We present a criterion for the use of thought experiments as a guide to possibilia that bear on important arguments in philosophy of religion. We propose that the more successful thought experiments are closer to the world in terms of phenomenological realism and the values they are intended to track. This proposal is filled out by comparing thought experiments of life after death by Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman with an idealist thought experiment. In terms of realism and values (...) we contrast an exemplary thought experiment by Iris Murdoch with one we find problematic by William Irwin. (shrink)

This highly original, provocative, and poetic work explores the nexus of time, truth, and death in the symbolic world of medieval kabbalah. Demonstrating that the historical and theoretical relationship between kabbalah and western philosophy is far more intimate and extensive than any previous scholar has ever suggested, Elliot R. Wolfson draws an extraordinary range of thinkers such as Frederic Jameson, Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig, William Blake, Julia Kristeva, Friedrich Schelling, and a host of kabbalistic figures into deep conversation (...) with one another. _Alef, Mem, Tau _also discusses Islamic mysticism and Buddhist thought in relation to the Jewish esoteric tradition as it opens the possibility of a temporal triumph of temporality and the conquering of time through time. The framework for Wolfson’s examination is the rabbinic teaching that the word _emet, _“truth,” comprises the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, _alef, mem,_ and _tau,_ which serve, in turn, as semiotic signposts for the three tenses of time—past, present, and future. By heeding the letters of _emet _we discern the truth of time manifestly concealed in the time of truth, the beginning that cannot begin if it is to be the beginning, the middle that re/marks the place of origin and destiny, and the end that is the figuration of the impossible disclosing the impossibility of figuration, the finitude of death that facilitates the possibility of rebirth. The time of death does not mark the death of time, but time immortal, the moment of truth that bestows on the truth of the moment an endless beginning of a beginningless end, the truth of death encountered incessantly in retracing steps of time yet to be taken—between, before, beyond. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Elliot Rubinstein BUÑUEL'S WORLD, OR THE WORLD AND BUNUEL* THE line OF descent from Surrealist cinema to chosiste fiction—the line which all the remarks that follow are meant at least to trace—is, if not direct, surely collateral. But the genealogy is so complex as to resist detailing in a brief paper. What I offer may be taken for preliminaries, observations on the cinema of Bunuel prompted in large (...) part by a rereading of Robbe-Grillet's For a New Novel. ' The world of any Bunuel film is first of all, in William S. Pechter's phrase, the worst of all possible.2 But the phrase misleads, implying that better worlds are imaginable, let alone photographable, let alone otherwise available. Neithersexual fascination {L'Aged' or, El [ This Strange Passion], Ensayo de un crimen [The Criminal Life ofArchibaldo de la Cruz], Abismos de pasión [Wuthering Heights], Diary ofa Chambermaid, Belle de Jour) nor faith (Nazartn, Robinson Crusoe, Vindiana, The Milky Way), nor any other agency of spiritual transcendence delivers us to a world fit for human habitation. Trailing clouds, but not of glory, do we come, and beneath these clouds we proceed to make fools and martyrs and killers of one another, of ourselves. Unhappily, such views, seized upon as novelties, leave Buñuel at the mercy of some of the most sophomoric adulators ever to hound a major artist. Happily, Buñuel's vision justifies his views; happily, his career transcends his vision. His particular achievement is the sheer variety of worlds he has discovered or reanimated, none quite like *This article, and the one by Stanley Cavell which follows it, grew out of remarks presented at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, December 30, 1977. The title of the symposium was "Chosisme and the Cinema: the Perception of Physical Reality in Cinema and Literature." 237 238Philosophy and Literature another except in the way it is seen—and each the worst of all possible. The world of Nazartn appears, on the relentlessly gray surface of its film stock, the most conventional in any of Buñuel's works. (I am not thinking of, for one must try to think as little as possible of, some of the potboilers Buñuel had to produce during his Mexican captivity of the late 1940s and 1950s.) Its story of a persecuted priest is left to progress without worrisome spatial or temporal discontinuities. The myth on which its story feeds, explicit in the title, is the most familiar of all, and the inescapable implications of the Quixote and of Dostoyevsky 's tale of the Grand Inquisitor further cater to our certainty of the correctness of our responses. The sole plainly Surreal moment occurs when the picture of Jesus on the priest's wall explodes into a wicked Bosch-like grin, but the image is subjective, "psychological," reflecting the delirium of a wounded prostitute whom the priest is sequestering, and seen only by her. Emotional valences are respected: there is nothing perplexing about the characters' reactions and interplayings. And things are in their place. Such an account of Nazartn recalls Robbe-Grillet's account of Balzacian fiction: All the technical elements of narrative—systematic use of the past tense and the third person, unconditional adoption of chronological development, linear plots, regular trajectory of the passions, impulses of each episode toward a conclusion, etc.—everything tended to impose the image of a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal, decipherable universe. Since the intelligibility of the world was not even questioned, to tell a story did not raise a problem. The style of the novel could be innocent, (p. 32) I trust there is no reason to belabor the frailness (I mean with respect to any reading of Balzac) of an argument that pushes to that last sentence. Still, the point is plain enough, and, in its way, and, in its limits, true enough. Because Nazarin (based, by the way, on a novel of Galdós) tells a story in an age when "To tell a story has become strictly impossible" (p. 33) it cannot lay claim to a place in the realm of New Narrative. But there is more to Nazarin than... (shrink)

