This chapter contains sections titled: Reasons as Not (Efficiently) Causal, Underwriting Irreducibly Teleological Explanations Reasons as Efficient Causes Reasons, Causes, and Physicalism Causally Relevant, though Not Causes Structuring Causes Reasons, Causes, and Free Will References Further reading.

1. Introduction: a look back at the reasons vs. causes debate. 2. The interventionist account of causation. 3. Four objections to interventionism. 4. The counterfactual analysis of event causation. 5. The role of free agency. 6. Causality in the human sciences. -- The reasons vs. causes debate reached its peak about 40 years ago. Hempel and Dray had debated the nature of historical explanation and the broader issue of whether explanations that cite an agent’s reasons are causal (...) or not. Melden, Peters, Winch, Kenny and Anscombe had contributed their anticausal conceptions. The neo-Wittgensteinians seemed to be winning the day when in 1963 Donald Davidson published his seminal paper “Actions, Reasons, and Causes”. Davidson’s paper devastated the Wittgensteinian camp. It contained, among other things, a powerful attack on the logical connection argument. Davidson argued that the existence of a logical or conceptual connection between descriptions can never eliminate a causal relation, which holds between events simpliciter, not between events under certain descriptions. Davidson maintained that in a way, reasons can be causes. When somebody acts for a certain reason, his intentional attitudes, or rather changes in his attitudes, cause his bodily movements. Davidson also argued that rationalization is a species of causal explanation. For the definition of action, he argued that intentional actions are bodily movements caused in the right way by beliefs and desires that rationalize them. Davidson’s paper paved the way for causal theories of action, which superseded neo-Wittgensteinian analyses in the following decades. The causal theory was rapidly adopted by Alvin Goldman, David Armstrong, Paul Churchland, Myles Brand and many others, entering the mainstream and dominating the philosophy of action to this very day. In 1971 Georg Henrik von Wright published his book "Explanation and Understanding". The second chapter did not deal with agency, but with causation. It developed a new account of causation, the interventionist or experimentalist account. Focusing on causation, von Wright remedied a major shortcoming of the reasons vs. causes debate. The concept of causality, and the nature of the causal relation, received little attention in this debate, a fact that holds true for both camps. Mostly it was simply taken for granted that, as Hempel had declared, “causal explanation is a special type of deductive-nomological explanation”. One camp then aligned intentional explanations with D-N explanations, while the other camp insisted on their disparity. So strictly speaking, the label “reasons/causes debate” was a misnomer. The controversy dealt primarily with the question as to whether intentional explanations can take the form of D-N explanations, while the notion of causation, and the metaphysics of the causal relation, were left obscured. With von Wright’s new approach, the situation changed. Von Wright was primarily concerned with causation, but his approach contained an implicit attack on the causal theory of action as well. His core idea was that the notion of causality is intimately linked with, or even derived from, the notion of intentionally making something happen. Other philosophers, even Hume, had considered such a connection before, but often just to reject this view, regarding it as a kind of myth belonging to the infancy of the human mind. Von Wright took the idea seriously. He submitted the analysis that p is the cause of q if and only if by doing p we could bring about q. The causal theory of action was also concerned with the relation between causation and agency, to which its name bears witness. The causal theory of action holds that actions are bodily movements with a certain causal history. This is why von Wright’s account constituted a momentous challenge to the causal theory: it reversed the direction of conceptual dependency between both notions. Davidson and his followers tried to define what an intentional action is by using the notion of causation. The causal condition which the causal theory sets is part of the definition of “doing something intentionally”. Von Wright claimed that the conceptual dependency is the other way round. He used the notions of doing, and bringing about, to explain what causal relations are. So, instead of a causal theory of action, he advocated an agency theory of causation, as it may be dubbed. It is remarkable how seldom this clash of opinions about conceptual primacy is reflected in the literature. There are few exceptions: Fred Stoutland noticed the conflict, and he published a number of papers in which he compared Davidson’s and von Wright’s views. Von Wright’s book "Explanation and Understanding" was widely read and discussed in the seventies, especially in Europe. But it strikes me that especially in North America, where the causal theory of action became the orthodoxy of the day, von Wright’s challenge went largely unnoticed. Even Davidson did not seem to take it seriously. He nowhere takes notice of the interventionist theory of causation, while he does discuss von Wright’s earlier book "Norm and Action". As is well-known, Davidson favoured an alternative account of causation, based on “the principle of the nomological character of causality”, as he somewhat clumsily called it, or, later and less clumsily, “the cause-law thesis”. Davidson’s firm adherence to a nomological theory of causality may explain why he did not take much interest in alternative accounts. [...] -/- . (shrink)

This paper focuses on two conflations which frequently appear within the philosophy of history and other fields concerned with action explanation. The first of these, which I call the Conflating View of Reasons, states that the reasons for which we perform actions are reasons why (those events which are) our actions occur. The second, more general conflation, which I call the Conflating View of Action Explanation, states that whatever explains why an agent (...) performed a certain action explains why (that event which was) her action occurred. Both conflations ignore the fact that there are at least two distinct objects that legitimately qualify as objects of action explanation2. As Jennifer Hornsby (1993) has previous suggested, one thing we might wish to explain is ‘why did A do what she did?’ another is, ‘why did the event of her doing it occur?’ -/- I shall argue that when these two views are combined they give rise to a futile debate about explanation in the philosophies of history and the social sciences, and to an almost identical debate in moral psychology and the philosophy of mind. In so doing, I shall also examine a proposed distinction between explaining a phenomenon, and rendering it intelligible. I conclude by distinguishing between four different objects of historical understanding, each of which is to be understood in the light of the aforementioned distinctions between event and thing done, and explanation and intelligibility. (shrink)

When you type the word “serendipity” in a word-processor application such as Microsoft Word, the autocorrection engine suggests you choose other words like “luck” or “fate”. This correcting act turns out to be incorrect. However, it points to the reality that serendipity is not a familiar English word and can be misunderstood easily. Serendipity is a very much scientific concept as it has been found useful in numerous scientific discoveries, pharmaceutical innovations, and numerous humankind’s technical and technological advances. Therefore, there (...) have been many books written around the concept. So why do we need this additional book? This is not just another book about serendipity. It has evolved from the Editor’s question lingering for a decade after finishing his widely cited article (coauthored with Prof. Nancy K. Napier of Boise State University, ID, USA) “Serendipity as a strategic advantage?” in T. Wilkinson’s edited volume Strategic Management in the 21st Century, published by Praeger. The Editor and contributing authors have tried to achieve the following in this title. Demystifying the Serendipity Myth The phenomenon of serendipity has always been thought of as a “miracle”. It is the mystery of human innovation and one of the ultimate secrets of our society. But serendipity is not just a lucky coincidence nor any hidden conspiracy. This book explores the science of the information process behind this seemingly miraculous phenomenon. It connects human society with nature, going back to the root of our existence and looking at the flame of survival to discover the harmony in making creativity. Presenting the nuts and bolts of being an adventurer of science The authors present their conceptual investigations into serendipity’s nature and its mechanism by examining interesting real events and stories. The content is thought-provoking, and readers are led to question and explore their own life stories and problems along the journey of reading this book. Catching an elusive high-value target requires great strategies and efforts. But there are no dark secrets here because this is the “way of nature” – how we humans have always strived for innovation without realizing the blueprints behind such processes. Unlike other books on serendipity, this book will show you that a powerful “secret” is closer than you think. Delivering practical uses for different audiences By understanding the conditionality and survival drivers of serendipity, individuals or organizations can make better decisions on creating the right environment to facilitate the encounter and attainment of this valuable phenomenon. For scientists: With clear explanations of the information processes underlying serendipity, flexible theoretical frameworks of mindsponge and the 3D principle of creativity, researchers are provided with the tools they need to dig deeper into their own fields of study and find practical applications, be it psychology, economics, sociology, or anything that involves innovation (which is, in fact, every scientific discipline). For curious casual readers: Everybody needs innovation to make breakthroughs or spice up one’s life. If you think great ideas come to people randomly from an unknown fairy place, this book will convince you otherwise without taking away that awe and wonder. But above all, you will know how to become more creative, scientifically and straightforwardly, with no snake oil and no weird tricks. For ambitious business people: The flame that brought about great successes throughout human history is within you. But you can only use it if you understand it. While others wait for serendipity to come, you will be able to actively hunt for those precious moments. As it has always been: the best hunters triumph, not the passive wanderers. And in this age of information chaos, finding the golden fruits is not easy. Those from information technology know this problem well, and this book is the treasure map that they have been seeking to navigate that stormy ocean looking for jewels. Like a kingfisher tracking its prey through the water, waiting to gracefully strike, with serendipity, a person seizes the prize of creativity amid the chaos of life. ¤ ¤ ¤ Official introduction: The book explores the nature, underlying causes, and the information processing mechanism of serendipity. It proposes that natural or social survival demands drive serendipity, and serendipity is conditional on the environment and the mindset, on both individual and collective levels. From Darwin's evolution theory to Sun Tzu's war tactics, major innovations throughout human history are unified by this key concept. In the rapidly changing world, information is abundant but rather chaotic. The adaptive power of serendipity allows people to notice treasures within this wild sea, but only for those who understand how it works. To increase the probability of encountering and attaining serendipity, one should employ the mindsponge mechanism and the 3D process of creativity, for without these frameworks, serendipity is truly an elusive target. The book also discusses methods to build environments and cultures rich in navigational and useful information to maximize the chance of finding and capitalizing on serendipity. As a skill, serendipity has a resemblance to how kingfishers observe and hunt their prey. (shrink)

In the era Islam emerged, Arabs were calling Jews and Christians as Ahl al-Kitāb, respecting them and affected by them in many ways. When they failed in their debates against the Prophet, they were referring to the scholars of Ahl al-Kitāb and relying on the information they got from them, they were trying to force and beat the Prophet intellectually by their questions. In the Meccan period, no clashes had happened between the Muslims and Ahl al-Kitāb. Jewish scholars had been (...) admitting that they knew the similarity in the topics of Qurʾān and Tawrāt, the Qurʾān were telling the truth and the Prophet was conveying the message of the truth. In some of the verses, these right attitudes of the scholars of Ahl al-Kitāb are used as a reference against Mus̲h̲riks. In the verses said, those scholars are praised and indicated as a source of information for the Prophet as well. The verses related with the topic were understood in parallel with the context and direct meaning of the Nass by some scholars, yet, they were explained not taking the Nuzul environment and process into consideration by some other scholars. It is mentioned that ʿAbdallāh b. Salām and his friends who became Muslims in Medina period have been told in these verses. In this study, level of validity for these interpretations will be evaluated based on Qurʾān –relationship and the fact that some of the asbab al-nuzul (circumstances of revelation) are known to be jurisprudential; and it will be argued that the true meaning of the naṣṣ is overshadowed.Summary: Tafsir is an effort to understand the divine address, and also to understand the relationship between Muslim, polytheist, and People of the Book (Ahl al-kitāb) in the revelation and experience in this context. Since these issues are not explained in a wide and clear manner in the Qur’ān, the hadīths, prophetic biography, narratives of asbâb al-nuzul and the opinions of the companions and the views of the Companions and Tābi‘īn gain importance in understanding the verses. As the narrations of asbâb al-nuzul contain some problems, it is proposed to evaluate this information based on sigas and hadīth method in classical Qur'ānic sciences studies. Although this approach is effective in solving many problems, it does not solve all problems.The question of whether the narrators of asbâb al-nuzul is the real reason for the verse has been discussed from the very beginning. According to Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) al-Zarkashī (d. 794/1392) and al-Dihlawī (d. 1176/1762), the expression that “This verse has been revealed on this particular event” does not mean that the verse is revealed particularly and only for this event but rather that it is revealed for an event which is similar to that event, and that, subject verse also covers this provision. A. Nedim Serinsu and A. Rıza Gül also drew attention to this fact and the narratives were divided into two as the real cause of nuzul and virtual cause of nuzul. When this issue is not known, it may become inexorable to analyze and make observations, and there may be problems regarding the interlocutors, date of births, being Meccan or Medinan.Those who want to learn the first-hand meaning of the verses, their interlocutors and the environment of nuzul are facing difficulties to choose between the contradictory narrations especially in narrative-weighted commentaries. It is necessary to pay attention to some points to evaluate the narrations correctly and make the right choice. These points are prophetic biography, the stages of nuzul, information about being Meccan or Medinan, the stages of development of relations between polytheists and Muslims, and tafsīr explanations about nuzul. One of the issues with contradictory narratives and interpretations is ʿAbdallāh b. Salām. As one of the notables of the Medina Jews, he came to him when the Prophet arrived in Kuba, he asked some questions, and when he got the right answers, he became a Muslim saying that they could only be known by a prophet. It is claimed that he believed in the period of Mecca and the eighth year of the Hijr, but this information was not well accepted.Although it was not very intense in Mecca, there were certain relations between Jews and Christians and Muslims. Since there was no conflict between Muslims and the People of the Book, these verses are often praised by their scholars, and they were also cited as a reference for the Prophet and idolaters Some Meccan verses mention the following: Jews who are righteous; the fulfilment of the requirements of the book, and the prayers of the Muslims that will not be wasted; the fact that the scholars of the Israelites know the truths in the Qur'an should be a proof for the idolaters; The Ahl al-kitāb know that the Qur'ān is a divine book; if he has doubts about the verses revealed to the Prophet, he should ask the Jewish scholars; Jews witnessed and believed the truth of the prophethood of the Prophet; the fact that Ahl al-kitāb were delighted with the Qur'ān. In the exegesis of these verses, it has been commented that the interlocutors are ʿAbdallāh b. Salām and his friends, Prophet Muhammad's companions, Selman al-Fârisî, Ali and the kitāb who believed in the Prophet.Since the commentators did not consider the process experienced with the Ahl al-kitāb sufficiently, the verses that were written before becoming Muslim were associated with ʿAbdallāh b. Salām. However, Masrūk (d. 63/683), Sha'bî (d. 104/722) and Said b. Jubayr (d. 94/713 [?]) refused to relate the Meccan verses to ʿAbdallāh b. Salām because they had considered the process of nuzul. When the revelations are evaluated on the basis of the Qur'ān and prophetic biography relationship and the process of nuzul, it is understood that the interlocutors are the scholars of Ahl al-kitāb who know and acknowledge that the Qur'ān and the prophethood are right, as some commentators have indicated. In this case, it is understood that the commentators make comments that are not appropriate to the context, wording and nuzul process of the verses based on the narratives that are not true and that they use the name of ʿAbdallāh b. Salām as a kind of filling material since the information about the interlocutors is limited. It is not acceptable to praise one of them in the revelations when we evaluate the Ahl al-kitāb by generalizing the truth, their hostility towards Islam and the wars. However, there were no clashes with Jews and Christians in Mecca and there were scholars who expressed the truth. They were praised when necessary, and also cited as a reference source for the Prophet and idolaters. In addition, in the verses that criticize the Ahl al-kitāb in the verses Medinan, those who make the mistakes in question are not criticized as a whole. As in these examples, we need to evaluate the verses in the context of the individual process, not with the influence of our established perceptions and with a wholesale mind. Otherwise, unintentional results can be reached. It can be claimed that the Predecessors fell to an anachronism in their explanations about ʿAbdallāh b. Salām which did not conform to the date and time. However, when we consider the views of Ibn Taymiyya, al-Zarkashī and al-Dihlawī, it is understood that the Predecessors expressed views in terms of exegesis, opinion-based sampling rather than an anachronism. These interpretations of the Predecessors also depict that the information available to the interlocutors of the verses is insufficient. The fact that the historical information errors in Predecessors’ illustrations and explanations show that the information transferred from them should be examined carefully and that one must not surrender him/her without investigation. It is a clear fact that those who accept interpretations based on ijtihâd as an actual asbâb al-nuzul fall into anachronism. In this respect, it is understood that asbâb al-nuzul narrations should be evaluated in accordance with the principles mentioned and it is necessary to distinguish between those who tell the real reason and those who do not and make a preference among them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LAW AND THOMISTIC EXEMPLARISM JOHN PETERSON University of Rhode Island Kingston, Rhode Island CIVIL LAW differs from empirical law in that the former prescribes regularities in human action while the latter describes and predicts regularities in the world apart from human action. By an empirical or descriptive law scientists mean a law that is knowable on the basis of observed regularities. An example is Boyle's law. That at a (...) constant temperature the volumes occupied by a constant mass of gas are in inverse ratio to the pressures they support is an observed regularity. This law also describes and predicts a regular occurrence in the world apart from human action. The same is true of Galileo's law that the acceleration of free fall on Earth is thirty-two feet per second per second. But the law that citizens ought to pay taxes in proportion to their incomes prescribes a type of action human beings are obliged to take at regular intervals. A notable difference is that predictability is much lower in the case of civil law than it is in the case of empirical law. You can infallibly predict that the inverse ratio of volumes to pressures in a gas will hold in the next case or that the next free fall will accelerate at thirtytwo feet per second per second. But that your neighbors will pay their fair share of taxes next year is a risky guess. This is part of what it means to say that empirical natural laws are in the world in a way that the laws of society and the state are not. Events, activities, or relationships in the world do not fail to conform to laws whereas actions of citizens often fail to conform to the laws of the state. From empirical laws scientists distinguish theoretical laws. These more general laws are usually called theories or hypotheses. Unlike empirical laws, theories are never generalizations drawn from observations of phenomena. Moreover, theories are often the explanation of empirical laws. So the latter both enter 81 82 JOHN PETERSON into the explanation of a phenomenon and are for their own part explained by theories. Empirical laws are thus both explanans and explanandum as regards phenomena and theories respectively. Thus, Galileo's law of acceleration both enters into the explanation of the particular event of the free fall of this stone at thirty-two feet per second per second and is itself partly explain~d by Newton's laws of motion and his law of gravity.1 But whether or not causal-deductive explanation includes empirical laws that are themselves explained by theoretical laws, all such explanation includes both explanandum and explanans. The former is always some empirical phenomenon. And the latter, as Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim point out, is generally made up of two parts, a law or laws and statements of fact or antecedent conditions.2 In the following schema the first two lines comprise the explanans and the last line the explanandum. Thus: C1, C2,..., Cn (statements of conditions) L1, L2,... Ln (laws) E (description of phenomenon to be explained)3 While much causal-deductive explanation in science follows this pattern, not all of it does. For while the explanans must include a law, it need not include a statement that is not a law. For example, Hempel and Oppenheim cite the case in which the regularities that govern the motion of the double stars are explained solely in terms of the laws of celestial mechanics.4 In any case, whether it is the explanandum of a theory or the explanans of a particular observed phenomenon, an empirical law has these three characteristics: first, it is originally based on observations; second, no term in the statement of it fails to occur in the observation statements from which (in the order of knowl1 Carl G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, "Studies in the Logic of Explanation," in Janet A. Kourany, ed., Scientific Knowledge: Basic Issues in the Philosophy ofScience (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth, 1987), 31. 2 Ibid., 31.·1 Ibid., 32. 4 Ibid., 31. LAW AND THOMISTIC EXEMPLARISM 83 edge) it is based; and third, no values of its variable terms are determined in relation... (shrink)

