During the era in which the Spanish first encountered public religious practices that they perceived to be idolatrous in the Americas, the study of Hermetic and Platonic texts in Europe was reactivating interest in the power of images and idols, and in the agency of demons. In the Americas, Spanish newcomers encountered idolatry, the cult of deities present to their worshippers in material objects of various kinds, as part of daily religious practice. The resulting battle over idols and the beliefs (...) surrounding them is in one sense only an outcrop of debates over idols and demons in the ancient Mediterranean and in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Yet while ancient beliefs about idols were reiterated in Peru, arguments shifted in this new context. At question is whether these arguments achieved anything beyond imposing European ideas and cognitive models on the Andean world? (shrink)

Kant’s critique/doctrine distinction tracks the difference between a canon for the understanding’s proper use and an organon for its dialectical misuse. The latter reflects the dogmatic use of reason to attain a doctrine of knowledge with no antecedent critique. In the 1790s, Fichte collapses Kant’s distinction and redefines dogmatism. He argues that deriving a canon is essentially dialectical and thus yields an organon: critical idealism is properly a doctrine of science or Wissenschaftslehre. Criticism is furthermore said to refute dogmatism, by (...) which Fichte means Spinozism. Schelling repudiates Fichte’s position in his Philosophical Letters by reviving Kant’s distinction. First, ‘critique’ for Schelling names a canon that is valid for all systems—including Spinozism—and thus favours none—not even the Wissenschaftslehre. Second, Schelling coins ‘dogmaticism’ to refer to what Kant calls ‘dogmatism’: reason’s uncritical claim to doctrine. Hence, he says all systems—even Fichte’s—are susceptible to the ‘enthusiasm’ of mistaking themselves for doctrines or ‘objects of knowledge’, instead of subjectively valid ‘objects of freedom’. I reconstruct Schelling’s argument for reviving Kant’s distinction, while noting two consequences for German idealism. First, if criticism favours no system, a system’s origin cannot be an act of knowledge, e.g., intellectual intuition, but only an act of endorsement. Second, if dogmaticism entails enthusiasm, a system’s goal cannot be absolute knowledge, but only infinite striving. Hence, by retrieving Schelling’s notion of dogmaticism, we can both gain a better understanding of the Letters and register the impact of a core Kantian distinction on the German idealist project. (shrink)

Posthuman ethics -- Great ephemeral tattooed skin -- Art: inhuman ecstasy -- Animalities: ethics and absolute abolition -- Wonder of Teras -- Mystic queer -- Vitalistic ethics: an end to necrophilosophy -- After life.

Although early emotion theorists posited that bodily changes contribute to emotion, the primary view in affective science over the last century has been that emotions produce bodily changes. Recent findings from physiology, neuroscience, and neuropsychology support the early intuition that body representations can help constitute emotion. These findings are consistent with the modern psychological constructionist hypothesis that emotions emerge when representations of bodily changes are conceptualized as an instance of emotion. We begin by introducing the psychological constructionist approach to emotion. (...) With Schachter as inspiration, we next examine how embodied representations contribute to affective states, and ultimately emotion, with inflammation as a key example. We close by looking forward to future research on how body representations contribute to human experience. (shrink)

The purpose of the present paper is to examine one way in which divine being or divine existence was expressed in the Ancient World, and to see how in late antiquity the expression of some aspects of divine existence was abandoned, while others survived. The inquiry therefore seeks to contribute to the discussion on change and continuity, and, more specifically, to the problem of what may be understood by conversion from paganism to Christianity in late antiquity.

Meillassoux seeks knowledge of transcendental reality, blaming Kant for the ‘correlationist’ proscription of independent access to either thought or being. For Meillassoux, correlationism blocks an account of the meaning of ‘ancestral statements’ regarding reality prior to humans. I examine three charges on which Meillassoux’s argument depends: (1) Kant distorts ancestral statements’ meaning; (2) Kant fallaciously infers causality’s necessity; (3) Kant’s transcendental idealism cannot grasp ‘the great outdoors’. I reject these charges: (1) imposes a Cartesian misreading, hence Meillassoux’s false assumption that, (...) for Kant, objects don’t exist without subjects; (2) misreads Kant, who infers causality’s necessity from the possibility of experience; (3) casts Kant’s idealism as subjective, ignoring his perspectival portrayal of it. (shrink)

Undoing anthropocentrism : becoming-animal and the nonhuman -- Vectors of becoming-imperceptible : the multiplicity of the pack -- Animal politics, animal deaths : transversal connectivities and the creation of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm -- Animal re-territorialisations in art and cinema -- Transverse animalities : ecosophical becomings.

