Introduction: contemporary conditions and diagrammatic trajectory -- From joy to the gap: the accessing of the infinite by the finite (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson) -- The care of the self versus the ethics of desire: two diagrams of the production of subjectivity (and of the subject's relation to truth) (Foucault versus Lacan) -- The aesthetic paradigm: from the folding of the finite-infinite relation to schizoanalytic metamodelisation (to biopolitics) (Guattari) -- The strange temporality of the subject: life in-between the infinite and the (...) finite (Deleuze contra Badiou) -- Desiring-machines, chaoids, probeheads: towards a speculative production of subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari) -- Conclusion: composite diagram and relations of adjacency. (shrink)

In a series of philosophical discussions and artistic case studies, this volume develops a materialist and immanent approach to modern and contemporary art. The argument is made for a return to aesthetics--an aesthetics of affect--and for the theorization of art as an expanded and complex practice. Staging a series of encounters between specific Deleuzian concepts--the virtual, the minor, the fold, etc.--and the work of artists that position their work outside of the gallery or "outside" of representation--Simon O'Sullivan takes (...) Deleuze's thought into other milieus, allowing these "possible worlds" to work back on philosophy. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Paragrana Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 2 Seiten: 80-93.

What is the importance of deconstruction, and the writing of Jacques Derrida in particular, for literary criticism today? Derek Attridge argues that the challenge of Derrida's work for our understanding of literature and its value has still not been fully met, and in this book, which traces a close engagement with Derrida's writing over two decades and reflects an interest in that work going back a further two decades, shows how that work can illuminate a variety of topics. Chapters include (...) an overview of deconstruction as a critical practice today, discussions of the secret, postcolonialism, ethics, literary criticism, jargon, fiction, and photography, and responses to the theoretical writing of Emmanuel Levinas, Roland Barthes, and J. Hillis Miller. Also included is a discussion of the recent reading of Derrida's philosophy as 'radical atheism', and the book ends with a conversation on deconstruction and place with the theorist and critic Jean-Michel Rabate. Running throughout is a concern with the question of responsibility, as exemplified in Derrida's own readings of literary and philosophical texts: responsibility to the work being read, responsibility to the protocols of rational argument, and responsibility to the reader. (shrink)

This article attends to Deleuze and Guattari's idea of a ‘minor literature’ as well as to Deleuze's concepts of the figural, probe-heads and the diagram in relation to Bacon's paintings. The paper asks specifically what might be usefully taken from this Deleuze–Bacon encounter for the expanded field of contemporary art practice.

Through recourse to Gilles Deleuze’s short polemical essay ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ and the accompanying interview on ‘Control and Becoming’, this article attempts to map out the conceptual contours of an artistic war machine that might be pitched against control and also play a role in the more ethico-political function of the constitution of a people. Along the way a series of other Deleuzian concepts are introduced and outlined – with an eye to their pertinence for art practice and, indeed, (...) for any more general ‘thought’ against control. At stake here is the development of a concept of fictioning – the production of alternative narratives and image-worlds – and also the idea of art practice as a form of myth-science, exemplified by Burroughs’ cut-up method. It is argued that these aesthetic strategies might offer alternative models for a subjectivity that is increasingly standardized and hemmed in by neoliberalism. (shrink)

This article offers two commentaries on two of Félix Guattari's essays from Chaosmosis: ‘The New Aesthetic Paradigm’ and ‘Schizoanalytic Metamodelisation’. The first commentary attends specifically to how Guattari figures the infinite/finite relation in relation to what he calls the three Assemblages (pre-, extant, and post-capitalism) and then even more specifically to the mechanics of this relation – or folding – within the third ‘processual’ Assemblage or new aesthetic paradigm of the essay's title. The second commentary looks at what Guattari has (...) to say about this paradigm in relation to subjectivity, that is, the schizoanalytic programme or practice of metamodelling. Here the focus is on the turn to asignifying semiotics – but also the importance of signifying material and indeed the actual material scene of encounter – in any programme for the production of subjectivity (it is here also that the symptom makes its appearance). (shrink)

Early last year, the GenEthics Consortium (GEC) of the Washington Metropolitan Area convened at George Washington University to consider a complex case about genetic testing for Alzheimer disease (AD). The GEC consists of scientists, bioethicists, lawyers, genetic counselors, and consumers from a variety of institutions and affiliations. Four of the 8 co-authors of this paper delivered presentations on the case. Supplemented by additional ethical and legal observations, these presentations form the basis for the following discussion.

