Totalism is the view that one distribution of well-being is better than another just in case the one contains a greater sum of well-being than the other. Many philosophers, following Parfit, reject totalism on the grounds that it entails the repugnant conclusion: that, for any number of excellent lives, there is some number of lives that are barely worth living whose existence would be better. This paper develops a theory of welfare aggregation—the lexical-threshold view—that allows totalism to avoid the repugnant (...) conclusion, as well as its analogues involving suffering populations and the lengths of individual lives. The theory is grounded in some independently plausible views about the structure of well-being, identifies a new source of incommensurability in population ethics, and avoids some of the implausibly extreme consequences of other lexical views, without violating the intuitive separability of lives. (shrink)

Essays by 14 Levinas scholars provide a fresh acount of the argument and purpose of Emmanuel Levinas's major work, Totality and Infinity, drawing parallels between Levinas and other thinkers; considering Levinas's relationship to other disciplines such as nursing, psychotherapy, and law; and bringing this seminal text to bear on specific, concrete issues of present-day concern"--Provided by publisher.

Berger, U., Total sets and objects in domain theory, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 60 91-117. Total sets and objects generalizing total functions are introduced into the theory of effective domains of Scott and Ersov. Using these notions Kreisel's Density Theorem and the Theorem of Kreisel-Lacombe-Shoenfield are generalized. As an immediate consequence we obtain the well-known continuity of computable functions on the constructive reals as well as a domain-theoretic characterization of the Heriditarily Effective Operations.

Total work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction -- Total stage: Wagner's festspielhaus -- Total machine: the Bauhaus theatre -- Total montage: Brecht's reply to Wagner -- Total state: Riefenstahl's triumph of the will -- Total world: Disney's theme parks -- Total vacuum: Warhol's performances -- Total immersion: cyberspace.

INTRODUCTION Ever since the beginning of the modern phenomenological movement disciplined attention has been paid to various patterns of human experience as ...

This article explores the relationship between pragmatic encroachment and epistemic permissiveness. If the suggestion that all epistemic notions are interest-relative is viable , then it seems that a certain species of epistemic permissivism must be viable as well. For, if all epistemic notions are interest relative then, sometimes, parties in paradigmatic cases of shared evidence can be maximally rational in forming competing basic doxastic attitudes towards the same proposition. However, I argue that this total pragmatic encroachment is not tenable, and, (...) thus, epistemic permissivism cannot be vindicated in this way. (shrink)

Totality and Infinity , the title of a well-known work by Emmanuel Levinas, takes up a word which readers of Poetic Intention and of many other texts of Édouard Glissant’s will easily recognize: a term sometimes used in a sense that is clearly positive, sometimes in a sense that is not quite as positive, such as when, for instance, he compares “totalizing Reason” to the “Montaigne’s tolerant relativism.” In his final collection of essays, Traité du tout-monde, Poétique IV , (...) Glissant attempts one more time to clarify the sense in which the reader will have to understand his use of the word “totality,” thinking, and rightfully so, that this word might lead to some confusion: “To write is to say the world. The world as totality, which is so dangerously close to the totalitarian.” Of course, here, it will be necessary to try to ascertain whether or not Levinas’s totality and Glissant’s can peacefully coexist, or, rather, whether this word might, in Glissant, have opposite meanings. Where the second word is concerned, “infinity,” any reader of Glissant will know that he locates its source in those societies he calls atavistic, which are grounded in foundational texts that are the bearers of stories of filiation, of legitimacy, societies whose arrogance and whose errors the author never ceases to decry and whose decomposition, in the very times in which we live, he never ceases to announce (even as Glissant recognizes that there was a time when atavistic cultures undoubtedly must have experienced their own period of creolization, and that, conversely, composite cultures undoubtedly often tend to become atavistic). On this level, “totality” and “infinity,” for him, seem to belong to the same world. Thus, and still in Traité du tout-monde , he proposes that "Hebraism, Christianity, Islam are grounded in the same spirituality of the One and to the same belief in a revealed Truth… The thought of the One that has done so much to magnify, as well as to denature. How can one consent to this thought, which transfigures while neither offending nor de-routing the Diverse?" Moreover, it would be interesting, I think, to know how Levinas might react to these words of Glissant’s: “Totality is not that which has often been called the universal. It is the finite and realized quantity of the infinite detail of the real.” This word, “infinite,” is decidedly dangerous: what is an “infinite detail?” Does this word, “infinite,” not always lead to the unknown, to the non-totalizable, to what Levinas would call an “enigma,” to what Glissant would call an “opacity?&rdquo. (shrink)

