This paper aims for a more robust epistemological disjunctivism (ED) by offering on its behalf a new and better response to the ‘new evil genius’ problem. The first section articulates the ‘new evil genius challenge’ (NEG challenge) to ED, specifying its two components: the ‘first-order’ and ‘diagnostic’ problems for ED. The first-order problem challenges proponents of ED to offer some explanation of the intuition behind the thought that your radically deceived duplicate is no less justified than (...) you are for adopting her perceptual beliefs. In the second section, I argue that 'blamelessness' explanations are inadequate to the task and offer better explanations in their place—that of ‘trait-level virtue’ and ‘reasonability’. The diagnostic problem challenges proponents of ED to explain why it is that classical internalists disagree with them about how to interpret 'new evil genius' considerations. The proponent of ED owes some error theory. I tackle this problem in the third section, arguing that classical internalists overlook disjunctivist interpretations of new evil genius intuitions owing to a mistaken commitment to a ‘vindicatory’ explanation of perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

(NEG) is widely accepted both by internalist and by externalists. In fact, there have been very few opponents of (NEG). Timothy Williamson (e.g., 2000) rejects (NEG), for reasons that have by now received a great deal of scrutiny.2 John McDowell also rejects (NEG), but his reasons have not received the scrutiny they deserve. This is in large part because those reasons have not been well understood. We believe that McDowell’s challenge to (NEG) is important, worthy of fair assessment, and maybe (...) even correct. In this paper, we explain McDowell’s challenge to (NEG), and also explain how McDowell can address a seemingly fatal objection to his view. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 25 This paper aims for a more robust epistemological disjunctivism by offering on its behalf a new and _better_ response to the ‘new evil genius’ problem. The first section articulates the ‘new evil genius challenge’ to ED, specifying its two components: the ‘first-order’ and ‘diagnostic’ problems for ED. The first-order problem challenges proponents of ED to offer some understanding of the intuition behind the thought that your radically deceived duplicate is no less (...) justified than you are for adopting her perceptual beliefs. In the second section, the author argues that _blamelessness_ explanations are inadequate to the task and offer better explanations in their place—that of ‘trait-level virtue’ and ‘reasonability’. The diagnostic problem challenges proponents of ED to explain why it is that _classical_ internalists disagree with them about how to interpret new evil genius considerations. The proponent of ED owes some error theory. The author engages this problem in the third section, arguing that classical internalists are misled to overlook disjunctivist interpretations of new evil genius thinking owing to a mistaken commitment to a kind of ‘vindicatory’ explanation of proper perceptual belief. (shrink)

In common with traditional forms of epistemic internalism, epistemological disjunctivism attempts to incorporate an awareness condition on justification. Unlike traditional forms of internalism, however, epistemological disjunctivism rejects the so-called New Evil Genius thesis. In so far as epistemological disjunctivism rejects the New Evil Genius thesis, it is revisionary. -/- After explaining what epistemological disjunctivism is, and how it relates to traditional forms of epistemic internalism / externalism, I shall argue that the epistemological disjunctivist’s account of the (...) intuitions underlying the New Evil Genius thought experiment is at best incomplete. As presented, therefore, epistemological disjunctivism is unable to accommodate the core guiding intuitions of epistemic internalism. Given the stated aim of not being revisionary on this score, the view is at a dialectical disadvantage over the traditional forms of epistemic internalism the position is meant to replace. Unfortunately, therefore, at present, the impasse between internalism and externalism remains. (shrink)

The over-arching claim that I intend to defend in this paper is that while widespread ‘local’ error is conceivable, we cannot, in the end, make sense of the radical sceptical idea that all our perceptual beliefs might be false – that no one has, as it were, ever been in touch with an ‘external world’ at all. To this end, I will show that an asymmetry exists between ‘local’ and ‘global’ sceptical scenarios, such that the possibility of ‘local’ error does (...) not imply that ‘global’ error must also be possible. Instead, we will see that what gives rise to the radical sceptical problem is an unquestioned acceptance of the ‘New Evil Genius Thesis’ (NET) – the notion that I and my ‘envatted’ counterpart share the same perceptual experiences, even though my benighted twin has never had any contact with an ‘external’ reality. Although most contemporary epistemologists take NET for granted, I will show that it cannot, ultimately, be rendered intelligible, and, consequently, that neither can the ‘global’ sceptical scenario that depends on it. (shrink)