Abductive reasoning is central to reconstructing the past in the geosciences. This paper outlines the nature of the abductive method and restates it in Bayesian terms. Evidence plays a key role in this working method and, in particular, traces of the past are important in this explanatory framework. Traces, whether singularly or as groups, are interpreted within the context of the event for which they have evidential claims. Traces are not considered as independent entities but rather as inter-related pieces of (...) information concerning the likelihood of specific events. Exemplification of the use of such traces is provided by dissecting an example of their use in the environmental reconstruction of mountain climate. (shrink)

What are the relationships between doubt and truth, thinking and writing in Montaigne’s Essais? We usually see Montaigne’s doubt through the lens of ancient schools of Scepticism and yet he notes that the Pyrrhonians ‘ne peuvent exprimer leur generale conception en aucune maniere de parler’: these philosophers describe their doubtful thought in negative affirmations but these are affirmations – ‘propositions affirmatives’ – all the same. This thesis approaches Montaigne’s doubt differently: I investigate the Essais not as an attempt to indicate (...) or describe doubtful, ‘double et divers’ thought but as a tool for thinking doubtfully in writing. Montaigne’s literary use of language is therefore central to my analysis. Irony, ambiguity, the practices of rewriting and overwriting, the ‘polyphony’ of cited authors who advocate different positions: these afford ways of thinking that sustain duality and doubt. I focus on Montaigne’s engagement with Seneca and Plutarch, ancient authors who are, superficially, unrelated to doubt: the Essais constitute a particular form of humanistic engagement with ancient texts, concerned with practices and forms of writing as much as, if not more than, with philosophical concepts. These ‘dogmatic’ authors – they defend philosophical positions of certainty – were, counter-intuitively, seen by Montaigne to have a ‘forme d’escrire douteuse et irresolue’. This doubtful ‘forme’ shaped Montaigne’s own and it was, I argue, in working with and on these authors – reading, writing, and thinking with them – that he constructed a way of writing doubtful in both form and thought: a text that is double, unresolved, ambiguous, and yet ‘truthful’ in its capacity to perform and make legible the complex, multiple nature of his thought and his thinking. (shrink)

This twelfth volume of Correspondence contains authoritative and fully annotated texts of all known letters sent both to and from Bentham between July 1824 and June 1828. The 301 letters, most of which have never before been published, have been collected from archives, public and private, in Britain, the United States of America, Switzerland, France, Japan, and elsewhere, as well as from the major collections of Bentham Papers at University College London Library and the British Library.In mid-1824 Bentham was still (...) preoccupied with the Greek struggle for independence against Turkey, though his active involvement waned as he became disenchanted with the behaviour of the deputies sent to London by the Greek National Assembly. His international reputation was reflected in his continuing contact with Simón Bolívar and Bernardino Rivadavia in South America, and with John Quincy Adams, John Neal, Henry Wheaton, and others in the United States, and his forging of new contacts in Guatemala, India, and Egypt. In the autumn of 1825 he visited France, where he stayed with Jean Baptiste Say and La Fayette, and was fêted by the French liberals.Bentham made considerable progress drafting material for his pannomion, or complete code of laws, and in particular for his Constitutional and Procedure Codes, while John Stuart Mill edited the massive Rationale of Judicial Evidence. Bentham became increasingly active in the cause of law reform, and exchanged a series of letters on the subject with Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, and Henry Brougham. He maintained his friendships with John and Sarah Austin, George and Harriet Grote, James and John Stuart Mill, John Bowring, Joseph Hume, Francis Burdett, Francis Place, and Joseph Parkes, re-established contact with the third Marquis of Lansdowne, son of his old friend the first Marquis, and made new acquaintances in James Humphreys, Sutton Sharpe, and Albany Fonblanque. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher and reformer, was at the height of his fame and influence in the 1820s. The 301 letters in this volume, many of which are previously unpublished, contain correspondence with international leaders such as Simón Bolívar, the 'Liberator', and Bernardino Rivadavia of Buenos Aires, British statesmen such as Robert Peel and Henry Brougham, and leading intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill and Sarah Austin.

