This chapter contains sections titled: What is Innateness? The Case for ElimiNativism Good Uses for Bad Concepts Against Premature Elimination References.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Origins and Evolution of Bioethics: Some Personal ReflectionsEdmund D. Pellegrino (bio)AbstractBioethics was officially baptized in 1972, but its birth took place a decade or so before that date. Since its birth, what is known today as bioethics has undergone a complex conceptual metamorphosis. This essay loosely divides that metamorphosis into three stages: an educational, an ethical, and a global stage. In the educational era, bioethics focused on a (...) perceived “dehumanization” of medicine by the rising power of science and technology. Remedies were sought by introducing humanities, ethics, and human “values” into the medical curriculum. Ethics was one among the humanistic disciplines, but not the dominant one. In the second era, ethics assumed a dominant role as ever more complex dilemmas emerged from the rapid pace of biological research. As such dilemmas were applied to medical practice, the need for a more rigorous and more formal analysis of their moral status was clear. Philosophically-trained ethicists had an obvious role. They began to teach, write, and profoundly influence medical education and practice. In the third—and present—period, the breadth of problems has become so broad that ethicists must, themselves, draw on disciplines well beyond their expertise—e.g., law, religion, anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and the like. The era of bioethics as a global enterprise is upon us. The original hope for humanizing medicine has not been overtly successful; however, much has been accomplished of value to patients, the profession, and society. Medical morality has been transformed into a formal, systematic study of a whole range of issues of the greatest significance to humanity. Now the major challenge is one of identity, or inter-relationships and connections between the theoretical and the practical. Bioethics has outgrown its beginnings.I have been invited to give a “personal recollection” of the early development of bioethics. Such invitations are notoriously hard to resist, but also problematic when they are the recollections of a participant [End Page 73] in the events to be described. We need only be reminded of the vagaries common to the plethora of memoirs on the book stands today. Few have escaped the perils of selective memory, self-promotion, or the settling of old scores. Yet their perils notwithstanding, memoirs may serve some useful purpose. They are the raw material—verbal kitchen middens so to speak—out of which historians can later sift fact from fancy. They enable “tribal elders” to give witness to the past from which the present can fashion some sense of continuity.I will organize my reflections around three very arbitrary time periods that represent my own way of thinking about the evolution of bioethics: (1) an era of “proto-bioethics” (1960–1972), (2) an era of philosophical bioethics (1972–1985), and (3) an era of global bioethics (1985-present). Each era, of course, overlaps with the others, and the dominant strand of each runs through the others as well.In the proto-bioethics period, the language of human values predominated; in the era of bioethics philosophically construed, it was the language of philosophical ethics; and in the era of bioethics globally construed, the social and behavioral sciences have gained greater prominence. In each period, interest in the traditional humanities other than philosophy waxed and waned. In the earlier years, religion and theology predominated. Beginning in the 1970s, philosophy took a dominant role. In the last two decades, other disciplines, like law, literature, and the social sciences, have exerted more and more influence (McNeur 1963; Pellegrino 1997; Barker 1987).I make no pretense here of writing any part of the formal “history” of bioethics. Works of this nature are beginning to appear (Rothman 1991; Jonsen 1998 ; Dell’Oro and Viafora 1996). Thomas McElhinney and I are preparing our own account of the work and influence of the Institute on Human Values in Medicine, one of the influential programs of the Society for Health and Human Values (Pellegrino and McElhinney, n.d.). Space limitations as well as prudence preclude any attempt to do justice to all the events, institutions, and people who have made the field of bioethics what it is today. I apologize for these omissions, for any unintentional lapses of... (shrink)

This essay explores the universal cognitive bases of biological taxonomy and taxonomic inference using cross-cultural experimental work with urbanized Americans and forest-dwelling Maya Indians. A universal, essentialist appreciation of generic species appears as the causal foundation for the taxonomic arrangement of biodiversity, and for inference about the distribution of causally-related properties that underlie biodiversity. Universal folkbiological taxonomy is domain-specific: its structure does not spontaneously or invariably arise in other cognitive domains, like substances, artifacts or persons. It is plausibly (...) an innately-determined evolutionary adaptation to relevant and recurrent aspects of ancestral hominid environments, such as the need to recognize, locate, react to, and profit from many ambient species. Folkbiological concepts are special players in cultural evolution, whose native stability attaches to more variable and difficult-to-learn representational forms, thus enhancing the latter's prospects for regularity and recurrence in transmission within and across cultures. This includes knowledge that cumulatively enriches (folk expertise), overrides (religious belief) or otherwise transcends (science) the commonsense ontology prescribed by folkbiology. Finally, the studies summarized here indicate that results gathered from “standard populations” in regard to biological categorization and reasoning more often than not fail to generalize in straightforward ways to humanity at large. This suggests the need for much more serious attention to cross-cultural research on basic cognitive processes. (shrink)

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash INTRODUCTION Religion has long provided guidance that has led to standards reflected in some aspects of medical practices and traditions. The recent bioethical literature addresses numerous new problems posed by advancing medical technology and demonstrates an erosion of standards rooted in religion and long widely accepted as almost axiomatic. In the deep soul-searching that pervades the publications on bioethics, several disturbing and dangerous trends neglect some basic lessons of philosophy, logic, and history. The bioethics (...) discourse on medical aid in dying emphasizes similarity over previously recognized important distinguishing features. For example, it overplays a likeness between assistance in dying and the withdrawal of life-saving technology. In many bioethics’ topics, arguments based on a logical continuum are used to question the lines demarcating important moral differences. l. The Line Between Ethical and Not: Logic Based on Continuum Careful case selection, often either end of a continuum, allows the tearing down or ridiculing of many rules and codes across most professions and fields of interest. This situation holds true for traffic laws as well as medical ethics guidelines. It is relatively simple for those who desire to attack a particular viewpoint by selecting a case that makes that position seem untenable. In the ethics realm, good and bad medicine exist at opposite ends of an ethical continuum, with many practices lying in between. For example, much of medical ethics exists between the Nazi criminal physicians and the most sainted nurse or physician. A gradual progression occurred over less than two decades from a utilitarian position that supported limited euthanasia for those with certain mental illnesses to genocide. German society embraced a utilitarian ethic in which the value of human life no longer was intrinsic but instrumental.[1] Many morally significant points on a continuum were then ignored as the misguided utilitarian policy rampantly continued. A point in the continuum to distinguish between ethically justifiable and that which is not can be difficult to identify compared to the two extremes. This continuum is not unique to ethics but can be applied to almost any other aspect of human life and endeavor. Between a severely ill schizophrenic person and a superbly well-adjusted individual, there is a continuum of mental and psychological function. The existence of a continuum should not paralyze thinking and prevent us from drawing lines and identifying moral differences based on objective criteria as well as moral philosophy. Yet, by focusing on a continuum, many bioethicists use logic to disregard dividing lines between an "ethical" and an "unethical" act. Unfortunately, sometimes bioethicists draw revolutionary conclusions that would change the scope of medical practices which is accepted as ethical. There are many examples of similar shifts on the continuum. Many authors argue for the ethical permissibility of abortion by pointing out that the human fetus is no different in various characteristics, one arguing it is as like an ape or chick as it is like a person,[2] and does not achieve unique human and individual characteristics until well into the first year of life.[3] While human fetuses arguably do not have certain distinctive qualities of personhood, most people shy away from the logical next conclusion: permitting infanticide. For example, Joshua Lederberg condemns infanticide, in the face of biological illogic, because of our emotional commitment to infants, to me, a relatively weak explanation. Sir Francis Crick suggests we might consider birth at two days of life in order to decide whether an infant is a "suitable" member of society.[4] Giublini and Minerva suggest that infanticide should be permissible since late pregnancy abortions are permissible, arguing there is no significant difference between a fetus just before birth and an infant just after birth.[5] Clearly the continuum approach would allow for subjective arguments in favor of later infanticide at other points many days post-birth. Years ago, with a cynical tone, I mentioned infanticide as a further step on the continuum beyond abortion, and I was rightly shouted down as being deliberately provocative to assert the logic would ever stretch so far. While it is not an accepted mainstream position, the movement in academic settings from widespread condemnation to limited possible acceptance of infanticide has taken place in an incredibly short time. Public opinion and medical opinion in these areas have shifted dramatically in a short time. In another area, from a biological and chemical point of view, there is a continuum from man down to a single carbon atom. Yet, it would not seem logical to ignore the emotional differences, the meaning of personhood, or the moral distinction between killing an insect and killing a person. ll. A False Continuum: Medical Aid in Dying I assert that there has been an erosion of ethical guidelines in recent years attributable to using continuums to camouflage important distinctions. James Rachels’ work on active and passive euthanasia, which contends that the two are ethically identical, exemplifies that logic.[6] He illustrates this thesis, using a continuum to compare different scenarios with like consequences as morally equivalent, by comparing the deliberate drowning of a child with a deliberate failure to rescue a drowning child when easily able to do so. The author's comparison proposes that since much of the medical profession has already made peace with withholding treatment in order to hasten death, consistency inexorably demands that we permit active euthanasia as well.[7] When permission for active euthanasia was first introduced, it was limited exclusively to patients suffering severely from an intractable, incurable, and irreversible disease. These guidelines have been continuously eroded. There is now a substantial serious consideration for permitting active euthanasia of healthy elderly individuals who feel that they have completed their lives and are "tired of living."[8] There are many moral and factual differences along the ethical continuum. In human life, there is a difference between a live baby and a fetus, between a viable fetus and one that is not, between a fetus and a zygote, and between a zygote and a sperm cell. Similarly, there is a difference between pulling a trigger to kill someone and not interfering in preventing his death, which is reprehensible though both may be. There is a difference between not resuscitating an 80-year-old man with cancer when his heart stops and injecting him with a fatal dose of potassium chloride. I argue that an overt act of taking life repels civilized human beings is to be commended and encouraged as the reverence for human life or even for just a moment of human life is one of the great contributions of our civilization. CONCLUSION As an orthodox Jew, I feel that divinely inspired guidelines that have stood the test of centuries shape my beliefs, and such guidelines contradict medical aid in dying. I cannot speak to the viewpoint of those who do not access religion in defining their moral stance, nor do I implicate them in the current bioethics' trends, as I am not aware of the personal role of religion in the lives of most such authors. While many nonreligious people have a firm philosophical grounding and oppose medical aid in dying, I suggest that in the absence of any religious or other absolute standards, developing logically defensible ethical guidelines may be challenging. At the least, religion may play a role in defining the points on the continuums that are ethically meaningful and refuting the trending beliefs that if the endpoint is the same, allowing different methods of arriving at that end are somehow ethically equal. The continuum of ways death may result does not negate analysis of whether death is brought about in ways that recognize the importance of life. The German philosopher Hans Jonas said, "It is a question whether without restoring the category of the sacred, the category most thoroughly destroyed by the scientific enlightenment, we can have an ethics able to cope with the extreme powers that we possess today and constantly increase and are compelled to use."[9] While countries vary on the role of religion in policy, with many emphasizing freedoms of religion, a recent position paper released by a group of Jewish, Christian, and Moslem leaders suggested the need for agreement on the unique sanctity of human life.[10] I would recommend that such a document serve as an example of consensus on critical foundational bioethical guidelines for democratic secular societies. - [1] Alexander L Medical science under dictatorship. New England Journal of Medicine, 241, p39-47 DOI10.1056/NEJM194907142410201 [2] Lederberg J. A geneticist looks at contraception and abortion, Annals of Internal Medicine 67, sup 2, 25-27. https:/doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-67-3-25 [3] Ibid. [4] Editorial, Sociology: Logic of biology. Nature 220, 429 https://www.nature.com/articles/220429b0 [5] Giublini A Minerva F After-birth abortion: why should the baby live. J Med Ethics 39, 261- [6] Rachels J Active and passive euthanasia. New England Journal of Medicine 292, 78-80 [7] Ibid. [8] Cohen-Almagor R Euthanizing people who are "tired of life". in Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide-Lessons from Belgium. Ch 11 of Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, Cambridge University Press pp173-187. 2017 and DOI; https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108182799.012 [9] Hans Jonas, Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics, 1972, found as Chapter IX, Philosophical Essays, 1980. https://inters.org/jonas-technology-responsability [10] A position paper of the Abrahamic Monotheistic religions on matters concerning the end-of-life. Vatican Press 28 October 2019 https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2019/10/28/191028f.html. (shrink)

By the mid-1960s, nonhuman primates had become key experimental organisms for vaccine development and testing, and was seen by many scientists as important for the future success of this field as well as other biomedical undertakings. A major hindrance to expanding the use of nonhuman primates was the dependency on wild-captured animals. In addition to unreliable access and poor animal health, procurement of wild primates involved the circulation of infectious diseases and thus also public health hazards. This paper traces (...) how the World Health Organization (WHO) became involved in the issue of primate supply, and shows how by the late 1960s concerns for vaccine development and the conservation of wildlife began to converge. How did the WHO navigate public health and animal health? What characterized the response and with what implications for humans and animals? The paper explores how technical standards of care were central to managing the conflicting concerns of animal and human health, biological standardization, and conservation. While the WHO’s main aim was to prevent public health risks, I argue that imposing new standards of care implied establishing new hierarchies of humans and animals, and cultures of care. (shrink)

