This chapter contains sections titled: Ahoy! The Sublime Poetry of Sail and Wind Poseidon's Wrath She Moves One is Free … on a Boat?

Words and (Possible) Worlds is a study of the relation between language and reality; between words and world. It is a study of reference. Analysing reference often leads to addressing fundamental issues in semantics, metaphysics and epistemology, thus suggesting the close links of reference to these three realms. By utilising the powerful tool of possible-worlds analysis, Alik Pelman carefully explores these links, and elegantly integrates them into a clear and unified model of reference. In the course of his study, (...) Pelman addresses familiar philosophical puzzles (many of which are due to Kripke), for example, Could we discover that Queen Elizabeth was not the daughter of George VI, that is, would we be talking about Queen Elizabeth in this case? Could this table come into existence from a different hunk of wood than the one it was originally made of? Does the term "water" refer to the pink solid H2O on another possible world? (shrink)

Explores the philosophical dimensions and implications of integral theory. Dancing with Sophia is the first book of essays to focus on the philosophical dimensions and implications of integral theory. A metatheory that organizes first order theories and disciplines into higher order modes of knowing and insight needed to address the complexity of today’s world, integral theory has already impacted a wide range of disciplines, from psychology to business to religious studies to art. Included here are perspectives by (...) scholars in the continental, comparativist, and process traditions who dive into integral theory’s postmetaphysical claims in order to mine, extend, and critique its philosophical merits. On the verge of its own emergence, integral philosophy promotes modes of creative critical thought oriented toward the multidimensional flourishing of planetary well-being, and Dancing with Sophia will be of interest to scholars in philosophy; religious studies; transpersonal, developmental, and humanist psychology; and more. “Integral theory is a bold and provocative endeavor. It challenges one to think past the norm, to sail beyond the horizon and risk encountering the Scylla and Charybdis of what is academically acceptable—or at least familiar—and what is possible, in ways that only are now beginning to dawn on both thinking and dwelling. If it is nothing else, integral theory is the movement beyond the purely intellectual into the lived experience. This is its ‘meta-’ dimension properly understood.” — from the Foreword by Brian Schroeder. (shrink)

Madness is a complex and contested term. Through time and across cultures it has acquired many formulations: for some, madness is synonymous with unreason and violence, for others with creativity and subversion, elsewhere it is associated with spirits and spirituality. Among the different formulations, there is one in particular that has taken hold so deeply and systematically that it has become the default view in many communities around the world: the idea that madness is a disorder of the mind. -/- (...) Contemporary developments in mental health activism pose a radical challenge to psychiatric and societal understandings of madness. Mad Pride and mad-positive activism reject the language of mental 'illness' and 'disorder', reclaim the term 'mad', and reverse its negative connotations. Activists seek cultural change in the way madness is viewed, and demand recognition of madness as grounds for identity. But can madness constitute such grounds? Is it possible to reconcile delusions, passivity phenomena, and the discontinuity of self often seen in mental health conditions with the requirements for identity formation presupposed by the theory of recognition? How should society respond? -/- Guided by these questions, this book is the first comprehensive philosophical examination of the claims and demands of Mad activism. Locating itself in the philosophy of psychiatry, Mad studies, and activist literatures, the book develops a rich theoretical framework for understanding, justifying, and responding to Mad activism's demand for recognition. (shrink)

Looking into the future is always a risky endeavour, but one way to anticipate the possible future shape of AI-driven societies is to examine the visionary works of some sci-fi writers. Not all sci-fi works have such visionary quality, of course, but some of Stanisław Lem’s works certainly do. We refer here to Lem’s works that explore the frontiers of science and technology and those that describe imaginary societies of robots. We therefore examine Lem’s prose, with a focus on (...) the Cyberiad stories, to see what challenges our future technological societies may face when they entrust their lives to AI technology. For example, what questions should we ask, and what questions do we forget to ask, when developing AI systems and allowing these systems to control our lives. The technologically honed minds of our current technocrats are perhaps too limited to guide us into this future, because AI-based technology is relatively unchartered territory, as any new, complex technology is by nature. Lem’s visions of future societies oriented around AI and robotics portray AI technology in a deeper and more nuanced way than the current technological visions offered by our leading technological prophets. Based on Lem’s visions, what is to come may not turn out to be an AI-driven nirvana. (shrink)

Conditional structures lie at the heart of the sciences, humanities, and everyday reasoning. It is hence not surprising that conditional logics – logics specifically designed to account for natural language conditionals – are an active and interdisciplinary area. The present book gives a formal and a philosophical account of indicative and counterfactual conditionals in terms of Chellas-Segerberg semantics. For that purpose a range of topics are discussed such as Bennett’s arguments against truth value based semantics for indicative conditionals.

This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind. In pursuing the first aim, we expect our main audience to be clinicians and linguists interested in pragmatics. It is when we turn to methodological issues that we hope to pique the interest of philosophers. (...) Still, the methodological issue becomes pressing precisely because of the empirical finding—thus the first part is important for the philosophical readers as well. The game plan is as follows. Given our intended dual audience, we begin with background on autism and pragmatics. Some of this material will be familiar to some of our readership, but few will know all of it. (Those who do are invited to skip these sections.) We then present some results from our pilot study on a corpus of speech by people with ASD. The heart of our finding is that certain speakers with ASD, who have severe trouble with familiar pragmatic phenomena such as metaphor and conversational implicature, exhibit surprising abilities with respect to what is often called “pragmatic determinants of what is said.” We turn next to a possible implication of this finding: It seems to suggest that hitherto seemingly promising evidence from ASD about the semantics/pragmatics boundary is.. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has (...) followed, has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Within the last decade or so several philosophers have argued against handgun prohibition on the ground that it violates the right to self-defense. However, even these philosophers grant that the right to own handguns is not absolute and could be overridden if doing so would bring about an enormous social good. Analysis of intra-United States empirical data cited by gun rights advocates indicates that guns do not make us safer, while international data lends powerful support to the thesis that guns (...) do indeed increase homicide. If handguns do not make us safer, then appealing to the right to self-defense as an objection to prohibition is moot. Prohibition neither violates the right to self-defense nor sacrifices anyone’s interests for the common good, since it makes each person less likely to be murderedthan the current permissive handgun laws. Moreover, we also must take into account the right to life of victims of handgun crimes made possible by liberal handgun laws. Consequently, invoking the right to self-defense does not provide any sound reason against handgun prohibition over and above familiar utilitarian objections, which are themselves refuted by the empirical evidence. (shrink)

In this thesis I investigate the notion of experience in German Idealist Philosophy. I focus on the exploration of an alternative to the transcendental model notion of experience through Schelling's insight into the notion of logogrif. The structural division of this project into two sections reflects the two theoretical standpoints of this project, namely the logic and the logogrif of experience. The first section - the logic of experience - explores the notion of experience provided in Kant's Critique (...) of Pure Reason, Critique of Judgement and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. I argue that Kant's fundamental question about the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements succeeds in thematising the aporia of cognitive experience but results in a subject-oriented, representational model which radically confines the notion of experience to the constitutive laws of the understanding or to the normative precepts of Reason. Experience is founded upon a sharp division between faith and knowledge, will and logic, desire and reflection, absolute and finitude. Fichte's endeavour to articulate a non-representational account of experience, does not succeed in extricating itself from the representational model, so long as experience is reduced to the ever-producing deeds of the self-positing ego. Despite the serious differences between Kant's and Fichte's notions of experience, both accounts, so long as they unfold from a transcendental standpoint, attempt to resolve experience into conceptual laws or determinations of the ego's absolute will. Experience is transformed into an object of the subject's cognitive or volitional faculties. The paradoxes of man's interaction with the world are intended to be accommodated either by the law-giving spontaneity of the understanding and the Architectonic of Pure Reason or by the overpowerful primordial act of the self-positing ego. This implies the conceptualisation of the self in terms of constant identity-through-time, or sheer self-determination. However, this conceptualisation remains at the normative or prescriptive level, which in turn is projected upon the world. The latter, though appears as the subject's property, essentially remains alien and opaque, confirming the radical limitations of the ego rather than its order-giving authority. Moreover, this notion of experience is ultimately founded upon a radical expulsion of the divine from the world, the de-spiritualisation of the sensual and the de-sensualisation of the spiritual, the sharp juxtaposition between absolute and finitude. This results in a self-defeating subjectivity, whose firm identity and rule-giving authority does not rescue it from its perennial unattainability to 'organise the conditioned' or 'conquer the unconditioned'. In Kant's and Fichte's thought, however, I detect elements that potentially transgress their transcendental account of experience. These are found in Kant's concept of spontaneity and free play between understanding and imagination, and Fichte's concept of productivity. I argue that these elements lose their potential dynamism, so long as they are absorbed by the transcendental demands for the solution of the aporias of logic. However, these elements point to the need for a radical re-conceptualisation of the notion of experience. This is provided by means of Schelling's logogriflic approach, which constitutes the theme of the second section. The second section - the logogrif of experience - attempts to articulate a different approach towards the notion of experience, through an exploration of Schelling's versatile and provocative thought. This section focuses on Schelling's original insight into the notion and act of logogrif, which opens the dialogue between logos and mythos, cosmic becoming and human soul, cosmic imagination and human reflection, faith and knowledge. This section attempts to illuminate Schelling's fascinating philosophical investigations and discoveries that have been rather overlooked, possibly, due to Hegel's overwhelming critique. This section, after a brief critical examination of the Identity Philosophy, attempts to elucidate Schelling's notion of experience through his middle works, Of Human Freedom, Ages of the World, The Deities of Samothrace, which are treated as a self-developing trilogy. Schelling re-addresses the aporias of logic not as part of Reason's self-interrogation but as part of the cosmic paradoxes and living experiences. In this way, Schelling resets the scene of the debate on the conditions of possibility for cognitive experience by putting on the stage the enigmas of the cosmos and life rather than the Tribunal of Reason. Logic itself is conceived as a potency in the cosmic becoming, and consequently can no longer attempt to establish the transcendental conditions for the possibility of cognitive experience. Cosmic becoming, in which man is an active part, is conceived as the process of the movement, the interaction, the transformations and transmutations of multiple potencies. These, far beyond any mechanical conceptualisation, appear as self-moving and yet interdependent, unknown yet familiar, inscrutable and yet manifest powers, describing the mystery of life itself. The latter is depicted as an ever-recurrent act of longing for self-expression as active unity. Experience is conceived as the lived process of a network of living potencies, which may not only resist rational powers but may also puzzle and seize them. In this context, reflection acquires a plastic dimension, as opposed to its rigidity in the representational model of experience. Reflection depicts cosmic longing's self-formation, whose man is part. This self-bending formation partially illuminates the nature of longing, and from this standpoint is the logic of the longing. However, this formation is movable, transmutable and mostly ineffable, and from this standpoint is the logic of a riddle: a logogrif. Logogrif is the transitive term that attempts to describe the transition of experience from its enacted phase to its allusive conceptual utterance, and in this sense the term itself participates in both phases, as both form of thought and form of life. The logogrific approach to experience in turn transposes us as from the realm of pure concepts to the realm of the mystery of life, from pure thought to acts of longing, from the Architectonic of Pure Reason to Cosmic Theurgy. The latter term attempts to grasp the paradox and dynamism of cosmic and non-cosmic becoming by means of multiple, vanishing and ever-recurring, transmutable potencies, or in Schelling's terms 'the magic of insoluble life'. Schelling's logogrific account consists in a powerful voice for the re-enchantment of the world, the introduction into the notion of experience of the imminence of the divine. This is not suggested in terms of the adoption of old religious doctrines but by means of the discovery and re-discovery of the theurgy of life, through the intensification of our artistic mood, the creative expansion of our deeds. This notion of experience allows for the reconsideration of the notion of the self, in terms of a dynamic, conflictual process between conscious and unconscious powers and the critical revaluation of the accounts of subjectivity which reduce it to the sphere of self-consciousness. The thesis concludes with the need for an investigation into the relation between logos and mythos, which only tangentially has been introduced by the present project. In this context it will be possible to re-appraise the potential that the logogrific approach opens for an alternative to both logical and traditional mythological patterns of thinking. (shrink)

