Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 7, Page 1035-1053, September 2022. The article aspires to cast light on aspects of the radical character of Walter Benjamin’s work, that, sadly, have not, to date, provoked much discussion in the literature on him. The main issue it elaborates is his dialectic between fetishized, reified social form, and content-essence, which forms the core of the concept of critique in his philosophy. In Benjamin’s case, the concept of illusion, or, as the notion is (...) described in his texts, of phantasmagoria, or of the image, holds a special gravity that comes to the fore if it is connected not only to commodity fetishism but also to the fetishism of social forms as a process, and the concept of cracks in capitalism. (shrink)

The section dealing with the "phenomenology of consciousness" is finally dominated by the question, How does consciousness become self-consciousness, or how does consciousness become conscious that it is self-consciousness? This assertion, however, that consciousness is self-consciousness, is a central teaching of modern philosophy since Descartes. To this extent, Hegel’s idea of phenomenology lies in the Cartesian line. Contemporary parallels show how much this is the case, especially the quite unknown book of Sinclair, the friend of Hölderlin and Hegel, which deals (...) with the Sphragis in the Rhein hymn, and is entitled Truth and Certitude. The work attempts, beginning quite explicitly with the Cartesian concept cogito me cogitare, to lead one along the path from certitude to truth in two rather similar fashions, through Fichte, and, almost contemporaneously, in Hegel. (shrink)

I shall suggest in this paper that this "inverted world" is exactly that: an absurd position. This is not to say that it is to be ignored or condemned as "fantastic," but rather that its importance and intelligibility lay in its very absurdity, in its appearance as an unintelligible inversion of what previously was taken to constitute the intelligibility of the world of appearance. More precisely, I shall suggest that this inverted world is a misunderstanding (...) and perversion of the conclusion to which we should have been brought at this point in the Phenomenology. It is Hegel's intention, underscored by the conditional rather than indicative construction of this section, that we see this misunderstanding as a misunderstanding. When on the other hand the inversion is correctly understood, it brings to the phenomenological "we" undergoing the Bildungsprozess of the Phenomenology of Spirit the explicit realization that consciousness is not merely finite intentionality, but as such is infinite. Consciousness is self-consciousness, consciousness limited by nothing but itself. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss an interpretation of Hegel's concept of the “Inverted World”, which is present in the final part of the chapter on Force and Understanding in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Other than my own reading of the chapter, I also summarize the three most important interpretations of the verkehrte Welt from the last century: those of Jean Hyppolite, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Joseph Flay. I have chosen these three due to the typology of interpretation within them: (...) the first one adopts a Christian reading of Hegel, the second a Hellenistic phenomenological interpretation, and the last one, which is closest to the interpretation I also propose, a reading consistent with the thought of Immanuel Kant. The article ends with a possible interpretation of Hegel's verkehrte Welt through Kant's “Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding” from his Critique of Pure Reason, where I argue that Kant's fundamental faculty of imagination and its object, schemata, play the same role in Kant's system that Hegel's verkehrte Welt does in the development of natural consciousness. (shrink)

Sociology originated in the mid-nineteenth century from a new confidence in the power of science to explain the world on a mathematical foundation. Both mathematics and sociology transformed over the ensuing century, inverting the hierarchical relationship from sociology as a mathematics-based science of complex human configurations to mathematics as a complex science based on social institutions. That is, where sociology began as the hard case for mathematics, it became possible to see mathematics as the hard case for sociology. In (...) this light, we examine a number of motivations and provocations for the sociology of mathematics, from language and social cognition to Marxist and materialist skepticism of ideology, and sample the evidence and arguments brought to bear on the sociology of mathematics at a range of scales. (shrink)

Proponents of the hard problem of consciousness argue that the zombie and inverted spectrum thought experiments demonstrate that consciousness cannot be physical. They present scenarios designed to demonstrate that it is conceivable that a physical replica of someone can have radically different or no conscious experiences, that such an experience-less replica is possible and therefore that materialism is false. I will argue that once one understands the limitations that the physics of this world puts on cognitive systems, zombies (...) and the inverted spectrum are not conceivable. (shrink)

Proponents of the hard problem of consciousness argue that the zombie and inverted spectrum thought experiments demonstrate that consciousness cannot be physical. They present scenarios designed to demonstrate that it is conceivable that a physical replica of someone can have radically different or no conscious experiences, that such an experience-less replica is possible and therefore that materialism is false. I will argue that once one understands the limitations that the physics of this world puts on cognitive systems, zombies (...) and the inverted spectrum are not conceivable. (shrink)

Palmer's attempt to dust off Locke's construct of “inverted spectrum” is discussed here to examine its plausibility. Perceptual inversion could be fulfilled by adopting the notion of “inverted trichromacy” rather than by the proposed existence of “red-green reversed trichromats.” Although the former alternative conforms to a hypothetical world of vampires, it fails to conform to the realities of genetics and neuroscience.

