Nietzsche’s Eternal Return (ER) is interpreted in many ways, including by him. I present it as a hermeneutic device, a way of reading texts, especially those whose influence threatens one’s authorial autonomy and/or are later difficult to take ownership of due to philosophical growth. It returns past texts with new interpretations, similar to the way ER leads one to embrace one’s past without changing anything, which radically changes everything from a resented painful burden into a celebrated enhancement of freedom (...) and power. I show how he could have derived the idea from Schopenhauer, his own embarrassing past, by performing the technique on Schopenhauer. The same attitude toward past texts of recreating them according to one’s present interests and concerns simultaneously releases one’s present texts for future readers to impose their readings onto them, just as Zarathustra tells his followers not to follow him. Heidegger takes the idea up in a far more nuanced account than he is usually given credit for and applies it, among other places, to the history of philosophy. All philosophers say the same as it keeps returning. Derrida then recreates this as iterability, the deconstruction of the no/change dichotomy that Nietzsche began. (shrink)

This book provides an account of the nature of time, especially time's arrow and the role of entropy, at a semi-popular level. Special attention is given to statistical mechanics, the past hypothesis, and possible cosmological explanations thereof.

Does it make sense to think of eternal life not as an unending continuation of life subsequent to death but as fully actualized in one’s present mortal and finite life? After outlining conceptual and moral reasons for being troubled by the notion of an endless life, this article draws upon the thought of major Christian theologians and philosophers of religion to expound the idea of eternal life as a possession exclusively of the life one is presently living. Supplementing (...) the claims of religious thinkers with notions of four-dimensionalism and eternalism from theoretical physics and the philosophy of time, and considering important objections to the conception of eternal life in question, I argue for both the conception’s intelligibility and its ethical and spiritual profundity. (shrink)

Erich Neumann (1905-1960) was a student, close collaborator, and life-long friend of C. G. Jung's. He moved from Berlin to Palestine in 1934 where he endured WW11 with much distress. This provoked intense and depthful research into topics such as evil, consciousness, and creativity that would occupy his attention for the rest of his life- as well as challenge his friend's (Jung) thinking in many ways. His writings are still valuable and ever so pertinent for our understanding of human nature (...) and the changing developments that have resulted in "the eruption of the shadow and psychic chaos in today's world." (Jerome Bernstein) Eternal Echoes offers the reader an overview of Neumann's opus, which is large and multifaceted. Beginning with an introduction of Erich Neumann including a series of his active imagination watercolors, we see an intimate view into his internal process. The Jung-Neumann Correspondence examines evil as witnessed during WW11. The work Neumann focused on during this period resulted in his exploration of his own Roots of Jewish Consciousness, both Revelation and Apocalypse, and Hasidism. From there we move into an exploration of his exceptional and iconic books, The Origins and History of Consciousness, and The Great Mother, and two papers "Mass Man and the Phenomena of Recollectivation" and "Narcissism". Neumann continued his study of mythology and archetypes in Amor and Psyche: The Development of the Feminine. Later in Neumann's life, he wrote a number of books on creativity exploring its nature and source which began with his important early paper on "Mystical Man": Creative Man, Art and the Creative Unconscious, The Place of Creation. Neumann's works lead us back to our ground of being, where we live with opposites that are fiercely alive, impacting our lives and cultures. His writings are comprehensive, clear and steeped in deeply felt experiences that help to place us on firm ground. Since many of his themes and concepts are universal-beginning with archetypes, myths, and images-this book is not only pertinent to Jungian psychotherapists but anyone interested in understanding the profundity of human nature and its development. (shrink)

Considers four apparent problems of eternal life--is heaven a mystical or social reality, is it other-worldly or this-worldly, is it static or dynamic, is it boring?--and shows how the teachings of Thomas Aquinas support more satisfying solutions than many contemporary philosophical and theological approaches.

Paul Helm presents a new, expanded edition of his much praised 1988 book Eternal God, which defends the view that God exists in timeless eternity. Helm argues that divine timelessness is grounded in the idea of God as creator, and that this alone makes possible a proper account of divine omniscience.

