The nature of consciouness or human awareness is one of the problems of perennial concern to philosphers and psychologists alike. Here is a systematic critical and comparative study the nature of human awareness according to the most influential school of classical Indian thought. After introducing the Advaita Philosophical system and indicating the place of consciouness in this system the author presents a detailed discussion of the Advaitin`s unique non-dual understanding of man`s basic intelligence. He continues with and analysis of the (...) Advaitin`s hierarchical vision of waking dream and dreamless sleep experience and compares this analysi,. (shrink)

Cognitive representation is the single most important explanatory notion in the sciences of the mind and has served as the cornerstone for the so-called 'cognitive revolution'. This book critically examines the ways in which philosophers and cognitive scientists appeal to representations in their theories, and argues that there is considerable confusion about the nature of representational states. This has led to an excessive over-application of the notion - especially in many of the fresher theories in computational neuroscience. Representation Reconsidered shows (...) how psychological research is actually moving in a non-representational direction, revealing a radical, though largely unnoticed, shift in our basic understanding of how the mind works. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth BurkeLawrence W. RosenfieldRhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke. Gregory Clark. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 181. $34.95, hardcover.Once again we are indebted to the University of South Carolina Press for a fine contribution from its Studies in Rhetoric/Communication series. Gregory Clark sets parallel aims: to apply Kenneth Burke's critical vocabulary (...) to cultural history, and to read American tourist sites and literature in the frame of Burke's notion of "identity" (147). Clark sees the American public landscape as "constituting in individual citizens a shared sense of common identity as members of a national public" (148). He claims that such shared experiences are as rhetorical as are more typical instances of public discourse. Thus American tourism has contributed to developing us into a national community.Clark supports his theme of rhetorical influence with six case studies: New York City, Shaker villages, Yellowstone National Park, the Grand Canyon, the Lincoln Highway, and the 1915 San Francisco Panama Exposition. While Burke's vocabulary offers a handy point of departure, the real news is in [End Page 172] Clark's discussion of the meaning and prominence of each of his six exemplars as cultural icons.This may be most evident (and endearing) as Clark recalls his own boyhood visits to Yellowstone, where he stood in the parking lot and was as captivated by the variety of license plates from across the country as by the hot springs and mudpots (69). This too was a celebration of nationhood. Equally fascinating is his consideration of the efforts of Stephan Mather, Mary Colter, and the Fred Harvey Company both to preserve national parklands and to develop a befitting "National Park Service Rustic" architectural style to enhance the natural landscape (this long before Disney's theme parks). Such typical excerpts almost cry out for Ken Burns or the History Channel to recreate the optimistic climate of a Romantic Post-Bellum civic culture depicted by Clark.The book becomes more tedious when its repeated invocation of Burkian terms tilts toward veneration. In his lifetime, Burke was unnerved by uncritical academic worship. He sought understanding, not deification. As he remarked, "They are an evangelical brood, bejeez. So... I [became] an observer at my own funeral."1 His wariness of academic enthusiasm is well taken. It does no disservice to Burke, for example, to recognize that his "identification" is a reworking of Vico's "ingenium" outfitted in creaky 1920s literary machinery.2 Shorn of some of the cumbersome Burkian baggage, the book's exemplars emerge as epideictic celebrations of the American tourist phenomenon and its part in shaping a national Romantic consciousness:And as rhetoric they traffic not in actions but in attitudes. People can encounter them without ever thinking of themselves as anything but spectators. Even in that role they are being educated... in matters of individual and collective identity.(148)Seen thus as reminders of our forebears' vision in pioneering the development of a national landscape trust, Clark's work edifies and opens us to the quiet excitement of meditative discovery. Clark guides us to monuments of cultural memory; his project is remarkably readable and a uniquely American enterprise.Lawrence W. RosenfieldUniversity of New HampshireNotes1. Letter to Malcolm Cowley, dated 11 August, 1955. Newberry Library Collection, Chicago.2. Cf. M. Mooney, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), 151. [End Page 173]Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University... (shrink)

