The word 'archaic' derives from the Greek arkhaios, which in turn is related to the word archē, meaning 'principle', 'origin', or 'cause'; the notion of ecstasy, or ekstasis, implies standing outside or beyond oneself, a self-transcendence. How these two concepts are articulated and co-implicated constitutes the core question underlying this edited collection, which examines both the present day and antiquity in order to trace the insistent presence of the ecstatic amid the archaic. Presented in three parts, the contributors to this (...) diverse book take the concept of the archaic in an entirely new direction. Part I, 'Ecstasy and the psychological', covers topics including Jung, Freud, ancient psychotherapy, desire, and theatre. Part II, 'Ecstatic-archaic history', considers Ludwig Klages, Orestes and Dionysus. Finally, Part III, 'Ancient ecstatic in other worlds', examines Luo Guanzhong's Three Kingdoms and Enki at Eridu. The collection offers a distinctive contextualisation of the dimension of the archaic in relation to the ecstatic experience. The Ecstatic and the Archaic will appeal to readers interested in the relationship between ancient and postmodern worlds, and in how the past manifests itself in the present. It will be of great interest to academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian ideas, classical religions and the history of ideas, as well as practitioners of analytical psychology and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

[Sebastian Gardner] German idealism has been pictured as an unwarranted deviation from the central epistemological orientation of modern philosophy, and its close historical association with German romanticism is adduced in support of this verdict. This paper proposes an interpretation of German idealism which seeks to grant key importance to its connection with romanticism without thereby undermining its philosophical rationality. I suggest that the fundamental motivation of German idealism is axiological, and that its augment of Kant's idealism is intelligible in (...) terms of its combined aim of consolidating the transcendental turn and legitimating the kind of relation to value articulated in German romanticism. /// [Paul Franks] German idealists regard Spinozism as both the realism that outflanks Kant's idealism and the source of the conception of systematicity with which to fortify idealism. But they offer little argument for this view. To fill the gap, I reconstruct arguments that could underlie Jacobi's and Pistorius's tentative but influential suggestions that Kant is or should be a Spinozist. Kant is indeed a monist about phenomena, but, unlike Spinoza, a pluralist about noumena. Nevertheless, it is arguable that the Third Antinomy can be solved by a more thoroughgoing Spinozistic monism. The resulting Spinozism outflanks Kant by acknowledging Jacobi's charge that philosophy annihilates immediacy and individuality, whereas Kant's commitment to things in themselves can seem a half-hearted attempt to avoid the charge. However, the German idealist contention is that only a synthesis of such a Spinozism with Kantian idealism can retrieve immediacy and individuality, thus overcoming nihilism. (shrink)

Recognizing the potential hidden artistic contributions of persons with dementia opens new opportunities for interpretation and potential communication. This visual essay explores the authors’ responses to the fragile objects of art produced by a person with severe dementia and examines what may be learned from them.

This article explores the intersemiotic affordances of photography and poetry and the expansion of meaning that surpasses the meanings embedded in and elicited from both. We specifically investigate the processes and mechanisms of this semantic expansion by systematically reconstructing the compositional process of poems written from three photographs and forensically investigate how the poems emerged out of each visual frame. We discovered that intersemiosis between photography and poetry demonstrates a strong interpretative component. Intra-semiotic connections between elements within the photograph are (...) interpreted by the viewer or writer and are translated by means of inter-semiotic triggers into intra-semiotic connections within the emerging poem during the process of composition. The resulting inter-semiotic connections between the photograph and the poem create and multiply meaning for both mediums together and independently. In other words, in the process of composition, the poem reads the meanings of components of the photograph framed by the photographer and super-frames them; creating a new frame of meanings that draw upon, and extend, meanings in the original frame of the photograph. At the same time, the poem enters a stage of self-change and self-reflection, inhabiting the life of the photograph. (shrink)

This rich and varied collection of essays addresses some of the most fundamental human questions through the lenses of philosophy, literature, religion, politics, and theology. Peter Augustine Lawler and Dale McConkey have fashioned an interdisciplinary consideration of such perennial and enduring issues as the relationship between nature and history, nature and grace, reason and revelation, classical philosophy and Christianity, modernity and postmodernity, repentance and self-limitation, and philosophy and politics.