Chapter 1 First Person Access to Mental States. Mind Science and Subjective Qualities -/- Abstract. The philosophy of mind as we know it today starts with Ryle. What defines and at the same time differentiates it from the previous tradition of study on mind is the persuasion that any rigorous approach to mental phenomena must conform to the criteria of scientificity applied by the natural sciences, i.e. its investigations and results must be intersubjectively and publicly controllable. In Ryle’s view, philosophy (...) of mind needs to adopt an antimentalist stance to achieve this aim. Antimentalism not only definitively rejects the idea that mind is a substance separated from the body, it also denies that mental phenomena radically differ from physical phenomena by virtue of several unique features. Most problematically, mental phenomena have a conscious character (mental states are related to specific qualitative feelings) and are accessible only to the first-person (only the subject knows directly what s/he is experiencing inside his/her mind). Ryle takes a strong stance on antimentalism going so far as to maintain that an approach to mind which aims to meet the criteria of scientificity set by the natural sciences must avoid any reference to internal, unobservable mental states. In his view (which is considered a specifically philosophical version of psychological behaviorism and also addresses questions put forward in psychological research), mental states can be redescribed in terms of behavioral dispositions. In this chapter, we address the historical roots of the antimentalist view and analyze its relation to the later tradition of research on mind. We show that, compared to the antimentalist stance, functionalism and cognitivism take a step back when they maintain that direct reference to mental states is necessary since mental states cause and therefore explain human behavior. This step backwards is often interpreted as a return to mentalism. However, this is only partially true. Indeed, we suggest that these later traditions retain one important element of Ryle’s antimentalism, i.e. the idea that mental states must be uniquely identified using external and publicly observable criteria, while excluding any reference to introspection and those qualitative dimensions of a mental state, which are accessible only to the first-person. According to the perspective we put forward, this epistemological stance has continued to influence contemporary research on mind and current philosophical and psychological theories which both tend to exclude the subjective qualities of human experience from their accounts of how the mind works. The issue we raise here is whether this is legitimate or whether subjective qualities do play a role with respect to the way our mind works. The conclusion of this chapter anticipates the argument the book makes in in favor of this latter position, starting from a particular angle, i.e. the problem of how we categorize concepts related to our internal states. -/- Chapter 2 The Misleading Aspects of the Mind/Computer Analogy. The Grounding Problem and the Thorny Issue of Propriosensitive Information -/- Abstract. After the crisis of behaviorism, cognitivism and functionalism became the predominant models in the field of psychology and of philosophy, respectively. Their success is mainly due to the new key they use for interpreting mental processes: the mind/computer analogy. On the basis of this analogy, mental operations are seen as cognitive processes based on computations, i.e. on manipulations of abstract symbols which are in turn understood as informational unities (representations). This chapter identifies two main problems with this model. The first is how these symbols can relate to and communicate with perception and thus allow us to identify and classify what we perceive through the senses. Here we limit ourselves to presenting this issue in relation to the classical symbol grounding problem originally put forward by Harnad on the basis of Searle’s Chinese room argument. An attempt to address the problem raised here will be made in chap. 3. The second point we discuss in relation to the mind/computer analogy concerns the idea of information it fosters. Indeed, following this analogy, information is something available in the external world which can be captured by the senses and transmitted to the central system without being influenced or modified by the procedures of transmission. This perspective does not take into account that – unlike computers – in living beings information is acquired by means of the body. As Ulric Neisser has already pointed out, the body is itself an informational source that provides us with additional sensory experience that influences (modifies or complements) the information extracted from the external world by the senses. To develop this line of analysis and to determine exactly what information is provided by the body and how this might influence cognition, we examine Sherrington’s and Gibson’s positions. Moving on from their views, we qualify bodily information in terms of ‘proprioception’. We use ‘proprioception’ in a broad sense to describe any kind of experience we have of our internal states (including postural information as well as sensations related to the general state of the body and its parts). Following Damasio’s and Craig’s studies, we further elaborate this position, arguing that living beings are equipped with an internal propriosensitive monitoring system which maps all the changes that constantly occur in our body and that give us perceptual (‘proprioceptive’ or propriosensitive) information about what happens inside us. Moreover, relying on Goldie’s and Ratcliffe’s view, we show that emotional information can also be considered as a form of ‘proprioception’ which contributes to determining everything we perceive. This analysis leads us to the second main thesis of this book: ‘proprioception’ is a form of internal perception and it is an essential component of the sensory information we can access and use for all cognitive purposes. -/- Chapter 3 Semantic Competence from the Inside: Conceptual Architecture and Composition -/- Abstract. Concepts are essential constituents of thought: they are the instruments we use to categorize our experience, i.e. to classify things and group them together in homogeneous sets. Here we define concepts as the internal mental information (representations) that allows us, among other things, to master words in natural language. By analyzing the way in which individuals master word meanings we explore a number of hypotheses regarding the nature of concepts. Following Diego Marconi’s research, we differentiate between two kind of abilities that underpin lexical competence – so-called ‘referential’ and ‘inferential competence’ – and we suggest that, in order to support these abilities, concepts must also include two corresponding kinds of information, i.e. inferential and referential information. We point out that the most widely used and acknowledged theories of concepts do not make this distinction, instead broadly characterizing the information used for categorization in terms of propositionally described feature lists. However, we show that while feature lists can explain inferential competence, they do not account for referential competence. To address the issue of referential competence we examine Ray Jackendoff’s hypothesis that to account for the possibility of linking perceptual and conceptual information we need to assume the existence of a (visual) representation that encodes the geometric and topological properties of objects and bridges the gap between the percept and the concept. Furthermore, we analyze the extension of this work by Jesse Prinz who introduced the notion of a proxytype, a perceptual representation of a class of objects that incorporates structural and parametric information related to their appearance. However, as we point out, proxytypes can only explain the relationship between perception and concepts with respect to instances that can be perceived through the senses and that belong to the same class by virtue of their physical similarity. We suggest that this notion be extended to include larger conceptual classes. To accomplish this, we further develop Mark Johnson, George Lakoff and Jean Mandler’s idea of a schematic image and argue that conceptual representations include a perceptual schema. Perceptual schemata are non-linguistic, structured experiential gestalts (patterns or maps) that make use of information taken from all sensory modalities, including body perception. They accomplish a quasi-conceptual function: they allow us to recognize and to classify different instances. In this work, we hypothesize that perceptual schemata are an essential component of concepts, but not identical to them. Instead, we suggest that concepts include both perceptual and propositional information with perceptual schemata providing the ‘perceptual core concept’ that grounds related propositional information. -/- Chapter 4 In the Beginning There Were Categories. The Bodily Origin of Prelinguistic Categorical Organization: The Example of Folkbiological Taxonomies -/- Abstract. Studies of categorization in psychology and the cognitive sciences have made use of the notions of ‘category’ and ‘concept’ without precisely defining what is meant by either; in fact, often these terms have been used as synonyms, making it difficult to address specific issues related to conceptual development. This chapter begins by discussing the definitions of, as well as the distinctions between, ‘categories’ and ‘concepts’ in the classical philosophical tradition (Aristotle, Kant and Husserl). We introduce our view of categories with reference to Husserl. Categorization is defined as the way in which our experience is originally (pre-linguistically) organized in a passive and fully unconscious manner on the basis of universal structuring principles. Conceptualization is explained as a later process in which the earlier categorical macro-classes are further subdivided into more specific and detailed sets; this later process also relies on linguistic learning and exposure to culture. On the basis of Ray Jackendoff, Jean Mandler, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work, we hypothesize that categorization is a two-step process that begins with the formation of homogeneous sets of entities partitioned into regions that describe the ontological boundaries of the objects that humans perceive (categories) and continues at a later stage with the development of more specific classifications (concepts). In this chapter, we mainly address three related issues: Why should we assume that there is categorical organization which precedes the development of a conceptual system? How do categories and concepts relate to each other? Shall we hypothesize that categories are innate or that they are formed before concepts on the basis of information and organizational structure available at a very early developmental stage? We show that categorical partitions are necessary for categorization and, following Mandler, that the general categories we form at an early age do not match our adult superordinate concepts. As for the third issue, we argue that there might be no need to assume that categories are innately present in the human mind, since their formation can be explained – at least in certain cases – by basic mechanisms that work on body (propriosensitive) information. This hypothesis will not be discussed in general, but in relation to a particularly relevant example of categorical partition, i.e. the folk-biological dichotomy between ANIMATE/INANIMATE. This is compared with other dichotomies that derive from it, but are not directly categorical such as LIVING/NON-LIVING and BIOLOGICAL/NON-BIOLOGICAL. -/- Chapter 5 Internal States: From Headache to Anger. Conceptualization and Semantic Mastery -/- Abstract. Here we ask if we can also apply the distinction between referential and inferential competence we introduced in Chapter 3 to words that do not refer to things that are perceived using the external senses, especially to words/concepts that denote bodily experiences (such as pain, thirst, hunger, etc.) or emotions. We introduce and discuss the hypothesis that – even though such words/concepts do not refer to intersubjectively identifiable entities in the external world – they do have a kind of referent that can be accessed via direct perception, more specifically ‘proprioception’, as we have defined it in terms of all propriosensitive information we can consciously access. In the first part of the chapter, we specifically consider terms denoting bodily experiences such as ‘pain’ or ‘hunger’ and argue that their referents are identified and classified from a first-personal point of view on the basis of four main characteristics: their specific intensity, their localization in the body, their co-occurrence with other signals and above all their specific qualitative sensations. Emotions are addressed in the second part of the chapter. We suggest that there is a continuity between bodily experiences and emotions. In particular, we argue for a perceptual theory of emotions in line with that proposed by James and Lange at the end of the 19th century and developed more recently by authors such as Damasio (see also chap. 2§5, §6). The hypothesis we put forward is that the referential information that supports the categorization of emotions and therefore also our mastery of terms referring to emotions consists in the perception (i.e. the ‘proprioception’) of those bodily states and changes in bodily states which constitute our emotional experience. In the context of this discussion we examine some objections to this line of reasoning that arise from a cognitivist perspective and following authors such as Oatley, Johnson-Laird and Frijda, we distinguish between basic emotions that can be identified and classified solely on the basis on how they feel and complex emotions whose identification and classification additionally depends on cognitive factors. To describe how emotions are identified and classified on the basis of how they feel, we rely on Marcel and Lambie’s distinction between an ‘emotion state’ and an ‘emotion experience’. Both notions indicate kinds of feelings that we consciously experience. However, they describe first-order and second order emotion awareness respectively. The emotion state is the feeling we have of the bodily states and changes that occur when we are experiencing an emotion, while the emotion experience is the fully developed and integrated emotion we both experience and are, with reflection, aware of experiencing. On the basis of this differentiation, we also show that the same characteristics that aid in the identification and classification of bodily experiences (specific qualitative sensations; somatic localization; specific intensity; presence/absence of specific concomitant sensations) can also be used for the identification and classification of emotions – at least basic emotions. In the last two sections of the chapter we present some clinical evidence on the semantic competence of people who suffer from Alexithymia and Autism Spectrum Disorder which supports the conclusions of our preceding analyses. -/- Chapter 6 The ‘Proprioceptive’ Component of Abstract Concepts -/- Abstract. In this chapter, we address the issue of whether the mastery of abstract words requires only inferential knowledge and thus, if the concepts that support the mastery of abstract words include only linguistic information. We start by differentiating the notions of ‘abstract’ and ‘general’ which are often erroneously confused. We then identify a strict definition of abstract, as contrasted with ‘concrete’, that applies to words or concepts whose referent cannot be experienced by the senses. We argue that abstract words/concepts would be better described as theoretical, because they are usually conceived as structured sets of inferential knowledge expressed linguistically; that is, as small theories. Pointing out parallels with Carnap’s analysis of this issue in philosophy of science, we hypothesize that words/concepts denoting non-observable entities are not all ‘equally theoretical’, because their link to sensory experience can be stronger or weaker. We revive the distinction, inspired by Quine, between theoretical and intertheoretical concepts/words. This distinction relies on the fact that the former – unlike the latter – retains a strong, although indirect, connection with perception. In Quine’s discussion, perception is understood uniquely in terms of observability, i.e. of external sensory experience. Here we argue, however, that bodily, ‘proprioceptive’ (i.e. propriosensitive) experience can also serve to referentially ground theoretical (i.e. abstract) concepts/words. We frame this issue using the example of the theoretical concept ‘freedom’ and Lakoff’s hypothesis that this concept is developed on the basis of bodily information. We contrast this with the example of ‘democracy’ which more closely resembles an intertheoretical concept/word. Furthermore, we show that one of the classical views put forward in psycholinguistic research to explain how abstract concepts are mentally represented – i.e. Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory – points in the same direction as our analysis. The same is true of Barsalou’s work suggesting that we use internal information to understand at least some abstract words. To sustain this position, we put forward two lines of evidence: the first comes from psycholinguistic studies while the second examines deficits of semantic competence exhibited by people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. On the basis of our analysis, we put forward a classification that distinguishes between different kinds of concreteness and different degrees of abstraction: concepts/words referring to body experiences and basic emotions are described as analogous to concrete concepts/words because they are grounded in perceptual (i.e. propriosensitive) experience, while abstract concepts/words are considered more or less abstract depending on whether they are intratheoretical (and rely entirely on inferential information) or theoretical (and are partially grounded in perceptual – or more often in propriosensitive perceptual – information). In the last section of the chapter we consider two scales that have been used in psycholinguistic research to measure the degree of concreteness vs. abstractness of words and we show that – used conjointly – they can provide a measure of the internal vs. external grounding of specific words. (shrink)

There is a vast literature on evidence-based practice in education. What function does evidence have in practical deliberations toward decisions about what to do? Most writers on EBP seem to think of evidence largely as quantitative data, serving as a foundation from which practice could and should be directly derived. In this paper I argue that we are better served by according a different and more indirect function to evidence in practical reasoning. To establish this claim I employ Toulmin’s (...) model of argumentation. On this model the evidence-as-foundation view amounts to evidence as data/grounds. The model also offers a different function for evidence, as backing of the warrant, and I argue in this paper that this is a more adequate understanding of the function of evidence in practical reasoning. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

These range from merely good reads to really outstanding books. A raw ranking of them would be of little use to others, unless I explained why I gave them the ranks I did, and anyway I'd probably give different rankings by the time your read this. (When I know of an on-line review about a book which I agree with --- e.g., because I wrote it --- I've included a link; also some exceedingly short remarks about interesting (...) cases.). (shrink)

Stuttering is one of the most well-known speech disorders, but the underlying neurological mechanisms are debated. In addition to genetic factors there are also major non-genetic contributions. It is here proposed that infection with group A beta-hemolytic streptococcus (GAS) was a major underlying cause of stuttering until the mid 1900s, when penicillin was introduced for the treatment of streptococcal infections about 1946. The main mechanism proposed is an autoimmune reaction from tonsillitis, targeting specific molecules, for example within (...) the basal ganglia. It is here also proposed that GAS infections may have continued to cause stuttering to some extent, to the present date, though more rarely. If so, early diagnosis of such cases would be of importance. Childhood cases with sudden onset of stuttering after throat infection may be particularly important to assess for possible GAS infection. The support for this hypothesis primarily comes from three lines of argument. First, medical record data from the 1930s strongly indicates that there was one type of medical event in particular that preceded the onset of childhood stuttering with unexpected frequency: diseases related to GAS throat infections. In particular, this included tonsillitis and scarlet fever, but also rheumatic fever. Rheumatic fever is a childhood autoimmune sequela of GAS infection, which was a relatively widespread medical problem until the early 1960s. Secondly, available reports of changes of the childhood prevalence of stuttering indicates striking parallels between stuttering and the incidence of rheumatic fever, with (1) decline from the early 1900s, (2) marked decline from the introduction of penicillin about 1946, and (3) reaching a more stable level in the 1960s. The correlations between the data for stuttering and for rheumatic fever after introduction of penicillin are very high, at about 0.95. Thirdly, there are established biological mechanisms linking GAS tonsillitis to immunological effects on the brain. In addition, a small number of more recent case reports have provided further support for the hypothesis linking stuttering to GAS infection. Overall, it is proposed that the available data provides strong evidence for the hypothesis that GAS infection was a major cause of stuttering until the mid 1900s. (shrink)

Peter Goldie’s account of grief as a narrative process that unfolds over time allow us to address the structure of self-understanding in the experience of loss. Taking up the Goldie’s idea that narrativity plays a crucial role in grief, I will argue that the experience of desynchronization and an altered relation to language disrupt even of our ability to compose narratives and to think narratively. Further, I will argue that Goldie’s account of grief as a narratively structured process focus on (...) the process having come to an end. By contrast, I will propose the idea that grief can be understood as an open-ended rehearsal of our capacity to be alone in the company of an absent other. This makes grief a relational activity that differs from composing narratives about one’s past and about one’s process of grieving. Thus, grief is not primarily a process of recollecting our past narratively; rather, it can be seen as a dedicational activity which involves a future-oriented and open-ended rehearsal of relatedness despite irrevocable absence. (shrink)

This volume challenges readers to think about what music means in contemporary society, and how music education can remain culturally relevant in the new millennium. A collection of thought-provoking philosophical perspectives on music education. Explores the changing ways in which music is being produced, disseminated and received. Considers how current phenomena such as the commoditization of music, the use of new technologies, and access to hybrid music forms, relate to music education. Covers themes such as pragmatism, performativity, cultural identity, (...) emotion, autonomy and globalization. Asks how music teaching and learning can remain culturally relevant. (shrink)

The historical period of the 18th and early 19th century is usually perceived as the high point of human self-emancipatory optimism. Specifically, the Enlightenment believed that reason would guide humanity from darkness to the light. Ay, there's the rub, so rhymes the Bard of Avon, for wherefrom arriveth the urge to flee the dark? The rationalist propensity to remodel and re-invent the world is testament to a dreary and pessimistic analysis of the human condition. Thus, the Enlightenment made a largely (...) self-content analysis of the natural, traditional and historical condition of humanity which suggested that underneath its emancipatory, rationalist optimism lurks an unspoken perspective on reality that, in the verse of Alexander Pope, on weak wings, from far, pursues [its] flights. In this dissertation, I have called that perspective the horror of existence : the tacit acknowledgment that whatever is naturally and historically presented to the human agent is to be treated with suspicion. Nietzsche even declared such squinty eyes part and parcel of the bad blood of Western metaphysics in its ignoble resentment towards the vitalistic full-bloodedness of existence. Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer are the protagonists in the investigation into the pessimistic focal point that looms underneath the Enlightenment s alleged optimism. Three points of inquiry are central to unravelling this pessimism. First, it is to be established that Immanuel Kant the proverbial vanguard of the Aufklärung actually subscribed to a sense of pessimism. Virtuous duty is the code word of Kant s ethics: to act in a fashion in opposition to certain countermoral inclinations. While Kant calls such behavior autonomy in the supposed fullest sense of the term, such autonomy is lacking in appeal in comparison to the pursuit of happiness. If rational morality is left unassisted, it remains in the perennial danger of being ineffective. The human agent is ill-disposed towards the moral law and radically inclined to overturn the moral world order. Accordingly, Kant turns to certain religious tools to bestow a kind of moral education that would augment the appeal of morality without ever making the human agent in any way inclined to moral virtue. At best, the human agent is justified in his/her rational faith to moral progress. In sum, while Kant believed that immanent rationality is the appropriate guide for moral pursuits, it is lacking in appeal to the finite and frail human agent. Second, it is to be shown that Schopenhauer s more overtly pessimistic philosophy is a continuation of a certain philosophical impetus at work in Kant s philosophy. After Schopenhauer questions the irresistible appeal of rationality, he finds that the Kantian recalcitrance to morality could very well be understood as self-justified self-expression of a blind, amoral will. Since even Kant admitted that rationality lacks in appeal to draw humanity in line, why would rationality be the most intimate aspect of noumenal reality? Instead, the human agent is mired in a depravity from which only his/her own frail and quasi-powerless tools can facilitate an escape. Accordingly, an ethics of compassion, a sublime piece of art, a pessimistic religion and proper philosophical insight can facilitate an escape from reality and turn the human agent to blissful nothingness. Third, it is to be shown that Kant and Schopenhauer s specific sense of pessimism is a philosophical translation of a certain theological perspective on the interplay between nature and goodness. Instead of thinking about nature and good as on a continuum, the Protestant Reformation introduced a radical dualism between nature and goodness which requires nature to be radically reformatted. No good is to come from the exercise of nature: works do not justify. Similarly, Kant and Schopenhauer reiterate how a radical change in the normal behavior of the human agent is the only escape from his/her depraved condition. But how do you fuel a quest for health if that which would do the healing is diseased to its core? (shrink)

Prevention of age-related disorders is increasingly in focus of health policies, and it is hoped that early intervention on processes of deterioration can promote healthier and longer lives. New opportunities to slow down the aging process are emerging with new fields such as personalized nutrition. Data-intensive research has the potential to improve the precision of existing risk factors, e.g., to replace coarse-grained markers such as blood cholesterol with more detailed multivariate biomarkers. In this paper, we follow an attempt to develop (...) a new aging biomarker. The vision among the project consortium, comprising both research and industrial partners, is that the new biomarker will be predictive of a range of age-related conditions, which may be preventable through personalized nutrition. We combine philosophical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork to explore the possibilities and challenges of managing aging through bodily signs that are not straightforwardly linked to symptomatic disease. We document how the improvement of measurement brings about new conceptual challenges of demarcating healthy and unhealthy states. Moreover, we highlight that the reframing of aging as risk has social and ethical implications, as it is generative of normative notions of what constitutes successful aging and good citizenship. (shrink)

The dominant forms of thought today exist as either deconstructive or metalinguistic structures. Here we attempt to situate dialectical thinking as a constructive meta-mediation of this opposition between deconstruction and metalanguage. Dialectical thinking offers us a way to think about the processual nature of reason itself as a force of thought mediating being. In this mode of understanding we attempt to think the possibility of articulating the meaning and importance of ‘metaontology’ defined as the ontology of epistemology. (...) In a metaontology we treat the structure of concepts not as reflecting external territory, nor as existing at a distance from external territory, but as having their own territory. We attempt to approach metaontology by reflectively observing the singularity of the author’s own internal territorial map, revealing a ‘quadratic twisted circularity’; and also the movement of the symbolic order itself, revealing a possible invariant unsymbolizable real. From these reflections we dive into the foundations of dialectical thinking, starting with Plato, and then exploring modifications introduced by Hegel and Lacan. Finally, we offer a dialectical structure of knowledge for the 21st century. This offering is meant only as an offer, a consideration, for how dialectics can be deployed at the location of key antagonisms in the contemporary field. The hope is that future dialecticians. (shrink)

The article argues that the work of literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin presents a starting point for thinking about the instrumentalization of climate change. Bakhtin’s conceptualization of human–world relationships, encapsulated in the concept of ‘cosmic terror’, places a strong focus on our perception of the ‘inhuman’. Suggesting a link between the perceived alienness and instability of the world and in the exploitation of the resulting fear of change by political and religious forces, Bakhtin asserts that the latter can (...) only be resisted if our desire for a false stability in the world is overcome. The key to this overcoming of fear, for him, lies in recognizing and confronting the worldly relations of the human body. This consciousness represents the beginning of one’s ‘deautomatization’ from following established patterns of reactions to predicted or real changes. In the vein of several theorists and artists of his time who explored similar ‘deautomatization’ strategies – examples include Shklovsky’s ‘ ostranenie’, Brecht’s ‘ Verfremdung’, Artaud’s emotional ‘cruelty’ and Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ – Bakhtin proposes a more playful and widely accessible experimentation to deconstruct our ‘habitual picture of the world’. Experimentation is envisioned to take place across the material and the textual to increase possibilities for action. Through engaging with Bakhtin’s ideas, this article seeks to draw attention to relations between the imagination of the world and political agency, and the need to include these relations in our own experiments with creating climate change awareness. (shrink)