Socrates (469-399 BC) is one of history's most enigmatic figures. Our knowledge of him comes to us second-hand, primarily from the philosopher Plato, who was Socrates' most gifted student, and from the historian and sometime-philosopher Xenophon, who counted himself as a member of Socrates' inner circle of friends. We also hear of Socrates in one comic play produced during his lifetime (Aristophanes' Clouds) and in passing from the philosopher Aristotle, a student of Plato. Socrates is a figure of enduring interest. (...) He is often considered the father of Western Philosophy, yet the four most famous accounts we have of him present a contradictory, confusing picture. Just who was Socrates? A brilliant philosopher, at times confounding and infuriating, morally serious and yet ironic; the ever-worldly man, sometime mystic, and uncommon martyr depicted by Plato? Or did Plato conflate Socrates' views with his own startling genius, as Aristotle suggests? Was So rates instead the less impressive, more mundane man whose commonsense impressed the laconic Xenophon? Or was Socrates the charlatan, the long-winded phony of Aristophanes' play? The Socratic works of Diogenes Laertius (3rd century AD), Libanius (AD 314 -- c. 393), Maximus of 'Tyre (2nd century AD), and Apuleius (born c. AD 125) add important dimensions to the portrait of Socrates: Diogenes Laertius' Life of Socrates emphasizes Socrates' deep ethical nature and his extraordinary personality; Libanius' Apology of Socrates is based on sources now lost to us; Maximus of Tyre's Whether Socrates Did the Right Thing When He Did Not Defend Himself makes the star ling claim (against testimony of Plato and Xenophon) that Socrates never spoke athis own trial; from Apuleius' On the God of Socrates we hear at length of Socrates' infamous daimonion: the "divine sign" only mentioned elsewhere, the sign that warned Socrates against certain courses of action. In short, from these four texts we are reintroduced to Socrates, and new wrinkles are added to an already intriguing historical figure. (shrink)

The last two decades have seen two significant trends emerging within the philosophy of science: the rapid development and focus on the philosophy of the specialised sciences, and a resurgence of Aristotelian metaphysics, much of which is concerned with the possibility of emergence, as well as the ontological status and indispensability of dispositions and powers in science. Despite these recent trends, few Aristotelian metaphysicians have engaged directly with the philosophy of the specialised sciences. Additionally, the relationship between fundamental Aristotelian concepts—such (...) as "hylomorphism", "substance", and "faculties"—and contemporary science has yet to receive a critical and systematic treatment. _Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science _aims to fill this gap in the literature by bringing together essays on the relationship between Aristotelianism and science that cut across interdisciplinary boundaries. The chapters in this volume are divided into two main sections covering the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of the life sciences. Featuring original contributions from distinguished and early-career scholars, this book will be of interest to specialists in analytical metaphysics and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Throughout the developing world, it is a well-documented fact that women farmers tend to get lower yields than their male counterparts. Typically this is attributed to disproportionate access to high-quality inputs and labor, with some even arguing there could be a skills-gap stemming from unbalanced access to training and education. This article examines the gender-based yield gap in the context of Zambian maize producers. In addition to the usual drivers, we argue that Zambia’s patriarchal and multi-tiered land distribution system could (...) disfavor women with respect to accessing quality soils. We are uniquely able to control for soil characteristics using farm data from a sample of 1573 fields with accompanying soil analysis. We find an expected difference in yields, but no evidence of a gap in unobserved characteristics, like skill, after controlling for access to inputs, especially quality soil, suggesting women are indeed disproportionately disadvantaged. We discuss how our findings could be used to develop self-targeting policy interventions that could empower women and would be consistent with the government’s stated equity goals. (shrink)