William Godfrey-Smith is now William Grey. It is agreed that the moral community can be justifiably extended to include sentient non-humans, however, it is claimed that it is possible to give up human chauvinism without adopting the ethic Godfrey-Smith advocates. Feinberg's interest principle is taken by Godfrey-Smith to be the most promising for demarcating the class of individuals to whom rights can be properly attributed. It is claimed that this principle does not force an extension of the class (...) of rights-holders beyond the class of sentient individuals, as claimed by Godfrey-Smith, to include individual trees, rainforests, soils and whole species. The crucial difference, it is claimed, is that sentient individuals but not plants are the subjects of experience. It is claimed that Godfrey-Smith has not provided sufficient argument to force an extension of the class of right-bearers in the way he advocates. Godfrey-Smith opposes the view that all values are grounded in human interest and concern, however, it is not necessary to accept his conclusion in order to argue against this position. Finally, it is not clear that he has produced an argument that shows there is no dependence between value and valuers analogous to the dependence between, say, lies and liars. (shrink)

This important anthology organises key essays that outline philosophical perspectives on the rapidly growing practice of environmental restoration. While some argue that environmental restoration is a new paradigm for environmentalism, others maintain that it is just more human domination of nature. The ongoing debate will help to shape environmentalism in the 21st century. A concise introduction by William M Throop outlines a range of issues about the values, beliefs, and attitudes that inform our assessment of restoration. Non-technical discussions of (...) restoration projects place the issues in the context of current policy-making. For each issue, pro and con articles are juxtaposed to highlight areas of controversy. Leading environmental philosophers and restorationists, including Robert Elliot, William Jordan, Eric Katz, Steve Packard, and Holmes Rolston, are represented.This is the only anthology that focuses on the philosophical issues underlying restoration ecology. As such it will be of interest to students and professionals in the fields of environmental philosophy, environmental restoration, and conservation biology, as well as educated lay persons with an interest in environmental issues. (shrink)

Although Elliot L. Jurist’s review of Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other was not unfavorable and indeed very helpful in showing the importance of the topic of recognition for contemporary philosophy, he nevertheless so fundamentally misrepresents my position that I am obliged to reply. For those who may have missed the review, the central issues are the following: Jurist asserts.

Robert R. Williams - Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche: Philosophy, Culture and Agency - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 408-409 Book Review Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche: Philosophy, Culture and Agency Elliot L. Jurist. Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche: Philosophy, Culture and Agency. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 355. Cloth, $37.95. Challenging the contemporary consensus that one must choose either Hegel or Nietzsche, Elliot Jurist joins the "rapprochement thesis" (...) originated by Walter Kaufmann. He explores Hegel and Nietzsche on the themes of agency, intersubjectivity, and society and culture. Jurist approaches these themes through the psychology of knowledge. Nietzsche's psychological method is well known; Jurist believes Hegel's contributions to psychology are no less significant: Hegel's "superb insight," found in his concept of recognition, is that others co-constitute self-identity . Jurist regards Hegel and Nietzsche as advancing important, somewhat divergent, but by.. (shrink)