Institutional review boards are almost universally considered to be overworked and understaffed. They also require substantial commitments of time and resources from their members. Although some surveys report average IRB memberships of 15 people or more, federal regulations require only five. We present data on IRB meetings at eight of the top 25 academic medical centers in the United States funded by the National Institutes of Health. These data indicate substantial contributions from primary reviewers and chairs during protocol discussions but (...) little from other members, which implies that it may be possible for smaller IRBs to accomplish the same tasks with no reduction in the quality of review. (shrink)

Online personalized genetic testing services offer accessible and convenient options for satisfying personal curiosity about health and obtaining answers about one’s genetic provenance. They are especially attractive to healthy people who wish to learn about their future risk of disease, as Paul Mason’s case study of “Jordan” illustrates. In this response, we consider how online genetic testing services are used by people diagnosed with a common neurodegenerative disease, Parkinson’s disease, to gain a sense of certainty regarding the future.

German idealism has been pictured as an unwarranted deviation from the central epistemological orientation of modern philosophy, and its close historical association with German romanticism is adduced in support of this verdict. This paper proposes an interpretation of German idealism which seeks to grant key importance to its connection with romanticism without thereby undermining its philosophical rationality. I suggest that the fundamental motivation of German idealism is axiological, and that its augment of Kant's idealism is intelligible in terms of its (...) combined aim of consolidating the transcendental turn and legitimating the kind of relation to value articulated in German romanticism. /// [Paul Franks] German idealists regard Spinozism as both the realism that outflanks Kant's idealism and the source of the conception of systematicity with which to fortify idealism. But they offer little argument for this view. To fill the gap, I reconstruct arguments that could underlie Jacobi's and Pistorius's tentative but influential suggestions that Kant is or should be a Spinozist. Kant is indeed a monist about phenomena, but, unlike Spinoza, a pluralist about noumena. Nevertheless, it is arguable that the Third Antinomy can be solved by a more thoroughgoing Spinozistic monism. The resulting Spinozism outflanks Kant by acknowledging Jacobi's charge that philosophy annihilates immediacy and individuality, whereas Kant's commitment to things in themselves can seem a half-hearted attempt to avoid the charge. However, the German idealist contention is that only a synthesis of such a Spinozism with Kantian idealism can retrieve immediacy and individuality, thus overcoming nihilism. (shrink)

Critics have standardly regarded Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason as an abortive attempt to overcome the subjectivist individualism of his early philosophy, motivated by a recognition that Being and Nothingness lacks ethical and political significance, but derailed by Sartre’s Marxism. In this paper I offer an interpretation of the Critique which, if correct, shows it to offer a coherent and highly original account of social and political reality, which merits attention both in its own right and as a reconstruction of (...) the philosophical foundation of Marxism. The key to Sartre’s theory of collective and historical existence in the Critique is a thesis carried over from Being and Nothingness: intersubjectivity on Sartre’s account is inherently aporetic, and social ontology reproduces in magnified form its limited intelligibility, lack of transparency, and necessary frustration of the demands of freedom. Sartre’s further conjecture – which can be formulated a priori but requires a posteriori verification – is that man’s collective historical existence may be understood as the means by which the antinomy within human freedom, insoluble at the level of the individual, is finally overcome. The Critique provides therefore the ethical theory promised in Being and Nothingness. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to defend the claim that the absolute idealism of Hegel is a liberal naturalist position against Sebastian Gardner’s claim that it is not genuinely naturalistic, and also to defend the position of ‘liberal naturalism’ from Ram Neta’s charge that there is no logical space for it to occupy. By ‘liberal naturalism’, I mean a doctrine which is a non-reductive form of philosophical naturalism. Like Fred Beiser, I take the thesis of liberal naturalism to (...) find support in the idealism of Hegel. I begin by first explaining what philosophical naturalism amounts to. I then move on to show, using Finn Spicer’s and Alison Stone’s understandings of philosophical naturalism, how there is a stronger form of philosophical naturalism but also how there is a weaker form as well. Having established the distinction between stronger and weaker variants of philosophical naturalism, I discuss Sebastian Gardner’s recent objections to treating absolute idealism as a genuinely naturalist position. I argue that Gardner is incorrect to claim that absolute idealism is not a genuinely naturalist position on both historical and interpretive grounds, where to do so I bring in features of Hegel’s idealism to show that Hegel was committed to liberal naturalism. In the next section of the paper, I address Ram Neta’s charge that there is no logical space for liberal naturalism. To counter this claim, I offer an Hegelian diagnosis of Neta’s charge and argue that Neta’s concern about the possibility of liberal naturalism is illegitimately motivated. (shrink)