Self-harm among adolescents, mostly girls, has increased in the last years. Self-harm is associated with mental illness and the risk of suicide. This qualitative study aims to explore the lived experience of self-harm as it is related to everyday life and challenges among adolescents. Nineteen girls in a clinical population participated in personal interviews analyzed by Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to capture how they made meaning of self-harm and essential features of experiencing self-harm. Adult persons with the first-hand experience of (...) self-harm were included in the research analysis. Data-analysis resulted in three superordinate themes which all speak about ways to handle inner pain and vulnerability: 1. “I deserve pain,” 2. “I don't want to feel anything,” and 3. “I'm harmed, and no one cares.” Each superordinate theme included four main themes characterizing essential features of difficult experiences during self-harm, the purpose of the action, self-descriptions, and the role of others during self-harm. The three superordinate themes are discussed as emerging self-representations – “the punished self,” “the unknown self,” and “the harmed self” – during the transitional age of adolescence. This article argues that subjective personal data on self-harm related to adolescents' everyday lives may indicate diversity in the capacity to integrate difficult needs, feelings, and traumatic experiences as part of the self. This knowledge may bring a nuanced understanding of self-harm in adolescence, enhance self-understanding and treatment motivation, and inform clinical adjustment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of MysticismJean-Michel Heimonet (bio)Translated by Emoretta Yang (bio)1It is always relatively surprising to see how the great minds of an era manifest a kind of blindness when it comes to judging their peers, whether one is thinking of Balzac as the reader of Stendhal or Gide as the reader of Proust. This is undoubtedly because any truly forceful mind is also a mind (...) so obsessed and fascinated by its own way of apprehending the world that it can admit no other system of reference, no other range of values than its own. From this point of view, “A New Mysticism,” the article that Sartre devoted in some bad faith to Bataille’s Inner Experience when the book was published in 1943, should be accorded a prime place in the annals of great literary misunderstandings. There is no doubt that the brilliant philosopher of Being and Nothingness commits a strange blunder—strange, at least, for an intellectual of his stature—with respect to the conceptual sacrifice by which Bataille seeks to reveal and, at the same time, cast out modern man’s nostalgia for the sacred. But is “blunder” the right word? Because everything in the book proceeds not as though Sartre had not understood, or badly understood, but rather as though he had pretended not to understand the true stakes that in turn are revealed and consumed by this impossible book. The harshness of his critiques, the vehemence of tone—poorly tempered by a forced irony—instead prove that Inner Experience had hit home, at a level unusual for intellectual polemics. Struck to the core, Sartre reacted. This explains why “A New Mysticism” is a “boomerang” text, or a revealing one, in the photographic sense, being more valuable for what it tells us about its author than for what it teaches about the object being criticized. It is a text in which the reader has to read what is not said, “between the lines,” seeking the cause for the text’s often flagrantly unjust and indeed petty and truistic assertions, in its defense system, or, to borrow a term from the field of psychoanalysis which Sartre so abhorred, in the author’s “denials.” To put it clearly, is not the presence of the sacred, this unknowable and virulent sacred, which seeps out of every part of Bataille’s book, through the cracks and tears in its “form” and the paradoxical gaps in its “content,” also the presence that ceaselessly haunts, with its shadow and disturbing light, the thinking of the last great philosopher-monster?In his didactic concern to be convincing, Sartre divided his article into three parts, the first two dealing respectively with “form” and “content,” the third functioning as a verdict. Viewed fifty years later, such a division applied to a text as anti-academic as Inner Experience might seem comical. It points, however, to the seriousness being accorded in Sartre’s text to knowledge as organized within the academy and to the institutional function of the academy. From one end of the text to the other, Sartre acts as censor and judge, pitilessly pointing out, with the derisive scorn of the specialist, the philosophical naiveté of “Mr. Bataille,” particularly his rapid and unprofessional reading of Jaspers and Heidegger, which Bataille knew only in translation [see “NM” 194]. Sartre’s superior mandarin attitude explains why his first task had been to divide literary and philosophical history into two “frames of mind.” Although original, Bataille’s style and writing already had their place in a “tradition,” which is that line from Pascal to the surrealists, by way of Nietzsche, made up of writers anxious to express (themselves), writing down their [End Page 59] thoughts as they come, helter-skelter, in the exalted illumination of the moment, even before being located and fixed within the design of an argument. In modern writers, this tradition had become even more intensified. Disregarding the classical writerly values of restraint and modesty, the writer seeks to express not only his mind but also his body and its living reality, to establish with the reader a sort of “carnal promiscuity.” Thus we get Breton, who... (shrink)

In biology, man is an object of research; therefore the question might be asked whether inspirations can go from biological data to the reflections on the mind-matter relation in man. The social aspect of man, as treated by sociobiology, is left out of consideration. The knowledge that man is mind, or has a mind, is no result of biological research. It is a datum from philosophy. The biologist, however, is living in a culture which knows about the (...) mental character of man, and this is incorporated in his investigations. He knows that mental activities are connected with processes in the central nervous system and that, especially in the brain, localizations of mental activities are found. As a result of the split-brain experiments with patients and animals, some have arrived at the conclusion that there is a double consciousness.An approach from biology can lead to statements of a philosophical character, as, for example, statements about the unity, or even identity, of mind and matter. The theories of identity meet with great interest in scientific circles, and the truth value of identity statements is investigated. The system theory is taken into consideration. On a philosophical level a revaluation of the concept of matter can lead to a different sort of identity theory. (shrink)

The study of social, ethical, and political issues from a naturalistic perspective has been pervasive in social sciences and the humanities in the last decades. This articulation of empirical research with philosophical and normative reflection is increasingly getting attention in academic circles and the public spheres, given the prevalence of urgent needs and challenges that society is facing on a global scale. The contemporary world is full of challenges or what some philosophers have called ‘existential risks’ to humanity. Nuclear (...) wars, natural and/or engineered pandemics, climate change, global totalitarianism, and emergent technologies, are some of the challenges mentioned by many authors devoted to the study of long-term potential risks for the survival of the human species. However, while there are many reasons to be a pessimist about the future of humanity, there is also a lot of ink wasted in showing that the world today is far better than we had in the past and also that there have been many instances of social and moral progress in the last centuries. Some authors have even claimed that “we have made more progress over the last 100 years than in the first 100,000”. According to ‘our world in data’, some of the most relevant advances of humanity in the last centuries have to do with the reduction of poverty and/or inequality, better health and security, the decline of violence and war, and the development of democracy and institutional mechanisms to guarantee individual freedom and rights. Yet, there is a more concrete concern that our world faces nowadays, and requires a particularly detailed analysis. In a few words, the advance in information and communication technologies, the huge volume of people migration because of prevalent instances of global inequality, and the reality of an interconnected world that just mirrors an extensive history of massive human intergroup relations open the question about the feasibility of social and moral progress in the contexts of diverse, multicultural, and unequal societies. This makes it crucial to reflect not only on whether human societies may keep advancing on a path of social progress, but how this can be achieved by addressing the challenges of inequality and potential intergroup conflict. This concern closely relates to the further consolidation of democratic values and the achievement of a more generalized consideration of the equal moral value of human individuals far from group, ethnic, or collective distinctions. This vision of progress follows the moral convictions that have been considered right and worthy to be pursued by most ethical theories explored by philosophers and social scientists so far. This work aims to contribute to the study of the mechanisms and feasibility of social and moral progress grounded on the precept of human equality and is guided by the idea that social and moral progress in a plural world requires the accomplishment of a more democratic and tolerant society. These forms of progress have already been defined by philosophers Allen Buchanan and Russel Powell as inclusivist forms of moral progress. According to these authors, inclusivist moral progress is featured by the transformation of moral judgments, motivations, and norms guided by the rejection of “group-based restrictions on moral standing and moral status” (2018). The work of Buchanan and Powell is fundamental for the argumentation developed in this work since they have pioneered a more complex debate in the field of evolutionary social sciences and philosophical anthropology. In brief, these authors have inquired how human nature, conceptualized by the advances in evolutionary thinking and the empirical sciences, is related to our moral convictions and the possibilities that we have to establish certain forms of social and moral progress. The work of Buchanan and Powell contributes to the debate on moral progress by incorporating empirically-informed concepts and arguments. With this objective in mind, they develop their discussion around a generalized tension between exclusivist and inclusivist forms of moral progress. This tension revolves around the question of whether and to what extent human moral concerns, motivations, and norms, are limited or bounded by social identities, group thinking, or collective values. This question is at the center of this work. In other words, I aim to answer whether and to what extent the nature of our social and moral cognition hinders or enables the development of inclusivist forms of morality and moral progress. As I mentioned so far, the distinction between exclusivist and inclusivist forms of morality has a practical implication and facilitates the reflection on the mechanisms and feasibility of concrete forms of progress based on the precept of human equality, which is the road to progress that we should follow according to most ethical theories. The distinction between exclusivist and inclusivist morality is not used here as a form of summarizing highly divergent descriptive approaches to morality, but as a way to address the practical implications of morality research, particularly around the question of the feasibility of social forms of progress based on the precept of equality and tolerance. My objective then has less to do with offering a conceptualization of human morality or with the proposition of a new ethical perspective. Instead, I aim to identify, from an empirically informed perspective, what enables the achievement of egalitarian forms of social progress, to subsequently offer a normative reflection about what we should do if we want to accomplish such inclusivist forms of progress. This task is of great relevance, having in mind that some theoretical proposals on the matter have claimed that human prosocial behavior and morality are constrained by exclusivist fixed tendencies as a product of our evolutionary history. According to these views, human morality is a group-centered cognitive and behavioral expression that has severe limits in its scope and extent, which hinders in the end the emergence of inclusivist forms of moral concerns and behaviors. These claims align with the philosophical intuition about the ‘dissociation of empathy’, or the fact that human individuals tend to express empathy and sympathy preferably for members of their group whereas their empathic and moral concern and recognition for outgroup individuals tend to be reduced or eliminated in real-life social interactions. Multiple theorists have expressed, however, that these assumptions are wrong for empirical and philosophical reasons, which results in a serious challenge to the conception of human morality as exclusivist by nature. Furthermore, simple intuition and practical experience constantly show us that human individuals can develop and endorse a broad spectrum of moral considerations and adopt an arguably inclusivist stance concerning the kind of persons or agents that deserve moral concern. Moreover, and adopting a historical perspective, the expansion of cultural and commercial exchanges, the consolidation of democracy, the development of welfare states, or the emergence of institutions based on the concept of universal human rights, have partially driven human progress based on the impartial concern for the well-being of persons. These historical instances of cultural evolution and institutional design have shown that it is feasible to promote behaviors and attitudes grounded in impersonal prosocial and inclusivist principles. This optimistic perspective, however, still begs the question of the exact relationship between social, cultural, and historical contexts, and the emergence of certain behavioral expressions of inclusivist morality. This is crucial since a great number of human individuals around the world still do not make part of these instances of social progress, and some authors have suggested that such instances of social and moral progress are particularly favored by the contexts of the WEIRD world, that is the world of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. Some of these approaches consider moral inclusivity a ‘luxury good’ and follow the ‘dependency thesis’ according to which the expression of moral inclusivity depends on the presence of very concrete material conditions that trigger inclusivist and impersonal prosocial tendencies that human beings are not able to express in threatening contexts without physical security. This thesis is problematic for various reasons and has led to incomplete explanations about the enabling and causal factors of inclusivist moral progress, as well as unsatisfactory suggestions about what we should do to foster the accomplishment of more generalized instances of progress based on inclusivist concerns. In an attempt to contribute to this debate, the main objective of this thesis is to offer an alternative proposal about the nature of human morality and a more detailed reflection on what we should do if we want to further accomplish such instances of progress. More precisely, this work adopts a particular developmental and constructivist vision of human morality to answer the question of how feasible it is to reach generalized forms of social progress based on the precepts of moral inclusivity. Furthermore, it offers some ideas about what are the most adequate and favorable conditions to foster such progress both at the individual and the collective level. At this point, a preliminary clarification of some starting points is necessary. In the first place, and contrary to what other authors have proposed when debating moral progress from an empirically-based approach, my perspective adopts a radical developmental and constructivist perspective, following particularly the conceptual and empirical ideas of the social-domain theory in moral psychology. From this perspective, morality is a domain of normative and social knowledge that develops and emerges in human interactions. Moral concerns, judgments, and norms are not only the result of the expression of innate adaptive intuitions, nor the product of social conformity and a simple process of mirroring the normativity that communities have established to organize their social life. Human individuals, instead, construct moral concerns and judgments during their situated interactions. More specifically, the constructivist tradition claims that we need to research how moral concerns, judgments, and reasons emerge in social interactions and how human beings construct the content of their moral knowledge in the first place. Based on these ideas, morality is defined here as the result of a constructive process through which human individuals, by the means of constant interactions on a background of mutual respect and recognition, develop evaluative concerns about how we ought to treat others, and how to ‘care’ and ‘respect’ others’ well-being, needs, and vulnerabilities. This developmental-constructivist theory of human psychology contributes to an alternative understanding of the origins of moral variability and informs a very particular normative stance about the most desirable contexts needed for the urgent accomplishment of inclusivist forms of morality in contemporary societies. This is so given that the very same definition of morality adopted presupposes the feature of inclusivity. The main objective of this work is then to argue, based on a developmental perspective, what are the most favorable conditions to foster the development of moral inclusivity and what we should do to accomplish concrete instances of moral progress that truly help us to overcome our most urgent moral challenges. The whole thesis is organized as follows. In part I, I show how received visions about human social evolution have informed conceptions of morality as an adaptive function evolved to solve the challenges of cooperative life. Based on these assumptions, some theories argue that human morality is limited by the boundaries of group thinking, and always obeys the mandates of collective interests and the will of the majority. However, this conception has problematic implications from a normative and ethical perspective. The aim of Chapter 1 is to present this introductory debate in detail. In chapter 2, I consider a relevant amount of scientific evidence that helps to consolidate a more optimistic and inclusivist perspective about the starting conditions of human prosocial behavior. Later, I will summarize some ideas offered to explain the possible evolutionary mechanisms that led to the consolidation of these inclusivist capacities. However, I will also show how evolutionary theories that share the same adaptationist foundations but initially seem relevant to explain the feasibility of moral inclusivity, result incomplete when considering the complexity of moral behavior and its ethical implications. Part II is devoted to presenting a developmental alternative to the adaptationist versions around the starting conditions of morality. In this section, I first summarize the epistemological, conceptual, and empirical basis of a constructivist perspective already proposed by several authors in the last decades. This is the goal of chapter 3. More precisely, I adopt the conceptualization of morality established by the social-domain theory school and clarify its conception of the situated development of moral concerns, motivations, and norms. All these ideas are essential for my argumentation on the feasibility of inclusivist moral progress offered later. Chapter 4 provides a more detailed idea of constructivist thinking about moral development, by analyzing one particular dimension: the development of moral concerns for fairness and the sense of justice in distributive dilemmas. In Part III, I assume a constructivist perspective on morality to contribute to the philosophy of moral progress. In particular, I discuss the implications of such a perspective for the conceptualization of human moral nature and discuss what are the most favorable conditions for moral inclusivity to emerge. Answering that question is of enormous relevance since favoring the transition of human societies towards more inclusivist forms of moral concern and behavior supposes a more generalized accomplishment of our most urgent moral convictions. Previous developmental or culturally-sensible attempts to explore this issue are already on the market. As mentioned before, most authors have approached the topic by situating the cultural evolution and development of (inclusivist) moral progress in the WEIRD world. For instance, some of these authors claim that very concrete material conditions (mostly present in the Western World) have been necessary for triggering inclusivist and impersonal prosocial tendencies that human beings are not able to express in threatening contexts without physical security. Despite their interest in explaining inclusivist morality and the feasibility of inclusivist forms of progress following a naturalistic and culturally situated approach, these theories are problematic for two main reasons. In the first place, most of the authors that explain moral progress tend to focus exclusively on the consolidation of liberal values in the Western world and the underlying adoption of laws, social-epistemic practices, and public narratives about tolerance and inclusivity, as unequivocal signs of inclusivist morality. Nevertheless, there is an enormous distance between the institutional and public support of inclusivist moral values or the construction of public images of tolerance and inclusivity, and the real materialization of impersonal moralities in situated social interactions. Secondly, the variability of human moral behavior is far bigger than most of the theories in moral psychology and moral progress tend to assume. Accordingly, inclusivist and exclusivist forms of morality may develop simultaneously in similar or divergent geographical and socio-ecological environments, including those with harsh conditions such as competition for scarce resources, potential intergroup conflict, and risks of disease transmission. In addition, harsh environmental conditions are usually present in almost all societies around the globe, and the presence of socio-ecological conditions such as physical security and prosperity, predominant in highly resourced populations, do not prevent the existence of exclusivist moral tendencies. My model explores a different perspective on the relationships between cultural, institutional, and historical factors, and the situated development of human morality. This supposes a clear distinction from previous approaches to the matter since it offers a different view on what we should do to pursue further instances of inclusivist social progress. In the fifth chapter, I first analyze the proposals of some defenders of the ‘dependency’ theory. The attention is focused on the ‘Evolutionary Developmental Model’ proposed by Buchanan and Powell (2018). Based on a critique of this approach, I will argue that to explain the evolution and development of human morality in its multiple manifestations, it is essential to put focus on social interactions. This also involves a different perspective on human-environment relations that in line with a constructivist worldview makes an innovative contribution to the philosophy of moral behavior and moral progress. Later, in the sixth chapter, I will define my alternative relational view of inclusivist morality and I will offer my view on how to establish favorable conditions that make inclusivist morality possible. Complementing the constructivist approach, my conception is based on the essential role of equality and individuality and on how moral inclusivity is favored if moral concerns do not develop driven by the accomplishment of group-centered, binding, and communitarian concerns and values. In brief, my relational model suggests that the accomplishment of moral inclusivity not only depends on the overall achievement of certain levels of physical security or economic prosperity. Instead, its development is favored by transforming the interactional contexts in which moral concerns towards autonomy and individuality emerge. In arguing so, I will need to start with a critique of contemporary situated and embodied approaches in ethics. Then, I will show how societies guided by the accomplishment of group-centered values of power, dominance, and relational inequality tend to express exclusivist moral behaviors, while individualistic societies tend to be more inclusivist. Starting from this diagnosis, my final attempt is then to reflect on which are the best conditions for the moral valuation of individuality to emerge and what we should do to promote the accomplishment of moral inclusivity at the societal level. (shrink)

This superb collection of writings on buddha nature by the Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorje (1284-1339) focuses on the transition from ordinary deluded consciousness to enlightened wisdom, the characteristics of buddhahood, and a buddha's enlightened activity. Most of these materials have never been translated comprehensively. The Third Karmapa's unique and well-balanced view synthesizes Yogacara Madhyamaka and the classical teachings on buddha nature. Rangjung Dorje not only shows that these teachings do not contradict each other but also that they supplement (...) each other and share the same essential points in terms of the ultimate nature of mind and all phenomena. His fusion is remarkable because it clearly builds on Indian predecessors and precedes the later often highly charged debates in Tibet about the views of Rangtong ("self-empty") and Shentong ("other-empty"). Although Rangjung Dorje is widely regarded as one of the major proponents of the Tibetan Shentong tradition (some even consider him its founder), this book shows how his views differ from the Shentong tradition as understood by Dolpopa Taranatha and the First Jamgon Kongtrul. The Third Karmapa's view is more accurately described as one in which the two categories of rangtong and shentong are not regarded as mutually exclusive but are combined in a creative synthesis. For those practicing the sutrayana and the vajrayana in the Kagyu tradition, what these texts describe can be transformed into living experience. (shrink)