"He himself thinks he knows one thing, that he knows nothing. (Socrates)" This book is in two parts. In part one, the focus is on past and present educational methods and systems whilst part two contains forward-looking views and opinions on educational needs and possible new forms of information transfer. The diverse issues addressed include: Genesis - The fruit of knowledge; Education, religion and morality; Becoming a teacher; Education, women and their position in society; Education during industrial revolutions and wars; (...) Military academic education; Global and individual education; Islamic education; Education in Israel; Children of tomorrow; Future teachers and new technologies; Early interdisciplinary education; Educate to negotiate; The need for media literacy; Artificial intelligence-based education; Spiritual evolution and the power of belief; Experience transfer to the next generation; Brain-to-brain communication. "It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it. (Maurice Switzer)". (shrink)

This book defends a new interpretation of Hegel's theoretical philosophy, according to which Hegel's project in his central Science of Logic has a single organizing focus, provided by taking metaphysics as fundamental to philosophy, rather than any epistemological problem about knowledge or intentionality. Hegel pursues more specifically the metaphysics of reason, concerned with grounds, reasons, or conditions in terms of which things can be explained-and ultimately with the possibility of complete reasons. There is no threat to such metaphysics in epistemological (...) or skeptical worries. The real threat is Kant's Transcendental Dialectic case that metaphysics comes into conflict with itself. But Hegel, despite familiar worries, has a powerful case that Kant's own insights in the Dialectic can be turned to the purpose of constructive metaphysics. And we can understand in these terms the unified focus of the arguments at the conclusion of Hegel's Science of Logic. Hegel defends, first, his general claim that the reasons which explain things are always found in immanent concepts, universals or kinds. And he will argue from here to conclusions which are distinctive in being metaphysically ambitious yet surprisingly distant from any form of metaphysical foundationalism, whether scientistic, theological, or otherwise. Hegel's project, then, turns out neither Kantian nor Spinozist, but more distinctively his own. Finally, we can still learn a great deal from Hegel about ongoing philosophical debates concerning everything from metaphysics, to the philosophy of science, and all the way to the nature of philosophy itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes and Husserl. The Philosophical Project of Radical BeginningsMichael K. ShimPaul S. MacDonald. Descartes and Husserl. The Philosophical Project of Radical Beginnings. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. 285. Paper, $21.95.The enormous influence exerted by Descartes on Husserl's phenomenological philosophy cannot be underestimated. Not only is Husserl quite open and explicit about his philosophical debt to Descartes, but the fundamental motivation of (...) the phenomenological [End Page 593] method (directed towards apodeicticity and the purification of consciousness) would most likely be meaningless without reference to the Cartesian precedent. Consequently, almost every exegetical approach to Husserlian phenomenology has at least mentioned the relevance of the Cartesian tradition. Unfortunately, rare has been the phenomenological treatment of Descartes current with the latest scholarship. As an exception to this general shortcoming, MacDonald's book is a most welcome entry into Husserl scholarship.One of MacDonald's main theses is that Descartes and Husserl shared similarities in historical circumstances and, thus, shared similar motives for their "radical beginnings" in philosophy. With regards to Descartes' historical circumstances, by providing a breathtaking overview of sixteenth-century skepticism, MacDonald gives a cogent account of what led to Descartes' attempted construction of an absolute epistemological foundation for philosophy. However, the "conceptual confusions and collapses" of neo-skepticism will "survive the Cartesian overthrow and, like a persistent contagion" (31) reappear in the form of nineteenth-century psychologism. MacDonald does a convincing job of highlighting the skeptical profile of psychologism by providing systematic parallels between the mainstays of neo-skepticism and nineteenth-century psychologism: namely, distrust of objective knowledge, subjective reductionism and epistemological relativism. Accordingly, what motivates Husserl's epoché has both historical and systematic resources in the Cartesian reduction. The point itself is nothing new, and Husserl himself stresses the skepticism of nineteenth-century psychologism, but the scholarship and erudition that inform MacDonald's detailed historical account is to be commended.The truly ambitious aspect of the book, however, is the painstakingly worked out systematic comparison between the respective philosophical projects. In this respect, MacDonald takes two correlated approaches. The first approach takes up the metaphors of discovery and "voyage of exploration" (5) common to both thinkers' writings in order to explicate the meaning of philosophical transformation or "conversion," a "cognitive-affective reorientation of the whole self" (227). However, these metaphors are to be understood as symptomatic of deeper formal parallels between the two thinkers.The second approach begins with the daring claim that "Descartes' and Husserl's formal ontologies are... functionally equivalent" (95), a claim MacDonald proposes to reinforce by examining the structural parallels between Descartes' simple-complex dyad on the one hand and Husserl's part-whole theory as introduced in the Third Logical Investigations. This claim is brought into relief by a reformation of Descartes' conception of "ideas." Rather than restrict the Cartesian conception of ideas to "objective content," MacDonald emphasizes the act-quality of Cartesian ideas (125-7). Thereby an intentional conception of Cartesian ideas is made possible. Anyone familiar with Husserl should not find this surprising: what MacDonald is trying to suggest is a division of Cartesian ideas into noesis and noema, with the "material" aspect of act-ideas finding phenomenological restoration in Husserl's "hyletic data." With these elements in place, MacDonald largely succeeds in constructing a fuller and richer than usual comparison between methodical doubt and the phenomenological reduction (151ff), centered on a non-mystical eidetic intuitionism. MacDonald's ultimate conclusion is [End Page 594] that Husserlian phenomenology, as "first philosophy," is thoroughly consistent with Cartesian metaphysics, now understood as "second philosophy" (243).MacDonald's systematic conclusions are much bolder than one might think, since they are adduced by running against the letter of Husserl's own interpretation of Descartes. The background claim is that Husserl himself did not fully appreciate his debt to Descartes, and it is this exegetical failure that has led to his eventual abandonment of the "Cartesian Way." However, in order to make such an assertion, MacDonald would be obligated to demonstrate the Cartesian influences on the phenomenological pillars of the later Husserl: i.e., temporalization, genetic analysis and the theory of intersubjectivity—as programmatically outlined in the Fourth and... (shrink)

Philosophy, which is limitless but abstract, and religions, which are concrete but unable to shed the limitations of their symbols, must construct a complementary relationship that draws on the strengths of both. Through developing philosophical insights into religious truth and values, we can shine new light on our modern maladies and urgent problems, such as the tendency to pursue facts but not truth in scholarly research (section 1), religious conflicts (section 2), and the rivalry between religion and ethics (...) (section 3). The author demonstrates ways this is possible from the perspectives of Old Testament studies, ethics, and modern Japanese Philosophy. (shrink)

The tendency to idealise artificial intelligence as independent from human manipulators, combined with the growing ontological entanglement of humans and digital machines, has created an “anthrobotic” horizon, in which data analytics, statistics and probabilities throw our agential power into question. How can we avoid the consequences of a reified definition of intelligence as universal operation becoming imposed upon our destinies? It is here argued that the fantasised autonomy of automated intelligence presents a contradistinctive opportunity for philosophical consciousness to (...) understand itself anew as holistic and co-creative, beyond the recent “analytic” moment of the history of philosophy. Here we introduce the concept of “crealectic intelligence”, a meta-analytic and meta-dialectic aspect of consciousness. Intelligent behaviour may consist in distinguishing discrete familiar parts or reproducible functions in the midst of noise via an analytic process of segmentation; intelligence may also manifest itself in the constitution of larger wholes and dynamic unities through a dialectic process of association or assemblage. But, by contrast, crealectic intelligence co-creates realities in the image of an ideal or truth, taking into account the desiring agent imbued with a sense of possibility, in a relationship not only with the Real but also with the creative sublime or “Creal”. (shrink)

Sport, Rules and Values presents a philosophical perspective on some issues concerning the character of sport. Central questions for the text are motivated from real life sporting examples as described in newspaper reports. For instance, the (supposed) subjectivity of umpiring decisions is explored via an examination of the judging ice-skating at the Salt Lake City Olympic Games of 2002. Throughout, the presentation is rich in concrete cases from sporting situations, including baseball, football, and soccer. While granting the constitutive nature (...) of the rules of sport, discussion focuses on three broad uses commonly urged for rules: in defining sport; in judging or assessing sport (as deployed by judges or umpires); and in characterizing the value of sport, especially if that value is regarded as moral value. In general, McFee rejects a conception of the determinacy of rules as possible within sport, and a parallel picture of the determinacy assumed to be required by philosophy. (shrink)

These essays, written in the spirit of Goethe’s Epimetheus who "traces the quick deed to the dim realm of form-combining possibilities", display the depth and breadth of Tallis’s fascination with our lives. Whether discussing philosophical "hardy perennials" like time, or a mundane artefact like ink, Tallis challenges us to think differently about who we are and why we are. The first part of the book – Analysis – dives into the deep-end to explore some of the big (...) questions in philosophy: perception, knowledge and belief; time; the relationship between mathematics and reality; and probability and causation. The middle section – Tetchy Interludes – takes a wry look at some aspects of contemporary art; stupidity (including the author’s own); and Christmas. The third part – Celebration – is more experimental in both its subject matter and treatment. It celebrates the complexity of ordinary, everyday consciousness by contemplating the miracle of speech, artefacts that have transformed our lives (and what they reveal about our cognition) such as the wheel, the sail, and ink; and ‘snapshots’ of the author’s own consciousness on an ordinary day, of past consciousness, as captured in historical memory. Notwithstanding their diversity in theme and style, these essays share the common aim of discovering and celebrating the submerged riches in the "quick deeds" of our everyday lives and perceptions. (shrink)

A number of recent scholarly works in Chinese philosophy approach Chinese texts and thinkers by incorporating them into longstanding issues and debates in the Western philosophical tradition. While the merits of this approach have received much discussion among those working in Chinese philosophy, it also has the potential to reach those outside the field whose research or teaching focuses on the debates and issues. In this article we look at the issue of using Chinese philosophy in courses on (...) contemporary philosophical topics for non-specialists. We give the justification for this pedagogical approach, put forth a “syllabus” of preparatory readings, and finally, discuss its limitations and possibilities. (shrink)