Objective: The objective of the current study was to maximise the amount of information children and adolescents understand about the risks and benefits associated with participation in a biomedical research study.Design: Participants were presented with one of six hypothetical research protocols describing how to fix a fractured thigh using either a “standard” cast or “new” pins procedure. Risks and benefits associated with each of the treatment options were manipulated so that for each one of the six protocols there was either (...) a correct or ambiguous choice.Participants and setting: Two hundred and fifty one children, ages 6–15 , and 237 adults were interviewed while waiting for a clinic appointment at the Hospital for Sick Children.Results: Using standardised procedures and questionnaires, it was determined that most participants, regardless of age group, were able to understand the basic purpose and procedures involved in the research, and most were able to choose the “correct” operation. The younger children, however, showed an overall preference for a cast operation, whereas the older participants were more likely to choose the pins.Conclusions: By creating age appropriate modules of information, children as young as six years can understand potentially difficult and complex concepts such as the risks and benefits associated with participation in biomedical research. It appears, however, that different criteria were used for treatment preference, regardless of associated risks; older participants tended to opt for mobility whereas younger participants stayed with the more familiar cast operation. (shrink)

The movement called Experimental Philosophy (‘x-Phi’) has now passed its tenth anniversary. Its central insight is compelling: When an argument hinges on accepting certain ‘facts’ about human perception, knowledge, or judging, the evoking of relevant intuitions by thought experiments is intended to make those facts seem obvious. But these intuitions may not be shared universally. Experimentalists propose testing claims that traditionally were intuition-based using real experiments, with real samples. Demanding that empirical claims be empirically supported is certainly reasonable; though experiments (...) are not necessarily the only means available. When experiments are conducted, adequately interpreting their results requires understanding the study’s design (and possibly flaws) that produced them. Experiment-based reports should document the design clearly. If Plato, writing his Meno, replaced accounts of Socrates demonstrating geometry to a slave-boy, with a survey of 100 real boys—some grasping his demonstrations, others not—what conclusions could be reached? Before answering, the reader needs details on key design questions, including (among others): (a) What population are these samples intended to represent? (E.g., ‘all slave boys’?; ‘math-ignorant people’?; ‘everyone’?) (b) What statistical tests were conducted, on what assumptions? (c) How was ‘significance’ of results determined? (d) Was the test instrument’s validity established? For readers wishing to explore x-Phi’s potentials, as contributors or as interpreters of their findings, this paper offers some cautionary considerations. Throughout their literature, examples can be found casting doubt on some experimentalists’ findings, due to design-related issues. Increased awareness of methodological questions would tighten the x-phi literature, going forward . (shrink)

Called the “greatest philosophical essayist of his time,” Rorty is both famous and notorious in academic philosophy for his uniquely engaging writing style. While his fellow analytic philosophers look askance at his flamboyant prose, suspicious that it lacks the care and precision that their discipline demands, literary intellectuals who champion the essay genre can have their qualms about Rorty as well: his work is too professional and specialized to be properly called essays. I argue not only that Rorty's work fits (...) into the essay genre, but also that his use of the essay form is integral to his rhetorical project of advancing his ideal of pragmatic liberalism. Rorty writes essays because the essay is a pragmatic literary genre: it is anti‐essentialist, conversational, and experimentalist and provocatively aims at “breaking the crust of convention,” in Dewey's phrase. Using the essay, Rorty “joshes” us to becoming more pragmatic and, therefore, better liberals. (shrink)

