As is well known, Deleuze says in Difference and Repetition that ‘the task of contemporary philosophy has been defined: to reverse Platonism’. This task is then continued in Logic of Sense, through its discussion of Stoic logic. Deleuze says there that ‘the Stoics are the first to reverse Platonism’. And, at the same time, in the big Spinoza book, we see Deleuze present Spinoza's ‘anti-Cartesian reaction’. This anti-Cartesian reaction is equivalent to the reversal of Platonism. We can say then (...) that the task of the reversal of Platonism unifies the three books Deleuze published at the end of the Sixties. The thesis of this essay will consist in arguing that ethics we find in Logic of Sense – which we can call ‘the ethics of the univocity of being’ – completes, in a constructive way, Deleuze's early project of the reversal of Platonism. The ethics centres on the idea of counter-actualisation. We shall argue that there are four senses of counter-actualisation. Here is a summary of the four senses of counter-actualisation: beatitude against resentment ; caring for the sense against neglecting the sense ; the embodiment of plural hopings and rememberings against the embodiment of one hope and one memory ; and ‘just enough’ against ‘too much’. Yet, as we shall see, there is a fifth meaning of counter-actualisation, the ultimate meaning. The ultimate sense of counter-actualisation is universal freedom. This is where my essay will end. (shrink)

Tainted political symbols ought to be confronted, removed, or at least recontextualized. Despite the best efforts to achieve this, however, official actions on tainted symbols often fail to take place. In such cases, I argue that political vandalism—the unauthorized defacement, destruction, or removal of political symbols—may be morally permissible or even obligatory. This is when, and insofar as, political vandalism serves as fitting counter-speech that undermines the authority of tainted symbols in ways that match their publicity, refuses to let (...) them speak in our name, and challenges the derogatory messages expressed through a mechanism I call derogatory pedestalling: the glorification or honoring of certain individuals or ideologies that can only make sense when members of a targeted group are taken to be inferior. (shrink)

My main concern in this article is the relevance of theoretically integrative approaches. I argue that such approaches are methodologically better equipped for the psychology of religion because they correspond with the inherent complexity of religiosity. In order to concretize this matter I critically evaluate the hypothesis proposed by some cognitive researchers that the attraction of counter-intuitive representations provides an explanation of religion. Irrelevant aspects are left out in this hypothesis. In contrast to this I rely on cognitive-analytic perspectives (...) that are based on a broader theoretical foundation. This generates a more complete picture that also connects to the tradition built on Otto's idea of the wholly other. From this perspective it is more plausible to assume that religious representations are trajectories of the early evolving tripartite sense of self, other and world and, further, formed by individual mentalization capacity. This can be conceptualized in terms of interplay between specific complex representational constellations rooted in different phases of early development. Integrative approaches that depict mental activity as a dynamic and multifaceted phenomenon embedded in intersubjectivity are relevant for the psychology of religion. (shrink)

This article suggests an oblique reading of The Headless Woman, the latest film by Lucrecia Martel, a founder member of the so-called New Argentine Cinema and one of the major stylists of contemporary cinema. Unlike the many memorial films that surround the trauma of the dis- appeared in Argentina, The Headless Woman ‘countersigns’ the genre, proposing a hallucinatory experience of immersion within the affects of guilt, complicity and denial unleashed by the last dictatorship. By presenting the existentialist drama of an (...) upper-class woman involved in a seemingly minor car accident on a deserted provincial road, the film manages to stage a counter-narrative of the traumatic past that affected the whole of society beyond obvious sites of suffering. Through an engagement with Judith Butler’s account of mourning, this article argues that the film bears the traces of a collective mourning, an experience of grief that permeated the Argentine citizenry and challenged blood as the only form of kinship. The article contends that the affects explored in Martel’s film may be crucial in confronting the new faceless, that is, those whose social exclusion persists unnoticed during the current democratic regime, and whose lives are in a sense ‘ungrievable’. By proposing an entanglement of temporalities, the analysis suggests that the 30,000 lives made to disappear during dictatorial times cannot be grasped except in conjunction with the silence surrounding poverty, the new spectre of the present. In Martel’s film each viewer becomes a witness and also a survivor and is thereby subtlety compelled to respond. In this way, The Headless Woman also suggests an ethical key to future possibilities. (shrink)

This chapter presents Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy as modern fictions with ancient-skeptical ambitions. Whether in the affective domain (Flaubert) or in the cognitive (Beckett), the aim is to help the reader achieve a position of studied neutrality—ataraxia, époché—thanks not to an a priori decision but to the mutual cancellation of opposing tendencies. Understanding Flaubert and Beckett in this way allows us, first, to enrich our sense of what “catharsis” may involve; second, to see why the (...) apparently odious Charles, in Madame Bovary, suddenly becomes a deeply touching figure; and third, to recognize the severe limitations of empathy-based moralist theories of fiction. (shrink)

This book brings together a group of Judith Butler's philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up with (...) becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power. Butler shows in different philosophical contexts how the self that seeks to make itself finds itself already affected and formed against its will by social and discursive powers. And yet, agency and action are not necessarily nullified by this primary impingement. Primary sense impressions register this dual situation of being acted on and acting, countering the idea that acting requires one to overcome the situation of being affected by others and the linguistic and social world. This dual structure of sense sheds light on the desire to live, the practice and peril of grieving, embodied resistance, love, and modes of enthrallment and dispossession. Working with theories of embodiment, desire, and relationality in conversation with philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Fanon, Butler reanimates and revises her basic propositions concerning the constitution and deconstitution of the subject within fields of power, taking up key issues of gender, sexuality, and race in several analyses. Taken together, these essays track the development of Butler's embodied account of ethical relations. (shrink)

