Usage-based linguistics postulates that multi-word expressions constitute a substantial part of language structure and use, and are formed through repeated chunking and stored as exemplar wholes. They are also re-used to produce new sequences by means of schematization. While there is extensive research on multi-word expressions in many spoken languages, little is known about the status of multi-word expressions in the mainstream U.S. variety of American Sign Language. This paper investigates recurring (...) multi-word expressions, or sequences of multiple signs, that involve a high-frequency sign of visual perception glossed as look and the family of ‘look’ signs. The look sign exhibits two broad functions: look/‘vision’ references literal or metaphorical vision and look/‘reaction’ signals a person’s reaction to a visual stimulus. Data analysis reveals that there are recurring sequences in distinct syntactic environments associated with the two functions of look, suggesting that look is in the process of grammaticalization from a verb of visual perception to a stance verb. The sequences demonstrate the emergence of linguistic structure from repeated use through the domain-general cognitive process of chunking in ASL. (shrink)

With Internet users constantly participating in online interactions, a wide range of novel usages have emerged, some of which involve multi-word expressions. The use of multi-word expressions in online discourses has not been fully explored. Therefore, this study sets out to investigate the Chinese word string bù shuō le ‘not talk anymore’, which occurs much more frequently in online discussion boards than in other written or spoken modes. In the corpus-based analysis, multiple contexts (...) in which bù shuō le indicates a reluctance to further elaborate are identified. The most common context is that the writer recounts a face-threatening experience and uses bù shuō le to bring the post to the conclusion, express a casual attitude toward that experience, and exert a humorous effect. This study contributes additional evidence that demonstrates how multi-word expressions fulfill textual, expressive, and interpersonal functions in online discourses. (shrink)

Idioms – expressions like kick the bucket and let the cat out of the bag – are strange. They behave in ways that ordinary multi-word expressions do not. One distinctive and troublesome feature of idioms is their unpredictability: The meanings of sentences in which idiomatic phrases occur are not the ones that we would get by applying the usual compositional rules to the usual meanings of their (apparent) constituents. This sort of behavior requires an explanation. I (...) will argue that the right explanation is that the sentences are being interpreted through a pretense. (What this means, exactly, will be explained in what follows.) This is a surprising claim, for two reasons. On the one hand, it seems that adopting a pretense account is overkill—it’s a far more radical move than is required to account for the phenomena. On the other hand, it seems that a pretense account is hopeless—that there is a fatal overgeneration problem for pretense accounts of idiom that causes them to fail, as Jason Stanley charges, “as badly as it is possible for an account of idiom to fail.” So I will have some work to do. (shrink)

Humans and animals communicate in various non-linguistic modes of communication. This multi-channelled form of communication seems to be characteristic of humans, and involves facial expression, calls/gestures, music and dance, as well as symbolic language; and seems likely to depend, in part, on the psychological mechanisms of projection and projective identification. This article attempts to reflect on the relation between these evolved forms of human communication, both linguistic and non-verbal, in terms of the unconscious as discovered by Freud.

A significant portion of the world’s text is tagged by readers on social bookmarking websites. Credit attribution is an inherent problem in these corpora because most pages have multiple tags, but the tags do not always apply with equal specificity across the whole document. Solving the credit attribution problem requires associating each word in a document with the most appropriate tags and vice versa. This paper introduces Labeled LDA, a topic model that constrains Latent Dirichlet Allocation by defining a (...) one-to-one correspondence between LDA’s latent topics and user tags. This allows Labeled LDA to directly learn word-tag correspondences. We demonstrate Labeled LDA’s improved expressiveness over traditional LDA with visualizations of a corpus of tagged web pages from del.icio.us. Labeled LDA outperforms SVMs by more than 3 to 1 when extracting tag-specific document snippets. As a multi-label text classifier, our model is competitive with a discriminative baseline on a variety of datasets. (shrink)

Word recognition is the Petri dish of the cognitive sciences. The processes hypothesized to govern naming, identifying and evaluating words have shaped this field since its origin in the 1970s. Techniques to measure lexical processing are not just the back-bone of the typical experimental psychology laboratory, but are now routinely used by cognitive neuroscientists to study brain processing and increasingly by social and clinical psychologists (Eder, Hommel, and De Houwer 2007). Models developed to explain lexical processing have also aspired (...) to be statements about the nature of human cognition (e.g., connectionist models, Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, and Patterson 1996). Words were convenient objects to study for cognitive psychologists because they are welldefined and their nature as alphabetic strings was a good fit to analysis with the computer programming languages of the 1970s and 1980s which excelled at string manipulation. But are words actually the privileged unit of mental representation and processing that all of this scientific attention makes them out to be? Like a growing number of other language researchers, our answer is no (see, e.g., (Bybee and Hopper 2001; Wray 2002). We propose that the mental representations for lexical structures form a continuum, from word combinations which have fossilized into single units (nightclub) to those that both exist as independent units and yet have bonds, varying in tightness, with the words with which they frequently co-occur (Harris 1998). The first line of support for this view is the simple observation that fluent speakers easily recognize the familiarity and cohesive quality of word combinations in their language. Examples in English include common noun compounds (last year, brand new), verb phrases (cut down, get a hold of, faced with) and other multi-word expressions such as common sayings and references to cultural concepts (saved by the bell, speed of light; Jackendoff 1995).. (shrink)

The volume explores the relationship between well-studied aspects of language (constructional alternations, lexical contrasts and extensions and multi-word expressions) in a variety of languages (Dutch, English, Russian and Spanish) and their representation in cognition as mediated by frequency counts in both text and experiment. The state-of-the-art data collection (ranging from questionnaires to eye-tracking) and analysis (from simple chi-squared to random effects regression) techniques allow to draw theoretical conclusions from (mis)matches between different types of empirical data. The sister (...) volume focuses on language learning and processing. (shrink)

Human communication is multi-modal. It is an empirical fact that many of our acts of communication exploit a variety of means to make our communicative intentions recognisable. Scholars readily distinguish between verbal and non-verbal means of communication, and very often they deal with them separately. So it is that a great number of semanticists and pragmaticists give verbal communication preferential treatment. The non-verbal aspects of an act of communication are treated as if they were not underlain by communicative intentions. (...) They are “relegated” to mere aspects of the context. However, several schools of thoughts have a different take on the issue. Thus psychologists or semioticians of gesture have shown how intricately gestures and speech are related in utterances. And, in a different area of the theoretical landscape, so-called “Relevance Theorists” have made the same point. Thus, Robyn Carston writes that “the domain of pragmatics is a natural class of environmental phenomena, that of ostensive stimuli; verbal utterances are the central case, but not the only one, and they themselves are frequently accompanied by other ostensive gestures of the face, hands, voice etc, all of which have to be interpreted together if one is to correctly infer what is being communicated”. This position rests on the assumption that there is a single “pragmatic system” or module at work in the interpretation of “ostensive stimuli”. When it comes to interpreting verbal stimuli, the same mechanisms and resources are used as when it comes to processing non-verbal ones. If there is no distinct “linguistic pragmatic system”, then the scholar who studies communication should not favour the verbal at the expense of the non-verbal. In this paper, I want to make a contribution to the study of multi-modal messages by considering a type of utterances that mix the verbal with the non-verbal in such a way that a piece of non-linguistic communication seems to stand in for a linguistic constituent which remains unrealised. Here is a real-life example : I didn't see the [IMITATION OF FRIGHTENING GRUMPINESS] woman today; will she be back this week? The square-bracketed string in small capitals is meant to capture the facial expressions and gestures performed in the conversational setting. What is intriguing here is that this instance of ostensive mimicry does not come as a mere complement to some linguistic stimulus; it appears to take the place of that stimulus. I shall try to show that a linguistic analysis can indeed be offered for cases like – though, I believe, without succumbing to the pro-linguistic bias that Carston warns against. I will, however, argue against an ellipsis-based account : the structure of sentence does not contain an unrealised adjective phrase. Instead, I shall defend a ‘syntactic-recruitment' account. (shrink)

As the use of automated social media analysis tools surges, concerns over accuracy of analytics have increased. Some tentative evidence suggests that sarcasm alone could account for as much as a 50% drop in accuracy when automatically detecting sentiment. This paper assesses and outlines the prevalence of sarcastic and ironic language within social media posts. Several past studies proposed models for automatic sarcasm and irony detection for sentiment analysis; however, these approaches result in models trained on training data of highly (...) questionable quality, with little qualitative appreciation of the underlying data. To understand the issues and scale of the problem, we are the first to conduct and present results of a focused manual semantic annotation analysis of two datasets of Twitter messages, associated with; hashtags commonly employed in automated sarcasm and irony detection approaches, and tweets relating to 25 distinct events, including, scandals, product releases, cultural events, accidents, terror incidents, etc. We also highlight the contextualised use of multi-word hashtags in the communication of humour, sarcasm and irony, pointing out that many sentiment analysis tools simply fail to recognise such hashtag-based expressions. Our findings also offer indicative evidence regarding the quality of training data used for automated machine learning models in sarcasm, irony and sentiment detection. Worryingly only 15% of tweets labelled as sarcastic were truly sarcastic. We highlight the need for future research studies to rethink their approach to data preparation and a more careful interpretation of sentiment analysis. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the phonological similarity of different elements of the phonological pole of multi-word units. I discuss two case studies on slightly different levels of abstractness. The first case study investigates lexically fully-specified V-NPDirObj idioms such as kick the bucket and lose one's cool; the idioms investigated are taken from the Collins Cobuild Dictionary of Idioms (Harper Collins, 2002). The second case study investigates the lexically less specified way-construction, which is exemplified by He fought his (...) way through the crowd (cf. Goldberg, Constructions: A Construction Grammar approach to argument structure, The University of Chicago Press, 1995: Ch. 9), on the basis of data from the British National Corpus 1.0. I show that both patterns exhibit a strong phonological within-pole relation, namely a strong preference for having their slots filled with phonologically similar elements, where phonological similarity is manifested in alliteration patterns. These preferences are statistically significant when compared to chance-level expectations derived both from the corpora and from the CELEX database (Baayen et al., The CELEX Lexical Database (CD-ROM), University of Pennsylvania, 1995) and are explained on the basis of Langacker's concept of syntactic and phonological constituents as well as current exemplar-/usage-based approaches. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 3, March 2022.