A number of recent scholarly works in Chinese philosophy approach Chinese texts and thinkers by incorporating them into longstanding issues and debates in the Western philosophical tradition. While the merits of this approach have received much discussion among those working in Chinese philosophy, it also has the potential to reach those outside the field whose research or teaching focuses on the debates and issues. In this article we look at the issue of using Chinese philosophy in courses on (...) contemporary philosophical topics for non-specialists. We give the justification for this pedagogical approach, put forth a “syllabus” of preparatory readings, and finally, discuss its limitations and possibilities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Epistemologies and the Limitations of Philosophical Enquiry: Doctrine in Madhva VedantaChristopher BartleyEpistemologies and the Limitations of Philosophical Enquiry: Doctrine in Madhva Vedanta. By Deepak Sarma. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005. Pp. xiii + 101.Epistemologies and the Limitations of Philosophical Enquiry: Doctrine in Madhva Vedanta, by Deepak Sarma, purports to discuss the possibility of philosophical evaluation of a tradition of thought and practice, in (...) this case the Dvaita school of Vedānta to which the author belongs, that upholds a "strict insider epistemology." (Although the work bears the subtitle "Doctrine in Madhva Vedanta," for information about beliefs and epistemology the reader would be better advised to consult Deepak Sarma's An Introduction to Madhva Vedanta [Ashgate, 2003].)The present reviewer is not privy to the "insider-outsider debate" apparently current in some centers of Religious Studies, and I state at the outset that I cannot see what all the fuss is about. If one is not a member of a private club, one probably doesn't care about what goes on within its walls. If a tradition is closed to nonmembers, successfully concealing its beliefs and practices (in the manner of some versions of Freemasonry), that's the end of the matter. If texts are really not accessible (p. 6), the activities that the philosopher can pursue are not just "severely restricted"! If what a tradition involves is public (even allowing for esoteric elements revealed only to initiates and for rituals of restricted participation), there are still "outsiders," but they are not debarred from appreciation, discussion, and critical philosophical [End Page 126] analysis of its truth claims. Albeit a middle-aged male member of the Church of England, I can understand (in the conventional sense of the term, which is the only one it has) the Dvaitin adoption of the unusual reading "atat tvam asi" (Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7 et seq.).What is meant by "insider epistemology"? Sarma says:[T]here are two kinds of communities that uphold insider epistemologies. One is centred around experiential data and claims that outsiders can neither know nor understand what it is like to be an insider. The other simply does not permit outsiders to access root texts. Though actual communities are likely to lie somewhere between these two, or combine elements from each, this bivalent taxonomy is useful as a heuristic device [sic]. (p. 9)The Madhvas, insofar as they deny noninitiates access to some of their basic texts, belong to the second group. (Members of the first are what can politely be called eccentric.) Madhvāchārya, the founder, prohibited outsiders from reading certain texts and from learning from teachers. These restrictions on eligibility, it is claimed, "insulated his position from criticism and evaluation."Even if outsiders' views of core Madhva school doctrines are deemed irrelevant by insiders, Sarma's assertion that Madhvāchārya's views are immune to rational consideration by people who do not belong to the same tradition will astonish anyone familiar with medieval Vedāntic debates. The second chapter describes the historical context in which Madhvāchārya's "insider epistemology" was established. The problem here for the author's insistence on some particularly exigent sort of Dvaitin exclusivity is that there is nothing strikingly un-Vedāntic about that tradition's claims where eligibility for hearing and understanding Scripture (shruti) is concerned. As the author makes clear, Vedāntic theological enquiry, the systematic elucidation of the Upanishads and Brahma-sūtras in the context of dialectic between rival schools, was the preserve of males born into the higher three castes who could understand Sanskrit. This constraint is sometimes intensified by sectarianism, where cultic initiation is additional to caste-based qualification. In the latter respect, the Madhvas are comparable to Shrī Vaishnavas and sundry Shaiva cults. But none of this impeded a plethora of rational disputation! Had the Madhva school prohibited outsiders from "accessing its texts altogether," argument could never have gotten off the ground. But it certainly did. Moreover, the restrictions on eligibility or qualification (adhikara) to study Scripture amount to the claim that there are moral and intellectual preconditions for a proper understanding of some subject matter. At its most... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy by John InglisMark D. JordanJohn Inglis. Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, volume 81. Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998. Pp. x + 324. Cloth, $99.50.Modern philosophers have shown themselves quite unphilosophical about the academic history of their own discipline. Content with grand stories that move from Plato (...) to themselves, they have treated institutional histories, recent histories, and bibliographical histories as unworthy of attention. John Inglis sets out to change all that for the study of medieval philosophy. He demonstrates by the book’s end that we have failed to recognize our historiographical procedures as conventions—with very particular histories of their own.The first part of the book traces the genealogy of the dominant (one might say, hegemonic) model in recent studies of medieval philosophy. The genealogy is prefaced with two chapters that show how various were the motives for reconstructions of medieval thought before 1850 in authors such as Billuart, Goudin, and Brucker or Hegel, Ritter, and Hauréau. These chapters might be dismissed by contemporary scholars as so much antiquarianism. There can be no dismissing the relevance to contemporary work of Inglis’s main genealogy, which runs with surprising directness from Joseph Kleutgen (1811–1883) and Albert Stöckl (1823–1895) to Norman Kretzmann and Anthony Kenny.It adds to the piquancy of Inglis’s argument that most specialists in medieval philosophy will not even recognize the names of Kleutgen and Stöckl, much less feel kinship with them. But Inglis shows convincingly what Kleutgen and Stöckl did to make the study of medieval philosophy possible in modern universities. Kleutgen mapped the medieval texts onto a system of “spheres,” of fields or topics, recognizable to professors of philosophy. This means that he necessarily privileged epistemology, as he necessarily connected a medieval thinker’s views across the “spheres” into a system—or a failed attempt at one. Kleutgen then emphasized the reason/revelation dichotomy and an allegiance to what he understood as the system of Thomas Aquinas. Put these elements together and you have a surprisingly familiar story. It remained for Stöckl to write it up as an erudite and monumental narration.Inglis follows this „Kleutgen-Stöckl model” through a number of more familiar authors, including De Wulf, Gilson, Boehner, Weinberg, and the editors of the Cambridge [End Page 530] History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Of course, in reducing the genealogy to a list of famous names I ignore two of its great virtues. The first is the detail with which it retells the institutional circumstances and the forgotten intermediaries of the scholarly tradition. Behind the genealogy, around its borders, there stands Inglis’s enormous effort of original research, much of it archival. The genealogy’s second virtue is the dialectical subtlety with which it locates continuities under contradictions. Gilson is usually touted as the antithesis of De Wulf, and Kretzmann of Gilson. Inglis makes such antitheses seem superficial by comparing them with an abiding if tacit agreement about how medieval texts can be appropriated within modern philosophy. To seal the comparison, Inglis suggests in the book’s second part what a real antithesis to the Kleutgen-Stöckl model might be. He reconstructs, in his last two chapters, Thomas’s accounts of human knowledge and of theology’s relations to philosophy in opposition to that model’s prescriptions.No review can represent—or even adequately praise—the enormous learnedness of this book. Moreover, since the book already discusses so much, it must seem ungrateful to suggest that it ought to discuss anything else. Let me end then rather by posing two questions beyond the book’s end. First, does Inglis’s genealogy mean to suggest that the Kleutgen-Stöckl model is now chiefly received in English-speaking philosophy departments? I wonder, for example, how far Inglis might judge Alain de Libera’s Penser au Moyen Age (Paris: Éds. de Seuil, 1991) an alternative to that model. Certainly de Libera shows more self-consciousness about the culturally determined history behind our historiography. His emphasis on the thirteenth-century recovery... (shrink)

This is my impersonation of a philosopher working from home, which aims at making lively a few worthy philosophical questions. The old is new again, as each generation confronts its own challenges and demons, in its own context.

Philosophers of quantum mechanics have generally addressed exceedingly simple systems. Laura Ruetsche offers a much-needed study of the interpretation of more complicated systems, and an underexplored family of physical theories, such as quantum field theory and quantum statistical mechanics, showing why they repay philosophical attention. She guides those familiar with the philosophy of ordinary QM into the philosophy of 'QM infinity', by presenting accessible introductions to relevant technical notions and the foundational questions they frame--and then develops and (...) defends answers to some of those questions. Finally, Ruetsche highlights ties between the foundational investigation of QM infinity and philosophy more broadly construed, in particular by using the interpretive problems discussed to motivate new ways to think about the nature of physical possibility and the problem of scientific realism. (shrink)

What does it mean to treat people as equals when the legacies of feudalism, religious persecution, authoritarian and oligarchic government have shaped the landscape within which we must construct something better? This question has come to dominate much constitutional practice as well as philosophical inquiry in the past 50 years. The combination of Second Wave Feminism with the continuing struggle for racial equality in the 1970s brought into sharp relief the variety of ways in which people can be (...) treated unequally, while respecting the formalities of constitutional government. Most obviously, the content of laws can mistreat them by wrongfully assuming that they are either threats to others, or that, like children, they need to be protected from harm through paternalistic limitations on their freedom of action. Or, as those concerned with class inequality have long noted, formal equality can create legal requirements, permissions, and prohibitions whose burdens fall predictably, and often solely, on groups who are already marginalised, and most in need of state protection. (Kairys, David 1990) Above all, what these two great political movements made plain, is that a concern for group inequality and, specifically, group injustice must figure in the formulation and adjudication of individual rights, if legal protections for equality are adequately to combat the causes of inequality. Getting to grips with that challenge, it became obvious, required going beyond the familiar analyses of inequality inherited from Liberalism and Marxism, given the many different ways in which people can be equal or unequal.(Hackett and Haslanger 2006, 3 - 15) In the first part of this chapter, I will seek to illustrate these claims, by focusing on efforts to reframe the theory and practice of constitutional equality given demands for sexual and racial equality. I will then show that analytic philosophy has also come to recognise the various non-reducible dimensions of equality in ways that reinforce the claims of critical legal theory, even as philosophers highlight their disconcerting consequences. If equality has multiple irreducible dimensions, conflicts between the legitimate demands of equality are unavoidable features of law and politics, even in the best possible world, and are likely to be particularly painful when set against a background of historical injustice. The chapter concludes with the challenges to democratic constitutionalism, and the scope for constructive responses to those challenges, which the rapprochement between critical and analytic thinking on equality suggests. (shrink)