Book synopsis: David-Hillel Ruben's new book pursues some novel and unusual standpoints in the philosophy of action. He rejects, for example, the most widely held view about how to count actions, and argues for what he calls a 'prolific theory' of act individuation. He also describes and argues against the two leading theories of the nature of action, the causal theory and the agent causal theory. The causal theory cannot account for skilled activity, nor for mental action. The agent (...) causalist theory unnecessarily reifies causings. He identifies an assumption that they share, and that most action theorists have assumed to be unproblematic and uncontroversial, that an action is, or entails the existence of, an event. Several different meanings to that claim are disentangled and in the most interesting sense of that claim, Ruben denies that it is true. His own alternative is simple and unpretentious: nothing informative can be said about the nature of action that explicates action in any other terms. Ruben sketches a theory of causal explanation of action that eschews the requirement for laws or generalisations, and this effectively quashes one argument for the oft-repeated view that no explanations of action can be causal, on the grounds that there are no convincing cases of laws of human action. He addresses a number of questions about the knowledge an agent has of his own actions, looking particularly at examples of pathological cases of action in which, for one reason or another, the agent does not know what he is doing. Inspiring and enlightening in its challenge to received wisdom, and in its convincing defence of some unfashionable positions, Action and its Explanation will be required reading for anyone working in this field. (shrink)

Recent discussions on the explanation of action are permeated with two divergent models of explanation, namely causal model and non- causal model. For causalists the notion of explanation is intimately related to that of causation. As Davidson contends, any rudimentary explanation of an event gives its cause. More sophisticated explanations may cite a relevant law in support of a singular causal claim. The non-causalists, on the other hand, hold that when we explain an action we do not ask for (...) the cause, rather we try to understand the action in terms of its meaning. Moreover, they argue that the causal model fails to account for the conceptual priority of human agency. The aim of this paper is to show how Max Weber attempted a synthesis of the two divergent models of explanation in the realm of human actions. The first section of this paper gives an expository account of Weber’s theory of explanation. In the second section an attempt is made to interpret Weber’s thesis so as to assimilate the two divergent models of explanation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME, MOTIVATION AND MORALITY Hume remarks, in the Abstract, that his account of the passions in Book II of the Treatise has 'laid the foundation' (A 7 Ì1 for his theory of morals. Pall Ardal has shown how Hume's theory of certain indirect passions (pride, humility, love, hatred) underpins his theory of the evaluation of character. I propose to explore the links between Hume's account of motivation and his (...) treatment of an agent 'ß moral assessment of prospective action. Where Ardal stresses the moral spectator, my focus is on the agent. Hume himself attends primarily to the moral spectator, but the agent's perspective is central in two of his chief arguments concerning morals, that for the thesis that moral distinctions are derived from a moral sense, and that for the artificiality of justice. I shall take it that the argument of Treatise II, iii, 3 ("Of the influencing motives of the will") provides the framework for analysis: acting for moral reasons is like acting for any other reason; citing his moral principles to explain a man's actions is like citing his desire to preserve his health as an explanation of his taking exercise; deliberating about moral matters is like pondering the purchase of a pair of shoes. Of course there are differences; I shall look to them shortly. It is essential, however, to begin with the similarities. To a first approximation, the central doctrine is that the reasons that explain actions are rational causes of those actions. Reasons for actions are constituted by suitably related desires and beliefs; volitions are somehow implicated in intentional actions. Reasons are causes: the desires and beliefs that constitute reasons cause volitions, and thus actions. They are rational causes: there are links of special kinds between the contents of the desires and beliefs that constitute an agent's reasons for what he does, and the content of the volitions implicated in the actions done. Hume is at pains to deny that "reason [here: belief] alone can... be a motive to any action of the will" (T 413). But he insists there are "two principal parts [of human nature], which are requisite in all its actions, the affections and understanding' (T 493). I suggest that by "affections" he here means specifically (if broadly) desires, and so both the "direct passions" of desire and aversion and such "indirect passions" as benevolence, anger, pity, compassion and malice. Hume's official doctrines both of desires and of volitions are unsatisfactory as they stand; he treats each as simple impressions. To be sure, these simple impressions are said always to be accompanied by thoughts of (in Hume's phrase) their objects. Even such complex states, however, can play no satisfactory role in psychological theory. The insights that Hume's official doctrines mishandle can, I suggest, be incorporated into more defensible, and more-or-less Humean, analyses of the internal structure of desire and volition. Having made efforts along these lines elsewhere, however, I shall here concentrate on other features of desire and volition that are germane to Hume's moral psychology. Desires and volitions are alike in two linked respects, among others: neither takes a truth value (and so each differs from belief); each is a conative, not a cognitive, psychological state (and so, again, each differs from belief). Because desires and volitions are not capable of "an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to real existence and matter of fact" it is "impossible... they can be pronounced either true or false" (T 458). Their general functional role is that of "propense and averse motions of the mind" (T 574). To be sure, there are differences. The principal difference is that of specific functional location: desires are constituents in reasons for acting: volitions are constituents of (or otherwise implicated in) actions done for such reasons. This functional difference is tied to differences of content. To grasp the many relations among belief, desire and volition, when the first two serve as 4 reason for (and so cause of) the third, it is useful to plot their causal relations onto the elements in an Aristotelian practical syllogism. Desires function as causally salient major premises... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94. HUME'S EXPLANATION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF1 In The Natural History of Religion, David Hume offers a not unsophisticated account of the fact that persons hold religious beliefs. In so doing, he produces an explanatory system analogous to that which occurs concerning causal belief, belief in 'external objects', and belief in an enduring self in the Treatise ¦ The explanation of the occurrence of religious belief is more (...) detailed than the explanation provided in the other cases just mentioned. In the Natural History, Hume devotes a short volume to explaining religious belief, while in the Treatise the causal, external object, and enduring self beliefs merit 2 but long sections. More important, however, than length of treatment is the fact that the pattern of explanation is identical in each instance. The Natural History could be embedded without categorial clash into the Treatise, perhaps as Book Four with"fifteen sections, and each formerly separate volume would shed light on the program and tactics of the other. My interest here is in the epistemic features of the explanatory system Hume developed in the Natural History. Hume forthrightly proclaims that The Natural History Of Religion is in fact an attempt to explain the occurrence of religious belief. He writes: What those principles are, which give rise to the original belief, and what those accidents and causes are, which direct its operation, is the subject of our present enquiry.4 (NHR21) Original belief here does duty for "original religious belief", and as he takes religious belief to be nearly but not altogether universal in scope and astonishingly diverse in object, he supposes the principle, or cause, of such belief to be secondary in the sense that its operation is (so to say) defeasible and its product diversified. Hume's powerful critique of the argument from design in Sections II 95. through VIII of the Dialogues is not the only reason for doubting that his occasional kind remarks concerning it should be taken as indicating that he supposed it sound and valid. The very fact that Hume wrote a book intended to explain the occurrence of religious belief by identifying as its cause a built-in principle and its eliciting stimuli should give us pause about Hume's apparent acceptance of something like the argument from design. For while in the Natural History he says that: The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no ¦ rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion. (NHR21) He speaks, not of a conclusion having been proved true, but of a belief having been rendered unsuspendable. Further, neither we nor Hume will ordinarily offer a causal account of the fact that a person has a belief unless there is doubt that the person has sufficient reason for holding it. He does not, for example, offer any such explanation of our acceptance of sincere present-tense first person psychological reports, concerning the truth (indeed, the incorrigibility ) of which he in the Treatise confidently affirms : For since all actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness, they must necessarily appear in every particular what they are, and be what they appear. Every thing that enters the mind, being in rea lity perception, 'tis impossible any thing should to feeling appear different. This were to suppose that even where we are most intimately conscious, we might be mistaken. (T190) Or, even more modestly, and without assuming a causal-account and a sufficient-reason-account of a belief to be competing (or even necessarily different) explanations, we may note that Hume proposes to explain the occurrence of religious belief by reference to principle and eliciting stimuli without making reference to reasons or arguments as items possessing epistemic function or 96. evidential force, but only as items capable of triggering a built-in response. That this is_ his tactic I have argued rather fully on another occasion; here I will focus only on the general pattern of Hume's explanation of religious belief. Hume endeavors to explain religious belief without supposing it (in any of its forms) to be true as well as without supposing it... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94. HUME'S EXPLANATION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF1 In The Natural History of Religion, David Hume offers a not unsophisticated account of the fact that persons hold religious beliefs. In so doing, he produces an explanatory system analogous to that which occurs concerning causal belief, belief in 'external objects', and belief in an enduring self in the Treatise ¦ The explanation of the occurrence of religious belief is more (...) detailed than the explanation provided in the other cases just mentioned. In the Natural History, Hume devotes a short volume to explaining religious belief, while in the Treatise the causal, external object, and enduring self beliefs merit 2 but long sections. More important, however, than length of treatment is the fact that the pattern of explanation is identical in each instance. The Natural History could be embedded without categorial clash into the Treatise, perhaps as Book Four with"fifteen sections, and each formerly separate volume would shed light on the program and tactics of the other. My interest here is in the epistemic features of the explanatory system Hume developed in the Natural History. Hume forthrightly proclaims that The Natural History Of Religion is in fact an attempt to explain the occurrence of religious belief. He writes: What those principles are, which give rise to the original belief, and what those accidents and causes are, which direct its operation, is the subject of our present enquiry.4 (NHR21) Original belief here does duty for "original religious belief", and as he takes religious belief to be nearly but not altogether universal in scope and astonishingly diverse in object, he supposes the principle, or cause, of such belief to be secondary in the sense that its operation is (so to say) defeasible and its product diversified. Hume's powerful critique of the argument from design in Sections II 95. through VIII of the Dialogues is not the only reason for doubting that his occasional kind remarks concerning it should be taken as indicating that he supposed it sound and valid. The very fact that Hume wrote a book intended to explain the occurrence of religious belief by identifying as its cause a built-in principle and its eliciting stimuli should give us pause about Hume's apparent acceptance of something like the argument from design. For while in the Natural History he says that: The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no ¦ rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion. (NHR21) He speaks, not of a conclusion having been proved true, but of a belief having been rendered unsuspendable. Further, neither we nor Hume will ordinarily offer a causal account of the fact that a person has a belief unless there is doubt that the person has sufficient reason for holding it. He does not, for example, offer any such explanation of our acceptance of sincere present-tense first person psychological reports, concerning the truth (indeed, the incorrigibility ) of which he in the Treatise confidently affirms : For since all actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness, they must necessarily appear in every particular what they are, and be what they appear. Every thing that enters the mind, being in rea lity perception, 'tis impossible any thing should to feeling appear different. This were to suppose that even where we are most intimately conscious, we might be mistaken. (T190) Or, even more modestly, and without assuming a causal-account and a sufficient-reason-account of a belief to be competing (or even necessarily different) explanations, we may note that Hume proposes to explain the occurrence of religious belief by reference to principle and eliciting stimuli without making reference to reasons or arguments as items possessing epistemic function or 96. evidential force, but only as items capable of triggering a built-in response. That this is_ his tactic I have argued rather fully on another occasion; here I will focus only on the general pattern of Hume's explanation of religious belief. Hume endeavors to explain religious belief without supposing it (in any of its forms) to be true as well as without supposing it... (shrink)