Experiments may contribute to understanding the basic processes of cultural evolution. We drew features from previous laboratory research with small groups in which traditions arose during several generations. Groups of four participants chose by consensus between solving anagrams printed on red cards and on blue cards. Payoffs for the choices differed. After 12 min, the participant who had been in the experiment the longest was removed and replaced with a naı¨ve person. These replacements, each of which marked the end of (...) a generation, continued for 10 – 15 generations, at which time the day’s session ended. Time-out duration, which determined whether the group earned more by choosing red or blue, and which was fixed for a day’s session, was varied across three conditions to equal 1, 2, or 3 min. The groups developed choice traditions that tended toward maximizing earnings. The stronger the dependence between choice and earnings, the stronger was the tradition. Once a choice tradition evolved, groups passed it on by instructing newcomers, using some combination of accurate information, mythology, and coercion. Among verbal traditions, frequency of mythology varied directly with strength of the choice tradition. These methods may be applied to a variety of research questions. D 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Rosa Calcaterra has written an extremely learned and thoughtful book about Richard Rorty’s controversial neopragmatism. It is a worthy addition to the growing number of works that offer a more generous and balanced assessment of Rorty’s thought, in contrast to the scores of highly critical treatments it received during his career. But, as Calcaterra insists, her book is “not an apology for Rorty” (Calcaterra 2019: ix); she critically approaches what she calls Rorty’s philosophical “provocatio...

Virtue liberalism holds that the success of liberal politics and society depends on the citizenry possessing a set of liberal virtues, including traits like open-mindedness, toleration, and individual autonomy. Virtue liberalism is thus an ethically demanding conception of liberalism that is at odds with conceptions, like Rawlsian political liberalism andmodus vivendiliberalism, that attempt to minimize liberalism’s ethical impact in order to accommodate a greater range of ethical pluralism. Although he claims to be a Rawlsian political liberal, Richard Rorty’s pragmatic liberalism (...) is best understood as a version of virtue liberalism that, in particular, recommends a controversial civic virtue of irony for good liberal citizenship. Indeed, Rorty ultimately joins Dewey in conceiving of liberal democracy as a “way of life,” rather than merely a set of political relations that have a minimal effect on our characters or on the shape of our private commitments and projects. (shrink)

In this paper my aim is to get clearer on what eliminative materialism actually does and does not entail. I look closely at one cluster of views that is often described as a form of eliminativism in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science and try to show that this characterization is a mistake. More specifically, I look at conceptions of eliminativism recently endorsed by writers such as Edouard Machery, Paul Griffiths, Valerie Hardcastle and others, and argue that although these views do (...) endorse the elimination of something, they offer only what I will call a sort of category dissolution, and should be treated as something altogether different from traditional eliminativism. Spelling out the main contrast between eliminative materialism proper and this alternative view, and defending the need to keep them distinct, is my primary objective. As I show, a central irony is that proponents of the problematic outlook often insist that divergent things should not be classified together under a single label. By characterizing their own views as a form of eliminativism, they commit a fundamental error that they themselves argue should not be made. While my focus here is on eliminative materialism, the error I intend to highlight appears across various discussions about alleged eliminativism of all sorts of things. (shrink)

This article suggests that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex offers an important contribution to a feminist phenomenology of temporality. In contrast to readings of The Second Sex that focus on the notion of “becoming” as the main claim about the relation between “woman” and time, this article suggests that Beauvoir's discussion of temporality in volume II of The Second Sex shows that Beauvoir understands the temporality of waiting, or a passive present, to be an underlying structure of women's existence (...) and subordination. Accordingly, I argue that Beauvoir does not see “woman” as a mere becoming, as that which unfolds in time, but instead understands becoming a woman to be realized as lived time. As such, Beauvoir's account shows that gender and temporality are deeply entangled, and thus she challenges the classic phenomenological account of temporality as a general, given structure of human existence. More specifically, I argue that her account shows how a particular experience of time is an underlying structure of sexual objectification, a claim that expands on the feminist phenomenological claim that a particular relation to space becomes a way in which women take up and negotiate their own subordination and objectification. (shrink)