Descartes is widely portrayed as the arch proponent of “the epistemological transparency of thought” (or simply, “Transparency”). The most promising version of this view—Transparency-through-Introspection—says that introspecting (i.e., inwardly attending to) a thought guarantees certain knowledge of that thought. But Descartes rejects this view and provides numerous counterexamples to it. I argue that, instead, Descartes’s theory of self-knowledge is just an application of his general theory of knowledge. According to his general theory, certain knowledge is acquired only through clear and distinct (...) intellection. Thus, in his view, certain knowledge of one’s thoughts is acquired only through clear and distinct intellection of one’s thoughts. Introspection is a form of intellection and it can be clear and distinct. Ordinarily, however, introspection isn’t clear and distinct but is instead confused with dubitable perceptions of bodies. To make introspection clear and distinct, we need to “sharply separate” it from all perceptions of bodies by doubting all perceptions of bodies. Without such radical doubt, introspection remains confused and we lack certain knowledge not just of the specific features of our thoughts, but even of the minimal claim that a thought exists. Far from being the high priest of Transparency, Descartes is radically opposed to it. (shrink)

Children are not simply molded by the environment; through constant inference and interpretation, they actively shape their own social world. This book is about that process. Elliot Turiel's work focuses on the development of moral judgment in children and adolescents and, more generally, on their evolving understanding of the conventions of social systems. His research suggests that social judgements are ordered, systematic, subtly discriminative, and related to behavior. His theory of the ways in which children generate social knowledge through (...) their social experiences will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and students in child development and education. (shrink)

Elliot R. Wolfson intervenes in the debate over Martin Heidegger and Nazism from a unique perspective, as a scholar of Jewish mysticism and philosophy who has been profoundly influenced by Heidegger's work. He reveals crucial aspects of Heidegger's thinking that betray an affinity with dimensions of Jewish thought.

No one theory of time is pursued in the essays of this volume, but a major theme that threads them together is Wolfson’s signature idea of the timeswerve as a linear circularity or a circular linearity, expressions that are meant to avoid the conventional split between the two temporal modalities of the line and the circle.

This entry provides a substantive overview of research and debates concerning creativity in philosophy and related fields. Topics covered include definitions of creativity, whether creativity can be learned, whether it can be explained, attempts to explain creativity in cognitive science, and whether computer programs or AI systems can be creative.

Clear and distinct perception is the centrepiece of Descartes’s philosophy — it is the source of all certainty — but what does he mean by ‘clear’ and ‘distinct’? According to the prevailing approach, what it means for a perception to be clear is that its content has a certain objective property, like truth. I argue instead that clarity is at least partly a subjective, phenomenal quality whereby a content is presented as true to the perceiving subject. Clarity comes in degrees. (...) Any weak degree of clarity, available to the senses, can be merely subjective, since what it presents as true may not actually be true. But complete clarity, available to intellectual perception, has an objective dimension, since what it presents as true is always some truth, some bit of reality. Further, I argue that the other perceptual qualities that Descartes identifies — obscurity, confusion, and distinctness — are all defined in terms of clarity. Of particular note is the fact that distinctness is not a positive feature to be added to clarity: a distinct perception is just a completely clear perception. (shrink)

Since late antiquity, a connection was made between Jews and the psychological state of despondency based, in part, on the link between melancholy and Saturn, and the further association of the Hebrew name of that planet, Shabbetai, and the Sabbath. The melancholic predisposition has had important anthropological, cosmological, and theological repercussions. In this essay, I focus on various perspectives on melancholia in thinkers as diverse as Kafka, Levinas, Blanchot, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Bloch, Scholem, and Derrida. A common thread that links these (...) thinkers is the hopelessness of hope imparted by the messianic belief in a future that must be perpetually deferred. (shrink)

Three kinds of things may be creative: persons, processes, and products. The standard definition of creativity, used nearly by consensus in psychological research, focuses specifically on products and says that a product is creative if and only if it is new and valuable. We argue that at least one further condition is necessary for a product to be creative: it must have been produced by the right kind of process. We argue furthermore that this point has an interesting epistemological implication: (...) when you judge a product to be creative--attributing creativity--you are not just judging it to be new and valuable. Even if you did not witness how it was produced, you are also making a judgement about how it was produced. (shrink)