The conditions of hunting and gathering through which one line of primates evolved into humans form the basis of what I term the wild self, a self marked by developmental needs of prolonged human neoteny and by deep attunement to the profusion of communicative signs of instinctive intelligence in which relatively “unmatured” hominids found themselves immersed. The passionate attunement to, and inquiry into, earth-drama, in tracking, hunting, foraging, rhythming, singing, and other arts/sciences, provided the trail to becoming human, and provide (...) external grammatical structures that became the basis of human language and animate mind. I outline my new philosophy of history as a progress in precision, counteracted by a regressive contraction of mind. The progress associated with history since the beginning of agriculturally-based civilizations can be considered as a regressive contraction from animate mind of our hunter-gatherer evolutionary past, to anthropocentric mind, and finally to the ghost in the machine world-view of mechanico-centric mind. Contemporary consumption culture represents an inversion of the original conditions of the human self, and indeed, targets aspects of developmental neoteny to condition conformity to its rational-mechanical system imperatives. (shrink)

Scientific realists argue that a good track record of multi-agent, and multiple method, validation of empirical claims is itself evidence that those claims, at least partially and approximately, reflect ways nature actually is independent of the ways we conceptualize it. Constructivists contend that successes in validating empirical claims only suffice to establish that our ways of modelling the world, our “constructions,” are useful and adequate for beings like us. This essay presents a thought experiment in which beings like us (...) intersubjectively validate claims about properties of particular things in nature under conditions in which those beings have profoundly different personal phenomenological experiences of those properties. I submit that the thought experiment scenario parallels our actual situation, and argue that this shows that successes in intersubjectively validating empirical claims are indeed enough to claim victory for the realist. More specifically, I champion a variation of realism that marries Ronald Giere’s brand of ‘perspectival realism’ with Philip Kitcher’s ‘real realism,’ and posits that causal relations between ourselves and properties instantiated in nature ground our references to the relevant properties even though our conceptions of them are perspective relative. (shrink)

The world perceived by a person undergoing vision without inversion of the retinal image has traditionally been described as inverted. Drawing on the philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the empirical research of Hubert Dolezal, I argue that this description is more reflective of a representationist conception of vision than of actual visual experience. The world initially perceived in vision without inversion of the retinal image is better described as lacking in lived significance rather than inverted; (...) vision without inversion of the retinal image affects the very content of the perceived world, including, importantly, its expressions and conducts, and not merely the orientation of this content. Moreover, I argue that the enactive approach, rather than a representationist approach, is best able to account for the perception of the world, after prolonged vision without inversion of the retinal image, as both normal and upright, yet still different from the world seen previously. Finally, in their attention to the perception of other people’s facial expressions, I argue that Merleau-Ponty and Dolezal draw out the existential significance of the enactive approach. In encountering another person, the most pressing task is generally not to observe this person’s features but, instead, to engage with this person’s expressions. (shrink)

Everyone can agree that modern Westerners live in a secular age. That the process of "disenchantment" which led to this age constituted an epistemic loss, that it was not just a rejection of false beliefs but a real alteration in the way the world is experienced, has been shown by previous scholarship, notably that of Charles Taylor. This paper makes the case that this disenchantment was not only a latent possibility from the earliest interactions of Christianity with pre-Christian Roman (...) society, but developed from theological and political developments unique to Western Christendom. In so doing, it builds on the work of Taylor as well as that of Michael Allen Gillespie, who has written about the theological origins of modernity. It also provides a brief illustration of a recurrence, within the secular epistemic frame, of the same distinct features Christianity demonstrated in Rome which first made that frame possible. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Relativistic Content The Argument from Primitive Colors The Argument from the Inverted Spectrum The Argument from Dual Looks The Argument from Duplication Conclusion References.

How "red", "green" were defined? Through analyzing how two children with congenitally inverted color sensations corresponding to red flags and green grass accept their grand mothers’ teaching about colors, the paper get opposite conclusions against logical empiricism. The “red” and “green” and other names of properties of objects were defined by objective physical properties (or together with behavior, such as in defining “beauty”), instead our sensations. So language directly points to things in themselves passing through sensations and presentative (...) class='Hi'>world. It is not that things in themselves are unknowable, but that sensations and presentative world cannot be exactly described by daily language. (shrink)

THERE are several answers in Aquinas to the question, what is the ground of the world's intelligibility. The fullest- answer is contained by the account of creation and expressed in the doctrine of divine Ideas. I would like to trace the lines of that doctrine in Aquinas's corpus as a means of showing how an account of creation at once clarifies and inverts the analysis of natural intelligibility.