The anthology contains twenty-two essays and is divided into two parts. The essays are, in the main, critical responses to aspects of what has come to be known in action theory as the ‘Standard View’ – the view that traces back to Donald Davidson's contribution to twentieth-century philosophy of action. The view under criticism treats actions as bodily movements caused in a non-deviant way by belief–desire pairs, construes these belief–desire pairs as the primary reasons for the actions that (...) they cause, and embraces event-causality.The issue of how we should conceive of action is taken up in several essays. For example: in Essay 1, Fred Dretske challenges the view that actions are external events that are the effect of the reasons for which the action is done. In Essay 16, Helen Steward, proposes that, instead of treating the availability of a reason-giving explanation as essential to action, we should construe action as ‘an exercise of the power of bodily control by an animal’. In Essay 21, Jonathan Dancy argues for a deflationary approach to actions, which forgoes treating actions ‘as individuals, with identity conditions’.Other authors – for example, Stephen Everson, Rowland Stout and Maria Alvarez – focus on the issue of what reasons for action are. Are they psychological states, or propositions, or states of affairs? Also under review is how to distinguish different kinds of reason: normative and explanatory reasons, and even explanatory and motivating reasons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.1 (2002) 77-89 [Access article in PDF] Time and Judgment in Demosthenes' De Corona 1 - [PDF] Michael S. Kochin Hannah Arendt concludes the first volume of The Life of the Mind thus: If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our (...) human dignity, win it back, as it were, from that pseudo-divinity named History of the modern age, without denying history's importance but denying its right to being the ultimate judge. Old Cato... has left us a curious phrase which aptly sums up the political principle implied in the enterprise of reclamation. He said: "Victrix causa deis placit, sed victa Catoni" ("The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato"). (1978, 1: 216) 2This article is an exercise in reclamation of the kind that Hannah Arendt describes. I wish to reclaim the cause for which Demosthenes struggled, the cause of democratic freedom, from the judgment of history expressed in the defeat of Athens and her allies at the hands of Philip of Macedon. Though politics is attenuated in the contemporary world, we can understand the peculiar characteristics of political action by reconstructing in our imagination those moments in the past when political life was richest. Here I am going to take up an aspect of political action that is particularly well-illuminated in Demosthenes' speech On the Crown: the role of time in the judgment of political action. 3We can approach Demosthenes' political career for a variety of purposes: The easiest to understand, because it is in many ways the most superficial, is with the motives of the humanist. We study the political speeches of Demosthenes in order to be inspired to value political freedom [End Page 77] and to learn how it can be defended. The trouble with this view is that it assumes that the conditions for political action are present for us, as they were for Demosthenes in the Athens of his time, and that political action is itself something serious men (and now women) ought to undertake. That these two assumptions are edifying and patriotic does not make them true.We can also approach Demosthenes as an exercise in historical science (that is, historische Wissenschaft). The scientific historian wants to learn the facts about the rise of Philip's hegemony over Greece. The scientific historian therefore prefers objectivity to edification. As George Cawkwell, a leading participant in the Demosthenesstreit in the '60s and '70s, wrote, "Moral edification and history can be kept separate" (1969, 166).I find this the most difficult purpose to understand, because it is unclear how this scientific-historical perspective can be connected with the human-all-too-human perspectives of the participants. When, for example, Cawkwell writes of the age of Demosthenes that "The central fact of the age is military, not moral—viz. the huge preponderance in military potential of the Macedonian state over the power of any Greek state," he cites a fact whose truth he himself perceives in part from Philip's victory over the Thebans and Athenians at Chaeroneia in 338 B.C.E. and Alexander's campaign against Thebes in 335. 4 Cawkwell does not trouble himself to explain how Demosthenes or anybody else could possibly have learned the fact of Philip's greater military strength and resources prior to these events. Nor does Cawkwell refute the claim that given Philip's failures before Perinthos and Byzantium in 340, at the very time that Demosthenes led the Athenians to war it was reasonable to suppose Philip much weaker than he had seemed, or seems to us (Pickard-Cambridge 1979, 491). 5 He does not even show how Philip could have known his own capabilities prior to his success. It is thus unclear what use historical-scientific judgment could be, since it is not clear how to relate historical-scientific judgment to the judgment of participants in human affairs.I should stop here, not least because I... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.1 (2002) 77-89 [Access article in PDF] Time and Judgment in Demosthenes' De Corona 1 - [PDF] Michael S. Kochin Hannah Arendt concludes the first volume of The Life of the Mind thus: If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our (...) human dignity, win it back, as it were, from that pseudo-divinity named History of the modern age, without denying history's importance but denying its right to being the ultimate judge. Old Cato... has left us a curious phrase which aptly sums up the political principle implied in the enterprise of reclamation. He said: "Victrix causa deis placit, sed victa Catoni" ("The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato"). (1978, 1: 216) 2This article is an exercise in reclamation of the kind that Hannah Arendt describes. I wish to reclaim the cause for which Demosthenes struggled, the cause of democratic freedom, from the judgment of history expressed in the defeat of Athens and her allies at the hands of Philip of Macedon. Though politics is attenuated in the contemporary world, we can understand the peculiar characteristics of political action by reconstructing in our imagination those moments in the past when political life was richest. Here I am going to take up an aspect of political action that is particularly well-illuminated in Demosthenes' speech On the Crown: the role of time in the judgment of political action. 3We can approach Demosthenes' political career for a variety of purposes: The easiest to understand, because it is in many ways the most superficial, is with the motives of the humanist. We study the political speeches of Demosthenes in order to be inspired to value political freedom [End Page 77] and to learn how it can be defended. The trouble with this view is that it assumes that the conditions for political action are present for us, as they were for Demosthenes in the Athens of his time, and that political action is itself something serious men (and now women) ought to undertake. That these two assumptions are edifying and patriotic does not make them true.We can also approach Demosthenes as an exercise in historical science (that is, historische Wissenschaft). The scientific historian wants to learn the facts about the rise of Philip's hegemony over Greece. The scientific historian therefore prefers objectivity to edification. As George Cawkwell, a leading participant in the Demosthenesstreit in the '60s and '70s, wrote, "Moral edification and history can be kept separate" (1969, 166).I find this the most difficult purpose to understand, because it is unclear how this scientific-historical perspective can be connected with the human-all-too-human perspectives of the participants. When, for example, Cawkwell writes of the age of Demosthenes that "The central fact of the age is military, not moral—viz. the huge preponderance in military potential of the Macedonian state over the power of any Greek state," he cites a fact whose truth he himself perceives in part from Philip's victory over the Thebans and Athenians at Chaeroneia in 338 B.C.E. and Alexander's campaign against Thebes in 335. 4 Cawkwell does not trouble himself to explain how Demosthenes or anybody else could possibly have learned the fact of Philip's greater military strength and resources prior to these events. Nor does Cawkwell refute the claim that given Philip's failures before Perinthos and Byzantium in 340, at the very time that Demosthenes led the Athenians to war it was reasonable to suppose Philip much weaker than he had seemed, or seems to us (Pickard-Cambridge 1979, 491). 5 He does not even show how Philip could have known his own capabilities prior to his success. It is thus unclear what use historical-scientific judgment could be, since it is not clear how to relate historical-scientific judgment to the judgment of participants in human affairs.I should stop here, not least because I... (shrink)

In On Not Expecting Too Much from Narrative, Lamarque (2004) challenges theories of narrative identity. For while narrativity might tell us something of interest about our selves, the requirements for this would be so strong that theories of narrative identity would not be able to meet them. In contrast, he identifies minimal conditions for narrativity, so that our identity could be of a narrative nature as well. But in that case, the concept of narrativity would be so weak that it (...) would hardly be able to tell us anything about ourselves. I first examine Lamarque's criticism of narrative concepts of identity. He shows that stories, understood in a minimal sense, are not found but told and that they establish a temporal relationship between at least two events. I then examine the concept of teleological explanations of action. Considering the problem of deviant causal chains that causalists are confronted with, they are at least a serious alternative to causal explanations of action. By doing that, I also attempt to render plausible the irreducibility of teleological explanations of action to causal ones. Subsequently, I outline some features of teleological explanations of action. Finally, I defend the idea that teleological explanations of action are essentially narrative explanations of action because they meet Lamarque's minimal conditions of narratives. I then make the case that these kinds of narratives are not trivial with respect to our personal identity but, on the contrary, are the prerequisite under which we can perceive ourselves as rational agents. (shrink)

In On Not Expecting Too Much from Narrative, Lamarque (2004) challenges theories of narrative identity. For while narrativity might tell us something of interest about our selves, the requirements for this would be so strong that theories of narrative identity would not be able to meet them. In contrast, he identifies minimal conditions for narrativity, so that our identity could be of a narrative nature as well. But in that case, the concept of narrativity would be so weak that it (...) would hardly be able to tell us anything about ourselves. I first examine Lamarque's criticism of narrative concepts of identity. He shows that stories, understood in a minimal sense, are not found but told and that they establish a temporal relationship between at least two events. I then examine the concept of teleological explanations of action. Considering the problem of deviant causal chains that causalists are confronted with, they are at least a serious alternative to causal explanations of action. By doing that, I also attempt to render plausible the irreducibility of teleological explanations of action to causal ones. Subsequently, I outline some features of teleological explanations of action. Finally, I defend the idea that teleological explanations of action are essentially narrative explanations of action because they meet Lamarque's minimal conditions of narratives. I then make the case that these kinds of narratives are not trivial with respect to our personal identity but, on the contrary, are the prerequisite under which we can perceive ourselves as rational agents. (shrink)

Recently, David Lewis’ counterfactual theory of causation has been attacked by context-relativists, who point to a number of intuitively absurd consequences of Lewis’ view – e.g. that my birth is a cause of my death – in order to argue that whether or not an event c is a cause of some distinct event e varies relative to certain contextual factors. Not all ; Schaffer ; Maslen ; Northcott ) agree on how contexts should be fixed; but all argue that (...) context-relative analyses better account for our intuitions about causes. In defense of his invariantist account, Lewis argues that the intuitions by which the relativist-accounts purport to be informed are, in fact, intuitions about contrastive explanation rather than causes. That is to say, Lewis accepts that my birth is a cause of my death, and argues that it is odd to say so precisely because the pragmatics of explanation deem saying so inappropriate in most cases. I will examine a definitive objection from Peter Menzies to Lewis’ proposed defence and argue that the former reveals that the true locus of the relativist-invariantist debate lies in the question of how we ought to order possible worlds. (shrink)

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

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)

