The underlying claim of this essay is that we live in a multiverse, that is a universe of many universes that occupy the same space and time, not as an exotic excursion into the realms of science fiction, but as an everyday necessity that affects our social and economic interchange. Faced with such instability, the convenient way that this was managed was through an arbitrary division of labour that assigned the rational to the ‘real’ and the irrational to the ‘imagined’. (...) Recent speculation in cosmology and the science of consciousness studies has obliged us to reconsider the concept of reality as an ‘absolute given’ from which all laws can be verified. In string theory in particular, the dispute now hinges on the existence of ten or eleven dimensions in rippling membranes that discharge energy at the point of contact. In consciousness studies, similar models have appeared in order to embrace what might be understood as an apparent moment of enchantment essential to turn consciousness into awareness. The inevitable realization in scientific circles that the reality of the imagined has as an equivalent epistemological significance to the reality of the material, raises fascinating questions as it invites a sceptical reconsideration of the essential basis of knowledge and a revision of procedures. While the radical shift in scientific thought provides the moment of profound satisfaction for those artists, designers and scientists who have long argued for a transdisciplinary world-view, it also provides a moment of great challenge as we begin to consider how knowledge might be extended, codified and distributed in a multiverse, and begin to reflect on the relationships between text and world when any given world is only defined by the temporary consensus dependent on an arbitrary episteme. (shrink)

In 1969 Jasia Reichardt curated an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London called Play Orbit. Although it has not achieved the landmark status of Reichardt's Cybernetic Serendipity, which was presented in London a year earlier, it caught the intellectual and artistic mood of a newly emergent constituency of (largely British) artists who had benefited from a post-war revision of art education and a de-centring of intellectual energy away from the economic capitals. It may be that Play Orbit (...) will eventually be regarded in much the same way as Cybernetic Serendipity that is, as a significant footnote in the history of contemporary art. By turning artists' attention to toys through this project, the categories of painting and sculpture dissolved and the Modernist imperative of the enduring observation that had informed the arts and letters in a centred intellectual regime was seen for what it was: a colonial anachronism. The unapologetic relativism of play and the provisional truths of games coalesced in Play Orbit as confrontations to the essentialist materialism of the prevailing orthodoxy. In this sense Play Orbit, and its extensive catalogue of images and essays, foreshadowed not only the critical style that followed the influence of Continental Theory in the mid 1970s but also anticipated the agenda of virtually all that has been written about games in the last decade. For all its apparent whimsy and reification of idiosyncrasy, Play Orbit can now be seen as, above all, a constructively political intervention levered through the arts. For example, one of the more enduring and least contested impacts of the intellectual revisions of the last thirty years that Play Orbit foreshadowed is evident in the practice of history not least the practice of history as a game to be played. This paper elaborates on these assertions and asks how games and games theory might be connected with their own political and intellectual history, and how contemporary artists who choose to benefit from the licence that play endows might situate their work within what might be called Art Ludistory: a political play on the history of play. (shrink)

Through analogy this paper draws attention to hypercapitalism, that is, the profitability of the processes of economic recirculation that are independent of a materialist reality. Since neither materialist ideology nor perception are any longer at stake in hypercapitalism this opens the way for other realities to be revisited. In particular, this paper suggests that this radical shift in the logic of the economy resonates with the values of the Mediaeval period. The paper concludes by suggesting that the study of human (...) consciousness may benefit from a new relationship with reason, particularly as we consider such terms as artificial and intelligent. (shrink)

This special issue of AVANT is all about Cognitive Innovation. It is not about CogNovo, the interdisciplinary and international doctoral training programme that produced three different Off the Lip events. It is not about Off the Lip 2017, the novel symposium format we developed to collaboratively create a publication resulting in this special issue of AVANT. It is not about the seemingly heterogeneous collection of papers that follow this preface. Collaborative Approaches to Cognitive Innovation required something else, something we are (...) starting to capture in the four GIFT principles. While this special issue is not solely about CogNovo, Off the Lip events, or the content of the following submissions, all these aforementioned elements were necessary to shape our current understanding of Cognitive Innovation, the very process which led to numerous publications, exhibitions, and events during the past three years. In a sense, all of our previous endeavours have culminated in this collection of 26 distinct pieces of work, yet we hope and believe that this special issue also marks a beginning. Let us explain. [...]. (shrink)