This thesis offers a fresh interpretation and defense of epistemological disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge. I adopt a multilevel approach according to which perceptual knowledge on one level can enjoy factive rational support provided by perceptual knowledge of the same proposition on a different level. Here I invoke a distinction Ernest Sosa draws between ‘judgmental’ and ‘merely functional’ belief to articulate what I call the bifurcated conception of perceptual knowledge. The view that results is a form of epistemological disjunctivism about perceptual (...) knowledge specifically at the higher judgmental level, layered over a straightforward externalism about perceptual knowledge at the lower merely functional level. The first chapter orients the reader to epistemological disjunctivism— with particular emphasis on the ‘reflective epistemological disjunctivism’ defended by Duncan Pritchard with inspiration from John McDowell. Here I review the arguments for thinking such a proposal true, as well as highlight some problems and three emerging challenges for the view: what I call the internalist challenge, the new access challenge, and the ‘new evil genius’ challenge. These challenges largely inspire the chapters to follow. In the second chapter I present the positive proposal: a fresh interpretation of epistemological disjunctivism in terms of perceptual knowledge at the specifically judgmental level. I argue that this is a modification that epistemological disjunctivists should adopt since it inoculates their view against the internalist challenge: the challenge of explaining why perception should provide one with knowledge by providing one with motivating reasons for belief. In the third chapter I motivate the view further in connection with the more familiar ‘basis problem’ for epistemological disjunctivism. I argue that this approach supports a unique strategy for solving that problem: one that is consistent both with what is known as ‘the entailment’ thesis and the thought that we can reduce perceptual knowledge to a kind of rationally supported belief. In the fourth chapter I move to playing defense. I defend the proposal against the so-called ‘new evil genius’ challenge. This is the challenge to explain why subjects in pairs of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cases can seem equally justified for sustaining their perceptual beliefs. I argue that what we are being sensitive to here, rather, is the fact that both subjects can be equally epistemically responsible and/or reasonable for believing what they do. Before concluding this chapter I also offer an error theory. In the fifth chapter I defend the proposal against the new access challenges raised in chapter one. These alleged challenges for epistemological disjunctivism arise specifically for versions of reflective epistemological disjunctivism that hold that one’s rational support for perceptual beliefs is not only factive but reflectively accessible as well. Rather than address the challenges head on, I try to dislodge the thought they depend upon—viz., that one’s factive rational support for perceptual beliefs is reflectively accessible to the subject. Here I argue that the reflective accessibility of one’s factive rational support is actually a wheel turning idly in the debate with the underdetermination-based radical sceptic—so that we can simply drop it without consequence. The result is an epistemological disjunctivism that is immune to access problems. I then offer a final summary and conclude. At the end of this thesis I have attached an appendix, which is an excursion into religious epistemology and an exploration of a form of religious epistemological disjunctivism. Here I apply the epistemological disjunctivist insight to the case of religious perception in order to defend the idea that one can offer independent rational support for theistic belief by appealing to religious beliefs that are justified on the basis of religious experiences. This appendix chapter is in keeping with the general spirit of the thesis insofar as it seeks to developed epistemological disjunctivism in new and fruitful directions. (shrink)

In this paper I consider a recent argument of Timothy Williamson’s that epistemic internalism and content externalism are indeed incompatible, and since he takes content externalism to be above reproach, so much the worse for epistemic internalism. However, I argue that epistemic internalism, properly understood, remains substantially unaffected no matter which view of content turns out to be correct. What is key to the New Evil Genius thought experiment is that, given everything of which the inhabitants are consciously (...) aware, the two worlds are subjectively indistinguishable for them, which is what matters on internalist accounts of epistemic justification. I argue that even if a standard moral of the New Evil Genius intuition is untenable due to considerations arising from content externalism, the case can be understood as supporting epistemic internalism in a way that is wholly compatible with content externalism. In short, epistemic internalism is committed to sameness of justificatory status between subjectively indistinguishable counterparts, not sameness of content of their justifiers. (shrink)

The Illusion of Doubt shows that radical scepticism is an illusion generated by a Cartesian picture of our evidential situation—the view that my epistemic grounds in both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ cases must be the same. It is this picture which issues both a standing invitation to radical scepticism and ensures that there is no way of getting out of it while agreeing to the sceptic’s terms. The sceptical problem cannot, therefore, be answered ‘directly’. Rather, the assumptions that give (...) rise to it, need to be undermined. These include the notion that radical scepticism can be motivated by the ‘closure’ principle for knowledge, that the ‘Indistinguishability Argument’ renders the Cartesian conception compulsory, that the ‘New Evil Genius Thesis’ is coherent, and the demand for a ‘global validation’ of our epistemic practices makes sense. Once these dogmas are undermined, the path is clear for a ‘realism without empiricism’ that allows us to re-establish unmediated contact with the objects and persons in our environment which an illusion of doubt had threatened to put forever beyond our cognitive grasp. (shrink)

I will argue that cases of massive deception, such as New Evil Demon cases, as well as one-off cases of local deception present challenges to views according to which epistemic reasons, epistemic warrant, epistemic rationality or epistemic norms are factive. In doing so, I will argue is that proponents of a factive turn in epistemology should observe important distinctions between what are often simply referred to as ‘bad cases.’ Recognizing epistemologically significant differences between deception cases raises serious challenges for (...) those who deny a central role for non-factive aspects of epistemology. (shrink)

