While scholars have generally agreed that the Cynegetica, a didactic epic in four books from the third century CE falsely ascribed to Oppian of Cilicia, are missing their ending, the structural implications of this loss are rarely considered seriously. This article brings together all available evidence (or lack thereof) from the poem itself and the secondary tradition about the intended scope of the Cynegetica. It argues that the Cynegetica were probably never completed, with the final 29 lines being a blueprint (...) of an unfinished product, and that the Cynegetica were most likely conceived with a five book structure in mind. (shrink)

The papers in the following volume are the outcome of a three-year long interdisciplinary research project. The project began with an in-person meeting hosted and funded by the Daimler und Benz Stiftung in Germany in March 2020 (the world was shutting down one nation at a time as we met). During the pandemic we continued to meet monthly online with support from Memorial University of Newfoundland. From the beginning it was the goal of the Working Group on Intelligence (WGI), as (...) we called ourselves, to broaden and deepen the AI debate with a more nuanced understanding of intelligence than is common in cognitive and computer science discussions of AI. We wished to draw on the history of philosophy, ecology, and the philosophy of mind to establish that intelligence is meant in many senses, to use an Aristotelian expression. The clarification of these various meanings is essential to the discussion around the ethics of AI, especially the question concerning the possibility of strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence. (shrink)

In his 1916 _Habilitationsschrift Heidegger enriched Husserl's notion of categorial intuition with Scotus's theory of intellection. The individual is entirely intelligible, even if its intelligibility is never fully defined. The historically singularized thing (essence modified by _haecceitas) speaks a primal word to us, and this original verbum makes possible the inner word of understanding, the _verbum interius. Heidegger argues that if the thing is actually intelligible in its singularity, history cannot be disregarded as ineffable: it becomes a domain of fore-theoretical (...) experience, which exhibits its own proper understandability, one that eludes the objectifications of judgment. (shrink)

I argue against current deflationary trends in Schelling scholarship that positive philosophy is not negative philosophy by other means but exceeds it in content and form. While nature-philosophy gives to positive philosophy the means to think the positive, the latter is not “natural” but revealed. I situate the turn to the positive in Schelling’s 1809 Freedom essay, which introduces the possibility of a real distinction between nature and God for the first time in Schelling’s thought, a possibility which becomes actual (...) in the positive philosophy as the difference between creation and its creator. Without this distinction revelation is a meaningless concept. (shrink)

Against the prevalent trend in eco-criticism which is to deny the human difference, I summon a set of untimely tropes from metaphysics in the interest of advancing an ecological humanism: the difference in kind between human consciousness and animal sensibility; the uniquely human capacity for moral discernment; and the human being’s peculiar freedom from the material conditions of existence. While I agree with eco-critics who argue that anthropocenic nature is not only finite, but sick: sickened by our abuse and neglect, (...) I disagree that this abuse is simply a result of insisting on the human difference, nor is species egalitarianism the way forward. On the contrary, the eco-collapse, referred to as the sixth great extinction event, is the consequence of a general disavowal of the human’s special call to take responsibility for the relation between the human and the non-human, and only a re-awakening of this responsibility can restore health to anthropocenic nature. The non-human cannot effect this restoration, for that is not its vocation. A difference in vocation is not necessarily a difference in moral worth, and so the human difference does not justify denying the “intrinsic value” of the non-human. Humanity is uniquely responsible both for the mess we are in and for cleaning it up. (shrink)

Schelling has been exploited for a variety of psychoanalytical projects, from Marquard’s revision of Freud, to various readings of Jung, to Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan. What we have not seen is an elaboration of the psycho-therapeutical implications of Schelling’s metaphysics on its own terms. What we find when we read Schelling as metapsychologist is a nonpathologizing theory of dissociation. Like anything that lives, the psyche dissociates for the sake of growth. The law of productive dissociation is the source of psyche’s (...) adaptive power and an explanation of the structure of its illnesses. (shrink)

