From an etymological standpoint the word "interest" is well suited to phenomenological investigations, lnteresse, to be among, 1 or as Husserl sometimes translates, Dabeisein, 2 succinctly expresses the sense ofHusserl's more usual term, "intentionality." Mind, he never tired or saying, is not at all another thing alongside the various things of the world; it is already outside itself, and in the company of the things it thinks. Yet despite the appropriateness of "interest" to name this fact of psychic life, only (...) gradually does the word assume a place in the phenomenological vocabulary. The reason is not hard to find. Husserl's early work treats intentional achievements statically and hence rather thinly. Once he secured the transcendental or properly phenomenological stance he was free to move beyond his initial "Platonism" to a more truly Platonic position, which attempts to think the forms in motion. That is to say, Husserl discovered genetic phenomenology. 3 Mind is now considered in light of its purposiveness: genetic phenomenology highlights the teleological character of our thinking engagement with the world. "Interest," accordingly, may be said to name the history of our readiness to take up with things in their intelligibility. Alternately stated, Husserl's account of interest displays the drawing power of the real in virtue of its being thinkable or ideal. It is perhaps not too grave an injustice to read interest as the Husserlian analogue to the "idea of the good" proposed by Socrates to Glaucon and Adeimantus as that which lights the mind's way. (shrink)

A consideration of the argument developed by Thomas Aquinas in Summa contra gentiles, II c. 46.

It is now a commonplace that premodern reflection, whether mythical, philosophical, or theological, was terminally “anthropomorphic,” given to the erroneous supposition that the human shape offers genuine insight into the shape of everything else.1 It is also commonly assumed that modern philosophy distinguishes itself from its precursors by placing the human being at the center of its concerns. Thus Kant, for example, claimed that the question “what is man?” recapitulates the whole of systematic philosophical inquiry.2 First impressions notwithstanding, these two (...) convictions are not really at odds. For it is precisely through their “turn to the subject” that modern thinkers…. (shrink)

AMONG THE BEINGS KNOWN TO US, the human being is, so far as we are aware, the only one to trouble himself about his origins. Mountains have no more care for such matters than it is in their power to leap like rams. As for the rams, they have perhaps some mute memory of their parents, and some abiding affection for them, yet they clearly lack all ambition to retrace the steps of their ovine past. We alone desire to know (...) whence we came. It is true that some among us manifest this desire in an obsession about “ethnic origins,” for example, but this need not signify that our interest in our predecessors must be a purely parochial affair. While a concern for our past seems to be peculiar to our species, and while it necessarily finds its initial expression in questions about our immediate precursors, origins being what they are, we cannot long wonder about our own without soon having to consider the origins of the whole human race, and of everything else besides. (shrink)

The bulk of the writings Husserl himself saw through to publication were, in one way or another, successive attempts at an "introduction" to phenomenology. That not a single one of these works is of easy access to those for whom phenomenology is something novel in no way contravenes the use of the term 'introduction" to name them. After all, to the end of his days Husserl spoke of himself as a philosophical beginner, and not from any false modesty, but because (...) he knew that the philosopher has access to the archai or old beginnings only if, by his persistent questioning, he is always ready to make a new beginning. "Introduction" amounts, then, to a term of art in his philosophy, describing as much a work in progress as an invitation to the dance. (shrink)

Metaphysics, the most concrete of human inquiries, cannot rightly leave anything out, not even or especially its own history. At the very least, a consideration of the history of metaphysical investigation is necessary in order to recover the peculiar naivete proper to the discipline, for any language at our immediate disposal comes to us already stamped by the thinking of our predecessors. Nor may we rule out of hand the possibility that metaphysics is itself in some way subject to "physics" (...) or time. Finally, only arrogance could keep us from admitting that the "history" of metaphysics might hold answers to our most pressing questions, and indeed put questions to us we had not thought to ask. Metaphysics is, in short, an archeological science in a double sense. (shrink)