The New Evil Demon Problem presents a serious challenge to externalist theories of epistemic justification. In recent years, externalists have developed a number of strategies for responding to the problem. A popular line of response involves distinguishing between a belief’s being epistemically justified and a subject’s being epistemically blameless for holding it. The apparently problematic intuitions the New Evil Demon Problem elicits, proponents of this response claim, track the fact that the deceived subject is epistemically blameless for believing (...) as she does, not that she is justified for so believing. This general strategy—which I call the “unjustified-but-blameless maneuver”—is motivated, in part, by the assumption that the distinction between epistemic justification and blamelessness is merely an extension of the familiar distinction between moral justification and blamelessness. In this paper, I consider three ways of drawing the distinction between justification and blamelessness familiar from the moral domain: the first in terms of a connection with reactive attitudes, the second in terms of the distinction between wrongness and wronging, and the third in terms of reasons-responsiveness. All three ways of drawing the distinction, I argue, make it difficult to see how an analogous distinction in the epistemic domain could help externalists explain away the intuitions which underwrite the New Evil Demon Problem. Motivating the unjustified-but-blameless maneuver, I conclude, is a much less straightforward task than its proponents tend to assume. (shrink)

For Descartes, nature must be interpreted through a limited number of simple laws used to describe the multiplicity of the real, focusing on the rule and normality rather than on the exception and monstrosity. Nevertheless, monstrosity has a vital function in Descartes' philosophy. By offering a new reading of the evil genius and the deceiver God in terms of absolute monstrosity, I intend to demonstrate the novel role played by the will in this philosophical ‘teratomachy’. Examining the peculiar (...) status Admiration occupies in the economy of the passions, I also analyze a passage from the Cogitationes circa generatione animalium , the only text in which Descartes explicitly discusses physical monstrosities. I argue that these pages, in which Descartes subscribes to a rigidly mechanistic, epigenetic view of embryology, are in tension with his doctrine of final causes and the idea of continuous creation. My theory is that the entire philosophy of Descartes can be read as a veritable war against a certain idea of monstrosity. (shrink)

Gerald A. Press - Platon: Penseur du visuel - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.3 487-488 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Gerald A. Press Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center Michail Maiatsky. Platon: Penseur du visuel. Commentaires philosophiques. Paris: l'Harmattan, 2005. Pp. 299. €25.50. Recent philosophers and cultural critics have written a new chapter in the long history of anti-Platonism, making Plato the evil (...) genius of a visual prejudice allegedly infecting the heart of Western metaphysics. Some find it contradictory that Plato expresses anti-visual thoughts but seems nevertheless deeply pro-visual; thus, his frequent use of visual language confuses his project. Others (the present reviewer.. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

An overview of the new evil demon problem.

This essay examines René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. It argues that the evil genius is the meditator who narrates Meditations and that Descartes’ goal in Meditation One is to transform his readers into evil geniuses. This account of the evil genius is significant because it explains why the evil genius must be finite and why it cannot call mathematics or logic into doubt. Further, it highlights the need to read the Meditations on (...) two levels—one examining the meditator’s line of thinking on its own terms and the other exploring Descartes’ reasons for depicting the meditator’s progress in the way that he does. (shrink)

The New Evil Demon Problem is often seen as a serious objection to externalist theories of justification. In fact, some internalists think it is a decisive counterexample to externalism. Recently, Moon has argued that internalists face their own New Evil Demon Problem. According to Moon, it is possible for a demon to remove one’s unaccessed mental states while leaving the justificatory status of her accessed mental states unaffected. Since this is contrary to the claims of many forms of (...) internalism, Moon maintains that his New Evil Demon Problem for Internalism shows that internalists face a problem that is just as troubling as the original NEDP. I argue that moderate internalists have nothing to fear from Moon’s demon. (shrink)

Stewart Cohen’s New Evil Demon argument raises familiar and widely discussed concerns for reliabilist accounts of epistemic justification. A now standard response to this argument, initiated by Alvin Goldman and Ernest Sosa, involves distinguishing different notions of justification. Juan Comesaña has recently and prominently claimed that his Indexical Reliabilism (IR) offers a novel solution in this tradition. We argue, however, that Comesaña’s proposal suffers serious difficulties from the perspective of the philosophy of language. More specifically, we show that the (...) two readings of sentences involving the word ‘justified’ which are required for Comesaña’s solution to the problem are not recoverable within the two-dimensional framework of Robert Stalnaker to which he appeals. We then consider, and reject, an attempt to overcome this difficulty by appeal to a complication of the theory involving counterfactuals, and conclude the paper by sketching our own preferred solution to Cohen’s New Evil Demon. (shrink)

I extend my direct virtue epistemology to explain how a knowledge-first framework can account for two kinds of positive epistemic standing, one tracked by externalists, who claim that the virtuous duplicate lacks justification, the other tracked by internalists, who claim that the virtuous duplicate has justification, and moreover that such justification is not enjoyed by the vicious duplicate. It also explains what these kinds of epistemic standing have to do with each other. I argue that all justified beliefs are good (...) candidates for knowledge, and are such because they are exercises of competences to know. However, there are two importantly different senses in which a belief may be a good candidate for knowledge, one corresponding to an externalist kind of justification and the other corresponding to an internalist one. I show how the account solves the new evil demon problem in a more satisfactory way than existing accounts. We end up with a view of knowledge, justification, and rationality that is plausible, motivated, and theoretically unified. (shrink)