Descartes' works were not allowed to be read at Leiden University, even his name could not be pronounced. Read the compelling story about how his pupil Johannes de Raey has had the opportunity to preach Descartes fully in philosophy, but also in medicine, in a hostile anti-Cartesian climate during 20 years (1647-1668). This book is not only meant for philosophers and medical historians, but for all who want to take a look at the extensive menu of Cartesian cuisine. The 17th-century (...) philosopher René Descartes turned established science upside down by doubting all certainties. His critical mind rejected statements that could not be proven by the Ratio. The Ratio was the metaphor for the roots, the physics for the trunk and the medicine for the branches and leaves of the Cartesian tree. This premise was directly opposed to the established aristotelian theory in which observation formed the basis of knowledge. De Raey, who once called Descartes his best student, synthesized a hybrid model of the old Aristotelian and the new Cartesian concept. From 1658 to 1662 he gave private lessons in medicine at Leiden University and tried to use his model as a basis for explaining human physiology. Until now, nothing was known about the content of these lectures. The author recently found a dispute. It is a new dish on the Cartesian menu. (shrink)

In this paper I outline the PAIR account of joint attention as a perceptual-practical, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that to explain joint attention we need to leave the received understanding of propositions and propositional attitudes and the picture of content connected to it behind and embrace the notions of subject mode and position mode content. I also explore the relation between joint attention and communication.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 27-30, July 2012.

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions (...) is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed. (shrink)

Morals from Motives develops a virtue ethics inspired more by Hume and Hutcheson's moral sentimentalism than by recently-influential Aristotelianism. It argues that a reconfigured and expanded "morality of caring" can offer a general account of right and wrong action as well as social justice. Expanding the frontiers of ethics, it goes on to show how a motive-based "pure" virtue theory can also help us to understand the nature of human well-being and practical reason.

The guiding inspiration of this book is the attraction and distance that mark the relation between anthropology and philosophy. This theme is explored through encounters between individual anthropologists and particular regions of philosophy. Several of the most basic concepts of the discipline—including notions of ethics, politics, temporality, self and other, and the nature of human life—are products of a dialogue, both implicit and explicit, between anthropology and philosophy. These philosophical undercurrents in anthropology also speak to the question of what it (...) is to experience our being in a world marked by radical difference and otherness. In The Ground Between, twelve leading anthropologists offer intimate reflections on the influence of particular philosophers on their way of seeing the world, and on what ethnography has taught them about philosophy. Ethnographies of the mundane and the everyday raise fundamental issues that the contributors grapple with in both their lives and their thinking. With directness and honesty, they relate particular philosophers to matters such as how to respond to the suffering of the other, how concepts arise in the give and take of everyday life, and how to be attuned to the world through the senses. Their essays challenge the idea that philosophy is solely the province of professional philosophers, and suggest that certain modalities of being in the world might be construed as ways of doing philosophy. Contributors. João Biehl, Steven C. Caton, Vincent Crapanzano, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, Michael M. J. Fischer, Ghassan Hage, Clara Han, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Michael Puett, Bhrigupati Singh. (shrink)

Eldred offers a remedy to the consequences of ancient Greek misconceptions of time that are also entrenched in today’s mathematized physics. Here time is spatialized as the one-dimensionally linear ‘arrow of time’ for the sake of predicting and controlling movement. But such spatialized time distorts the phenomenon of time itself. An alternative, hermeneutic-phenomenological path begins with a pre-spatial concept of time that is genuinely three-dimensional. This paves the way for recasting who we are as humans in belonging, first of all, (...) to the free openness of 3D-temporality. This belonging enables temporally 3D-vision of the psyche that empowers us to see movement at all and reconcile its inherent contradictoriness. We are then also able to conceive ourselves no longer merely as internally cogitating, self-conscious subjects, but as engaged existentially in temporally 3D-interplay, mutually estimating and esteeming who we are. This unpredictable interplay is constrained, however, by being played out in the sociating medium of thingified value, the accumulative movement of thingified value having gained the upper hand in dictating our life-movements as well as our interplay with the earth. (shrink)