This chapter presents Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy as modern fictions with ancient-skeptical ambitions. Whether in the affective domain (Flaubert) or in the cognitive (Beckett), the aim is to help the reader achieve a position of studied neutrality—ataraxia, époché—thanks not to an a priori decision but to the mutual cancellation of opposing tendencies. Understanding Flaubert and Beckett in this way allows us, first, to enrich our sense of what “catharsis” may involve; second, to see why the (...) apparently odious Charles, in Madame Bovary, suddenly becomes a deeply touching figure; and third, to recognize the severe limitations of empathy-based moralist theories of fiction. (shrink)

On a classical conception, knowing the sense of a proposition is knowing its truth-condition, rather than simply knowing how to verify the proposition, or how to find its implications (whether deductive implications or implications for action). But knowing the truth-condition of a proposition is not unrelated to your use of particular methods for verifying the proposition, or finding its implications. Rather, your knowledge of the truth-condition of the proposition has to justify the use of particular methods for verifying it, (...) or finding its implications. And your knowledge of the truth-condition of the proposition has to be what causes your use of particular methods for verifying it or finding its implications. So on a classical picture, we do not appeal to knowledge of sense only in explaining the informativeness of identities. We have to think of knowledge of sense as what causes, and justifies, your use of particular ways of verifying or finding the implications of a proposition. I argue that in the case of a perceptual demonstrative, like 'that star' or 'that mountain', it is conscious attention to the object that causes, and justifies, your use of particular ways of verifying or finding the implications of propositions involving the demonstrative. So conscious attention to the object is what constitutes your grasp of the sense of the demonstrative. This runs counter to the philosophical tradition since Locke, which takes it that the role of experience in understanding has to do solely with the verification of propositions. I argue that once we think of conscious attention as a pre-intentional acquaintance with the object itself, we can see how it is possible to think of understanding as consisting in knowledge of classical truth-conditions. (shrink)

According to a widespread view, one of the most important roles of education is the nurturing of common sense. In this article I turn to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of sense to develop a contrary view of education—one that views education as a radical challenge to common sense. The discussion will centre on the relation of sense and common sense to thinking. Although adherents of common sense refer to it as the basis of all thought (...) and appeal to critical thinking as instrumental in eliminating its occasional errors, I shall argue, following Deleuze, that common sense education in fact thwarts thinking, while only education which revolves around making sense may provoke thinking that goes beyond the self-evident. I demonstrate how making sense can become an educational encounter that breaks hierarchies and generates thinking independently of the thinker’s knowledge and place in the sociopolitical order. The present article attempts, therefore, to put some sense into Deleuzian education for thinking, and thereby shed new light on its radical-political, counter-commonsensical power. (shrink)

How ontologically committal is common sense? Is the common-sense philosopher beholden to a florid ontology in which all manner of objects, substances, and processes exist and are as they appear to be to common sense, or can she remain neutral on questions about the existence and nature of many things because common sense is largely non-committal? This chapter explores and tentatively evaluates three different approaches to answering these questions. The first applies standard accounts of ontological commitment (...) to common-sense claims. This leads to the surprising and counter-intuitive result that common sense has metaphysically heavyweight commitments. The second approach emphasizes the superficiality and locality of common-sense claims. On this approach, however, common sense comes out as almost entirely non-committal. The third approach questions the seriousness of ontological commitment as such. If ontological commitment is cheap, it becomes possible both to accept the commitments of common sense at face value and to avoid the counter-intuitive consequences of heavyweight metaphysical commitments. (shrink)

In the wake of recent attempts at alternate history (Bowler 2013), this paper suggests several avenues for a pluralistic approach to Charles Darwin and his role in the history of evolutionary theory. We examine in what sense Darwin could be described as a major driver of theoretical change in the history of biology. First, this paper examines how Darwin influenced the future of biological science: not merely by stating the fact of evolution or by bringing evidence for it; but (...) by discovering natural selection, and giving it pre-eminence over any other mechanism for evolution; and also by proposing a masterful and quite unique synthesis of many scientific fields. Contrasting Darwin’s views with those of A.R. Wallace, I conclude that “natural selection” is clearly an original contribution, that it had no forerunners or co-discoverers, and could barely have appeared after Darwin conceived of it. This specificity of Darwin’s contribution is an invitation to be strongly presentist (Loison 2016) and to adopt only weak counter-factuals. In contrast, there are possible ways to use strong counter-factuals as attempts to “pluralize” the history of biological theory: i.e. imagine new possible avenues for the development of evolutionary biology. The idea that evolution was a theory “in the air” suggests that evolutionary theory could have developed in a world without Darwin, especially if we accept to delete not only “Darwin” but “England”. France and Germany are examined as possible countries where evolutionary ideas would have thrived even with no contribution from the English scientists. Finally, the paper suggests another counter-factual hypothesis: deleting not Darwin and his Origin but the Darwin Industry itself. This may allow us to read the Origin of Species with fresh eyes and to discover Darwin’s life-long interest in variation and its laws, as many of his early readers did. (shrink)

Abstract“Psychological essentialism” refers to our tendency to view the natural world as emerging from the result of deep, hidden, and internal forces called “essences.” People tend to believe that genes underlie a person’s identity. People encounter information about genetics on a regular basis, as through media such as a New York Times piece “Infidelity Lurks in Your Genes” or a 23andMe commercial showing people acquiring new ethnic identities as the result of their genotyping. How do people make sense of (...) new scientific findings that are inherently complex if they don’t have years of specialized training and education at their disposal? Given the substantial overlap between a lay understanding of genetics and lay intuitions about essences, we argue that, when most people are thinking about genes, they are not really thinking about genes in the complex ways that good scientists are. Combating people’s essentialist biases can be a formidable challenge. Although we have identified some promising results of trying to reduce people’s genetic essentialist tendencies, there is still much to learn about how these essentialist biases can be countered. It is important to help people understand genetic information so they are able make well‐informed decisions about their lives. (shrink)