Philosopher, novelist, dramatist and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the greatest writers of all time. He was fascinated by the role played by the emotions in human life and placed them at the heart of his philosophy. This brilliant short work - which contains some of the principal ideas later to appear in his masterpiece Being and Nothingness - is Sartre at his best: insightful, engaging and controversial. Far from constraining one's freedom, as we often think, Sartre argues (...) that emotions are fundamental to it and that an emotion is nothing less than 'a transformation of the world'. With a new foreword by Sebastian Gardner. (shrink)

Philosopher, novelist, dramatist and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the greatest writers of all time. He was fascinated by the role played by the emotions in human life and placed them at the heart of his philosophy. This brilliant short work - which contains some of the principal ideas later to appear in his masterpiece Being and Nothingness - is Sartre at his best: insightful, engaging and controversial. Far from constraining one's freedom, as we often think, Sartre argues (...) that emotions are fundamental to it and that an emotion is nothing less than 'a transformation of the world'. With a new foreword by Sebastian Gardner. (shrink)

Philosopher, novelist, dramatist and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the greatest writers of all time. He was fascinated by the role played by the emotions in human life and placed them at the heart of his philosophy. This brilliant short work - which contains some of the principal ideas later to appear in his masterpiece Being and Nothingness - is Sartre at his best: insightful, engaging and controversial. Far from constraining one's freedom, as we often think, Sartre argues (...) that emotions are fundamental to it and that an emotion is nothing less than 'a transformation of the world'. With a new foreword by Sebastian Gardner. (shrink)

Doubts have been expressed about the virtue of toleration, especially in view of what some have seen as its complicity with a morality of anything goes. More rigorous arguments have been provided by Peter Gardner and Harvey Siegel against the relativism evident in certain versions of multiculturalism and in the new religious studies. This article examines their arguments. While it recognises the cogency of these arguments, it suggests that their concentration on matters of belief and mistaken belief is apt (...) to divert attention from what is most important with regard to questions of toleration in these areas of experience. In order to illustrate this, remarks of Wittgenstein on religion and on understanding other cultures are considered. In contrast to the standard analysis of toleration, where toleration is seen as a response to an object that arouses disgust or disapproval, the value and the limitations of an easy-going tolerance are examined. This is related to bearing witness and knowledge-by-acquaintance. In the final section attention is turned to aspects of the curriculum that may have an unexpected relevance to toleration and the multicultural society. (shrink)

Rock art - paintings, and pecked or engraved images on rocks, whether in caves, shelters, or in the open-air - exists in all but a couple of countries of the world [Bahn, 1998], It spans a period from at least 35,000 years ago to historic times, comprises many millions of images from hundreds of thousands of sites, and thus constitutes the vast majority of the world's art, and art history. It is a phenomenon that has seen a huge upsurge of (...) interest in the last few decades, with not only numerous publications and conferences, but also a proliferation of calendars, T-shirts, mugs, jewellery, and garments bearing rock art images. Many people who are famous for other things have worked on or published rock art - for example, scholars such as Mary Leakey or authors like Joy Adamson or Erle Stanley Gardner. Rock art studies have always been the domain of the “amateur” as well as the “professional”, and amateurs remain of huge importance in this field. Indeed, most of the principal rock art organisations, along with their journals, were created by, are run by, and consist largely of amateur enthusiasts who include some of the world's foremost specialists. The growing popularity of the art brings an ever-increasing risk of pollution, damage, and vandalism, as well as outright thefts of wall or cave images. The rock art associations are dedicated to the discovery, recording, and conservation of rock art, and play a major role in striving to teach schoolchildren and adults alike about the incalculable importance of this irreplaceable, universal heritage and about the need to respect and protect it. (shrink)