What is, or should be, the role of defense in thinking about the justification of use of armed force? Contemporary just war thinking prioritizes defense as the principal, and perhaps the only, just cause for resorting to armed force. By contrast, classic just war tradition, while recognizing defense as justification for use of force by private persons, did not reason from self-defense to the justification of the use of force on behalf of the political community, but instead (...) rendered the idea of just cause for resort to force in terms of the sovereign's responsibility to maintain justice, vindicating those who had suffered from injustice and punishing evildoers. This paper moves through three major stages in the historical development of just war thinking, first examining a critical phase in the formation of the classical idea of just cause as the responsibility to maintain justice, then discussing the shift, characteristic of the modern period, to an idea of sovereignty as connected to the state and the prioritization of defense of the state as just cause for use of force, and lastly showing how this conception of the priority of defense became part of the recovery of just war thinking in the latter part of the twentieth century. The paper concludes by noting recent changes in thought on international law that tend to emphasize justice at the expense of the right of self-defense, suggesting that the roots of just war thinking imply the need for a similar rethinking of contemporary just war discourse. (shrink)

This article integrates John Dewey’s _Art as Experience_, Mikel Dufrenne’s _Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience_, and phenomenological interviews with museum visitors to answer what it means to be ‘moved by art’. The interviews point to intense affective and existential experiences, in which encounters with art can be genuinely transformative. We focus on Dufrenne’s notion of ‘adherent reflection’ and Dewey’s notions of ‘doing and undergoing’ to understand the intentional structure and dynamics of such experiences, concluding that being moved contains two merged forms (...) of intentionality: one overt aspect of perceptual intentionality directed at the work, and a covert affective intentionality directed back at oneself in one’s situated existence. These are operational simultaneously but can work in loops, one leading to an intensification of the other and vice versa. As such, these analyses emphasize the value of phenomenological interviews and advance the integration of phenomenological and pragmatist thinking in the context of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

This study explores the social representations of cloning taking in consideration a series of associated emotions and the subjects' level of religiosity. The participants in our study consisted of 356 subjects of different ages and professions. The data collection included four tasks for the subjects to fill in. First, they had to fill in a free task association: starting from the stimulus-word „cloning" they had to associate five words or expressions, and then rank these five words according to their importance. (...) The second task required polarity association for each of the expressions; thus, the subjects had to evaluate them as positive, negative or neutral in relation to „cloning". The third task was a questionnaire evaluating the level of religiosity (28 items). The last task included a list of 35 emotions (positive as well as negative) which subjects had to associate on a scale from 1 to 10 with the bio-medical procedure of cloning. The data analysis was focused on comparing the different groups defined in relation to the level of religiosity, affective polarity, age and level of education. We used the prototipicality technique, developed in the framework of the social representation's theory, in order to identify the elements of the social representations of cloning belonging to the previously mentioned variables. . (shrink)

Carl F. Craver and Lindley Darden’s new book, In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences, is a fantastic and lucid introduction to the “new mechanism” tradition in the philosophy of science. Over the last 2 decades, but particularly since the turn of the century, this has become an influential framework for thinking about core problems in the history and philosophy of science, with a strong emphasis on biology. There are at least four major aims. (...) First, the new mechanism tradition purports to resolve conventional problems in the philosophy of science, such as the nature of explanation, theory evaluation, reduction, the unity of science, and the levels of the scientific hierarchy. Second, it constitutes what Karl Popper called a Logik der Forschung: a set of maxims and precepts to propel the process of scientific discovery itself. This emphasis on the process of discovery distinguishes the tradition from much of twentieth-century philosophy of science, with its emphasis on the logic of justification. Third, the new mechanism tradition, at least in Craver and Darden’s view, recommends a certain historiographical framework for organizing the history of biology, a framework that depicts the history of biology primarily as a search for mechanisms. Fourth, it constitutes a fundamental metaphysics—a picture of what the physical world is like, in which entities possess various properties, which allow them to have various powers and which are organized in such a way as to give rise to observable phenomena. As the authors provocatively conclude, “nothing in biology makes any sense without the idea that biologists are searching for mechanisms” (202). I do not know whether the authors are correct in their assessment, but this book certainly demonstrates the scope of their ambitions. (shrink)