On 22 July, 2011, we were confronted with the horror of the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. The instant reaction, as we have seen with similar incidents in the past—such as the Oklahoma City bombings—was to attempt to explain the incident. Whether the reasons given were true or not were irrelevant: the fact that there was a reason was better than if there were none. We should not dismiss those that continue to cling on to the initial (...) claims of a wider Jihadist plot behind the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as Islamophobes (or merely lacking common sense): for, it is often easier to rely on reason—no matter how fictional—than not to have anything to cling on at all. In many ways, it is even better if the reason is fictional: for, if grounded in a certain fact, or reality, it can then go away. However, if it is in the realm of the imaginary, it is then always already metaphorical: thus, can be applied to any and every situation. And it is this, if we echo Friedrich Nietzsche, that gives us our “metaphysical comfort”; that we can know what is going on. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular: underlying them is the logic that someone—no matter how implausible—is in control of the situation. One would rather believe that all acts of terror stemmed from Osama bin Laden (and the narrative worked even better when he was in a ‘cave in Afghanistan’) than if they were the actions, and decisions, of singular individuals. For, if there is a head organizing everything, it can be cut off; there is no controlling a mass of singularities. As Jean Baudrillard continues to teach us, the term ‘mass’ is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpen-analytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with ‘more subtle’ categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. This is wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like ‘mana’ once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts ‘class’, ‘social relations’, ‘power’, ‘status’, ‘institution’, and ‘social’ itself—all these too-explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences—but also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term ‘mass’ is a mistake—it is to provide meaning for that which has none.1 And it is this lack of meaning—this nothingness of not only the mass, but our inability to know in general—that truly scares us. For, if we are never able to legitimately make a generalizing statement, this suggests that we can never actually posit beyond a singular, situational, moment. Hence, we can never claim to know anyone: at best, we can only catch momentary glimpses. It is for this very reason that the insanity plea Breivik’s lawyer will attempt is the one that horrifies us the most. For, if Breivik is insane, this foregrounds our inability to understand, know. And as Aristotle has taught us, it is more important that something is plausible than if something were probable—in this context, we would rather have Breivik as a calculating mass murderer than someone who was completely out of his mind. This is especially ironic in the light of the fact that none of us would say that we have any similarity with Breivik. If that were so, the declaration that he was mad should be no more than a logical consequence. However, we also want Breivik to be accountable for his actions. And in order for that to be so, we need him to be of sound mind. But if that were true, we can then no longer distinguish ourselves from him. And it is precisely this that scares us. For, we are horrified not when there are abnormalities to our way of life. There are usually two different reactions to this—either oppose and destroy it; or subsume it under the dominant logic. We see this most clearly in reactions to immigration: there are either calls for immigrants to ‘pack up and leave’ or pseudo-liberal notions of ‘we are all alike’. Both of which are merely version of “all men are brothers”—the brutal translation of which is that you are my brother if you live the same way as me; otherwise not only are you not my brother, you are also potentially not part of mankind (you might as well be, to echo Giorgio Agamben, bare life ). This is played out in our age of what is commonly termed post-political bio-politics —an instance of horribly awkward theoretical jargon that Slavoj Žižek channeling Agamben unpacks rather elegantly: “ post-politics is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus[es] on expert management and administration, while bio-politics designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”2 Žižek continues: Post-political bio-politics also has two aspects which cannot but appear to belong to two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to ‘bare life,’ to Homo sacer , that so-called sacred being who is the object of expert caretaking knowledge, but is excluded, like prisoners at Guantanamo or Holocaust victims, from all rights; and that of respect for the vulnerable Other brought to an extreme through an attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential harassments [….] What these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. That is why there is no contradiction between the respect for the vulnerable Other and […] the extreme expression of treating individuals as Homini sacer .3 This is why the ones that are harshest towards new immigrants are the recently naturalized citizens of any country. For, if there is no longer any “ideological struggle” and all life is reduced to mere automaton-living, there is the realization that we are all the same—not in a tree-hugging hippie sense—but that the immigrant is the same as us precisely because we are all immigrants. And since all nations, and by extension peoples in a nation (especially those who believe in the notion of nationality, and national identity), have to find some manner, no matter from where or what it is, to distinguish themselves from those around them, the other (in spite, and especially in the light, of its absence) is the most crucial aspect of the discourse of nationality. More precisely, in the interests of what Baudrillard calls “preserving a certain code of analysis” (nationality in this case), what has to be maintained is the absolute otherness of the other. Very rarely is Boris Johnson right: “it is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad.”4 However, much like Breivik in his manifesto, he should have stopped whilst he was ahead. By attempting to diagnose Breivik—“the fundamental reasons for their callous behavior lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause … that gives them an excuse to dramatize the resentment … and to kill.”—Johnson falls into the same trap that he accuses others of: “to try to advance any other explanation for their actions … is simply to play their self-important game.” More crucially, and this is the point that Johnson completely misses, attempting to rationalize Breivik’s actions—to rehabilitate reason—is a desperate attempt at maintaining his otherness. In fact, we’ll end up going one step further, insist on Breivik’s sanity, put him on the stand, and hope that he will display such a difference from all of us that we can rest safe that we are unlike him and his kind. That, in itself, is a dangerous game to play. One should not forget that the turning point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the central part of her novel where she lets the monster speak. At that moment, the monster moves from an ‘it’ to a fully subjectivized person; with his own stories, historicities, emotions, and so on. In Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Frankenstein , this is the moment where “the ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.”5 But, in the case of Breivik, this goes beyond just a risk of us feeling for him: for, no right-minded person should ever deny another the opportunity to put forth her or his own case. The problem lies with us trying to deny the madness of Breivik’s act by putting him back under reason. The problem is in our inability to differentiate the act from the person; the singular from the universal.6 In our desperation to preserve the notion that we are rational beings incapable of becoming monsters, we’ve had to deny the meaninglessness—in the strict sense of it lying outside of reason—of Breivik’ act; we’ve had to “provide meaning where there is none.” For, if this act were a moment of madness—a moment that comes from elsewhere—we cannot say that it will not descend upon us one day. If Breivik’s actions were that of a sane person, one who is in control of his being, his self, we can then locate the otherness in his being. More importantly, this would allow us to distinguish ourselves from that said being. Breivik’s sanity is the only thing that allows us to say that ‘this act of terror is borne out of one with an ultra-right ideology’; and ‘since I am not of that ideology, I would never do such a thing’. By doing that, we attempt to protect ourselves by claiming that people who share Breivik’s ideology are foreign to us, other to us. However, if Breivik’s act was a moment of insanity, his otherness is no longer locatable: and the notion of ‘us and them’ shifts from a geographical, physical, religious, or cultural notion, to one in the realm of ideas. And this is what truly scares us. For, if what is foreign is not phenomenological, then it cannot be seen, detected, sensed. Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and Terry Nichols, terrify us not merely for the fact that they were white in a white society, but more pertinently that their skin color did not matter: we would not be able to spot them even if they were blue, even if they were right next to us, even if we had known them all our lives. Even as we are grappling with holding Breivik accountable by declaring him of sound mind, what truly terrifies us is that deep down we know that Breivik’s act is a moment of madness; beyond all comprehensibility. And this means that we would not be able to spot the idea; even if it were in our heads at this very moment. We have gone to lengths to rehabilitate Breivik, McVeigh, Nichols, and such perpetrators of massive incomprehensible violence, in order to preserve our difference from them. What we have really been trying to deny is the fact that everyone, at any given moment, could have a moment of madness. And this is the true radicality of Mary Shelley: in allowing us to momentarily enter the head of the monster, she shows us not just the fact that he is like any one of us, but that any one of us could, in the right (or wrong) circumstance, be like him. Perhaps here, there is a lesson to be learned from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street . The most dangerous thing that one could do on Elm Street was to mention Freddy’s name—once you had knowledge of him, you were open to the possibility of a visit during your dreams. This suggests that Freddy is a combination of externalities (after all, when you die, he survives) and your self (if you have never heard of him, he cannot come for you). In this sense, Freddy would be the manifestation par excellence of what Avital Ronell calls a “killer text”—it is one’s relationality with the text (and the ideas, notions, in the said text) that opens oneself to it, to the lessons of the text, to being changed, affected, even to the dangers of the text. After all, one should never forget Plato’s warning that ideas can corrupt, can be perilous. To compound matters, as Ronell reminds us, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.”7 Thus, in attempting to differentiate ourselves from Breivik by concocting some reason(s) why we are not like him, we have done nothing but read him, open a connection to him. *** Bang bang, he shot me down Bang bang, I hit the ground Bang bang, that awful sound Bang bang, my baby shot me down. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” Sonny Bono, 1966. This is the part that we all know and remember. Whilst never quite remembering that this is a song that is not so much about violence, love, but about remembering. For, after the bridge comes the accusatory stanza: “Now he's gone, I don't know why/ And till this day, sometimes I cry/ He didn't even say goodbye/ He didn't take the time to lie.” Bang Bang is a game that the two lovers used to play; and all she has now is the memory of the game to remember him by. And the only reason she has to recall this game is: he never provided her a reason for his leaving, his death. Not that she will, can, ever get that satisfactory answer. This is precisely the game we are playing with Anders Behring Breivik. Even though he has left a 1500 page manifesto, even though we will allow him to use the court-room as his platform, we will continue screaming at him “tell me why …” For, what we want him to say is that we are not like him: what we really want him to do is, “take the time to lie …” Perhaps here, we should allow the echo of the infans to resound in baby . As Christopher Fynsk reminds us, the infans is one that is pre-language, pre-knowing, pre-understanding: it is the very finitude, and exteriority, of relationality itself.8 And thus, it is a position of openness to the fullness of possibility—and nothing else. This would be, in Ronell’s terms, a “connection to the other” that knows nothing other than the fact that it is a connection. The true horror of 22 July, 2011, is the fact that it is not Anders Behring Breivik who is mad, but the act itself that is. And this is precisely why only “my baby” that could have “shot me down.” For, it is an act that is from beyond, a sheer act of madness that—as Plato warns us—is whispered into our ears (and can so easily be mistaken for inspiration, and even wisdom), an act that can both seize, and cease, us at the same time. And what can this utter openness to an other, the other, be but a moment of love, a true ‘falling in love’. At the moment of whispering, nothing can be known as we are babies as our baby shoots us down …. Hence, all attempts at analyzing this event (including this one) are not only futile, but border on the farcical. The real tragedy is that we forget that all of us have the possibility of becoming Breivik. NOTES Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton, & Andrew Berardini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. p. 37. Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p. 34 Ibid: 35-36. Boris Johnson. “ Anders Breivik: There is nothing to study in the mind of Norway’s mass killer .” The Telegraph . (25 July, 2011): Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p.39. What is killing us is the notion that Breivik’s act is beyond reason, beyond knowing, outside understanding itself. This is why Boris Johnson’s plea was for us to ignore Breivik as a madman. But to do so, Johnson conflates the notion of the act and the person; the singular and the universal. This is exactly the same gesture as insisting on his sanity: the ‘madman’ is merely the absolute other, one that we are not. Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989: 380. Christopher Fynsk. Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What’s His Story?Gwen Adshead (bio)Keywordsnarrative, violence, identityIn this commentary, I discuss three issues raised by Cartwright: whether and to what extent explanations from the past can adequately explain or excuse present actions, the nature of moral identity, and the notion of the moral community.I have often thought that psychiatrists and psychotherapists working with offenders have to be like writers of detective fiction. To make the story convincing, (...) the writer of detective fiction has to convey to the reader an understanding of the killer's motives. The successful writer enables the reader to appreciate the killer's reasons for killing; and these reasons offer to readers a tantalizing glimpse of what it might actually be like to be a violent and dangerous person; or more particularly, one who acts on their cruel and violent thoughts.Psychiatrists want to understand the reasons for their patient's violence, for several reasons (which probably include the voyeuristic pleasure that all humans seem to have at other people's disasters). However, the main reason is to do with prevention of future harm; if we understand the reasons that this happened, then we can take steps to make sure that it does not happen again. This view has been called the just world theory (Janoff Bulman 1989), which implies a world of predictable causes and reasons, where disasters occur because of an identifiable fault or omission that can be rectified with good result. The payoff of this view is that it gives the believer a sense of control, which after a disaster is important for maintaining confidence and self-esteem.The problem with this theory is that it presupposes that the world of human actions is essentially rational, and that people do things for reasons that make sense to them. However, much human cruelty has an irrational and unreasonable aspect to it; one that literally makes no sense. Cartwright's paper begins with a narrative about real people doing really dreadful things for no reasons that would ever satisfy the average detective story reader. Forensic mental health work is full of histories that are actually much stranger than any detective fiction.But it seems that humans are not happy with stories that do not make sense, even if senselessness is part of the natural world around them. As Cartwright indicates (see p. 150), when we hear about people like Robert Harris, we immediately move the field of inquiry from "Why did he do that?" to "Why is he like that?" With the rise of developmental psychology over the last 150 years, it has become natural to look at people's histories to see if this explains the person's present identity. In this sense, therefore, we seem to be natural Aristotelians, assuming that a man's character is revealed by his current actions: we also seem to be assuming that a man's character is an expression of past actions and events. [End Page 157]His-Story: Explaining the PresentIs this in fact the case? To what extent is it true that our identities are shaped by our past experiences? Even if this were the case, shaping is not the same as determining. There has always been a risk that developmental psychology will take up a similar position to genetics, with regard to explaining behavior; namely, that there are those who will try to argue that the presence of this, that, or the other gene, or this, that, or the other experience, both determines and "explains" the behavior. The moral point here is that when it comes to violent and antisocial behaviors, a person's past history is said to simultaneously explain the behavior, determine the behavior, and excuse it, by implying that the actor had no choice about what he did, given his past. This has been taken to an extreme in the US criminal courts, with what Dershowitz (1994) has called "the abuse excuse" (used most notably in the trial of the Menendez brothers, who killed their parents and claimed at the trial that their parents had abused them).Trials are about evidence, and it is worth considering the evidence about the effect of early childhood adversity... (shrink)

Does the fact that everything has a cause imply that all events are causally determined? Drawing on discussions from the history of philosophy, John Burbidge's Cause for Thought captures the diverse dynamics found in physics, chemistry, biology, animal psychology, and rational action. At each level, forms of activity emerge that cannot be reduced to the functioning of simpler, more elementary components. By exploring the logic of what happens when two causal conditions reciprocally interact, Burbidge develops a concept of (...) complex cause in which an agent generates effects not simply because of the action of its constituent components, but also because of the way those components mutually supplement and reinforce one another. By extending this to the interaction of agents with their environment, Burbidge throws light on the structure of organisms, on the distinctive contributions of consciousness and rationality, and on the quest for a comprehensive explanation of the cosmos. Recovering the force and legitimacy of metaphysical inquiry by focusing on the concept of cause and causality, Cause for Thought offers a new way of understanding natural processes, the role of consciousness and free will, and the significance of rational explanation. (shrink)

If mental causal explanations are grounded in facts about physical causes and effects, and if there are no psychophysical laws, how can we avoid the conclusion that the mental is causally, and causally explanatorily, irrelevant? The chapter analyses the ways in which this objection has been raised against non‐reductive monism in general, and Davidson's anomalous monism in particular. Then a conception of explanatory relevance for non‐basic physical properties is set out: properties are candidates for explanatory relevance if (...) they play a role in a simple model of causal action; it is intelligible how a property can be causally explanatorily relevant only if it supervenes on low‐level physical properties; but such supervenience does not provide a self‐standing condition of explanatory relevance. A parallel model is developed for the mental case, exploiting the intuitive model of rational action and appealing to supervenience. Anomalous monism is thereby defended against one objection; but, it is argued, this defence challenges the original motivation for thinking that mental events must be physical events. (shrink)

Non-causal accounts of action explanation have long been criticized for lacking a positive thesis, relying primarily on negative arguments to undercut the standard Causal Theory of Action The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016). Additionally, it is commonly thought that non-causal accounts fail to provide an answer to Donald Davidson’s challenge for theories of reasons explanations of actions. According to Davidson’s challenge, a plausible non-causal account of reasons explanations must provide a way of connecting an agent’s reasons, not (...) only to what she ought to do, but to what she actually does. That is, such explanations must be truth-apt, not mere rationalizations. My aim in this paper is to show how a non-causal account of action can provide explanations that are truth-apt and genuinely explanatory. To make this argument, I take as a given an account of the practical syllogism discussed by Michael Thompson and Eric Wiland, according to which the practical syllogism is truly practical rather than propositional in nature. Next, I present my primary positive thesis: reasons for actions have explanatory power in virtue of being parts of a structure—the practical syllogism—that contains the action being explained. I then argue that structural action explanations can meet Davidson’s challenge and that they genuinely explain actions. Finally, I conclude by addressing some objections to my argument. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:15 LOCKE, HUME AND THE NATURE OF VOLITIONS 1. The concept of a volition plays a key role in the theories of mind that both Locke and Hume devise. It is central to the views each develops on the nature of action and of explanations of actions, on the character of practical reasoning, on the nature of desire, on the ways in which, most usefully, to (...) categorize the several kinds of mental states and events. Without attending closely to their concepts of volition, one cannot get quite clear about the views of each, and the considerations thought to support those views, on the vexed questions of free action and of responsibility. Whether it be Locke or Hume, then, there is good reason to scrutinize what he says of volitions. Why take them together? The principal reason is that the views of each, when considered closely, throw a quite considerable light on those of the other (or so I hope to show). But there is a philosophical point as well. A theory of volitions more adequate than either proposes must borrow from each. What is amenable to being borrowed, and what ought to be borrowed, are fairly readily seen when the two theories are put face to face. I concentrate on three central issues: the question whether volitions are thoughts; the relationship of volition to practical reasoning; the links between volitions and their effects. Hume's views on these topics are to be found chiefly in the Treatise and the first Enquiry; Locke's, of course, in the Essay. Locke's recently published correspondence with the Dutch theologian Philippus van Limborch is, however, essential reading here, and I have made extensive use of it. 16 2. Locke and Hume agree that volitions are indefinable psychological primitives that must be invoked in an analysis of voluntary action (T 399, EHU 69, E 249). They agree, too, in a number of the things that each says in his efforts to characterize volitions. They differ, however, on a fundamental point, Hume's volitions are 'internal impression[s]' (T 399); Locke's are 'thought[s] of the Mind' (E 235). As internal impressions Humean volitions are feelings akin to, but not 'properly speaking' (T 399) instances of, passions. They are like the 'direct passions' (desire and aversion, grief and joy, hope and fear) in two respects: they are 'immediate effects of pain and pleasure' (T 399); they are 'propense and averse motions of the mind' (T 574), and thus bear a special relation to action. Though they are not thoughts they have causal, thus contingent, links to thoughts, including in particular thoughts whose content specify the so-called 'immediate object of volition' (E 66). As 'distinct impression[s]' (T 625) volitions do not modify the thoughts of their objects in the logically intimate way in which, in Hume's view, the feeling essential to belief 'modiffies] the conception' (T 625) of what is believed. Hume frequently compares volitions to commands (T 623, 629, 632; EHU 48, 64, 65, 67, 68). He also, not surprisingly, denies them truth values: because they are not capable of 'an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to real existence and matter of fact' it is 'impossible... they can be pronounced either true or false' (T 458; compare T 415). Locke's volitions are thoughts, not feelings; and they have their own contents and objects. '[T]he proper and only object of the will', he writes, 'is some action of ours' (E 258); in forming a volition one 17 'wills to number', say, or 'wills to walk' (C 405). Locke never says as much, but his overall theory is best read as requiring volitions to be thoughts without truth values. He contrasts 'Will' or 'the Power of Volition1 with 'Understanding' or 'the Power of Thinking' (E 128). Since 'Volition' is as much a 'Mode... £f thinking' as is 'Reasoning' or 'Judging' (E 227), however, the contrast is most plausibly taken as one between thoughts that do and thoughts that do not purport to represent the way the world is. Locke's distinction, to be examined below, between volitions and 'last judgements of the understanding' suggests the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:GOD'S KNOWLEDGE OF FUTURE CONTINGENT SINGULARS: A REPLY THEODORE J. KoNDOLEON Villanova University Villanova, Pennsylvania I N A RECENT article in The Thomist William Lane Craig has discussed certain aspects of Saint Thomas's teaching on God's knowledge of creatures. While for Craig Saint Thomas's concept of God's knowledge of vision (scientia visionis) is not fatalistic, his concept of God's knowledge of approbation (i.e., God's causal knowledge) is.1 Craig believes (...) that this latter type of divine knowledge implies fatalism since, on his reading, its causality determines everything that takes place in this universe. In developing his argument Craig makes a number of statements (and arguments) which are not only at variance with Saint Thomas's expressed thought but which, I believe, are also clearly mistaken. Some of his errors are of a trivial sort and may in part be due to the fact that he occasionally misspeaks himself. One can single out in this regard his statement, on page 78, that "God's knowledge does not necessitate an effect because an effect may be impeded by its secondary cause," and also his observation, on page 79, that "God's knowledge is the cause of everything God knows." 2 However, there are a number of more 1 See William Lane Craig, "Aquinas on God's Knowledge of Future Contingents," The Thomist, 54 (January 1990): 33-79. For his discussion of Thomas's teaching on God's knowledge of vision see particularly pp. 32-67; on Aquinas's teaching on God's causal knowledge, pp. 68-79. 2 Contrary to Craig's way of stating this, Aquinas never speaks about an effect being impeded by its secondary cause. Rather, a contingent cause may be impeded from producing its effect by the intervention of another secondary cause. Examples would be frost preventing the production or development of the fruit of certain plants, or a drug preventing the development of a normal embryo. For Aquinas's discussion of a contingent cause see De veritate, q. 2, a. 12, c. and also Summa contra Gentiles, Book I, chap. 67. Concerning 117 118 THEODORE J. KONDOLEON serious errors to be found in his discussion of God's knowledge of creatures, and it is to these that I would like to address this reply. I. In discussing the topic of God's knowledge of future contingent singulars, Craig considers Saint Thomas's explanation as to how it is possible for God to know what is future and contingent (i.e., something which, from the standpoint of its proximate cause, can either come to be or not come to be). As generally known, his explanation points out that while what is future and contingent with respect to its proximate cause(s)-and thus also from our vantage point-is something indeterminate in being and therefore in truth and knowability, as falling within the scope of God's eternal knowledge it is something already present (and thus determined to one of two opposites) and, consequently, can be known with certitude.3 In this Thomistic view, then, there is no past or future in God's knowledge of created things; everything is known at once and as present. At this point in his discussion, when he has yet to consider Saint Thomas's position that God's knowledge of things is also a causal knowledge (i.e., a knowledge which involves God's will as First Cause of His creatures and their actions), Craig claims that Saint Thomas employs the Boethian notion of God's eternity, and thus of His timeless knowledge, in order to " defuse the threat of fatalism." ' He holds this view because, he argues, otherwise, i.e., if God's knowledge were something past with respect to a future contingent singular (so that God could be said to " foreknow " it), that future would be something which would necessarily come to be-either that or else God could be mistaken-and therefore not truly Craig's second observation, it is not true to say, even of God's causal knowledge, that God's knowledge is the cause of everything God knows since God knows many things He will never cause... (shrink)