Words are rarely produced in isolation. Yet, our understanding of multi-word production, and especially its time course, is still rather poor. In this research, we use event-related potentials to examine the production of multi-word noun phrases in the context of overt picture naming. We track the processing costs associated with the production of these noun phrases as compared with the production of bare nouns, from picture onset to articulation. Behavioral results revealed longer naming latencies for French (...) noun phrases with determiners and pre-nominal adjectives (D-A-N, the big cat ) than for noun phrases with a determiner (D-N, the cat ), or bare nouns (N, cat ). The spatio-temporal analysis of the ERPs revealed differences in the duration of stable global electrophysiological patterns as a function of utterance format in two time windows, from ~190 to 300 ms after picture onset, and from ~530 ms after picture onset to 100 ms before articulation. These findings can be accommodated in the following model. During grammatical encoding (here from ~190 to 300 ms), the noun and adjective lemmas are accessed in parallel, followed by the selection of the gender-agreeing determiner. Phonological encoding (after ~530 ms) operates sequentially. As a consequence, the phonological encoding process is longer for longer utterances. In addition, when determiners are repeated across trials, their phonological encoding can be anticipated or primed, resulting in a shortened encoding process. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 2, November 2004, pp. 265-296 A Symposium on Louis E. Loeb, Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise The Unity of Hume's Philosophical Project MICHAEL WILLIAMS 1. Introduction In both his Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Hume presents a protean figure.1 By turns, he appears as a naturalistic theorist of the mind, a proto-Positivist critic of speculative metaphysics, and an utter (...) skeptic. Can these various characters be seen to work together? On the whole, Hume's interpreters seem to think not. The typical approach is to pick a dominant personality, leaving Hume's other philosophicalpersonae to be squeezed in as an afterthought, deprecated, or simply ignored. Louis Loeb is a shining exception.2 His new book, subtle and densely argued, offers an account of Hume's epistemology that makes a sustained effort to come to terms with its multi-faceted character. However, while Loeb's interpretation marks a real advance in our understanding of Hume, it is not one that I find ultimately persuasive. As I shall try to show, for all his insights, Loeb too fails to provide a satisfyingly unified account of Hume's philosophical pro j ect. In the course of explaining why I think this, I shall indicate how I think a better account ought to go. 2. Varieties of Skepticism The key to understanding Hume is to come to terms with the ways in which Hume is and is not a skeptic. So before going farther it will be useful to distinguish the Michael Williams is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Philosophy at The Johns Hopkins University, 347 Gilman Hall, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. e-mail: [email protected] 266 Michael Williams various forms that skepticism takes, or might be thought to take, in Hume's epistemological writings. The distinctions I shall introduce will also make it easier to characterize different ways of reading Hume, Loeb's included. First, we must distinguish between epistemological skepticism, which has to do with knowledge and belief, and conceptual skepticism which has to do with meaning. So for example, where an epistemological skeptic may wonder whether beliefs of a certain broad kind can be justified, a conceptual skeptic will wonder whether the words we use to express such purported beliefs are so much as meaningful. It seems clear that both kinds of skepticism figure in Hume's theory of the understanding. However, commentators differ sharply over their relative importance. Second, we must distinguish two forms of epistemological skepticism: theoretical (or Academic) skepticism and suspensive skepticism (or Pyrrhonism). As its name suggests, theoretical skepticism is a thesis (or family of theses) about the epistemic status of human beliefs: for example, the thesis that such and such beliefs do not amount to knowledge or are not justifiable. It is important to note that one can entertain such a thesis in a purely speculative or theoretical way, without becoming inclined to relinquish any fundamental beliefs. By contrast, Pyrrhonism involves an actual breakdown in belief. Again, though we seem to be able to find both Academic and Pyrrhonian elements in Hume's epistemological outlook, commentators are seriously at odds over how to put them together. Third, both theoretical and suspensive skepticism can be either qualified (Hume says "mitigated") or unqualified (we can say "radical"). The most important form of qualified theoretical skepticism is anti-Rationalism. Anti-Rationalism embraces such theses as that our beliefs never amount to knowledge, or are not supportable by (what we can show to be) truth-conducive reasons. By contrast, theoretical skepticism in its most radical form is the claim that no beliefs are in any sense more reasonable than others: i.e., that normative-epistemological distinctions between beliefs are completely indefensible. We can make an analogous distinction with respect to suspensive skepticism. A qualifiedly skeptical outlook might take the form of anti-Dogmatism: we hold beliefs, but in an open-minded, fallibilist spirit, taking nothing to be altogether certain, suspending final judgment. Alternatively, we might suffer a complete breakdown of belief. Once more, we find serious differences of opinion among commentators. In what way is Hume's skepticism mitigated, or qualified, if indeed it is qualified... (shrink)

Spoken word recognition involves a perceptual tradeoff between the reliance on the incoming acoustic signal and knowledge about likely sound categories and their co-occurrences as words. This study examined how adult second language (L2) learners navigate between acoustic-based and knowledge-based spoken word recognition when listening to highly variable, multi-talker truncated speech, and whether this perceptual tradeoff changes as L2 listeners gradually become more proficient in their L2 after multiple months of structured classroom learning. First language (L1) Mandarin (...) Chinese listeners and L1 English-L2 Mandarin adult listeners took part in a gating experiment. The L2 listeners were tested twice—once at the start of their intermediate/advanced L2 language class and again two months later. L1 listeners were only tested once. Participants were asked to identify syllable-tone words that varied in syllable token frequency (high/low according to a spoken word corpus) and syllable-conditioned tonal probability (most probable/least probable in speech given the syllable). The stimuli were recorded by 16 different talkers and presented at eight gates ranging from onset-only (gate 1) through onset+40 ms increments (gates 2 through 7) to the full word (gate 8). Mixed-effects regression modeling was used to compare performance to our previous study which used single-talker stimuli (Wiener, Lee, & Tao, 2019). The results indicated that multi-talker speech caused both L1 and L2 listeners to rely greater on knowledge-based processing of tone. L1 listeners were able to draw on distributional knowledge of syllable-tone probabilities in early gates and switch to predominantly acoustic-based processing when more of the signal was available. In contrast, L2 listeners, with their limited experience with talker range normalization, were less able to effectively transition from probability-based to acoustic-based processing. Moreover, for the L2 listeners, the reliance on such distributional information for spoken word recognition appeared to be conditioned by the nature of the acoustic signal. Single-talker speech did not result in the same pattern of probability-based tone processing, suggesting that knowledge-based processing of L2 speech may only occur under certain acoustic conditions, such as multi-talker speech. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary approach to the semiotics of emotion offers insights on emotion as a semantic category organising an array of feelings, thoughts and sensations into meaningful (communicable) terms. This is achieved via an exploration of the role of perspective-taking in making meanings that are felt rather than expressly articulated through words. Forming a semiotic system based on embodied experiences and their contexts, emotions, as semantic categories, are the first stage in processes of expression and communication. I lay the groundwork for (...) an interdisciplinary semiotics of emotion in accordance with findings and stances taken in the fields of literary and cultural studies, neuroscience, and cognitive and comparative psychology. Narrative empathy (sometimes called narrative emotion), like emotion per se, stands upon processes of communication involving the interpretive capacities of feeling, cognitive processes of identification, and perspective-taking. Feeling, beginning as an interpretation of sensorial and neurologically driven values, intensifies through the cognitive-affectual interpretative processes of perspective-taking. With recursive (multi-perspectival) feeling resulting in intensifications of feeling we recognise as emotion, I define emotion as a complex recursive pattern of feeling and affect that calls attention to itself in terms that are readily identifiable with semantic categories such as love, hate, shame, sadness, and anger. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. The article is devoted to the analysis of the key directions of the study of the possible influence of the specifics of Chinese language culture on the content and nature of intellectual discourse, which is recognized as philosophical. Logic and ontology are the key areas of analysis of the possible influence of linguistic determinants on the intellectual discourse of China. Three main topics that attract the attention of researchers are the (...) structure of judgment, the semantics of lexical units, and the specificity of the pragmatics of the Chinese language. M e t h o d s. The author applied general scientific methods of analysis, synthesis, comparison and description of the works of researchers of Chinese philosophy, which justify and argue the fruitfulness of studying the peculiarities of Chinese language to explain the reasons of the fundamental difference between the problems actualized in the history of Chinese philosophy and those that formed the basis of the development of the history of philosophy in the Western world. R e s u l t s. It is generally accepted that for the worldview of representatives of Chinese culture, the world is a structural whole, consisting of elements that continuously interact in the dynamics of changes and transformations, we find a reflection of this feature in the semantics of the corresponding symbolic system. Polysemy in the Chinese language mostly reveals a complex and multi-layered "web" of associative and correlative connections between meanings, which in fact cannot be argued outside the context of the relevant cultural tradition indicating common features or similarities of the signified. The doubt about the typicality of understanding the denotations as fixed and atomized for the Chinese language culture is reasonable, even in those cases when it comes to the designation of empirically accessible objectivity. The main specific features of polysemy in the Chinese language are the complete heterogeneity of what is signified, and the lack of transparent grounds for identifying the genus-species subordination of the scope of general concepts. This can also serve as an explanation for the fact that we do not find a completely obvious and nondisputable analogue of the problem of universals of the Western model in the history of Chinese philosophy. C o n c l u s i o n s. Based on the peculiarities of the Chinese language culture, we can recognize as a reasonable a statement that the seemingly natural understanding of the essence – the subject, as something that remains the same (at least for a certain time), but it undergoes some changes through its manifestations – a predicate (properties and actions). It is not as necessary and axiomatic for Chinese thinkers as, for example, for ancient Greek philosophers. In addition, we can recognize the fact that the verb "to exist" does not fulfill the role of a necessary copula in judgments in the Chinese language, as a probable reason for the lack of fundamental problematization of the concept of "being" in the Chinese history of philosophy. In general, the context of the use of a certain word-sign in the Chinese language plays a determining role. The actualization of one or another meaning in an expression is formed not only by its integration into a certain text, but also by its purpose in accordance with the specific practice of application. Therefore, this can serve as an explanation for the absence of an original and axiomatic interpretation of truth as absolute, that is, unchanging and non-relative in the history of Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