Taking its clues from Popperian philosophy of science, cladistics adopted a number of assumptions of the empiricist tradition. These include the identification of a dichotomy between observation reports and theoretical statements and its subsequent abandonment on the basis of the insight that all observation reports are theory-laden. The neglect of the ‘context of discovery’, which is the step of theory (hypothesis) generation. The emphasis on coherentism in the ‘context of justification’, which is the step of evaluation of the relative merits (...) of alternative theories. The appeal to a total evidence approach in phylogenetic inference. And finally, a silence about causation, which results in an instrumentalist approach to phylogeny reconstruction. This paper explores how these empiricist assumptions are embedded in phylogenetic systematics, and why these assumptions are problematic for cladists (or any taxonomists). (shrink)

In the context of non-classical logics, many philosophers have been particularly interested in the paraconsistent logics. In addition to traditional definitions, in recent years, new ways of characterizing the notion of paraconsistency have been proposed. In all of these definitions the rule or the meta-rule of explosion is abandoned. In this article, I present those definitions and evaluate the role that the negation and the transitivity play in each of them. Finally, I propose a new definition of paraconsistency which I (...) call total paraconsistency and show that the rule of weakening plays a crucial role in all of the characterizations of such a concept. (shrink)

The development and international diffusion of total quality management as a normative theory are examined. It is shown that the main concepts associated with TQM contain an implicit Darwinist view of society made up only of institutions struggling to survive against increasingly ruthless competition. It is also shown that their development was the result of a process in which universities, large corporations, and government interacted to develop a response to the increasingly serious economic challenge that Japan presented to the United (...) States from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. The TQM paradigm was taken up by U.S. multinational corporations and the leading business and management schools of the United States and disseminated throughout the world. It is concluded that TQM has an ideological dimension designed to help diffuse to private and public service institutions throughout the world the dominant U.S. view of society and economy at the end of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This paper aims to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Adorno’s thought for business ethicists working in the critical tradition by showing how his critique of modern social life anticipated, and ofers continuing illumination of, recent technological transformations of capitalism. It develops and extrapolates Adorno’s thought regarding three central spheres of modern society, which have seen radical changes in light of recent technological developments: work, in which employee monitoring has become ever more sophisticated and intrusive; leisure consumption, in which the algorithmic (...) developments of the culture industry have paved the way for entertainment products to dominate us; and political discourse, in which social media has exacerbated the anti-democratic tendencies Adorno warned of in the mid-twentieth century. We conclude by presenting, as a rejoinder to these developments, the contours of an Adornian ethics of resistance to the reifcation and dehumanisation of such developments. (shrink)

D. Alan Shewmon has advanced a well-documented challenge to the widely accepted total brain death criterion for death of the human being. We show that Shewmon's argument against this criterion is unsound, though he does refute the standard argument for that criterion. We advance a distinct argument for the total brain death criterion and answer likely objections. Since human beings are rational animals – sentient organisms of a specific type – the loss of the radical capacity for sentience involves a (...) substantial change, the passing away of the human organism. In human beings total brain death involves the complete loss of the radical capacity for sentience, and so in human beings total brain death is death. (shrink)

In Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey offers a razor-sharp analysis of the split between public and private, fact and feelings.