W. V. Quine famously defended two theses that have fallen rather dramatically out of fashion. The first is that intensions are “creatures of darkness” that ultimately have no place in respectable philosophical circles, owing primarily to their lack of rigorous identity conditions. However, although he was thoroughly familiar with Carnap’s foundational studies in what would become known as possible world semantics, it likely wouldn’t yet have been apparent to Quine that he was fighting a losing battle against intensions, (...) due in large measure to developments stemming from Carnap’s studies and culminating in the work of Kripke, Hintikka, and Bayart. These developments undermined Quine’s crusade against intensions on two fronts. First, in the context of possible world semantics, intensions could after all be given rigorous identity conditions by defining them (in the simplest case) as functions from worlds to appropriate extensions, a fact exploited to powerful and influential effect in logic and linguistics by the likes of Kaplan, Montague, Lewis, and Cresswell. Second, the rise of possible world semantics fueled a strong resurgence of metaphysics in contemporary analytic philosophy that saw properties and propositions widely, fruitfully, and unabashedly adopted as ontological primitives in their own right. This resurgence — happily, in my view — continues into the present day. -/- For a time, at any rate, Quine experienced somewhat better success with his second thesis: that higher-order logic is, at worst, confused and, at best, a quirky notational alternative to standard first-order logic. However, Quine notwithstanding, a great deal of recent work in formal metaphysics transpires in a higher-order logical framework in which properties and propositions fall into an infinite hierarchy of types of (at least) every finite order. Initially, the most philosophically compelling reason for embracing such a framework since Russell first proposed his simple theory of types was simply that it provides a relatively natural explanation of the paradoxes. However, since the seminal work of Prior there has been a growing trend to consider higher-order logic to be the most philosophically natural framework for metaphysical inquiry, many of the contributors to this volume being among the most important and influential advocates of this view. Indeed, this is now quite arguably the dominant view among formal metaphysicians. -/- In this paper, and against the current tide, I will argue in §1 that there are still good reasons to think that Quine’s second battle is not yet lost and that the correct framework for logic is first-order and type-free — properties and propositions, logically speaking, are just individuals among others in a single domain of quantification — and that it arises naturally out of our most basic logical and semantical intuitions. The data I will draw upon are not new and are well-known to contemporary higher-order metaphysicians. However, I will try to defend my thesis in what I believe is a novel way by suggesting that these basic intuitions ground a reasonable distinction between “pure” logic and non-logical theory, and that Russell-style semantic paradoxes of truth and exemplification arise only when we move beyond the purely logical and, hence, do not of themselves provide any strong objection to a type-free conception of properties and propositions. -/- Most of my arguments in §1 are largely independent of any specific account of the nature of properties and propositions beyond their type-freedom. However, I will in addition argue that there are good reasons to take propositions, at least, to be very fine-grained. My arguments are thus bolstered significantly if it can be shown that there are in fact well-defined examples of logics that are not only type-free but which comport with such a conception of propositions. It is the purpose of §2 to lay out a logic of this sort in some detail, drawing especially upon work by George Bealer and related work of my own. With the logic in place, it will be possible to generalize the line of argument noted above regarding Russell-style paradoxes and, in §3, apply it to two propositional paradoxes — the Prior-Kaplan paradox and the Russell-Myhill paradox — that are often taken to threaten the sort of account developed here. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the thought and behavior involved in drug dependence is associated with a certain pre-theoretic conception of the self that finds philosophical expression as a grossly simplified form of materialism. Addicts tend not to take mentality seriously: They do not understand themselves as minded beings capable of self-awareness and development through intentional action. Recognizing the practical implications of accepting this philosophically unconvincing view, I argue, encourages a modification of self-conception that is instrumental to the (...) process of recovery from addiction. Using a combination of philosophical analysis and close reading of a trio of narratives that describe drug dependence and recovery, I pursue the possibility that rehabilitation may involve the clarification and alteration of self-conception in such a way that emphasizes autonomous agency and certain values that have not yet been embraced by twelve-step programs, namely, integration, apprehension, moderation, and self-discipline. The rich and substantial history of analytic–philosophical thought about the self is of immense practical value to people impacted by drug dependence and/or engaged in recovery from it; philosophy offers us a set of investigative tools, terms, and concepts that may help to map the different cognitive routes to successful self-rehabilitation. A philosophical consideration of the use of self-related words and ideas within the context of narratives of addiction and recovery may bear directly and significantly on the improvement of the lives of those persons who struggle to overcome drug dependence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Defense of My Reading of Husserl and a Final NotePeter Hadreas (bio)KeywordsSSRI, Prozac, Fluoxetine, Zoloft, Sertraline, Paxil, Paroxetine, Husserl, phenomenologyI want to acknowledge Dr. Mark D. Rego and Professor Marilyn Nissim-Sabat for the care they put into the responses to my paper "Husserlian Self-Awareness and Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors." One of the abiding strengths of Philosophy, Psychiatry and Philosophy is its debate format.Thanks to the debate format, (...) I am not constrained from openly (and sincerely) contesting Marilyn Nissim-Sabat's reading of my paper. In my opinion, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat remarks suffer from many misconceptions. I'll respond in some detail to these misconceptions and misapprehensions. Contrastingly, I am largely in agreement with Mark Rego's commentary. After discussing Nissim-Sabat's misconceptions, I'll use the remaining space to propose how some of Mark Rego's suggestions might be filled out for further psychological research using the model of prereflective awareness.Nissim-Sabat brings many misunderstandings to my paper. They extend to the paper's purposes, its manner of evidence, as well as its consequences for psychotherapy. I respond to each of these issues.First about the paper's purpose. She writes: "I share with Hadreas the conviction that Husserlian phenomenology is the best philosophical approach to understanding, and indeed, possibly improving the treatment of mental disorders" (54). Nissim-Sabat and I do not share the same point of view regarding Husserlian philosophy and mental disorders. I am keen on Edmund Husserl's theories of pre-reflective awareness inasmuch as they provide a model for understanding mental disorders. Given the space limits, I focus my paper on puzzles emerging from case histories of people treated with SSRIs. Even so, I think it is a mistake to make Husserl's philosophy into a Rosetta stone for decoding this topic. This may mislead the reader as well as misrepresent the history of philosophy. As I point out in the section of the paper titled, "Husserl on Self-Awareness," Husserl is not the only well-known philosopher or psychologist who proposes a pre-reflective account of self-awareness. William James proposes an analogous notion of self-awareness. G. W. Leibniz, at the and of the seventeenth and the beginning of eighteenth centuries, worked out a very sophisticated understanding of pre-reflective awareness, which he applied to a multitude of psychological, epistemological, and ethical topics (Leibniz 1996, 53, 11, 164, 194). Husserl's account of pre-reflective awareness is 'better' inasmuch as it is systematically connected to an epistemology that can enable a researcher to understand how pre-reflective awareness fits both personal self-understanding and empirical psychological [End Page 61] experimentation. But James' and Leibniz 's accounts also have their strengths. Their descriptions of pre-reflective awareness are less burdened with technical language than Husserl's and, in the case of Leibniz, broadly applied to topics outside of psychology and epistemology.Perhaps in keeping with Husserl's philosophy as "the best," Nissim-Sabat argues that I am unfaithful to Husserl's true mission as she sees it. I fail to uphold the essence of Husserlian philosophy. She reminds us: "… Husserl's view that the raison d'etre of phenomenology is to develop an attitude that 'overcomes naturalism once and for all' …" (55–56). She quotes from Husserl's "Vienna Lecture," in support of the claim that overcoming naturalism is the raison d'etre of Husserl's phenomenology. Nissim-Sabat picks out one theme of Husserl's philosophy and makes it into its "raison-d'etre." Those familiar with Husserlian philosophy, and circumspect of its application to current issues in psychiatry and psychotherapy, would find her position worrisome. Specifically, as regards the application of Husserlian philosophy to current issues, a more specific obstacle than a looming naturalism is the prospect that researchers in the empirical sciences will doubt the efficacy of Husserlian philosophy for establishing causal relations through statistical correlations. Because Husserlian philosophy is intentionality based, it might seem (falsely) that it cannot handle the rigorous quantitative analysis of after and side effects that psychopharmacology requires.There should be little worry that anyone who would apply Husserlian philosophy to current psychological or psychiatric issues might... (shrink)

The main task for philosophers is introducing, clarifying, articulating, or simply redirecting concepts as—to echo Quine’s poetic formulation— “devices for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.” I sometimes use “coining concepts” as shorthand for this task. When the concepts are quantitative they are part of a possible science ; when the concepts are qualitative they can be part of a possible philosophy. Of course, in practice, concepts are oft en stillborn, while others have multiple functions in (...) fi elds of inquiry that may straddle philosophy and science. In this chapter I argue that historians of philosophy must, among other things, coin concepts that disclose the near or distant past and create a shared horizon for our philosophical future. In virtue of our expertise we can often do so by drawing on previously orphaned concepts. The more narrow aim of this paper is to introduce two concepts, “Newton’s challenge to philosophy” and, especially, “philosophic prophecy,” that are suitable to philosophers who engage with texts in a scholarly fashion. I do so by re-telling the story of early analytical philosophy and its connection to the reception of Spinoza. By “Newton’s challenge to philosophy,” I mean the following: from about 1700 onward, “natural science” is increasingly taken to be authoritative in settling debates within philosophy; it is a concept that focuses attention on the authority of science and its various manifestations within philosophy. By “philosophic prophecy,” I mean the structured ways in which concept formation by philosophers can shape possible futures, including that of philosophy. In what follows, I first develop and characterize philosophic prophecy more precisely. In order to illuminate the concept, I contrast it with several related, more familiar concepts. Second, I offer brief critical comments on two alternative approaches to the history of philosophy promoted by Quentin Skinner and Michael Kremer in order to make more precise the approach favored here. Third, I offer a fresh narrative about the prehistory and origin of analytical philosophy. My story focuses on Ernest Nagel, who, I claim, is the philosophic prophet of analytical philosophy. Along the way, I explore the shared origins of analytical philosophy and analytical history of philosophy in the anti-Spinozistic writings of George Boole and Bertrand Russell. I oppose Nagel’s and Russell’s narratives in light of Moritz Schlick, the founder of the Vienna Circle. I adopt Schlick’s bold and unappreciated vision of the task of philosophy in scientific age. I focus on his identification of philosophical legislation with qualitative concepts. (shrink)

I investigate the extent to which there might be, now or in the future, non-human animals that partake in the kind of fully human-style consciousness that has been taken by many philosophers to be the basis of normative personhood. I first sketch a conceptual framework for considering the question, based on a range of philosophical literature on relationships between consciousness, language and personhood. I then review the standard basis for largely a priori skepticism about the possibility that any non-human (...) animal could experience FHSC and be a person to any extent, and indicate empirically motivated grounds for rejecting such skepticism, at least with respect to a select group of hypersocial candidate species with communication systems we do not currently know are not languages: corvids, parrots, elephants, and toothed whales. Relevant facts about elephants are reviewed in some detail, as a mini case study. While it is suggested that elephants might partake in the sort of consciousness characteristic of personhood to some extent, grounds are given for expecting that this extent is sharply limited by comparison with normal humans. As these grounds are mainly aspects of elephants’ external niche, however, rather than known limitations in their inboard cognitive or representational capacities, the surprising conclusion emerges that elephants might acquire FHSC, and thereby become persons, if they can be brought into conversation with humans, a possibility opened by considerations canvassed in the paper. (shrink)

Though Wittgenstein's On Certainty has been influential in analytic epistemology, its interpretation has been enormously controversial. It is true that exegesis has been mainly concerned with the proper characterization of Wittgenstein's very notion of ?certainty?; however, some important questions remain unanswered regarding this notion. On the one hand, I am above all referring to the study of the possibilities we have of retaining a certainty when it has seemingly been placed into question and, on the other hand, of (...) regaining a certainty once it has been lost. In this paper, I attempt to provide a detailed answer to both questions. In so doing, some important features of the picture of ourselves which emerges from Wittgenstein's On Certainty are also revealed. (shrink)

Most of us have felt, at one time or another, an attraction to the idea that fate plays a role in our lives. It is difficult to dismiss entirely the notion that certain things were somehow meant to be. Perhaps key events did not just happen but were inevitable, maybe even a part of our destiny. As thoughtful and critical beings, however, we may find that we cannot explain to ourselves or to others just what fate means. In this groundbreaking (...) work, Michael Gelven confronts the question of fate and shows how it is possible to think clearly about fate without abandoning logic or philosophical sophistication. Dismissing the mysterious or the psychological, Gelven subjects the issue to rigorous philosophical examination, thereby opening the topic to critical and rational sensibility. Gelven raises the challenging question "what is fate?" and seeks to answer it by expressing the problem in terms of what it means to be fated. Chance, destiny, fortune, inevitability--these four aspects of fate provide the foundation for the investigation. Gelven closely examines these aspects through four corresponding figures--the gambler, the historian, the birthday celebrant, and the tragedian--and demonstrates how each interacts with fate. His findings are both surprising and provocative. Finally, Gelven explores the full significance of what it means to be an individual buffeted by uncontrolled destinies. Placing the great human issues of freedom, mortality, rationality, and truth within the context of his discussion, Gelven reveals how our existential meaning is indeed consistent with our being fated. Written in clear, nontechnical language for the philosophical audience as well as for those who are simply perplexed by fate's wanton authority, Why Me? offers an enlightening and stimulating inquiry into the nature of our existence. (shrink)