This work formalizes an informant-based structured argumentation approach in a multi-agent setting, where the knowledge base of an agent may include information provided by other agents, and each piece of knowledge comes attached with its informant. In that way, arguments are associated with the set of informants corresponding to the information they are built upon. Our approach proposes an informant-based notion of argument strength, where the strength of an argument is determined by the credibility of its informant agents. Moreover, (...) we consider that the strength of an argument is not absolute, but it is relative to the resolution of the conflicts the argument is involved in. In other words, the strength of an argument may vary from one context to another, as it will be determined by comparison to its attacking arguments (respectively, the arguments it attacks). Finally, we equip agents with the means to express reasons for or against the consideration of any piece of information provided by a given informant agent. Consequently, we allow agents to argue about the arguments’ strength through the construction of arguments that challenge (respectively, defeat) or are in favour of their informant agents. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 104-107 [Access article in PDF] Motivating Aesthetics Cynthia C. Rostankowski Humanities Department San Jose State University The territory of philosophical aesthetics remains a conceptual hinterland in the world of academic disciplines. It is not the only hinterland, but in comparison to other disciplines in arts and letters, few scholars engage in the subject professionally, and many people avoid the territory it occupies (...) as a place to visit, let alone to tarry or reside. Why is this? Usually people do not wish to visit places that are uncomfortable in some way. Frozen wastelands, blazing deserts, war zones, and places with nothing to do or see are usually avoided because they are perceived as unpleasant, dangerous, or boring,and the same is very likely true of their conceptual analogs. In what senses might some people perceive aesthetics as analogous to Siberia, Sudan, or central Kansas? I would like to investigate what it is about aesthetics that causes people to shy away from it more often than to flock to it. I have long been fascinated by the responses of students who express amazement or confusion when exposed to the field of aesthetics as a part of an introductory philosophy class, or of arts educators who do not know what to do with aesthetics since it does not seem quite to fit with the rest of what they do, or the responses of some artists or other arts practitioners who are occasionally disdainful of aesthetics. It would be easy to say that aesthetics has merely had bad press or inadequate exposure in the classroom, but I suspect there is more to it than that. I have experienced many of the situations I have just mentioned, and they have usually surprised and sometimes demoralized [End Page 104] me. They have always motivated me to think harder about my beloved field of interest, to try to reveal its attractions to those who do not find it as appealing and engaging as I do, or as you, my reader does. (I am presuming that one who is reading an essay in a journal about aesthetic education has already found his or her comfort zone in the field.) I will also presume to offer some thoughts about motivating an interest in aesthetics among the aesthetically uninterested — why one might want to do it, and what one might do. Please note, I am not speaking of the aesthetically disinterested 1 ; they too have already found their place in the discipline!It is likely that the problem of aesthetics has to do in part with misunderstandings, and those misunderstandings are multi-layered. If one looks up the word "aesthetic" in the Oxford English Dictionary, one finds the following: (F)rom the Greek for perception...and, being pre-occupied;...pertaining to things perceptible by the senses, things material;..."criticism of taste"...the science which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception...of or pertaining to the appreciation or criticism of the beautiful...Recent extravagances in the adoption of a sentimental archaism as the ideal of beauty have still further removed aesthetic and its derivatives from their etymological and purely philosophical meaning. There are varied suggestions about the use of the term, including the mention of its removal in contemporary parlance from its original meanings. If one looks up the keyword "aesthetic" on the Internet, one may find the following sites: skin care, plastic surgery, dentistry, exterior and interior design, tattoos, and some art, art theory, and philosophy among other things. An exemplification in practice of what is suggested in the OED. It is clear that the meaning of the word "aesthetic" has become at best imprecise, at worst confusing in common parlance.So, the first misunderstanding regarding aesthetics is the meaning of the term. What is philosophical aesthetics? It is not what some misconstrue as the imposition of value judgments on society. Unfortunately, some presume that because matters of taste or definitions of beauty are considered in the field, someone must be telling someone what they ought to think is pleasing or beautiful. This is not the focus... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 104-107 [Access article in PDF] Motivating Aesthetics Cynthia C. Rostankowski Humanities Department San Jose State University The territory of philosophical aesthetics remains a conceptual hinterland in the world of academic disciplines. It is not the only hinterland, but in comparison to other disciplines in arts and letters, few scholars engage in the subject professionally, and many people avoid the territory it occupies (...) as a place to visit, let alone to tarry or reside. Why is this? Usually people do not wish to visit places that are uncomfortable in some way. Frozen wastelands, blazing deserts, war zones, and places with nothing to do or see are usually avoided because they are perceived as unpleasant, dangerous, or boring,and the same is very likely true of their conceptual analogs. In what senses might some people perceive aesthetics as analogous to Siberia, Sudan, or central Kansas? I would like to investigate what it is about aesthetics that causes people to shy away from it more often than to flock to it. I have long been fascinated by the responses of students who express amazement or confusion when exposed to the field of aesthetics as a part of an introductory philosophy class, or of arts educators who do not know what to do with aesthetics since it does not seem quite to fit with the rest of what they do, or the responses of some artists or other arts practitioners who are occasionally disdainful of aesthetics. It would be easy to say that aesthetics has merely had bad press or inadequate exposure in the classroom, but I suspect there is more to it than that. I have experienced many of the situations I have just mentioned, and they have usually surprised and sometimes demoralized [End Page 104] me. They have always motivated me to think harder about my beloved field of interest, to try to reveal its attractions to those who do not find it as appealing and engaging as I do, or as you, my reader does. (I am presuming that one who is reading an essay in a journal about aesthetic education has already found his or her comfort zone in the field.) I will also presume to offer some thoughts about motivating an interest in aesthetics among the aesthetically uninterested — why one might want to do it, and what one might do. Please note, I am not speaking of the aesthetically disinterested 1 ; they too have already found their place in the discipline!It is likely that the problem of aesthetics has to do in part with misunderstandings, and those misunderstandings are multi-layered. If one looks up the word "aesthetic" in the Oxford English Dictionary, one finds the following: (F)rom the Greek for perception...and, being pre-occupied;...pertaining to things perceptible by the senses, things material;..."criticism of taste"...the science which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception...of or pertaining to the appreciation or criticism of the beautiful...Recent extravagances in the adoption of a sentimental archaism as the ideal of beauty have still further removed aesthetic and its derivatives from their etymological and purely philosophical meaning. There are varied suggestions about the use of the term, including the mention of its removal in contemporary parlance from its original meanings. If one looks up the keyword "aesthetic" on the Internet, one may find the following sites: skin care, plastic surgery, dentistry, exterior and interior design, tattoos, and some art, art theory, and philosophy among other things. An exemplification in practice of what is suggested in the OED. It is clear that the meaning of the word "aesthetic" has become at best imprecise, at worst confusing in common parlance.So, the first misunderstanding regarding aesthetics is the meaning of the term. What is philosophical aesthetics? It is not what some misconstrue as the imposition of value judgments on society. Unfortunately, some presume that because matters of taste or definitions of beauty are considered in the field, someone must be telling someone what they ought to think is pleasing or beautiful. This is not the focus... (shrink)