In my paper ‘Three Forms of Internalism and the New Evil Demon Problem,’ I argued that the new evil demon problem, long considered to be one of the biggest obstacles for externalism, is also a problem for virtually all internalists. In (McCain 2014a) and in his recent book (McCain 2014b), Kevin McCain provides a challenging and thought provoking reasons for thinking that many internalists do not have any such problem. In this paper, I’ll provide some replies to McCain. (...) Of note, I’ll show that a Frankfurt-style counterfactual intervener, who commonly appears in the free will literature, can also serve as a new evil demon in the epistemology literature. (shrink)

This article commemorates Jean Baudrillard’s career with an account of the consistency of his interventionist logic, the subtlety of his styles of argument and the prescience of his observations. It provides an account of Baudrillard’s sustained engagement with the intensification of simulation that has increasingly codified trends in communications, technology politics, the social, the psychological and economics in the name of functionality. The consistency of Baudrillard’s arguments belies the many superficial judgements made about them, which were anyway often knowingly encouraged (...) by Baudrillard’s rhetorical strategies. (shrink)

The new evil demon problem is often considered to be a serious obstacle for externalist theories of epistemic justification. In this paper, I aim to show that the new evil demon problem also afflicts the two most prominent forms of internalism: moderate internalism and historical internalism. Since virtually all internalists accept at least one of these two forms, it follows that virtually all internalists face the NEDP. My secondary thesis is that many epistemologists – including both internalists and (...) externalists – face a dilemma. The only form of internalism that is immune to the NEDP, strong internalism, is a very radical and revisionary view – a large number of epistemologists would have to significantly revise their views about justification in order to accept it. Hence, either epistemologists must accept a theory that is susceptible to the NEDP or accept a very radical and revisionary view. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the value of epistemic justification cannot be adequately explained as being instrumental to truth. I intend to show that false belief, which is no means to truth, can nevertheless still be of epistemic value. This in turn will make a good prima facie case that justification is valuable for its own sake. If this is right, we will have also found reason to think that truth value monism is false: assuming that true belief does (...) have value, there is more of final epistemic value than mere true belief. (shrink)

This article commemorates Jean Baudrillard’s career with an account of the consistency of his interventionist logic, the subtlety of his styles of argument and the prescience of his observations. It provides an account of Baudrillard’s sustained engagement with the intensification of simulation that has increasingly codified trends in communications, technology politics, the social, the psychological and economics in the name of functionality. The consistency of Baudrillard’s arguments belies the many superficial judgements made about them, which were anyway often knowingly encouraged (...) by Baudrillard’s rhetorical strategies. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider whether it makes sense to say that our cognitive capacities—remembering, imagining, intending, hoping, expecting and so on—manifest as inner, subpersonal processes. Given whether something makes sense is a grammatical rather than theoretical or empirical issue, it cannot be explained but can only be better understood by describing and reflecting on situations in which it arises. As such, I approach this issue using the descriptive method of O.K. Bouwsma, which is a development of Wittgenstein's latter methodological (...) approach of conceptually clarifying our bounds of sense. In the course of my investigation, I come to the realisation that cognitive capacities do not, as much psychology and cognitive science imply, make sense as inner, subpersonal processes. Instead, they make sense as personal capacities, which manifest in many ways of acting. (shrink)

The New Evil Demon Problem is meant to show that reliabilism about epistemic justification is incompatible with the intuitive idea that the external-world beliefs of a subject who is the victim of a Cartesian demon could be epistemically justified. Here, I present a new argument that such beliefs can be justified on reliabilism. Whereas others have argued for this conclusion by making some alterations in the formulation of reliabilism, I argue that, as far as the said problem is concerned, (...) such alterations are redundant. No reliabilist should fear the demon. (shrink)

Descartes refuted skepticism in 1641. George Berkeley refuted skepticism in 1710. O.K. Bouwsma refuted skepticism in 1949. Hilary Putnam refuted skepticism in 1981. The locus classicus for the form of skepticism refuted is Descartes' Meditations -- which also goes on to set out a famous realist refutation of skepticism. Indeed, Descartes is the principal inventor of the philosophic enterprise of skepticism refutation so central to Modern philosophy and its epistemic preoccupations. What the cited successors of Descartes and many others have (...) in common is a rejection of both skepticism and Descartes' refutation of it. Berkeley, Bouwsma and Putnam offer a sophisticated, undercutting, refutation which undermines the very coherence of skepticism. And for all, issues of language and meaning rise to the fore, determining the coherence of any skeptical doubts and constraining the possibilities of systematic error and deception (for Berkeley, these appear as issues about the objects of thought, which in turn are the foundation of the meaning of language). (shrink)

Internalists who argue against reliabilism usually construct thought experiments designed to show how reliability is not necessary or sufficient for justification. Defenders of reliabilism have responded with debunking explanations of the intuitions that people are expected to have when considering anti-reliabilist thought experiments. One defender is Jennifer Nagel, who argues that internalist counterexamples to reliabilism play off of a shift between belief-formation processes that are unconscious and those that involve self-reflection on the contents of one’s conscious states. Nagel aims to (...) show how thought experiments commonly appealed to by internalists rest on a mistake by carefully examining some of the most well-known examples in the literature. However, Nagel’s analysis does not apply on certain counterexamples to reliabilism, such as Cohen’s New Evil Demon. In this paper, I will show that when applied to NED-intuitions, Nagel’s analysis fails, so her argument does not extend to all anti-reliabilist counterexamples. (shrink)