Computer science only became established as a field in the 1950s, growing out of theoretical and practical research begun in the previous two decades. The field has exhibited immense creativity, ranging from innovative hardware such as the early mainframes to software breakthroughs such as programming languages and the Internet. Martin Gardner worried that "it would be a sad day if human beings, adjusting to the Computer Revolution, became so intellectually lazy that they lost their power of creative thinking" ( (...) class='Hi'>Gardner, 1978, p. vi-viii). On the contrary, computers and the theory of computation have provided great opportunities for creative work. This chapter examines several key aspects of creativity in computer science, beginning with the question of how problems arise in computer science. We then discuss the use of analogies in solving key problems in the history of computer science. Our discussion in these sections is based on historical examples, but the following sections discuss the nature of creativity using information from a contemporary source, a set of interviews with practicing computer scientists collected by the Association of Computing Machinery’s on-line student magazine, Crossroads. We then provide a general comparison of creativity in computer science and in the natural sciences. (shrink)

Schelling und Hegel benutzen in ihren philosophischen Texten mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Modelle wie Unendlichkeit oder Gleichgewicht. Die Strukturen dieser Begriffe liefern einen Massstab fur den Vergleich der Positionen Schellings und Hegels, der fur Schellings Identitatsphilosophie und Hegels erste Jenaer Schriften durchgefuhrt wird. Als wichtigstes Resultat kann eine grundlegende Differenz zwischen beiden Positionen bereits um 1801 nachgewiesen und gezeigt werden, dass diese auf einer unterschiedlichen Auffassung der Rolle des Absoluten beruht.

Zusammenfassungen der Referate in französischer Sprache.

An agent often does not have precise probabilities or utilities to guide resolution of a decision problem. I advance a principle of rationality for making decisions in such cases. To begin, I represent the doxastic and conative state of an agent with a set of pairs of a probability assignment and a utility assignment. Then I support a decision principle that allows any act that maximizes expected utility according to some pair of assignments in the set. Assuming that computation of (...) an option's expected utility uses comprehensive possible outcomes that include the option's risk, no consideration supports a stricter requirement. (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)

This paper presents the view that tropes can change, and so are not individuated by their determinate qualitative characters. On the view I have in mind, a trope is at any given time fully determinate, but can change qualitatively within the bounds set by a determinable essence. A charge trope, for example, must at any time have some exact intensity, but can survive changes in intensity. My argument, roughly, is this: Objects can change, and tropes are the parts of objects (...) that change (in a special sense of ‘part’), so tropes can change too. After some preliminaries, I present the argument carefully and discuss the operant notions. I then discuss each premise in turn. I respond to the charge that the view isn't realist, and to objections based on identity‐conditions for tropes. I describe both substratum‐ and bundle‐theoretic versions of the view, and finally, show what the view buys us. (shrink)

The centrality of death rituals has in anthropologically informed studies of Buddhism been little documented. The current volume brings together a range of perspectives on Buddhist death rituals including ethnographic, textual, historical and theoretically informed accounts, and presents the diversity of the Buddhist funeral cultures of mainland Southeast Asia and China. It arises out of the University of Bristol's Centre for Buddhist Studies research project Buddhist Death Rituals in Southeast Asia and China, funded by the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities (...) Research Council. This project involved extensive new research in Thailand, Laos and China. Other items from that project included several public exhibitions, extensive stills photographs, and several video films. The project-team produced two 30 minutes films on the ghost festival in Laos and China, one on urban funerals in Chiang Mai (Thailand) and several shorter clips dealing with funeral cultures in Laos, Thailand and China. Most of this material (and an extensive bibliography on the topic) is available free of charge from the project website located at the webpage of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies (Centre for Buddhist Studies) at the University of Bristol. (shrink)

The paper asks under what conditions deductive reasoning transmits justification from its premises to its conclusion. It argues that both standard externalist and standard internalist accounts of this phenomenon fail. The nature of this failure is taken to indicate the way forward: basic forms of deductive reasoning must justify by being instances of 'blind but blameless' reasoning. Finally, the paper explores the suggestion that an inferentialist account of the logical constants can help explain how such reasoning is possible.