Despite the hadiths and narratives that warn about the interpretation of the Qur’ān by opinion, the question of how Qur’ānic verses can be understood is about the nature of Qur’ānic exegesis. These narratives, which limit the interpretation to the exact field and indicate the invalidity of the specification of the intention with the imprecise information, bring with it the question of how to understand the Qur’ān in each period and society. The issue that has been questioned in the frame of (...) the commentary from the earliest periods is based on the possibility of commenting besides the narration and defining the area that the thought belongs to the commentator. In this context, it is seen that the distinction between the conceptualization of tafsīr-taʾwīl words in classical commentary literature deals with the subject of the tafsīr, their belongings, epistemological values and contexts. Mainly, this study will question whether authors who do not distinguish between tafsīr-taʾwīl categorize the information about commentary in a different context, then it will analyze two basic approaches on tafsīr and taʾwīl. In the paper, it will be suggested that these classifications in the classical literature should be evaluated together within the framework of the search for methodology in exegesis. Summary: The Prophet, who was the first glossator of the Qur’ān, forbade people to talk about the Qur’ān with their own judgments. The prominent people of the companions refused to comment on some words that were closed in meaning (garīb). The words quoted from Abū Bakr and ʿUmar on this subject are quite famous. However, the Qur’ān is a universal book revealed to be understood in all ages and geographies till the doomsday. The fact that all the verses were not interpreted by the Prophet, and the expansions of meaning observed in the Qur’ān wording necessitate the interpretation of the Qur’ān. The fact that the Prophet forbade people to talk with their own judgments about the Qur’ān and the necessity of understanding the Qur’ān in every era constitutes a dilemma that must be explained. The resolution of this issue will both determine the legitimacy of tafsīr (interpretation) and reveal the difference between the Prophet's tafsīr and the tafsīrs by other people. In this context, a distinction was made between the interpretations of the Prophet and of the companions who witnessed the revelation period from the Tabarī (d. 310/923) in the classical tafsīr literature and the interpretations by glossators in terms of their bindingness and information values. Thus, before even starting the interpretation, glossators questioned the possibility of interpretation of the Qur’ān without the tafsīr of the Prophet and the narratives from the companions that have the force of hadith marfūʿ.It is seen in classical tafsīr literature that distinctions between the tafsīr of the Prophet and the interpretations of the glossator are usually constructed on the terms of tafsīr and ta'wil, to which terminological meanings are attributed. In this regard, the methodology of Māturīdī (d. 333/944) is quite specific and clear. According to Māturīdī, tafsīr is an exact field. Only the tafsīr of the Prophet and the narratives of the companions that have the force of marfūʿ can be included in this field. Taʾwīl, on the other hand, is an area based on supposing. Preferences to be made from possible meanings are supposition and related to taʾwīl. The fact that Māturīdī included the explanations of the Prophet and his companions in the tafsīr field and stated that they expressed exact information shows that he regarded this information in the value of the statement of mutakallim. The data included in the field of taʾwīl are not as the data included in the field of tafsīr in terms of their bindingness and information value. The interpretations made in the field of taʾwīl include supposition; so they cannot be attributed to the desire of God. The field that the Prophet forbade people from declaring their own views is the field of tafsīr in the methodology of Māturīdī. The exactness of this field is an indication that the tafsīr is related to God's desire. It is not right to declare an opinion with supposition in the field that is exact and definite. Even though the interpretation in the field of tafsīr is in accordance with the truth, this cannot eliminate the responsibility of the interpreter that make determinations based on supposition in the exact and definite field. Some scholars, such as Qushayrī (d. 465/1072), also classify the narrative-sagacity areas by means of tafsīr-taʾwīl concepts. This classification deals with the data that is the subject of tafsīr in terms of their belongingness. Indeed, tafsīr science includes both the data that are linked with transmission and non-transmittable elements that can be achieved by following a methodology. Non-transmittable elements included in the taʾwīl field by those who make a distinction between tafsīr and taʾwīl based on narrative-sagacity are the meanings reached through linguistic efforts. Language is an element that holds possibilities in itself. Considering closeness of meaning, multi-meanings, metaphors and allusions in the wording, it can be thought that the meanings reached by linguistic methods include supposition. In the methodology of Māturīdī, the field of tafsīr is composed of the explanations of the Prophet and the narratives of the companions who witnessed the revelations while in the classifications of those who make a distinction between tafsīr and taʾwīl based on narrative-sagacity, tafsīr generally includes narratives. When the issue is handled within the framework of the desire of God and the statements of the mutakallim, it seems that the classification of Māturīdī is more punctual. However, it is understood that this approach does not give a satisfactory answer to the subsequent situations and bindingness of the mentioned data. In the classifications based on narrative-sagacity, the narratives in the field of tafsīr are taken as a whole without analyzing their health grades and their signification. However, some of these narrations are not authentic; so, in this respect it is a problematic issue that they are the subjects of the field of tafsīr. Besides, sometimes there can be different narrations about the tafsīr of verses from the companions. The evaluation these narratives in a field attributed to the desire of God may also pose a problem. The linguistic data that both Māturīdī and those who make a distinction between tafsīr and taʾwīl based on narrative-sagacity include in the field of taʾwīl does not appear to have a homogeneous structure -as is the case with the narratives-. Indeed, among this data, there are elements whose meanings are quite hard to determine as well as firm ones that possibly have only one meaning. It is controversial that these expressions, which have only one meaning and to the validity of whose meaning other evidence point out are included in the field of taʾwīl.The distinction between meaning and interpretation fields in tafsīr is very important in terms of tafsīr methodology. This field designation is in a way a description of nature of the science of tafsīr. Thus, in matters where the human intelligence remains insufficient with the tafsīr narratives from the Prophet, the bindingness of the narratives from the companions are clarified; furthermore, beyond the narrative, the validity and the information values of interpretations of the glossator are determined. In this regard, the tafsīr-taʾwīl distinctions made in the classical tafsīr literature provide us with a rich content and a multifaceted point of view. However, when addressed separately, these distinctions present a number of problems in terms of scope and applicability. Our study proposes the evaluation of tafsīr-taʾwīl distinctions in classical literature together while the meaning-interpretation fields are specified in the framework of the search for methodology in tafsīr. Thus, the incomplete aspects of the classification will be eliminated and a much more comprehensive and functional classification will be achieved. At this point, the methodologies of some figures as Tabarī, who is known to have used the terms of tafsīr and taʾwīl in the same meaning, must also be evaluated separately. Indeed, when the works of these names are analyzed, it is seen that these names also distinguish the meaning-interpretation fields in tafsīr, but they do not do this through the tafsīr-taʾwīl concepts. (shrink)

FREE to download my New Book . https://www.academia.edu/31495642/_Meta-Philosophy_Meta-Cognition_and_Critique_of_Doing_Philosophizi ng am in the top 0.5% of Academic Publications on Academia.Edu and belong to a group of Academic giving our work for FREE as Commercial Publishers change too much for books. My new book is HERE for download: https://www.academia.edu/31495642/_Meta-Philosophy_Meta-Cognition_and_Critique_of_Doing_Philosophizi ng Abstract So far in my books and articles I have dealt with the following‭ (‬I hope I do not commit self-plagiarism by referring to my previous work and ideas expressed therein‭! ‬Lol‭)‬: -/- My own (...) discussions or‭ ‘‬philosophizing‭’ ‬follow right at the end after the numerous and very lengthy quotes from philosophers.‭ ‬The nature of the subject-matter of philosophy,‭ ‬the methodology,‭ ‬methods,‭ ‬techniques and tools of doing philosophy or philosophizing,‭ ‬the nature of the different steps or stages of the process/es of theorizing,‭ ‬the fact that doing philosophy are some of the stages of theorizing,‭ ‬the fact that philosophers lack meta-cognition and/or meta-reflection of these things.‭ ‬If they had awareness of what and how they are doing philosophy they might not become involved in quibbling over concepts and the differentiations of these concepts.‭ ‬It is as if philosophers are blind to what they are doing and have been doing for thousands of years,‭ ‬with the result that they continue repeating the same thing‭ – ‬arguing with words over the use of words and in the process creating more and more‭ –‬isms.‭ ‬They are seemingly unable to escape from such‭ –‬isms and their implications.‭ ‬Instead of getting or going anywhere they way they conceive‭ (‬of‭) ‬problems and express their questions they end up with conceiving of notions that cannot be solved or dissolved.‭ ‬They enclose themselves in an insular world or bubble of their own making,‭ ‬compared to sciences investigating humans and the different features and systems of the human body who find irrelevant the problems that philosophers have with things such as the brain,‭ ‬cognition,‭ ‬mind,‭ ‬consciousness,‭ ‬perception,‭ ‬thinking,‭ ‬etc.‭ ‬Sciences deal with these things on many levels and multi-dimensional while philosophers try to restrict them to a single level in one dimension by their words and the way they use those words.‭ ‬Consequently they lose sight of their objects and are unable to question them or express questions about them in a meaningful manner. -/- In my articles and books on the subject-matter I dealt with the traditional branches of philosophy and that with the differentiation of other disciplines and discourses the discourse of philosophy lost subject-matter.‭ ‬I mentioned newer areas of‭ ‘‬philosophy‭’‬,‭ ‬such as X-Phi,‭ ‬Philosophy’s interdisciplinary involvement in for example cognitive sciences,‭ ‬that there exists a philosophy of every discipline possible‭ (‬eg philosophy of science,‭ ‬art,‭ ‬music,‭ ‬sport,‭ ‬social sciences,‭ ‬etc‭)‬,‭ ‬that discourses such as Logic,‭ ‬Critical Thinking,‭ ‬Argumentation and argument maps,‭ ‬Reasoning,‭ ‬etc are relevant to and employed by many if not all disciplines and many discourses and are not uniquely subject-matter of the discourse of philosophy and does not have to form part of or be taught as subject-matter of philosophy. -/- I identified and discussed the methodology,‭ ‬methods,‭ ‬techniques and tools of doing philosophy and some underlying or implicit transcendentals such as pre-suppositions,‭ ‬suppositions and assumptions.‭ ‬I explore the nature of the different features,‭ ‬aspects,‭ ‬characteristics,‭ ‬steps and stages of the processes of theorizing.‭ ‬I showed that doing philosophy or philosophizing employ and/or consist of some of these features,‭ ‬steps and stages of theorizing. -/- As I involuntary have‭ (‬am‭)‬,‭ ‬seemingly endless‭ (‬a stream of consciousness like‭) ‬philosophically-‭ (‬question or problem and insight‭) ‬related‭ ‘‬intuitions‭’‬,‭ ‬it is difficult,‭ ‬painful and frustrating to me for that to be interrupted by social interaction,‭ ‬talking to people,‭ ‬phones,‭ ‬executing all sorts of‭ ‬mundane activities,‭ ‬etc.‭ ‬To understand or cope with this‭ ‘‬mental state‭’ ‬is one of the reasons why I need to explore meta-cognition or thinking about thinking,‭ ‬especially one’s own thinking and related‭ ‘‬activities‭’‬. (shrink)