The early Freiburg lectures have shown us the degree to which Heidegger is influenced by Luther. In Being and Time, Heidegger designs a philosophy that can co-exist with a radical Lutheran theology of revelation. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity constitutes a polemic with the Scholastic idea of a natural desire for God and an accommodation of a theology of revelation. However, Heidegger’s implicit assent to the Lutheran concept of God-forsakenness is philosophically problematic. To be God-forsaken is not to be ignorant of (...) God; it is to be abandoned by God, to have a history of dealing with God that has resulted in a decisive rupture and distance. But if this is a theological position, as Luther would be the first to argue, it can be justified only theologically. (shrink)

Against the prevalent trend in eco-criticism which is to deny the human difference, I summon a set of untimely tropes from metaphysics in the interest of advancing an ecological humanism: the difference in kind between human consciousness and animal sensibility; the uniquely human capacity for moral discernment; and the human being’s peculiar freedom from the material conditions of existence. While I agree with eco-critics who argue that anthropocenic nature is not only finite, but sick: sickened by our abuse and neglect, (...) I disagree that this abuse is simply a result of insisting on the human difference (“anthropocentrism”), nor is species egalitarianism the way forward. On the contrary, the eco-collapse, referred to as the sixth great extinction event, is the consequence of a general disavowal of the human’s special call to take responsibility for the relation between the human and the non-human, and only a re-awakening of this responsibility can restore health to anthropocenic nature. The non-human cannot effect this restoration, for that is not its vocation. A difference in vocation is not necessarily a difference in moral worth, and so the human difference does not justify denying the “intrinsic value” of the non-human. Humanity is uniquely responsible both for the mess we are in and for cleaning it up. (shrink)

Revelation according to Schelling is not the possession of any institutional form of Christianity; it is not even bound to faith or confession. Rather, revelation disseminates itself freely and universally throughout history. It now inextricably permeates modernity. Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation does not look backwards to an event in the first century of the common era, it looks forward to the genuine singularity, the moment when humanity will become adequate to the divine subjectivity which lives in it, that is, the (...) penultimate eschaton proclaimed by Paul and the author or the Book of Revelation, the age of righteousness prior to the general resurrection.1 By bringing mythological consciousness to an end and drawing real limits to rationalism, revelation first establishes a free relation of the human being to the divine. At the same time, revelation liberates philosophy and culture from religion and inaugurates secular consciousness. History, according to the late Schelling, which he undeniably reads Eurocentrically, is moving toward this third age of revelation, in which all of humanity will pass over into absolute or true monotheism. With the universalization of the revelation, the free and philosophical appropriation of its content, all historical forms of religion will be overcome, including, it should be added, all historical forms of institutional Christianity. The complete secularization of the world will be achieved, and the sundered human community unified, without expense of historical or cultural diversity. (shrink)

This paper explores the possible therapeutical applications of Schellingian psychological principles. A Schellingian analysis would enable us to retrieve the largely forgotten heritage of Romantic psychiatry, in particular the dissociationist model of the psyche, which was strategically rejected by Freud and somewhat clumsily revised by Jung, but which has its own intelligibility and applicability. Schellingian analysis would be dissociationist rather than repressivist, and would depart from Freud and Jung in being both a metaphysical and a moral therapy. But the open-ended (...) eschatological nature of the model of the psyche employed would prevent the therapy from dogmatizing or moralizing the inner life of the analysand. (shrink)

The extent of the influence of Augustine on Heidegger, long only indicated in a few notes in Being and Time, has come into focus with the publicationof Heidegger’s earliest lectures. Far from one among many sources upon which Heidegger draws, we now know that Augustine’s Confessions is a central source of concepts for the early Heidegger. While this is further evidence of the ongoing relevance of Augustine to contemporary philosophy, it does not necessarily makeHeidegger an Augustinian thinker. The question of (...) the degree to which Heidegger’s philosophy is compatible with Augustine’s theology is the subject of a recentlypublished volume of papers, The Influence of Augustine on Heidegger. While the editor, Craig de Paulo, proclaims the advent of an “Augustinian phenomenology”founded upon Heidegger, several contributors exhibit more caution, pointing out important divergences between Heidegger—whom no one would call a Christian—and Augustine. The author sides with the skeptics, reading Heidegger as in fact a subversion of Augustine. Heidegger reverses Augustine’s central insight, that the restless heart is intentionally structured, directed toward union with God. Heidegger’s anxiety in the face of death has no intentional term; it is self-reflective,Augustinian agitation without that which agitates it. (shrink)