The need to prove the existence of the external world has been a subject that has concerned the rationalist philosophers, particularly Descartes and the empiricist philosophers such as John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. Taking the epoché as the key mark of the phenomenologist—the suspension of the question of the existence of the external world—the issue of the external world should not come under the domain of the phenomenologist. Ironically, however, I would like to suggest that it could be (...) argued that the founder of the phenomenological school of thought, Edmund Husserl, also did not avoid the question of the existence of the external world. What I would like to suggest further is that Immanuel Kant grants himself illicit access to the external world and thus illustrates that the question of the external world is vital to the argument structure of the first Critique. (shrink)

D'habitude on n'attribue qu'une hypothèse du malin génie à Descartes. Malheureusement un tel procédé explique mal un passage crucial de la troisième Méditation où le philosophe semble traiter les simples vérités mathématiques et le "Cogito" de la même manière. Par contre si l'on songe que Descartes a révisé l'hypothèse du malin génie en face de la vérité et la certitude du "Cogito" on est en mesure de rendre compte du passage en question. De plus on est en mesure d'apprécier les (...) vraies limites du scepticisme qu'affiche Descartes dans la première Méditation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Denying the Body? Memory and the Dilemmas of History in DescartesTimothy J. ReissIn an essay first published in The New York Review of Books in January 1983, touching her apprenticeship as writer, the Barbadian /American novelist Paule Marshall described the long afternoon conversations with which her mother and friends used to relax in the family kitchen. She recalled how they saw things as composed of opposites; not torn, but (...) completed and made whole by them.Theirs was not a Manichean brand of dualism that sees matter, flesh, the body, as inherently evil, because they constantly addressed each other as “soully-gal”—soul: spirit; gal: the body, flesh, the visible self. And it was clear from their tone that they gave one as much weight and importance as the other. They had never heard of the mind/body split. 1This closing claim is surely less than self-evident. Whether or not the companions had heard of the mind/body split depends on the meaning given to the verb “hear.” Certainly it was embedded in their language, however much the phrase “soully-gal” might recombine its parts.Did the split come from Descartes and early European debates, linguistically colonizing all those who came within its sphere—Africans, Barbadians, Brooklynites? Did it come from a Christian heritage, with its haggling over bodily mortality and immortality of soul? Who knows? A first point is that it is still an everyday experience, deeply buried in language and so in the ideas, feelings, and meanings expressed in language. A second point is that the post-Cartesian debates—to simplify for a moment with an overly heavy [End Page 587] hand—were and are themselves but a variant within a much longer received wisdom. Nonetheless, such wisdom is now bound to that variant, which, willy-nilly, does give one set of parameters to a common experience—at least, to that of those of us who dwell under Western hegemonies. It gives them also, no doubt, to many who live within them at once less clearly and more contentiously.I would like to offer a further powerful instance here, simply to emphasize what and how much is at stake in the questions to be addressed. It occurs in a writing by the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris, his Palace of the Peacock. First in a tetralogy, this novel recounts something like a journey away from a life of colonial and postcolonial violence and oppression towards a hoped-for rebirth in “fulfilment and understanding.” 2 Early on, the harsh protagonist, Donne, mocks the narrator, his mysterious “double” and “brother,” Dreamer, who has remarked their distance from “the folk.” “Is it a mystery of language and address?” asks Donne. Slightly bewildered, Dreamer struggles to suggest that the obstacle is less of language than of a deeper disjunction:“it’s an inapprehension of substance,” I blurted out, “an actual fear of the substance of life, fear of the substance of the folk, a cannibal blind fear in oneself. Put it how you like,” I cried, “it’s a fear of acknowledging the true substance of life. Yes, fear I tell you, the fear that breeds bitterness in our mouth, the haunting sense of fear that poisons us and hangs us and murders us. And somebody,” I declared, “must demonstrate the unity of being, and show...” I had grown violent and emphatic... “that fear is nothing but a dream and an appearance....” 