I develop and refine an argument for the total brain death criterion of death previously advanced by Germain Grisez and me: A human being is essentially a rational animal, and so must have a radical capacity for rational operations. For rational animals, conscious sensation is a pre-requisite for rational operation. But total brain death results in the loss of the radical capacity for conscious sensation, and so also for rational operations. Hence, total brain death constitutes a substantial change—the ceasing to (...) be of the human being. Objections are considered, including the objection that total brain death need not result in the loss of capacity for sensation, and that damage to the brain less than total brain death can result in loss of capacity for rational operations. (shrink)

This paper defends a novel account of how to determine the intrinsic value of possible worlds. Section 1 argues that a highly intuitive and widely accepted account leads to undesirable consequences. Section 2 takes the first of two steps towards a novel account by clarifying and defending a view about value-contribution that is based on some of W. D. Ross’ claims about the value of pleasure. Section 3 takes the second step by clarifying and defending a view about value-suppression that (...) is based on Ross’ claims about the interplay between prima-facie duties. Section 4 states and defends the account that I call Rossian Totalism. According to this account, the atoms of intrinsic value within a world only sometimes contribute their intrinsic value to the value of that world. (shrink)

It is shown that all the provably total functions of Basic Arithmetic BA, a theory introduced by Ruitenburg based on Predicate Basic Calculus, are primitive recursive. Along the proof a new kind of primitive recursive realizability to which BA is sound, is introduced. This realizability is similar to Kleene's recursive realizability, except that recursive functions are restricted to primitive recursives.

We consider the classical concept of time of permanence and observe that its quantum equivalent is described by a bona fide self-adjoint operator. Its interpretation, by means of the spectral theorem, reveals that we have to abandon not only the idea that quantum entities would be characterizable in terms of spatial trajectories but, more generally, that they would possess the very attribute of spatiality. Consequently, a permanence time shouldn’t be interpreted as a “time” in quantum mechanics, but as a measure (...) of the total availability of a quantum entity in participating to a process of creation of a spatial localization. (shrink)

In Preference, Value, Choice, and Welfare, I argued, among other things, that preferences in economics are and ought to be total subjective comparative evaluations, that the theory of rational choice is a reformulation of everyday folk-psychological explanations and predictions of behaviour, and that revealed preference theory is completely untenable. All three of these theses have been challenged in essays by Erik Angner (2018), Francesco Guala (2019) and Johanna Thoma (2021a, 2021b). This essay responds to these criticisms and defends these three (...) theses. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution.

We discuss the total collision singularities of the gravitational N-body problem on shape space. Shape space is the relational configuration space of the system obtained by quotienting ordinary configuration space with respect to the similarity group of total translations, rotations, and scalings. For the zero-energy gravitating N-body system, the dynamics on shape space can be constructed explicitly and the points of total collision, which are the points of central configuration and zero shape momenta, can be analyzed in detail. It turns (...) out that, even on shape space where scale is not part of the description, the equations of motion diverge at (and only at) the points of total collision. We construct and study the stratified total-collision manifold and show that, at the points of total collision on shape space, the singularity is essential. There is, thus, no way to evolve the solutions through these points. This mirrors closely the big bang singularity of general relativity, where the homogeneous-but-not-isotropic cosmological model of Bianchi IX shows an essential singularity at the big bang. A simple modification of the general-relativistic model (the addition of a stiff matter field) changes the system into one whose shape-dynamical description allows for a deterministic evolution through the singularity. We suspect that, similarly, some modification of the dynamics would be required in order to regularize the total collision singularity of the N-body model. (shrink)