“Scholasticism” has not always been a term of opprobrium. Strictly speaking, the word simply targets a “school of thought,” and schools, like thoughts, can be good, bad, or indifferent. Francis Bacon did much to foster common derision of scholasticism. As he observed, “it is scarcely possible at once to admire authors and to surpass them, knowledge being like water, which will not rise above the level from which it fell.” Insofar as great thinkers do not reliably engender their equals, much (...) less set the cause of truth in motion by logarithmic progression, Bacon has a point. Yet the premise of the best schools of philosophy has always been the modest one that by standing on a giant’s shoulders one is sometimes able to see what would otherwise have lain hidden in the distance. In any case, Bacon did little to stem the scholastic tide. Despite all the antischolastic vitriol of the last several centuries, philosophical schools have multiplied profusely. Neo-Kantianism, logical positivism, existentialism, structuralism, feminism, and postmodernism represent only a small sample of recent possibilities. One can safely conclude from this list that as long as there is thinking, there will be schools of thought. A corollary suggests itself: the most antischolastic forms of thinking usually engender the most rigidly scholastic forms of thought. (shrink)

It is, if not a happy accident, then surely a pleasing peripety that despite Pascal's intention to complete an Apology for the Christian Religion, the fragmentary character of his Pensées should, by its very incompleteness, so well have served his purpose, as the vitality of the torso he left us attests. Yet there is ample evidence in the Pensées themselves that the book's orderless order captures both the rhetorical problem Pascal confronted and the solution he envisaged. More broadly stated, the (...) literary form of the work, such as it is, mirrors its substance, namely, the fragmentary character of the created whole and the human part of that whole. In short, the last thing Pascal wished to do was to make things easy for his reader, and in this respect the Pensées he left us serve his intentions admirably. While Kolakowski's study of "Pascal's religion" ultimately denies that the rigors of Pascal's argument are compatible with human happiness or reason, God Owes Us Nothing does honor Pascal's purpose by refusing to ease our way by making things simple. (shrink)

For biblical or more precisely Christian theology the way up and the way down are not one and the same. Christian theology could attempt to avoid this potentially embarrassing impasse and, refusing to speak to the philosophers, retreat to a comfortable interiority were it not for the fact that the founder of Christianity and indeed the theologians' own humanity demand otherwise. Philosophy in turn might have chosen to disregard the claims of a theology emboldened by reason and Revelation were it (...) not for its own desire to be comprehensive. Accordingly, no major philosopher of the last millennium has passed over the Bible in silence. Admittedly, the theologians have been reticent of late, yet it is by no means clear that the philosophers have succeeded in restoring thought to its former state of Greek "innocence." It is no surprise, then, that the crisis it is the fashion to call "postmodernism" should have reawakened the old question, Quid sit deus? Marion's short, demanding, and at times repetitive book, written "at the border between philosophy and theology," meets this question in a provocative way. This careful translation will surely win him both theologically and philosophically minded readers, as did the French original. His formation points to his currency: among his "teachers" we may mention Derrida; Levinas and Balthasar number among his "masters"; and as he himself admits, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger form his "horizon". (shrink)

If modern natural science were to be our guide, the truth of cosmology ought to be fully expressible in the abstruse but concise language of mathematics. As an account of the genesis of the universe as a whole and in its every part, however, a truly completed cosmology would culminate in an understanding of its own coming to be, and thereby provide both a recapitulation of the many past attempts human beings have made to understand themselves and their place, and (...) an explanation of the genesis of that which is true and false in each such attempt. For this and for other reasons one might well doubt whether a genuinely comprehensive cosmogenesis is possible for us, to say nothing of one set forth in exclusively mathematical terms. It seems fair to say, in any case, that that part of a conjectural history of the universe devoted to “the history of the human experience of the universe” would easily dwarf all of its other parts in size, and not only in size. (shrink)