The Eternal Coin is a fair coin has existed forever, and will exist forever, in a region causally isolated from you. It is tossed every day. How confident should you be that the Coin lands heads today, conditional on (i) the hypothesis that it has landed Heads on every past day, or (ii) the hypothesis that it will land Heads on every future day? I argue for the extremely counterintuitive claim that the correct answer to both questions is 1.

Modernity seemed to be the autumn of eternity. The secularization of European culture provided little sustenance to the concept of eternity with its heavy theological baggage. Yet, our hero would not leave the stage without an outstanding performance of its power and temptation. Indeed, in the first three centuries of the modern period – the subject of the third chapter by Yitzhak Melamed - the concept of eternity will play a crucial role in the great philosophical systems of the period. (...) The first part of this chapter concentrates on the debate about the temporality of God. While most of the great metaphysicians of the seventeenth century – Suarez, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz – ascribed to God eternal, non-temporal, existence, a growing number of philosophers conceived God as existing in time. For Newton, God’s eternity was simply the fact that “He was, he is, and is to come.” A similar view of God as being essentially in time was endorsed by Pierre Gassendi, Henry More, Samuel Clarke, Isaac Barrow, John Locke, and most probably Descartes as well. In the second part of the chapter we study the concept of eternal truth, and its relation to the emerging notion of Laws of Nature. The third part of the chapter explicates Spinoza’s original understanding of eternity as a modal concept. For Spinoza, eternity is a unique kind of necessary existence: it is existence that is self-necessitated (unlike the existence of other things whose necessity derives from external causes). Eternity is the existence of God or the one substance. Yet, Spinoza claims that if we conceive finite things adequately - “sub specie aeternitatis” – as nothing but modes flowing from the essence of God, even finite things (like our minds) can take part in God’s eternity. The fourth and final part of the chapter is mostly focused on the reception of Spinoza’s original conception of eternity by Leibniz and other eighteenth century philosophers. (shrink)

In eternally inflating cosmology, infinitely many pocket universes are seeded. Attempts to show that universes like our observable universe are probable amongst them have failed, since no unique probability measure is recoverable. This lack of definite probabilities is taken to reveal a complete predictive failure. Inductive inference over the pocket universes, it would seem, is impossible. I argue that this conclusion of impossibility mistakes the nature of the problem. It confuses the case in which no inductive inference is possible, with (...) another in which a weaker inductive logic applies. The alternative, applicable inductive logic is determined by background conditions and is the same, non-probabilistic logic as applies to an infinite lottery. This inductive logic does not preclude all predictions, but does affirm that predictions useful to deciding for or against eternal inflation are precluded. (shrink)

This ambitious book looks into the reasons for the exceptional durability of the Chinese empire, which lasted for more than two millennia (221 B.C.E. - 1911 C.E.). Yuri Pines identifies the roots of the empire's longevity in the activities of thinkers of the Warring States period (453-221 B.C.E.), who, in their search for solutions to an ongoing political crisis, developed ideals, values, and perceptions that would become essential for the future imperial polity. In marked distinction to similar empires worldwide, the (...) Chinese empire was envisioned and to a certain extent 'preplanned' long before it came into being. As a result, it was not only a military and administrative construct, but also an intellectual one. Pines makes the argument that it was precisely its ideological appeal that allowed the survival and regeneration of the empire after repeated periods of turmoil. "Envisioning Eternal Empire" presents a panoptic survey of philosophical and social conflicts in Warring States political culture. By examining the extant corpus of preimperial literature, including transmitted texts and manuscripts uncovered at archaeological sites, Pines locates the common ideas of competing thinkers that underlie their ideological controversies. This bold approach allows him to transcend the once fashionable perspective of competing 'schools of thought' and show that beneath the immense pluralism of Warring States thought one may identify common ideological choices that eventually shaped traditional Chinese political culture. The result is a refreshingly novel look at the foundational period in Chinese intellectual history. (shrink)