The age old conflict between logical analysis and phenomenological study revealed by different philosophical treatments of our experience of temporal passage are discussed in the present paper. Temporal passage is found to be problematic because philosophers entertain conflicting views regarding the status of the passage of time. As logical analyses prove temporal passage as unreal or illusory and phenomenological study of our experience of temporal passage considers it to be a fundamental structure of our life, the conflict regarding the (...) status of the passage of time emerges. In this paper our aim will be to explore gradually different logical analyses of our experience of temporal passage provided by philosophers of both classical India and the West on the one hand and also to discuss some of the phenomenological treatments of our experience of temporal passage provided by some continental philosophers to show the conflict between the results of these two philosophical treatments. Finally, we would like to state that since this conflict culminates into the conflict between reason and experience, it is not possible to resolve the conflict in the present life form in which both these categories have their distinctive roles to play. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cynthia Willett HEGEL, ANTIGONE, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF ECSTATIC DIALOGUE In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel argues that drama is the highest form of art. Only drama can resolve, or sublate (auflieben), an opposition between objective and subjective poles ofaesthetic experience.1 This opposition takes its penultimate form in the difference between epic and lyric poetry. Subjective feelings expressed in lyric and the objective representation ofevents in epic are sublated (...) in classical drama as ethical character and action. In this article I will examine both what Hegel does and does not say about the structure and function ofclassical drama in order to determine its role in the education of humanity, or what Hegel calls the "phenomenology of spirit." As it turns out, drama is not only a climactic moment in the development of spirit. The structure ofdrama also traces a paradigm and an historical origin for Hegel's dialectic. The ironic reversals and discoveries that emplot tragic drama also constitute dialectic. An immediate consequence of this parallel is mat, in accordance with Aristode's definition of tragic drama, dialectic demands the catharsis, or purging, of emotion from educated spirit.2 After establishing the analogy between dialectic and cathartic drama, I turn to the exemplary role that is played by Sophocles' Antigone in the Phenomenology ofSpirit. A reinterpretation of the play suggests that Hegel fails to see that emotional engagement, or the unsublated subjective feeling relegated to die lower art of lyric, in fact orients the dramatic action of Antigone. The resemblance between drama and dialectic suggests that desire can no more be purged from dialectic than from classical tragedy. As a consequence, Hegelian dialectic should be reconceived in terms of a notion of tragedy that is not cathartic but ecstatic. Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 268-283 Cynthia Willett269 In the AesUietks, Hegel places drama after epic and lyric as the third and final moment of the highest stage of art. Drama presents actions that are ethical and thus differs from the lyrical expression of feelings as well as the adventures narrated in epic (A, pp. 1158; 474). Hegel's definition of epic in terms of narration and description suggests that the language of epic functions as representation. Representational language externalizes, or objectifies, spirit's movement in a series ofevents which are related by the epic poet. This narration functions without the mediation ofa subject, which is to say without an "agent's inner will and character" (A, pp. 1160; 476). Lyric poetry, on the other hand, concerns feelings or "the inner life alone" (A, pp. 984; 254). In accordance with its subject matter, the language oflyric is not representational but expressive. Drama presents actions before an audience, such actions occurring primarily in the mode of speech (A, pp. 1159; 475). What we can characterize as the "speech-acts" performed in drama carry out intentions of, or ends soughtby, the main character. Drama advances dialectic because, as Hegel writes, "drama does not fall apart into a lyric inner life and an external sphere as its opposite, but displays an inner life and its external realization" (A, pp. 1 160; 476). First, events which occur episodically in epic attain the unity of a single action that comprises dramatic plot. Secondly, a "cleaned-up" version ofthe "chaotic" feelings expressed in lyric poetry develops into the intention of a character to adher to a universal ethical principle. It is important to emphasize that, according to Hegel, drama should not draw any of its effect from subjective emotions. Drama sublates lyrical feeling into ethical law. Only thus does drama bring together the epic-making events and lyrical subjectivity, notby wayofa mechanical synthesis, but in a metamorphosis enabling elements initially opposed to give rise to an original whole. The proximity ofdrama to dialectical thought appears in the contrast Hegel draws between dramatic action and action which is prosaic, or philosophically insignificant (A, pp. 1159; 475). Dramatic action, Hegel explains, "is notconfined to the simple and undisturbed accomplishment ofa specific aim; on the contrary, it rests entirely on collisions ofcircumstances, passions, and characters... which in turn necessitate a resolution of the conflict and discord" (A, pp. 1159; 475). On the other hand, a prosaic, or ordinary... (shrink)

Since the advent of the internet, researchers have been interested in the intersubjective possibilities and constraints that digital environments offer users. Some argue that seemingly disembodied digitally-mediated interactions are severely limited when compared to their embodied face-to-face counterparts; others are more optimistic about the possibilities that such technologies afford. Yet, both camps tend towards offering static accounts of online intersubjectivity. What we think these approaches fail to take into account is how users’ intersubjective capabilities on digital platforms (...) can evolve and change over time. Developmental psychology emphasises that intersubjective capabilities build upon and are interrelated to one another, and more sophisticated styles of intersubjectivity only emerge once earlier stages are in place. This is suggestive for analysing intersubjectivity online as it provides a framework for thinking about how an individual’s intersubjective capabilities might develop. We argue that in some cases this can happen through gradual adjustments of our basic intersubjective capabilities to digital spaces, especially those that strive to mimic established forms of offline interaction (e.g. Zoom). In other cases, this can involve more substantial processes of learning to walk and talk again online. Consequently, determining the possibilities and limits of online intersubjectivity is, at least in part, relative to a user’s skill, history, and familiarity with the technology in question. (shrink)

The world of aesthetics is, itself, inextricable from the world as a whole. Indeed, as this book argues, it is among its essential features, and an invaluable key to its appreciation. Thus, to venture into the uncharted world of aesthetics is also to venture into this larger world, a world that might be called the "cosmos" or the "universe". At the same time, to venture into this uncharted realm is to also blaze a trail to (...) the self. This trail would, itself, be paradoxical, as it would end where it begins and begins where it ends. In this light, it may also be said that the uncharted world of aesthetics is the uncharted world of the self. This book provides insights into how works about aesthetics are also works reflective of the self, as well as works with endless possibilities of being. (shrink)

Today it is widely recognized that we face urgent and serious environmental problems and we know much about them, yet we do very little. What explains this lack of motivation and change? Why is it so hard to change our lives? This book addresses this question by means of a philosophical inquiry into the conditions of possibility for environmental change. It discusses how we can become more motivated to do environmental good and what kind of knowledge we need (...) for this, and explores the relations between motivation, knowledge, and modernity. After reviewing a broad range of possible philosophical and psychological responses to environmental apathy and inertia, the author argues for moving away from a modern focus on either detached reason and control or the natural, the sentiments, and the authentic, both of which make possible disengaging and alienating modes of relating to our environment. Instead he develops the notion of environmental skill: a concept that bridges the gap between knowledge and action, re-interprets environmental virtue, and suggests an environmental ethics centered on experience, know-how and skillful engagement with our environment. The author then explores the implications of this ethics for our lives: it changes the way we think about, and deal with, health, food, animals, energy, climate change, politics, and technology. (shrink)