Regarding the relation of Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, scholars have been divided to two opposing groups: unitarists and developmentalists. While developmentalists try to prove that there are some noticeable and even fundamental differences between Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, the unitarists assert that there is no essential difference in there. The main goal of this article is to suggest that some of Plato’s ontological as well as epistemological principles change, both radically and fundamentally, between the early and (...) middle period dialogues. Though this is a kind of strengthening the developmentalistic approach corresponding the relation of the early and middle period dialogues, based on the fact that what is to be proved here is a essential development in Plato’ ontology and his epistemology, by expanding the grounds of development to the ontological and epistemological principles, it hints to a more profound development. The fact that the bipolar and split knowledge and being of the early period dialogues give way to the tripartite and bound knowledge and benig of the middle period dialogues indicates the development of the notions of being and knowledge in Plato’s philosophy before the dialogues of the middle period. -/- Keywords Plato; early dialogues; middle dialogues; being; knowledge; development -/- Introduction The differences between two groups of the early and middle period dialogues have always been a matter of dispute. Whereas the developmentalists like Vlastos, Silverman (2002), Teloh (1981), Dancy (2004) and Rickless (2007) think that from the early to the middle dialogues Plato’s philosophy changes, at least in some essential points, the unitarists like Kahn, Cherniss and Shorey believe that there happens no development and the differences must be taken as natural, ignorable and even pedagogic. In his well-known article, Socrates contra Socrates in PLATO, Vlastos lists ten theses of difference between two groups of dialogues. The first group which includes Plato’s early dialogues he divides to 'elenctic' (Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Protagoras and Republic I) and 'transitional' (Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus and Meno) dialogues. These transitional come after all the elenctic dialogues and before all the dialogues of the second group which compose Plato’s middle period dialogues, including (with Vlastos' chronological order) Cratylus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic II-X, Phaedrus, Parmenides and Theaetetus (1991, 46-49). Vlastos asserts strictly that his list of differences are 'so diverse in content and method that they contrast as sharply with one another as with any third philosophy you care to mention, beginning with Aristotole’s' (ibid, 46). Vlastos’ list of differences between two Socrateses is considered a view breaking sharply between the early and the middle dialogues. Besides all ten differences between the two Socrateses in Vlastos’ list that can be supportive for our doctrine here, we intend to focus on some ontological as well as epistemological distinctions that have not completely been discussed hitherto. Contrary to the developmentalist theory of Vlastos, unitarian theory of Charles Kahn wishes to eliminate any substantial difference between the early and the middle dialogues. He distinguishes seven 'pre-middle' or 'threshold' dialogues including Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Meno, Lysis and Euthydemus from the other Socratic dialogues which he calls 'earliest group' (1996, 41). The threshold dialogues, Kahn thinks, 'embarke upon a sustained project' that is to reach to its climax in the middle period dialogues, namely Phaedo, Symposium and Republic. Believing in that there is no 'fundamental shift'between the early and middle dialogues (ibid, 40), Kahn thinks the Socratic dialogues are just the 'first stage' with a 'deliberate silence' towards the theories of later periods (ibid, 339). One of the reasons of the surprising fact that Plato gives no hint of the metaphysics and epistemology of the Forms in the early dialogues, he thinks, is the pedagogical advantages of aporia. He thinks that Plato 'obscurely', and mostly because of education, hinted to some doctrines and conceptions in his early dialogues and with the aim of clarifying them only in the later ones (ibid, 66). The seven threshold dialogues, Kahn asserts, 'had been designed from the first' to prepare the pupils and readers for the views expounded in the middle period dialogues (ibid, 59-60). To show that the differences of the two Socrateses of the early and middle period dialogue are in their onto-epistemological grounds and thence cannot be explained by a unitaristic view, we try to draw the ontological and epistemological principles of the early dialogues in the first part below in order to show, in the second part, that those principles have been developed in the middle period dialogues. -/- A. The Onto-Epistemologic Principles of the Early Dialogues Socratic dialogues are paradoxical about knowledge because while being knowledge-oriented always searching for knowledge, they deny it and even never discuss it directly. Three elements of Socrates’ way of searching Knowledge throughout the early dialogues, i.e. Socratic 'what is X?' question, his disavowal of knowledge and his elenctic method combined together produce something like a circle which works, more or less, in the same way in these dialogues. Though this circle is an embaressing inquiry always resulting in ignorance instead of knowledge, its motivation is surprisingly Socrates’ passionate enthusiasm for knowledge, an intensive love of wisdom. The starting point of this circle is Socrates’ confession of having no knowledge which might be explicitly asserted or presupposed, maybe because it was one of the famous characteristics of Socrates; a confession always paradoxically accompanied with his intense longing for knowledge (e.g., Gorgias 505e4-5). Every time Socrates encounters with someone who thinks he knows something (οἴεταί τι εἰδέναι) (Apology 21d5) and tries to examine him. This examination seems to be the simplest one asking just what it is that he knows. Socrates’ elenchus, therefore, is always connected with 'what is X?' (τίς ποτέ ἐστιν) question, a question that most of the early dialogues of Plato are concerned with; 'what is courage?' in the Laches, 'what is piety?' in Euthydemus, 'what is temperance?' in Charmides and 'what is beauty?' in Hippias Major. This question we call here 'Socratic question' and probably is the very question the historical Socrates used to employ, is tightly interrelated with both his disavowal and his elenchus. He disclaims knowledge because he cannot find the answer to the question himself and he rejects others’ since they cannot offer the correct answer too. Every interlocutor can claim he knows X, if and only if he can answer the Socratic question. Otherwise, he is more of an ignorant than of a knower of τί ποτέ ἐστι X. Knowing the answer to this question is, thus, knowledge’s criterion for Socrates. Having found out that he cannot answer what it is which he would claim to know, the interlocutor comes to the point Socrates was there at the beginning. The least advantage of this circle is that he becomes as wise as Socrates does about the subject, becoming aware that he does not know it. At the end of the circle they are both still at the beginning, not knowing what X is. So let us first take a glance at these three elements. Socratic disavowal of knowledge is strictly asserted in some passages. At Apology 21b4-5, Socrates says: -/- I do not know of myself being wise at all (οὔτε μέγα οὔτε σμικρὸν σύνοιδα ἐμαυτῷ σοφὸς ὤν) -/- Moreover, at 21d4-6: -/- None of us knows anything worthwhile (καλὸν κἀγαθὸν εἰδέναι) …. I do not know (οἶδα) neither do I think I know. -/- In Charmides Socrates speaks about a fear about his probable mistake of thinking that he knows (εἰδέναι) something when he does not (166d1-2). The somehow generalization of this disavowal can be seen in Gorgias. After calling his disavowal 'an account that is always the same' (509a4-5), Socrates continues (a5-7): -/- I say that I do not know (οἶδα) how these things are, but no one I have ever met, like now, who can say anything else without being absurd. -/- At the end of Hippias Major (304d7-8), Socrates affirms his disavowal of knowledge of 'what is X?' this time about the fine: -/- I do not know (οἶδα) what that is itself (αὐτὸ τοῦτο ὅτι ποτέ ἐστιν). Some other passages, however, made a number of scholars dubious about Socrates’ disavowal. Vlastos mentions Apology 29b6-7 as an evidence : 'that to do wrong and to disobey one’s master, both god and men, I know (οἶδα) to be evil and shameful'. He thinks that if we give this single text 'its full weight' it can suffice to show that Socrates does claim knowledge of a moral truth (1985, 7). Vlastos’ claim is not admittable since it would be too strange, I think, for a man like Socrates to violate his disavowal claim just after emphasizing it. We can see his claim just before the already mentioned passage: -/- And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know. It is perhaps on this point and in this respect, gentlemen, that I differ from the majority of men and if I were to claim that I am wiser than anyone in anything it world be in this, that, as I have no adequate knowledge (οὐκ εἰδὼς ἱκανῶς) of things in the underworld, so I do not think I have (οὐκ εἰδέναι) (Apology 29b1-6) Vlastos tries to solve what he calls the 'paradox' of Socrates’ disavowal of knowledge distinguishing the 'certain' knowledge from 'elenctic' knowledge (1985, 11) and thinking that when Socrates avows knowledge, we must perceive it as an elenctic knowledge, a knowledge its content 'must be propositions he thinks elenctically justifiable' (ibid, 18). Irwin’s solution is the distinction of knowledge and belief. He approves that Socrates does not 'explicitly' make such a distinction, but still thinks that Socrates’ 'test for knowledge would make it reasonable for him to recognize true belief without knowledge, and his own claims are easily understood if they are claims to true belief alone' (1977, 40). While I agree with Vlastos up to a point, I strongly disagree with Irwin about the early dialogues. As I will try to show below, we are not permitted to consider any kind of distinction within knowledge in Socratic dialogues because only one category of knowledge is alluded to there and the distinction of knowledge and belief thoroughly belongs to the second Sorcates. Although no kind of distinction can be admittable here, I think Vlastos’ distinction can be accepted only if we regard it as a distinction between knowledge, which is unique and without any, even incomparable, rival, and a semi-idiomatic and ordinary one that is a necessary requirement for any argument, and thus, unavoidable even for someone who does not claim any kind of knowledge. An apparent evidence of this is Gorgias 505e6-506a4: -/- I go through the discussion as I think it is (ὡς ἄν μοι δοκῇ ἔχειν), if any of you do not agree with admissions I am making to myself, you must object and refute me. For I do not say what I say as I know (οὐδὲ γάρ τοι ἔγωγε εἰδὼς λέγω ἃ λέγω) but as searching jointly with you (ζητῶ κοινῇ μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν). -/- The minimal degree of knowledge everyone must have to take part in an argument, conduct it and use the phrase "I know" when it is necessary is what Socrates cannot deny. We can call it elenctic knowledge only if we agree that it is not the kind of knowledge that Socrates has always been searching, the one that can be accepted as the answer of Socratic 'what is X?' question. His disavowal of knowledge is applied only to the knowledge which can truly be the answer of Socratic question and pass the elenctic exam; a knowledge that, I believe, is never claimed by first Socrates. Socrates conducts his method of examining his interlocutors’ knowledge, our second element here, by almost the same method repeated in Socratic dialogues. That whether we are allowed to regard all the examinations of Socrates in the early dialogues as based on the same or not has been a matter of dispute. Vlastos himself (1994, 31) distinguished Euthydemas, Lysis, Menexenns and Hippias Major from the other Socratic dialogues because he thinks Socrates has lost his faith to elenchus in there. Irwin (1977, 38) distinguishes Apology and Crito where Socrates’ own convictions is present. Contrary to some scholars like Benson (2002, 107) who take elenchus in all the Socratic dialogues as a unique method, Michelle Carpenter and Ronald M. Polansky (2002, 89-100) argue pro the variety of methods of elenchus. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith (2002, 145-160) even reject such a thing as Socratic elenchus which can gather all of the Socrates’ various arguments under such a heading. There can be no solution for the problem of elenchus, they think, is due to 'the simple reason that there is no such thing as 'the Socratic elenchos"'(p.147). Though we consider elenchus a somehow determined process and a part of Socratic circle in the early dialogues, all we assume is that whatever differences it might have in different dialogues, it has the same onto-epistemological principles and, thus, we are not going to take it necessarily as a unique method. This method sets out to prove that the interlocutors are as ignorant as Socrates himself is. That whether elenchus is constructive, capable of establishing doctrines as Vlastos (1994) or Brickhouse and Smith (1994, 20-21) believe or not is another issue to which this paper is not to claim anything. What is crucial for our discussion here is that elenchus does not reach to the very knowledge Socrates is looking for. This is strictly against Irwin who thinks that not only elenchus leads to positive results, 'it should even yield knowledge to match Socrates’ conditions'(1977, 68, cf. 48). He does not explain where and how they really yield to that kind of knowledge. He explains his elenctic method in his apology in the court (Apology 21-22), that how he used to examine wise men, politicians, poets and all those who had the highest reputation for their knowledge and every time found that they have no knowledge. If we accept, as I strongly do, that Socrates’ disavowal of his knowledge is not irony, it might seem more reasonable to agree that the process that has that disavowal as its first step cannot be irony as well. The key of the circle which can explain why Socrates disclaims knowledge and how he can reject others’ claim of having any kind of knowledge lies in the third element, Socratic question. In Hippias Major (287c1-2), Socrates asks: 'Is it not by Justice that just people are Just? (ἆρ᾽ οὐ δικαιοσύνῃ δίκαιοί εἰσιν οἱ δίκαιοι). He insists at 294b1 that they were searching for that by which (ᾧ) all beautiful things are beautiful (cf. b4-5, 8). At Euthyphro 6d10-11 it is said that the Socratic question is waiting for 'the form itself (αὐτὸ τὸ εἶδος) by which (ᾧ) all the pious actions are pious; and at 6d11-e1: -/- Through one form (που μιᾷ ἰδέᾳ) impious actions are impious and pious actions pious. -/- Since the X itself is that by which X is X, knowing 'X itself' is the only way of knowing X. It is probably because of this that Socrates makes the distinction between the ousia as a right answer to the question and effect as a wrong one: -/- I am afraid, Euthyphro, that when you were asked what piety is (τὸ ὅσιον ὅτι ποτ᾽ ἐστίν) you did not wish to make clear its nature itself (οὐσίαν … αὐτοῦ) to me, but you said some effect (πάθος) about it. (Euthp. 11a6-9) -/- 1. Knowledge of what X is Now it is time to look for the onto-epistemological principles of Socratic circle and its three elements. It cannot reasonably be expected from the first Socrates to present us explicitly and clearly formulated principles of his onto-epistemology when such explications cannot be found even in the second Socrates who has some obviously positive theoris. Since there must be some principles underlying this first systematic inqury of knowledge, we must seek to them and be satisfied with elicitation of the first Socratas’ principle. What will be drawn out as his principles cannot and must not, thus, be taken as very fix and dogmatic principles. Some very slightest principles and grounds suffice for our purposes here. The first principle that is the prima facie significance of the Socratic question and his implementation of all those elenctic arguments I call the principle of 'Knowledge of What X is' (KWX): -/- KWX To know X, it is required to know what X is. -/- Aristotle (Metaphysics 1078b23-25, 27-29, 987b4-8) takes Plato’s τί ἐστι question as seeking the definition of a thing that is the same as historical Socrates’ search but applying to a different field. That Plato’s 'what is X?' question was a search for definition became the prevailed understanding of this question up to now. I am going neither to discuss the answer of Socratic question nor to challenge taking it as definition. What I am to insist is that knowledge is attached firmly to the answer of the question: Knowledge of X is not anything but the knowledge of what X is. It entails, certainly, the priority of this knowledge to any other kind of knowledge about X but it also has something more fundamental about the relation of knowledge and Socratic question. Socrates’ exclusive focus on the answer of his question can authorize the consideration of such an essential role for KWX in his epistemolgoy. The total rejection of his interlocutors’ knowledge when they are unable to answer the question can be regarded as a strong evidence for it. Socrates’ elenctic method and his rejection of others’ knowledge in the early dialogues, which all end aporetically with no one accepted as knower and nothing as knowledge, prevent us from finding any positive evidence for this. We have to be content, therefore, of negative evidences which, I think, can be found wherever Socrates rejects his interlocutors’ knowledge when they are not able to give an acceptable answer to his 'what is X?' question. 2. Bipolar Epistemology Socrates’ rejection of his interlocutors’ knowledge has another epistemological principle as its basis. Let me call this principle Bipolar Epistemology' (BE): BE There is no third way besides knowledge and Ignorance. -/- BE says that about every object of knowledge there are only two subjective statuses: knowledge and Ignorance. Socrates’ disavowal, however, says nothing but that he is ignorant of knowledge of X because he does not know what X is. This means that BE is presupposed here. Socrates’ elenchus and his rejection of interlocutors’ having any kind of knowledge are the necessary results of the fact that he does not let any third way besides knowledge and ignorance. The first Socrates never let anyone partly know X or have a true opinion about it, as he would not let anyone know anything about X when he did not know what X is. -/- 3. Bipolar Ontology The principle of BE in first Socrates’ epistemology is parallel to another principle in his ontology. Plato’s bipolar distinction between being and not being is as strict and perfect as his distinction between knowledge and ignorance. This principle I shall call the principle of 'Bipolar Ontology' (BO): BO Being is and not being is not. BO is apparently the same with the well-known Parmenidean Principle of being and not being (cf. Diels-Kranz (DK) Fr. 2.2-5). Euthydemus’ statement against the possibility of false knowledge can be good evidence for this principle: -/- The things which are not surely do not exist (τὰ δὲ μὴ ὄντα … ἄλλο τι ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν). (Euthydemus 284b3-4) -/- He continues (b4-5): -/- There is nowhere for not being to be there (οὖν οὐδαμοῦ τά γε μὴ ὄντα ὄντα ἐστίν). -/- That BE does not let true opinion as a third option besides knowledge and ignorance seems to be related to BO’s rejecting a third option besides being and not being, which is itself the basis of the impossibility of false belief. Socrates’ elaborate discussion of the problem of false belief in Theatetus that leads to a more decisive discussion and finally to some solutions in Sophist can make our consideration of BO for the first group of dialogues authentive. -/- 4. &5. Split Knowledge and Split Being The fourth principle I shall call the principle of 'Split Knowledge' (SK): -/- SK Knowledge of X is separated from any other knowledge (of anything else) as if the whole knowledge is split to various parts. -/- This Principle is hinted and criticized as Socrates’ way of treating with knowledge in Hippias Major: -/- But Socrates, you do not contemplate the entireties of things, nor do people you have used to talk with (τὰ μὲν ὅλα τῶν πραγμάτων οὐ σκοπεῖς, οὐδ᾽ ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι). (301b2-4) -/- Contrary to Rankin who regards the passage as 'antilogical, almost eristic in tone rather than presenting a serious philosophy of being' (1983, 54), I think it can be taken as serious. Hippias criticizes Sorcates that he does not contemplate (σκοπεῖς) the entireties of things (ὅλα τῶν πραγμάτων), a critique which Socrates is not its only subject but all those whom Socrates accustomed to talk with (ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι). This last phrase, I think, extends this critic beyond this dialogue to other Socratic dialogues. Hippias’ use of the perfect tense of the verb ἔθω (to be accustomed) is a good evidence of this extension. We can get, thus, these ἐκεῖνοι as Socrates’ interlocutors in his other dialogues that hints that this criticism has the epistemological groundings of the previous dialogues as its subject. What ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι points to is that Hippias does not have in mind Socrates’ way of treating things only in this dialogue, but he is also criticizing Socrates’ way throughout his dialogues. At 301b4-5, Socrates and his interlocutors’ way of beholding things is described as such: -/- You people knock (κρούετε) at the fine and each of the beings (ἕκαστον τῶν ὄντων) by taking each being cut up in pieces (κατατέμνοντες) in words (ἐν τοῖς λόγοις). This leads us to our next principle that is parallel to, and the ontological side of, SK, the principle of 'Split Being'(SB): -/- SB Everything (being) is separated from any other thing as if the whole being is split to many beings. -/- Socrates and his interlocutors and thus, as we saw, the Socratic dialogues are accused to regard everything as it is separated from all other things. This separation is en tois logois that, I think, can reasonably be taken as saying that Socratic dialogues (it refers of course to the dialogues before Hippias Major) cut up all things which have the same name/definition from all other things and try to understand them separately, without considering other things that are not in their logos. They, for example in Hippias Major, are cutting up to kalon and try to understand what it and all others inside this logos are by separating it from all other things. This is directed straightly against Socratic question and the way Socratic dialogues follow to find its answer, every time separating one logos. As Meyer (1995, 85) points out, every question 'presupposes that the X in question in a logos is something' and 'every answer to every question aims at unity' (84). The critique of Hippias Major is, therefore, at the same time a critique of SK and SB. It is also a critique of KWX because it is only based on KWX that Socratic dialogues could search for the answer of 'what is X' question supposing that knowing what X is is enough for the knowledge of X. SK and KWX are absolutely interdependent. What Socrates and all his previous interlocutors have neglected in Socratic dialogues, Hippias says, was 'continuous bodies of being' (διανεκῆ σώματα τῆς οὐσίας) (301b6). Either this theory actually belongs to the historical Hippias as it is being said or not, it is strictly criticizing SB. We have the same phrase with changing sūma to logos some lines later at 301e3-4: διανεκεῖ λόγῳ τῆς οὐσίας. Although this theory that can be observed as both an ontological and an epistemological theory is rejected by Socrates (301cff.), it is still against first Socrates’ onto-epistemological principles and might let us look at what is rejected as Socratic prineple. -/- 6. Knowledge is of Being The sixth principle that I think is presupposed by the first Socrates, is the 'Knowledge of Being' Principle (KB): -/- KB Knowledge is of Being. -/- This principle is obviously the source of the problem of false knowledge, a very important problem throughout Plato’s philosophy. We face this problem maybe for the first time in Euthydemus. In less than 20 Stephanus’ pages, 276-295, we are encountered with different interwoven problems about knowledge , all grounded in the problem of false opinion. Having challenged the obvious possibility of telling lies at 283e, at 284 Euthydemus discusses it saying that the man who speaks is speaking about 'one of those things that are (ἓν μὴν κἀκεῖνό γ᾽ ἐστὶν τῶν ὄντων)' (284a3) and thus speaks what is (λέγων τὸ ὄν) (a5). He must necessarily be saying truth when he is speaking what is because he who speaks what is (τὸ ὄν) and the things that are (τὰ ὄντα) speaks truth (τἀληθῆ λέγει) (a5-6). This is based on Parmenidean principle of the impossibility of being of not being which Euthydemus restates (284b3-4) and we mentioned discussing BO principle above. The things that are not are nowhere (οὐδαμοῦ) and there is no possibility for anyone to do (πράξειεν) anything with them because they must be made as being before anything else can be done, which is impossible (b5-7). The words, then, are of things that exist (εἰσὶν ἑκάστῳ τῶν ὄντων λόγοι) (285e9) and as they are (ὡς ἔστιν) (e10). The result is that no one can speak of things as they are not. It is this impossibility of false speach that is extended to thinking (δοξάζειν) at 286d1 and leads to the impossibility of false opinion (ψευδής … δόξα) (286d4). The general conclusion is asserted at 287a extending this impossibility to actions and making any kind of mistake. Not only knowledge is of being but speech, thought and action are of being simply because of the fact that nothing can be of not being. -/- B. First Socrates’ Principles in the Middle Period Dialogues Out of what were presupposed or criticized mostly in five dialogues, Euthyphro, Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Laches and Charmides, we tried to draw the first Socrates’ principles. Our inquiry here is directed to find out the fate of these principles in the three dialogues of the middle period, Meno, Phaedo and Republic. To do this, first we ought to check the situation of Socratic circle in these dialogues. The Socratic circle that was predominant in the early dialogues, does not look like a circle here anymore though they certainly have some features in common. Meno, Phaedo and Republic II-X are not committed to the principles of the circle and the whole circle in disrupted in them. The difference of the two Socrateses towards acquiring knowledge is obvious. The Socrates of Meno, Phaedo and Republic is evidently more self-confident that he can get to some truths during his arguments as he does. They are in their first appearance, as almost all other dialogues, committed to Socrates’ disavowal. All of them try to keep the shape of the Socratikoi Logoi genre, which is committed to the historical Socrates’ way of discussion; a dramatic personage who is to challenge his interlocutors, ask them and refuse the answers. Nevertheless, the fact is that what we have in common between two groups of dialogues is mostly a dramatic structure. Whereas the first group’s arguments are based on Socrates’ disavowal and lead to no positive results, the second group is decisively going to achieve some positive results. The aim of the first Socrates was to show others that they are ignorant of what they thought they knew. The new Socrates of Meno, on the opposite, makes so much efforts to show that the slave boy has within himself true opinions (ἀληθεῖς δόξαι) about the things that he does not know (οἶδε) (85c6-7). Despite his lack of knowledge, he has true opinions nevertheless. The way from these true opinions to knowledge, as Socrates states, is not so long. These true opinions are now like a dream but 'can become knowledge of the same things not less accurate than anyone’s' (οὐδενὸς ἧττον ἀκριβῶς ἐπιστήσεται περὶ τούτων) (c11-d1), if they be repeated by asking the same questions. The most outstanding text regarding Socrates’ disavowal is Meno 98b where he explicitly claims knowledge: -/- And indeed I also speak as (ὡς) one who does not know (εἰδὼς) but is guessing (εἰκάζων). However, [about the fact] that true opinion and knowledge are different, I do not altogether expect (δοκῶ) myself to be guessing (εἰκάζειν), but if I say about anything that I know (εἰδέναι) -which about few things I say- this is one of the things that I know (οἶδα). (98b1-5) This passage is very significant about Plato’s disavowal of knowledge. There can hardly be found, I think, anywhere else in Plato’s corpus where Socrates speaks about his knowledge of something as such. He says first that he speaks as someone who does not know. This ὡς οὐκ εἰδὼς λέγω comparing with what he used to say in the first group, οὐκ οἶδα, has this added ὡς. Socrates does not claim strongly anymore that he does not know anything but speaks only as someone who does not know. He needs this ὡς not only because he is going to accept that he does know some, though few, things immediately after this sentence, but also because he needs his previous disavowal to be loosened from Meno on. He does not merely say here that he knows something. It is then different from the examples mentioned before which could be taken as idiomatic or at least not emphatic. Socrates’ remarkable emphasis on distinguishing εἰδέναι from εἰκάζειν departs it from all other passages where he says only he knows something. Moreover, he claims definitely that he has knowledge about few (ὀλίγα) things. From the early to the middle dialogues, Socrates’ attitude to knowledge has totally renewed its face. He brings forth a new concept, true opinion, and he does not speak of knowledge as he used to before; the rough, perfect and unachievable knowledge of the first group has turned to something more smooth, realistic and achievable. Comparing with the early dialogues that did not set out from the first to reach positive results, the middle ones are extraordinarily and surprisingly positive and hence destroy the basis of the Socratic circle. The questions and answers are purposely directed to some specific new theories; most of them are not directly related to the topics or the main questions of the dialogues. They are suggested when Socrates draws the attention of the interlocutor away from the main question because of the necessity of another discussion. Even if the main question remains unanswered, we have still many positive theories, prominently of metaphysical type. These theories are so abundant and dominant in these dialogues, especially Phaedo and Republic, that one might think that they may appear to be arbitrarily sandwiched in there. This helps dialogues to keep their original Socratic structure while they are suggesting new theories. Hence, the Socratic question of 'what is X?', though is still used to launch the discussion, is loosened and is forgotten for most part of the dialogues. Meno that has first a differently formulated question, 'can virtue be taught?', leads finally to the Socratic question of 'What is virtue?'. Phaedo is dedicated to the demonstration of the immortality of soul and the life after death without having a central Socratic question. The case of Republic is more complicated. The first book, on the one hand, has all the criteria of a Socratic circle: its 'what is justice?' question, Socrates’ strong disavowal (e.g. 337d-e), his rejection of all answers and coming back to the first point without finding out any answer. This Book, considered alone, is a perfect Socratic dialogue, as many scholars regard it as early and separated from other books. The books II-X are, on the other hand, far from implementing a Socratic circle. They have still the 'what is justice?' question as their incentive leading question, but they are, in most of the positive doctrines and methods that encompass the main parts, ignoring the question. Even these books that, I believe, are the farthest discussions from the Socratic circle are so cautious not to break the Socratic structure of the dialogue as long as it is possible. What is changed is not the structure of the dialogue but the ontological and epistemological grounds based on which new theories are suggested. -/- 1. Knowledge of the Good We can clearly see in the second group of dialogues that the KWX principle loses the place it had before in our first group. It is not, of course, rejected, but still we cannot say that it has the same situation. KWX that was based on Socratic question, as we discussed before, was the leading principle of the first Socrates’ epistemology and of the highest position. Other epistemological principles, SK directly and BE indirectly, were relying on Socratic question and therefore on KWX. Such a position does not belong to KWX from Meno on. What makes it different in the second Socrates is another principle that is needed it not only as its complementary principle but also as what is more fundamental. Plato, then, does not reject KWX in this period, but, it seems, he transcends to another more basic principle; a principle we shall call the principle of 'Knowledge of the Good' (KG): -/- KG Knowledge of X requires knowledge of the Good. -/- Whereas all the dialogues of our first group are free from any discuscon about KG, it bears a very important role in the second group so as becomes the superior principle of knowledge in Republic. Trying to solve the problem of teachability of virtue, Socrates says that it can be teachable only if it is a kind of knowledge because nothing can be taught to human beings but knowledge (ἐπιστήμην) (Meno 87c2). The dilemma will be, then, whether virtue is knowledge or not (c11-12) and since virtue is good, we can change the question to: whether is there anything good separate from knowledge (εἰ μέν τί ἐστιν ἀγαθὸν καὶ ἄλλο χωριζόμενον ἐπιστήμης) (d4-5). Therefore, the conclusion will be that if there is nothing good which knowledge does not encompass, virtue can be nothing but knowledge (d6-8). What let us discuss KG as an epistemological principle for the second Secrates is the relation he tries to establish between knowledge and the Good which, though is alongside with the mentioned thesis and the idea of virtue as knowledge, goes much deeper inside epistemology asking to regard the Good as the basis of knowledge. The effort of Phaedo cannot succeed in establishing the Good as the criterion of explanation and knowledge since, I think, it needs a far more complicated ontology of Republic where Socrates can finally announce KG. What is said in Republic is totally compatible with Phaedo 99d–e and the metaphor of watching an eclipse of the sun. In spite of the fact that we do not have adequate knowledge of the Idea of the Good, it is necessary for every kind of knowledge: 'If we do not know it, even if we know all other things, it is of no benefit to us without it' (505a6-7). The problem of our not having sufficient knowledge of the Idea of Good is tried to be solved by the same method of Phaedo 99d-e, that is to say, by looking at what is like instead of looking at thing itself (506d8-e4). It is this solution that leads to the comparison of the Good with sun in the allegory of Sun (508b12-13). What the Good is in the intelligible realm corresponds to what the sun is in the visible realm; as sun is not sight, but is its cause and is seen by it (b9-10), the Good is so regarding knowledge. It has, then, the same role for knowledge that the sun has for sight. Socrates draws our attention to the function of sun in our seeing. The eyes can see everything only in the light of the day being unable to see the same things in the gloom of night (508c4-6). Without the sun, our eyes are dimmed and blind as if they do not have clear vision any longer (c6-7). That the Good must have the same role about knowledge based on the analogy means that it must be considered as a required condition of any kind of knowledge: -/- The soul, then, thinks (νόει) in the same way: whenever it focuses on what is shined upon by truth and being, understands (ἐνόησέν), knows (ἔγνω) and apparently possesses understanding (νοῦν ἔχειν). (508d4-6) -/- Socrates does not use agathon in this paragraph and substitutes it with both aletheia and to on. He links them with the Idea of the Good when he is to assert the conclusion of the analogy: -/- That which gives truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say, is the Idea of the Good: being the cause of knowledge and truth (αἰτίαν δ᾽ ἐπιστήμης οὖσαν καὶ ἀληθείας) so far as it is known (ὡς γιγνωσκομένης μὲν διανοοῦ). (508e1-4) Knowledge and truth are called goodlike (ἀγαθοειδῆ) since they are not the same as the Good but more honoured (508e6-509a5). KG, which had been implicitly contemplated and searched in Phaedo, is now explicitly being asserted in Republic. As what was quoted clearly proves, this principle is the very one which we can observe as the most fundamental principle of the second Socrates in Republic, corresponding to the role KWX had in the first Socrates. The Form of the Good in Republic, of which Santas speaks as 'the centerpiece of the canonical Platonism of the middle dialogues, the centerpiece of Plato’s metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and …' (1983, 256) much more can be said. Plato’s Cave allegory in Book VIII dedicates a similar role to the Idea of the Good. The Idea of the Good is there as the last thing to be seen in the knowable realm, something so important that its seeing equals to understanding the fact that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful (517b). Producing both light and its source in visible realm, it controls and provides truth and understanding in the intelligible realm (517c). -/- 2. Tripartite Epistemology BE is thoroughy rejected in the second Socrates and substituted by its opposite, the principle of 'Tripartite Epistemolgy' (TE): -/- TE Opinion is an epistemological status between knowledge and ignorance. BE of the first Socrates was denying any third way besides knowledge and ignorance which was the foundation of Socratic circle without which Socrates could not reject his interlocutors’ possessing any kind of knowledge. We cannot say, however, that the first Socrates had a third epistemological status in mind but rejected it. Such a status was unacceptable for him so that one can say that he would reject any kind of such status if suggested. There were only two possibilities about knowledge: either one knows something or he does not know it. TE, thus, was not the first Socrates’ discovery and, I think it is not the second Socrates’discovery. All we can see in our second group of dialouges is that he uses this principle as an already demonstrated one. Having examined the slave boy in Meno for the prupose of showing the working of recollection, it truns out that he has some opinions in him while he still does not know. Without trying to prove it, Socrates takes this as the distinction between knowledge and opinion: -/- So, he who does not know (οὐκ εἰδότι) about what he does not know (περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ) has within himself true opinions (ἀληθεῖς δόξαι) about the same things he did not know (περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε) (85c6-7). -/- The same distinction is set between ὀρθὴν δόξαν and ἐπιστήμην at 97b5-6 ff. (also cf. 97b1-2: ὀρθῶς μὲν δοξάζων … ἐπιστάμενος). He connects then their difference to the myth of Daedalus, the statue that would run away and escape. So are true opinions, not willing to remain long in mind and thus not worthy until one ties them down by αἰτίας λογισμῷ (98a3-4). Socrates says that this tying down is anamnesis. We face, in Phaedo, the same relation is settled between knowledge as the process of being tied down and getting the capability to give an account, on the one hand, and anamnesis, on the other hand. When a man knows, he must be able to give an account of what he knows (Phaedo 76b5-6) and since not all people are able to give such an account, those who recollect, recollect what once they learned (76c4). Although the distinction between knowledge and opinion is not explicitly used in Phaedo, referring to the parallel link between knowledge plus account and anamnesis in Phaedo and Meno, one can say that those who cannot recollect are not able to give account and, thus, are in a state of opinion. What is said at Phaedo 84a, though not yet a definite distinction between knowledge and opinion, makes a distinction between their objects so as we can agree that it is presupposed. The soul of the philosopher, Socrates says, follows reason, stays with it forever and contemplates the divine, which is not the object of opinoin (ἀδόξαστον) (84a8, cf. Meno 98b2-5). The distinction of knowledge and belief in Republic has a significant difference with what we discussed in Meno and Phaedo since the distinction of Meno was based on anamnesis and thus more an epistemological distinction. Even in Phaedo that we do not have any elaborate discussion about the distinction, the only hint to the matter at 76 is bound to the theory of anamnesis. In addition to the relation of the distinction with this theory, there is another evidence that does not permit us to consider the distinction as an ontological distinction. Let’s see Meno 85c6-7: -/- So, he who does not know about what he does not know has within himself true opinions about the same things he did not know (τῷ οὐκ εἰδότι ἄρα περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ ἔνεισιν ἀληθεῖς δόξαι περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε). (85c6-7) -/- This last sentence persists that the objects of knowledge and true opinion are the same. What Socrates is to say here is that whereas he does not know X he has true opinion about the same X. I think Socrates’ sentence that the slave boy οὐκ εἰδότι ἄρα περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ and his restatement of it by saying περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε is because he wants to emphasize that the slave boy who does not know, has true opinion about the same thing. Socrates could say this just with using τούτων and there would be no necessity to bring περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ for οὐκ εἰδότι if he did not want to emphasize. -/- 3. Tripartite Ontology The distinction between knowledge and true opinion in Republic, on other side, has nothing to do with recollection, but is based on an ontological principle, 'Tripartite Ontology' (TO): -/- TO There are things that both are and are not. -/- This principle I confine, among our three dialogues of the second group, to Republic not extended to Meno and Phaedo, is obviously the opposite of BO. Speaking about the lovers of sights and sounds in the fifth book, Socrates distinguishes them from philosophers because their thought is unable to understand the nature of beautiful itself besides beautiful things (476a6-8) and hence they can only have opinions. The philosopher who, on the contrary, believes in beautiful itself and can distinguish it from beautiful things (476c9-d3), has knowledge because he knows, contrasting others who have opinion because they only opine (d5-6). Since those whose knowledge were degraded as opinion will complain about Socrates’ such calling their thought, he provides them the following argument (476e7-477b1): -/- - Does the person who knows, knows (γιγνώσκει) something (τὶ) or nothing (οὐδέν)? - He knows something (τί). - Something that is (ὂν) or is not (οὐκ ὄν)? - Something that is (ὂν) for how could something that is not be known (πῶς γὰρ ἂν μὴ ὄν γέ τι γνωσθείη)? - Then we have an adequate grasp of this: No matter how many ways we examine it, what completely is (παντελῶς ὂν) is completely knowable (παντελῶς γνωστόν) and what is in no way (μὴ ὂν δὲ μηδαμῇ) is in every way unknowable (πάντῃ ἄγνωστον). - A most adequate one. - Good. Now, if anything is such as to be and also not to be (ὡς εἶναί τε καὶ μὴ εἶναι), won’t it be intermediate (μεταξὺ) between what purely is (εἰλικρινῶς ὄντος) and what in no way is (μηδαμῇ ὄντος)? - Yes, it’s intermediate. - Then as knowledge (γνῶσις) is set over what is (τῷ ὄντι), while ignorance (ἀγνωσία) is of necessity set over what is not (μὴ ὄντι) mustn’t we find an intermediate between ignorance (ἀγνοίας) and knowledge (ἐπιστήμης) to be set over the intermediate, if there is such a thing? -/- From the third status of being we must reach to the third status of knowledge. The simple reading of this text can be an existential reading, taking the "is" of the mentioned sentences as existence. The problem is that when it is said that there is something that both is and is not reading "is" existentially, it sounds too bizarre to be acceptable. It cannot easily be understandable to have something as both existent and non-existent at the same time. This problem arose so many debates and led many scholars to reject the existential reading of "is" and suggest some other readings like predicative or veridical readings. I think though Plato’s complicated ontology of Republic cannot be correctly understood by a simple existential reading, this "is" cannot be free from existential sense of being and, thus, cannot be reduced to just a predicative or veridical sense of being. -/- 4. Bound Knowledges In addition to KG, the Good is also the basis of another principle in the second Socrates, namely the principle of 'Bound Knowledge' (BK): -/- BK Knowledge of everything is bound to the knowledge of the Good. -/- We distinguished BK from KG because we want to insist, in BK, on what had not been insisted upon in KG, that is, the binding role that the Good plays in the second Socrates, contrasting the absence of such a role in the first Socrates. Socrates remembers, in Phaedo, his wonderful keen on natural philosophers' wisdom when he was young. The origin of this enthusiasm was Socrates’ hope to know the cause of everything as they used to claim. When he was searching the matters of his interest on their basis, Socrates says, he became convinced he can get no acceptable answer from them and found himself blind even to the things he thought he knew before. One day he hears Anaxagoras’ theory that 'it is Mind that arranges and is the cause of everything (ὡς ἄρα νοῦς ἐστιν ὁ διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων αἴτιος)' (Phd. 97c1-2 cf. DK, Fr.15.8-9, 11-12, 12-14) and thinks that he can finally find what he has always expected, i.e. something which can explain all things. What I intend to show here is that what makes Socrates hopeful is that Anaxagoras’ theory tries 1) to explain all things by one thing and 2) this explanation is understood by Socrates as if it is based on the concept of the Good. That Socrates was searching for one explanation for all things can be proved even from what he has been expecting from natural philosophers. The case is, nonetheless, more clearly asserted when he speaks about Anaxagoras’ theory. In addition to διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων αἴτιος of 97c2 mentioned above, we have τὸ τὸν νοῦν εἶναι πάντων αἴτιον (c3-4) and τόν γε νοῦν κοσμοῦντα πάντα κοσμεῖν (c4-5) all emphasizing on the cause of all things (πάντα) which can clearly prove that one of the reasons which caused Socrates to embrace it delightfully was its claim to provide the cause of all things by one thing. Another reason was that Anaxagoras’ Mind, at least in Socrates’ view, was attempting to explain everything by the concept of the Good. This connection between Mind and Good belongs more to the essential relation they have in Socrates’ thinking than Anaxagoras’ theory because there are almost nothing about such a relation in Anaxagoras. The reason for Socrates’ reading can be that Mind is substantially compatible with Socrates’ idea of the relation between good and knowledge. Both the thesis 'no one does wrong willingly' and the theory of virtue as knowledge we pointed to above are evidences of this essential relation. Nobody who knows that something is bad can choose or do it as bad. The reason, when it is reason, that means when it is as it should be, when it is wise or when it knows, works only based on good-choosing. In this context, when Socrates hears that Mind is considered as the cause of everything, it sounds to him like this: good should be regarded as the basis of the explanation of all things. We see him, thus, passing from the former to the latter without any proof. This is done in the second sentence after introducing Mind: -/- I thought that if this were so, the arranging Mind would arrange all things and put each thing in the way that was Best (ὅπῃ ἂν βέλτιστα ἔχῃ). If one then wished to find the cause of each thing by which it either perishes or exists, one needs to find what is the best way (βέλτιστον αὐτῷ ἐστιν) for it to be, or to be acted upon, or to act. On these premises then it befitted a man to investigate only, about this and other things, what is the most excellent (ἄριστον) and best (βέλτιστον). The same man must inevitably also know what is worse (χεῖρον), for that is part of the same knowledge. (97c4-d5) This passage is a good evidence of Socrates’ leap from Anaxagoras’ Mind to his own concept of the Good that can explain why Socrates found Anaxagoras theory after his own heart (97d7). Mind is welcomed because of its capability for explanation on the basis of good to 'explain why it is so of necessity, saying which is better (ἄμεινον), and that it was better (ἄμεινον) to be so' (97e1-3). What Socrates thought he had found in Anaxagoras can indicate what he had been expecting from natural scientists before. Socrates could not be satisfied with their explanations because they were unable to explain how it is the best for everything to be as it is. It can probably be said, then, that it was the lack of the unifying Good in their explanation that had disappointed him. We must insist that we are discussing what Socrates thought that Anaxagoras’ theory of Mind should have been, not about Anaxagoras’ actual way of using Mind. Phaedo 97c-98b, is not about what Socrates found in Anaxagoras but what he thought he could find in it. On the contrary, it should also be noted that it was not this that was dashed at 98b, but Anaxagoras’ actual way of using Mind. It was Anaxagoras’ fault not to find out how to use such an excellent thesis (98b8-c2, cf. 98e-99b). Socrates gives an example to show how not believing in 'good' as the basis of explanation makes people be wanderers between different unreal explanations of a thing. His words δέον συνδεῖν (binding that binds together) as a description for the Good we chose as the name of BK principle: They do not believe that the truly good and binding binds and holds them together (ὡς ἀληθῶς τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ δέον συνδεῖν καὶ συνέχειν οὐδὲν οἴονται). (99c5-6) -/- Having in mind Plato’s well-known analogy of the sun and the Good at Republic 508-509, we can dare to say that his warning of the danger of seeing the truth directly like one watching an eclipse of the sun in Phaedo (99d-e) is more about the difficulty of so-called good-based explanation than its insufficiency, a difficulty which is precisely confirmed in Republic (504e-505a, 506d-e). Moreover, BK is asserted in a more explicit way in the Republic, where the Good is considered not only as a condition for the knowledge of X, as was noted above discussing KG, but also as what binds all the objects of knowledge and also the soul in its knowing them. At Republic VI, 508e1-3, when Socrates says that the Form of the Good 'gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower (τοῦτο τοίνυν τὸ τὴν ἀλήθειαν παρέχον τοῖς γιγνωσκομένοις καὶ τῷ γιγνώσκοντι τὴν δύναμιν ἀποδιδὸν)', he wants to set the Good at the highest point of his epistemological structure by which all the elements of this structure are bound. This binding aspect of the Good is by no means a simple binding of all knowledges or all the objects of knowledge, but the most complicated kind of binding as it is expected from the author of the Republic. The kind of unity the Good gives to the different knowledges of different things is comparable with the unity which each Form gives to its participants in Republic: as all the participants of a Form are united by referring to the ideas, all different kinds of knowledge are united by referring to the Good. If we observe Aristotle's assertion that for Plato and the believers of Forms, the causative relation of the One with the Forms is the same as that of the Forms with particulars (e.g. Metaphysics 988a10-11, 988b4), that is to say the One is the essence (e.g., ibid, 988a10-11: τοῦ τί ἐστὶν, 988b4-6: τὸ τί ἢν εἶναί) of the Forms besides his statement that for them One is the Good (e.g., ibid, 988b11-13) the relation between the Good and unity may become more understandable. Since the quiddity of the Good (τί ποτ᾽ ἐστὶ τἀγαθὸν) is more than discussion (506d8-e2), we cannot await Socrates to tell us how this binding role is played. All we can expect is to hear from him an analogy by which this unifying role is envisaged, the sun. The kind of unity that the Good gives to the knowledge and its objects in the intelligible realm is comparable to the unity that the sun gives to the sight and its objects in the visible realm (508b-c). The allegory of Line (Republic VI, 509d-511), like that of the Sun, tries to bind all various kinds of knowledges. The hierarchical model of the Line which encompasses all kinds of knowledge from imagination to understanding can clearly be considered as Plato’s effort to bind all kinds of knowledges by a certain unhypothetical principle. The method of hypothesis starts, in the first subsection of the intelligible realm, with a hypothesis that is not directed firstly to a principle but a conclusion (510b4-6). It proceeds, in the other subsection, to a 'principle which is not a hypothesis' (b7) and is called the 'unhypothetical principle of all things' (ἀνυποθέτου ἐπὶ τὴν τοῦ παντὸς ἀρχὴν) (511b6-7). This παντὸς must refer not only to the objects of the intelligible realm but to the sensible objects as well. Plato does posit, therefore, an epistemological principle for all things, a principle that all things are, epistemologically, bound and, thus, unified by. -/- 5. Bound Beings The ontological aspect of BK we shall call the principle of 'Bound Beings' (BB): -/- BB Being of all things are bound by the Good. -/- We saw in our principle of Split Being (SB) how the first Socrates was criticized because of his approach to split being and separate each thing from other things. The principle of Bound Beings intends to make the things more related, a duty which is done again by the Good. In the allegory of Sun, there are two paragraphs that evidently and deliberately extend the binding role of the Good to the ontological scene: -/- You will say that the sun not only makes the visible things have the ability of being seen but also coming to be, growth and nourishment. (509b2-4) -/- This clearly intends to remind the ontological role the sun plays in bringing to being all the sensible things in order to display how its counterpart has the same role in the intelligible realm (b6-10): -/- Not only the objects of knowledge (γιγνωσκομένοις) owe their being known (γιγνώσκεσθαι) to the Good, but also their existence (τὸ εἶναί) and their being (οὐσίαν) are due to it, though the Good is not being but superior to it in rank and power. That the Good is here represented as responsible for being of things in addition to their being known means, in my opinion, that Plato wants to posit BB in addition to BK. The allegory of Cave at the very beginning of the seventh Book (514aff.) can be taken as another evidence. The role of the Good, one might say, is confined to the intelligible realm because it is asserted that the role the Good plays in this realm is corresponding to that of the sun in the visible realm. The fact that Plato wants to observe the Good also as the ontological cause of the sensible things is obvious from his saying, in the allegory of Cave, that the Form of the Good 'produces light and its source (τὸν τούτου κύριον) [i.e. the sun] in the visible realm' (517c3). We can conclude, then, that the ontological function of the Good is not confined to the intelligible realm in which it is the lord and provides truth and understanding (c3-4) because it is also responsible to produce τὸν κύριον of light. 6. Proportionality of Being and Knowledge Insofaras BE and BO principles of the first Socrates gave way to TE and TO principles of the second Socrates, we cannot expect him to preserve KB in the same way as it was in the first Socrates. The new tripartite ontology and epistemology necessitates some modifications in KB which results in the principle of 'Proportionality of Being and Knowledge' (PBK): -/- PBK To every class of being there is a proportionate category of knowledge. -/- This principle, of course, does not entail the refutation of KB and thus is not kind of rejecting PBK but only a more complicated version of it. Based on PBK, we can still agree that knowledge is of being (KB) but the issue is that since none of the concepts of knowledge and being in the second Socrates are as simple as they were for the first Socrates, we need a more complicated principle for their relation here. Although from Meno 97a where the distinction of knowledge and true opinion is drawn out in the second group of the dialogues, we can expect a new relation, it is articulated in its most complete way in Republic and specifically in the allegory of Line. All the beings are divided there hierarchically to four classes, to each of them belongs a class of knowledge: imagination to images, belief to the sensible things (more correctly: the things of which they[in previous class] were images (ᾧ τοῦτο ἔοικεν)), thought to mathematical objects (?) and understanding to the Forms and the first principle. The degree of clarity that each of the classes of knowledge shares in (σαφηνείας ἡγησάμενος μετέχειν) is proportionate to the degree that its object shares in truth (ἀληθείας μετέχει). (511e2-4) -/- Conclusion From the six onto-epistemilogical principles of the first Socrates, four principles turn to their opposite in the middle period dialogues. While bipolar epistemology and ontology of the early dialogues give place to tripartite epistemology in the middle period dialogues and tripartite ontology in Republic, the split knowledge and being of the first Socrates are inclined to be substituted by bound knowledges and bound beings in the second Socrates and specifically in Republic. Not all our system of principles in this article is necessarily determinative. Either they are rightly formulated or not, our result would not be vulnerable if we accept that 1) making the distinction of knowledge and belief, 2) accepting the being of not being and 3) trying to bind both being and knowledge by the concept of the Good happens only in middle period dialogues, having been absent in the early ones. These are the favourite results all those somehow arbitrary and even oversimplified principles were to illustrate; that there is kind of a development in the epistemological as well as the ontological grounds of Plato’s philosophy. -/- Notes . (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