Reasons are given to justify the claim that computer simulations and computational science constitute a distinctively new set of scientific methods and that these methods introduce new issues in the philosophy of science. These issues are both epistemological and methodological in kind.

People generally accept that there is causation by omission—that the omission of some events cause some related events. But this acceptance elicits the selection problem, or the difficulty of explaining the selection of a particular omissive cause or class of causes from the causal conditions. Some theorists contend that dependence theories of causation cannot resolve this problem. In this paper, we argue that the appeal to norms adequately resolves the selection problem for dependence theories, and we provide novel experimental evidence (...) for it. (shrink)

The first book-length study of a leading tenth-century Ismaili theoretician Abu Ya'qub al-Sijistani.

This article has two objectives. First, and in particular, it seeks to reinterpret the ostracism procedure of early democratic Athens. Since Aristotle, this has been understood as a rational, political weapon of collective defense, intended to expel from Athens a disproportionately powerful individual. In this article, by putting emphasis on themateriality, gestures, and location of ostraka-casting, I propose instead that the institution can more fruitfully be understood as a ritual enactment of civic unity. Second, and more generally, I hope to (...) explore the frames within which early Athenian democracy is placed: while Greek kingship and tyranny (i.e. “primitive” polities) have been very successfully explored through anthropological and cross-cultural comparison, Greek democracy for the most part has remained in the domains of the institutional historian and political theorist. Taking a phenomenological and comparative approach, this article asks how the citizens of early democratic Athens experienced and comprehended their new sovereignty and the invented procedures of mass decision-making through which it was expressed. (shrink)

Dieses historische Buch kann zahlreiche Tippfehler und fehlende Textpassagen aufweisen. Kaufer konnen in der Regel eine kostenlose eingescannte Kopie des originalen Buches vom Verleger herunterladen (ohne Tippfehler). Ohne Indizes. Nicht dargestellt. 1910 edition. Auszug:...endliche als durch sie erzeugt; oder diese in jener involviert und aus ihr sich evolvierend. Der wahre Erzeuger der endlichen Grosse ist nicht die unendlichkleine" Grosse (das Unendlichkleine ware dem Grossenwert nach vielmehr Null), sondern es ist das Gesetz der Grosse (als Veranderlicher), das man sich nun wie (...) in einen Punkt zusammengezogen, d. h. fur den einzelnen Punkt ausgedruckt, oder an einer endlichen Erstreckung sich darstellend denken kann, das aber dem letzten Sachgehalt nach dasselbe ist fur den Punkt und die endliche Erstreckung, wenn es auch in Bezug auf beide verschiedene, im allgemeinen auseinander ableitbare Ausdrucke erhalten muss. Da aber die endliche Grosse uberhaupt von Punkt zu Punkt entstehend (d. h. veranderlich) gedacht wird, so ist insofern der punktuelle, d. h. infinitesimale Ausdruck der fundamentale, aus dem der extensionale gleichsam erst hervorwachst. Die Differenz entsteht eben von der Null an; nicht aus ihr; aus Null wird keine extensive Grosse; wohl aber von der Null, d. h. dem Nichtsein dessen, was werden soll, oder ganz schlicht1) vom Ausgangs wert an; woraus? Aus dem Gesetz; eine andere Antwort ist nicht zu geben und nicht zu verlangen. Durch dies Gesetz aber ist die Grosse als Eines, Identisches, im Unterschied von den sukzessiven Grossenwerten, also in ihrem Gattungsausdruck definiert. i) Vgl. oben S. 122. Fragt man also: wie soll aus der Null gewordenen, verschwundenen" Grosse die endliche Grosse wiederentstehen? so ist zu antworten: die Grosse zwar (yuantitas). (shrink)