. The article attempts to show the way in which the notions of “natural law” and “cosmic harmony” have been applied by Western scholars in the interpretation of traditional Chinese thinking about the role of law in society, the extent to which the Western interpretations can be supported by the Chinese sources, and , more specifically, the degree to which official Chinese thought subscribed to a correlation between the occurrence of natural disasters and acts of maladministration or injustice on the (...) part of the emperor and state. Generally it is argued that the extent to which Chinese statesmen and administrators actually believed that errors in the infliction of legal punishment or the sentencing of offenders would produce aberrant natural phenomena has been exaggerated by Western scholars. (shrink)

The skin is always and already a serietl of planes which signify race, gender, age and such. Tattooing creates a new surface of potential significance upon the body. Tattooing can call into question concepts of volition in reference to the power to inscribe and define one's subjectivity through one's own skin, and the social defining of the subject. Skin is the involution or event between subject and object, will and cultural inscription, the social and the self. Feminists, particularly corporeal feminists, (...) have attempted to think ways in which the female flesh may be recognized and self-defined without risking essentialism through reification of the meaning of ‘woman's body’. Thinking a tattooed female body thus resonates with some of the risks and benefits feminism has found in theorizing a marginalized body. Using Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard and other major influences on corporeal feminists, this article explores ways in which significance is sought in skin, and possible configurations of skin and world, which challenge the desire to read the flesh as a legible incarnation of subjectivity. (shrink)

The Legalists were a group of statesmen and writers in China (mainly fourth and third centuries BC) who advocated in their practice and writings the use of law as the principal instrument of government. They understood law in the Austinian sense of orders, stipulating punishments or rewards, issued by the ruler to his subjects. Emphasis was placed upon the fact that punishments should be severe and deterrent, that official should be accountable under the law for the correct performance of their (...) duties, that laws should be clear and certain, and that there should be a strict separation between law and morality, in the sense that law should take no account of moral desiderata but should itself furnish the sole source of what was right conduct. Although the great imperial codes from the T’ang to the Ch’ing (eighth to twentieth centuries) enshrined the basic values of Confucian orthodoxy, they were also strongly influenced, especially in their technical construction and the specification of officials’ duties, by Legalist doctrines. (shrink)

This is part 1 of 6 of the dossier What Do We Talk about when We Talk about Queer Death?, edited by M. Petricola. The contributions collected in this article sit at the crossroads between thanatology and queer theory and tackle questions such as: how can we define queer death studies as a research field? How can queer death studies problematize and rethink the life-death binary? Which notions and hermeneutic tools could be borrowed from other disciplines in order to better (...) define queer death studies? The present article includes the following contributions: – MacCormack P., What does queer death studies mean?; – Radomska M., On queering death studies; – Lykke N., Death as vibrancy; – Hillerup Hansen I., What concreteness will do to resolve the uncertain; – Olson P., Queer objectivity as a response to denials of death; – Manganas N., The queer lack of a chthonic instinct. (shrink)

The Animal Catalyst deals with the 'question' of 'what is an animal' and also in some instances, 'what is a human'? It pushes the critical animal studies in important new directions; it re-examines its basic assumptions, suggests new paradigms for how we can live and function ecologically, in a world that is not simply "ours." It argues that it is not enough to recognise the ethical demands placed upon us by our encounters with animals, or to critique our often murderous (...) treatment of them: this simply reinforces human exceptionalism. Featuring contributions from leading academics, lawyers, artists and activists, the book examines key issues such as: - How "compassion" for animals reinforces ideas of what distinguishes human beings from other animals. - How animal documentaries highlight the problematics of human-based representations of nonhumans. - How speciesism and human centricity are built into the legal system. - How individualist subjectivity works in relation to animals who may not think of themselves in the same way. - How any consideration of animal others must involve a radical deconstruction of our very notion of the "human." This volume is a unique project which stands at the cutting edge of both animal rights philosophies and posthuman/artistic/abstract philosophies of identity. It will be of great interest to undergraduates and researchers in philosophy, ethics, particularly continental philosophy, critical theory and cultural studies. (shrink)