The difficulty of this little poem is shown by the facts that Ausonius had no idea what it was about, and that Westendorp Boerma's commentary takes 22 pages to explicate its five lines. The latter relies on Quintilian 8.3.27ff., who quotes the poem, saying that Vergil wrote it to attack a certain Cimber for his taste in obsolete words. This is no doubt the Annius Cimber whom Augustus ridiculed when reprimanding Mark Antony for a similar foible and who, as an (...) antiquarius is contrasted with the Asiatici oratores. For convenience, I have kept Westendorp Boerma's text, but I take issue with his interpretation on two points. 4 tau Gallicum: since Bücheler tentatively suggested it in RhM 38 , 508, the standard explanation of this has been to point out that a number of Latin inscriptions in Gaul use a Greek θ or else a barred D , to represent what appears to have been a dental fricative elsewhere indicated in Latin by -sd- or -st-. Thus Frank, AJP 56 , 255, quotes HYÐRITANVS for what is elsewhere spelled Thysdritanus, and says that ‘Ð clearly represents the best that one Celt could do with sd’. On the basis of this supposed Gallic incompetence, Frank went on to see the repeated -st- sounds in the poem as some sort of joke on the orator's inability to pronounce this sound. His view seems to have been generally accepted. There seems to me a profound error in this viewpoint which shows cultural imperialism at its worst. First, let us note that none of the examples of alleged substitution are in Latin words; they are native names for people or places or things. The Latin names by which we know some of them are only the approximation of foreigners, and not in any sense the ‘correct’ names of those people or places. (shrink)

The objectives of this study were to develop a high-density chromosome bin map of homoeologous group 7 in hexaploid wheat, to identify gene distribution in these chromosomes, and to perform comparative studies of wheat with rice and barley. We mapped 2148 loci from 919 EST clones onto group 7 chromosomes of wheat. In the majority of cases the numbers of loci were significantly lower in the centromeric regions and tended to increase in the distal regions. The level of duplicated loci (...) in this group was 24% with most of these loci being localized toward the distal regions. One hundred nineteen EST probes that hybridized to three fragments and mapped to the three group 7 chromosomes were designated landmark probes and were used to construct a consensus homoeologous group 7 map. An additional 49 probes that mapped to 7AS, 7DS, and the ancestral translocated segment involving 7BS also were designated landmarks. Landmark probe orders and comparative maps of wheat, rice, and barley were produced on the basis of corresponding rice BAC/PAC and genetic markers that mapped on chromosomes 6 and 8 of rice. Identification of landmark ESTs and development of consensus maps may provide a framework of conserved coding regions predating the evolution of wheat genomes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors' IntroductionAlan D. Schrift and Shannon SullivanThe articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the sixtieth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas October 13–15, 2022.Michael Hardt of Duke University and Patricia Pisters of the University of Amsterdam gave the SPEP (...) 2022 Plenary Addresses, and we are grateful to be able to include their plenary papers in this special issue. Hardt's paper, "The Politics of Articulation and Strategic Multiplicities," treated SPEP members to an early peek at his newest book, The Subversive 70s (Oxford University Press, 2023). In this work, Hardt digs into the powerful resources for social movements that activists and theorists from the 1970s developed. As he argues, in many ways those activists and thinkers were ahead of their times—and also ahead of ours—in understanding how to analyze interwoven multiplicities of power and how to articulate and organize liberation struggles based on those multiplicities. Hardt brilliantly demonstrates how analyzing the progressive and revolutionary social [End Page 237] movements of the '70s can help us not only understand the roots of contemporary social and political struggles but also reclaim critical resources for those struggles.Patricia Pisters's paper, "Thinking with Fire: Elemental Philosophy and Media Technology," draws upon Gaston Bachelard's "fire complexes" to address a variety of pyrotechnical images appearing in contemporary cinema. Noting that elemental philosophy is on the rise in media studies and elsewhere, not least because of current environmental crises, fire is particularly engaging for its metaphorical, "matterphorical," and technological associations. While acknowledging fire as a material medium—cooking, heating, burning, etc.—Pisters's primary focus in her paper is on fire as an immaterial medium, and it is here that she turns to Bachelard's constellation of fire complexes—the Empedocles, Prometheus, and Novalis Complexes—to which she adds her own fourth complex, the Sita Complex. With these complexes, she provides readings of four cinematic productions that elucidate the annihilating, transgressive, sexual, and purifying qualities of fire, and she suggests that these entangled fire complexes present different kinds of combustive knowledge in which the element of fire manifests itself as material phenomenon of nature, the engine for modern life, and immaterial affective reverie of destruction, transgression, and sexuality.The other articles in this special issue have been organized according to five broad groupings. The first grouping, "On Latin American Philosophy," brings together three papers that engage Latin American philosophy, particularly as found in Mexican, Columbian, and Venezuelan history and political movements. In "Radicalizing Localization: Notes on Santiago Castro-Gómez's Genealogies of Coloniality," Julian Rios Acuña argues that Columbian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez develops a radical method of localization. This method allows Castro-Gómez to transform Foucauldian genealogy into genealogies of coloniality that grapple with the complexities of extreme violence produced by colonialism. In "Stefan Gandler's Renewal of Critical Theory from Latin America," Jake M. Bartholomew argues for a version of Critical Theory that is not bound by Europe but also remains true to its first-generation Marxist roots. Relocating to Mexico and advocating for Mexican philosophers, German-born philosopher Stefan Gandler shows how Latin American philosophy can enrich Critical Theory, providing more than can the second and third generations of Critical Theory because of its ability to analyze capitalism from outside the economic perspectives of the Global North. In "Two Versions of the Mestizo [End Page 238] Model: Toward a Theory of Anti-Blackness in Latin American Thought," Miguel Gualdron Ramirez criticizes the anti-Blackness that he sees at the heart of mestizo models of latinidad, or lo latinoamericano. Focusing on the concepts of liberation offered by Venezuelan theorist and politician Simón Bolívar and Mexican philosopher José de Vasconcelos, Ramirez reveals the exclusion and erasure of Black bodies, lives, and histories that ground their versions of Latinx identity and Latin American history. Together these three articles showcase how Latin American philosophy can enrich and expand the scope of Continental philosophy.The second grouping, "Liberatory Limits and Misalignments," features three articles... (shrink)