On a classical conception, knowing the sense of a proposition is knowing its truth-condition, rather than simply knowing how to verify the proposition, or how to find its implications (whether deductive implications or implications for action). But knowing the truth-condition of a proposition is not unrelated to your use of particular methods for verifying the proposition, or finding its implications. Rather, your knowledge of the truth-condition of the proposition has to justify the use of particular methods for verifying it, (...) or finding its implications. And your knowledge of the truth-condition of the proposition has to be what causes your use of particular methods for verifying it or finding its implications. So on a classical picture, we do not appeal to knowledge of sense only in explaining the informativeness of identities. We have to think of knowledge of sense as what causes, and justifies, your use of particular ways of verifying or finding the implications of a proposition. I argue that in the case of a perceptual demonstrative, like 'that star' or 'that mountain', it is conscious attention to the object that causes, and justifies, your use of particular ways of verifying or finding the implications of propositions involving the demonstrative. So conscious attention to the object is what constitutes your grasp of the sense of the demonstrative. This runs counter to the philosophical tradition since Locke, which takes it that the role of experience in understanding has to do solely with the verification of propositions. I argue that once we think of conscious attention as a pre-intentional acquaintance with the object itself, we can see how it is possible to think of understanding as consisting in knowledge of classical truth-conditions. (shrink)

On a classical conception, knowing the sense of a proposition is knowing its truth-condition, rather than simply knowing how to verify the proposition, or how to find its implications (whether deductive implications or implications for action). But knowing the truth-condition of a proposition is not unrelated to your use of particular methods for verifying the proposition, or finding its implications. Rather, your knowledge of the truth-condition of the proposition has to justify the use of particular methods for verifying it, (...) or finding its implications. And your knowledge of the truth-condition of the proposition has to be what causes your use of particular methods for verifying it or finding its implications. So on a classical picture, we do not appeal to knowledge of sense only in explaining the informativeness of identities. We have to think of knowledge of sense as what causes, and justifies, your use of particular ways of verifying or finding the implications of a proposition. I argue that in the case of a perceptual demonstrative, like 'that star' or 'that mountain', it is conscious attention to the object that causes, and justifies, your use of particular ways of verifying or finding the implications of propositions involving the demonstrative. So conscious attention to the object is what constitutes your grasp of the sense of the demonstrative. This runs counter to the philosophical tradition since Locke, which takes it that the role of experience in understanding has to do solely with the verification of propositions. I argue that once we think of conscious attention as a pre-intentional acquaintance with the object itself, we can see how it is possible to think of understanding as consisting in knowledge of classical truth-conditions. (shrink)

I am very grateful to my commentators for their interest and their careful attention to A Theory of Sentience. It is particularly gratifying to find other philosophers attracted to the murky domain of pre-attentive sensory processing, an obscure place where exciting stuff happens. I can by no means answer all of their objections or counter-arguments, and some of the problems noted derive from failures in my original exposition. But a theory is a success if it helps spur the creation (...) of better successors. By those lights this one seems to be succeeding admirably. Would that every author could receive such commentaries! (shrink)

From playing basketball to ordering at a food counter, we frequently and effortlessly coordinate our attention with others towards a common focus: we look at the ball, or point at a piece of cake. This non-verbal coordination of attention plays a fundamental role in our social lives: it ensures that we refer to the same object, develop a shared language, understand each other’s mental states, and coordinate our actions. Models of joint attention generally attribute this accomplishment to gaze coordination. (...) But are visual attentional mechanisms sufficient to achieve joint attention, in all cases? Besides cases where visual information is missing, we show how combining it with other senses can be helpful, and even necessary to certain uses of joint attention. We explain the two ways in which non-visual cues contribute to joint attention: either as enhancers, when they complement gaze and pointing gestures in order to coordinate joint attention on visible objects, or as modality pointers, when joint attention needs to be shifted away from the whole object to one of its properties, say weight or texture. This multisensory approach to joint attention has important implications for social robotics, clinical diagnostics, pedagogy and theoretical debates on the construction of a shared world. (shrink)

Many of the experiments that produced the empirical basis of quantum mechanics relied on classical assumptions that contradicted quantum mechanics. Historically this did not cause practical problems, as classical mechanics was used mostly when it did not happen to diverge too much from quantum mechanics in the quantitative sense. That fortunate circumstances, however, did not alleviate the conceptual problems involved in understanding the classical experimental reasoning in quantum-mechanical terms. In general, this type of difficulty can be expected when a (...) coherent scientific tradition undergoes a theoretical upheaval. The problem may be circumvented through the use of phenomenological theory in experimentation during the period of theoretical instability. (shrink)

Alleged counter-examples based on conceptual thought experiments, including those involving sense or content, have no force against physicalist supervenience theses properly construed. This is largely because of their epistemological status and their modal status. Still, there are empirical examples that do contradict Kim-style theses, due to the latter’s individualism. By contrast, non-individualist supervenience, such as “global” supervenience, remains unscathed, a possibility overlooked by Lynne Baker, as is dear from a physicalist account of sense in the case of (...) non-human biological adaptations that are for producing things about affairs in the world. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Rousseau is an important precursor of the Counter-Enlightenment. To this end, I will examine the parallels between his partial critique of the Enlightenment and that of Joseph de Maistre, whose work represents one of the most comprehensive and systematic indictments of the central ideas and objectives of the Enlightenment. Despite his frequent denunciations of Rousseau's ideas and influence, Maistre shares with him a profound concern for what he takes to be the disastrous social (...) and political ramifications of eighteenth-century ideas, and he selectively appropriates many of Rousseau's arguments to support his own, more radical critique of the Enlightenment. Between 1749, when Rousseau's Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts first appeared, and the publication of Maistre's Soir?es de Saint-Petersbourg in 1821, a movement gradually developed against the Enlightenment, culminating in a complete rejection of its central ideas and assumptions by many writers of the early nineteenth century. Rousseau is a crucial figure in this movement. His writings, beginning with his first discourse, contain one of the earliest major critiques of the Enlightenment project. In a sense, Maistre's works are the consummation of many of the ideas and arguments first directed against the Enlightenment by Rousseau. (shrink)