We discuss the total collision singularities of the gravitational N-body problem on shape space. Shape space is the relational configuration space of the system obtained by quotienting ordinary configuration space with respect to the similarity group of total translations, rotations, and scalings. For the zero-energy gravitating N-body system, the dynamics on shape space can be constructed explicitly and the points of total collision, which are the points of central configuration and zero shape momenta, can be analyzed in detail. It turns (...) out that, even on shape space where scale is not part of the description, the equations of motion diverge at (and only at) the points of total collision. We construct and study the stratified total-collision manifold and show that, at the points of total collision on shape space, the singularity is essential. There is, thus, no way to evolve the solutions through these points. This mirrors closely the big bang singularity of general relativity, where the homogeneous-but-not-isotropic cosmological model of Bianchi IX shows an essential singularity at the big bang. A simple modification of the general-relativistic model (the addition of a stiff matter field) changes the system into one whose shape-dynamical description allows for a deterministic evolution through the singularity. We suspect that, similarly, some modification of the dynamics would be required in order to regularize the total collision singularity of the N-body model. (shrink)

This paper introduces an interesting class of predicates that come in pairs, so-called total and partial predicates. It will be shown that such predicates contribute to an explanation for the weak and strong interpretations of donkey sentences. This paper proposes that the phenomenon of weak and strong interpretations is real, and that whether a sentence receives the weak or the strong interpretation depends on the predicate in the nuclear scope of the sentence. It also proposes that sum individuals are calculated (...) at some level before the nuclear scope of the sentence is processed. Once the sum individuals are calculated, it will be decided whether the nuclear scope is true of at least one element of the sum individual (weak interpretation) or true of all elements of the sum individual (strong interpretation). (shrink)

In this paper we study applicative theories of operations and numbers with the non-constructive minimum operator in the context of a total application operation. We determine the proof-theoretic strength of such theories by relating them to well-known systems like Peano Arithmetic PA and the system <0 of second order arithmetic. Essential use will be made of so-called fixed-point theories with ordinals, certain infinitary term models and Church-Rosser properties.

The complete system of knowledge is a standard trope of science fiction, a techno-utopian dream and an aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon’s House, the Encyclopaedia and the Museum. It is also an ideology – of Enlightenment, High Modernism and absolute governance. Far from ending the dream of a total archive, 20th-century positivist rationality brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ to Mass-Observation, from the Unity of Science movement to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies hard. As a political (...) tool, the total archive encompasses population statistics, gross domestic product, indices of the Standard of Living and the international ideology of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Health Organization, the free market and, most recently, Big Data. Questions of the total archive engage key issues in the philosophy of classification, the poetics of the universal, the ideology of surveillance and the technologies of information retrieval. What are the social structures and political dynamics required to sustain total archives, and what are the temporalities implied by such projects? This introduction and the articles that follow describe and place in historical context a series of concrete instances of totality. Our analysis is arranged according to four central themes: the relationship between the Archive (singular) and archives (plural); the image of the archive and the aesthetics of totality; pathologies of accumulation; and the specific historical trajectory of the total archive in the 19th and 20th centuries. (shrink)

It is widely believed to be permissible for a physician to discontinue any treatment upon the request of a competent patient. Many also believe it is never permissible for a physician to intentionally kill a patient. I argue that the prospect of deactivating a patient’s artificial heart presents us with a dilemma: either the first belief just mentioned is false or the second one is. Whichever horn of the dilemma we choose has significant implications for contemporary medical ethics.

Building upon his previous books about Marx, Hayek, and Rand, _Total Freedom_ completes what _Lingua Franca_ has called Sciabarra’s "epic scholarly quest" to reclaim dialectics, usually associated with the Marxian left, as a methodology that can revivify libertarian thought. Part One surveys the history of dialectics from the ancient Greeks through the Austrian school of economics. Part Two investigates in detail the work of Murray Rothbard as a leading modern libertarian, in whose thought Sciabarra finds both dialectical and nondialectical elements. (...) Ultimately, Sciabarra aims for a dialectical-libertarian synthesis, highlighting the need to think of the "totality" of interconnections in a dynamic system as the way to ensure human freedom while avoiding "totalitarianism". (shrink)

Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, conceives the world as ‘the totality of facts’. Type-stratification threatens that conception : the totality of facts is an obvious example of an illegitimate totality. Wittgenstein’s notion of truthoperation evidently has some role to play in avoiding that threat, allowing propositions, and so facts, to constitute a single type. The paper seeks to explain that role in a way that integrates the ‘philosophical’ and ‘technical’ pressures on the notion of an operation.