The research question addressed in this paper is: How do the activities of writing mediate knowledge of writing, disciplinary knowledge, and professional knowledge as intertwined sites of learning? To conceptualise the role that writing can take in these complex processes, we apply an analytical framework comprising two core concepts; mediation and learning trajectories. We draw on an empirical study from the context of initial teacher education in Norway. From our analysis, we identify three qualities of writing as important. First, the (...) writing process should in- clude responding to and sharing drafts. Other important qualities include high teacher expectations and continuous reflection. From the perspective adopted here, learning is understood to be distributed and situated. In particular, in situated cultural contexts, collaborative writing can become a significant mediational tool for learning. Initial teacher education seeks to prepare the student teacher for a highly complex professional competency, developing both professionally and in individual subjects. To do so, students must transform social structures and the tools embedded in practices into psychological tools. We contend that writing is one significant tool in moving through complex trajectories of learning towards becoming professional teachers. (shrink)

Biologists and philosophers have offered differing concepts of biological race. That is, they have offered different candidates for what a biological correlate of race might be; for example, races might be subspecies, clades, lineages, ecotypes, or genetic clusters. One thing that is striking about each of these proposals is that they all depend on a concept of population. Indeed, some authors have explicitly characterized races in terms of populations. However, including the concept of population into concepts of (...) race raises three puzzles, all having to do with time. In this paper, I extend the causal interactionist population concept (CIPC) by introducing some simple assumptions about how to understand populations through time. These assumptions help to shed light on the three puzzles, and in the process show that if we want to understand races in terms of populations, we will need to revise our concept(s) of race. (shrink)