Chapter 5 is an essay on the methodology of equilibrium theory. In the course of examining recent controversies concerning lawlike claims and "assumptions" in economic theory, I reach a position similar to J. S. Mill's. Neo-classical economics is what Mill would call "a separate science." It follows a deductive method, since its basic laws supported by everyday experience. In its general equilibrium formulation, equilibrium theory possesses, however, no explanatory worth and very little explanatory importance, since its idealizations are not legitimate. (...) General equilibrium theory ought fundamentally to be regarded as an explanation of how economic equilibrium is possible. ;In conclusion I argue that Sraffa's contribution is a legitimate form of economic theorizing. Those methodological views, like Lionel Robbins', which would proscribe the sort of piecemeal theorizing Sraffa exemplifies, are, as methodological strictures, unjustified. In fact they involve an ideological distortion. Given the weaknesses in general equilibrium theory identified in Chapters 3 and 5, one has good reason to be eclectic. The Austrian theory, despite the Cambridge criticisms, may be useful in some investigations. A much more segmented economics built around Sraffa's work may have a great deal to teach us. Theories of capital, interest and exchange value currently are underdeveloped, unsupported, and subject to ideological influence. ;In Chapter 3 one special formulation of intertemporal general equilibrium theory is examined. I argue that general equilibrium theory may be taken as a theory of the rate of interest to which the Cambridge criticisms do not apply. Puzzles remain, however, concerning both the apparently lawlike claims and the unrealistic stipulations concerning background conditions that general equilibrium theory makes. ;In Chapter 4 Sraffa's system in The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is presented and tentatively assessed. I argue that it is consistent with equilibrium theory, but may be combined with other claims that are not consistent with equilibrium theory. What is puzzling but, I argue, methodologically legitimate in Sraffa's work is that he takes as givens factors like the composition of output, that are themselves subject to further economic analysis. Sraffa's work, when properly understood, can prove valuable to Marxian economists. ;Chapter 1 establishes a contrast between physical cost and marginal utility theories of exchange value and examines why issues concerning capital and interest are theoretically central to both theories. I point out that physical cost theories of value are not tenable. ;Chapter 2 is concerned with simplified aggregate capital theories, especially Wicksell's Austrian theory of capital, and with the Cambridge criticisms of such theories. The Cambridge criticisms show, I conclude, that aggregative capital theories make unwarranted economic claims. ;This dissertation examines from both an economic and a philosophical perspective controversies concerning the theory of capital and interest and the relationship of capital and interest to exchange value. The fundamentals of the neo-classical and neo-Ricardian approaches to economic theory are made explicit and compared. The neo-Ricardian approach is partially defended. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2001) 294-295 [Access article in PDF] Schouls, Peter A. Descartes and the Possibility of Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 171. Cloth, $35.00. There are at least three ways to write the history of philosophy. Truly historical historians of philosophy emphasize the context and development of ideas, concentrating on the intellectual, social, and personal factors that affect the way (...) philosophers have thought about their subject. Analytic philosophers take a critical approach, considering the logic and merit of the arguments of philosophers who have lived in the past almost as if they are engaging in contemporary debates. Another group of philosophers use the ideas of historical figures to support their own philosophical agendas. Peter Schouls' new book on Descartes falls into this third category.Schouls' aim is to present Descartes' philosophy as the origin of modernity. What he means is that "Descartes believed that the world and humanity exist in a relationship which makes it possible for humanity to improve its state through manipulating the world. This manipulation is by means of developing and applying science." Schouls interprets Descartes' notion of progress as leading to "increases in freedom from the drudgery of labor, from the suffering of illness, and from the anxiety of interpersonal and international quarrels,"(ix) arguing that mind-body dualism is necessary for humanity to accomplish these lofty goals.Schouls asks what conditions are needed for humans to develop the science that is a necessary condition for the kinds of progress Descartes sought (and Schouls clearly endorses). Human progress depends on the possibility of science. Descartes founded his science on the pure metaphysics developed in The Meditations. These metaphysical foundations provided the framework for his claim that the human mind can acquire certain knowledge of the world. Central to Descartes' method, Schouls argues, is the view that the imagination must be incorporeal. If this view can be justified, it is a significant departure from the views of most seventeenth-century philosophers who thought that the imagination is a corporeal organ that translates and transmits mechanical impulses to the incorporeal soul. Schouls argues that because the subject-matter of science, especially geometry, involves imagining relationships apart from empirical [End Page 294] experience, it is necessary that the imagination must be incorporeal. Consequently, mind-body dualism is a necessary condition for the kind of science and progress that Descartes sought.There are flaws in this book, some having to do with Schouls' argument and some having to do with its lack of historical context. The two problems are inextricably linked. Schouls reads Descartes without due consideration of historical context. The book's bibliography reveals no primary sources other than the writings of Descartes. Descartes did not write in an intellectual vacuum. He worked within a community of philosophers, and that community provided both the background and audience for his own thoughts. Ignoring this seventeenth-century context causes Schouls to misread the significance of some of Descartes' ideas. For example, he writes that Descartes' philosophy was condemned in both Protestant and Catholic venues "in part because of its assertion of the limitlessness of human freedom" (4). In fact, Descartes' philosophy was banned because he attempted to give a mechanical explanation of the Eucharist. On a related point, Schouls' drive to present Descartes as the origin of modernity causes him to sideline important issues such as the role of theology in Descartes' thought.Similarly, the lack of historical context leads to errors of interpretation. As Alan Gabbey and others have recently demonstrated, terms like "mechanics" and "science" meant something different in the seventeenth century from what they mean today. Even the terms a priori and a posteriori had different meanings in early modern thought. Schouls expresses some mystification about Descartes' use of the term "a priori" in the second Meditiation. This mystification would vanish if he had taken into account early modern usage according to which a priori means reasoning from the one, true cause to an effect rather than acquiring knowledge of the world independently of experience.Schouls' argument sometimes loses... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001) 211-232 [Access article in PDF] Aristotelianism and the Soul in the Arabic Plotinus Peter Adamson It is common for historians of medieval thought to note that the influence of Aristotle on Islamic philosophy was tinged with Neoplatonism, thanks to a text known as the "Theology of Aristotle." It is now known that the "Theology" is in fact not a work of (...) Aristotle's but rather a paraphrase of parts of Plotinus's Enneads. Certainly, the misattribution of this work to Aristotle facilitated the spread of Neoplatonism as an aspect of Islamic peripateticism, as represented by such authors as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Some efforts have been made to assess its influence on particular philosophers, most notably Ibn Sina whose notes on the "Theology" have come down to us and who may have doubted its authenticity. 1 Until recently the attention paid to the "Theology" itself has tended more towards philological than philosophical analysis, focusing in particular on possible sources of the text. 2 Yet the differences between the original writings of Plotinus and its Arabic paraphrase are of considerable philosophic interest. In recent years research into the "Theology" has begun to pay more attention to the philosophical issues raised by the paraphrase. 3 Here I hope to further this trend by suggesting that, although the author [End Page 211] of this paraphrase was not Aristotle, his own thought was suffused with Aristotelianism.First, we should note that the so-called "Theology of Aristotle" is itself only a part of an original, larger paraphrase of the Enneads. It is now usually thought that this paraphrase was authored by a member of al-Kindi's circle in ninth- century Baghdad. 4 The original Arabic Plotinus has been preserved in three separate texts. The first is the "Theology" (hereafter Th.A) which is itself subdivided into a prologue, a series of "headings" (ru'us), and ten chapters, each called a mimar, meaning "chapter" in Syriac. 5 This is by far the longest of the three texts. We also have the so-called Letter on Divine Science, formerly attributed to al-Farabibut shown by Kraus to belong to the Arabic Plotinus materials. 6 Finally, there are the Sayings of the Greek Sage, a set of fragments collected from various sources by Rosenthal and Lewis which also paraphrases Plotinus in Arabic. 7 As argued by F. W. Zimmermann, these three sources all derive originally from a lost, perhaps much more extensive, paraphrase of Plotinus. 8 They are united both by writing style and philosophical content. I will call them, collectively, AP; and since I cannot here provide conclusive arguments as to the identity of their author, I will call him the Adaptor.One of the major goals of al-Kindi and his circle seems to have been the synthesis of available Greek texts into a coherent philosophy. Thus al-Kindi himself produced doxographical works (for example, his Discourse on the Soul) and a survey of the Aristotelian corpus. 9 If the Adaptor worked in such a milieu, he may well have been influenced by other philosophical sources in making a paraphrase of Plotinus. Zimmermann has suggested that such an influence is at [End Page 212] work in mimar III, where the Adaptor may have drawn on Aristotle's De Anima in order to "reconcile" Plotinus with an Aristotelian theory of the soul as the entelechia of the body. 10 Here I will examine the relationship of soul and body in AP and expand on Zimmermann's thesis in an effort to show that the Adaptor was, in this respect at least, an Aristotelian interpreter of Plotinus. I will close by examining the relationship between AP and a contemporaneous work, the paraphrase of the De Anima produced in al-Kindi's circle. Mimar III and the Question of entelechiaStudents of Aristotle are familiar with his thesis that soul is the form of the body. In the De Anima Aristotle explains this further by claiming that the soul is the "perfection" or entelechia of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 38.4 (2000) 479-502 [Access article in PDF] Possible Worlds in the Tahâfut al-Falâsifa Al-Ghazâlî on Creation and Contingency Taneli Kukkonen University of Helsinki 1. This article is the second half in an inquiry into the debate between al-Ghazâlî (1058-1111) and Averroes (1126-1198) on the metaphysical basis of modalities. The first article focused on Averroes' exposition of the Arabic Aristotelian position on the (...) eternity of the world and the modalities, as found in the Tahâfut al-tahâfut, the "Incoherence of the Incoherence [of the Philosophers]" from ca. 1180.1 In this paper I propose to sketch the outlines to a very different conception suggested by al-Ghazâlî in the Tahâfut al-falâsifa (1095) and quoted verbatim and commented upon by Averroes in the Tahâfut al-tahâfut.2 In contrast to the naturalistic model of modalities propounded by [End Page 479] Averroes, al-Ghazâlî develops an interpretation of possibility in which conceivability and co-assertability are central. In several key respects al-Ghazâlî's approach mirrors that of John Duns Scotus in the fourteenth century: it makes possible, for instance, a distinction between conceptual and natural possibilities in a manner reminiscent of later Latin medieval theory, and, reflecting this, a distinction between the (non-temporal) moments of conception and causation in the divine mind. The parallels between al-Ghazâlî's and Augustine's basic conceptions, meanwhile, highlight the theological motives lying at the heart of the new thinking.As in the previous article, the dialectical form of Averroes' later Tahâfut al-tahâfut is used for critical insight. Averroes' criticism of al-Ghazâlî's modal theoretical innovations gives rise to an important question about the lengths to which al-Ghazâlî's proposals could be taken. The issue is to an extent unresolveable; one would do well to note why. Whereas Averroes' formulations in the Tahâfut al-tahâfut are made readily understandable against the backdrop of his Aristotelian commentaries and wider systematic teaching, it is less easy to determine how far al-Ghazâlî is willing to develop his own ideas. The materials given in the Tahâfut al-falâsifa leave the impression of being inconclusive and open-ended—perhaps deliberately so—and the ambiguities are mirrored in al-Ghazâlî's other texts.3Taken as they stand, al-Ghazâlî's formulations retain a substantial Avicennian residue, for better or for worse. This makes for a curious mixture of old and new in his overall scheme, a feature which Averroes can exploit by criticizing al-Ghazâlî from a strict Aristotelian viewpoint (just as he criticized Avicenna), while all the time maintaining that his adversary's proposals do not add up to a coherent and full-bodied alternative to that venerable tradition. But Averroes' criticisms do not touch on the way al-Ghazâlî's suggestions, vague as they may be, do represent a genuine breakthrough. Al-Ghazâlî's interpretation of the modal terms bypasses the connection traditionally made between true possibility and temporal instantiation. This allows for a freer handling of counterfactual possibilities, an important feature in any refiguring of the limits of possibility. 2. Al-Ghazâlî's innovations have their root in the idea of God freely choosing (arbitrating) between alternatives equal to him. This simple kernel of an idea, seated in the kalâm conception of possibility, allows for a recognition of the genuineness of synchronic alternatives: a seemingly small shift, but all-important [End Page 480] to the ensuing debate. Al-Ghazâlî has defended the notion of God's genuine choice earlier,4 but in refuting "the third proof of the philosophers for the world's eternity," he begins to make systematic use of the notion of possibility. A brief recapitulation of the philosophers' argument will serve to recall the reasoning from which al-Ghazâlî takes his cue. The philosophers, in al-Ghazâlî's words, had... (shrink)

In his newly reissued and revised book, the philosopher Ian Dearden at- tempts a critical inquiry into a philosophical position he calls “nonsensi- calism,” which he takes to correspond to the view “that it is possible to be mistaken in thinking one means anything by what one says”.1 He holds that an unexamined assumption to this effect is implicit in a large swathe of philosophical work dating from a period stretching throughout most of the 20th century, thanks (...) to the widespread tendency of philosophers to accuse each other of talk- ing nonsense. This is, according to the author of the book, most visible in the earlier and later philosophical writings of Wittgenstein, in logical pos- itivism, and in representatives of the Oxford-based “ordinary language” philosophy movement, as well as in the writings of many of those subse- quently writing under the influence of these. Dearden coins a special term to refer to the sort of error that philosophers are accusing each other of having committed: he calls such cases of error “illusions of meaning.”. (shrink)

Commonsense metaphysics populates the world with an enormous variety of macroscopic objects, conceived as being capable of persisting through time and undergoing various changes in their properties and relations to one another. Many of these objects fall under J. L. Austin’s memorable description, “moderate-sized specimens of dry goods.” More broadly, they include, for instance, all of those old favourites of philosophers too idle to think of more interesting examples—tables, books, rocks, apples, cats, and statues. Some of them are natural objects, (...) such as rocks, apples, and cats. Some are artefacts, such as tables, books, and statues. Some are living things, such as apples and cats. Some are inanimate things, such as tables, books, rocks, and statues. To such a list we could add much larger natural objects, such as planets and stars, as well as much smaller ones barely visible to the naked eye, such as mites and pollen grains. Telescopes and microscopes enable us to extend the scale further in both directions, to include such things as galaxies and microbes. To call into question the existence of all or any of these things would appear to be an extravagance of the sort that only a philosopher could indulge. Until fairly recently in the history of philosophy, however, the only way in which their existence would have been called into question was in the context of the debate between realism and idealism. Idealism calls their existence into question by questioning the existence of an “external world” as such, proposing instead that only minds and their experiences exist. What is much more recent is the suggestion that, although there is an external world of entities existing in space and time, it is not in fact populated by most, or perhaps even by any, of the objects recognized by common sense. Instead, it is suggested, the world is populated by submicroscopic entities of a highly esoteric kind best understood by theoretical physicists—entities which may not even qualify as “objects” in anything like the familiar sense because, quite possibly, they should not be thought of as having precise spatiotemporal locations or as persisting over time and through processes of qualitative change. Let us call these putative entities ‘atoms’, without prejudice as to whether they conform to the descriptions currently favoured by physicists in speaking of what they call ‘atoms’. In other words, let us use ‘atom’ as a place-holder for whatever kind or kinds of entities an ideal or completed physics would postulate as the “ultimate” constituents, as opposed to infinitely descending levels of ever more fine-grained physical structure, but let us set aside dispute over these alternatives for the time being, if only because we have little idea as to how to settle it. (shrink)