This is part 1 of 6 of the dossier What Do We Talk about when We Talk about Queer Death?, edited by M. Petricola. The contributions collected in this article sit at the crossroads between thanatology and queer theory and tackle questions such as: how can we define queer death studies as a research field? How can queer death studies problematize and rethink the life-death binary? Which notions and hermeneutic tools could be borrowed from other disciplines in order to better (...) define queer death studies? The present article includes the following contributions: – MacCormack P., What does queer death studies mean?; – Radomska M., On queering death studies; – Lykke N., Death as vibrancy; – Hillerup Hansen I., What concreteness will do to resolve the uncertain; – Olson P., Queer objectivity as a response to denials of death; – Manganas N., The queer lack of a chthonic instinct. (shrink)

Imperial ceremony was a vital form of self-expression for late antique society. Sabine MacCormack examines the ceremonies of imperial arrivals, funerals, and coronations from the late third to the late sixth centuries A.D., as manifest in the official literature and art of the time. Her study offers us new insights into the exercise of power and into the social, political, and cultural significance of religious change during the Christianization of the Roman world.

Inspired by the ecosophical writings of Felix Guattari, this book explores the many ways that aesthetics - in the forms of visual art, film, sculpture, painting, literature, and the screenplay - can act as catalysts, allowing us to see the world differently, beyond traditional modes of representation. This is in direct parallel to Guattari's own attempt to break down the 19th century Kantian dialectic between man, art, and world, in favour of a non-hierarchical, transversal approach, to produce a more ethical (...) and ecologically sensitive world view."-- Back cover. (shrink)

Where is the church? And what is it? In transposing to Spanish America a question that arose in the bitter confrontations between Catholics and Donatists in Augustine's North Africa, I would like to explain some aspects of the impact of Catholic Christianity, and thus of the Europe that had created it, overseas. Specifically, I will tell the story of Peru, the outlines of which are paralleled, not only throughout the Andes, but also in Brazil, Mexico, and Central America. The works (...) of Augustine, including his writings against the Donatists, were read by Spanish missionaries in America, but it is not merely, nor even primarily, the influence of Augustine that I am tracing here. Rather, what concerns me is to reveal the functioning of a series of tensions and contradictions in the impact of Europe on the world. It is fashionable, of course, to highlight the oppressive and destructive nature of colonial regimes and to stop at that. But this, however justified, along with reference to the all-pervasive power of a dominant culture will not on its own help us understand the ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions that filled the minds of people at the time, and that in one way or another motivated their actions. (shrink)

Bazzocchi disposes the text of the Tractatus in a user-friendly manner, exactly as Wittgenstein's decimals advise. This discloses the logical form of the book by distinct reading units, linked into a fashioned hierarchical tree. The text becomes much clearer and every reader can enjoy, finally, its formal and literary qualities.

Knowledge of mechanisms is critical for causal reasoning. We contrasted two possible organizations of causal knowledge—an interconnected causal network, where events are causally connected without any boundaries delineating discrete mechanisms; or a set of disparate mechanisms—causal islands—such that events in different mechanisms are not thought to be related even when they belong to the same causal chain. To distinguish these possibilities, we tested whether people make transitive judgments about causal chains by inferring, given A causes B and B causes C, (...) that A causes C. Specifically, causal chains schematized as one chunk or mechanism in semantic memory led to transitive causal judgments. On the other hand, chains schematized as multiple chunks led to intransitive judgments despite strong intermediate links. Normative accounts of causal intransitivity could not explain these intransitive judgments. (shrink)

We point out that constructionist models from experimental psychology account for the sociocultural, psychological, and neural levels of analysis in emotion. Individual constructionist models form a “metamodel” that integrates the levels of analysis important to a science of emotion. By clarifying the multilevel nature of constructionism, we hope to help lay a strong foundation for future cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)