3Recovery of unity might become a way to defeat political and historical violences. In the next novel in the sequence, one of two self-indulgently whining characters, accused of pining for a woman who has run away to seek education, explodes: “I don’t believe you can begin to see how some body like they born seeking for mind.” 4 For peoples of the colonized Americas, imbued with “the great civilization of the American Indian,” this urge, Harris then wrote in a critical essay, was simply the personal form of a social and political necessity to recover still-living elements of a culture for which “matter truly bore the imprint of genius,” refusing “the taboo of spirituality removed from sensuous direction.” 5 Recently, Harris has worried this... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to ExpressionismDavid MorganA familiar tradition since the eighteenth century has invested art with the power to heal a decadent human condition. Inheriting this ability from religion—the romantic enthusiast Wilhelm Wackenroder considered artistic inspiration to originate in “divine inspiration” in the case of his hero, Raphael 1 —art eventually replaced institutionalized belief in an evolutionary schedule of cultural development determined (...) by German idealism. Hegel, for instance, theorized the evolution of spirit from religion to art as a qualitative advancement over time. Rejecting the metaphysics of German idealism, Friedrich Nietzsche nevertheless contended that “Art raises its head where religions decline.” By assuming the “feelings and moods” of religion which had been dismantled by enlightenment, Nietzsche claimed that art gave new form to the life of feeling and imbued human endeavors with a “loftier, darker coloration.” 2 In the early twentieth century Wassily Kandinsky believed that the “spiritual in art” was the historical manifestation of an “inner necessity” that was in itself timeless and universal. Kandinsky portrayed the “life of the spirit” as “a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts.” In a kind of “trickle down” aesthetic, the compartments of the triangle move slowly upward toward the apex, which is inhabited by the solitary genius of an age whose vision gradually elevates all those who occupy the lower stages. 3 [End Page 317]The point for proponents of the spiritual in art from romanticism to expressionism (and beyond) was to find in works of art what can best be described as an enchantment. 4 As the negotiation of the gaps or disjunctures separating human beings from complete power over their lives, enchantment conjoins the plane of immediate human experience to a desirable state of affairs through the mediation of such symbolic devices as rituals, incantations, or charms. Thus, evil can be warded off by the use of an apotropaic amulet, and fertility can be enhanced by the recitation of a suitable prayer or the performance of a certain ritual. In a modern analogy a sense of impotence is often alleviated by a trip to the mall where the bored therapeutically lose themselves in symbolic acts of self-renewing consumption. In the traditions of philosophy and science, systems of representation such as astrology, the microcosm, the harmony of the spheres, the great chain of being, the celestial hierarchies, or the mechanisms of theurgy and divination situate humanity within a cosmos that follows a particular order accessible to and in some degree manipulable by human beings. Enchantment consists of an apparatus of belief whose form of representation or enactment is thought to exert influence over the realities it configures.But enchantment is not limited to the spells and magic of premodern metaphysics (or modern consumerism). By means of religion, morality, and aesthetics, Nietzsche once averred, “man likes to believe that... he is touching the heart of the world.” 5 This study will focus on the manner in which art as constructed within the idealist tradition of German art theory functioned as an enchantment. Specifically, it will explore what the history of ideas about abstraction and empathy has to tell us about the spiritualization or enchantment of art. After identifying the philosophical and aesthetic wherewithal of enchantment in nineteenth-century Germany, attention focusses on Franz Marc’s early twentieth-century theorization of abstraction. It is certainly more customary to study Kandinsky, whose writings and early efforts at abstraction are much better known, but Marc’s ideas offer more immediate connections to German intellectual history and clarify the aims of his abstract art as a strategy of enchantment. Moreover, Marc was unusually articulate and wrote often, exploring ideas and artistic efforts with great insight. Focusing on Marc therefore offers a corrective to the historiography that has favored Kandinsky’s writings. Finally, Marc differed from his Russian friend over the cause of the war. Manifesting a difference that is portentous for this study, Kandinsky left Germany for Russia in 1914, while Marc enthusiastically took up arms for the fatherland. Given these circumstances and the unfortunate tendency of art historians to valorize expressionist art rather than situate it in the ideological context of... (shrink)