We tackle the problem of preservation of totality by composition in arena games. We first explain how this problem reduces to a finiteness theorem on what we call pointer structures, similar to the parity pointer functions of Harmer, Hyland and Mélliès and the interaction sequences of Coquand. We discuss how this theorem relates to normalization of linear head reduction in simply-typed lambda-calculus, leading us to a semantic realizability proof à la Kleene of our theorem. We then present another proof (...) of a more combinatorial nature. Finally, we discuss the exact class of strategies to which our theorems apply. (shrink)

In the context of non-classical logics, many philosophers have been particularly interested in the paraconsistent logics. In addition to traditional definitions, in recent years, new ways of characterizing the notion of paraconsistency have been proposed. In all of these definitions the rule or the meta-rule of explosion is abandoned. In this article, I present those definitions and evaluate the role that the negation and the transitivity play in each of them. Finally, I propose a new definition of paraconsistency which I (...) call total paraconsistency and show that the rule of weakening plays a crucial role in all of the characterizations of such a concept. (shrink)

David Naguib Pellow demonstrates his impressive scholarship of environmental justice and social movements in his latest work, Total Liberation. Exhaustive in its breadth of research and perspective...

Let us begin—as is fitting—with what is familiar. Now, familiar is by no means what ‘totalizing thinking’ is, but rather what ‘totalitarian’ means. Today this word rings in everyone’s ears, is common in public life—not so much as a descriptive, but more as a defamatory epithet. It brands political systems of our time which not only gave rise to horrifying consequences, but what is more spread terror through their form of domination. Now, rule by means of terror is in fact (...) no recent discovery; new here is rather the technique of the complete penetration of every expression of social life. Were the latter perhaps susceptible in a special way to such penetration? (shrink)

We analyze the points of total collision of the Newtonian gravitational system on shape space (the relational configuration space of the system). While the Newtonian equations of motion, formulated with respect to absolute space and time, are singular at the point of total collision due to the singularity of the Newton potential at that point, this need not be the case on shape space where absolute scale doesn’t exist. We investigate whether, adopting a relational description of the system, the shape (...) degrees of freedom, which are merely angles and their conjugate momenta, can be evolved through the points of total collision. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Even without scale, the equations of motion are singular at the points of total collision (and only there). This follows from the special behavior of the shape momenta. While this behavior induces the singularity, it at the same time provides a purely shape-dynamical description of total collisions. By help of this, we are able to discern total-collision solutions from non-collision solutions on shape space, that is, without reference to (external) scale. We can further use the shape-dynamical description to show that total-collision solutions form a set of measure zero among all solutions. (shrink)

This paper investigates the link between the total bivariate risk premium and the sum of partial bivariate risk premia. Whereas in the case of small risks, the non interaction between risks is a sufficient condition to obtain the equality between the total risk premium and the sum of partial risk premia, the paper shows that this condition is not sufficient for large risks. The non interaction between risks occurs in two cases: if risks are independent or if individual's marginal utility (...) of one good is independent of the endowment in the other. Without restriction on the utility function, none of these two conditions is sufficient for large risks. If attention is restricted to preferences that exhibit constant absolute risk aversion, the non variability of the marginal utility of good one with respect to variations in endowment in the other remains a sufficient condition, while the independence between risks does not. (shrink)