The story of eternity is not as simple as a secularization narrative implies. Instead it follows something like the trajectory of reversal in Kant’s practical proof for the existence of god. In that proof, god emerges not as an object of theoretical investigation, but as a postulate required by our practical engagement with the world; so, similarly, the eternal is not just secularized out of existence, but becomes understood as an entailment of, and somehow imbricated in, the conditions of (...) our practical existence. -/- The sections that follow discuss some of those central figures in modern European philosophy whose views prominently feature some consideration of eternity. I start with Kant in section I. Kant’s critique of speculative theology is well-known, and this hostility would appear to make it unlikely that the eternal, with all its theological baggage, would feature prominently in Kant’s critical philosophy. But in fact Kant’s transcendental idealism endorses no fewer than three different concepts of the eternal, including what turns out to be the most historically influential idea: that practical reason involves a kind of eternal, non-temporal action. Kant shifts this notion of a non-temporal act from its original theological context of god’s actus purus to a practical context, setting the stage for Schelling’s and Kierkegaard’s later development of this theme. Before detailing this trajectory however, section II is devoted to Hegel, the philosopher whose radical historicism is perhaps more than any other thinker responsible for making “the nineteenth century preeminently the historical century.”4 Hegel is not fertile soil for the concept of the eternal, but his historicism does turn out, at a crucial moment in the philosophy of nature, to presuppose a certain conception of eternity as an eternal present. Perhaps more importantly for the further development of eternity in nineteenth century thought however is that both Schelling and Kierkegaard situate their views of the eternal in the context of a collective rejection of Hegel. Section III discusses Schelling, who returns to Kant’s conception of non-temporal choice, seeing human capacities for free eternal self-creation as rivaling god’s. Such powers are required, Schelling argues, to resist the sublimation of the individual human person into the blankness of the Absolute. Section IV briefly consider Schopenhauer’s view that the in-itself of everything is an endlessly striving will. Section V concerns Kierkegaard who is strongly committed to the eternal, and indeed criticizes Hegel for compromising his conception of the eternal by thinking it temporally; but he is obsessed by the paradoxical question of our practical “access” to the eternal within a particular temporal moment: the decisive moment, imbued with significance that can turn life around and create a new person, pushing Schelling’s concerns even further. The remaining, shorter sections, present briefer accounts of more recent figures who make important use of some conception of the eternal: Nietzsche’s eternal return (section VI), Agamben’s (1942-) theory of sovereignty (section VII) and finally Alain Badiou’s unapologetic attempt to resuscitate eternity as the condition of revolutionary political change (Section VIII). I end with a concluding meditation (Section IX). (shrink)

This article aims to provide an explication of the Christian doctrine of eternal generation. A model of the doctrine is formulated within the ground-theoretic framework of Jonathan Schaffer and E. Jonathan Lowe, which enables it to be explicated clearly and consistently, and two often raised objections against the doctrine can be successfully answered.

This paper develops a detailed reading of Deleuze's philosophical study of Bacon's triptychs in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. It examines his claims regarding their apparent non-narrative status, and explores the capacity of the triptychs to embody and express a spiritual sensation of the eternity of time.

Eleonore Stump and Katherin Rogers have recently defended the doctrine of divine timelessness in separate essays, arguing that the doctrine is consistent with libertarian free will and that timeless divine knowledge is providentially useful. I show that their defenses do not succeed; a doctrine of eternity having these features cannot be saved.

In recent publications, Kit Fine devises a classification of A-theories of time and defends a non-standard A-theory he calls fragmentalism, according to which reality as a whole is incoherent but fragments into classes of mutually coherent tensed facts. We argue that Fine's classification in not exhaustive, as it ignores another non-standard A-theory we dub dynamic absolutism, according to which there are tensed facts that stay numerically the same and yet undergo qualitative changes as time goes by. We expound this theory (...) in some detail and argue that it is a serious alternative to the positions identified by Fine. (shrink)

Are the laws of nature among the eternal truths that, according to Descartes, are created by God? The basis of those laws is the immutability of the divine will, which is not an eternal truth, but a divine attribute. On the other hand, the realization of those laws, and in particular, the quantitative consequences to be drawn from them, depend upon the eternal truths insofar as those truths include the foundations of geometry and arithmetic.