The Health Impact Fund (HIF) is a project aimed at expanding access to life-saving drugs worldwide and incentivizing pharmaceutical companies to invest in research and development for neglected diseases. The HIF would invert the existing patent framework by rewarding ideas through their diffusion rather than protecting against this diffusion, by encouraging a collective rather than privatized wealth scheme. The basic idea behind the HIF is the creation of a new competitive market that centers on individuals who, under normal circumstances, exert (...) very little force on the tide of market demand. The HIF does not operate on standard market measures of demand, but instead measures demand as a product of needs, while in conventional market scenarios, private citizens and national welfare states pay for needs. The idea is that the HIF would create a functional, competitive market in which pharmaceutical profit is determined by the actual health impact of each new drug, a measure born from pharmacological and distributive efficacy. In this article, the basic features of and main challenges to the HIF are addressed. (shrink)

If recent exploratory traditions tap into evolved psychological dispositions to explore, wouldn't humans be expected to have drawn on such dispositions long before the written word? Trickster oral traditions fill this role in all levels of society, affluence, and on all continents, inverting the boundaries of social worlds and those between humans and animals, fostering cultural innovation.

Sylvia Wynter discusses Eurocentric thought as a closed cognitive order. In this article, Mijke van der Drift interrogates this cognitive closure as a style of thought that is intertwined with institutions. By inverting the attention Foucault gives to the subjects under scrutiny, van der Drift shows that the focus on those that maintain the institution, the managerial class, reveals how power and knowledge configure this contraction of perception. Van der Drift argues that institutions are central to this process because it (...) offers alignment of purpose and understanding by means of rights and discipline. Consequently, this alignment leads to an indifference to other ways of worlding that Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving describe as “smug ignorance.” Van der Drift argues that this finds root in the institution, rather than being a harmful side effect that needs to be addressed. To contrast institutional alignment, the author sketches a pluralist ethics that offers an alternative mode of relationality and collective organization. (shrink)

Ibn Gabirol apresenta, em sua obra Fons Vitae, um modelo metafísico baseado no hilemorfismo universal, ou seja, na presença de matéria e de forma em todos os seres, tanto corpóreos quanto espirituais. Embora considerado um autor neoplatônico, Ibn Gabirol não explicita propriamente uma henologia, mas parte das realidades sensíveis e corpóreas em direção às mais sutis. Este artigo pretende inverter essa apresentação do autor, buscando redesenhar sua metafísica a partir da Essência Primeira até o fim da criação. Para tanto, o (...) ponto específico analisado, ainda que de modo incipiente, é a questão da unidade e seu qualificativo uno/una, tanto na atribuição que ele faz em seu modelo ontológico, quanto nos seus aspectos lógicos. In his work Fons Vitae, Ibn Gabirol presents a metaphysical model based on universal hylomorphism, i.e., on the presence of matter and form in all beings both corporeal and spiritual. Although considered a neoplatonic author, Ibn Gabirol does not properly present a henology, but starts from sensible and corporeal realities and then treats the more subtle ones. This article intends to invert the author's presentation, seeking to redesign his metaphysics from the first essence to the end of creation. To this end, the specific point that is analyzed (although in an incipient way) is the question of unity and its qualifier 'one', both in the attribution Ibn Gabirol makes in his ontological model and in the model's logical aspects. (shrink)

This is a translation of Carnap's early classic, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt and his less technical but also important article from the same period, Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie. It is no secret that Carnap abandoned the phenomenalism of the Aufbau for the physicalism of Logische Syntax der Sprache, but there is no doubt that the real message of the Aufbau—which is punctuated with the Messianic spirit of early logical positivism—is the program of "rational reconstruction" which becomes, on an (...) class='Hi'>inverted reading and with the addition of a bias in favor of the universal descriptive and explanatory power of scientific discourse, the program of scientific reductionism. In this light, the continuities between the Aufbau and Carnap's later work completely dwarf in importance the discrepancies between these two periods of his creative output. The Aufbau remains an important book in its own right, and is not simply a detailed manifesto of a now defunct program; it is a pleasure to have it in English.—E. A. R. (shrink)