The paper studies two fundamentally different forms in which the concept of care makes its comeback in twentieth-century thought. We make use of a distinction made by Peter Sloterdijk, who argues that the ancient and medieval ‘ascetic’ ideal of self-enhancement through practice has re-emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the form of a rehabilitation of the Hellenistic notion of self-care (epimeleia heautou) in Michel Foucault’s late ethics. Sloterdijk contrasts this return of self-care with Martin Heidegger’s concept of (...) being-in-the-world as ‘total care’ (Sorge), an utterly ‘secularized’ understanding of the human being as irreducibly world-embedded that rejects the classical ascetic ideal of world-secession. We examine further the historical roots and emergence of these contrasting contemporary reappropriations of care in the Western tradition of thought and show them to be rooted in two different ontologies and ethics of the self as either world-secluded or world-immersed, autonomous or constitutively relational. The historical point of divergence of these two approaches to care, we argue, can be found in the Christian transformation of Hellenistic ethics. (shrink)

We claim that Kant's doctrine of the "transcendental ideal of pure reason" contains, in an anticipatory sense, a second-order theory of reality (as a second-order property) and of the highest being. Such a theory, as reconstructed in this paper, is a transformation of Kant's metatheoretical regulative and heuristic presuppositions of empirical theories into a hypothetical ontotheology. We show that this metaphysical theory, in distinction to Descartes' and Leibniz's ontotheology, in many aspects resembles Gödel's theoretical conception of the possibility of a (...) supreme being. The proposed second-order modal formalization of the Kantian doctrine of the "transcendental ideal" of the supreme being includes some specific features of Kantian general logic like "categorical", "hypothetical", and exclusive disjunctive propositions as basic forms. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that Kant remained committed to the necessity and fundamental importance of education throughout his career. Like Johann Bernhard Basedow (1724–90), Kant holds that a ‘total transformation’ of schools is necessary, and he holds this view not only in the 1770s but in his later years as well. In building my case I try to refute two recent opposing interpretations – Reinhard Brandt’s position that Kant’s early ‘education enthusiasm’ was later replaced by a politics enthusiasm, and (...) Manfred Kuehn’s view that the increasing importance of autonomy in Kant’s mature ethics leads him to de-emphasize education. (shrink)

There has been a groundswell of interest in the account of modality that Kant sets forth in his pre-Critical Only Possible Argument. Andrew Chignell's reconstruction of Kant's theistic argument in terms of what he calls has a prima facie advantage in that it appears to be able to block the plurality objection (namely, that even if every modal fact presupposes some ground, this does not entail that all modal facts share the same ground). I argue that it is both textually (...) and philosophically problematic to interpret Kant's argument in terms of real harmony. Then, I set forth an alternative response to the plurality objection which does not require the adoption of the problematic notion of real harmony. Instead, I argue that the objection can be overcome by observing that the argument seeks to ground modal facts as a totality and that, according to Kant, such relations can be accounted for only by their schematization in a single intellect. (shrink)

Dummctt argues that classical quantification is illegitimate when the domain is given as the objects which fall under an indefinitely extensible concept, since in such cases the objects are not the required definite totality. The chief problem in understanding this complex argument is the crucial but unexplained phrase 'definite totality' and the associated claim that it follows from the intuitive notion of set that the objects over which a classical quantifier ranges form a set. 'Definite totality' is (...) best understood as disguised plural talk like Cantor's 'consistent multiplicity', although this does not help in understanding how a totality could be anything other than definite. Moreover, contrary to his claims, Dummett's own notion of set is not intuitive and he does not demystify the set-theoretic paradoxes. In conclusion, it is argued that Dummett's context principle is responsible for the incoherent projection of the haziness of a conception of some objects onto reality. (shrink)

Armstrong famously argued in favour of introducing totality facts in our ontology. Contrary to fully negative (absence) facts, totality facts yield a theory of “moderate” or “partial” negativity, which allegedly provides an elegant solution to the truthmaking problem of negative claims and, at the same time, avoids postulating (many) first-order absences. Friends of totality facts argue that partial negativity is (i) tolerable vis-à-vis the Eleatic principle qua mark of the real, and (ii) achieves a significant advantage in (...) terms of ontological parsimony. But are totality facts, which are partially negative, really more ontologically acceptable than fully negative facts? In this paper, we argue that, comparatively, the case for totality facts is weaker than commonly assumed and that, ultimately, the answer is negative. (shrink)

