negotiators on one side of the table and everybody else—Serb, Croat, and international representatives—on the other. In the end, justice was subverted and the final solution justified on the basis of an intractable “conflict of civilizations." Mahmutćehajić confronts the religious dimension of the Bosnian dilemma with refreshing honesty. As a Bosniak committed to interreligious dialogue, he calls for more than simple toleration among Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians. He remembers that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all share the same deity, and it is this common transcendent perspective that should open the door to the acceptance and celebration of religious diversity. Only in this way will Bosnia reclaim its unique civilization. _The Denial of Bosnia_ has dire implications for the future of a Europe searching for a viable post–Cold War order. Will Europe accept ethnic segregation as a solution to the contradictions of ethnic diversity or find a way to protect and build upon this diversity? Bosnia, though currently divided and shaken to its foundations, could become a model for European progress. The greatest danger is for Bosnia to be declared just another ethnoreligious entity, in this case a “Muslim State” ghettoized inside of Europe. If protected and allowed to develop, however, Bosnia too could find a place in the new European order. (shrink)

The paper is a contribution to the object ontology. The general approach assumed in the investigation is that of Roman Ingarden's The Controversy Over the Existence of the World where an object is the subject-of-properties. The analysis of the form and the mode of existence of properties leads to the rejection of both negative and general properties. Each property is an individual qualitative moment of a particular object. Its form reveals existential heteronomy: the quality of the property is not immanent (...) but refers to the object. The subject of properties has not its own qualitative content: its form is just the internal causality establishing the unity of an object. An object is not causally isolated from other objects, but external causation differs from internal either by being ramified in case of the composition and destruction of an object or reciprocal in case of interaction between coexisting objects. (shrink)

At A71/B96–7 Kant explains that singular judgements are ‘special’ because they stand to the general ones as Einheit to Unendlichkeit. The reference to Einheit brings to mind the category of unity and hence raises a spectre of circularity in Kant’s explanation. I aim to remove this spectre by interpreting the Einheit-Unendlichkeit contrast in light of the logical distinctions among universal, particular and singular judgments shared by Kant and his logician predecessors. This interpretation has a further implication for resolving a (...) controversy over the correlation between the logical moments of quantity (universal, particular, singular) and the categorial ones (unity, plurality, totality). (shrink)

Introduction. The technical art of cinematography is traditionally regarded as a synthetic unity of scientific and technological progress and creativity. The possibility of unlimited copying of movie plots makes it possible to extend the authority of cinema to broad areas of public attention and forms a mass man. At the same time, the fact that cinema is, first of all, an experiment with time, organized by technical means, remains behind the scenes. The purpose of the study. If the core (...) issues of humanity are centered on the problem of life and death, on the problem of mastering and overcoming time, then cinema clearly shows that humanity has a ready-made embodied model of its desire. Methods. The authors use a phenomenological method that allows one to see the temporal fabric behind the “opaque body” of cinema. The eidetic reduction to the foundations of the constructed film plot temporal reality is complemented by the structuralist method of analyzing technical devices and technological methods of the film industry. Scientific novelty of the research. The ontology of the technical art of cinema goes beyond rationality and pragmatics. By launching a special kind of experiment with time, cinema technologies allow the viewer to be present in the bifurcation moments of temporal metamorphoses that connect different temporal modes. The temporal fabric is subject to the plot logic. Results. In cinema, time is constructed by technical means. The nature of this construction allows us to see the layered structure of time, the intersections of time flows, influxes, reverse time orders and stops in time. The cinema technique clearly shows that time barriers are conditional. Conclusions. Cinema dissolves any empirical density, creating gaps in it and transitions to other worlds. The connection between the worlds is carried out by constructed time. Time is taken out of objects and, obeying the course of the narrative, expands the reality of the world. (shrink)

The very idea of a general philosophy of science relies on the assumption that there is this thing called science —as opposed to the various individual sciences. In this programmatic piece I make a case for the claim that general philosophy of science is the philosophy of science in general or science as such. Part of my narrative makes use of history, for two reasons. First, general philosophy of science is itself characterised by an intellectual tradition which aimed to develop (...) a coherent philosophical view of science, qua a part of culture with distinctive epistemic features and a distinctive relation to reality. But, second, this tradition went through some important conceptual shifts which re-oriented it and made it more sensitive to the actual development of science itself. The historical narrative focuses on three such moments: the defining moment, associated with Aristotle, and two major conceptual turns, related to Kant and Duhem. The pressures on the very idea of a general philosophy of science that followed the collapse of the macro-models of science that became popular in the 1960s, the pressures that lay all of the emphasis on fragmentation and not on integration, can be dealt with by a new synthesis within general philosophy of science of the constitutive and the historical, in light of the intellectual tradition that has defined it. (shrink)

This paper investigates Hegel’s idea of life, which is on the one hand significant to the research of the dynamic structure of Hegelian absolute idea and on the other hand provides a relevant philosophical foundation for our current exploration of life. In this paper, the research on the idea of life is mainly based on Hegel’s Science of Logic and is divided into two parts, namely an argumentative reconstruction of the moments of the life-idea and an interpretation of its (...) role in the inner-logical process of the idea itself. Through the study of these two dimensions, this paper shows that the complex logical structure of the life-idea is, as claimed by Hegel, in its forming activity, in its negative unity, the only one unified process and plays four relevant roles in the inner-logical construction of the idea itself, namely in the core concept of Hegel. (shrink)

The article provides proof that the concept of time articulated in Russian philosophy of the nineteenth century was very close to the understanding of time in the philosophy of Henri Bergson. This explains the close attention of Russian culture to the philosophical system of the French thinker at the beginning of the twentieth century. It also allows us to hypothesize about the possible influence of the ideas of Russian philosophers of the late nineteenth century on Bergson. Bergson’s most original idea (...) is the recognition of the metaphysical primacy of the subjective, inner time of the human in relation to physical time. In physical time, only the moment of the present has real existence; in internal time, designated by Bergson as duration, all moments of the past are preserved as real, and this is expressed by memory. Internal time turns out to be the spiritual Absolute from which the entire material world originates. A very similar metaphysical concept is presented in Pyotr Chaadaev’s Philosophical Letters. According to Chaadaev, each person is directly involved in the spiritual Absolute, which has the characteristic of integral time. In this time, all moments are in unity, and there is no division into the past, present, and future; this division arises only in the time intrinsic to the material reality that originates from the spiritual Absolute. In the religious teaching of Leo Tolstoy, personality is defined as the appearance of God within the limits of material existence, so a person is simultaneously involved in the earthly physical time and absolute time, which manifests itself through memory. The article concludes that Bergson’s ideas determined the most important features of Russian avant-garde culture of the twentieth century; in particular, thanks to them, the opposite trends of Russian thought were brought to unity: metaphysics of pan-unity and personalism. (shrink)