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Academic barbarism : practice and transmission -- Academic barbarism, universities and inequality -- Academic barbarism and the literature of concealment : Roberto Bolaño and W.G. Sebald -- Aaron Swartz, new technologies and the myth of open access -- Academic barbarism and the Asian university : the case of Hong Kong.

This article argues that history played a larger role in the thought of Gottlob Frege than has usually been acknowledged. Frege’s logical writings frequently employed statements about the past as examples that included references to historical persons. Frege also described history as a science and argued that historical propositions could support valid inferences and reliably identify historical persons and events. But Frege’s eternalist theory of reference, designed primarily for formal concepts and objects, struggled to accommodate such propositions. Identifying an objective (...) referent for the subjectivity of historical actors was particularly problematic. The article suggests that Frege’s writings are interesting for the philosopher of history for at least two reasons: first, his work is clarificatory when considering the key features that historical propositions must have to count as objective knowledge, and second, it foreshadowed the issues with historicity that analytical philosophy experienced in the twentieth century. It concludes that the problems Frege raised exposed the need for a new concept of inter-subjectivity to replace his own Platonic foundation for objectivity. (shrink)

Animals, Equality and Democracy examines the structure of animal protection legislation and finds that it is deeply inequitable, with a tendency to favor those animals the community is most likely to see and engage with. Siobhan O'Sullivan argues that these inequities violate fundamental principle of justice and transparency.