Everyday teaching involves emotional and relational irrationalities, and these aspects of pedagogical sensitivity and sense are critical for beginning teachers as they develop their practice. The complex elements of what it means to teach are often impossible to grasp from an instrumental approach to teacher education, which emphasizes subject matter knowledge and practical behavioral know-how. Increased educational standardisation and a new teacher training paradigm in Sweden have resulted in positioning future teachers as responsible only for communicating official school knowledge (...) and assessing their learning process. This narrowed understanding of teachers’ practice requires another perspective of teaching to be articulated. This article explores the internships of beginning teachers from a phenomenological perspective, drawing on storytelling in teacher education as a way to reveal student teachers’ lived experiences. These beginning teachers are learning professional ways of being, which reveal the complexities of teaching, and their accounts have the potential to counter the dominance of neoliberalism in education. (shrink)

In ‘Acceptance and Morality’, 433–453) Sophie Botros tells us ‘The Stoics and Wittgenstein look upon acceptance as the only means of achieving freedom, in the sense of liberation from desire, in a world in which, because men are relatively or totally powerless, desire must often be unsatisfied’.

The Counter-Enlightenment and its corollary, the Counter-Revolution, must not be systematically reduced to some sterile philosophical denial and combat, hoping to return to the former established society, political power and thought, which would be nothing more than a mere reactionary endeavor. Counter-revolutionary authors such as Maistre and Bonald, who, at first, did favour the Enlightenment, intend to explain what seems inexplicable, notably the Terror, and, by giving a sense to it, to go beyond the dread created (...) by the outburst of revolutionary violence. Indeed, their purpose is to understand the course of the Revolution, its causes and effects, and its infernal logic. To proceed, they develop new intellectual strategies, induced by the radical novelty of the revolutionary process itself. In order to reassign to this event such a place in History as defined by a divine purpose, they start by proving that the Revolution is evil, then, further explaining this evil from a theological point of view. Favouring internal criticism, this paper purports to analyze and compare Maistre’s and Bonald’s methodical examination of the Revolution in some of their more relevant works. (shrink)

Although appeals to human dignity became quite popular after the end of War World II in various moral and legal settings, the term retained an air of semantic indeterminacy, and scholars are of opposing minds concerning its usefulness and significance. In this essay I intend to offer a sketch of a “deflationary” account of human dignity – viewed as one moral value among many others – according to which it is conceived as the minimal respect we prima facie owe to (...) our own personality, as well as to the personality of everyone else without any restriction or exception. This account is accompanied by a justification, which does not presuppose the endorsement of a particular moral theory, and envisages dignity as a bulwark to counter the morally abhorrent consequences of many categorical and normatively tainted dichotomies western societies have created. (shrink)

In ‘Acceptance and Morality’ , 433–453) Sophie Botros tells us ‘The Stoics and Wittgenstein look upon acceptance as the only means of achieving freedom, in the sense of liberation from desire, in a world in which, because men are relatively or totally powerless, desire must often be unsatisfied’.

For Bernard Stiegler ‘the question of philosophy is first of all that of action’ (p.7). By extending this statement to philosophy of education, I consider the possibilities of action in education in responding to the conditions of the contemporary. These conditions, which have come to be discussed and dissected with reference to such terms as Anthropocene (Stoermer, Crutzen), Capitalocene (Moore), Plantationocene (Haraway), hold unprecedented and mostly devastating consequences for all life. To consider possibilities for action within the field of education (...) to the conditions of the contemporary, I read Walter Mignolo’s concept of the colonial wound together with Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualisation of the wound. Based on this reading, I argue for the conditions of the contemporary to be understood as a wound in both Mignolo’s and Deleuze’s sense. Conceptualising it as such in turn allows me to ask how we might counter-actualise the wounds of the contemporary. In other words, how might we be worthy of the wound-event and respond in an affirmative yet critical manner to it within the field of education, and in so doing generate new possibilities of (educational) life. To consider what one such possibility of counter-actualisation might entail, I propose that education be informed by the notion of incompleteness, as expressed in the concept of conviviality. I conclude by reflecting on implications of counter-actualising the wound of the contemporary in relation to education if we were to activate the concepts of incompleteness and conviviality and pursue a different aesthetics of (educational) life. (shrink)

Written for general readers and students, this book provides an accessible and brief metaphysical defense of freedom. James W. Felt, S.J., invites his audience to consider that we are responsible for what we do precisely because we do it freely. His perspective runs counter to the philosophers who argue that the freedom humans feel in their actions is merely an illusion. Felt argues in detail that there are no compelling reasons for thinking we are not free, and very strong (...) ones for thinking that we are. The view that Felt develops parallels that of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. In the course of his analysis, Felt considers determinism, compatibilism, agency, and the problem of evil. Featuring an updated list of suggested readings, this clearly and engagingly written introductory work is ideal for the undergraduate classroom. (shrink)