Drawing an analogy with Kant, Carman argues that Being and Time is a transcendental analytic of the hermeneutic conditions of the possibility of intelligible experience. In defense of this thesis Carman makes a well-stated case for the implementation of the phenomenological attitude in the philosophy of mind. Against thinkers like Daniel Dennett, who insist on interpreting consciousness as a thing among things, Carman argues that intentionality, the defining feature of consciousness, can be properly accessed only as it shows itself, that (...) is, from within intentional experience itself. This leads to a solid critique of contemporary analytic interpretations of intentionality, whether objectivistic or subjectivistic. Intentionality is neither objectively explicable nor merely subjective; the phenomenon shows the inadequacy of the objective/subjective distinction. This, according to Carman, is the main contribution of Being and Time: intentionality is only possible on the grounds of an a priori belonging to the world. Being and Time’s archeology of the “situatedness” of understanding breaks with Husserl’s naive Cartesian approach to consciousness, for it shows how the human being always understands things in historical contexts: first, the pragmatic contexts of everyday human activities; second, the social contexts of received beliefs and interpretations. It follows that the analytic of Dasein is utterly unlike the investigation of any natural phenomenon; it requires a sensitivity to historicity typically foreign to metaphysics. (shrink)

Volume 6, Issue 2, November 2019, Page 195-202.

Scholarship in Heideggerian philosophy can be broadly differentiated into three groups, which evolved in the European and Anglo-American discourses after WWII, namely, first a transcendental (idealist Kantian) approach; second, an Aristotelian approach; and third, a Christian approach to Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein and his fundamental ontology. All of these basic positions are a result of Heidegger’s philosophy on his way to Being and Time (1927) which he developed both in his broad ranging and fascinating lecture courses in Freiburg, where he (...) taught as Husserl’s assistant between 1917 and 1923, and in Marburg, where he taught between 1923 and 1927 (before he returned to Freiburg in 1928 as Husserl’s successor). Interestingly, the analytic reception of Heidegger focuses on Heidegger’s main work Being and Time, whereas the European and “Continental” discourse is oriented towards larger issues, which include philosophical anthropology, theology, hermeneutics, and the history of philosophy. McGrath’s study belongs to the theologically motivated studies on Heidegger’s phenomenology and ontology and thereby contributes to the recent renewed interest in Heidegger’s early philosophy, which arose after his early lecture courses were published in his Collected Works and after it became clear that Heidegger’s way to Being and Time (and his later thinking) not only was heavily influenced by Scholasticism, especially by Duns Scotus, but also by Augustine, Eckhart, and Luther, all of which took effect before Heidegger encountered Husserl’s phenomenology, Neo-Kantianism or Aristotle’s philosophy. The greatness of Being and Time is indeed a result of the ingenious transformation of all these sources into something new. (shrink)

Thinking Nature is an essay in negative ecology, written in part to commemorate the deaths nature has died, pace Morton, Žižek, and even Latour. We have killed it; what now should we do? How to move forward? The path ahead will require eco-political action, to be sure. But brazen activism without the guidance of contemplative thought, McGrath argues, will not be sufficient to meet the demands of the present. Such a task demands discernment regarding the deeper roots of our (...) ecological crisis, and knowledge of the developments that make possible both the emergence and the collapse of modernity, with its advancements in science and technology. (shrink)

Some omissions seem to be causes. For example, suppose Barry promises to water Alice’s plant, doesn’t water it, and that the plant then dries up and dies. Barry’s not watering the plant – his omitting to water the plant – caused its death. But there is reason to believe that if omissions are ever causes, then there is far more causation by omission than we ordinarily think. In other words, there is reason to think the following thesis true.