Although the family is the safest environment for each member, sometimes violence and abuse can come from the family members. Violence causes family relationships to deteriorate as in all other relationships among people. Sibling violence, as a form of domestic violence, can sometimes have dire consequences that can result in family breakup, death or long-term loss of one of the siblings. In this study, sibling violence, which has the potential to harm family relations in such a way, will (...) be discussed in the context of two stories in the Qurʾān. It is aimed to contribute to other disciplines that study on this subject by examining the attitude of Islam against this violence, which affects the family, and the solutions of the Qur’ān to sibling violence. These stories in the Qur’ān are the story of Prophet Adam’s two sons who narrate an incident of violence that result in the brother killing his brother, and the story of Prophet Joseph and his brothers who narrate the sibling violence resulting in long-term loss. Both stories provide clues to the prevention of violence in the light of the causes of sibling violence and the behavior of the victim sibling in the development of events. In addition, because of the fact that these stories have taken place in the family of the prophets, they give people the message that sibling violence can happen in any family.Summary: Because of the social nature of the mankind, it must live in structured societies. Family is the medium for him where he is born, raised, socializes and prepares for his future life. It is normal sentiments of love, mercy and tolerance which dominate in a family. But despite this, it is possible for a family member to be a transgressor against another family member’s rights. Emotions like jealousy and hostility can cause violence between siblings. Psychologists generally attribute the source of this kind of violence to the parents’ failure to show equal love and affection to all children. While this is an important cause for violence among the siblings, craving for attention and acceptance from society, trying to achieve material and sensual superiority and desire for social success can incite feelings of envy among the siblings. While feelings of jealousy is unproblematic when its intensity can be considered normal, it can cause psychological imbalance if it increases to the level beyond manageable limits. If the latter case occurs, this produces a state of mind where a sibling becomes capable of committing every act of transgression to another sibling, which is the most important cause for the violence among siblings.Archetypical stories of Cain and Abel, and Prophet Joseph in the Qur’ān provide some clues pertaining to recognition and prevention of violence among the siblings. In these two parables, the real reason for envy does not lie in the other sibling. According to the Qur’ān, the true reason for this envy is attributed exclusively to the transgressor. In the parable of Cain and Abel, source of the problem between the siblings is the sacrificial offering to Allah. While the offering of Abel was accepted, Cain’s was not. Cain felt jealous and threatened his brother with death. Facing with his brother’s threat, Abel stayed firm and peaceful, said to his brother that if he were to attack him, he will not retaliate even for self-defence. He reminded Cain that his envy and anger was not due to him, Abel. Abel reminded Cain that the act that Cain was contemplating was a great sin in Allah’s eyes and that it is punishable by eternal hellfire. Cain, despite these warnings, went on to implement his intention of murder successfully.When we inspect the parable we can see that Abel was free from any guilt on his part for his brother’s envy which is the source of his transgression. His sacrifice was accepted because Abel was among the pious and this doesn’t harm or effect negatively Cain in anyway. Therefore the main cause for the jealousy of Cain is his unworthiness in the eyes of Allah, in reality, the reason is solely Cain himself. Therefore it is totally unfair when Cain put the blame on his brother Abel. By the way of this example, the Qur’ān reminds mankind not to blame others for his problems and to take responsibility. Envy, which is the main reason for violence among siblings, will cloud judgment and prevent clear thinking. In the parable of Cain and Abel, the Qur’ān recommends not to taunt the already jealous sibling by way of words and actions and instead, encourages warning against the grave consequences of evil intentions both in this world and in the hereafter. In the parable of Prophet Joseph, because of jealousy of their father from Joseph, bigger brothers of Joseph planned to kill him but they give up on the idea of killing him and instead they dumped him in a well. Later on in the parable, some merchant finds Joseph and brings him to Egypt. There, Joseph becomes a high ranking statesman and meets with his older brothers. Because of the famine, older brothers are in need of Joseph for food and asks him for it, without knowing that the person they are asking from is their little brother, Joseph. Although Joseph faces with his brothers on a superior position his behavior exemplifies the best course of action to end violence among the siblings. In order to remove animosity and callousness from his brothers’ heart, the gradual plan that Joseph had implemented is a great example for healing the wounds that violence among the siblings can cause. It is unreasonable to expect all the animosity and jealousy that brothers of Joseph held for years to go away completely in a moment. Prophet Joseph did not remind his brothers of their crime, on the contrary he was very generous to them. He brought their father and their brother Benjamin to Egypt and in front of them Prophet Joseph forgave his older brothers for the crimes they had committed against him. In this way, Prophet Joseph prevented his brothers potentially denying every transgression they did if he were to confront them in their first meeting, and made them ready to accept their evil deeds.Parables of Cain and Abel and Prophet Joseph are important for recognizing that envy can destroy the mercy that the siblings innately have for each other. It is understood from the parables that envy must be controlled and violence can’t be realized under any circumstances. It is clear from these parables that violence is never a solution for the jealousy among the siblings. A positive and viable solution would be for Cain to seek Allah’s approval instead of killing Abel and for brothers of Joseph this would be to earn their father’s love and respect. Introspection and analysis regarding possible reasons for jealousy and trying to resolve them and striving to be a better human, sibling, or child is a solution prescribed by the Qur’ān. Also, importance of speaking in a soft tone with the person who is experiencing intense jealousy, avoiding provocative language and behavior and trying every possible way to set this person straight is emphasized. The Qur’ān reminds us through these two parables that the human nature is prone to evil suggestions from the satan and for this reason humans need generous and benevolent help from others in order to clear themselves from these evil temptations. (shrink)

Starting with the example of irreducible quantum events, it is shown that other kinds of events also have an element of randomness. The hallmark of “genuine” events is their irreducibility to some previous conditions. A connection between this concept and the traditional notion of contingency is explored. This concept is further brought in connection with Peirce’s Firstness. Such a notion raises the problem of how to understand causation. It seems that causes deal with individual happenings. In (...) fact, laws are only general, while causal explanations necessarily involve localization in space and time and therefore indexical connection with events. When we deal with causes, we necessarily deal with their effects, which are shifted in space and delayed in time and so do not reveal the singularity of the event that is at the origin of the process. Our descriptions of events are really about the effects of the events, not the events themselves. This helps us to define what events are in all generality: an event is what cannot be fully described by our means although we have reason to assume that it is real. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:15 LOCKE, HUME AND THE NATURE OF VOLITIONS 1. The concept of a volition plays a key role in the theories of mind that both Locke and Hume devise. It is central to the views each develops on the nature of action and of explanations of actions, on the character of practical reasoning, on the nature of desire, on the ways in which, most usefully, to (...) categorize the several kinds of mental states and events. Without attending closely to their concepts of volition, one cannot get quite clear about the views of each, and the considerations thought to support those views, on the vexed questions of free action and of responsibility. Whether it be Locke or Hume, then, there is good reason to scrutinize what he says of volitions. Why take them together? The principal reason is that the views of each, when considered closely, throw a quite considerable light on those of the other (or so I hope to show). But there is a philosophical point as well. A theory of volitions more adequate than either proposes must borrow from each. What is amenable to being borrowed, and what ought to be borrowed, are fairly readily seen when the two theories are put face to face. I concentrate on three central issues: the question whether volitions are thoughts; the relationship of volition to practical reasoning; the links between volitions and their effects. Hume's views on these topics are to be found chiefly in the Treatise and the first Enquiry; Locke's, of course, in the Essay. Locke's recently published correspondence with the Dutch theologian Philippus van Limborch is, however, essential reading here, and I have made extensive use of it. 16 2. Locke and Hume agree that volitions are indefinable psychological primitives that must be invoked in an analysis of voluntary action (T 399, EHU 69, E 249). They agree, too, in a number of the things that each says in his efforts to characterize volitions. They differ, however, on a fundamental point, Hume's volitions are 'internal impression[s]' (T 399); Locke's are 'thought[s] of the Mind' (E 235). As internal impressions Humean volitions are feelings akin to, but not 'properly speaking' (T 399) instances of, passions. They are like the 'direct passions' (desire and aversion, grief and joy, hope and fear) in two respects: they are 'immediate effects of pain and pleasure' (T 399); they are 'propense and averse motions of the mind' (T 574), and thus bear a special relation to action. Though they are not thoughts they have causal, thus contingent, links to thoughts, including in particular thoughts whose content specify the so-called 'immediate object of volition' (E 66). As 'distinct impression[s]' (T 625) volitions do not modify the thoughts of their objects in the logically intimate way in which, in Hume's view, the feeling essential to belief 'modiffies] the conception' (T 625) of what is believed. Hume frequently compares volitions to commands (T 623, 629, 632; EHU 48, 64, 65, 67, 68). He also, not surprisingly, denies them truth values: because they are not capable of 'an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to real existence and matter of fact' it is 'impossible... they can be pronounced either true or false' (T 458; compare T 415). Locke's volitions are thoughts, not feelings; and they have their own contents and objects. '[T]he proper and only object of the will', he writes, 'is some action of ours' (E 258); in forming a volition one 17 'wills to number', say, or 'wills to walk' (C 405). Locke never says as much, but his overall theory is best read as requiring volitions to be thoughts without truth values. He contrasts 'Will' or 'the Power of Volition1 with 'Understanding' or 'the Power of Thinking' (E 128). Since 'Volition' is as much a 'Mode... £f thinking' as is 'Reasoning' or 'Judging' (E 227), however, the contrast is most plausibly taken as one between thoughts that do and thoughts that do not purport to represent the way the world is. Locke's distinction, to be examined below, between volitions and 'last judgements of the understanding' suggests the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:66 IN DEFENCE OF KEMP SMITH D. C. Stove argues against Kemp Smith's contention that Hume's philosophy "was intended not to subvert but to endorse our natural beliefs" in general, and our belief in the Causal Principle in particular. His arguments are insufficient. Kemp Smith does not need to deny that the falsity of the Causal Principle is believed by Hume to be possible in the strongest of Stove's (...) three suggested 2 senses: it is not merely self-consistent, but the Principle is unverifiable and unconfirmable in the sense that no empirical proposition is relevant to its truth. However, to say flatly that its falsity is possible is to say that it is not impossible in any way at all; and that is what is at stake both in Hume's letter to Stewart and in the use Kemp Smith makes of it. If Hume had written a letter to Stewart or to any scientific enquirer urging him to desist from his labours on the ground that "something may begin to exist, or start into being without a cause," he would have been a fool, and in representing Hume's position in this way Stewart is in fact calling Hume a fool. It is not surprising that Hume is indignant. The problem is whether, and how, one can hold both that the Causal Principle is undeniably true and that it can be supported neither by deductive nor by inductive argument, and whether Hume on the most reasonable interpretation of his published works held both these views. Clues to the answer lie in the in tradition of sceptical philosophy, and in the difference between a cause and a reason. Hume's philosophy is indeed, as he says, 'very sceptical'. But scepticism is a kind of philosophy with a long history, from Sextus Empiricus to Bayle, and it is reasonable to suppose that Hume was aligning himself with this position, especially since so much of the argument in 67 the Treatise is derived from Bayle. But sceptics do not behave otherwise than ordinary men. Scepticism is not directed against everyday beliefs but again.st arguments: this is a point on which Sextus insists." It would not be the part of a sceptic to doubt that every event has a cause, but to refute all arguments purporting to show that such is the case. To assert "that any thing might arise without a Cause" would not be scepticism, but an inverse dogmatism: to infer from a philosophical argument a belief about the real world that is at variance with everyday belief. The crucial step in Stove's argument occurs in his gloss of Hume's claim that he had maintained "that our Certainty of the Falsehood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration; but from another Source" phrase "sic., experience, of course". This could be misleading. It could mean that Hume here claims that experience gives us reason to believe that the Causal Principle is true; and this Hume has denied, as Stove urges ad loc. But nothing in what Hume says in his letter requires us to interpret him thus. And his sceptical principles tell against it: an argument from experience, whether inductive or by analogy or whatever, is still an argument and thus liable to sceptical attack. What Hume could mean, and what Kemp Smith took him to mean, is that our experience causes us to regard the principle as necessary: experience is not a premise in any sort of argument at all, but a causal explanation for a universal propensity to believe in the Causal Principle. It is true that Hume's citation as analogues of such empirical affirmations as "That Caesar existed" is misleading. But it is not in fact the case that Hume represents these as in any way 'parallel' with the Causal Principle: he says only that, like it, They are believed without recourse to Reason and Intuition. In 68 point of fact, Stove is going a bit far when he says that this is (like "There is such an Island as Sicily") an observation-statement; but that point is hardly relevant here. It is worth noting that in the offending passage... (shrink)

Using the language of common-sense psychology, we explain human behavior by citing its reason or purpose, and this is central to our understanding of human beings as agents. On the other hand, since human beings are physical objects, human behavior should also be explicable in the language of physical science, in which causal accounts cast human beings as collections of physical particles. CSP talk of mind and agency, however, does not seem to mesh well with the language of (...) physical science.In Teleological Realism, Scott Sehon argues that CSP explanations are not causal but teleological -- that they cite the purpose or goal of the behavior in question rather than an antecedent state that caused the behavior. CSP explanations of behavior, Sehon claims, are answering a question different from that answered by physical science explanations, and, accordingly, CSP explanations and physical science explanations are independent of one another. Common-sense facts about mind and agency can thus be independent of the physical facts about human beings, and, contrary to the views of most philosophers of mind in recent decades, common-sense psychology will not be subsumed by physical science.Sehon defends his non-reductionist account of mind and agency in clear and nontechnical language. He carefully distinguishes his view from forms of "strong naturalism" that would seem to preclude it. And he evaluates key objections to teleological realism, including those posed by Donald Davidson's influential article "Actions, Reasons and Causes" and some put forth by more recent proponents of causal theories of action. CSP, Sehon argues, has a different realm than does physical science; the normative notions that are central to CSP are not reducible to physical facts and laws. (shrink)