This article considers Beauvoir’s gesture towards fraternité at the end of The Second Sex (1949) by focusing on her fleeting characterisation of this future as ‘an androgynous world’. Generally, either Beauvoir’s call for fraternité is dismissed as an erasure of sexual difference and is thus seen to be politically bankrupt, or fraternité is understood to realise sexual difference. This latter reading suggests that androgyny plays no role in Beauvoir’s solution to women’s oppression, while the other view often sees it as (...) one effect of fraternité. This article takes a different position by arguing that Beauvoir affirms sexual difference and commits to an androgynous future. The article argues that androgyny is an affective mood that is constitutive of an openness in the field of possibility for living sexual difference. Consequently, androgyny plays not only a central role in fraternité, but also gestures to a future beyond dimorphic sexual difference. (shrink)

This article argues that Maurice Merleau-Ponty advances a queer notion of love. In particular, I argue that his notion of love as an institution, as a hollow fueled by the imaginary dimension of existence, shows that love unhinges petrified ideals of gender. I suggest that the crucial insight to be found in Merleau-Ponty's account of love is that love is a lived openness that invites us to seek out new ways of being.

This article argues that Maurice Merleau-Ponty advances a queer notion of love. In particular, I argue that his notion of love as an institution, as a hollow fueled by the imaginary dimension of existence, shows that love unhinges petrified ideals of gender. I suggest that the crucial insight to be found in Merleau-Ponty's account of love is that love is a lived openness that invites us to seek out new ways of being.

Emily Carroll and Parker Crutchfield propose a new inconsistency argument against abortion restrictivism. In response, I raised several objections to their argument. Recently Carroll and Crutchfield have replied and seem to be under the impression that I’m a restrictivist. This is puzzling, since my criticism of their view included a very thinly veiled, but purposely more charitable, anti-restrictivist inconsistency argument. In this response, I explain how Carroll and Crutchfield mischaracterize my position and that of the restrictivist.

ABSTRACT Internalization is an important yet puzzling and undertheorized element in Nietzsche's moral psychology. The aim of this article is to resolve some textual puzzles by way of shedding light on Nietzsche's views on the general nature of internalization, and how it relates to other significant concepts deployed in his thought such as bad conscience, the pathos of distance, the will to power, and the ascetic ideal. I begin by providing a brief interpretation of internalization that is somewhat more perspicuous (...) than exists in the literature. I then make a case for the claim that the consequences of internalization are dependent upon the nature of the attitudes that get redirected inward. This insight allows us to explain why Nietzsche does not give a uniform account of all instances of internalization, and provides resources to give a richer and more satisfying interpretation of his moral psychological and ethical thought. (shrink)

Eschewing conventional candidates, like Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince, Richard Rorty praises Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as "the best introduction to political philosophy," because it shows us "what sort of human future would be produced by a naturalism untempered by historicist Romanticism, and by a politics aimed merely at alleviating mammalian pain."1 Huxley's celebrated dystopia is thus a poignant warning to our modern utilitarian political projects. Yet Rorty also suggests that utopian literature can play a positive and inspirational role (...) for liberal politics, and even dubs his own political ideal, "liberal utopia." Rorty's liberal utopia is not an impossible society bereft of political .. (shrink)

Ancients and moderns alike have constructed arguments and assessed theories on the basis of common sense and intuitive judgments. Yet, despite the important role intuitions play in philosophy, there has been little reflection on fundamental questions concerning the sort of data intuitions provide, how they are supposed to lead us to the truth, and why we should treat them as important. In addition, recent psychological research seems to pose serious challenges to traditional intuition-driven philosophical inquiry. Rethinking Intuition brings together a (...) distinguished group of philosophers and psychologists to discuss these important issues. Students and scholars in both fields will find this book to be of great value. (shrink)

When one takes the evolution of operant behavior as prototype, one sees that the term replication is too tied to the peculiarities of genetic evolution. A more general term is recurrence. The important problem raised by recurrence is not “information” but relationship: deciding when two occurrences belong to the same lineage. That is solved by looking at common environmental effects.

The question, “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” is logically identical to the question, “Does the chimpanzee have a soul?” It is a peculiarity of our culture that we talk about anyone having a mind, and such talk is unhelpful for a science of behavior. The label “killjoy hypothesis” is an ad hominem attack.