Purpose Google commands approximately 70 per cent of search market share worldwide, resulting in businesses investing heavily in search engine advertising on Google to target potential customers. Recently, Google changed the way in which content and ads were displayed on the search engine results page. This reshuffling of content and ads is expected to affect the advertisers who advertise on Google and/or use it to drive traffic to their websites. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of (...) these changes on various stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach Data have been collected from various sources on the internet including blogs and discussion forums. Netnography has been used as it allows a detailed evaluation of the consumers’ needs, wants and choices in a virtual space. Findings The average cost-per-click for ads on the top positions is expected to increase. Advertisers whose ads usually occupy the lower positions would be adversely affected. To counter this, more emphasis should be placed on ad extensions and on product listing ads. In addition, organizations would benefit from increased efforts on search engine optimization. Practical implications A variety of coping strategies have been developed that can help marketers to successfully navigate through the change, including the use of ad extensions and the use of product listing ads. Originality/value This practice-focused paper offers guidelines for digital marketers to use sponsored search more effectively as part of their arsenal in light of some important changes recently made by Google. The potential of netnography as a research methodology has also been expanded by using it in a novel setting and in drawing up actionable insights. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy: A New Reading of Six Thinkers by Henry Somers-HallClayton CrockettSOMERS-HALL, Henry. Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy: A New Reading of Six Thinkers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 264 pp. Cloth, $99.99Henry Somers-Hall's book examines how French philosophers in the twentieth century develop a logic of thinking based on sense that is both influenced by but also (...) counters Kant's paradigm of thinking, which is based on judgment. Beginning with Kant and German idealism, including the German responses to Kant in the work of Hölderlin, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, this book then carefully draws out the ways that Bergson, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze all work against this understanding of thinking as judging by showing how our experience and our thought precede the categories of judgment.In chapter 1, Somers-Hall carefully sets out Kant's model of thinking and shows how the categories of philosophical thought are fundamentally based on how we judge our sensible intuitions. Judgment is at the center of Kant's thought, and this is apparent in the Critique of Pure Reason, including the famous Transcendental Deduction. Our knowledge has a legislative function in relation to objects, and conscious synthesis takes the form of a judgment. Despite their criticisms of Kant, later German idealists do not fundamentally depart from this modality of judgment that takes place at the center of their philosophy. Even though they put Kant's concepts in motion, it remains a structure of judgment that is understood as dynamic.Chapter 2 turns to Bergson, to show how his emphasis on immediate experience precedes categorical judgement. Bergson distinguishes between temporal and spatial multiplicities, and argues that temporal multiplicities that are expressed in terms of duration underlie the spatial ones that contribute to judgment. Duration is a deeper experience of time that is associated with life. Somers-Hall in chapter 3 examines Sartre's writings on imagination to show how consciousness is a pure relation and an affective mode of thinking that underlies the categorial mode of judgment.Most of these French philosophers develop their accounts of noncategorial sense in either explicit or implicit relation to Kant's philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is no exception, and in chapter 4 we see how it is the organization of perception that gives sense to the world, and this precedes and generates "our reflective categories of judgement." Judgment emerges out of perception, although Merleau-Ponty grounds perception in the embodied person. Derrida does not ground sense or [End Page 365] thinking in a body, but looks for noncategorial grounds that make possible "surface structures of thinking." In chapter 5, Somers-Hall elaborates Derrida's famous nonconcept of différance, which underlies and makes possible our concepts of voice and writing that appear to be oppositions but in fact are not because they rely on each other. Différance is not a concept; it is prior to conceptual determination, and it "operates as an 'origin' that has none of the traits of the structure of judgement."Foucault relies on Kant for his three epistemes of resemblance, representation, and the human being, modern man. Chapter 6 shows how Foucault is concerned in both his archaeology and his genealogy with opening up the structures of power that make any juridical ordering possible. Here a productive biopower works beneath what we recognize more explicitly as "juridico-discursive power" in both positive and negative ways that escape the grasp of a philosophy that is solely based on judgment.In chapter 7 Somers-Hall shows how Deleuze's concept of intensity underlies all forms of representational judgment. Intensity operates according to a process of differentiation that produces a logic of sense, which we miss when we grasp onto a "dogmatic image of thought" that "prevents a genuine encounter with the world [that] conditions us to understand it in terms of unified subjects who make sense of the world in terms of judgements." We think in response to a shock or an encounter with something in the world that forces us to think and to make sense. We form judgments retroactively, by reducing differences to... (shrink)

This essay examines the contradictions often found in third wave feminist texts that function as strategic choices that may shape, foster, and enhance an individual's sense of agency. Many third wave feminists utilize contradiction as a way to understand emergent identities, to develop new ways of thinking, and to imagine new forms of social action. Agency, then, stems from the use of contradiction as a means of self-determination and identity, of transcendence of seemingly forced or dichotomous choices, and (...) class='Hi'>counter-imaginations of a better future. (shrink)

This thesis explores Epicurus' attempt to establish sense-perception as the primary or basic means by which we can gain knowledge about the world. In It is argued that it was this aim, along with his belief that perceptions are all equal in trustworthiness, which lead him to maintain "All perceptions are true", this being the thesis that all sense-perceptions present states of affairs which actually obtain. The heart of the thesis is then a discussion of how Epicurus dealt (...) with apparent counter-examples to "All perceptions are true", which aims to establish that, for him, all such counter-examples are in fact instances of being mistaken about what is being presented. The thesis then discusses Epicurus' account of how people are able to trust the judgements they make on the basis of sense-perceptions, and how knowledge of the perceptible world serves as a basis for making judgements about the non-evident.. (shrink)

The concept of a priori plays an important role in Kant’s entiree philosophy. However, Husserl often claimed that a genuine concept of a priori in the phenomenological sense was absent in Kant. Scheler criticized this concept of Kant just as Husserl did. All of Scheler’s ethical critiques of Kant, who is the major opponent to Scheler, are based on his critiques of Kant’s concept of a priori because, for Scheler, it is the largest absurdity of Kant’s theory that a (...) priori is equated to the formal. Scheler thus clearly delineated Kant’s transcendentalism, which seeks a priori in form. It seems that Scheler‘s comprehension and interpretation of a priori reversed Kant’s “Copernican revolution”, in contrast with which, Scheler carried ou a „Ptolemiac counter-revolution“. In fact, Scheler questioned Kant‘s transcendental-rational theory of the function of synthetic categories, which derived from the “Copernican revolution”. Nevertheless, Scheler did not want to defend the pre-Kant position, or Kant’s pre-critique period. He also did not mean simply to stress one side in Kant’s dualism, which was ignored by Kant. In fact, he wanted to question Kant’s metaphysical dualism itself. The eventual goal of his phenomenological philosophy is to reveal the uncritical presuppositions in Kant’s critical philosophy. (shrink)