In True Detective, the description of time as a "flat circle" is one of the most mysterious aspects of the story. The idea of the flat circle ultimately helps Rust to overcome his bleak interpretation of reality, although for a long time it anchors him in his dreary worldview. A philosophical pessimist is likely to view knowledge and meaning as inherently flawed. Rust tells Marty all about his philosophical pessimism in the first episode of season one. A metaphysical claim tries (...) to describe the true nature of reality. Friedrich Nietzsche calls his theory "eternal recurrence", however differ in name aside, there are numerous similarities between his theory and Rust's. The flat circle is really a thought experiment that Rust remains trapped within insofar as he remains a philosophical pessimist, at least up to the point of his near‐death experience, where he "sees the light". (shrink)

(Version 2.4) I have argued elsewhere for ascribing an error theory about all normative and evaluative judgements to Nietzsche. Such a nihilism brings with it a puzzle: how could we—or at least the select few of us being addressed by Nietzsche—continue in the face of this nihilism? This is a philosophical puzzle and so, defeasibly, an interpretive puzzle. If there is no theory it would make sense for Nietzsche to have about how the select few could go on, then this (...) is some evidence against the proposed interpretation of him as a nihilist. I defended the interpretation by arguing that Nietzsche’s declarations about creating values point to a practice of generating honest evaluative illusions. Such honest evaluative illusions are tricky things, though, and, precisely because they are honest, one might worry that they lack the motivational power of genuine evaluative belief. Can they truly play the role that evaluative beliefs play in our psychological economies? I suspect that Nietzsche does not want the honest illusions to play exactly the role that evaluative beliefs played. The cheerfulness, the playfulness, the lightness that Nietzsche hopes for are, I have suggested, a function of the shift from belief to pretence, from illusion to honest illusion. The question, nonetheless, is whether the resulting picture is too light. Can I go through life merely acting, as a critic might put it? My suggestion in this essay will be that the thought of eternal recurrence is meant to add weight to the lightness of acting—“acting”, obviously, in both the here relevant senses of the word. (shrink)

The paper argues that two apparently attractive conceptions of an eternal sentence are defective. An alternative conception is presented which the authors think allows greater insight into the nature of semantic concepts.

It is the laws of nature, among other things, that allow for the periodic processesthat underlie isochronic clocks. Is God in any Measured Time? If not, does our Measured Time measure the eternity of God? I will argue that God is not in any ...

In this paper I defend the eternity solution to the problem of human freedom and divine foreknowledge. After motivating the problem, I sketch the basic contours of the eternity solution. I then consider several objections which contend that the eternity solution falsely implies that we have various powers (e.g., to change God’s beliefs, or to affect the past) which, according to the objector, we do not in fact have.

pt. 1. [without special title] -- pt. 2. The eternal world drama.

Nietzsche believed in the horror of existence—in a world filled with meaningless suffering. He also believed in eternal recurrence—that our lives will repeat infinitely and that in each life every detail will be exactly the same. Furthermore, it was not enough that eternal recurrence simply be accepted—Nietzsche demanded that it be loved. Thus the philosopher who introduces eternal recurrence is the very same philosopher who also believes in the horror of existence—a paradox that is completely overlooked by (...) commentators (who thus fail to adequately understand Nietzsche). All of this demands careful explanation. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Eternal Order I believed in a personal God, who created the beav ens and earth and all contained therein; in a personal devil, who had once been an angel, but had become evil through an avaricious ambition; in a literal heaven, and hell; that at death one went to one or the other of those places, eternally. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book (...) is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

According to Heidegger’s philosophy, the essence of time is not chronological; for this reason, history is not a linear succession of facts but is opened up by an event: that is what Heidegger’s philosophy reveals at first glance and it’s also what we can’t consider suspect today. But it is less obvious that the ‘base’ from which time and history will disclose themselves is the phenomenon of love: love stands out in the letters of Heidegger to Hannah Arendt as a (...) most excellent way of temporalizing time, and it allows the philosophy of finitude to be reconciled with the eternity. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 46 Heft: 1 Seiten: 153-166.