Why is there no sustained tradition of argument concerning the existence of a supreme (omniscient and omnipotent) being who is perfectly evil, as there is about one who is perfectly good? Arguments which are reflections of the ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments, and arguments based on personal experience or the occurrence of antimiracles (harmful events not explicable by science) could have provided at least as good grounds for belief in such a being (ie for antitheism) as their originals in (...) fact provide for theism. An imaginary encyclopedia entry, in which fictional antitheistic arguments and thinkers are presented, illustrates this point. The reason for the nonexistence of a tradition of antitheism seems therefore to be that it is merely emotionally, not that it is rationally, less inviting than theism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 415-431 [Access article in PDF] The Humanities at Home with Themselves Mark Bauerlein The Crafty Reader, by Robert Scholes; 272 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, $24.95. WHEN I STARTED GRADUATE SCHOOL in English in the early Eight ies, a typical thing happened. Those few students with a background in philosophy drifted together, shared influences, and developed a hierarchy of critical works. A (...) few pushed analytic philosophy and pragmatism, but overall Continental theory took first place, especially Derrida. "Structure, Sign, and Play" and "White Mythology," de Man's "Rhetoric of Temporality," Shoshana Felman's "Turning the Screw of Interpretation," and other weighty essays had the status of cutting-edge wisdom, and the hostility deconstruction drew from traditionalists and Marxists in the department only sharpened our commitment. Having no other professional standing, we savored the stigma, the roguishness. It complemented our poverty, and eased our transition from hot-shot undergraduates to first-year, prequalifying Ph.D aspirants. In the evenings, after instructing freshmen in comma splices, we gathered to trade Nietszchean epigrams and mock professors who looked befuddled at the mention of a priori and aporia.Other students found us insufferable, and doubtless we were, but not in a partisan way. We panned each other just as hard as we did the uninformed. This was UCLA, not Yale or Johns Hopkins, and personalities mattered less than arguments. If in discussion I backed a point with [End Page 415] "As Derrida says...," someone always answered, "So what?" We frowned on arguments from authority. Popularizations such as Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction earned our scorn. They were one step up from Cliff's Notes, packed with servile observations like "Jean Baudrillard wants to take us further, into a world where everything is so textualized that there is no space left for the real." We preferred to understand deconstruction through laborious readings of Being and Time and Beyond Good and Evil, not in watery effusions about textuality or the mechanical pairing of binary oppositions. The latter we placed among the scribes, those well-intentioned professionals canny enough to recognize the broad import of deconstruction, but not acute enough to discern the real meaning of différance or the radical disclosure of the ontic-ontological difference. The genius of philosophy, we thought, lay in plumbing the fundamental habits of cognition, like Hegel breaking down sense certainty and Heidegger questioning the determination of Being as substance. Exegesis of other texts was a lesser activity, though we acknowledged exceptions such as Starobinski's book on Rousseau and Kojève's lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit.Lower in our rankings were the quasi-Leftist attacks just emerging, such as Frank Lentricchia's Criticism and Social Change, which cast theorists as mandarin functionaries treating interpretation as an apolitical game. They filled the page with spiteful terms like "the mask of pure reason" and righteous declarations like "it is wrong to claim that you are above politics," spurning argument for the rhetoric of the reformer. We diagnosed them as puny reactions to the Reagan Revolution, carried out on the irrelevant ground of literary theory. Philosophically, Lentricchia was a hack, and we rejected the imputation that theory nullified activism and justified the status quo. Not that we thought theory bred activism. We just considered them separate activities, and saw no determinate connection between hermeneutical stance and party affiliation. However, we accepted the elitist charge. How could ambitious academics avoid elitism? It wasn't hard for graduate students struggling on $900 a month to see that populist attitudes didn't suit the tenured Ivy Leaguer. Professors were paid by exclusive institutions to teach poetry, to write letters for the best and brightest, to run recondite journals and jet to prestigious symposia. We wanted to join them, but not with phony expressions of social injustice that targeted theory as the problem.Allied with the political attacks on theory, and esteemed even lower, were critiques of the humanities as a bastion of high culture. Polemics [End Page 416] such as Andrew Ross's No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture treated... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:SUMMA CONTRA GENTILES III, CHAPTERS 131-135: A RARE GLIMPSE INTO THE HEART AS WELL AS THE MIND OF AQUINAS LAWRENCE B. PORTER Setoii Hall University South Orange, New Jersey Introduction BERNARDO GUI, Saint Thomas's thirteenth-century biographer, relates in his Legenda S. Thomae the story of how once upon a time Saint Thomas was seated at the table of King Louis IX of France. Far removed from mere dinner conversation, (...) the scholar was absorbed in profound rumination on no less a problem than the existence of evil. Suddenly in the midst of the meal Aquinas came to an insight and " he struck the table, exclaiming : ' That settles the Manichees! ' " 1 More than a century later Fra Angelico presents us with a comparable image of the saint though in an appreciably different setting, not a royal dinner table but a cloister walk. If the reader were to walk in the cloister garden of the priory of San Marco in Florence, he or she would eventually come upon a portrait of Saint Thomas painted by Fra Angelico (in the lunette above the door to the right of the entrance on the south side of the cloister). The saint stands erect facing the viewer, holding open upon his chest a book with the pages facing us so that we might read them. Saint Thomas is looking off into space, not distractedly but with concentration, with arched eyebrows and fixed gaze. It is as though he sees directly what we can only read about in the text of his open book. 1 " The Life Of Saint Thomas Aquinas by Bernard Gui," in The Life of St. Thomas Aquinas: Biographical Documents, trans. and ed. Kenelm Foster (London, 1959), pp. 44-45. 