This discussion paper aims to explore potential ethical and moral implications of (patient) centredness in nursing and healthcare. Healthcare is experiencing a philosophical shift from a perspective where the health professional is positioned as the expert to one that re‐centres care and service provision central to the needs and desires of the persons served. This centred approach to healthcare delivery has gained a moral authority as the right thing to do. However, little attention has been given to its moral (...) and ethical theoretical grounding and potential implications for nurses, persons served and the healthcare system. Based upon a review of academic and grey literature, centredness is proposed as a value‐laden concept in nursing inquiry. Potential moral and ethical implications of centredness on nurses/healthcare providers, persons served and the healthcare system are discussed. These challenges are then considered within the context of normative and relational ethical theories. These perspectives may offer guidance relative to how one should act in those circumstances as well as an understanding as to how interdependency and engagement with the other person(s) can help navigate the challenges of a centred care approach. Viewing centredness through an ethical theoretical lens provides a valuable discourse to nursing in efforts to expand the knowledge base and integrate centred approaches into practice and policy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDavis argues that the familiar periodization dividing European history into medieval and modern phases disguises a claim to power as a historical fact. It justifies slavery and subjugation by projecting them onto the “feudal” Middle Ages and non‐European present, while hiding forms of slavery and subjugation practiced by “secular” modernity. Periodization thus furnishes one of the most durable conceptual foundations for the usurpation of liberty and the abuse of power.In part I, devoted to “feudalism,” Davis traces the legal, (...) political, and colonial struggles behind the development of the concept of “feudal law” in early modern France and England and unravels just how that concept hides colonial oppression while justifying European sovereignty. In part II, devoted to “secularization,” she demonstrates the failure of twentieth‐century critics of “secularization” like Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg, and Reinhart Koselleck to break out of the limits imposed by the medieval/modern periodization. Part II concludes with a look at conceptual alternatives in the writings of Amitav Ghosh and the Venerable Bede.Three limitations of this book are worth mentioning. It traces the political history hidden by the concept of “feudalism,” but does not trace the political history hidden by the concept of “religion.” It offers no answer to the question of how to break the link between scholarship and politics without ending up in a logical impasse or reinforcing the link. It does not address the possibility that answering this question may require breaking with the terms of professional historical inquiry. Perhaps the question could be answered in terms like those that led Wittgenstein to characterize his Philosophical Investigations as remarks on the natural history of human beings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 21-39 [Access article in PDF] Capability and Language in the Novels of Tarjei Vesaas Catherine Wilson I THOUGH RELATIVELY UNKNOWN to English-speaking readers, Tarjei Vesaas (1897-1970) is recognized as one of the great Scandinavian novelists and literary innovators of the last century. His oeuvre is substantial, extending to thirty-four volumes published between 1923 and 1966, many of them translated into English and European (...) languages. He was one of four nominees for the 1964 Nobel Prize in literature, and he received a number of other awards and citations in the course of his life. At the same time, his work has failed almost entirely to generate a secondary literature going beyond plot summary, stylistics, and moral approval, and even that literature remains strongly regionalized. 1 Vesaas wrote in nynorsk or "New Norwegian," the minority language of the country created from south-central dialects and distinct from the official, bureaucratic bokmal. He settled permanently on a farm in the remote Telemark district of Norway and assumed no role in European culture as critic or essayist, refusing to discuss his own work in literary or philosophical terms. As a result, analytic and comparative studies have proved difficult to launch.The present essay is intended to provide one such analytical study, addressed specifically to the philosophical themes of ethical resignation, the precariousness of communication, and inwardness. These are familiar themes in twentieth-century literature. In his study of the "literary conquest of the void," R. M. Adams shows how Moravia, Musil, and Beckett amongst others make use of devices of paralysis, immobility, exhaustion, and incomprehension that have their origins in the romantic literature of the nineteenth century, notably in Baudelaire [End Page 21] and Gogol. 2 Literary modernism rejected certain nineteenth-century conventions of plot and character, but did not abandon the fascination of the preceding century with nihilistic themes. Vesaas's work demands to be read in this literary context. The novels, at once semirealistic and highly stylized, deal almost exclusively with rural people and their struggles against the elemental forces of nature. The main characters are often children and adolescents who suffer some degree of helplessness. Simple contrasts are posed: warmth and cold; loss and retrieval, childbirth and death. Agricultural cycle motifs abound. The choice of protagonists and the dominance of vitalistic and biological themes pose the threat of sentimentality and preciousness, but it is avoided by the ubiquity of devastation and destruction in the moral landscape. According to Randi Brox's note in the Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature, the early novels in particular "advocate as the highest goal in life an accepting, contented attitude toward the human condition." 3This judgment reflects what might be termed a judicial-theological picture of fiction. On this view, a novel constitutes a testing ground for discovering what sort of world we live in and what pursuits are possible and worthwhile. Various alternatives are set up as hypotheses, and novels prove and disprove them through narrative demonstrations of the causal effects of adopting them. False theories of the human world and untenable values are subject to refutation. This template is surprisingly useful, not only with respect to the nineteenth-century novel, with its apparent tendency to confident judgment, but even to modern fiction. Moravia, for example, can be seen to be awarding divergent roles to characters and allowing the qualities they represent to struggle for supremacy. 4Yet poststructuralist and postmodernist criticism have cast doubt on the notion that, to the extent that they are important, such contests can ever be decided, and it is increasingly clear that the greatest nineteenth-century novelists, Hardy and Eliot, did not regard the hierarchy of values as settled and demonstrable. Persons, we are coming to understand, are more plausibly seen as sites of conflict; thus fictional representations of persons are repositories of opposing values. Vesaas's novels reflect such an understanding of persons and values, and so the judicial-theological template is inapplicable.The critical view that Vesaas's novels are essentially instructions in adaptation is untenable, because the goal of... (shrink)