Since the demise of the Sense-Datum independent objects or events to be objects Theory and Phenomenalism in the last cenof perception; however, unlike Direct Retury, Direct Realism in the philosophy of alists, Indirect Realists take this percepperception has enjoyed a resurgence of tion to be indirect by involving a prior popularity.1 Curiously, however, although awareness of some tertium quid between there have been attempts in the literature the mind and external objects or events.3 to refute some of the arguments (...) against Idealists and Phenomenalists agree with Direct Realism, there has been, as of yet, the Indirect Realists. (shrink)

This article traces the emergence of ecomedia in Japan’s nuclear exclusion zone. I take this emergence as an opportunity to think through the relations of sensing technologies and animals as well as the transformative potential of these relations for critical thought. I turn to the camera trap and the Geiger counter first to understand how these sensor-based media are used to generate data around environmental inquiry as well as how they may be reassembled to help us take measure of (...) the aftereffects of the 3.11 disasters through and with located relationships and encounters among species, human and nonhuman. By exploring how ecomedia invite nonhuman makings to enter the analytical frame, I hope to arrive at an understanding of environmental harm not as a futurological threat but as an ongoing event that calls for new forms of agentic thinking and enactments of multispecies struggle and collaboration. (shrink)

This article engages with Michel Foucault’s idea of confession as the central Christian strategy of subjection or subjectivation and the link he proposes between confession and obedience. The article also wishes to show how confession can become counter-conduct. I apply Foucault’s conceptions to early modern Lutheran confessionalism, elucidating how the confessional apparatus of the orthodox Lutheranism of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden strived to mold obedient subjects who are able to conduct themselves. I also examine the transformation and overthrow of (...) these subjectivation techniques in Radical Pietism, analyzing a dissident confession of faith by the Radical Pietist Peter Schaefer, who exemplifies perfect subjection, constituting himself as a perfectly obedient subject, and yet a failure of subjectivation in the sense of submission, insofar as for him, obedience becomes a strategy of empowerment. (shrink)

The essay consists of three parts: the first argues that Deleuze's moral philosophy in The Logic of Sense provides an ethical model of counter-actualisation; the second shows how three different practices of art therapy offer a means to effect this counter-actualisation and thereby demonstrate the restorative power of art; the third explores how such a power might form part of what Guattari calls the ‘ethico-aesthetic paradigm’ (Guattari 1995).

Sensorial access to products in shop encounters constitutes a crucial aspect of the appeal to customers. This paper examines sensorial engagements with products in a specific ecology with a focus on the possible opening of a shop encounter. When passers-by stroll from one stand to another, open to local findings, unplanned discoveries, and emergent opportunities to buy, they orient to the sensory appeal of the products, becoming possible customers, stopping in front of a counter and engaging in a social (...) interaction with sellers and other customers. The analysis focuses on multisensoriality in action, studying how customers and sellers treat the sensorial qualities of the products, the relevance of the sensory engagement of the customer with their materiality, and their involvement in the social encounter with the seller, including normative expectations related to sensing and buying. It includes a discussion of how under Covid-19 sensorial access to products was restricted and the sensorial, interactional, normative, and economic consequences of these restrictions. Based on video recordings of market encounters, and on an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach of multimodality and multisensoriality, the paper reflects on how appealing to the senses of sight, touch, smell, and taste is methodically orchestrated, and its consequences for the interaction with the seller, the sensorial experience, and the economic transaction. (shrink)

SUMMARYThis essay investigates censorial responses to Jean Bodin's Methodus in Counter-Reformation Italy, using evidence from Italian libraries and archives to shed new light on the process that led to the inclusion of the work in the Roman Expurgatory Index of 1607. By examining the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, opinions that Catholic censors expressed on Bodin's text and the ‘errors’ it contained, the essay shows that even a relatively cohesive ‘reading community’ such as that of Counter-Reformation censors could nurture (...) fundamental disagreement in evaluating the content and dangerousness of a book, as well as in devising appropriate countermeasures. Censors often made sense of the same texts in utterly different ways, based not only on their own intellectual interests and backgrounds, but also on the different interpretive strategies that they adopted. In light of this fact, the article suggests that early modern censorship should be seen less as a purely repressive practice than as a peculiar type of readership, characterised by instability, controversy and active ‘meaning-making’. (shrink)

In a review of Frege's Puzzle1, Graeme Forbes makes the claim that Salmon's account of belief might be seen, under certain conditions, as a mere notational variant of a neo-Fregean theory; and thus that such an account might be reduced to a neo-Fregean one simply by rewriting it in terms of Fregean terminology. With a view to supporting his claim, Forbes offers an outline of an account of belief which, according to him, would satisfy the following conditions: (i) it could (...) be directly obtained from Salmon's own analysis by means of a certain set of substitutions, which presumably would not affect the essential features of Salmon's view; (ii) it could naturally be described as Fregean, in the sense that it would preserve, (at least) the spirit of Frege's doctrines, especially his fundamental intuitions about belief. Of course, the upshot of Forbes's argument is that Salmon's theory would not, at bottom, constitute a genuine alternative to a Fregean semantics for belief ascriptions. In this paper I argue to the effect that Forbes's claim is not in general sound. It seems to me that the sort of indirect argument used by Forbes - that of trying to undermine Salmon's theory by showing that it is just a version of a neo-Fregean account - does not provide someone working within a Fregean framework with an adequate strategy to counter Salmon's neo-Russellian views. It would perhaps be better to concentrate a Fregean attack on certain apparently dubious and highly controversial theses and results which are constitutive of Salmon's view, e.g. the counterintuitive character of a substantial set of consequences which follow from his theory of belief, as well as the associated revisionist stand he is forced to take towards our current patterns of speaking about belief. (shrink)