: ‘Alā’ al-Dawla al-Simnānī (d. 736/1336) was a Kubrawī sheikh lived in Simnān one hundred years after Ibn al-Arabī (d. 638/1240). He authored around ninety works in Arabic and Persian on various fields within Sūfism, raised many disciples. His contribution to the sūfī tradition mainly come to forefront regarding problems like unity, latāif (subtle organs), rijāl al-ghaib (men of the unseen), wāqia (dream-like mystical experiences) and tajallī (manifestation). Simnānī’s understanding of the unity influenced subsequent sūfī’s and specifically Ahmad Sirhindī (d. (...) 1034/1624) and his sheikh Bāqībillah’s (d. 1012/1603) views of the unity overlap with Simnānī’s one. In Maktūbāt, Sirhindī who developed the idea of unity of the seen against the unity of the existence expresses that his understanding of being is the same with Simnānī’s one. Simnānī is also known as the first critic of Ibn al-Arabī’s conception of the unity among sūfī’s. Such that, whenever his name is mentioned the first thing comes to one’s mind has been his criticism against Ibn al-Arabī. However, his criticism against Ibn al-Arabī was not studied as a whole looking at his ouvre. Studying Simnānī’s works, it is seen that his criticism is concentrated on two main problems. First is Ibn al-Arabī’s employing the concept wujūd al-mutlaq (absolute being) for God. He maintains that it is not convenient to use this concept for al-Haq. His second criticism is against a sentence mentioned in al-Futūhāt: “سبحان من أظهر الأشياء وهو عينها”. In this article, causes for Simnānī’s critiques will be discussed and both sūfī’s conceptions of wujūd al-mutlaq and ‘ayn (quintessence) will be studied.Summary: One of the famous names in the Kubrawī tradition, ‘Alā’ al-Dawla al-Simnānī is a sheikh who lived in the city of Simnān in the contemporary Iran between 659-736/1261-1336. In his youth, he served in the service of Arghūn Khan (r. 1284-1291) in the Īlkhānid Palace; and later, after a spiritual experience, he left the palace and turned to a Ṣūfī life. For a certain period, he continued worshipping and riyādhat (spiritual fight against the evil commanding self) on his own, and looked for a guide convenient to his character. Eventually, he became the disciple of the Kubrawī sheikh in Baghdad, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Isfarāyīnī (d. 717/1317), and obtained ijāzah (permission) for irshād (guidance). After that, with the instruction of his sheikh, he went back to Simnān; and spent rest of his life with guiding his disciples and writing scholarly works. He authored around ninety works in Arabic and Persian on various fields within Sūfism. His contribution to the sūfī tradition mainly comes to forefront regarding problems like unity, latāif, rijāl al-ghaib, wāqia and tajallī; and influenced subsequent sūfī’s. Simnani’s influences can best be seen on the founder of the Mujaddidiyya branch of Naqshbandiyya, Ahmad Sirhindī (d. 1034/1624), and Sirhindī’s sheikh Bāqībillah (d. 1012/1603). In a letter Bāqībillah wrote to Sirhindī, he mentions certain differences between Simnānī’s understanding of unity and unity of the existence by stating that Simnānī’s path is not that of unity of the existence, and that his shuhūd (seen) is the most perfect shuhūd. Also in the Maktūbāt, Sirhindī expresses that his understanding of being is the same with that of Simnānī’s. Simnānī is also known as the first critic of Ibn al-Arabī’s conception of being and unity among sūfī’s. It would not be incorrect to say that he is more famous for this critique so much so that whenever his name is mentioned the first thing comes to one’s mind has been his criticism against Ibn al-Arabī. The main reason for this is that a letter Simnānī wrote to one of the followers of Ibn al-Arabī, ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī (d. 736/1335) in which Simnānī criticizes Ibn al-Arabī’s conception of unity, was included in the famous work of Abd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492), Nafakhāt al-uns. This letter’s presence in the Nafakhāt played a vital role in its publicity. For this reason, it can be said that Nafakhāt made Simnānī famous. Yet, it should also be said that the fame stemming from Nafakhāt is incomplete and it is just about one aspect of Simnānī, a scholar who authored dozens of books on the Sūfism. Moreover, it is not correct to defend that Simnānī’s statements in that letter reflects a full picture of his opinion about Ibn al-Arabī. Hence, to have a better understanding of his criticism and thoughts about Ibn al-Arabī, one should explore other works of Simnānī as well. Studying Simnānī’s works, it is seen that his criticism is concentrated on two main problems. First is Ibn al-Arabī’s employing the concept wujūd al-mutlaq for God. His second criticism is against a sentence mentioned in al-Futūhāt: “سبحان من أظهر الأشياء وهو عينها”. To understand the first criticism, one needs to know the meaning both sūfī’s attribute to the concept of wujūd al-mutlaq; and for the second the meaning they attribute to the concept of ‘ayn. First, it should be known that Ibn al-Arabī did not think of being as a form category the members of which are beings. To the contrary, he uses wujūd exclusively for the Eternal, and refrains from using the concept of wujūd for the creation; and calls them mawjūd. In other words, Ibn al-Arabī differentiates between being and existence; and limits the concept of being only for the al-Haqq. Ibn al-Arabī states this view repeatedly in statements such as “al-Haqq (the Truth) is being; things, however, are attributes of being.” What Ibn al-Arabī means by wujūd al-mutlaq is al-Haqq who is wajib al-wujūd (the Necessary Being) and free from all restrictions. Thus, in a certain sense wujūd al-mutlaq means wajib al-wujūd. By writing that “Wujūd al-Haqq is the essence of wajib al-wujūd who is qualified with the perfect attributes of eternity and infinity. Absolute Being is the actions emanating from these attributes. Wujūd al-Muqayyad (the Limited Being) is the outcome that comes into existence as a result of these actions”, Simnānī explicitly states that for him Absolute Being is the actions of al-Haqq. What one can understand from the statements of both sūfī’s is that while by wujūd al-mutlaq Ibn al-Arabī refers to wajib al-wujūd (i.e. the essence of al-Haqq), for the same term Simnānī refers to actions of al-Haqq. Since in criticizing Ibn al-Arabī, Simnānī takes into account his own definition of the term Wujūd al-Mutlaq as the actions of al-Haqq, his criticisms are not valid. In fact, both exonerate al-Haqq from all the conditions. However, while Ibn al-Arabī chooses to verbalize the existence of God with the concept of “Absolute Being”, Simnānī only approves to express the existence of God with the concepts of wājib al-wujūd and al-Wujūd al-Haqq and differing from Ibn al-Arabī attributes the meaning of the actions of God to the concept of Absolute Being.Simnānī’s second critique against Ibn al-Arabī is related to this sentence: “سبحان من أظهر الأشياء وهو عينها”. An annotation that is written by Simnānī on a page which is out of his gloss on al-Futūhāt is highly harsh reads as follows: “O, followers of the most deviant leader! If you hear that one says that your sheikh is identical with his beard, put the claim that he is identical with his rejectomenta aside, should you accept this and tolerate him?” It is understood from these sentences that Simnānī considers the concept “al-ayn” as the essence of that thing. Though, the word “al-ayn” is one of the most multi-meaning word in the Arabic language and in Ibn al-Arabī’s works it is used with various meanings such as eye, the quintessence, spring, water source, tangible being of a thing, the essence of a thing and so on. The usage as “the essence of a thing” is very much common in Ibn al-Arabī’s works. It is interesting that while this word has so many meanings, Simnānī takes one meaning as base and blaspheme against Ibn al-Arabī. It is obvious that the main cause for Simnānī’s critique against Ibn al-Arabī in both problems is his attribution to the concepts different meanings than Ibn al-Arabī and then judging him in the context of his attributes. (shrink)

We have never come face to face with ‘Philosophy’, that goddess who was courted, scorned, hated, and betrayed throughout history by those who claimed to represent her - we only come into contact with her officers: philosophers, that is, human beings who exist in an economic context, have religious ideas, support political opinions, find a way through their emotional history, are paid by institutions, fanstasize about a vision of hope, have appetites, can fight, are mad keen to be noticed and (...) recognized and above all frequently make certain types of statements that have claims to validity. So philosophers are not only creatures in history but also historical creatures who interrogate the meaning of the world and particularly their own work. However, one of the tricks of instrumental rationality - if we follow Marx's analysis - is to focus first on the product rather than the producer. This is the basic reason for the fact that a passion for the exegesis of philosophical texts often conceals philosophers’ practices. And this is why - where African philosophers are concerned, and they are not the only ones - people focus first, with benign curiosity, on their books, the theories that they expound and that may provide matter for heated discussion, but questions are hardly ever asked about the stance of African philosophers, in other words, the actual conditions in which their position is created, the particular abilities of African philosophers to achieve their emergence as ‘philosophers’, and their recognition in the international arena. The rhetoric about the acceptance of multi-culturalism argued on the basis of the complexity of present-day societies often hides practices and processes of legitimation that are revealed by their relationship to those two phenomena, economics and the state. The love of little abstractions that philosophy resists in the name of its historical position, the haste with which African philosophers, among others, clamour for recognition from their peers in other cultures are partly intended secretly to conceal their true relationship to money. Not that ‘disinterested’ philosophers ‘in love’ with knowledge do not exist, but we need to recognize that they often fail to say, as Adorno does in Dialectique négative, that ‘philosophy's freedom is simply the ability to allow its non-freedom to be expressed’. The purpose of this article is less to question philosophers’ capacity for knowledge than to urge them to have the courage to proclaim and challenge their non-freedom. (shrink)