Imagine I hold up a Granny Smith apple for all to see. You would thereby gain justified beliefs that it was green, that it was apple, and that it is a Granny Smith apple. Under classical foundationalism, such simple visual beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning your experience. Under dogmatism, some or all of these beliefs are justified immediately by your experience and not by reasons you possess. This paper argues for what I call the looks (...) view of the justification of simple visual beliefs. According to the looks view, such beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning how the relevant things look. Unlike under classical foundationalism, under the looks view as I develop it, these reasons are public. They are public with respect to both their content and possession: with respect to content, they are not about ourselves and our experiences, and with respect to their possession, many people can have the very same looks-related reasons. (shrink)

Introduction -- Tending the dark fire: the Boehmian notion of drive -- The night-side of nature: the early Schellingian unconscious -- The speculative psychology of dissociation: the later Schellingian unconscious -- Schellingian libido theory.

In this chapter, we follow Edward Craig?s advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, we will examine the purposes we have in attributing knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results (...) to bear on an important debate about the application conditions of the concept of knowledge?the debate between contextualists and their rivals. (shrink)

It is commonplace in discussions of modern cosmology to assert that the early universe began in a special state. Conventionally, cosmologists characterize this fine-tuning in terms of the horizon and flatness problems. I argue that the fine-tuning is real, but these problems aren't the best way to think about it: causal disconnection of separated regions isn't the real problem, and flatness isn't a problem at all. Fine-tuning is better understood in terms of a measure on the space of trajectories: given (...) reasonable conditions in the late universe, the fraction of cosmological histories that were smooth at early times is incredibly tiny. This discussion helps clarify what is required by a complete theory of cosmological initial conditions. (shrink)

Effective Field Theory (EFT) is the successful paradigm underlying modern theoretical physics, including the "Core Theory" of the Standard Model of particle physics plus Einstein's general relativity. I will argue that EFT grants us a unique insight: each EFT model comes with a built-in specification of its domain of applicability. Hence, once a model is tested within some domain (of energies and interaction strengths), we can be confident that it will continue to be accurate within that domain. Currently, the Core (...) Theory has been tested in regimes that include all of the energy scales relevant to the physics of everyday life (biology, chemistry, technology, etc.). Therefore, we have reason to be confident that the laws of physics underlying the phenomena of everyday life are completely known. (shrink)

This article sketches an intellectual history of the distinction between Christian theology and Christian ethics. The twists and turns of that history have been obscured by a recent tendency to deny the distinction's usefulness, as part of a wider strategy for reasserting theology's relevance to modern social problems. By contrast, earlier theologians assumed the value of the theology/ethics divide, interpreting it through Aristotelian, neo-Kantian, and finally Marxist categories. The distinction fell into disrepute because theologians struggled to maintain the distinction consistently (...) and disagreed on the concerns implicated by it, variously using it to affirm the moral subject's agency, the divine/human difference, or the complexity of real people's circumstances. Nonetheless, the distinction has persisted as a useful shorthand for recognizing the limitations of Christian theology, qua a conceptual discourse, in fully apprehending its subject matter of the Christian life. (shrink)

In tackling emergentist Marxism in depth, this well-written volume demonstrates that critical realism and materialist dialectics are indispensable to theorizing the functioning of complex social and physical systems. Author Sean Creaven investigates Marxâes dialectics of being and consciousness, forces and relations of production, base and superstructure, class structure and class conflict, and demonstrates how they allow the social analyst to conceptualize geo-history as embodying a tendential evolutionary directionality, rather than as simply random or indeterminate in terms of its outcomes. (...) For those interested in social and political theory, Marxism and communism and contemporary social theory, this outstanding volume is an in important read and a valuable resource. (shrink)

In this paper I develop an account of member obligation: the obligations that fall on the members of an obligated collective in virtue of that collective obligation. I use this account to argue that unorganized collections of individuals can constitute obligated agents. I argue first that, to know when a collective obligation entails obligations on that collective’s members, we have to know not just what it would take for each member to do their part in satisfying the collective obligation, but (...) also what they should do if they cannot do their part because others will not do theirs. I go on to argue (contra recent proposals) that it is not good enough for members in this situation to reasonably believe that others will not do their part. Rather, for a member of an obligated collective to permissibly escape doing her part in a collective obligation, she must both reasonably doubt that others will do their part and stand ready to act in case others do as well. -/- This necessary condition for collective obligation points the way to plausible sufficient conditions – conditions that, I argue, allow unstructured collectives to bear obligations. For (a) if a collective’s members are individually obligated to be ready to do their part, in a given collective action, and (b) if that individual readiness makes it sufficiently likely that the collective will in fact act, then it is hard to see what could block an attribution of collective obligation. In particular, in that case there ought to be no additional objection that there is no existing, organized “agent” on which the obligation might fall. For agents are, simply, things that can act. To be able to act is just to be able to succeed by trying. Unstructured collectives try to do something, I argue, when each member acts on their willingness to do their part in that thing if others do theirs; sometimes they succeed, producing a collective action. Some unstructured collectives, therefore, can succeed by trying; therefore, they can act; therefore they are agents. (shrink)