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;This thesis proposes that the death of the author is neither a desirable, nor properly attainable goal of criticism, and that the concept of the author remained profoundly active even--and especially--as its disappearance was being articulated. ;As the phrase implies, the death of the author is seen to repeat the Nietzschean deicide. In Barthes, the idea of the author is explicitly connected to that of God, for Foucault and (...) Derrida, to that of the transcendental subject of knowledge. Nowhere, however, is any demonstration forwarded as to why we must conceive author, transcendental subject, and divinity as specifications of the same subject, and therefore implicated in a common closure. Always and everywhere, the death of the author proceeds on the basis of an idealized conception of authorship. ;In practical terms, such are the pressures exerted upon critical discourse by the death of the author that the author is implied from the outset. Barthes will insist that the authorial subject is constituted in and through language, whilst also recommending that we should regard certain authors as "founders of languages". With Foucault, the requisite transindividuality of archaeology is subverted by the absolutely privileged, metahistorical status it bestows upon Nietzsche. Derrida's history of logocentrism denies the author precisely because of the exorbitant recourse it must make to Rousseau as the single systematized instance of an age of logocentric metaphysics. ;The placement of the author reflects the experience of these critics in writing their texts. In Barthes, the return of the author is inseparable from his own autobiographical project; with Foucault, it relates to the rejection of the transcendental detachment of the archaelogist in favour of the engaged subjectivity of the genealogist; in Derrida, authorial reinscription coincides with his attempt to move beyond critical reading toward autobiographical literature. With hindsight, it appears that it is the becoming-author of the critic that is actually at issue. ;However, this revisionary phase has been largely neglected, and Barthes, Foucault and Derrida are continually invoked to underwrite critical resistance to the author. From the Russian Formalists onward, literary theory has shown itself incapable of accommodating authorial subjectivity. As such, the question of the author increasingly presents itself as the question of theory, of its adequacy as a descriptive science of literature and discourse in general. (shrink)

Bona fide historians who prefer secondary sources, especially deceptive ones, to primary sources do not come readily to mind. In modern accounts Charlemagne prospers without the archangel Gabriel as a strategic guide. Anglo-Saxon and Norman tall stories about William the Conqueror have given way to writs, Domesday Book, and the Bayeux Tapestry. Columbus no longer astounds his contemporaries by standing eggs on their heads, and further down the road of time, George Washington's shoulders have flexed free of the burden (...) of Mason Weems's pieties. Yet many twentieth-century historians continue to reprocess as gospel sixth-century legends and didactic fiction that portray the first Prankish king of Gaul as a thoroughgoing barbarian. (shrink)

Research on culture would be enriched by studying the connection between gender and peer relations. Cultures vary in the roles, privileges, opportunities and rights that are ascribed to females and males. They are known to differ also in the degree to which females and males interact with each other. Although the preference for same-gender peers has been observed across multiple cultural contexts, the degree of this segregation between females and males varies. We argue that variability in the interactional divide between (...) females and males is an important cultural construct that is likely to account for diversity in developmental processes and outcomes. (shrink)