Der private, sehr gefahrdete Bucherbestand Friedrich Nietzsches gilt als ein besonders interessantes Beispiel einer Schriftstellerbibliothek des 19. Jahrhunderts.

We ordinarily suppose that there is a difference between having and failing to exercise a rational capacity on the one hand, and lacking a rational capacity altogether on the other. This is crucial for our allocations of responsibility. Someone who has but fails to exercise a capacity is responsible for their failure to exercise their capacity, whereas someone who lacks a capacity altogether is not. However, as Gary Watson pointed out in his seminal essay ’Skepticism about Weakness of Will’, the (...) idea of an unexercised capacity is much more difficult to make sense of than it initially appears. The aim of ’Rational Capacities’ is to provide the needed explication of this idea. (shrink)

This will be the best way of explaining ‘Paris is the lover of Helen’, that is, ‘Paris loves, and by that very fact [et eo ipso] Helen is loved’. Here, therefore, two propositions have been brought together and abbreviated as one. Or, ‘Paris is a lover, and by that very fact Helen is a loved one’.

This article considers intersections between cultural studies and New Testament studies. It ponders and focuses on possible approaches to the bearing of the 'cultural turn' on biblical studies. Following a brief consideration of cultural studies and its potential value for New Testament studies, four promising developments in cultural studies approaches to the New Testament are noted.

Scholars in the past have signalled the almost complete absence of Paul - as a cypher for the Pauline letters and tradition(s) - in Africa. The apparent lack of use or deliberate ignoring of Paul in Black, African and Liberation Theologies on the continent in all its pluralist variety and richness is generally taken as testimony to the perceived strangeness of the apostle in Africa. However, even if Paul's strangeness does not equate with his absence, at least not altogether, Paul's (...) profiles in Africa include dimensions such as Paul as a stranger, as an unwelcome guest, as a conquering traveller and as a victim of tradition. I argue that Paul's absence from as well as strangeness in Africa may be more apparent than real, and that hermeneutical patterns and practices more than epistolary content may have played a stronger role in the construal of Paul in Africa. CONTRIBUTION: Evaluating a range of entrenched interpretive profiles of Paul in Africa exposed certain hermeneutical tendencies that offer the potential for reinterpretation and reassessment of the use of Pauline materials on the continent and elsewhere. (shrink)

Ancient people envisaged a strong link between what was deemed transgressive religious activities and objectionable sexual practices. Moreover, sexual behaviour considered aberrant was deemed to upset political boundaries which should protect civic and national stability, especially when this behaviour was suspected of effeminacy. Such thinking appears to inform both Romans 1:18–32 and Wisdom of Solomon 14:12–14. Focussing on two passages from these documents, the links between religion, sexual behaviour and politics in the context of the 1st-century Roman Empire are investigated, (...) tracing underlying ideological intersections, connections and divergences. (shrink)

This contribution explores the potential value of a postcolonial approach for teaching Mark’s gospel. Investigating a number of texts from the gospel, it asks to what extent a postcolonial optic implies a different approach to the gospel, what it adds and where challenges exist. Teaching with a postcolonial optic entails framing the gospel in its 1st-century imperial context and focusing on the ambivalence and ambiguity of imperial rule, investigating texts with attention to hybridity and mimicry in particular. Teaching the Gospel (...) of Mark through a postcolonial optic opens up new possibilities for interpretation and contextualisation, but at the same time poses certain challenges, pedagogically and otherwise. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics offers the most authoritative and compelling guide to this diverse and fertile field of philosophy. Twenty-four of the world's most distinguished specialists provide brand-new essays about 'what there is': what kinds of things there are, and what relations hold among entities falling under various categories. They give the latest word on such topics as identity, modality, time, causation, persons and minds, freedom, and vagueness. The Handbook's unrivaled breadth and depth make it the definitive reference work (...) for students and academics across the philosophical spectrum. (shrink)