The psychological effects of aesthetic education have often been discussed, and major studies such as Michael Parsons’s inquiry into art understanding show that the development of understanding works of visual art is influenced by education.1 His findings show that the way people talk about art can be structured in five stages of development according to the model of Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. He believes that the understanding of art, just like general cognition, is based on mental (...) maturation but that some kind of education is necessary to acquire the different skills of the understanding of art at each stage of development. Parsons’s study does not include educational strategies, but his .. (shrink)

Throughout the Global North, policymakers invest in large-scale integration of health-data infrastructures to facilitate the reuse of clinical data for administration, research, and innovation. Debates about the ethical implications of data repurposing have focused extensively on issues of patient autonomy and privacy. We suggest that it is time to scrutinize also how the everyday work of healthcare staff is affected by political ambitions of data reuse for an increasing number of purposes, and how different purposes are prioritized. Our analysis (...) builds on ethnographic studies within the Danish healthcare system, which is internationally known for its high degree of digitalization and well-connected data infrastructures. Although data repurposing ought to be relatively seamless in this context, we demonstrate how it involves costs and trade-offs for those who produce and use health data. Even when IT systems and automation strategies are introduced to enhance efficiency and reduce data work, they can end up generating new forms of data work and fragmentation of clinically relevant information. We identify five types of data work related to the production, completion, validation, sorting, and recontextualization of health data. Each of these requires medical expertise and clinical resources. We propose that the implications for these forms of data work should be considered early in the planning stages of initiatives for large-scale data sharing and reuse, such as the European Health Data Space. We believe that political awareness of clinical costs and trade-offs related to such data work can provide better and more informed decisions about data repurposing. (shrink)

Most scholars of Islamic intellectual history now agree on the distortedness of the traditional Western portrayal of al-Ġazālī as the defender of Muslim orthodoxy whose Incoherence of the Philosophers was such a powerful critique that it caused the annihilation of philosophical activity in Islamic civilization. Some in fact are coming to the conclusion that al-Ġazālī's importance in the history of Islamic philosophy and theology derives as much from his assiduous incorporation of basic metaphysical ideas into central doctrines of Sunnī kalām (...) , as from his far more celebrated bashing of the falāsifa . What is less well known is that al-Ġazālī's role in the ‘‘philosophizing” of Sunnī theology was not a lonely struggle by a single genius, but part of a broader trend that seems to have begun during Avicenna’s lifetime and that picked up speed in the first and second generations after Avicenna's death in 1037, with the work of al-Ġazālī's teacher, the Aš‘arite al-Gˇuwaynī , as well as of the Māturīdite al-Bazdawī , work that was carried forward by dozens of subsequent members of those two major Sunnī theological schools. It is clear, in fact, that the dividing line between the Sunnī theologians commonly referred to in the later Islamic tradition as mutaqaddimūn , and those referred to as muta’a&hbrevu;h&hbrevu;irūn , lies not with al-Ġazālī but with Avicenna himself, and that the turn in Sunnī kalām was therefore Avicennian, not Ġazālian. (shrink)

What is, or should be, the role of defense in thinking about the justification of use of armed force? Contemporary just war thinking prioritizes defense as the principal, and perhaps the only, just cause for resorting to armed force. By contrast, classic just war tradition, while recognizing defense as justification for use of force by private persons, did not reason from self‐defense to the justification of the use of force on behalf of the political community, but instead (...) rendered the idea of just cause for resort to force in terms of the sovereign's responsibility to maintain justice, vindicating those who had suffered from injustice and punishing evildoers. This paper moves through three major stages in the historical development of just war thinking, first examining a critical phase in the formation of the classical idea of just cause as the responsibility to maintain justice, then discussing the shift, characteristic of the modern period, to an idea of sovereignty as connected to the state and the prioritization of defense of the state as just cause for use of force, and lastly showing how this conception of the priority of defense became part of the recovery of just war thinking in the latter part of the twentieth century. The paper concludes by noting recent changes in thought on international law that tend to emphasize justice at the expense of the right of self‐defense, suggesting that the roots of just war thinking imply the need for a similar rethinking of contemporary just war discourse. (shrink)

This chapter provides a short history of the reception of Liang Shuming’s thought in European-language scholarship since 1922. By reviewing a significant number of monographs, edited volumes, and articles published in academic and missionary journals in English, French, and German during the last one hundred years, the chapter aims to provide a historical typology of the multifaceted reception of Liang’s thought through time. In the scholarship reviewed, Liang is variously portrayed as a philosopher, a social reformer or activist, a (...) religious thinker, an educator, a legal thinker, and a political figure. Throughout the years, Liang has been described as a conservative, a restorationist, a fundamentalist, and a modern thinker, and has been labeled a Confucian, a Buddhist, and a populist. The many faces of Liang Shuming laid bare by this short history are revealing of the complexity and tensions of the man and his thought, but also of the interpreters’ gaze and the historical evolution of the academic field in the Euro-American region. The end result is a genealogy of sort—one that challenges some deep-seated assumptions about Liang by tracing them back to a particular and contingent historical moment and by situating them within a broad spectrum of alternative positions vying for attention in the small but diverse discursive space allotted to the thought of Liang Shuming in European-language scholarship. (shrink)

There exists a fundamental convergence between some major trends of modern epistemology—as outlined, for instance, by Filmer Northrop and Henry Margenau—and the theories actually developed within sciences of the human mind where two types of thought—one implicit and, the other, explicit—tend to refer to two different lines of development. Moreover, these theories can find in the psychology of Lev Vygotsky some seminal hypotheses of a major importance. In order to highlight this convergence, we parallel the role played by (...) structured conceptual systems in Vygotsky’s conception of intellectual development and Northrop’s epistemology. We show how these conceptual systems account for the notion of causality and can explain the success of scientific thought, i.e. its possible match with the real world, while this match falsely justified an overall biological model of intellectual development in Jean Piaget’s work. We conclude that dual process theorists should no longer neglect cognitive tools, and especially conceptual systems, which underpin the awareness and mastery of thought that are characteristic of type 2 processes. This whole analysis leads us to maintain that human psychology is not characterized in the first instance by a need to act, but a quest for meaning. (shrink)

First, I offer a short overview on the classical occidental philosophy as propounded by the ancient Greeks and the natural philosophies of the last 2000 years until the dawn of the empiricist logic of science in the twentieth century, which wanted to delimitate classical metaphysics from empirical sciences. In contrast to metaphysical concepts which didn’t reflect on the language with which they tried to explain the whole realm of entities empiricist logic of science initiated the end of metaphysical theories (...) by reflecting on the preconditions for foundation and justification of sentences about objects of investigation, i.e. a coherent definition of language in general, which was not the aim of classical metaphysics. Unexpectedly empiricist logic of science in the linguistic turn failed in the physical and mathematical reductionism of language and its use in communication, as will be discussed below in further detail. Nevertheless, such reflection on language and communication also introduced this vocabulary into biology. Manfred Eigen and bioinformatics, later on biolinguistics, used ‘language’ applied linguistic turn thinking to biology coherent to the logic of science and its formalisable aims. This changed significantly with the birth of biosemiotics and biohermeneutics. At the end of this introduction it will be outlined why and how all these approaches reproduced the deficiencies of the logic of science and why the biocommunicative approach avoids their abstractive fallacies. (shrink)

CELL AND PSYCHE THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE By EDMUND W. SINNOTT. PREFACE TO THE TORCHBOOK EDITION: SINCE the publication of this little book, as the McNair Lectures at the University of North Carolina, the author has written two others, as well as a number of papers, on the same gen eral theme. Though these elaborate the argument a little further, the essence of it is in Cell and Psyche. This is admittedly a specula tion, but one based solidly on (...) class='Hi'>biological fact. It has been regarded as rather visionary and metaphysical by some people, but others have been attracted to it by the suggestion it offers for a better understanding of the ancient problem of how mind and body are related to each other. This problem is of such paramount impor tance, not only for a knowledge of what man really is but for the construction of a satisfying life philosophy, that any light thrown on it should be welcome. The suggestion that man's physical life grows out of the basic goal-seeking and purposiveness found in all organic behavior and that this, in turn, is an aspect of the more general self - regulating and normative character evident in the development and activities of living organisms, is at least worth serious consideration. If we are to avoid a dualistic idea of man's nature and to construct a true monism that does not require the sacrifice of the significance of either mind or body, some such conception as this seems a rea sonable means of doing so. It is to be hoped that the wider distri bution now made possible for the present book may result in a more general consideration of this particular relationship between biol ogy and philosophy* E. W. S. CONTENTS: Introduction. i I. Organization, the Distinctive Character of All Life 15 II. Biological Organization and Psychological Activity 43 IIL Some Implications for Philosophy 75 Suggested Readings. 112 Index. 117. INTRODUCTION: IN THE CLAMOR and confusion of our times one fact grows ever clearer beliefs are important. One of the major problems with which men now are faced per haps, indeed, the most important one is the wide dis agreement which still exists in their fundamental philos ophies. What course a man will follow, or a nation, is set in no small measure by his basic creed, by what he really thinks about the true nature of a human being his personality, his freedom, his destiny, his relations to others and to the rest of the universe; by the judgments lie makes as to what qualities and courses of action are admirable and should command his allegiance. These are not academic questions merely. They arc ancient mys teries which long have troubled human hearts and seem today almost as far as ever from solution. The answer a ny* n gives to them is the most significant thing that one can know about him. We may be tempted to under estimate the importance of these inner directives and turn instead to outer influences, to economic and social factors, as more decisive for our actions. But when we look at what the philosophy of Marx has done to set one half the world against the other, at the basic divergence between the thinking of East and West, and at so many other differences in political and religious beliefs which now divide mankind, we can hardly doubt the profound practical import of men's philosophies. It is still true today that as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. In the minds of men are the most fateful battles fought. Against those ideologies we condemn, force in the end will fail. If our opponents cannot be convinced, or their ideas reconci. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Theoretical Remarks on Combined Creative and Scholarly PhD Degrees in the Visual ArtsJames Elkins (bio)The PhD in visual arts is inescapable: it is on the horizon. In just a few years, there will be a number of such programs in the United States, and if the trend mirrors the expansion of MFAs after the mid-1960s, then in a few decades the PhD will be the consensus "terminal" degree for (...) artists. Given that, it is pressing to consider how the degree might be theorized. In Australia and the United Kingdom, where the degrees already exist, their growth has been dictated in large measure by the existing educational structures and by the inevitable quest for funding. (In the United Kingdom, university departments get a disproportionate increase in their funding if they offer doctorate programs, and the same pattern occurs in state schools in America.) As a result, existing programs simply grow by exonomic necessity or opportunity, and so far they have not been well theorized apart from models already in use elsewhere in the university. Private universities and art schools in the United States are therefore well positioned to rethink the conceptual foundations of combined studio and scholarly PhDs, because they are largely freed of the temptation of increased funding and the obligation to fit the new programs into existing structures. In this essay, I propose eight configurations that such degrees might take. I close with three general observations about the future of such programs.Three pieces of background are necessary as introduction. First, the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, where I teach, is currently running an four-year undergraduate major in visual studies. Soon we will be expanding it into an MA and, in a few years, a PhD. At the BA level our program already has a large studio component. For that reason we have been looking at programs that offer comparable combinations of creative and scholarly work at the PhD level. Our own program, we hope, will be a place [End Page 22] where the possibilities of other programs can be kept open and continuously questioned.Second, this essay was originally a reader's report for a creative-arts PhD thesis called "Beyond the Surface: The Contemporary Experience of the Italian Renaissance," written by Jo-Anne Duggan for the University of Technology, Sydney. In fall 2003 Duggan was a candidate for the "DCA," Doctorate of Creative Arts." She is a photographer, and her special interest is photographing inside museums; her thesis explores the history and theory of that practice. The report I wrote for her was the basis of this essay, because I found that her thesis is a mixture of what I think are the eight principal possibilities for combining PhD-level scholarship and creative work.Third, this essay is the outgrowth of several colloquia that have been held at the College Art Association and at the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design/National Association of Schools of Art and Design (AICAD/NASAD) conferences (organizations of art school administrators). These ad hoc forums have been, so far, the only places where the new programs have been debated. I hope this essay can contribute to a more detailed discussion.Here are the eight configurations. The first five are (or will be) common, and the last two are rare but preferable.1. The thesis is art history, intended to inform the art practice. The most obvious relation between scholarship and creative work is that the former informs the latter. The artist positions her scholarship so that it supports her art practice. Within this possibility, perhaps the most common option would be to write an art historical thesis, covering the history of practices that lead up to the writer's own practice. Among the advantages would be that, in theory, the candidate would be able to go on to teach in a department of art history. In terms of her practice, the idea would be that historical knowledge strengthens art practice: a debatable point, if only because so many artists have done so well by ignoring or distorting the relevant history. In Canberra in summer 2003, I met a recent PhD whose thesis was on... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 19-37 [Access article in PDF] Eudaimonism and Theology in Stoic Accounts of Virtue Michael Gass The Stoics were unique among the major schools in the ancient world for maintaining that both virtue and happiness consist solely of "living in agreement with nature" (homologoumenos tei phusei zen). We know from a variety of texts that both Cleanthes and Chrysippus, if not (...) also Zeno, characterized such conduct both in essentialist terms, as a matter of living purposively in a manner natural for the human species, and in cosmological terms, as a matter of living in agreement with the purposes of nature as a whole, this being regarded as identical to Zeus. This is not to suggest, however, that cosmo-theological speculation figured prominently in the ethical systems of the early Stoics. Judging from extant summaries and discussions of Stoic ethical doctrines, those doctrines were justified in a dialectical fashion, not by appeal to facts about the purposive order of nature but simply from an analysis of ethical concepts patterned after similar analyses by earlier philosophers (most notably, Aristotle). It is this kind of learning that Chrysippus apparently had in mind when he maintained that ethics should be studied prior to undertaking a systematic investigation of nature: [T]here are three kinds of philosopher's theorems, logical, ethical and physical.... [W]hat should be ranked first of these are the logical, next the ethical, third the physical; and what should come last in the physical theorems is theology. 1On the other hand, as we learn from the testimony of Plutarch (and also from other indirect textual evidence examined recently by Jacques Brunschwig), 2 [End Page 19] Chrysippus also believed that physics in general and theology in particular yield a quite distinct, demonstrative knowledge of the matters first studied in ethics. A. A. Long and others have suggested that such knowledge was regarded by the Stoics as encompassing not just information about the ways in which virtuous living is encouraged by, and fits into, the wider aims of nature at large but also a deeper understanding of the very essence of virtue. 3 Specifically, virtue is revealed to consist in a conscious and deliberate harmonization of one's actions with the purposes of the divine architect. Thus, under this interpretation of their ethical intentions, the Stoics thought of the initial, analytical approach to ethics as necessarily incomplete even in its treatment of strictly ethical topics; the systematic study of nature was thought to impart additional wisdom regarding ethical matters.In her recent study of ancient ethical theories, Julia Annas seeks to counter this view of the place of cosmo-theological speculation in early Stoicism by arguing that such a religious characterization of virtue is incompatible with the eudaimonism to which all schools of ancient philosophy, including Stoicism, were committed. 4 She concedes that first Cleanthes and then much later the Roman Stoics did regard virtue in religious terms, but in her assessment this represents a radical departure from mainstream Stoic thinking on this subject (which is identified mostly with the views of Chrysippus and his disciples, all of whom were clearly and consistently committed to the eudaimonistic model of ethical inquiry). Annas argues that whereas the Stoic sage was traditionally depicted as a person whose commitment to morally appropriate conduct stems from his own rational reflection on his own needs and interests, a person who identified completely with the aims of the divine architect in his purposive activity would be someone who surrendered his right to decide for himself what his needs and interests are, and who therefore could even be required to act in violation of what he might judge by himself to be crucial to his happiness.In what follows I demonstrate that this argument, often advanced in the literature as a reductio ad absurdum of divine command theories of morality, falls wide of the mark in the present case due to the fact that those Stoics who characterized virtue in religious terms did so apparently because they regarded a complete identification with... (shrink)

<I>The Last Book of Postmodernism comprises set of essays written on and about 'postmodernism' and education. It is written in an apocalyptic tone that treats themes of religion and spiritualism, drawing on poststructuralist sources of inspiration, to contrast the present 'postmodern condition' and the philosophical significance and historical influence of Nietzsche's statement 'God is dead.' The book considers the meaning of the 'end' of Christendom and the prospect of global spirituality. It also considers the 'end' of literature (...) and the beginning of user-generated cultures and the implications of this shift for education and the philosophical model of dialogue that has dominated the humanities in the West. It charts the 'end' of philosophy and the rise of 'body' criticism, the promise of the Enlightenment, the relation between education, power and freedom, geophilosophy and the pedagogy of the concept, and the narrative turn as a basis for a new critical language for educational studies. Finally, the book considers post-postmodernism and the 'end' of the linguistic turn in educational theory. (shrink)