245 246 LAWREN CE B. PORTER The image of Saint Thomas presented in these hagiographic and iconographic traditions is distinctly that of an intellect-at one time engrossed in speculative thought, at another time in mystic contemplation-but it is always the mind that is foremost engaged. The image is always that of the intellectual genius entirely taken up with recondite or divine ideas, far removed from this-worldly concerns or domestic distractions. These images cannot be easily dismissed, nor indeed should we want to do such a thing, for there is much truth in these images. Certainly Thomas was at times a mystic, and his powers of abstraction and concentration were nothing less than extraordinary. His own writings are the best witness to this. The method displayed therein-the dispassionate objectivity, the unrelenting logic, the economy of expression, the precise and telling distinctions, not to mention his encyclopedic knowledge of scriptural, mystical, and philosophical sources-makes for the impression of an almost disembodied intellect at work. No wonder he was given the title "angelic doctor"! However, the problem with such images and titles is that they never allude to the fact that Saint Thomas also had a human heart and human feelings, and that these, too, could at times have had an effect upon his thinking, especially when his feelings had been hurt. To illustrate this thesis, I propose to examine the interplay between thought and emotion, history and analysis, in the Summa Contra Gentiles III, especially as concerns Chapters 131-135. Chapters 131-135 constitute a small treatise on religious poverty and as such appear as a peculiarly recondite consideration amid Aquinas's much more general treatment there of the themes of divine providence and human freedom. I believe this peculiar feature can only be understood in relation to an historical controversy of the times, namely, the attack upon the new mendicant orders by the secular clergy. Indeed, I believe the true nuances of this small treatise can best be understood when it is seen more as the heartfelt response of Aquinas to a slur upon his dignity rather than as his dispassionate or purely reasoned response to a contest of ideas. Aquinas was once personally embarrassed dur- SUMMA CONTRA GENTILES III 247 ing his professorship at the University of Paris when a student demonstration broke in upon a Sunday sermon of his with pamphlet literature that poked malicious fun at his considerable body size and privileged social status. And... (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 151-165 [Access article in PDF] Santayana and Buddhism: The Choice between the Cross and the Bo Tree Paul Grimley KuntzEmory UniversitySantayana honors Gotama Buddha as a profound religious genius as well as an original philosopher. Gotama's way is genuine spiritual wisdom, and constantly compared with Christian mysticism as a way of enlightenment. It is therefore understandable that a Spaniard, who learned his catechism in (...) Ávila, and who was educated in the New England of Emerson and other Transcendentalists who honored Oriental wisdom, should have so much to say about the Buddha and Buddhism.The effort of this paper is to gather many of the isolated passages to give a coherent picture of Santayana and Buddhism. One difficulty to be overcome is that the philosopher rarely quotes his sources (the exception is a single quotation from Dasgupta). Although Santayana has numerous opinions, he does not reveal on which translations he has relied. Nor does he contrast different traditions of Buddhists. To overcome the vagueness of scholarship, I have used the volumes found in Widener Library: the sorts of books known to Santayana's dissertation director, Josiah Royce, and those of a sympathetic sort that had led Santayana as early as the writing of his dissertation on Rudolf Hermann Lotze to reject the latter's defiantly Christian and Western contempt for oriental "superstition." The sympathy can be expressed as similar to that of Schopenhauer in reading the Upanishads or Wilhelm von Humboldt in studying the Bhagavadgita. Santayana's study makes him aware of his Catholicism but he is unlike the Jesuit Dahlmann who attacks Buddhism as Nihilism. Santayana is more like his contemporaries who worked in psychology and philosophy of religion. Although Friedrich Heiler's work 1 and writings of James Bissett Pratt 2 were a bit too late to have influenced Santayana, comparison serves to illuminate and strengthen Santayana's conclusions. Perhaps Heiler is even more appropriate because Buddhistic insights remind him of those of St. Theresa. Santayana would support Pratt's view that Nirvana is not the annihilation of all desire but the extinguishing of evil passions. What Santayana finds congenial in Christian Neo-Platonism and in Spinoza, as well as in Buddhism, is the achievement of freedom of the spirit. 3 It has become a commonplace of world history that the two greatest founders of religion whose ways of salvation triumphed in Europe and in Asia respectively are the Christ and the Buddha. Philosophers of religion like Heiler accept both as saviors with a universal message, one, Jesus "the master of prayer" ("der Meister des Gebets"), the [End Page 151] other, Gotama "the master of contemplation" ("der Meister der Versenking"). Santayana is not concerned with the fact of the success of their missions, for there are indeed other triumphs such as Mohammed's Islam, and if it be classified as a religion, Marx's Communism. Santayana is hardly offering his services as a philosophic mediator, as Whitehead tries to do in Religion in the Making, to bring the two communities of faith to a closer approximation of a truly universal religion. 4Santayana reveals great personal depth as he ponders the contrast between the Gospel and the Fourfold Noble Truth. What is the appeal of Christ on the Cross dying "to save us?" What is the appeal of "the serene Buddha, lifting the finger of meditation and profound counsel?" 5 These questions are asked in a meditation in Soliloquies in England in the sympathetic way of those American philosophers who like Pratt have the option of remaining Christian or converting to Buddhism. William James might well have patted Santayana on the back for struggling with the alternatives, for wrestling with a live option. Probably because of Buddha's message of truth, Santayana has shifted from religion as poetry, which James considered "rotten," to how "a general truth about existence and experience" is symbolized poetically, which James would consider healthy.In answering the question "What does the cross signify?" Santayana strips away the "various analogies, legal, sentimental, or chivalrous," and he... (shrink)

In the course of examining the origin of evil in the De malorum subsistentia, Proclus reproduces a position that considers the maleficent (world-)soul as cause of evil. The same entity is held to co-govern the material realm alongside the beneficent world-soul. While scholarship tends to associate the testimonium with Plutarch (and Atticus), this survey shows why Numenius of Apamea is a much more probable candidate. The discussion concludes with further proposals for a new edition of Numenius, including possible (...) traces of Numenius in Iamblichus’ On Soul and Porphyry's On the Faculties of Soul. (shrink)