The article is primarily a study of Nietzsche’s unpublished fragments from the period spring-autumn 1881, in which Nietzsche first developed his thought of the “eternal recurrence of the same.” In the article, I attempt to accomplish two goals: the first goal is to explain Nietzsche’s theses on the eternal recurrence, which at that time were still remarkably clear and coherent. And the second goal is to try to find in these same theses an explanation for their future silence. (...) In other words, the article examines the relationship between Nietzsche’s theses that he developed in 1881 and his book _Thus spoke Zarathustra_, which, in Nietzsche’s own words, relies on these theses as their “grounding thought,” but nevertheless never fully reveals them. Both lines of inquiry lead to the conclusion that the core of Nietzsche’s introduction of the idea of eternal recurrence is his concept of _Einverleibung_ or embodiment. Indeed, the analysis shows that Nietzsche’s main concern with the thought of eternal recurrence was not to set forth its clear articulation within consciousness, but rather to construct it in such a way that it could become an unconscious instinct capable of gradually displacing the “embodied mistakes” that dominate our thinking from within itself. (shrink)

Eternity is a unique kind of existence that is supposed to belong to the most real being or beings. It is an existence that is not shaken by the common wear and tear of time. Over the two and half millennia history of Western philosophy we find various conceptions of eternity, yet one sharp distinction between two notions of eternity seems to run throughout this long history: eternity as timeless existence, as opposed to eternity as existence in all times. Both (...) kinds of existence stand in sharp contrast to the coming in and out of existence of ordinary beings, like hippos, humans, and toothbrushes: were these eternally-timeless, for example, a hippo could not eat, a human could not think or laugh, and a toothbrush would be of no use. Were a hippo an eternal-everlasting creature, it would not have to bother itself with nutrition in order to extend its existence. Everlasting human beings might appear similar to us, but their mental life and patterns of behavior would most likely be very different from ours.The distinction between eternity as timelessness and eternity as everlastingness goes back to ancient philosophy, to the works of Plato and Aristotle, and even to the fragments of Parmenides' philosophical poem. In the twentieth century, it seemed to go out of favor, though one could consider as eternalists those proponents of realism in philosophy of mathematics, and those of timeless propositions in philosophy of language. However, recent developments in contemporary physics and its philosophy have provided an impetus to revive notions of eternity due to the view that time and duration might have no place in the most fundamental ontology.The importance of eternity is not limited to strictly philosophical discussions. It is a notion that also has an important role in traditional Biblical interpretation. The Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew name of God considered to be most sacred, is derived from the Hebrew verb for being, and as a result has been traditionally interpreted as denoting eternal existence. Hence, Calvin translates the Tetragrammaton as 'l'Eternel', and Mendelssohn as 'das ewige Wesen' or 'der Ewige'. Eternity also plays a central role in contemporary South American fiction, especially in the works of J.L. Borges. The representation of eternity poses a major challenge to both literature and arts. The current volume aims at providing a history of the philosophy of eternity surrounded by a series of short essays, or reflections, on the role of eternity and its representation in literature, religion, language, liturgy, science, and music. Thus, our aim is to provide a history of philosophy as a discipline that is in constant commerce with various other domains of human inquisition and exploration. (shrink)