Propositional logic has been recognized throughout the centuries as one of the cornerstones of reasoning in philosophy and mathematics. Over time, its formalization into Boolean algebra was accompanied by the recognition that a wide range of combinatorial problems can be expressed as propositional satisfiability (SAT) problems. Because of this dual role, SAT developed into a mature, multi-faceted scientific discipline, and from the earliest days of computing a search was underway to discover how to solve SAT problems in an automated (...) fashion. This book, the Handbook of Satisfiability, is the second, updated and revised edition of the book first published in 2009 under the same name. The handbook aims to capture the full breadth and depth of SAT and to bring together significant progress and advances in automated solving. Topics covered span practical and theoretical research on SAT and its applications and include search algorithms, heuristics, analysis of algorithms, hard instances, randomized formulae, problem encodings, industrial applications, solvers, simplifiers, tools, case studies and empirical results. SAT is interpreted in a broad sense, so as well as propositional satisfiability, there are chapters covering the domain of quantified Boolean formulae (QBF), constraints programming techniques (CSP) for word-level problems and their propositional encoding, and satisfiability modulo theories (SMT). An extensive bibliography completes each chapter. This second edition of the handbook will be of interest to researchers, graduate students, final-year undergraduates, and practitioners using or contributing to SAT, and will provide both an inspiration and a rich resource for their work. Edmund Clarke, 2007 ACM Turing Award Recipient: "SAT solving is a key technology for 21st century computer science." Donald Knuth, 1974 ACM Turing Award Recipient: "SAT is evidently a killer app, because it is key to the solution of so many other problems." Stephen Cook, 1982 ACM Turing Award Recipient: "The SAT problem is at the core of arguably the most fundamental question in computer science: What makes a problem hard?". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Space, Place and Capitalism: The Literary Geographies of “The Unknown Industrial Prisoner” by Brett HeinoDavid McLaughlinSpace, Place and Capitalism: The Literary Geographies of “The Unknown Industrial Prisoner” BY BRETT HEINO Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021I would not be the first to describe Brett Heino’s new book as timely. Its publication in 2021 coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of David Ireland’s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971). (...) This experimental novel, centered on a “kaleidoscopic vision” of its characters and their lives, tells the story of a group of workers at the Puroil refinery in a fictionalized part of Sydney. In Heino’s own words, this project emerged from a desire to write about industrialization and representation in Australian fiction. Working primarily as a legal scholar and historian, this work represents his first foray into literary geography.At the heart of Heino’s argument is a question: What does literature know about space? In his pursuit of a spatially-directed reading of The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, Heino eschews work in literary geography that cultural geographers might recognize— particularly the writings of Sheila Hones, the doyenne of an emerging interdiscipline of literary geography, whose practitioners work at the interstices between literary studies and geography. Heino criticizes this interdisciplinary literary geography as being too focused on establishing the “sovereignty” or “imperialism” of fictional space at the expense of recognizing the [End Page 132] role of literature in the world. Arguably, such a stance is a misreading of the thinking within literary geography that “reading literature is essentially an experimental process in which the categorical distinction between the frames of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ become blurred,”1 and where the “ontological distinction between literary and non- literary spaces” is undermined.2 Neither of these statements supposes that reading literature is a practice by which the world falls away and nothing remains but the book. Instead, following Doreen Massey’s idea that space is a complicated process of events and happenings, literary geographers in this mold argue that fiction is a part of life as it happens, and reading is a constitutive practice in the co- production of space.In its place, Heino emphasizes a form of literary geographical thinking that understands literature’s role as being separate from, but intimately connected to, the actual world. His theoretical framework is multi-layered, borrowing from Marxist literary scholars, including Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, and Marxist geographers, including Henri Lefebvre. In essence, however, it can be expressed neatly in the following quotation from geocritic Bertrand Westphal:Fiction does not reproduce the real, but actualises new virtualities that had remained unformulated, and then goes on to interact with the real according to the hypertextual logic of interfaces... fiction detects possibilities buried in the folds of the real, knowing that these folds have not been temporised.3I think that Heino’s rejection of what he characterizes as poststructural literary geography, of the kind represented in his analysis of Sheila Hones’s work, misses some opportunities. First, there are similarities between his conception of literary geography and those he leaves aside— not least, their shared acceptance of the productive tension that sits between literature as text and world as practical, non- representational, and exceeding narrative. Secondly, the shared aim of both approaches is to understand how “representation ‘takes place’ and precisely how texts are part of what happens.”4 This is particularly powerful in the light of Heino’s aim to understand the development and contents of literary texts in materialist terms. Despite these areas [End Page 133] of convergence, Heino’s argument that literary geography’s potential to analyze class and political structures remains untapped is well founded. This is where Heino’s contribution is at its strongest.Heino’s work is at its most convincing when he discusses the realities of “abstract space” that both permeate the spaces of The Unknown Industrial Prisoner and structure the very fabric of latter- twentieth century Australia. Running through both Heino’s critique and Ireland’s novel is an understanding “that the inherent drive of capital is towards the creation of a fragmented, homogenised and hierarchised space within which it can produce and... (shrink)

Declaring that the universe was created in a certain order, Almighty Allah said, "Do not make mischief on earth after it has been brought into order." With this statement she made, she warned humanity not to disturb the established order. Natural disasters such as epidemics, earthquakes, floods and landslides that we face in the 21st century make it necessary to draw attention to the actions of people once again. Human beings, who interfere with nature irresponsibly, disrupt the balances in the (...) universe, and these disturbed balances return to humanity as a calamity over time. Almighty Allah knows in many verses that these calamities are the result of people's own deeds. To this situation; He emphasizes with the expressions “bimâ kesebû, “bimâ kesebet eydinnâs”, “febimâ kesebet eydiküm”, “bimâ kaddemet eydîhim”,“bimâ zalemû”. It is understood from these expressions that a significant part of the calamities are caused by human error, negligence and unjust interventions. While troubles and calamities mean punishment/retribution for some people, the same event can be a test or a lesson for other people. In this context, it is stated in the Qur'an that many troubles and calamities that have been experienced in the past, such as Noah's Flood, have been made a lesson for all humanity as follows: “As for the people of Noah, We drowned them because they denied their prophet, and made them a sign for the people. We have prepared a painful chastisement for the wrongdoers.” As can be seen, while it is stated in the verse that the cause of the torment is people's denial of the prophets, on the other hand, it is emphasized that this event is a lesson for all humanity. However, it is stated in the next verse that those who do not take lessons from these events and warnings and insist on doing what their souls want deserve punishment.However, the words of the Prophet also guide us regarding the epidemic that befell us and our attitude towards troubles. He (sas) prayed to Allah so that his ummah would not be destroyed altogether. He said that "taun" is a kind of punishment that Allah punishes some people, but it is a mercy for believers. In line with the verses we have mentioned, although most of the calamities are the result of human actions, it is out of the question to call every calamity a divine punishment. Because the prophets suffered the greatest of troubles. This topic is too broad to be tackled from a single point of view. The individual, social, human, divine and test dimensions of the subject should be evaluated as a whole. Therefore, such a sensitive issue that needs to be evaluated from multiple perspectives; Bringing only a part of it to the fore as "trouble equals divine punishment" would be to deviate the subject from its target. In this study, within the framework of the scriptures, the individual, social and divine dimensions of troubles and calamities, these calamities may have spiritual causes as well as material reasons; it will be examined that every calamity is not caused by the mistakes of people, but some of them are caused by what people do. In addition, it will be pointed out that troubles and calamities should be evaluated in a multi-dimensional way within the framework of main elements such as faith, test, hope, precaution, trust, patience, prayer and divine providence. (shrink)

The article investigates the problem of the existence of the so-called multi-modal argu­ments – persuasive structures, where, along with written or spoken words, there are non-verbal elements that also perform persuasive functions. Such arguments are considered neither to be fully translatable into words, nor not to be total aliens in the argumentation studies. Along with the problem of translating the non-verbal component of a multi-modal argument, the question of their functional status in the structure of the argument is (...) also discussed. It is proposed to consider such elements as premises, the connection of which with the conclusion is explained through the description of the mode (whether it is an action, an image or a recorded audio message) in which their propositional con­tent is actualized. It is argued that the mode of the actualization of propositional content of the argument is no less significant than the content itself. On the basis of this claim it is proposed to consider “classical” textual arguments as a form of multi-modal arguments. (shrink)

The aim of the study was to develop a new comprehensive reading assessment battery for multi-ethnic and multilingual learners in Malaysia. Using this assessment battery, we examined the reliability, validity, and dimensionality of the factors associated with reading difficulties/disabilities in the Malay language, a highly transparent alphabetic orthography. In order to further evaluate the reading assessment battery, we compared results from the assessment battery with those obtained from the Malaysian national screening instrument. In the study, 866 Grade 1 children (...) from multi-ethnic and multilingual backgrounds from 11 government primary schools participated. The reading assessment battery comprised 13 assessments, namely, reading comprehension, spelling, listening comprehension, letter name knowledge, letter name fluency, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy, word reading efficiency, oral reading fluency, expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, elision, and phonological memory. High reliability and validity were found for the assessments. An exploratory factor analysis yielded three main constructs: phonological-decoding, sublexical-fluency, and vocabulary-memory. Phonological-decoding was found to be the most reliable construct that distinguished between at-risk and non-at-risk children. Identifying these underlying factors will be useful for detecting children at-risk for developing reading difficulties in the Malay language. In addition, these results highlight the importance of including a range of reading and reading-related measures for the early diagnosis of reading difficulties in this highly transparent orthography. (shrink)