Creativity pervades human life. It is the mark of individuality, the vehicle of self-expression, and the engine of progress in every human endeavor. It also raises a wealth of neglected and yet evocative philosophical questions: What is the role of consciousness in the creative process? How does the audience for a work for art influence its creation? How can creativity emerge through childhood pretending? Do great works of literature give us insight into human nature? Can a computer program really be (...) creative? How do we define creativity in the first place? Is it a virtue? What is the difference between creativity in science and art? Can creativity be taught? The new essays that comprise The Philosophy of Creativity take up these and other key questions and, in doing so, illustrate the value of interdisciplinary exchange. Written by leading philosophers and psychologists involved in studying creativity, the essays integrate philosophical insights with empirical research. CONTENTS I. Introduction Introducing The Philosophy of Creativity Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman II. The Concept of Creativity 1. An Experiential Account of Creativity Bence Nanay III. Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art 2. Creativity and Insight Gregory Currie 3. The Creative Audience: Some Ways in which Readers, Viewers and/or Listeners Use their Imaginations to Engage Fictional Artworks Noël Carroll 4. The Products of Musical Creativity Christopher Peacocke IV. Ethics & Value Theory 5. Performing Oneself Owen Flanagan 6. Creativity as a Virtue of Character Matthew Kieran V. Philosophy of Mind & Cognitive Science 7. Creativity and Not So Dumb Luck Simon Blackburn 8. The Role of Imagination in Creativity Dustin Stokes 9. Creativity, Consciousness, and Free Will: Evidence from Psychology Experiments Roy F. Baumeister, Brandon J. Schmeichel, and C. Nathan DeWall 10. The Origins of Creativity Elizabeth Picciuto and Peter Carruthers 11. Creativity and Artificial Intelligence: a Contradiction in Terms? Margaret Boden VI. Philosophy of Science 12. Hierarchies of Creative Domains: Disciplinary Constraints on Blind-Variation and Selective-Retention Dean Keith Simonton VII. Philosophy of Education (& Education of Philosophy) 13. Educating for Creativity Berys Gaut 14. Philosophical Heuristics Alan Hájek. (shrink)

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients (...) than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. _Shame and Necessity_ gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world. (shrink)

There is a strong presumption that mental disorder injures a person's autonomy, understood as a set of capacities and as an ideal condition of agency which is worth striving for. However, recent multidimensional approaches to autonomy have revealed a greater diversity in ways of being autonomous than has previously been appreciated. This presumption, then, risks wrongly dismissing variant, neuro-atypical sorts of autonomy as non-autonomy. This is both an epistemic error, which impairs our understanding of autonomy as a phenomenon, and a (...) moral error, which withholds recognition and respect that autonomous agents are due. I argue that careful attention to the different 'shapes' of agent's autonomy reveals that there are indeed distinctive kinds of neuro-atypical autonomy that are widely mistaken for non-autonomy. This project argues for two propositions. First, that there is a kind of autonomy, with a distinctive shape and texture, available to bipolar agents. This is a variant sort of autonomy, but not a defective or deficient sort. It is the ideal of autonomy that it is worth bipolar agents striving for, given the range and intensity of experiences that they will have to confront. Whilst bipolar autonomy will look unlike more neurotypical kinds of autonomy, it continues to be owed recognition. The second proposition is that we should understand the ideal of autonomy to be both pluralist and highly context sensitive. Given the range of starting points from which agents will strive to an ideal of autonomy, there will be some variation in the ideals worth striving for. The variation in ideals will reflect the existential realities they are local to. Theory of autonomy must be adapted to recognise bipolar, and other neuro-atypical, kinds of autonomy, and to reflect this wider pluralism. These propositions will be argued for with careful attention to the experiences and agency of people living with bipolar, or related, disorders. Understanding the ways that manic or depressive episodes, and the shifts between them, alter and apply pressure to our agency will inform an account of the distinctively bipolar autonomy that can be built on top of it. (shrink)