Spiritual formation currently lacks a robust epistemology. Christian theology and philosophy often spend more time devoted to an epistemology of propositions rather than an epistemology of knowing persons. This paper is an attempt to move toward a more robust account of knowing persons in general and God in particular. After working through various aspects of the nature of this type of knowledge this theory is applied to specific issues germane to spiritual formation, such as the justification of understanding spiritual growth (...) on an integrative and holistic (heart and mind) model, the reality of hearing God’s voice, and knowing his activity, as well as how such a theory should change the shape of sermons, evangelism, and apologetics. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom by developing a modified version of Boethius' solution to the problem – one that is meant to cohere with a dynamic theory of time and a conception of God as temporal. I begin the article by discussing the traditional Boethian solution, and a defence of it due to Kretzmann and Stump. After canvassing a few of the objections to this view, I then go on to offer my own modified (...) Boethian solution, according to which temporal reality is fundamentally dynamic, but truth is not. My claim is that there are eternally existing, tenseless propositions, with determinate truth values, but that these are made true by events that come into existence, and are not themselves eternal.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Eternity, knowledge, and freedomVolume 49, Issue 1JOSEPH DIEKEMPER DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412512000170Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Eternity, knowledge, and freedomVolume 49, Issue 1JOSEPH DIEKEMPER DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412512000170Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Eternity, knowledge, and freedomVolume 49, Issue 1JOSEPH DIEKEMPER DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412512000170Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Franz Overbeck associates the eternal return with Nietzsche's passion for the ideal of the extreme (Ideals des ‘Extremen’), a drive for the ultimate that is related to the notion of the Nietzschean overhuman. The aim of this paper is to bring to light and analyze the Nietzschean understanding of the ultimate, starting from Overbeck and bringing to light the conception of Christian eschatology presupposed in Nietzsche’s analysis of ressentiment and the ascetic ideal. Explaining the eschatology from which Nietzsche starts (...) will help to have a better understanding of the doctrine of the eternal return, exploring how the Christian heritage from which Nietzsche drank weighs on it. (shrink)

M. Kneale; XIII—Eternity and Sempiternity, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 69, Issue 1, 1 June 1969, Pages 223–238, https://doi.org/10.1093/aris.

Metaphysics as an independent discipline has a surprisingly short history. Until the early eighteenth century, many, perhaps even most, writers on “metaphysics” primarily had the eponymous work of Aristotle in mind. In the writings of the early eighteenth-century German rationalists—Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten—we find a conception of metaphysics that is no longer necessarily tied to Aristotle’s great work. But metaphysics as a discipline was not blessed with longevity, as a dozen years or so before Louis XVI it was condemned (...) to the guillotine by Kant’s first critique. The fate of metaphysics after the Kantian revolution is a story that still needs to be told, but it would be fair to say, I think, that for the past two centuries engagement with heavy metaphysical concepts such as eternity has been taken to be either a form of backwardness (religious or otherwise) or a kind of eccentricity. Luckily, things seem to have changed somewhat over the past twenty years. Suddenly, for example, we are seeing debates about monism appear in mainstream journals. (This could hardly be imagined in the 1970s or 1980s.) The emergence of interest in metaphysical monism as well as the persistent engagement with the philosophy of modality may open a window of opportunity through which eternity could again take her rightful seat as a fundamental notion of metaphysics. (shrink)

Truth Eternal and the Adversity of Diversity Law sheds new light on the problem of truth, and its power to create, sustain, and account for all things. It also seeks to convey some new insights into how truth inconspicuously pervades every element of creation. Silent and unseen, it grounds time and the flow of events within it.

Published in PoMo Magazine vol. 2, nr. 1 (Spring/Summer 1996) during my years as a grad student at the New School. I examine Nietzsche's presentation of the eternal recurrence, and discuss its interpretations by Heidegger, Bataille, Derrida, Klossowski, Stambaugh, and Vattimo. I will be returning to Nietzsche in the future.

In an excellent article that traces the logical structure of Maimonides’ Guide of the perplexed and his arguments on the existence of God, William Lane Craig (1988 122-147), concludes that most of the Guide’s impact rests precisely on its rigorous method of deduction. Perhaps, in Craig’s view, this is one of the things that makes Maimonides a model for further conciliating attempts between theology and philosophy. However, despite his careful analysis, there is one idea that Craig mentions and leaves undeveloped, (...) namely, that a certain notion of eternity of time underlies Maimonides’ argumentative scheme. Trying to go beyond the examples Craig offered in his article, my method toward a final solution to the question is divided in three steps. The first one is a reconstruction of Craig’s statements and its interpretation as supporting material for his conclusion. Then, I present three alternative views about Maimonides’ beliefs on the creation of the world, an issue strongly attached to his idea of time. Finally, I use the material of the two former sections to support an answer to my question. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind eloquently and powerfully suggests a controversial philosophical position: that the harm caused by voluntary memory removal cannot be entirely understood in terms of harms that are consciously experienced. I explore this possibility through a discussion of the film that includes consideration of Nagel and Nozick on unexperienced harms, Kant on duties to oneself, and Murdoch on the requirements of morality.