The paper outlines the theoretical and methodological complexity of the historical-philosophi- cal study of Georges Bataille’s literary and philosophical heritage, In: particular «Inner Expe- rience», one of his key works, which is about to be released in Ukrainian. To this end, I analyze the biographical and historical-philosophical contexts of writing «Inner Experience». I observe the main events of the thinker’s life, which led to the writing of this work and testify to Bataille’s opposition to the most common artistic movements of (...) the time (surrealism), philosophical theo- ries (existentialism), religious teachings, and, in fact, anti-systemic nature of his work. In addi- tion, the paper tends to identify sources of influence on the formation of philosophical views of Bataille in the period of «Inner Experience» writing. In particular, I analyze the theoretical and political relations of Bataille, especially with his critics (Belgian surrealists group, G. Marcel, J.-P. Sartre), but also allies (M. Blanchot, P. Klossowski, M. Leiris, H. Masson and others). Further, I study the genesis of the concept of «internal experience» formation, its inherent multi- faceted, multi-layered,and metaphorical nature, rooting in the tradition of Christian mysticism and reflecting the state after the loss of faith at the same time. Particularly, I study the image of the labyrinth as one of the most expressive synonyms of internal experience term, which empha- sizes the meaning of this fundamental word-concept of Bataille’s philosophy. To provide the in- tellectual context, I list main points of Bataille’s «Inner Experience» critique by representatives of the French intellectual communities of the 1940s, as well as the main Bataille’s arguments against this critique. Eventually, I analyze the main ideas of his «Inner Experience», as well as the ways how Bataille’s philosophy influenced the key representatives of the French poststruc- turalism (J. Derrida, M. Foucault, J. Kristeva, J.-F. Lyotard). (shrink)

A modular analysis of spontaneous language use provides support for the existence of an identifiable step in language evolution, protolanguage. Our suggestion is that a grammarless form of expression would have evolved to signal unexpected events, a behavior still prevalent in our species. Words could not be so specific as to refer to whole, non-recurring, situations. They referred to elements such as objects or locations, and the communicated event was inferred metonymically. Compositionality was achieved, without syntax, through multi-metonymy, as (...) words referring to elements of the same situation were concatenated into proto-utterances. (shrink)

The article explores the complex and multi-dimensional relationship between organization and discourse, using interview data and written documents collected within banks in Sweden, Germany and Britain. The first part of the analysis, which examines the extent to which the organizations studied can be said to form discourse units in their own right, shows that management ideas, norms and values seem to have a considerable impact on bank discourse. Although the discourse found in different banks naturally has many features in (...) common, each organization is found to be created at least partly differently by its discourse. Analyses of sender markings, expressive illocutions and expressions of thanks to the staff show how discourse is part of the construction of an organizational culture in relation to ideas concerning leadership, hierarchy, centralization etc. The second part of the analysis focuses on the role of the national community in the formation of an organization. An analysis of the bank images disseminated in spoken discourse and documents points to differences which could be attributed to national cultural patterns. The interview data further show how much effort is devoted to internally and externally disseminated images; this could be seen as a sign of an awareness among management of the decisive role of the spoken and written word for their company. (shrink)

Emotion recognition is an important part of building an intelligent human-computer interaction system and plays an important role in human-computer interaction. Often, people express their feelings through a variety of symbols, such as words and facial expressions. A business ecosystem is an economic community based on interacting organizations and individuals. Over time, they develop their capabilities and roles together and tend to develop themselves in the direction of one or more central enterprises. This paper aims to study a multimodal (...) ER method based on attention mechanism. It analyzes the current emotional state of consumers and the development direction of enterprises through multi-modal ER of human emotions and analysis of market trends, so as to provide the most appropriate response or plan. This paper firstly describes the related methods of multimodal ER and deep learning in detail, and briefly outlines the meaning of enterprise strategy in the business ecosystem. Then, two datasets, CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, are selected to design the scheme for multimodal ER based on self-attention mechanism. Through the comparative analysis of the accuracy of single-modal and multi-modal ER, the self-attention mechanism is applied in the experiment. The experimental results show that the average recognition accuracy of happy under multimodal ER reaches 91.5%. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

Human instructors often refer to objects and actions involved in a task description using both linguistic and non-linguistic means of communication. Hence, for robots to engage in natural human-robot interactions, we need to better understand the various relevant aspects of human multi-modal task descriptions. We analyse reference resolution to objects in a data collection comprising two object manipulation tasks and find that 78.76% of all referring expressions to the objects relevant in Task 1 are verbally underspecified and 88.64% (...) of all referring expressions are verbally underspecified in Task 2. The data strongly suggests that a language processing module for robots must be genuinely multi-modal, allowing for seamless integration of information transmitted in the verbal and the visual channel, whereby tracking the speaker’s eye gaze and gestures as well as object recognition are necessary preconditions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Proclus: Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Science by Lucas SiorvanesP.A. MeijerLucas Siorvanes. Proclus: Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Science. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Pp. xv+ 340. Cloth, $35.00.This book will be welcomed by scholars of Proclus and by readers unfamiliar with Proclus alike. There are not many introductory books on Proclus. And Siorvanes presents in an interesting way the latest developments in scholarship. [End Page 160]Siorvanes gives an account of (...) Proclus’s life and times, his position in the Athenian Neoplatonic school, and his influence and offers a panoramic view of Proclus’s philosophy in the chapters: “General Metaphysics,” “Knowledge and the levels of Being,” “Physics and Metaphysics,” and “Stars and Planets.” He presents not only Proclus’s views on physics and astronomy, but also his poetics (189).Siorvanes deals competently with Proclus’s metaphysics, analyzing it in its own right and as the indispensable background of his scientific views. His summaries are on the whole adequate and instructive. But a scheme or outline of levels of the multi-layered Proclean system of Gods (Henads), such as that offered by H. D. Saffrey and L. G. Westerink in Proclus, Théologie Platonicienne (Paris 1968) for example, would have facilitated understanding.In an impressive description of Proclus’s historical influence, Siorvanes establishes connections between Proclus’s ideas and modern views in metaphysics, mathematics, physics, logic and astronomy. Yet a warning would be appropriate in this context. There is, for instance, the strikingly modern Proclean theory that planets have satellites. Perhaps Siorvanes is too much enamoured with these modern Proclean theories. Though he recognizes that the theory about the satellites is really a consequence of Proclus’s metaphysics (268–271), he fails to emphasize that Proclus’s modern-seeming theories are no less speculative than other ancient theories. Neither Proclus’s metaphysics nor his mathematics can replace evidence as used in modern science. Thus, the rather triumphal tones Sioravanes sounds in this regard are somewhat out of place. The incidental similarities in theoretical structures and patterns that emerge in the course of history are interesting to note, but we should beware of becoming too enthusiastic about their significance. The so-called indirect influence may be due precisely to the structure of problems and the (limited) range of possible solutions.I would raise some objections to Siorvanes’s manner of translating and interpreting the Greek word for “to be” (einai) or “Being” (on). As is often done, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, Siorvanes alternatively uses “being,” “existence” and “reality,” without being aware of the fact that in ancient philosophy the Greek words “on/ousia” (“Being”) generally do not admit of the translation “existence.” Such translations are anachronistic and wrong. “Reality” is entirely inappropriate as a translation. As an essentially medieval expression, the word “reality” (realitas) as such is nowhere to be found in antiquity. When Proclus presents his multilevel system of Being, there are no degrees of reality in the sense that one transcendent level is more real than another. There are only degrees of Being. The problematic nature of the issue stands out even more when one speaks about not being. “Being” interpreted as “reality” suggests that what is not being, has no reality. But that is not what Proclus meant to say. The translation “existence” is bound to bring about similar misunderstandings. The notion “existence” is seldom in the focus of the interest when an ancient philosopher uses “einai.” Thus, an innocent reader of Siorvanes’s book may despair when he encounters “real existence” as a translation for “ousia” (124). Do the levels of being other than the one called “ousia” exist or do they not exist? If they do not, Proclus’s entire philosophy would be incoherent, and our world would not even exist or possess “reality.” But this is not what Proclus or Siorvanes mean. To avoid misunderstandings, we should use only “Being” (and “to be”) as translations. [End Page 161]There are also problems with some aspects of Siorvanes’s description of participation. In picturing the connection of the entity that is participated (methekton), what is given to the participant (metechomenon) and the participant (metechon), the terms “predication” and... (shrink)