This paper argues against the claim that Frege is committed to an infinite hierarchy of senses. Carnap and Kripke, along with many others, argue the contrary; I expose where all such arguments go astray. Invariably these arguments assume (without citation) that Frege holds that sense and reference are always distinct. This is the fulcrum upon which the hierarchy is hoisted. The counter to this assumption is based on two important but neglected passages. The locution ‘indirect sense’ has (...) no ontological significance for Frege. It was just a ‘short expression’ (his term) to indicate that the customary relation between sign, sense, and reference is suspended in what he called the exception case of indirect context. Once the hierarchy is abandoned, the alleged problem of just what indirect sense is, as well as questions as to why Frege said so little about it and why he did not examine iterative indirect contexts are resolved. Of course, with no hierarchy, Davidson’s “unlearnability argument” turns out to be a non-starter. Some objections to my interpretation are considered and answered. Additionally, comparisons to Dummett’s one-level view of sense, which is similar to mine are made, as well as to some two-level views (Parsons and Skiba). (shrink)

Jaak Panksepp’s article ‘Affective Consciousness: Core Emotional Feelings in Animals and Humans’ is a excellent review and summary by a leading empirical contributor whose work for many years has been running counter to reigning behavioristic premises in neuroscience. It may unfortunately be true that he could not get this review published in many neuroscience journals because it attacks too many sacred cows. Panksepp has given readers of Consciousness and Cognition a nicely condensed summary of much of his classic 1998 (...) textbook, Affective Neuroscience. I’m reasonably confident that future neuroscience students will look on that textbook as one of the seminal publications on the subject of emotion and the brain, much as we might now look back on Luria’s Higher Cortical Functions in Man, or Paul MacLean’s classic work, The Triune Brain. There is probably little that I can add to his elegant presentation of the basic affective neuroscience findings, but I would like to highlight a few key issues for the reader. (shrink)

The topics of language and subaltern social groups appear throughout Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Although Gramsci often associates the problem of political fragmentation among subaltern groups with issues concerning language and common sense, there are only a few notes where he explicitly connects his overlapping analyses of language and subalternity. We build on the few places in the literature on Gramsci that focus on how he relates common sense to the questions of language or subalternity. By explicitly tracing (...) out these relations, we hope to bring into relief the direct connections between subalternity and language by showing how the concepts overlap with respect to Gramsci's analyses of common sense, intellectuals, philosophy, folklore, and hegemony. We argue that, for Gramsci, fragmentation of any social group's 'common sense', worldview and language is a political detriment, impeding effective political organisation to counter exploitation but that such fragmentation cannot be overcome by the imposition of a 'rational' or 'logical' worldview. Instead, what is required is a deep engagement with the fragments that make up subaltern historical, social, economic and political conditions. In our view, Gramsci provides an alternative both to the celebration of fragmentation fashionable in liberal multiculturalism and uncritical postmodernism, as well as other attempts of overcoming it through recourse to some external, transcendental or imposed worldview. This is fully in keeping with, and further elucidates Gramsci's understanding of the importance of effective 'democratic centralism' of the leadership of the party in relation to the rank and file and the popular masses. (shrink)

The article draws on critiques in political theory and morality to argue that womanism, a worldview rooted in Black women's lives and history, provides an alternative conceptual framework to prevailing Eurocentric thinking, for promoting socially just institutions of higher education. Presupposing a positioned, encultured, and embodied account of identity, womanism’s social change perspective holds transformative promise. It foregrounds Black women’s penchant for reaching solutions that promote communal balance, affirm one’s humanity and attend to the spiritual dimension (Phillips, 2006 Phillips, L. (...) (Ed.). (2006). The womanist reader. Routledge.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]). Directed first towards scholars of color, fostering inclusivity, communalist values and acknowledged intersectionality offers an ethic of the embodied self. As a corollary, it argues for a universal that recommends at least two guiding principles for a pedagogical philosophy. It is, first oriented towards a love of self and second towards placing all disciplines within a cultural-historical context. In the first claim, there is potential for nothing less than suspending the symbolic and ontological violence to one’s sense of belonging in academia. In the second claim, such an understanding can position scholars of color to actively re-narrate their fields. As illustrations, we focus on three academic fields of education, theology in higher education, and criminal justice. (shrink)

Philosophers from Plotinus to Paul Churchland have yielded to the temptation to embrace doctrines which contradict the core beliefs of common sense. Philosophical realists have on the other hand sought to counter this temptation and to vindicate those core beliefs. The remarks which follow are to be understood as a further twist of the wheel in this never-ending battle. They pertain to the core beliefs of common sense concerning the external reality that is given in everyday experience (...) -the beliefs of folk physics, as we might call them. Just as critics of Churchland et al. have argued that the folk-psychological ontology of beliefs, desires, etc. yields the best explanation we can have of the order of cognitive phenomena conceived from the perspective of first-person experience, so we shall argue that (1) the commonsensical ontology of folk physics yields the best explanation we can have of our externally directed cognitive experience and that (2) an ontology of mesoscopic things, events and processes must play a role, in particular, in our best scientific theory of human action. (shrink)

By the middle of the eighteenth century the new science had challenged the intellectual primacy of common experience in favor of recondite, expert and even counter-intuitive knowledge increasingly mediated by specialized instruments. Meanwhile modern philosophy had also problematized the perceptions of common experience — in the case of David Hume this included our perception of causal relations in nature, a fundamental precondition of scientific endeavor.In this article I argue that, in responding to the ‘problem of induction’ as advanced by (...) Hume, Reid reformulated Aristotelian foundationalism in distinctly modern terms. An educator and mathematician self-consciously working within the framework of the new science, Reid articulated a philosophical foundation for natural knowledge anchored in the human constitution and in processes of adjudication in an emerging modern public sphere of enlightened discourse. Reid thereby transformed one of the bases of Aristotelian science — common experience — into a philosophically and socially justified notion of ‘common sense’. Reid's intellectual concerns had as much to do with the philosophy of science as they did with moral philosophy or epistemology proper, and were bound up with wider social and scientific changes taking place in the early modern period. (shrink)