According to the causal theory of action---briefly, "causalism"---actions are distinguished from other events in the world by being caused by mental states of the agent. I argue that the standard argument for causalism is in fact unsuccessful, and then sketch an alternative account of action. The dominance of causalism is largely due to an apparently simple argument of Donald Davidson's: the only way to make sense of the connection between an action and the reason for which (...) it is performed is to suppose that the reason causes the action. In response, I first show that Davidson's argument has a more complicated structure than is usually supposed, turning essentially on consideration of cases in which an agent acts on one reason rather than another. Davidson's proposal is that causalism offers the best explanation of this contrastive phenomenon. ;I argue that, in order to explain Davidson's contrastive phenomenon successfully, the causalist must appeal to the additional notion of motivational strength. This undermines the causalist's argument because noncausalists can also invoke the idea that some reasons are motivationally stronger than others to explain Davidson's contrastive phenomenon. Thus, whichever side has the better account of motivational strength will have the more plausible theory of action. Standard theories of motivational strength, including causal theories, are all arguably unsatisfactory, but I conclude that a version of interpretationism offers a better account of motivational strength, suitable for a noncausal theory of action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:15 LOCKE, HUME AND THE NATURE OF VOLITIONS 1. The concept of a volition plays a key role in the theories of mind that both Locke and Hume devise. It is central to the views each develops on the nature of action and of explanations of actions, on the character of practical reasoning, on the nature of desire, on the ways in which, most usefully, to (...) categorize the several kinds of mental states and events. Without attending closely to their concepts of volition, one cannot get quite clear about the views of each, and the considerations thought to support those views, on the vexed questions of free action and of responsibility. Whether it be Locke or Hume, then, there is good reason to scrutinize what he says of volitions. Why take them together? The principal reason is that the views of each, when considered closely, throw a quite considerable light on those of the other (or so I hope to show). But there is a philosophical point as well. A theory of volitions more adequate than either proposes must borrow from each. What is amenable to being borrowed, and what ought to be borrowed, are fairly readily seen when the two theories are put face to face. I concentrate on three central issues: the question whether volitions are thoughts; the relationship of volition to practical reasoning; the links between volitions and their effects. Hume's views on these topics are to be found chiefly in the Treatise and the first Enquiry; Locke's, of course, in the Essay. Locke's recently published correspondence with the Dutch theologian Philippus van Limborch is, however, essential reading here, and I have made extensive use of it. 16 2. Locke and Hume agree that volitions are indefinable psychological primitives that must be invoked in an analysis of voluntary action (T 399, EHU 69, E 249). They agree, too, in a number of the things that each says in his efforts to characterize volitions. They differ, however, on a fundamental point, Hume's volitions are 'internal impression[s]' (T 399); Locke's are 'thought[s] of the Mind' (E 235). As internal impressions Humean volitions are feelings akin to, but not 'properly speaking' (T 399) instances of, passions. They are like the 'direct passions' (desire and aversion, grief and joy, hope and fear) in two respects: they are 'immediate effects of pain and pleasure' (T 399); they are 'propense and averse motions of the mind' (T 574), and thus bear a special relation to action. Though they are not thoughts they have causal, thus contingent, links to thoughts, including in particular thoughts whose content specify the so-called 'immediate object of volition' (E 66). As 'distinct impression[s]' (T 625) volitions do not modify the thoughts of their objects in the logically intimate way in which, in Hume's view, the feeling essential to belief 'modiffies] the conception' (T 625) of what is believed. Hume frequently compares volitions to commands (T 623, 629, 632; EHU 48, 64, 65, 67, 68). He also, not surprisingly, denies them truth values: because they are not capable of 'an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to real existence and matter of fact' it is 'impossible... they can be pronounced either true or false' (T 458; compare T 415). Locke's volitions are thoughts, not feelings; and they have their own contents and objects. '[T]he proper and only object of the will', he writes, 'is some action of ours' (E 258); in forming a volition one 17 'wills to number', say, or 'wills to walk' (C 405). Locke never says as much, but his overall theory is best read as requiring volitions to be thoughts without truth values. He contrasts 'Will' or 'the Power of Volition1 with 'Understanding' or 'the Power of Thinking' (E 128). Since 'Volition' is as much a 'Mode... £f thinking' as is 'Reasoning' or 'Judging' (E 227), however, the contrast is most plausibly taken as one between thoughts that do and thoughts that do not purport to represent the way the world is. Locke's distinction, to be examined below, between volitions and 'last judgements of the understanding' suggests the... (shrink)

This chapter discusses the view according to which human actions are explained teleologically and, therefore, all causal accounts of action explanation are, in a sense, rivals. This view is referred to here as “anticausalist teleologism” (AT). Teleological explanations of human actions are explanations in terms of aims, goals, or purposes of human agents. After providing some background on AT, an objection raised by Mele to a proposal George Wilson makes in developing his version of AT (...) is presented and dissected. Scott Sehon’s recent reply to Mele’s objection is then presented, after which, Donald Davidson’s challenge to anticausalists about action explanation comes next. In conclusion, this chapter presents a reply to this challenge proposed by Sehon, which is explained in detail. (shrink)

This paper argues that both teleological and causal concepts are required for explanations of intentional actions. It argues against ‘causalism’, the idea that action explanations are essentially causal. This requires analyzing Mele’s Q-Signals-from-Mars argument that having a purpose and behaving so as to achieve it aren’t sufficient to explain an intentional action. Though Mele’s example shows that external causal interference can defeat the claim that an intentional action has been performed, this is consistent with teleological concepts being (...) required (even if not sufficient) for action explanation. Mele’s example would work even if causalism were true. But causalism is false. Causalism depends on the idea that ‘agents always do what they want’ can be understood as saying agents have mental states, desires, that cause their behavior. But intentional actions involve what agents want only in the sense that actions have purposes, which are not mental states and cannot be the causes of actions. To perform an intentional action is to pursue some purpose in some way. This paper argues that neither the reference to the purpose that explains why the action was performed, nor the causal account of how this purpose was pursued, can be eliminated. (shrink)

In empirically informed research on action explanation, philosophers and developmental psychologists have recently proposed a teleological account of the way in which we make sense of people’s intentional behavior. It holds that we typically don’t explain an agent’s action by appealing to her mental states but by referring to the objective, publically accessible facts of the world that count in favor of performing the action so as to achieve a certain goal. Advocates of the teleological account claim that this (...) strategy is our main way of understanding people’s actions. I argue that common motivations mentioned to support the teleological account are insufficient to sustain its generalization from children to adults. Moreover, social psychological studies, combined with theoretical considerations, suggest that we do not explain actions mainly by invoking publically accessible, reason-giving facts alone but by ascribing mental states to the agent. (shrink)

With the 21st century, we are witnessing the mass spread of the communication technologies and social media revolution. Interactive networks built on a global scale have led to the formation of a virtual world of reality that is connecting the whole world. With the global spread of communication networks, the question of whether social media points to a new public sphere has been raised. Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are nowadays seen as a place where political (...) campaigns are carried out, causing the destruction of authoritarian regimes, organizing global protests and innovation culture, and discussing political, social and cultural changes. What gives social media a similar quality to the agora of Ancient Greek city-states is the characteristic of been a place where citizens come together and talk about issues that are considered to be public, eventhough in a virtual reality. This work, following the Arendtian sense, discusses whether social media really is a place where public issues are discussed, common ideas are produced and transparency prevails. In her work "The Human Condition", Arendt makes a fundamental distinction between private and public sphere based on human activities. By conceiving the activities that she describes as labour and work in relation to the private sphere, Arendt tackles the activity of action through linking it to public sphere. Arendt defines the public sphere as a sphere of freedom and a political sphere. The public sphere consists of equal people without hierarchy, who come together with their completely free will. According to Arendt, the condition for the public sphere to be possible is transparency and commonality. Firstly; it has a wide transparency in the sense that something have to be seen and heard by others, and the second is that it points to a common world that belongs to everyone, except for the part that is privately owned. Considering the public sphere in relation to the transparency not a direct transfer of things that happen in the private or intimate sphere. It is precisely related to the fact that something pertaining to the private exhibits a presence within the world of public and the fact that the private acquires a public chatacter. This does not mean that the public sphere is a sphere in which the private and intimate are directly transferred. According to Arendt, leading a private life as a whole will lead to the lack of what is necessary to be a true person. It also leads to the lack of a common world that unites and separates them. Arendt thinks that with the modern period, what belongs to the purely private and intimate sphere expands and causes the collapse of the public. The collapse of the public sphere in the modern period; It has caused both the loss of difference and interaction and the emergence of individuals who are increasingly alike, unable to think and act. In this kind of society, action has left its place to behavior, difference to standartization and thought to obedience. Arendt sees the public sphere as a sphere where public affairs are discussed, while the private sphere is a sphere where intimate and private activities take place. Arendt argues that with modern society the distinction between public and private has became indistinct , and as a third sphere, the social sphere has swallowed up both the public and the private. The social sphere has removed the distinction between the public transparency and commonality of the public and the privacy of the private sphere and activities. This study considers social media as a sphere where public issues are discussed. It also dıscusses the private sphere events and the most intimate issues. It claims that social media is not a new public sphere as it is cosidered, but it is a social sphere in which the distinction between private and public in the Arendtian sense is become indistinct. In this context, the study seeks to answer the following questions: How does the distinction between public and private spheres, which is central in Arendt's thought, look like in today’s world? Is it possible to talk about a public sphere in the modern age? Can social media be considered as a public sphere? Or is social media a sphere of freedom and a political sphere? Does social media allow discussions on public issues? Is social media a non-hierarchical nature open to the free participation of everyone, difference and plurality? (shrink)

This book comprises eleven essays in the philosophy of action, six of which were previously published. The book has a fairly extensive index. The essays are arranged in four groups. The first group contains two essays on the individuation of action. The second contains four essays that argue for the view that what makes an event an action is, not how it is caused, but that it is, or begins with, a volition, “an intrinsically actional” mental event. The third (...) contains three essays that defend the view that free and responsible action is incompatible with determinism, largely by arguing for a noncausal account of reasons explanation of action. The final group contains two essays on intention formation and rationality; the first argues that it is sometimes rational to form intentions that are inconsistent with each other or with one’s beliefs; the second argues that an important sort of practical reasoning has as its conclusion the forming of an intention for action, rather than the adopting of a belief as to what one should do. (shrink)

The main purpose of this study was to determine the accumulation of the tradition of political texts (Siyasatnāma) in the context of freedom of expression and to discuss the potential of creating new perspectives accordingly. One of the most important criticisms of modernity towards traditional structures is the claim that people are subjected to many limitations on social, cultural and religious grounds. This criticism, which mainly focuses on limiting the freedom of action, also comes across as preventing the expression (...) of thoughts. While traditional understandings had such an approach, they aimed not only to preserve or strengthen the position of a particular authority, but also to prevent problems that may arise from an individual and social point of view. However, it is not possible to say that these thoughts always remain true to the stated intention. In this context, considering traditional understandings with their historical contexts should not only aim to gain an intellectual knowledge about a certain period or civilization. The main goal should be to evaluate the accumulated knowledge critically and to achieve meaningful results from this field. While determining the framework of the study, it was thought that reading through the political texts would provide such an opportunity. The study focused primarily on the intellectual infrastructure of freedom of expression and, accordingly, included general assessments of the issue in political texts and touched on the concept of authority, which is of great importance for determining the scope of freedom. In particular, it is emphasized on which power the administrators, who are at the head of the administrative power, base their authority on and from which principles the boundaries of this should be determined. It is seen that the political texts related to political life, oriented to ideal principles and taking into account reality, contain important assessments of the source of authority in terms of creating a ground of legitimacy or making sense of the existing situation. When evaluating the issue, it is highly evident that politicians point out that the main purpose of the existence and use of authority is the idea of order. In this context, what kind of precautions have to be taken in case of violation of the determined borders to maintain order is one of the most important issues of the policy books. Among these precautions, the idea of limiting all freedoms, especially freedom of expression, has an important place. The article also points out the possible contributions of the suggestions made in this context to the reactions that may arise in different political and social situations. At the beginning of the mentioned contributions, there are assessments on overcoming an obstacle that causes rulers not to perceive some facts adequately. This creates a serious obstacle to a healthy communication with different layers of society, and can be expressed as a masking effect. One of the main issues that the article focuses on is the suggestions of politicians on how to use the freedom of expression of the broad masses that make up the body of society. These suggestions state that the governed also have responsibilities at the point of determining the framework of the dialectical relationship between the different dimensions of the social structure. The social understandings that developed in the post-modern world have a nature that puts the individual in the foreground much more than traditional approaches. This may have produced positive effects to some extent. However, it seems that a serious erosion in the culture of people’s coexistence occurred on this occasion. The problematic use of freedom in general and freedom of expression in particular may be one reason for this. From the point of view of the states that are the highest social structures, it can also be said that these problems are increasing day by day. Therefore, the medium-term result of the desire to ensure individual freedoms may sometimes appear as chaos, and the long-term result may appear as the emergence of a more authoritarian structure again. In fact, these authoritarianism tendencies can gain strength by being based on reasonable grounds, such as misuse of freedoms of expression. It should be noted that to overcome these problems, political texts can help to prevent major social breakdowns by providing important alternatives to the disinterest which was created by the modern era. In this context, the study also touches on the conditions under which freedom of expression can be restricted according to political statements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CAUSALITY AND GENERALITY IN THE TREATISE AND THE TRACTATUS In the Tractatus Wittgenstein cryptically rejects the existence of a causal connection (or relation or nexus) : 5.135There is no possible way of making an inference from the existence of one situation to the existence of another, entirely different situation. 5.136There is no causal nexus to justify such an inference. 5.1361 We cannot infer the events of the future (...) from those of the present. Belief stition. Belief in the causal nexus is super1 And he later proceeds to add: 6.37 There is no compulsion making one thing happen because another has happened. The only necessity that exists is logical necessity. What he is claiming can be understood in terms of the "Logical Atomism* of the Tractatus. Atomic sentences, composed of a monadic predicate or a relational predicate and a suitable number of subject terms, represent situations or possible facts. The existence of a represented situation is the ground of truth for (or condition for the truth of or explanation of the truth of) the representing atomic sentence. We can consider 2 such atomic situations or atomic facts to be composed of a monadic property or relational property and an appropriate number of particulars. (This is a matter of some debate among interpreters of the Tractatus, but that issue does not really affect the question at issue in this paper. So, I will simply treat the view in the Tractatus along the lines of Russell's more explicit version of logical atomism in his lectures of 1918.) The world, according to Wittgenstein, is made up of such facts. This is the point of: 1.11The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.12The facts in logical space are the world. 1.13The world divides into facts. Consider, then, the claim that a's being F is the cause of its being G. This suggests that we construe causality in terms of a relation between the situations represented by 'Fa' and 'Ga'. With 1C representing a relation or nexus of causality, we could express that situation by: (1)C(Fa, Ga). The existence of the situation represented by (1) would then ground or explain the truth of (1). But that would mean that we recognize a relation of causality and causal relations between facts or situations. I cannot here argue, but will simply assert, that Wittgenstein's logical atomism in the Tractatus is incompatible with the recognition of relations between facts. However, one point that will be relevant to the concerns of this paper is easy to see. Logical atomism involves the claim — 1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same. This is not compatible with the recognition of the relation C and a fact grounding the truth of (1), for then Fo and Ga would not be items that were "independent" in the sense of 1.21. Hence, one who holds Wittgenstein's views about the independence of atomic facts cannot recognize causal relations between such facts. Thus, no fact is represented by (1) and C cannot relate atomic facts. The same results would hold if one suggested, in place of (1), that there was a fact corresponding to (2)(X)(Fx * Gx), where we read the arrow as the "causal" arrow — anything's being F causes it to be G. For, if there were a fact corresponding to (2), it would guarantee the link between the purported atomic facts Fa and Ga, since (3)Fa + Ga would be a logical consequence of (2), and we are back to a case like (1), with the arrow replacing 'C. (2) would also be problematic in that it would be some sort of "general" fact, which Wittgenstein also rejects. Thus, as Wittgenstein sees it there is no basis in the world for the explanation of causal statements. If the sentence (4)' (x) (Fx O Gx) ' is a statement of causal law is true, it is so simply because the list of atomic facts will contain the atomic sentence 'Ga' if it contains 'Fa'. That is, (4) is true, not because of any special fact corresponding to (5)(X... (shrink)