This paper explicates Descartes’ theory of intuition (intuitus). Departing from certain commentators, I argue that intuition, for Descartes, is a form of clear and distinct intellectual perception. Because it is clear and distinct, it is indubitable, infallible, and provides a grade of certain knowledge he calls ‘cognitio’. I pay special attention to why he treats intuition as a form of perception, and what he means when he says it is ‘clear and distinct’. Finally, I situate his view in relation to (...) those of his Scholastic predecessors on one hand and current theories on the other. His view anticipates the contemporary ‘perceptual model of intuition’, though it is much bolder with its promise of certainty. (shrink)

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order to (...) take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

In Matters of Life and Death Elliot Dorff thoroughly addresses this unavoidable confluence of medical technology and Jewish law and ethics.

An analysis of two heuristic strategies for the development of mechanistic models, illustrated with historical examples from the life sciences. In Discovering Complexity, William Bechtel and Robert Richardson examine two heuristics that guided the development of mechanistic models in the life sciences: decomposition and localization. Drawing on historical cases from disciplines including cell biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, they identify a number of "choice points" that life scientists confront in developing mechanistic explanations and show how different choices result in (...) divergent explanatory models. Describing decomposition as the attempt to differentiate functional and structural components of a system and localization as the assignment of responsibility for specific functions to specific structures, Bechtel and Richardson examine the usefulness of these heuristics as well as their fallibility—the sometimes false assumption underlying them that nature is significantly decomposable and hierarchically organized. When Discovering Complexity was originally published in 1993, few philosophers of science perceived the centrality of seeking mechanisms to explain phenomena in biology, relying instead on the model of nomological explanation advanced by the logical positivists (a model Bechtel and Richardson found to be utterly inapplicable to the examples from the life sciences in their study). Since then, mechanism and mechanistic explanation have become widely discussed. In a substantive new introduction to this MIT Press edition of their book, Bechtel and Richardson examine both philosophical and scientific developments in research on mechanistic models since 1993. (shrink)

In this study, I examine Susan Taubes’s criticism of Heidegger’s Seinsdenken that pivots around her contention that he absolutized the nothingness of being in a manner that is analogous to but yet significantly different than the role assigned to the Godhead on the part of many mystical visionaries. The common denominator is in Heidegger’s insistence on being to the neglect of fully engaging with the rhythms of life. As a consequence, there is no purchase on the chaotic, which falls outside (...) the purview of what can be signified, and in the absence of the unsignifiable, there can be no signification. Every attempt to reconstruct the broken world into a totality contains the flaw of an ontological untruth. The effort at totalization is not only the methodological weakness of tragedy and mysticism, but it is also the nihilistic basis of the role accorded to the nothingness of being in Heidegger’s Seinsdenken. The erroneous nature of the world is not denied by Susan, but she struggled to uphold the ontological untruth that what is most wrong in our existence is what is most precious. The paradoxical retrieval of the truth of this untruth affords the poetic soul the opportunity to confront the limit by breaking it, an infringement of boundary that is redolent equally with the enduring transience of love and the transient endurance of death. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant claims that genius is a talent for art, but not for science. Despite his restriction of genius to the domain of fine art, several recent interpreters have suggested that genius has a role to play in Kant’s account of cognition in general and scientific practice in particular. In this paper, I explore Kant’s reasons for excluding genius from science as well as the reasons that one might nevertheless be tempted to think that his account (...) allows room for the scientific genius. I then argue that Kant’s concerns are not only epistemic, but also moral, and together, they give us good reason for resisting the veneration of genius. (shrink)

Bernard Williams's remarkable essay on morality confronts the problems of writing moral philosophy, and offers a stimulating alternative to more systematic accounts which seem nevertheless to have left all the important issues somewhere off the page. Williams explains, analyses and distinguishes a number of key positions, from the purely amoral to notions of subjective or relative morality, testing their coherence before going on to explore the nature of 'goodness' in relation to responsibilities and choice, roles, standards, and human nature. The (...) final chapters make a fascinating enquiry into what morality is about, looking beyond happiness to other human aims and ideals. This re-issue of a classic in moral philosophy includes a new foreword by the author. (shrink)