Un uomo in cappa e cilindro di fronte a voi promette: “muoverò la materia con la sola forza del pensiero”. Scettici aspettate la prova. Ed ecco che, mirabilmente, egli alza un braccio. Un braccio, il suo braccio! Un pezzo di materia, dotato di massa, carica elettrica, proprietà magnetiche e quant’altro, si è mosso solo grazie alla sua volontà di alzarlo. Con la sola forza del pensiero il braccio si è sollevato! Per quanti sforzi retorici faccia, nessuno riterrà particolarmente sorprendente l’esperimento. (...) Il fatto è che diamo per scontato che la materia possa essere mossa con la sola forza del pensiero se quella materia siamo noi. I viaggi nel tempo, o il trasferimento istantaneo di informazioni, quelli sì sarebbero davvero una sorpresa. Eppure, mentre per questi si sono in un certo senso raggiunti risultati teorici o sperimentali interessanti, ed esistono teorie che spiegano in base a quali leggi fisiche questi fenomeni possano avvenire, per quanto riguarda la nostra capacità di agire intenzionalmente ci troviamo ancora sommersi da difficoltà teoriche enormi, e il terreno rimane ancora pieno di difficoltà concettuali. Uno dei problemi più cruciali è che entrambe le opzioni metafisiche generali, il monismo e il dualismo, sono radicate nel senso comune come nella nostra tradizione culturale, e talvolta in modi davvero curiosi. Possiamo trovare richiami teologici al monismo, mentre sarebbe ragionevole pensare a una adesione esclusivo a una forma di dualismo, e derive dualiste nelle indagini di neurofisiologi contemporanei. Come esempio del primo caso voglio menzionare la procedura di pesatura delle anime che si può veder raffigurata in alcune chiese (la Cattedrale di Torcello e San Pietro a Spoleto) e che si basa sull’idea che le proprietà etiche degli individui siano riscontrabili nelle proprietà fisiche, il peso delle loro anime. Certo, si può pensare che le bilance per anime siano in effetti sensibili a proprietà non fisiche, nondimeno esse parteciperebbero di una struttura nomologica tipica delle scienze fisiche, di contro a quanto solitamente segna il confine tra regno della natura – nomologico - e regno della mente - normativo. Di contro, un recente numero di Nature (luglio 2006) apriva con un richiamo a caratteri cubitali in copertina: Trasformare il pensiero in azione [Turning thought into action]. L’uso del verbo “trasformare” dà adito all’idea che le proprietà di un dominio siano state cambiate e modificate così da divenire proprietà di un dominio diverso. Ma come notavo in apertura, non c’è nulla di sorprendente nell’idea che i nostri pensieri diventino azioni, e dobbiamo pensarla proprio così se vogliamo giustificare l’idea che le nostre azioni siano nostre, ossia risultato dei nostri atti deliberativi. In questo lavoro cercherò di offrire una risposta al problema della causalità mentale, ossia a come la nostra mente possa interagire con gli eventi del mondo fisico e da essi esserne modificata. Un problema classico, quindi assai vasto, sia per ciò che attiene la letteratura sia per quanto riguarda le questioni da affrontare. La bussola adottata è stata la seguente: se il problema è il rapporto del mentale con il mondo fisico allora va tenuto nel massimo rispetto il modo in cui il problema generale della causalità è stato affrontato entro il mondo fisico. La mia impressione è che nella letteratura filosofica non venga dedicata una sufficiente attenzione a questo aspetto, e uno degli intenti che perseguirò sarà porvi rimedio. Il libro è diviso in quattro capitoli. Nel primo si evidenziano le radici del problema mente corpo da un punto di vista più concettuale che storico. I due domini sono sempre stati tratteggiati tramite proprietà all’apparenza differenti, così da rinforzare la ragionevolezza di un approccio più o meno dualista. Emerge già qui che il problema, nella specifica declinazione causale nella quale viene qui considerato, diventa tale solo se si assume un modello di causalità adeguato alle discipline fisiche, anche se assai più controverso negli altri casi. Questo modello era nelle pagine di Leibniz, e costituiva la sua schiacciante obiezione a Descartes. Tuttavia, nell’attuale dibattito non sempre ha giocato un ruolo altrettanto cruciale. Penso sia il tempo di rimetterlo al centro della scena. Sosterrò quindi che in effetti il problema della causalità mentale e del generale rapporto tra mente e corpo è una conseguenza, piuttosto che il punto d’avvio, di un modello generale di causalità. Tale modello è da identificarsi nella teoria secondo la quale tra causa ed effetto c’è un trasferimento di una quantità conservata, una teoria sulla quale si è acceso un intenso dibattito. Nel capitolo successivo il modello di causalità fisica del trasferimento viene combinato col più generale approccio fisicalista che in questi anni si sta diffondendo. Ci sono modi assai diversi per caratterizzare il fisicalismo, che comportano conseguenze molto divergenti tra loro. Analizzerò diverse varietà di fisicalismo e la loro compatibilità sia con il modello della causalità come trasferimento, cui si faceva riferimento, sia con il dominio del mentale. Sosterrò che il principio metafisico della chiusura causale del mondo fisico può essere integrato con la visione della causalità difesa nel primo capitolo, il tutto accettando l’idea che la causalità sia una relazione tra eventi. L’ipotesi è che sussista uno spazio di manovra per la causalità mentale a condizione che le proprietà mentali, elementi cardine della relazione causale, siano identificate con le proprietà fisiche, una teoria oggi non più di gran moda. Il terzo capitolo è dedicato alla difesa della teoria dell’identità dei tipi dalle due note obiezioni: la teoria delle identità necessarie di Kripke e l’argomento della realizzabilità multipla nelle sue diverse varianti. La strada per rispondere alle obiezioni e difendere la teoria dell’identità passa attraverso una teoria delle sensazioni che metta in luce il carattere intrinsecamente causale e, in certa misura, esternistico di questi stati, combattendo così l’intuizione che le sensazioni si risolvano nelle proprietà fenomeniche di tipo qualitativo, nel cosa si prova ad averle. A supporto di questa visione verranno schierate anche un certo numero di prove empiriche, facenti capo alla letteratura medica. Nondimeno, la tesi di identità richiede che essa sia condizionata, ossia che venga vincolata a condizioni locali, un tema perseguito nell’ultimo capitolo. Il quarto capitolo è dedicato a mostrare che non c’è un’enorme distanza tra la teoria dell’identità e il funzionalismo nella sua versione di primo ordine. In questo contesto giocano un ruolo chiave i generi naturali, che soddisfano i requisiti per una teoria dell’identità senza per questo condurla nelle maglie delle critiche che l’hanno condannata. Così costruita, la teoria dell’identità è il portato dell’incontro tra analisi concettuale e ricerca empirica e un simile connubio ha tra le sue conseguenze l’abbandono dell’immagine per cui la realtà è costituita da diversi strati ontologici di complessità crescente. Di contro, l’incontro tra il piano concettuale e quello empirico che porta all’identità consente di accordare pieni poteri causali alle proprietà mentali, un desiderata al quale non è possibile rinunciare. Solo che esse vanno individuate nel mondo fisico, senza che ciò comporti la rinuncia alla forza epistemica ed esplicativa delle medesime. Alcuni possono vedere in questa posizione un’abdicazione della filosofia alla scienza. Non credo che sia compito della filosofia avocarsi regioni del sapere. Se è la scienza a dovere risolvere il problema della causalità mentale, la filosofia non può mettersi di traverso. A quest’ultima spetterà il compito di mostrare che la distanza tra le nostre intuizioni, per quanto fallimentari e confuse siano, e le descrizioni scientifiche è colmabile da una ricerca comprensibile e razionale. Frutto comunque delle nostre intuizioni. (shrink)