Emotional hardcore and other music genres featuring screamed vocals are puzzling for the appreciator. The typical fan attaches appreciative value to musical screams of emotional pain all the while acknowledging it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart: actual human screaming. Call this the screamed vocals problem. To solve the problem, I argue we must attend to the anti-sublimating aims that get expressed in the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics. Screamed vocals (...) help us see the value in rejecting (a) restrictive social norms of emotional expressiveness and (b) restrictive artistic norms about how one ought to express or represent pain in art, namely that if one is going to do so they must ensure the pain has been ‘beautified’. In developing this second point I argue that emotional hardcore is well-suited (though not individually so) for putting pressure on longstanding views in the history of aesthetics about the formal relationship between art and human pain. (shrink)

What makes something a part of my body, for moral purposes? Is the body defined naturalistically: by biological relations, or psychological relations, or some combination of the two? This paper approaches this question by considering a borderline case: the status of prostheses. I argue that extant accounts of the body fail to capture prostheses as genuine body parts. Nor, however, do they provide plausible grounds for excluding prostheses, without excluding some paradigm organic parts in the process. I conclude by suggesting (...) that embodiment is moralized all the way down: to be a body part is to be the sort of thing that ought to be protected, in a certain way, by social practices. (shrink)

This chapter corrects for Susan Sontag's undeserved neglect by contemporary ethical philosophers by bringing awareness to some of the unique metaethical insights born of her reflections on photographic representations of evil. I argue that Sontag's thought provides fertile ground for thinking about: (1) moral perception and its relation to moral knowledge; and (2) the epistemic and moral value of our emotional responses to the misery and suffering of others. I show that, contrary to standard moral perception theory (e.g. Blum 1994), (...) Sontag holds that we can have general moral perceptual knowledge. I then explore Sontag's idea that certain emotional responses, like sympathy and compassion, can sometimes be impertinent, in virtue of their having false or illusory content. I explain why this is so, and show the epistemic and motivational problems it poses for moral sentimentalism. (shrink)

Some modern cosmological models predict the appearance of Boltzmann Brains: observers who randomly fluctuate out of a thermal bath rather than naturally evolving from a low-entropy Big Bang. A theory in which most observers are of the Boltzmann Brain type is generally thought to be unacceptable, although opinions differ. I argue that such theories are indeed unacceptable: the real problem is with fluctuations into observers who are locally identical to ordinary observers, and their existence cannot be swept under the rug (...) by a choice of probability distributions over observers. The issue is not that the existence of such observers is ruled out by data, but that the theories that predict them are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Organizations constitute morally-complex environments, requiring organization members to possess levels of moral courage sufficient to promote their ethical action, while refraining from unethical actions when faced with temptations or pressures. Using a sample drawn from a military context, we explored the antecedents and consequences of moral courage. Results from this four-month field study demonstrated that authentic leadership was positively related to followers’ displays of moral courage. Further, followers’ moral courage fully mediated the effects of authentic leadership on followers’ ethical and (...) pro-social behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications for further integrating the work on moral courage, authentic leadership and ethics are discussed. (shrink)

A non-technical introduction to quantum mechanics, the Everett interpretation, and the emergence of spacetime.

In the revised and updated edition of this popular book, Sean Burke shows how the attempt to abolish the author is fundamentally misguided and philosophically ...

The concept of alienation: Hegelian themes in modern social thought -- Creative activity and alienation in Hegel and Marx -- The concept of labour -- The individual and society -- Freedom and the "realm of necessity" -- Alienation as a critical concept -- Private property and communism -- The division of labour and its overcoming -- Marx's concept of communism.