The emphasis on God in American psychology of religion generates the problem of explaining divine-versus-natural causality in “spiritual experiences.” Especially “theistic psychology” champions divine involvement. However, its argument exposes a methodological error: to pit popular religious opinions against technical scientific conclusions. Countering such homogenizing “postmodern agnosticism,” Bernard Lonergan explained these two as different modes of thinking: “common sense” and “theory”—which resolves the problem: When theoretical science is matched with theoretical theology, “the God-hypothesis” explains the existence of things whereas science (...) explains their natures; and, barring miracles, God is irrelevant to natural science. A review of the field shows that the problem is pervasive; attention to “miracles”—popularly so-named versus technically—focuses the claims of divine-versus-natural causality; and specifications of the meaning of spiritual, spirituality, science, worldview, and meaning itself offer further clarity. The problem is not naturalism versus theism, but commonsensical versus theoretical thinking. This solution demands “hard” social science. (shrink)

This research situates new farmers within the counter-urbanization phenomenon, explores their urban–rural migration experiences and examines how they are becoming a part of the rural agricultural landscape. Key characteristics in new farmers’ sense of place constructions are revealed through an ethnographic study conducted in southern Ontario, Canada, during the summer of 2009. Using a sense of place framework comprised of place identity, place attachment, and sense of community, this research details a contemporary concept of place to (...) provide a fresh perspective on new farmers. It uncovers underlying motivations, goals, and values attached to rural agricultural landscapes as well as the “everyday” interactions and challenges experienced by those transitioning into rural farming communities. New farmers are found to draw unevenly from both the physical and social landscape of the urban and rural environments in the creation of a sense of place. This finding raises important questions about the socio-spatial dynamics that underscore the place of food and the local food movement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to MiltonWilliam WalkerMachiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton, by Victoria Kahn; xv & 3l4 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, $29.95.The premise of this book is that the account of Machiavelli’s politics given by Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock is fundamentally inadequate. It is inadequate in that it fails to recognize that the Machiavelli of force and fraud—what (...) Kahn calls the “rhetorical Machiavel”—is inseparable from the republican, and that his politics “could be used not only pro and contra republicanism but pro and contra secular thought” (p. 12). This failure is answerable to a flawed methodology: reading Machiavelli’s texts for content, Skinner and Pocock neglect Machiavelli’s rhetorical techniques which “fragment, subvert, or otherwise qualify the literal sense” of his texts (p. 5). By paying attention to these rhetorical techniques, Kahn claims to correct Skinner and Pocock’s misunderstanding of Machiavelli as a virtuous, secular republican and “to provide a revised history of Renaissance Machiavellism, particularly in England” (p. 4).The main reason for the failure of this project is Kahn’s crude understanding of Skinner and Pocock. Rather than seeing Machiavelli assimilating virtù with classical virtue, Skinner observes that Machiavelli’s exclusion of justice from republican virtù is an epoch-making break with the classical republican analysis of the cardinal virtues as expounded in Cicero’s Of Duties. Pocock, too, clearly recognizes that Roman republican virtù as it is documented by Machiavelli includes what Kahn calls “the resources of the Machiavel” (p. 124). In addition, rather than equating Machiavellism with secular republicanism, Pocock observes that it was difficult for not just Machiavelli but everyone in the Renaissance to conceive the moment of recreating the republic without making recourse to the apocalyptic moment, the moment at which grace acted in history. And to think as Kahn does that Pocock needs to be told that Machiavellism could be “used for sectarian religious purposes” (p. 8) is simply to disregard Pocock’s own assertion of this fact and his tremendous meditation on how this actually occurred in the millennially oriented society of seventeenth-century England.The claims which Kahn makes on the basis of her perceptive close readings [End Page 370] of the rhetoric of Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Discourses, then, do not significantly revise Pocock and Skinner. Neither do her considerations of readings of Machiavelli by counter-Reformation thinkers such as Zuccolo, Caterino, and Botero, sixteenth-century Englishmen such as Starkey, Gardiner, Ralegh, Bacon, and Shakespeare, and the seventeenth-century Englishmen who were involved in civil war and Interregnum political debates. These considerations simply make the point that Machiavelli was read in very different ways and was used to support very different political agendas—an interesting point, and one which is entirely consistent with the views of Skinner and Pocock. Kahn’s revised history of English Machiavellism is further compromised by her construal, beginning in chapter five, of Machiavellism as “the Machiavellian topics of legitimacy and force, virtue and success, intention and effect, means and ends” (p. 156). Kahn seems to suppose that because Machiavelli writes about these topics, these topics are Machiavellian, and anyone who writes about them in English is therefore a subscriber to “English Machiavellism.” This move allows her to consider all kinds of texts which only seem remotely connected to Machiavelli—from sixteenth-century debates over things indifferent, to Coriolanus, to masques by Jonson and Carew, to Milton’s Areopagitica, Comus, and Paradise Lost—as cases of “English Machiavellism.” Kahn ends up defining Machiavellism so widely, that is, that she finds it everywhere. On the other hand, she ignores it where it is most conspicuous: she gives passing attention to Marchamont Nedham’s fully articulated republicanism and no attention whatsoever to the most comprehensive English reading of Machiavelli in the seventeenth century: James Harrington’s Oceana.A revised history of Renaissance Machiavellism, particularly in England? Hardly. Skinner and Pocock still rule.William WalkerUniversity of Canterbury, New ZealandCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)