In this paper the author examines the key principles of Kant's conception of eternal peace and the possibility of an international legal order grounded in Reason. The central segment of the paper consists of an analysis of the problem of mediation between Kant's normative theory and political practice. U radu se razmatraju kljucni principi Kantove koncepcije Vecnog mira i mogucnosti umnog utemeljenja medjunarodnog pravnog poretka. Glavni deo ovog rada predstavlja analiza problema posredovanja izmedju Kantove normativne teorija i savremene politicke (...) prakse. (shrink)

The present piece focuses on the influence of Plotinus' understanding of time and eternity as articulated in Plotinus' third and fifth Enneads upon Mīr Dāmād's (d. 1631–2) conception of eternity, perpetuity, and time found in his Book of Blazing Brands (Kitab al‐Qabasāt). Although Mīr Dāmād's conception of eternity, perpetuity, and time resembles that of Plotinus' cosmology and ontology, he departs from Plotinus' hypostases in establishing strict parameters for each domain. Unlike Plotinus, Mīr Dāmād argues that the realm of eternity is (...) reserved for God alone, while the realm of Perpetuity contains the Platonic Forms. For Mīr Dāmād, the realm of time is an effect of the realm of Perpetuity and a tool for human beings to understand how to measure events in the temporal world. Unlike many other Shī'ite philosophers, Mīr Dāmād's articulation of these three cosmological realms incorporates thought found in the works of both prominent Sunni and Shī'ite scholars such as Ibn Sīnā, Abū Ḥāmid al‐Ghāzālī, Suhrawardī, and Naṣīr al‐Dīn Ṭūsī. Although his most successful student, Mullā Ṣadrā Shirazī, had ultimately disagreed with his teacher's cosmological doctrine, he remained influenced by the multitude of sources that his teacher had used. (shrink)

(2000). The eternal present of Utopianism. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 3, The Philosophy of Utopia, pp. 44-55.

The essay introduces an interpretation of Nietzsche's Eternal-Recurrence-Thought distinct from traditional 'cosmological' as well as 'ethical' interpretations. The interpretation suggests that eternal recurrence is a conceptualization of intellectual and volitional processes. External recurrence is understood as a concept articulating peculiarities about mental processes related to knowledge and pleasure.Der Aufsatz stellt ein Interpretation von Nietzsches Gedanken der Ewigen Wiederkunft vor, die weder 'kosmologisch' noch 'ethisch' sein möchte. Diese Interpretation hält die Ewige Wiederkunft für eine Konzeptualisierung von Verstandes- und Willensakten. (...) Der Begriff der Ewigen Wiederkunft wäre somit entworfen, um Besonderheiten der Prozesse des Scelenlebens zu artikuliern, die mit Erkenntnis und Lust zu tun haben. (shrink)

At the opening of the first volume of his Deconstruction of Christianity, Nancy argues that “The much discussed ‘return of the religious,’ which denotes a real phenomenon, deserves no more attention than any other ‘return’” (1). This statement may seem paradoxical in light of Nancy’s extensive study of the logic of the return – including, of the divine – in texts such as “Of Divine Places,” Noli me tangere, Dis-Enclosure and Adoration. Nancy does pay considerable attention to something that, according (...) to him, deserves none. In this paper, I examine Nancy’s critique of the “return of religion” in detail and argue that it would be a mistake to assume that Nancy’s understanding of the logic of the “return” is limited to the – largely uninteresting and even dangerous, indeed – return of the Same, just as it is a mistake to assume that the phenomenon known as the “return of religion” merely consists of the dialectical resurgence of a past religious fervour, a step backwards in history. According to Nancy, religion today returns in a way that radically breaks with the logic of the return of the Same and testifies to an eternal return of difference which, paraphrasing Nancy, opens religion to the limitlessness that constitutes its truth. It does, therefore, deserve our attention, yet only insofar as, paraphrasing Nancy, it opens religion to the limitlessness that constitutes its truth (Dis-Enclosure 1), thereby providing us with new resources to think religion in the singular-plural today. (shrink)