A modular analysis of spontaneous language use provides support for the existence of an identifiable step in language evolution, protolanguage. Our suggestion is that a grammarless form of expression would have evolved to signal unexpected events, a behavior still prevalent in our species. Words could not be so specific as to refer to whole, non-recurring, situations. They referred to elements such as objects or locations, and the communicated event was inferred metonymically. Compositionality was achieved, without syntax, through multi-metonymy, as (...) words referring to elements of the same situation were concatenated into proto-utterances. (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mind, Theaters, and the Anatomy of ConsciousnessDonald Beecher"All unified theories of cognition today involve theater metaphors."—Bernard J. BaarsAmong the most perplexing challenges for cognitive philoso-phers are those pertaining to representationalism, Gilbert Ryle's denial of the "ghost in the machine," the languages of cognition, and the "self" as the one-time audience and author of consciousness.1 Each of these topics can be discussed metaphorically in terms of the theater. The mind (...) is a kind of acting space in which thoughts and images are in some fashion prepared and represented in rapid sequence. Consciousness is a theatrical machine behind which there is a director who helps to determine how the narrative of the mind will play itself out. The discrete "I" is not only the prompter of consciousness, but its audience, receiving all that is played in the mind's theater. Or, in the words of C. S. Sherrington, "each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, in comedy, farce or tragedy by a dramatis persona, the 'self,' and so it will be until the curtain drops."2 The problem, however, is that in matters so difficult to comprehend as the workings of the human brain and the mind operations attached to it, metaphors develop vectors of their own that shade and nuance understanding in ways that obstruct the plasticity of analysis. For this reason, theater analogies in relation to consciousness have been widely endorsed in characterizing its distinctive operations, yet widely criticized for epitomizing the philosophical thinking in the past (and the present) that detaches consciousness from the emotions, the body, and the material world. For the latter reason, the metaphor of [End Page 1] the theater will generally be found wanting, as it is in Dennett's assault on what he labels "the Cartesian theater." And yet there are compelling reasons why this metaphor may persist for a time to come as the image of choice for illustrating the operations of consciousness.Arguably, the earliest intimations of mind as resembling a theater emerged at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It was not only an age that fostered a renewed interest in dramatized spectacle, but one that confronted, through theater metaphors, the illusory nature of human experience. The rise of the modern theater, and speculations upon reality in relation to happenings in the mind, are quite separate phenomena, but, arguably, a sense of the theater as a place of memory, of illusions projected as realities, and of experience provided the best "thought experiment" for dealing with the paradoxes of mentation. In fact, the emerging sense of reality as an illusion was tantamount to a major paradigm shift, one that has remained at the center of western philosophy from the time of Descartes to the present day. That there could be a disparity between the phenomena of mind and the world of extension was a watershed in epistemological thinking, and it followed, as a matter of course, that the illusions associated with perception would find expression in the illusions associated with theatrical representation. The result was that the medieval metaphor of the speculum, emphasizing the mind as the faithful reflection of reality, was replaced by the theater, in which the necessary conventions permitting belief came to bear on the understanding of the data which the mind represented to itself. In short, conventions are to the theater what adequate representation is to the mind—the necessary slippages whereby perceptions function as reality.Parallel insights into the mind as a theater came about through sixteenth-century inquiries into mnemonics techniques for the improvement of memory. This metaphor of mind came about by analogy with memory theaters of the kind epitomized in the Idea del Theatro (1550) of Giulio Camillo. He chose the theater simply as the most apt edifice in which to house his elaborate set of memory prompts. His goal was to devise an actual working machine for enhancing recall. He chose the theater because of its architectural complexity and multi-sectionality which he could in turn invest with information. Yet insofar as the theater functioned in relation to memory through the art of mnemonics, it became an extension of mind, and... (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 310—311. Writing Death . Jeremy Fernando, foreword by Avital Ronell. Den Haag: Uitgeverij. 2011 ISBN: 978-90-817091-0-1 Rite and ceremony as well as legend bound the living and the dead in a common partnership. They were esthetic but they were more than esthetic. The rites of mourning expressed more than grief; the war and harvest dance were more than a gathering of energy for tasks to be performed; magic was more than a way of commanding forces of nature (...) to do the bidding of man; feasts were more than a satisfaction of hunger. Each of these communal modes of activity united the practical, the social, and the educative in an integrated whole having esthetic form.(1) Jeremy Fernando’s Writing Death is a sensitive attempt at exploring the depths and heights to which the processes of mourning can take us. Death, as an absence, renders all gestures (for what is mourning but a gesture with many faces) surrounding it at once as a possibility and an impossibility. Fernando poses questions that often elude the mourner and the mourned—the same, and different—by raising the specter of subject and object; by compelling the examination of what it actually means to mourn; and most crucially, by considering the very status of possibility itself that the act of mourning foregrounds. Mourning, he reminds us, is premised upon memory (remembrance, recollection), the shadow of forgetting upon which is perpetually cast—the inextricability between memory and forgetting haunts the living more than it does the dead. And if grief has anything to do with it, mourning can quite easily be mistaken for an attempt to remember in order to forget; an attempt, in other words, to deny death, deny the one thing that confirms mortality. As if living has anything to do with it. What, then, of writing death? It becomes an unceasing process of locating—and addressing—possibility itself: the passing as possibility; loss as possibility; impossibility as, and of, naming this possibility. In confronting the passing on, it is possible, nay inevitable, to move on, move away from the site of loss, of grief. All the while, we forget, Fernando reminds us, that mourning has little to do with the dead, and a whole lot to do with the living, the mourning self. Here, he echoes Dewey’s consolidation of rituals and ceremonies, of the dead and of the living, all as parts of a larger unity, of a social, public gesture meant to sate a private need: In trying to “get over it,” are we trying to get over ourselves? Or more than that: are we trying to get over the fact that we can never quite get over ourselves? (Fernando, 77) As if guilt has anything to do with it. And “it” continues to be the point that he is driving at, driving towards. “It” is the possibility and impossibility, death and life, memory and forgetting, lost and cherished. “It” is what eludes mourning, eludes attempts to overcome grief. Nonetheless, move on, he must. And Fernando does this in fewer moves than a 12-step program—hardly therapeutic, but intellectually satisfying. Writing Death attends to some of the pertinent aspects of the act of mourning—both as gesture and as meditation: eulogy, distress (call), tears, and the question of how (beyond ritual, beyond sentimentality) to mourn. And what’s love got to do with it? Everything and nothing. Mourning, after all, is an articulation of love, but it is also one that forces the mourner to be selective, as with myth-making, in the recollection: Remembering only ever occurs in exception to memory—quite possibly in betrayal of a memory. In this way, each remembrance is a naming of that memory, a naming of something as memory, bringing with it an act of violence. (40) Mourning is thus not only an act of fictionalizing, it is also an act of reading, to continually be compelled to respond to another, all the while keeping vigil against a reconceptualization of the dead, without, therefore, misreading the dead. This can only be done, Fernando argues, by all the while “maintaining the otherness of the other. After all, one must try not to forget that one cannot be too close—space is needed—to touch.” (82) There is also tacit acknowledgement that doing so foregrounds the fact that the selectivity of memory becomes exclusive, and concretizes into a singularity, thus negating the multi-dimensionality of a life lived – and thus killing the already dead. Writing Death is framed by two eulogies—or the approximations of eulogies; approximation because both foreground and call into question the eulogy as a genre. The first is Avital Ronell’s foreword to the book, remembering Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; the second is Fernando’s own response to the passing of a mentor, Jean Baudrillard. Both are not merely attempts to philosophize their way out of the act of mourning. Both are in fact deeply moving pieces that remind us of the emotional possibilities that may reside within any intellectual undertaking, that the latter need not be cold and devoid of feelings. And whereas Writing Death does not attempt to make any philosophical claim for humanism, the underlying wistfulness of both pieces does suggest that there is a proper place for deep-seated human response to death. We can (and the book does) intellectualize and problematize the acts of mourning and grieving, but these do not diminish the fact that we mourn and grieve. And, framing Writing Death as the two eulogies do, Jeremy Fernando perhaps finally, and inadvertently, names “It”—it is, above everything else, Human. August, 2011 Singapore NOTES (1) Dewey, John. Art as Experience . New York: Perigee, 1934. (shrink)

How to interpret the “molecular gene” concept is discussed in this paper. I argue that the architecture of biological systems is hierarchical and multi-layered, exhibiting striking similarities to that of modern computers. Multiple layers exist between the genotype and system level property, the phenotype. This architectural complexity gives rise to the intrinsic complexity of the genotype-phenotype relationships. The notion of a gene being for a phenotypic trait or traits lacks adequate consideration of this complexity and has limitations in explaining (...) the genotype-phenotype relationships. I explore ways toward an integrative interpretation of the gene in the context of multi-layered biological systems. A gene, I argue, should be interpreted as a functional unit that is responsible for the trans-generation passage of the capacity to dynamically produce a biochemical activity or biochemical activities. At the molecular level, a gene is a genetic unit, a stretch of DNA sequence, which dictates the behavior and the dynamic production of the encoded cellular component(s). Embedded in a gene’s quadruple DNA code are the regulatory signals, such as those for RNA splicing and/or editing, as well as for transcription factor binding. A regulatory signal can be recognized by the gene expression machinery in one state, but not in another. The confusion caused by RNA splicing, editing, and a gene’s selective tissue distribution pattern is addressed. Instead of a context-dependent definition of the gene, I argue for the view that it is the same gene displaying multiple meanings, subject to differential interpretation by the cellular machinery in different states. In other words, the same gene gives rise to different products and expression levels under different conditions. (shrink)

For many years, it has been common-ground in semantics and in philosophy of language that semantics is in the business of providing a full explanation about how propositional meanings are obtained. This orthodox picture seems to be in trouble these days, as an increasing number of authors now hold that semantics does not deal with thought-contents. Some of these authors have embraced a “thin meanings” view, according to which lexical meanings are too schematic to enter propositional contents. I will suggest (...) that it is plausible to adopt thin semantics for a class of words. However, I’ll also hold that some classes of words, like kind terms, plausibly have richer lexical meanings, and so that an adequate theory of word meaning may have to combine thin and rich semantics. (shrink)

In this paper, I assess the relative merits of two semantic frameworks for slurring terms. Each aims to distinguish slurs from their neutral counterparts via their semantics. On one, recently developed by Kent Bach, that which differentiates the slurring term from its neutral counterpart is encoded as a ‘loaded’ descriptive content. Whereas the neutral counterpart ‘NC’ references a group, the slur has as its content “NC, and therefore contemptible”. On the other, a version of hybrid expressivism, the semantically encoded aspect (...) of a slurring term that distinguishes it from its neutral counterpart is, rather, expressed. A speaker who uses the slurring term references the group referenced by the neutral counterpart and, in addition, expresses her contempt for the target. On this view, while the speaker’s attitude may be evaluated for appropriateness, the expressivist component of slurring terms is truth-conditionally irrelevant. The reference to the group, and only the reference to the group, contributes to truth conditions. I’ll argue that hybrid expressivism offers a more parsimonious analysis of slurs’ projective behavior than loaded descriptivism and that its truth conditional semantics is not inferior to the possible accounts available for loaded descriptivism. I also meet Bach’s important objection that hybrid expressivism cannot account for uses of slurring terms in indirect quotation and attitude attributions. (shrink)

Should our commitment to freedom of speech extend to freedom of hate speech: speech that promotes hatred toward an individual or group on the basis of a characteristic such as race, gender, sexuality, nationality, or religion—often, although perhaps not exclusively, using slurs and epithets? Drawing on philosophy of language and empirical research, this essay outlines five theoretical models of how hate speech may function, and explores their implications for this issue. I argue that (some) hate speech can be regulated without (...) compromising freedom of expression; and furthermore that, under certain circumstances, considerations of free speech may favour regulating hate speech. (shrink)