This is a translation of Carnap's early classic, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt and his less technical but also important article from the same period, Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie. It is no secret that Carnap abandoned the phenomenalism of the Aufbau for the physicalism of Logische Syntax der Sprache, but there is no doubt that the real message of the Aufbau—which is punctuated with the Messianic spirit of early logical positivism—is the program of "rational reconstruction" which becomes, on an (...) class='Hi'>inverted reading and with the addition of a bias in favor of the universal descriptive and explanatory power of scientific discourse, the program of scientific reductionism. In this light, the continuities between the Aufbau and Carnap's later work completely dwarf in importance the discrepancies between these two periods of his creative output. The Aufbau remains an important book in its own right, and is not simply a detailed manifesto of a now defunct program; it is a pleasure to have it in English.—E. A. R. (shrink)

Adi Da argues that no solutions currently proposed are sufficient to righten the present unsustainable trajectory of life on Earth, because there is no integrated approach to the ordering of society and use of the planet. The presumption of separateness—manifesting collectively as separate “tribes” vying for control—characterizes human affairs, rather than the prior (“a priori”) unity of existence. The struggle for dominance is the “stave in the wheels” of the Earth-system's inherent capacity to self-correct. A new institution, “the Global Cooperative (...) Forum,” is proposed—invoked by “everybody-all-at-once” (a global populace awakened as a single force, capable of cooperatively effecting global change). (shrink)

orbit and far beyond it. Indeed, the immense, painstaking, indefatigable and ever-improving effort of Husserl to find ever-deeper and more reliable foundations for the philosophical enterprise (as well as his constant critical re-thinking and perfecting of the approach and so called "method" in order to perform this task and thus cover in this source-excavation an ever more far-reaching groundwork) stands out and maintains itself as an inepuisable reservoir for philosophical reflec tion in which all the above-mentioned work has either its (...) core or its source. In fact, in his undertaking to re-think the entire philosophical enterprise as such and to recreate philosophy upon what he sought to be at least a satisfactorily legitimated basis, Husserl, through his already systematised and "authorized" work, and his courses, and later on in his spontaneous reflection (which did not find its way into a definitive corpus but was nevertheless sufficiently coherent with his previously established body of thought to be considered a continuation of it), uncovers perspectives upon the universe of man and projects their new philosophical thematisation that brings together all the attempts by philosophers (e. g., Merleau-Ponty, who drew upon this material and found there his own inspiration) who succeeded him with foundational intentions; it also gives a core of philosophical ideas and insights for the youngergenerationofphilosophers today. (shrink)

Wild Ideas is a collection of essays that brings a fresh and refreshing perspective to the wilderness paradoxically at the center of our civilization.

This collection is the final volume of a four book survey of the state of phenomenology fifty years after the death of Edmund Husserl. Its publication represents a landmark in the comprehensive treatment of contemporary phenomenology in all its vastness and richness. The diversity of the issues raised here is dazzling, but the main themes of Husserl's thought are all either explicitly treated, or else they underlie the ingenious approaches found here. Time, historicity, intentionality, eidos, meaning, possibility/reality, and teleology are (...) the main concerns of this collection devoted to studies in aesthetics, metaphysics and literary interpretation, written by such authors as, among others, R. Cobb-Stevens, C. Moreno Marquez, J. Swiecimski, Sitansu Ray and M. Kronegger. These original studies of phenomenological aesthetics and literary theory by scholars from all parts of the world were gathered by the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learn ing during the year 1988/89 during its assessment of the phenomeno logical movement, fifty years after Husserl's death. IX A -T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXVII, ix. (shrink)

Uncoupling proteins (UCPs) regulate mitochondrial function, and thus cellular metabolism. Angiotensin‐converting enzyme (ACE) is the central component of endocrine and local tissue renin–angiotensin systems (RAS), which also regulate diverse aspects of whole‐body metabolism and mitochondrial function (partly through altering mitochondrial UCP expression). We show that ACE expression also appears to be regulated by mitochondrial UCPs. In genetic analysis of two unrelated populations (healthy young UK men and Scandinavian diabetic patients) serum ACE (sACE) activity was significantly higher amongst UCP3‐55C (rather than (...) T) and UCP2 I (rather than D) allele carriers. RNA interference against UCP2 in human umbilical vein endothelial cells reduced UCP2 mRNA sixfold (P < 0·01) whilst increasing ACE expression within a physiological range (<1·8‐fold at 48 h; P < 0·01). Our findings suggest novel hypotheses. Firstly, cellular feedback regulation may occur between UCPs and ACE. Secondly, cellular UCP regulation of sACE suggests a novel means of crosstalk between (and mutual regulation of) cellular and endocrine metabolism. This might partly explain the reduced risk of developing diabetes and metabolic syndrome with RAS antagonists and offer insight into the origins of cardiovascular disease in which UCPs and ACE both play a role. (shrink)