The philosophical innateness debate has long relied onpsychological evidence. For a century, however, a parallel debate hastaken place within neuroscience. In this paper, I consider theimplications of this neuroscience debate for the philosophicalinnateness debate. By combining the tools of theoretical neurobiologyand learning theory, I introduce the ``problem of development'' that alladaptive systems must solve, and suggest how responses to this problemcan demarcate a number of innateness proposals. From this perspective, Isuggest that the majority of natural systems are in fact innate. (...) Lastly,I consider the acquistion strategies implemented by the human brain andsuggest that there is a rigorous way of characterizing these ``neuralconstructivist'' strategies as not being strongly innate. Alternatives toinnateness are thus both rigorously definable and empirically supported. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:In Search of the Good: A Life in Bioethics by Daniel Callahan, and: Why the Church Needs Bioethics: A Guide to the Wise Engagement with Life’s Challenges ed. by John F. Kilner, and: Respecting Life: Theology and Bioethics by Neil MesserAndrea Vicini SJIn Search of the Good: A Life in Bioethics By Daniel Callahan (edited by Arthur Caplan) CAMBRIDGE, MA: MIT PRESS, 2012. XVII + 206 PP. $29.00Why (...) the Church Needs Bioethics: A Guide to the Wise Engagement with Life’s Challenges Edited by John F. Kilner GRAND RAPIDS: ZONDERVAN, 2011. 304 PP. $26.99Respecting Life: Theology and Bioethics By Neil Messer LONDON: SCM PRESS, 2011. XI + 236 PP. $36.20With their specific styles, targeted readerships, and overall goals, these three volumes provide diverse but synergic ways to articulate and expand bioethical reflection in today’s society. Daniel Callahan is undoubtedly one of the founders of the field of bioethics. In Search of the Good: A Life in Bioethics is a fascinating memoir where, in a very engaging and personal way, Callahan unveils his intellectual development, career, and major interests. At the same time, he provides a critical lens to examine the history of bioethics in the United States. It shows his “abiding fascination with the human nature, scope, and validity of ethics as part of human life, and a similar strong interest in the ways that the scientific knowledge of medicine influences how we think about our health and mortality and shapes the ways we live our lives” (xvi). In particular, he describes how his philosophical training, and philosophical mind, led him to address the burgeoning ethical questions in biology and medicine and, thereby, to contribute to the founding of today’s bioethics.By sharing his intellectual journey with great honesty and transparency, Callahan guides his readers from his initial philosophical questioning to the later critical developments that have shaped bioethics as a theoretical and practical discipline in the last forty years. The list of topics that he has studied is impressive—from birth control to heart transplants, from end-of-life issues to embryonic stem cell research, and from market-driven health care to medical rationing. Drawing on his time as editor of the famous liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal in the 1960s, Callahan narrates his 1969 founding of the Hastings Center in cooperation with the author and psychiatrist Willard Gaylin. He describes the [End Page 196] stages in the life of this first bioethics research institution in the world, focusing on the years of its success (1980–86) and then on the routinization of its charisma (1986–96). More recent years have seen Callahan questioning medical progress and stressing the urgency of critically examining the goals of today’s medicine, even including discussion topics that are often avoided.Bioethics scholars and students will enjoy In Search of the Good. They will be able to integrate their own historical study of this discipline with Callahan’s personal memoir, which gives a human face to issues and debates. Moreover, bioethicists will be stimulated to reassess their own intellectual engagement and reflect on the future developments of this interdisciplinary discipline whose “roots lie in the humanities” (167).John Kilner, director of bioethics programs and professor of bioethics and contemporary culture at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, takes a broader approach in Why the Church Needs Bioethics. The volume includes contributions from an interdisciplinary group of thirty-one Christian leaders with diverse expertise, ranging from medicine, business, and law to biblical studies, theology, counseling, and intercultural and pastoral ministry. Nineteen leaders contributed essays, and twelve offered their critiques to earlier drafts. This collaborative effort is praiseworthy, but at the same time it leaves readers desiring more cohesive reflections and a synthetic theological voice.The volume considers three cases emblematic of major human quests: reproductive technologies for a better birth; enhancing drugs for a better life; and end-of-life care for a better death. Each case is discussed by experts from three different disciplines—biblical theology, practical theology, and other secular professions (business, law, or health care)—followed by a specifically bioethical essay. The volume ends with two conclusive contributions discussing how preaching and wisdom... (shrink)

BackgroundRespect for autonomy is a key concept in contemporary bioethics and end-of-life ethics in particular. Despite this status, an individualistic interpretation of autonomy is being challenged from the perspective of different theoretical traditions. Many authors claim that the principle of respect for autonomy needs to be reconceptualised starting from a relational viewpoint. Along these lines, the notion of relational autonomy is attracting increasing attention in medical ethics. Yet, others argue that relational autonomy needs further clarification in order to be adequately (...) operationalised for medical practice. To this end, we examined the meaning, foundations, and uses of relational autonomy in the specific literature of end-of-life care ethics.MethodsUsing PRESS and PRISMA procedures, we conducted a systematic review of argument-based ethics publications in 8 major databases of biomedical, philosophy, and theology literature that focused on relational autonomy in end-of-life care. Full articles were screened. All included articles were critically appraised, and a synthesis was produced.ResultsFifty publications met our inclusion criteria. Twenty-eight articles were published in the last 5 years; publications were originating from 18 different countries. Results are organized according to: (a) an individualistic interpretation of autonomy; (b) critiques of this individualistic interpretation of autonomy; (c) relational autonomy as theoretically conceptualised; (d) relational autonomy as applied to clinical practice and moral judgment in end-of-life situations.ConclusionsThree main conclusions were reached. First, literature on relational autonomy tends to be more a ‘reaction against’ an individualistic interpretation of autonomy rather than be a positive concept itself. Dichotomic thinking can be overcome by a deeper development of the philosophical foundations of autonomy. Second, relational autonomy is a rich and complex concept, formulated in complementary ways from different philosophical sources. New dialogue among traditionally divergent standpoints will clarify the meaning. Third, our analysis stresses the need for dialogical developments in decision making in end-of-life situations. Integration of these three elements will likely lead to a clearer conceptualisation of relational autonomy in end-of-life care ethics. This should in turn lead to better decision-making in real-life situations. (shrink)

Thinking About Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techno-Nihilism addresses our existential crisis by reminding us of the conditions for meaning that have been obscured by the modern technological mentality. Madden weaves together disparate insights from Wittgenstein, Hegel, Aristotle, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Sophocles, and others in an attempt to account for our mindedness in terms of its inextricable connection to a world capable of inspiring our care. The mind is not a discrete entity locked behind (...) the skull or withdrawn into a ghostly realm, but a participation in an inheritance (biological and cultural) held in common with other participants, and taking responsibility for that world is crucial for the meaning. The ever-increasing technological mediation of our lives undermines this worldliness. We are subsequently "losing our minds," and as our mindedness fades, so goes our sense of dignity and value. Madden makes this case deploying insights from phenomenology, analytic philosophy, Aristotelianism, neuroscience, and cognitive science, and along the way confronts the mind-body problem, freedom, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and nihilism. More importantly, he invites the reader into an accessible dialogue concerning issues of grave importance to the meaning of our lives. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

In February 2020, the British Medical Association will be surveying members for their views on what the BMA’s position on physician-assisted dying should be. The BMA is currently opposed to physician-assisted dying in all its forms, a position that was agreed in 2006 at the annual representative meeting, the Association’s policy-making conference.1 As previously reported in Ethics briefing,2 the decision to survey members follows a motion passed at last year’s ARM which called on the BMA to “carry out a (...) poll of members to ascertain their views on whether the BMA should adopt a neutral position with respect to a change in the law on assisted dying”. The results from the survey will not determine BMA policy. Rather, the results be published ahead of this year’s ARM and provided to those attending to inform a debate and discussion on the BMA’s policy position. More information about the survey, including a briefing pack of useful information, and information for BMA members on how to participate can be found online at www.bma.org.uk/PAD. ### High Court rejects Judicial reviews on assisted suicide The High Court has refused permission for two separate challenges to the law on assisted suicide in the UK to proceed to a full hearing. In the first case, Phil Newby, who has motor neuron disease, applied for judicial review of the law on assisted suicide and asked for the court to carry out a detailed examination of what he termed “legislative facts” – that is, an examination of the existing evidence on the “costs, risks and benefits” of regulating assisted suicide – including a cross-examination of relevant expert witnesses.1 Handing down the judgement, Lord Justice Irwin and Mrs Justice May, held that assisted dying …. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 136-140. In early 2011, Cow Heavy Books published The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature , a compendium of catalog 'blurbs' for non-existent desired or ideal texts. Along with Erinrose Mager, I edited the project, in a process that was more like curation as it mainly entailed asking a range of contemporary writers, theorists, and text-makers to send us an entry. What resulted was a creative/critical hybrid anthology, a small book in which each page opens (...) to a new iteration of textual desire. These texts explore the material possibilities of the book. Somewhat parallel to the call of N. Katherine Hayles who, in her book Writing Machines , urges literary theorists to take up the practice of Medium Specific Analysis (to account for the way the medium in which it is presented conditions or at least bears on a literary text). I see in the imagined works of The Official Catalog a call for the innovative writers of today to become Medium-Responsive. This would mean thinking through the specific (materially constrained) possibilities offered by the media in which texts are presented, and in thinking of the literary text as a kind of art in the greater context of other arts and the book as a medium situated within the context of many other media. In doing so, the contemporary writer refutes the chorus of critics who lament the death of the book by consistently reinvigorating literary innovation. The following are selections from The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature that show possible paths for (thinking about) new writing that engages with its medium. —Ben Segal, Editor THE CUBE Even the most radical non-linear texts have tended to exploit or subvert only the sequential possibilities of print—from the continuous loop of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the shuffled cards of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 —but The Cube takes such multiplicities to an entirely new level. Set in a grid, the book's words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column—with either route making complete grammatical sense. But they can also be read as stacked strata and mined like lexical core samples through the layered pages of the book. Each path tells the same story from a different perspective (the narrative, naturally, hinges on the potential outcomes of a throw of cubed dice). By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space. Taking its lead from Armand Schwerner's (If Personal) and Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes , The Cube reads like a experiment by Christian Bök precision printed by Emily McVarish. Craig Dworkin is the editor, most recently, of The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof Books, 2008), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound , with Marjorie Perloff (U. Chicago Press, 2009), and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing , with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern UP, 2010). He teaches at the University of Utah. HE GOES In He Goes , we read notes, letters and e-mails from a scholar father to his novelist daughter. We read of the father's musings on Beckett, on Pinter, on Anne Frank; his description of a woman hanging laundry from a line. We read about his journey toward dying, followed by a brief, third person account of his death, and his obituary. Then a long series of blank pages that demand to be read in real time, non-sentence by non-sentence, blank page by blank page. Finally—and it is here that this peculiar little book begins to soar—the dead father writes to his as-of-yet-still-living daughter. He does not write from death. He does not write from life. The words unprint, unstamp, unkindle. Still, they require no translation. The father "writes" (for lack of a better word) about the serendipitous, the commonplace; he recommends another book. He jokes. He asks his daughter how her stomach is. He says forget about presence in absence, darling; screw words as memorial and the guys in garbage cans and loss as redemption and I can't go on I must go on. He goes, "Love, Fodder." He goes, "incidentally." He goes, "I thought you might like to know." Elizabeth Graver is the author of a story collection, Have You Seen Me? , and three novels: Unravelling ; The Honey Thief ; and Awake . Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards . She teaches at Boston College. THE PAPER ARCHIVIST A stunning package and a triumph of imagination, The Paper Archivist at times looks to be less a book than an abstract expressionist painting. Softly bound, its contents unfold to a single sheet of uneven thickness and texture—a canvas splattered with colored lines, stickers, broken sentences, and nonsense pictographs. But by following the directions to fold, dip, smell, rub, scratch, and tear the sheet according to the contingencies of the weather and using only the objects at hand, the reader slowly brings the forces hidden in the noise into a glorious sculptural convergence, processing a different story and shape each time. This is the rare book that continues to stir, whirl, and pop on every new reading. Sean Higgins blogs at BOMBlog where he is responsible for the column Volumes and Territories, as well as Ghost Island , a fledgling collaborative intellectual collective. THE SLOW BOOK The Slow Book , written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called “shef” sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time). Each word is, across the Forty Galaxies, agreed to be uncannily apt for the century in which it appears—even “of,” in a century during which the highest value was attached to fidelity, whether to ideals, worlds, or romantic love; even “the,” which governed two centuries, one extraordinarily materialistic, during which advances in propulsion and navigation accelerated the exchange of exceptional objects between the remotest planets of the Forty, and one in which the central concern, both of philosophers and the common man, was whether, in an age of rapidly proliferating hypothetical worlds, anyone or anything concretely existed at all. Even those words published long before interstellar contact can be seen in retrospect to have transgalactic pertinence. As a result, attempts to abstract the machine from its publishers, Hobson & Hui, in order to “predict the future” for insight or gain by “fast- forwarding” the copper strip have been many and ingenious. While, in centuries of skepticism (“maybe”), or of unrest (“go”) the book has been nearly forgotten, in others it seems to haunt every thought, every deed, despite the fact that the subject of The Slow Book is still unclear. So far only a few sentences exist in print; everyone knows them, can quote them, offer the standard exegeses and assorted heresies; yet certainties are the stuff of adolescence; mature readers are forced to acknowledge that these sentences are probably only a preamble to the main argument. They contain no proper nouns, nor can we identify any definite theme. There is even disagreement about their tone, whether coolly ironic, as some insist, or ardent. The appearance of an unusual grammatical case, sometimes called the future pluperfect continuous, used to describe events that at some future point will have always been true (but are not yet)—hitherto known to appear only in the synthetic dogmas of the Thanatographical Society, and in certain highly circumscribed religious contexts—has suggested to some scholars that the Slow Book was originally intended for ritual use, but the proximity of the usage to a term designating a small hand plow that, as Pott and Mielcke have convincingly shown, would have borne a distinctly obscene double meaning in its culture of origin in the author’s time, argues otherwise. It is likewise unclear whether the situation that seems to be—with teasing incompleteness—sketched out in these few lines is intended as an illustration of general principles, a case study, a dramatic scene, or an extended metaphor. In short, we have no idea what The Slow Book is about. In our own time, we believe that it is almost certainly a work of fiction, but that may be because we live in the century of “if”. In each age, perhaps, we see the book we most need to read. Some have dared to suggest that the metal strip is blank until, with millennial fanfare, it advances into its new position, that no ur-text exists, that the book itself is brought into being—written—by our need. But that is exactly the sort of thing we would believe, in 7645. Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy , the novel Half Life , and hypertexts including Patchwork Girl . The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she has also written and illustrated several children's books, including The Old Woman and the Wave ; Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog ; and Mimi's Dada Catifesto . Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions , McSweeney's , The Paris Review , and Cabinet Magazine . In 2004 she launched her project SKIN , a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers. THE BOOK OF SOUNDS The Book of Sounds is just that: a book of sounds made when letters are construed in new ways to bring forth out of the alphabet new forms of speech. A book meant to be read out loud, The Book of Sounds is not unlike Laurie Anderson's O Superman or Brian Eno's Music for Airports in its attempt to make music out of the most primary and simplest of methods. It breaks language down to its barest bones and makes out of the page a drum that has never before been beaten upon. Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books) as well as two books of short fiction, Good, Brother and The Singing Fish , both of which were published by Calamari Press. A new collection of stories, We Make Mud , is now available from Dzanc Books. PARADISE OF THE BLIND by Celan Solen Although the reclusive Celan Solen published his first and only book in 1963—paying out-of-pocket for a limited edition of the slim collection No One May Have the Same Knowledge Again —he remained in American obscurity for almost three decades. In 1992 a micro-press in Istanbul brought out No One in Turkish. A German translation followed in 1995. Soon it became clear in literary circles Solen was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist—lyrical, dense, enigmatic—who could undo the conventional short story in 397 words by inventing impossible worlds housed in impossible whirls (in “Small Sadnesses,” a single chartreuse tree frog in Borneo unknowingly holds time together by its very presence in the universe, while each letter of its tale refers, not to itself, but to the one preceding it in the alphabet). By his disappearance last year, Solen was considered master by a generation of writers and critics (except, alas, for those gentlemen in the Swedish Academy). Imagine, then, that generation’s delight at the discovery, locked away in the author’s safe-deposit box, of his second and final composition. Had Lynch’s Lost Highway been book instead of film, and had it been penned by Beckett at his least certain, revised by Barthelme at his most formally deranged, and typeset by Derrida at his most semiotically catastrophic, the result might have been something like Paradise of the Blind : interlacing narratives of a man composed of borrowed organs (whose most cheerless and difficult to locate, god, could only have been invented by an empty heart), a nonexistent medieval painting blamed for the ruin of future hope, and the spread of a philosophy that holds earth a mistake constantly recurring in the dream of a fish lying on the floor of the Atlantic (if the fish wakes, our world winks off)—all contained in a text packed with typed-over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-l'œil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible. Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novels Calendar of Regrets (2010) and Head in Flames (2009). He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. SUPERSTRUCTURE! by Barbara D'Albi As soon as I opened the third drawer of Barbara D'Albi's wooden novel, everything became hopeless. Now in Ithaca, there was no going back. And it wasn't just the intricate series of shelves, hinged doors and locked drawers which D'Albi layered into the book, no, lo, I was constructed anew by the story. Who else but D'Albi to imagine a God who becomes a carpenter and gets killed?! And makes it good! You want stories? D'Albi is a skyscraper, built with planes and levers. Momentarily I wondered where I could shelve this book, and then I thought: no matter; I couldn't put it down. Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he runs Publishing Genius. He is the author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem. (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means of (...) subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:R. D. Ackerman BELIEVING IN A FICTION: WALLACE STEVENS AT THE LIMITS OF PHENOMENOLOGY The "ring of men" of "Sunday Morning" will chant their "devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be, / Naked among them, like a savage source" (CP, pp. 69-70).' Solar nakedness is deferred even as it is named. The problem for belief is the question of appearance and (...) representation. Things appear as and like.... The phenomenological return to things is also a turn to fiction, as Husserl understood: "If anyone loves a paradox, he can really say... that the element which makes up the life of phenomenology... is fiction. ' " The sun is divine, and it is not; it is both naked and clothed, savage and civilized, source (or end) and means. But such paradox is ultimately unsatisfying, and as we will see with Stevens, the need for belief—for an image or idea of totality—forces the issue of fiction and reality. The Stevens we will have in view is not the Stevens—as if there were such a creature. Our Stevens is the one most persuaded by promises such as those of phenomenology, the one most concerned with decreation (reduction) and fresh beginnings, with discovery and recognition, with imagination, the body, and the earth. This is the Stevens for whom the barrier of language presages at last not absence and difference but fictive recovery of presence and identity, the one for whom poetry represents a way of belief beyond mysticism even as it bodes mythic proximity. Finally, this is the Stevens who predominates throughout the prose (as well as in much of the poetry), who tries mightily to secure a belief while disencumbering himself of metaphysics—but alas, I think, with small success. Although Stevens's association of the problem of belief with the idea of fiction occurs in early poems such as "A High-Toned Old Christian 79 80Philosophy and Literature Woman" and "To the One of Fictive Music," his most intensive involvement with fiction as belief dates from the early 1940s and spans the period of his major essays and his last four volumes of poems. He recounts, for instance, a 1942 conversation with a student: "I said that I thought that we had reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognized that it was a fiction. The student said that that was an impossibility, that there was no such thing as believing in something that one knew was not true. It is obvious, however, that we are doing that all the time" (L, p. 430). What does it mean to believe in a fiction? That is my main subject here, as we seek out the limits of the phenomenological Stevens. His letters of this period are preoccupied with the problem of fictive belief: "If one no longer believes in God (as truth), it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else.... A good deal of my poetry recently has concerned an identity for that thing.... In one of the short poems that I have just sent to the harvard advocate, I say that one's final belief must be in a fiction. I think that the history of belief will show that it has always been in a fiction" (L, p. 370). The poem referred to, "Asides on the Oboe," begins: The prologues are over. It is a question now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. (CP, p. 250) Acknowledging that "in the long run, poetry would be the supreme fiction" (L, pp. 430-31), Stevens nonetheless singles out the nominative function of poetry as the essence of its claim to supremacy: "Poetry means not the language of poetry but the thing itself.... The subject matter is what comes to mind when one says of the month of August... 'Thou art not August, unless I make thee so'" (L, p. 377). The quoted line (also from "Asides") underscores the paradox that for Stevens the essence of fiction (the nontrue) is its capacity to nominate the true or the real. This... (shrink)