This thought provoking book uncovers a crisis in the political imagination, a wide-spread failure to provide the passionate sense of community "in which our need for belonging can be met." Seeking the answers to fundamental questions, Michael Ignatieff writes vividly both about ideas and about the people who tried to live by them—from Augustine to Bosch, from Rosseau to Simone Weil. Incisive and moving, The Needs of Strangers returns philosophy to its proper place, as a guide to the art (...) of being human. (shrink)

Virtually all philosophers agree that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it must satisfy certain conditions. Perhaps it must be supported by evidence. Or perhaps it must be reliably formed. Or perhaps there are some other "good-making" features it must have. But does a belief's justification also require some sort of awareness of its good-making features? The answer to this question has been hotly contested in contemporary epistemology, creating a deep divide among its practitioners. Internalists, who tend to focus (...) on scientific or theoretical beliefs as the ideal, insist that such awareness is required for justification. Externalists, who think children's ordinary beliefs in obvious facts are paradigm cases of justified belief, say it isn't required. Michael Bergmann's book offers a decisive refutation of internalism and a sustained defense of externalism. (shrink)

Bringing together ethnographic exposition with philosophical concepts and arguments and effectively transcending subdisciplinary boundaries between cultural and ...

This article characterizes the varieties of four - dimensionalism and provides a critical overview of the main arguments in support of it.

This wide-ranging book reconstructs this debate and places within their contemporary contexts the rival claims concerning the nature of the cosmos and the ...

Naturphilosophie und Metaphysik scheinen zwei unterschiedliche, ja, sich ausschließende philosophische Ansätze zu sein. Bestimmt man aber Naturphilosophie als Metaphysik der Natur im Sinne des Projekts, im Ausgang von den naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen zu einer kohärenten und vollständigen Sicht der Welt zu gelangen, ergibt sich eine neue und überraschende Konstellation. Die Bezugnahme auf die Naturwissenschaften verleiht der Metaphysik einerseits die Berechtigung dazu, revisionär zu sein, das heißt, Erkenntnisansprüche, die aus dem alltäglichen Weltverständnis stammen, zu revidieren. Andererseits ist eine solche Metaphysik ebenso hypothetisch (...) wie die Wissenschaften selbst. Michael Esfeld zeigt zunächst, wie man in diesem Rahmen einen wissenschaftlichen Realismus vertreten kann, und begründet dann so umstrittene Thesen wie die eines vierdimensionalen Blockuniversums mit Ereignissen und Prozessen statt Substanzen oder die eines naturphilosophischen Holismus und Strukturenrealismus statt eines Atomismus und rehabilitiert die Idee notwendiger Verbindungen in der Natur. (shrink)

This new book by Michael Slote argues that Western philosophy on the whole has overemphasized rational control and autonomy at the expense of the important countervailing value and virtue of receptivity. Recently the ideas of caring and empathy have received a great deal of philosophical and public attention, but both these notions rest on the deeper and broader value of receptivity, and in From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Slote seeks to show that we need to focus more on receptivity if (...) we are to attain a more balanced sense and understanding of what is important to us. -/- Beginning with a critique of Enlightenment thinking that calls into question its denial of any central role to considerations of emotion and empathy, he goes on to show how a greater emphasis on these factors and on the receptivity that underlies them can give us a more realistic, balanced, and sensitive understanding of our core ethical and epistemological values. This means rejecting post-modernism's blanket rejection of reason and of compelling real values and recognizing, rather, that receptivity should play a major role in how we lead our lives as individuals, in how we relate to nature, in how we acquire knowledge about the world, and in how we relate morally and politically with others. (shrink)