Virtue liberalism requires democratic citizens to possess certain ethical character traits, like open-mindedness, toleration, and autonomy. This puts it at odds with theories, like Rawlsian political liberalism, that seek to minimize liberalism’s ethical demands to accommodate a greater range of ethical pluralism. Although Rorty endorses Rawls’s theory, his pragmatic liberalism is best understood as a version of virtue liberalism that, in particular, recommends a controversial civic virtue of irony for good citizenship. Indeed, in contrast to Rawls, Rorty joins Dewey in (...) conceiving of liberal democracy as a “way of life” that deeply affects our characters and our private commitments and projects. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I'm an Mammal, I'm a Reptile, I'm a Tree! Asanas as Earth Democracy in Practice Yogis for the Earth.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anonymous Temporality and Gender:Rereading Merleau-PontyMegan M. BurkeThis Essay Provides a Feminist reading of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of anonymity in order to show that it is a critical resource for a feminist account of gender. For Merleau-Ponty, anonymity is a structure of temporality that is prior to the cogito; it is a time that actualizes the reflective self. It gestures away from ontological commitments rooted in presence and calls attention to (...) how senses inform and actualize one’s reflective experience, which illuminates how it is that certain habits become sedimented or deeply rooted into the structure of one’s lived experience. As such, anonymity provides a useful framework for understanding how and in what ways gender normativity is taken up and resisted in experience. Yet feminist readings of Merleau-Ponty and anonymity are divided. On the one hand, there is a strong criticism of his work in general and anonymity in particular and, on the other hand, there is an effort to recuperate aspects of his project, including anonymity. Four examples can help frame this disparate feminist reception of his work:1. Merleau-Ponty neglects sexual difference. For example, Elizabeth Grosz suggests, “Merleau-Ponty leaves out—indeed, is unable to address—the questions of sexual difference, the question of what kind of human body he is discussing, what kind of perceptual functions, and what kind of sexual desire result from the sexual morphology and particularity of the subject” (Grosz 1994, 10). [End Page 138]2. Anonymity neglects sexual difference. Shannon Sullivan is representative of this point, claiming, “Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the anonymous or impersonal body … leads one to overlook” difference; “Merleau-Ponty fails to realize” difference; “He is wrong” (Sullivan 2001, 71).3. Anonymity illuminates sexual difference. For Silvia Stoller “[W]ith the help of Merleau-Ponty … sexual difference presupposes an anonymous sexuality which underlies gender identifications,” making anonymity important to a phenomenological account of sexual difference (Stoller 2013).4. Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied subjectivity provides insight into the lived experience of femininity. Feminist analyses of female body comportment, such as those of Iris Marion Young and Sandra Bartky, suggest that gender is a process of sedimentation (Young 1990; Bartky 1990). More specifically, they suggest gender becomes a lived experience through the repetition of particular behaviors and actions such that they become a deeply habituated part of one’s being in the world.While the feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty are important insofar as they caution against the acceptance of universal claims about existence, they also overlook anonymity’s relationship to time. Given that Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of anonymity is temporal through and through, this oversight is problematic. Without an account of anonymity as a kind of temporality, we miss the value of anonymity and the further insight that can be drawn from it in relation to gender. In what follows, then, I propose a solution to the disparate reception of his work. I suggest that reading anonymity as a structure of temporality illuminates how gender is taken up in lived experience. And, I suggest that anonymity can provide a strong account of gender normativity when one understands the parallels between sedimentation and anonymity with respect to temporality. By showing the strong connection between sedimentation and anonymous temporality, I suggest that it is ontologically and politically helpful to understand gender as a lived time.In the first section of this paper, I will address the main criticisms of anonymity provided by Shannon Sullivan and Luce Irigaray, while also paying attention to those from Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, and Beata Stawarska. For Sullivan, Grosz, and Butler, Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous body is a neutral body, a body that fails to account for gender differences. Irigaray and Stawarska suggest that anonymity is the mark of patriarchy, making ethical and ontological solipsism fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s work. In each of these cases, anonymity provides nothing useful for and is, in fact, a detriment to feminist projects.In the second section of this paper, I turn to Stoller’s positive reading of anonymity. For Stoller, anonymity is a political and ethical resource that challenges gender norms because it can allow for transformation in... (shrink)

Esfeld has proposed a minimalist ontology of nature called ‘super-Humeanism’ that purports to accommodate quantum phenomena and avoid standard objections to neo-Humean metaphysics. I argue that Esfeld’s sparse ontology has counterintuitive consequences and generates two self-undermining dilemmas concerning the nature of time and space. Contrary to Esfeld, I deny that super-Humeanism supports an ontology of microscopic particles that follow continuous trajectories through space.