The badness of having conflicting emotions is a familiar theme in academic ethics, clinical psychology, and commercial self-help, where emotional harmony is often put forward as an ideal. Many philosophers give emotional harmony pride of place in their theories of practical reason.1 Here we offer a defense of a particular species of emotional conflict, namely, ambivalence. We articulate an conception of ambivalence, on which ambivalence is unresolved inconsistent desire (§1) and present a case of appropriate ambivalence (§2), before considering two (...) alternative defenses of emotional conflict (§3). We then argue that inconsistent desires can be fitting (§4) and that it can be reasonable not to resolve inconsistent desires (§5), before considering an objection (§6) and concluding the discussion (§7). (shrink)

Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Organisational strategy -- Finance and economics -- Organisational behaviour -- Marketing and innovation -- HRM and employee relations -- Epilogue.

Resumo Neste artigo, pretendemos abordar o pensamento de duas mulheres por meio dos conceitos de aniquilamento, que encontramos em Le mirouer des simples ames de Marguerite Porete, e descriação que aparece em Pensateur et grace de Simone Weil. Também usaremos a obra de Weil La connaisance surnaturelle composta pelos Cahiers d’Amérique e Notes ècrites à Londres, onde ela faz referência ao livro de Marguerite Porete. Deste modo, apresentaremos, num primeiro momento, a mística de Marguerite Porete, focando no conceito de aniquilamento. (...) Depois, num segundo momento, mostraremos um pouco da mística de Simone Weil por meio do conceito de descriação. A partir deste segundo momento, já iremos traçando alguns paralelos para mostrar a semelhança entre a mística das duas pensadoras que se refletirá no terceiro momento deste artigo, onde apresentaremos Weil como leitura de Le mirouer des simples ames.In this article we intend to approach the thought of two French philosophers through two concepts: annihilation, found in the Le mirouer des simples ames of Marguerite Porete, and decreation, which appears in the Pensateur et grace of Simone Weil. We will also refer to Weil’s La connaisance surnaturelle, composed of the Cahiers d’Amérique and Notes ècrites à Londres, where she refers to Marguerite Porete’s book. First we present the mysticism of Marguerite Porete, focusing on the concept of annihilation. Next we discuss the mysticism of Simone Weil through the concept of decreation. We then draw some parallels to show the similarity between the mysticism of the two thinkers, and discuss Weil as a reader of Le mirouer des simples ames. (shrink)

Abstract:Contemporary common sense holds that authenticity is an ethical ideal: that there is something bad about inauthenticity, and something good about authenticity. Here we criticize the view that authenticity is bad because it detracts from the wellbeing of the inauthentic person, and propose an alternative moral account of the badness of inauthenticity, based on the idea that inauthentic behaviour is potentially misleading.