Architecture and Deconstruction Case of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi -/- Introduction Towards deconstruction in architecture Intensive relations between philosophical deconstruction and architecture, which were present in the late 1980s and early 1990s, belong to the past and therefore may be described from a greater than before distance. Within these relations three basic variations can be distinguished: the first one, in which philosophy of deconstruction deals with architectural terms but does not interfere with real architecture, the second one, in (...) which a collaboration between Jacques Derrida and a group of architects interested in his concepts is commenced, and the third one, in which completed or only designed objects or new concepts of deconstruction created by architects gain their supremacy over philosophy. The following book analyses these three possible ways, first of all with the reference to Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. -/- Peter Eisenman -/- Misreading… and Other Errors -/- The issue of relations between Peter Eisenman’s work and philosophy of deconstruction may be referred to his activity more than ten years preceding his direct collaboration with Jacques Derrida (in 1985) and organisation of the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture at Museum of Modern Art in New York (in 1988). As soon as at the stage of designing the first houses (House I-III, 1967-1970), which almost entirely inscribed in formalistic aesthetics of Modernism, the architect analysed the problem of architecture dependence on its assumptions. All his later designs may be treated as consequence of this initial interest in relations between practice and theory, and at the same time as an introduction to manipulations later on led at the level of metaphysics of architecture. Beginning with the issue of presence, considered in comments to House VI (1972), the number of ideas having their analogies in philosophy of deconstruction increased. The text entitled The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of the End (1984), in which Eisenman criticised questions of representation in architecture, its delusive strive for truth and comparably unattainable attempts at ultimate definition of elementary rules, should be acclaimed the breaking point. This attitude was extended by numerous strategies disturbing architecture rules defined at metaphysical level in an essay Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors: an Architecture of Absence (1986). The issue of Eisenman’s passage from formalism to deconstruction has already been much discussed in the literature (Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Patin among others), still it should be mentioned that the threads similar to Derrida’s concept included in Eisenman’s writing reveal untranslatability of architecture and philosophy. -/- Choral Works or Separate tricks -/- In 1985-1986 a series of seven disputes between Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman took place. The pretext for them were designs concerning Parc de la Villette in Paris. The situation of many months of collaboration between a notable philosopher of the second half of the 20th c. and an architect that already had a huge theoretical oeuvre, ended up with a publication of a large volume entitled Chora L Works and it became at the same time a vast study area for historians of contemporary architecture and philosophers. Derrida’s contribution to concept works were his considerations over the idea of chôra, the properties related to this concept were about to be reflected in shapes of the park. Therefore, Chora L Works became an example of the abilities of contemporary art, both in its capability of translation from philosophical ideas to artistic forms and its resistance to tradition of representing in architecture some phenomena and values originating outside this discipline. In the final period of their collaboration both interlocutors started to polemicise with each other more decidedly, what became a separate part of their thought exchange. The exchange of letters between Derrida and Eisenman at the turn of 1989 ended up the period of their direct contacts, nevertheless, at this time precisely a large group of experts in issues of deconstruction joined the discussion and extended the revealed in the former dispute problems into more than ten years of further considerations and publications. Except for a long text by Jeffrey Kipnis, who had participated in the meetings of the philosopher and the architect, there appeared also comments of researchers of artistic theories (K. Michael Hays, Thomas Patin), philosophers (Andrew Benjamin), and even experts in Greek literature (Maria Theodorou or Ann Bergren). Following these debates a contemporary reflection on architecture has saturated with indeed numerous concepts originating in philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Architecture which imitates mute philosophy -/- The series of Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman meetings, which took place in the period of 1985-1987, induced many authors to make comments. Some of them (Jeffrey Kipnis, Ann Bergren, Maria Theodorou) developed the subject of chôra which was introduced to the discussion by Derrida. The problem that was about to be solved was the question of tying up the concept of chôra with architecture, including Eisenman’s architecture and the series of meetings within frames of Chora L Works project. Kipnis on this occasion paid attention to chôra and its character of anachronia which infects any being created within chôra. In other words any event has its counterpart (analogon) in another, earlier event. He demonstrated the similarity of structure of many events and statements from the times of Derrida and Eisenman’s meetings to the almost identical behaviour of figures in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. The loss of beginning present in this phenomenon was appropriate to both features of chôra and the effects of typical analyses of philosophy of deconstruction. Bergren’s analyses focused on accentuating gender of chôra, which, according to this author, had been neglected hitherto in discussions. She collated chôra descriptions with characteristics of women in myths, early Greek epic and philosophy and she arrived at a conclusion that chôra has features of a single woman and a married one at the same time. And yet Theodorou’s studies showed that in the Homeric epics chôra is not treated as an idea but is related with single things and events. The other part of the comments (represented by Andrew Benjamin and K. Michael Hays’ utterances) concerns Eisenman’s attitude to tradition which was treated as a variety of iteration understood philosophically. Benjamin commenced his considerations at the point of closeness between a definition of tradition and a concept of chôra understood as perpetuation (placement). A problematic issue was for him Eisenman’s complex relation to tradition based on its contest and affirmation at the same time. Overcoming the simple subordination to tradition – according to Benjamin – was based on awareness of the role of repetition in culture not known before. Hays made an attempt to explain the pleasure and torment of repetition with the support of Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes’ concepts. According to Hays repetitions are attempts of a single being to a certain primal state perceived as free of any tension. In a similar way Rosalind Krauss explained a motif of a grate present in Modernistic art and also exceptionally frequent in Eisenman’s work. -/- Annex Architecture is still writing Balzac novels. Peter Eisenman and literature -/- Architecture’s approach to writing, script or literature, present within Peter Eisenman’s work, is an exceptional phenomenon, furthermore a complex one. The article considers four possible relations. The first one relates to Eisenman’s characteristics as a person extremely gifted with the ability to wordplay, which very ‘play’ reveals skills to create architectural images. In the second approach the attention has been paid to Eisenman’s interests – in the first period of his oeuvre – in linguistic works by Noam Chomsky and his transformational-generative grammar. The third kind of relations applied to overcoming the need for autonomy of architecture (and of modernist aesthetics at the same time) and renew interests in questions of meaning in architecture. The fourth sort of relations occurred when Eisenman started to create reflections of historic or literary narrations in architecture – ‘stone stories’ and architectural fictions of their kind. -/- Bernard Tschumi -/- From perversion to deconstruction In Bernard Tschumi’s writings from the 1970s and 1980s we can find a transposition of important threads of post-structuralist ideas deriving from Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s works. The analysis of the architect’s writings also shows roots in Phillippe Sollers, Michel Foucault and Denis Hollier’s works. The analysis of borrowed elements from the beginnings of Tschumi’s theoretical activity may be helpful in explaining the contents of his later writings motre inspired by philosophy of deconstruction. The set of his earliest views was inspired by Marxism, Neo Marxism and French Structuralism, mainly by the writings of Henri Levebre and Guy Debord. From the thought of Levebre Tschumi took interest for city as not only a question of urbanistics but also a political issue. From Debord’s concepts he borrowed a conviction about the role of situational violation for changes in the society structure. Some of these beliefs were preserved in his own concepts of architecture as an event. From this period derived also his will to change conservative elements of social structure not by means of political revolution but of theoretical and creative activity. Tschumi acknowledged that the effective way of the proceedings towards achieving his aims would be accepting the role of both a critical intellectualist and architecture expert who would not hide away his left-wing orientation. The speculations defined by the architect as ‘revolting analyses’ were about to characterise contradictions which tear the society apart, penetrate architecture and constitute the basis of culture. Spreading away of the conscience of false assumptions hidden away in various disciplines could have weakened cohesion of a conservative society and influence the will to change among the elites. This way the beginnings of political revolution were rooted in philosophy of architecture. In 1977 Tschumi published his text entitled The Pleasure of Architecture inspired by Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, it also included some concepts derived from Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida. First of all the author used Barthes’s concept which made an assumption that literary activity is pervaded by the spirit of resistance towards social rules, and Tschudi transferred this remark onto architecture. From the ideas of Bataille, acquainted via Holier’s work, he derived his belief that two concepts of space, a conceptual one (defined as Pyramid) and a sensual one (defined as Labirynth), not losing their distinct features, they join in the concept of experienced space which exceeds contradictions. The exceeding itself was defined as the basic rule of architecture and it was referred to situations in which architecture not only negates social needs, but also disavows its own tradition. Crossing the borders applies not only to political issues or permanent rules of the very discipline but also interfering with other fields (especially literature and film). The fact that architecture is associated with organising events turned Tschumi’s attention to questions of violence that result from upsetting architectural order of a given building by its users and the one hand, and on the other from forcing the users to specific acts imposed by this very order. The analysis of the concepts used by Tschumi in his early writings indicates that they are close to definitions that would occur in his reflection in the following years influenced by philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Approaching deconstruction Tschumi in his theories developed in the 1980s presumed that the current social world had undergone a deep process of decay, and the reaction against which ought to be based on ordering-up actions, and also preserving the main outline of disintegration of the whole and its elements in the state of conflict. The statements concerning the nature of the contemporary to Tschumi social relations were applied by him to the world of architecture, this led him to coming up with designing strategies that took into consideration the destabilised character of conditions in which works of architecture were created. New ways of conduct invented by Tschumi drew their inspiration from literature and research on literature, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, structuralism and post structuralism, and eventually also deconstruction philosophy. The proposed methods were opposed by their author both to functionalism continuity trends and postmodern architecture. Tschumi’s proposals contradicted any forms of conservatism or traditionalism in political sphere as well as in reference to tendencies in architecture. They were not simple contradictions of social or architectural rules, they intrude them from the inside, weaken or escalate the already existing incongruities, they move the boundaries between the areas. Revolutionary illusions about the possibility of radical changes were replaced with strategies which completed, tainted or test former rules in the series of formal games of permutation and combination. Quite different from avant-garde formalism Tschumi’s games were not about maintaining the autonomy of a given area, but on the contrary – polluting it with other areas’ influences. Tschumi enjoyed demonstrating illusions of architecture concerning simple relations between form and function, or between form and meaning. Making use of Freud, Lacan and Foucault’s research he introduced a category of “madness” into architecture allowing an observation that the recognised norms are nothing but merely ones of many possible principles of behaviour, and their recognised status resulted from unjustified hindering innovativeness which is crucial for architecture. To reborn architecture’s capability of changing Tschumi also made use of Barthes’s discoveries concerning rules of narration and works by writers who applied in their writing knowledge on linguistics. Making a work’s author unclear by various mechanical transformations of its elements was however apparent only, and formal rigours imposed on the process of designing liberated possibilities difficult to obtain in more traditional creative action. Another mode of acting introduced by Tschumi was combining his work of elements deriving from outside architecture; joining space records with notation of motion and events accompanying architectural objects among others. These architectural and extra-architectural elements were not unified, on the contrary their heterogenous and conflictual character was stressed. This is how shock, anxiety and instability, typical for live in great metropolises, infiltrated architecture. Taking some ideas of deconstruction philosophy as a pattern Tschumi also took into critical consideration in his essays traditional in architecture oppositions between form and figuration, or theory and practice. By combining various inspirations he eventually worked out an idea of architectural event, which he understood as a series of actions contesting its own field, redefining its sources, principles and elements. An event, understood in this way, was not so much producing works as rather creating conditions of their production and at the same time designing the society different from a hierarchic one. -/- Park of deconstruction Among numerous philosophical strategies of deconstruction most frequently used was questioning the practice of strong opposition of two reasons. In many cases Bernard Tschumi’s writings just consider functioning of the conflict juxtaposition of the ideas of structure and ornament or theory and practice in history of architecture. Violation of traditional relations between terms of this kind, both old and modern, raised Jacques Derrida’s objections, when he was induced for the first time to co-operate with architects’ milieu. During this long lasting thought exchange the philosopher eventually acknowledged Bernard Tschumi’s arguments for reasoning the encroachment of architecture’s fundamental rules. Deconstruction applied in architecture was not a simple transposition or analogy of practices that had been applied by philosophy of deconstruction. We may even say that considering architectural terms became an important formula of deconstruction. Architecture understood in philosophical way became something beyond the practice and theory of its own discipline, a sort of metaphysics of both philosophy and architecture. The deliberate encroachment of simplicity of dividing architecture into theory and practice, for the first time became a clear aim for Tschumi in his drawings and texts entitled The Manhattan Transcripts. The contents of this series of works was a record of characteristic features of this New York district in such a way that not only objects were the subject of the record but also relations between objects, people and events. The record was about to take into consideration a conflict character of elements of this representation and at the same time to avoid applying to them the rule of mimetism. The record became a form of reflection over the very record by an increased control over the ways of representation. Architecture which was considered in the The Manhattan Transcripts was not directed to fulfill the needs of inhabitation or production, it was rather related with hitherto usually marginalised liminal situations: building ostentatiously big monuments, religious cult, war etc. Architecture operating in these relations focused also the attention on the included in it continuous tendency to overpass its own restrictions, the role of violence as its not recognised factor, or the meaning of excess and shock in its operation. Architecture moving from reason towards madness became even more visible in the design of Parisian Parc de la Villette, whose pavilions were defined as folies (in French it means both small park buildings and follies). The park was supposed to be on the one hand a reflection of traditional society disintegration while on the other it questioned basic rules of producing a work of architecture. The traditional rules of designing, based on ordering up, were replaced with the strategies of dysfunction and dissociation. In Tschumi’s opinion methods of this kind may be equivalent of what Derrida named différance. Instead of aiming at mergence, any diversity, plays or variations were strengthen. Tschumi’s texts, in which he explained his attitude, were completed by Derrida’s extent statement entitled Point de folie – Maintenant l’architecture. Derrida’s article is the most significant of all his statements on architecture as a form of thinking and activity. According to the philosopher, architecture should divide space (in French defined as espacement), what enables both thinking and action – it arranges the space of an event. Tschumi’s buildings, defined as folies, in an essential way destabilise any created order, and at the same time they refresh it. Derrida’s statement suggests that architecture may become both metaphor of an order merging a language or a society but also of inner forces which deconstruct and reconstruct it. Therefore architecture is at the same time a construction, a deconstruction and a reconstruction. Parc de la Villette stands out in this system with its attempt to step beyond the scheme of an easy repetition and its heading for chances of achieving more radical otherness. -/- Conclusion Destruction as construction. Paradoxes of deconstruction in architecture -/- Scepticism about persistence and common importance of fundamental values of human culture evinced in philosophers and writers’ works as early as in Greek antiquity, nevertheless it was not expressed so strongly as in the second half of the 20th century. Especially in Heidegger’s work Being and Time (although originated in 1927, still influential in all later philosophy) the following states were characterised: the state of losing the ground (Abgrund), of being out of sight (Unheimlichkeit) and of being out of dwelling (Un-zuhause-sein) – as the basis of self-confidence of conscious being there (Dasein). The entire criticism of philosophy of home and dwelling draws the inspiration from this early writing of the German philosopher, it combines crisis of basic terms of metaphysics with social conditions which are dictated by living in large metropolis. The crisis of both metaphysical foundation and home appears to be similar to the situation of weakening the relations between a man and his dwelling in extensively expanding cities. Whereas philosophy, as well as many disciplines of social sciences, have diagnosed for a long time the destabilisation of fundamental ideas of Western culture and crucial changes in the ways of dwelling, architecture itself occurred to be “the last fortress of metaphysics” (J. Derrida). Among contemporary architects, Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi were the ones who engaged most decidedly in the issues of critical analysis of architecture foundation and its social role. Both the architects noticed new formulas of contemporary social and individual existence, tremendously different from the entire history, and at the same time they affirmed lack of adequacy of architecture concepts to new situations. Both Eisenman and Tschumi used to describe the existing architecture as a tool for consolidation of highly integrated and hierarchised societies, and also as a discipline extremely uncoincidental with the current character of social life based on ideas of freedom and diversity. The means to transform architecture and make a factor of further social changes out of it, was a concept that accentuated revealing the inner contradictions of this discipline, and considering them in designing strategies. Eisenman’s activity, in regard of what has just been noticed, was focused on questioning the basic rules of traditionally comprehended architecture, especially the rule of purpose. The American architect noticed that the concept of architecture as fulfilment the need of location, hides away the fact that the location has to be constantly reconsidered, and hence it is overtaken by change (dislocation). Therefore new concept of architecture propounded architectural activity to translocate the concept of location – more than before – but also to change its status perpetually. Such comprehended architecture should claim, as its main purpose, the constant revision of this purpose and create itself anew permanently. Even Eisenman’s earliest designs of houses nos. I-IV broke with such values as the sense of safety, closeness and familiarity, and just on the contrary they accentuated senses of strangeness, homelessness and loss of confidence. The contradictions within architecture noticed by Tschumi referred to combination of intellectual and sensual values in architecture, when their non-appropriation was defeated by an additional condition, namely the way of experience based on pleasure of excess, marked by insanity. The features of folly were especially visible in his designs of gardens, where the order of planning was mixed with sensual experience introduced by particular elements (both the ones created by nature, and the buildings defined as folies). Parc de la Villette designed by the French architect in Paris put in question not only the common understanding of purpose in architecture but also the ideas of order and integrity, as its plan was based on the combination of independent layers with records of grids of points, various lines and planes. The architecture that collides inadequate elements with each other was supposed to be a kind of an event with no beginning and no end. The architecture treated as an event became a form of a space weakened articulation that maintains its diversity and lack of accordance of the elements building it up. The analyses of Eisenman and Tschumi’s theoretical writings indicate how much the aims of architecture have actually changed; instead of supporting social persistence, the architecture is rather intensifying contradictions, and instead of providing people with the sense of safety, it sublimes danger. From simple acts of defamiliarisation, increasing the distance to itself and enhancing the role of theory, through discomfort, anxiety, not feeling someone at home, weirdness, excess, shock and violence, architecture reached the edge of stability and uncertainty, only to make an attempt at penetrating what is impossible and unutterable, and recording what cannot become the subject of any records. -/- . (shrink)

I am a philosopher with Parkinson’s Disease. Over the past several years I’ve been trying to write about my situation. I wrote about how I was forced to face the disease. I described how the disease twists and distorts my world. Then I asked myself, as a philosophy writer and teacher, whether I could say anything that might help myself or others facing life with Parkinson’s? I found ideas in the ancient Stoics and expanded them with ideas about time, coming (...) up with suggestions for living as excellently as possible despite the disease. Looking at those suggestions, I realized how the special awareness, resolve, and attention I was suggesting would be eaten away by dementia, and I know that a majority of Parkinson’s patients face dementia if they survive long enough. What can philosophy say to me or any person whose self and philosophy are being erased? Writing about such issues has helped me deal with my situation, and maybe my essay might be useful for others dealing with decline. (shrink)

Is there such a thing as philosophical nonsense? For the best part of a century now philosophers have been accusing each other of talking nonsense. This practice presupposes that people can be wrong in thinking they mean anything by what they say, that there can be an illusion of meaning. But the assumption that illusions of meaning are possible has not, the author believes, been seriously examined; nor has the problem of how such illusions could be diagnosed been satisfactorily (...) answered. This book extends the work of a number of recent writers on Wittgenstein who have advocated an 'austere' view of nonsense, but in a more sceptical direction than they have taken. It argues that nonsensicalism is radically misguided and should be abandoned. The possibility that illusions of meaning occur outside philosophy - in dreams, in certain hoaxes, in madness or under the influence of drugs - is also examined. IAN DEARDEN read philosophy at Downing College, Cambridge, and Bedford College, London. He taught philosophy at Bedford College, the City University, the Polytechnic of North London and the University of Essex, and also for the London University Department of Extra-Mural Studies. (shrink)