There is something rather comical about the nihilist, who makes such a passionate ado about precisely nothing. This is not to deny the tragic consequences, in Russia and elsewhere, of the nihilist’s revolutionary fury. It is only to suggest that, despite what he may say about himself, the nihilist himself is no more animated by “the tragic sense of life” than he is elevated by a sense of humor. Tragedy requires “some error” in an agent and his agency. Such an (...) error presupposes in turn some standard of the human good by virtue of which that error comes to light, but the reality of such a standard is the one thing nihilism cannot allow. It is given to us, but not to the nihilist, to see the tragedy and the comedy of nihilism. One might therefore be inclined to wonder whether nihilism really has anything to do with philosophy, which, if Socrates is to be trusted, requires the self-conscious possession of the tragic and the comic art in equal measure. (shrink)

In his earlier writings Hans Jonas has offered searching criticism of modern philosophic and scientific attempts to reduce the living to a mode of the non-living, and advanced some promising suggestions for a more adequate understanding of the phenomenon of life. With this book he has set himself a more ambitious task: to provide an ethics--although not a politics --which will enable man to secure human and non-human life from the threat posed by man's technology.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where (...) they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.Cormac McCarthy, The Road. (shrink)

These notes discuss formalizing contexts as first class objects. The basic relationships are: ist(c,p) meaning that the proposition p is true in the context c, and value(c,p) designating the value of the term e in the context c Besides these, there are lifting formulas that relate the propositions and terms in subcontexts to possibly more general propositions and terms in the outer context. Subcontextx are often specialised with regard to time, place and terminology. Introducing contexts as formal objects will permit (...) axiomatizations in limited contexts to be expanded to transcend the original limitations. This seems necessary to provide AI programs using logic with certain capabilities that human fact representation and human reasoning possess. Fully implementing transcendence seems to require further extensions to mathematical logic, ie. beyond the nonmonotonic inference methods first invented in AI and now studied as a new domain of logic. (shrink)

Logical AI develops computer programs that represent what they know about the world primarily by logical formulas and decide what to do primarily by logical reasoning--including nonmonotonic logical reasoning. It is convenient to use logical sentences and terms whose meaning depends on context. The reasons for this are similar to what causes human language to use context dependent meanings. This note gives elements of some of the formalisms to which we have been led. Fuller treatments are in [McC93], [Guh91] and (...) [MB94] and the references cited in the Web page [Buv95]. The first main idea is to make contexts first class objects in the logic and use the formula ist(c,p) to assert that the proposition p is true in the context c. A second idea is to formalize how propositions true in one context transform when they are moved to different but related contexts. An ability to transcend the outermost context is needed to give computer programs the ability to reason about the totality of all they have thought about so far [McC96]. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Alterity, the difference that being-other makes, is not an overt theme in the writing of Ueda Shizuteru, and yet by bringing alterity to the fore we are able to connect and examine several themes that Ueda does engage explicitly. It will turn out that several models of alterity are discernable in Ueda’s philosophy, and their common ground opens a mode of being-other that offers an alternative to dominant models of irreducible difference. Ueda’s philosophy of language suggests four alternative configurations that (...) increasingly allow for the dual emergence of authentic otherness and selfhood. Those configurations are intimated in his interpretations of Nishida’s pure experience, of the interplay of language and silence, of a dialogue envisioned in a Zen oxherding picture, and of the poetic form known as linked verse, which best models how discrete beings help create a world in common. (shrink)

We outline some ways in which motor neglect (the underutilization of a limb despite adequate strength) and hysterical paralysis (failure to move a limb despite no relevant structural damage or disease) may throw light on the pathophysiology of catatonia. We also comment on the manifold inadequacies of distinguishing too firmly between symptoms of “neurologic origin” and of “psychiatric origin.”.

The eight essays and three responses collected in Rethinking Borders were commissioned from an exciting range of leading younger writers, artists and intellectuals whose work has raised significant questions about the border cultures in ...

This collection of articles and associated discussion papers focuses on a problem that has attracted increasing attention from linguists and psychologists throughout the world during the past several years. Reduced to essentials, the problem is that of discovering the character of the mental capacities that make it possible for human beings to attain knowledge of their language on the basis of fragmentary and haphazard early linguistic experience. A fundamental assumption running through all of these contributions is that people possess strong (...) innate predispositions that are critical for success in this task. (shrink)