When in 2001 Earth Liberation Front activists drove metal spikes into hundreds of trees in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, they were protesting the sale of a section of the old-growth forest to a timber company. But ELF's communiqu on the action went beyond the radical group's customary brief. Drawing connections between the harms facing the myriad animals who make their home in the trees and the struggles for social justice among ordinary human beings resisting exclusion and marginalization, the dispatch declared, (...) "all oppression is linked, just as we are all linked," and decried the "patriarchal nightmare" in the form of "techno-industrial global capitalism." In Total Liberation, David Naguib Pellow takes up this claim and makes sense of the often tense and violent relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species, expanding our understanding of inequality and activists' uncompromising efforts to oppose it. Grounded in interviews with more than one hundred activists, on-the-spot fieldwork, and analyses of thousands of pages of documents, websites, journals, and zines, Total Liberation reveals the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights movements challenge inequity through a vision they call "total liberation." In its encounters with such infamous activists as scott crow, Tre Arrow, Lauren Regan, Rod Coronado, and Gina Lynn, the book offers a close-up, insider's view of one of the most important--and feared--social movements of our day. At the same time, it shows how and why the U.S. justice system plays to that fear, applying to these movements measures generally reserved for "jihadists"--with disturbing implications for civil liberties and constitutional freedom. How do the adherents of "total liberation" fight oppression and seek justice for humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems alike? And how is this pursuit shaped by the politics of anarchism and anticapitalism? In his answers, Pellow provides crucial in-depth insight into the origins and social significance of the earth and animal liberation movements and their increasingly common and compelling critique of inequality as a threat to life and a dream of a future characterized by social and ecological justice for all. (shrink)

Dummctt argues that classical quantification is illegitimate when the domain is given as the objects which fall under an indefinitely extensible concept, since in such cases the objects are not the required definite totality. The chief problem in understanding this complex argument is the crucial but unexplained phrase 'definite totality' and the associated claim that it follows from the intuitive notion of set that the objects over which a classical quantifier ranges form a set. 'Definite totality' is (...) best understood as disguised plural talk like Cantor's 'consistent multiplicity', although this does not help in understanding how a totality could be anything other than definite. Moreover, contrary to his claims, Dummett's own notion of set is not intuitive and he does not demystify the set-theoretic paradoxes. In conclusion, it is argued that Dummett's context principle is responsible for the incoherent projection of the haziness of a conception of some objects onto reality. (shrink)

In his masterpiece The Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig shows as the notion of totality is a constant and central reference in the history of philosophy from Ionia to Jena. This paper aims to explain a different meaning of the concept of totality, reconsidering some aspects of the question starting from the philosophical reflection of Franz Rosenzweig and his opposition to the Hegelian thought. In particular, according to Rosenzweig, the concept of totality is the essential background in (...) which one could rethink the concept of community. For this reason, the second part of this paper is focused on the implications of a different concept of totality embodied by Judaism. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the spatial organization of the genre of ‘Man.’ In particular, I investigate the spatial attitudes through which the genre of Man emerges as a racialized, geographically determined, and gendered category. There are two main arcs of analysis provided: the first arc follows the relation between the space of exploration and the space of totalization. The second arc focuses on the role of boundary markers such as the ‘Other’ and the ‘Outside,’ in the spatial organization of (...) Man. I argue, overall, that the totalitarian spatial attitude of the Modern State is formed on the basis of the transformation of the cosmogeny of Man from a spatially limited earth to one open to exploration. The racialized ladder of the State rests on such production of a spatial attitude that is at once open and totalitarian. (shrink)

This book offers an annotated translation of two of preeminent Chinese Tang dynasty monk Chengguan’s most revered masterpieces. With this book, Chengguan’s Commentaries to the Avatamsaka Sutra and The Meanings Proclaimed in the Subcommentaries Accompanying the Commentaries to the Avatamsaka Sutra are finally brought to Western audiences.