The research analyzes the social ontology of the American philosopher B. Epstein. Social ontology studies the nature of the social world: what are its main elements and how they come together. There are different theories in modern social ontology: the theory of structuration, the theory of communicative action, social constructivism, critical realism. B. Epstein opposes psychological theories of social ontology and ontological individualism in explaining the social world. B. Epstein distinguishes between ontological questions about the social world and causal relationships (...) between events. The initial category of social ontology for American philosopher is a social fact. To establish a social fact, two actions are necessary: to give an ontological explanation of the existing social fact and to find facts that determine the conditions necessary for a social fact. Accordingly, B. Epstein distinguishes between two projects: the project of the foundation of a social fact and the project of fixing a social fact. The project of the foundation of a social fact provides an ontological explanation of a social fact, studies the conditions for the presence of social facts. The fixation project explores what gives rise to the conditions of the basis for social facts. The ground relation and the fixation relation are not causal relationships. A social fact must have diachronic constituent elements, which is, in particular, a test of social theory for truth. The article also discusses the theory of social facts by J. Serle. The theory of J. Serle B. Epstein refers to a psychological concept based on the collective acceptance of certain rules by the community. This position does not seem to be entirely correct, since J. Searle, in understanding the nature of a social fact, relies on social institutions, and the fact itself refers to institutional facts. (shrink)

The experience of causation is a pervasive product of the human mind. Moreover, the experience of causing an event alters subjective time: actions are perceived as temporally shifted towards their effects [Haggard, P., Clark, S., & Kalogeras, J.. Voluntary action and conscious awareness. Nature Neuroscience, 5, 382-385]. This temporal shift depends partly on advance prediction of the effects of action, and partly on inferential "postdictive" explanations of sensory effects of action. We investigated whether a single factor of statistical (...) contingency could explain both these aspects of causal experience. We studied the time at which people perceived a simple manual action to occur, when statistical contingency indicated a causal relation between action and effect, and when no such relation was indicated. Both predictive and inferential "postdictive" shifts in the time of action depended on strong contingency between action and effect. The experience of agency involves a process of causal learning based on statistical contingency. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94 HUME ON THE PERCEPTION OF CAUSALITY Introduction Few issues in philosophy have generated as much debate and as little agreement as Hume's controversial theory of causality. The theory itself has been notoriously difficult to pin down, and not surprisingly empirical evidence has played a very minor role in the issue of what is meant by 'cause'. This is not, however, due to the fact that empirical tests (...) of the theory are hard to devise, but rather because such tests have usually been undertaken by experimental psychologists addressing slightly different issues and unaware of the philosophical implications of their work. However, recent signs of agreement on the overall nature of the theory (reviewed in Beauchamp and Rosenberg, chapter 1) allow a profitable integration of the theory with psychological research on the nature and importance of the perception of causal relations in conditioning. The significance of some of these experiments will be discussed later, and it will be argued that the factors Hume cited as being the essential determinants of causality, when complemented by the additional factor of the degree of contingency between the cause and the effect, correspond exactly with the factors known to affect conditioning; and therefore, that the laws of conditioning specify the properties that define causal relationships. Hume's Theory of Causality Hume was well aware of the importance of causal connections between events as a source of associations in the mind: 95 'Tis sufficient to observe, that there is no relation, which produces a stronger connexion in the fancy, and makes one idea more readily recall another, than the relation of cause and effect betwixt their objects (T II).2 In other words, if we believe a causal relationship exists between two events, then one of these events, the cause, will readily recall the other, the effect. The problem comes, of course, when we ask how it is that we know that a causal relationship exists. Obviously, a distinction must be made between causation as a physical property and causality as a mental idea. Traditionally, the following definitions have been made: causation is the physical property of one event causing another, such as one ball colliding with and causing the movement of a second ball. This property is part of the realm of mechanics and physics. Causality, on the other hand, describes the attribution by an organism of an effect to a cause. Such a distinction is supported by dictionary definitions. These two ways of thinking of what is meant by the term 'cause' are explicitly discussed by Hume. On the notion of physical causation, he says: We may define a CAUSE to be 'An object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resembling the former are plac'd in like relations of precedency and contiguity to those objects, that resemble the latter.' Of the mental idea of a causal relationship, on the other hand, he says: A CAUSE is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it, that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other. (T 170) Unfortunately, Hume was never less than imprecise in maintaining this dissociation, and often 96 he plainly confused the two definitions. Hence the academic controversy, between those who, like Kemp Smith, believe that the second definition represents a misguided attempt by Hume to analyse the causal relation on a mental level, 3 and those who see both definitions as essential (e.g. Beauchamp and Rosenberg). But surely the first definition simply represents Hume's view of causality as a philosophical relation, while the second represents his view of it as a psychological fact. And it is as much his intention to explain this fact, that ideas do not simply come into our heads for no apparent reason, but on the contrary are summoned up by preceding thoughts which they are associated, as it is to elucidate the philosophical relation. The extent of Hume's commitment to a psychological explanation of causal attribution has been recognised by Beauchamp and Rosenberg: 5 Hume plainly did develop a theory of causal... (shrink)

A formal, logical, theory of events is developed and used as the basis for a definition of causation and to provide a pragmatics for causal counterfactuals. The theory begins with with a logical formalization of events as represented in the planner strips. The resulting inertial theories include a common sense law of inertia and their pragmatics is based on the principle of chronological minimization. The theory of events is then developed by removing some of the simplifying assumptions (...) of the strips representation. To begin with the assumption that events always succeed, given that their preconditions are true when they occur, is dropped. Instead a common sense law of change is introduced with the effect that events normally succeed but may fail if some qualification (some unusual or unexpected condition) arises. The pragmatics of the resulting causal theories is provided by refining the pragmatics of inertial theories. In particular, where there is a conflict between change and inertia, preference is given to change. The resulting defeasibility of events makes it possible to remove the strips assumption that only one event occurs at any given time; as conflicting events now result in failure rather than inconsistency. However it is desirable to provide a means for adjudicating between conflicting events. Consequently the theory is extended so that qualification preferences can be specified and the pragmatics are refined accordingly. A further strips assumption is that the effects of an event are invariant. In order to remove this assumption a distinction is drawn between primary events, events of the kind described above, and secondary events. Secondary events are invoked by primary events in appropriate contexts, they are causally dependent on primary events and when successful produce the additional, variant, effects of the primary events which invoke them. As a result, both the context-dependent effects of events (their ramifications) and non-deterministic events (events whose outcome is uncertain) can be represented. The theory of primary and secondary events is then used as the basis for a definition of causation which can be seen as providing a formal account of Mackie's definition of a cause as an inus condition. A major theme of this paper is the conflict between the opposite but complementary principles of change and inertia. For much of the paper the emphasis is on restricting the effects of inertia and favouring change. The resulting imbalance becomes unnatural when considering the combined effects of several events. However the definition of causation makes it possible to state a law of change and inertia, which is used to regulate change and inertia and thus ensure a proper balance between them: while caused change is preferred to inertia, inertia is preferred to uncaused change. The theory is then used to provide a pragmatics for causal counterfactuals, thereby extending the representation of actual causal reasoning to counterfactual causal reasoning. This is illustrated by the use of causal counterfactuals in order to obtain explanations. (shrink)

A standard problem with the objectivity of social scientific theory in particular is that it is either self-referential, in which case it seems to undermine itself as ideology, or self-excepting, which seem pragmatically self-refuting. Using the example of Marx and his theory of ideology, I show how self-referential theories that include themselves in their scope of explanation can be objective. Ideology may be roughly defined as belief distorted by class interest. I show how Marx thought that natural science (...) was informed by class interest but not therefore necessarily ideology. Capitalists have an interest in understanding the natural world (to a point) so that they can manipulate it for profit. Their survival in the marketplace often depends on their competitive success in doing so. The fact that their interventions into nature, driven by class interest, often succeed, is evidence of the reliability and truth of their natural scientific theories. -/- With social science, capitalists have a partial interest in understanding the world, so that they may maintain their class power, ideological hegemony, and a reasonably stable and self-reproducing economy. Some bourgeois social science, Marx thinks, is therefore vindicated the same way that natural science is, because of, not despite, its success in promoting the class interests that cause it. But the capitalist class, Marx thinks, also has an interest in obfuscating the truth about the social world. It would undermine the stability of capitalism, for example, for the bourgeoisie to adopt what Marx thinks to be the correct social theory, Marxism, and proclaim to the world that capitalism is exploitative and unstable. Capitalism creates a a need for ideological social theories that, driven by class interest, represent capitalism as just, natural, inevitable, and unalterable. If Marxism is correct, while these theories may further capitalist interests, they will not withstand the test of time as capitalist exploitation and instability engenders countersystemic political action. -/- How, then can we know, according to Marx, that Marxism is correct, as applied to itself? In part it is whether it succeeds in further the class interests that cause it. If workers adopt bourgeois theories and Marxism is right, they will find themselves frustrated in pursuit of goals that they have, such as improving their well-being, and if Marxism is wrong, then those theories will help them further their own goals. Similarly with Marxism: if it is right, then workers who adopt it should in the long run have more success in furthering their own goals, and if not, then not. But it is question begging to say that our confidence in the reliability of Marxism is enhanced by its successful promotion of goals that capitalists do not have but (according to Marxism) workers do. To avoid this problem it is necessary to compare the relative success of each sort of theory in promoting the interests and needs that the respective classes have independently of the theory, as well as by the usual criteria of scientific theory choice. -/- Thus the Soviet variant of Marxism was fairly decisively refuted by its failure to generate the support of its own designated constituency necessary to grow and survive. Whether the same is true of other varieties of Marxism or of capitalist social theory, it is, as Zhou En Lai said when asked whether the French Revolution had succeeded, too soon to tell, at least in any definitive way. However, and this is the point of the paper, an objective test of Marxism is possible even though Marxism says that all theory is informed by class interest. The question is whether the interests are in discovering or obfuscating the truth. The point is not limited to Marx, but applies to any self-referential social scientific theory that includes itself in its scope. -/- Keywords: ideology, self-referential theory, self-reference, reliabilism, objectivity, Marx, Marxism, sociology of science, class interest, classes, capitalism, bourgeoisie, workers, working class, social theory of knowledge, confirmation of scientific theory. (shrink)

Miracles are extraordinary events that occur in the hands of those who claim to be prophets and which cannot be repeated by others. By these miracles, the prophets prove to society that the truths they convey are of divine origin. The miracles bestowed upon prophets vary according to the scope of the message they deliver and the interests and relevance of the societies with which they deal. Accordingly, Islamic scholars have classified miracles into three groups. The miraculous (...) events that appeal to people’s senses and lead them to the truths they convey by captivating their astonishment are called emotional miracles. Such miracles are events that occur without cause by overcoming the laws of nature, which are in the realm of causes, through the direct intervention of Allāh. On the other hand, spiritual miracles are truths that arouse the interlocutor’s interest in moral conduct and rational conclusions rather than in his sensory perceptions. Since these truths are attained through contemplation, they are not confined to a particular time and place, as in the case of emotional miracles. Some Kalām scholars have also considered the Prophets’ revelational knowledge about events that have occurred in the past or will occur in the future as miracles. They have studied these events that a person could not bear in the past or could not predict for the future under the title of "The news miracle" Among these three types of miracles, scholars have considered spiritual miracles superior to the others both in terms of the breadth of their influence and their continuity. That Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) is the last of the prophets, and that the teachings he received through revelation remain valid until the Day of Judgment necessitates that some of the miracles bestowed upon him must be of a quality that attracts the attention of all people. For this reason, Islamic scholars have placed the permanent miracle of Prophet Muhammad in the category of spiritual miracles. Scholars agree that his greatest miracle that has astonished all humankind is the Qurʾān. The clearest proof of this are the verses in the Qurʾān that challenge the opponents to bring a similar one. Allāh commands the disbelievers first to bring a similitude of the Qurʾān (al-Isrāʾ 17:88), then the equivalent of ten surahs (Hūd 11:13), and finally any surah of the Qurʾān (al-Baqara 2:23). Thus, the deniers are made aware of their inability to meet this challenge under gradually mitigating circumstances. Although scholars agree on the Qurʾānic miracle’s reality, they have expressed different views on its nature and essence. Thus, some scholars have argued that the miracle of the Qurʾān does not arise from some properties special to it but from the direct intervention of Allāh in human who have the ability to bring something like it. Most Islamic scholars, on the other hand, pointed out that the Qurʾān has aspects that exceed human powers in various fields, and they explained the inability to reply in the same vein to the Qurʾān due to its uniquenesses. Accordingly, some scholars have argued that miracles are perceptible, but it is never possible to define them. Other scholars, however, viewed miracles as an identifiable phenomenon and stated that the Qurʾān is an unusual and unique book in terms of verses. In this article, the questions Why was the Quran sent down as a miraculous Kalam with an attribute not found in other divine books and in what way did the Qurʾān make people weak to have a similar of it? were scrutinized, thus, some fundamental questions regarding the nature and character of iʿdjāz al-Qurʾān are elucidated. Since the topic deals with history and literature, scanning sources and data analysis were mainly used as methods in the research. The results can be summerized as follows: Although the Prophet was supported by both emotional and mental miracles in proving the Prophetic case, his greatest miracle is the Quran. The miracle of the Qurʾān is different from the other miracles, based on both the challenging verses and the Prophet's explanations of the miracles. The reason for this difference lies in the fact that the miracle of the Qurʾān is based on reason, unlike the other miracles which are emotional. Most Islamic scholars who deal with the miracle of the Qurʾān emphasize the issues of rhetoric, verse, style, and content. At this point, they emphasized that the Qurʾān has a unique expression and content that cannot be surpassed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Vulnerabilization and De-pathologizationTwo Philosophical SuggestionsHavi Carel, PhD (bio)Alastair Morgan raises useful and interesting philosophical critiques of the 'power-threat-meaning' framework proposed by Johnstone et al. (2018). In what follows I make two suggestions that may clarify some aspects of the debate. First, to broaden the notion of threat: we can think more broadly about adverse life events as the source of mental suffering by broadening the notion of threat (...) to what I term (in joint work with Ian James Kidd) Vulnerabilization. Second, I offer a distinction between de-pathologizing psychiatric disorders (i.e., removing stigma and negative stereotypes) and de-medicalizing such disorders (i.e., rescinding them from a diagnostic manual), in order to suggest that de-medicalizing on its own does not solve the problem of stigma, but de-pathologizing is a better candidate for achieving that.Threat and VulnerabilizationMorgan argues that the notion of threat is too limited to cover the breadth of psychiatric conditions and presentations. Threat and power may often be present, but how they lead to the appearance of behaviors that meet certain diagnostic criteria, is, as Morgan states, unclear at best and only a partial explanation for psychiatric disorders (it explains some behaviors, not all). I suggest we view threat as one type of a broader category, which I propose to term 'Vulnerabilization' (Carel & Kidd, 2021).Vulnerabilization refers to the effects of interactions and actions that impact on people by harming them and making them more vulnerable to future adversity. For example, removing a struggling child from a classroom causes them to miss the lesson, and if done repeatedly, harms their capacity to continue studying. Leaving a weak patient unsupervised in the wrong kind of bed may cause them to fall and become more vulnerable to disease and infection. Failing to organize accommodation for an inmate about to be released from prison forces them onto the streets and makes them more vulnerable to reoffending. The point of the term is to draw attention to the fact that one is not born vulnerable, to paraphrase de Beauvoir, [End Page 73] but becomes vulnerabilized through acts and omissions of others. Such acts and omissions often take place under the auspices of an institution—health care, social care, education, criminal justice, and so on—and are therefore intimately tied to ethoi and conduct of institutions (for a full analysis see Carel & Kidd, 2021).Vulnerabilization is a common theme in the testimonies of people who have negative experiences of social institutions, including, of course, health care institutions. Ideally, health care systems, schools, courts, and other major institutions scaffold and protect our agency, efficiently support our endeavors, and fairly and reliably disperse social and epistemic resources. But while some people have reliably satisfying experiences of social institutions, others find that many, if not all, of the institutions they encounter abandon, ignore, silence, harm, or even kill them and people like them (this is not an exaggeration: inquiries such as the Francis Report (2013) on the Mid Staffordshire patient neglect case and the Sheldon Review (n.d.) provide plentiful examples of that).1 When vulnerable people encounter institutions, they are often at an epistemic and communicative disadvantage that makes their interactions with institutions a source of suffering and injustice and indeed makes such people even more vulnerabilized. They may be affected by poverty, disability (especially mental ill health and learning disabilities), trauma, domestic violence, ill health, racism, sexism, ageism, or other sources of disadvantage, prejudice and discrimination; and, of course, they can be disadvantaged by a combination of such factors. Seeing power as the source of much suffering, social injustice and poor mental health is, of course, entirely in line with this view and I agree with Morgan that Johnstone et al. (2018) identified an important source of suffering.De-Medicalizing Versus De-PathologizingAnother important issue about psychiatric diagnoses is the stigma and negative stereotypes surrounding mental illness. Calls to de-medicalize a specific or all mental disorders is, in part, a call to remove stigma and negative stereotype from the behaviors and mental states that characterize a mental disorder. However, to de-medicalize... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard Eldridge SELF-UNDERSTANDING AND COMMUNITY IN WORDSWORTH'S POETRY Prior to die rise of modern science in die seventeenth century, to understand oneself was to know one's place in a ideologically organized universe. Human actions, together with natural events in general, were intelligible as aiming at the realization of given purposes or ends. To be a human person was to have a particular sort ofend: intellectual contemplation, according (...) to Aristotle, or oneness with God, according to Augustine. Self-knowledge becomes problematic, however, once events in nature are conceived in terms of the new physics to be only materially caused, not purposive. Given that human actions are events in nature, physical explanations then seem to be both necessary and sufficient for understanding them. It then becomes no longer possible to understand and explain one's actions as grounded in a partial grasp of an intelligible order of things. The self, it seems, is not real; bits of matter are, and their motions are mechanical, not plotted in a divinely ordered book ofnature. Thus the self or the person as a locus ofautonomous agency and understanding tends to come to be regarded as a fiction, not a physical something and not effective in the occurrence of events, so not a something at all. Human actions tend no longer to be seen as stemming from persons who can alter and are responsible for diem, but instead as complex events falling under physical laws. Yet despite the revolutionary revisions in the explanation of human action and die account of personhood seemingly forced by the new physics, self-knowledge is not something easily abandoned in favor ofknowledge of matter. It is not easy to conceive of one's actions as nonpurposive and of oneself as an unreal playdiing of fortune. Determinism seems incompatible with individual responsibility and hence with morality. Determinists make claims, investigate things, and regard diese activities as significant 273 274Philosophy and Literature and under their control, yet it is hard to see how this could be ifphysicalist determinism were true. Even within modern scientific understanding, autonomous creativity and human understanding are generally allotted roles in experimentation as well as in the rest of life. Yet this acknowledgment of human autonomy is seemingly in fundamental conflict with the commitment to the explanation of all events under physical laws that is characteristic of the modern scientific attitude.1 In the absence, however, of a well worked out description of how we can autonomously generate partial understandings of our proper ends as persons, understandings to which we then give expression in action, these objections will seem hollow, and the sense diat it must be possible to explain our actions fully under physical laws will press upon us. Ifwe cannot say how we can understand ourselves and our end in ways that inform our actions, then it will seem wise to abandon trying to understand agentive persons and to try instead to formulate the physical explanations of the motions of our bodies that are seemingly in order. Here Wordsworth's poetry can be of special value, for one of Wordsworth 's chief poetic concerns was to diagnose and locate skepticism about the possibility of self-understanding as a natural but temporary stage in the lives of persons who can grasp their proper end. Skepticism about action-guiding self-understanding, on his showing, is a plight of mind to which self-conscious end-directed beings succumb just as they most fully assert their particularity and separateness from others. Recovery from this plight occurs naturally when they come both to see that genuine autonomy requires community with others in a particular sort of expressive activity and to find themselves already so engaged. Further self-conscious and effective engagement in this expressive activity then emerges as the proper end of persons and as an end that is to be achieved communally. The scandal of philosophy, as Wordsworth would have it, is diat this natural development of die mind, a development Wordsworth traces throughout his own career, should be ignored in favor ofdie pursuit ofoverly abstract, narrow, and impoverishing causal explanations of our behavior. Wordsworth thus offers us a detailed and comprehensive description of how action-guiding self... (shrink)

This thesis mounts an attack against accounts of perceptual justification that attempt to analyze it in terms of evidential justifiers, and has defended the view that perceptual justification should rather be analyzed in terms of non-evidential justification. What matters most to perceptual justification is not a specific sort of evidence, be it experiential evidence or factive evidence, what matters is that the perceptual process from sensory input to belief output is reliable. I argue for this conclusion in the following way. (...) Chapter 1: The Arguments from HallucinationChapter 1 presents a skeptical argument from hallucination that starts from a premise about the alleged introspective indistinguishability of perception and hallucination, and concludes that perceptual knowledge is impossible. Underlying this argument are certain assumptions about the nature of perceptual justification, and different responses to the argument portray different views of perceptual justification. Evidentialism and dogmatism both reject the premise that appearances do not provide evidence sufficient for perceptual knowledge, although they disagree about the precise nature of the appearances. Epistemological disjunctivism rejects the premise that introspectively indistinguishable experiences provide the same evidence, while upholding the idea that some sort of evidence, namely factive evidence, is necessary for perceptual justification and knowledge. Process reliabilism rejects the premise that evidence is necessary for perceptual knowledge on the grounds that even perceptual justification can be obtained without evidence, as long as the cognitive process producing the belief is reliable.Chapter 2: EvidentialismChapter 2 starts by introducing some motivations for experientialist views of perceptual justification, such as evidentialism and dogmatism, which hold that conscious experiences evidentially justify perceptual beliefs. These motivations have to do with their ability to accommodate the New Evil Demon Intuition that demon-deceived subjects have justified perceptual beliefs and the Blindsight Intuition that blindsighters do not have justified perceptual beliefs. However, experientialist views are also faced with a Sellarsian dilemma: either experience is construed as non-propositional, but then the proposed evidential relation is unclear, or experience is construed as propositional, but then it is ad hoc to hold that they can evidentially justify without being justified themselves.Chapter 2 continues with a discussion of evidentialism, which grasps the first horn of this dilemma. I argue that evidentialism cannot adequately explain why a non-propositional experience constitutes evidence for this rather than that belief, and also does not provide any account of how to determine which belief fits an evidence-set which partly consists out of non-propositional experiences. Although a reliabilist version of evidentialism can provide a better account of these matters, it suffers from counter-intuitive predictions about justification and a conception of evidence that is so liberal that it could even include blindsighters and clairvoyants as having such evidence.Chapter 3: DogmatismChapter 3 focuses on variants of dogmatism, a theory of perceptual justification that grasps the second horn of the Sellarsian dilemma by holding that a perceptual experience with the content that p is sufficient for immediate prima facie justification of the belief that p. I first argue that dogmatism should identify perceptual experiences with high-level conscious states to accommodate the problem of novice vs. expert identification and the problem of the speckled hen. I then argue that this version of dogmatism still fails to meet a certain explanatory challenge which I dub the `Distinctiveness Problem'. Dogmatism should explain what is so distinctive about perceptual experience that enables it, in contrast with desire and imagination, to evidentially justify the belief that p without, in contrast with belief, being justified itself.Phenomenalist answers to this problem fail because they either do not provide a distinctive property of perceptual experience, or else provide a property that is reducible to or possibly caused by beliefs. In both cases, dogmatism would have the result that intuitively unjustifying experiences, such as imaginations, nevertheless become capable of justifying beliefs. Moreover, phenomenalists still need some explanation of why phenomenology is epistemically relevant at all.A new variant of the problem of the speckled hen is an intuitive illustration of this point against dogmatists. If a perceptual experience that p is not reliably connected to the fact that p or the belief that p, then beliefs based on this experience simply will not be intuitively justified. One possible response to this problem incorporates reliability into the content of experience in the sense that an experience cannot have the content that p if it is not reliably connected to both the fact that p and the belief that p. However, this will lose the motivation from the New Evil Demon Scenario, and will make large concessions towards reliabilism.Chapter 4: Epistemological DisjunctivismGiven these problems for experientialist views of perceptual justification, chapter 4 focuses on a different evidential account of justification: epistemological disjunctivism. According to the Justified True Belief version of Epistemological Disjunctivism, the fact that I see that p is the factive and reflectively accessible evidence in virtue of which I know that p. I argue that JTBED faces formidable problems: first, it cannot adequately deal with the basis problem, second, it cannot accommodate the New Evil Demon Intuition, third,it faces the problem of hyper-intellectualization, and fourth, it has no good account of reflective access.Knowledge First Epistemological Disjunctivism, in contrast, holds that seeing that p just is a way of knowing that p. The fact that I see that p constitutes my justification for believing that p, even though it is not necessary for my knowledge that p. Although this view solves most of the above problems, I argue that KFED still faces a challenge of its own: its notion of justification is so strong that justification entails knowledge but is not itself entailed by it. This means that it too faces a hyper-intellectualization objection because it cannot accommodate animal justification, and that it too will struggle to accommodate the New Evil Demon Intuition.Nevertheless, there is something to the epistemological disjunctivist idea that higher-order capabilities are important to perceptual justification. Specifically, higher-order capabilities provide one with a way of accommodating the Blindsight Intuition without appealing to the notion of experiential evidence: blindsighters are epistemically worse off than normal human perceivers because they lack higher-order beliefs about how they are gaining their information. If one holds that these higher-order beliefs provide a special sort of justification for perceptual beliefs, then blindsighters lack this type of justification. Chapter 5: Process ReliabilismAfter displaying the problems of several evidential accounts of perceptual justification, chapter 5 introduces a non-evidential account: process reliabilism. The classic version of this view holds that the reliability of a belief-forming process is necessary and sufficient for the prima facie justification of a specific set of beliefs, namely, those that arise out of belief-independent processes. Two classic major problems for this view consist of counterexamples to both the necessity and sufficiency of reliability for justification. Although the Generality Problem raises some difficulties for reliabilism, they do not appear to be insurmountable.The second part of chapter 5 focuses on a variety of process reliabilism, inferentialist reliabilism, that is explicitly aimed at responding to clairvoyance cases. According to inferentialist reliabilism, one should distinguish between basic and non-basic beliefs, where basic beliefs are those that result out of the non-inferential operation of an inferentially opaque cognitive system that developed in a natural way. Reliability is only sufficient for the justification of basic beliefs, while non-basic beliefs also require conditional reliability and justification of the beliefs on which they are based.This distinction between basic and non-basic beliefs is meant to answer the challenge arising out of clairvoyance cases because these are all supposedly cases in which the resulting beliefs arenon-basic. However, I argue that the beliefs in these cases come out as non-basic primarily because of the etiological constraint on cognitive systems, a constraint that is unfortunately undermotivated. It seems that beliefs can be justified even if they are produced by a cognitive system that developed by accident, or by a system that was artificially designed to produce those beliefs. So even though the inferentialist reliabilist might have a point in distinguishing between basic and non-basic beliefs, it is still in need of a different response to clairvoyance cases. Chapter 6: Rejoinders for ReliabilismChapter 6 improves on the inferentialist reliabilist account of justification by presenting a different way of dealing with the clairvoyance cases and New Evil Demon Scenario. I start from the empirically plausible idea that we know that we are perceiving when we are perceiving, not because of the use of experiential evidence, but rather, because of an unconscious source-monitoring mechanism. I then argue that the existence of such a source-monitoring mechanism could be used to explain why clairvoyance cases actually have to do with defeat rather than absence of prima facie justification: beliefs that pop up in our head should be recognized as stemming from untrustworthy sources, and so we acquire defeating higher-order beliefs about the first-order beliefs. I also argue that this defeat should be able to occur even if the higher-order beliefs are themselves unjustified. This defeater-account of clairvoyance is preferable to several externalist alternatives. Making reliability relative to a specific world seems rather ad hoc, and further requirements on justification, such as evidence-based belief, cognitively integrated belief, or properly produced belief, all appear unnecessary and are susceptible to adapted versions of the clairvoyance case.I further argue for an alternative inferentialist reliablist response to the New Evil Demon Intuition which treats it as mistaken rather than correct. The New Evil Demon Intuition might arise because of a mistaken view of actual perceptual justification as having to do with experiential evidence. This mistaken view could be explained by the fact that experience is actually reliably connected to belief and is often cited in response to a knowledge-challenge. If this is a correct analysis of the New Evil Demon Intuition, then there is an element of question-begging involved when this scenario is still pressed against inferentialist reliabilists who do not adhere to the experientialist assumption it presupposes.With the inferentialist reliabilist account in hand,we are able to see that many of the premises of the epistemological argument from hallucination are problematic. Evidence does not appear to be required for perceptual knowledge, as perceptual justification does not even require such evidence. Moreover, if we accept a reliabilist model of introspection, then we are often able to know on the basis of introspection that we are perceiving rather than hallucinating. Once one gets clear about the alternatives, it becomes apparent that the argument thrives on internalist assumptions about justification and knowledge that one need not accept. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IJIME Paul Dumouchel Université du Québec à Montréal In Japan, in particular in junior and senior high school, there is a violent phenomenon known in Japanese as ijime, a term which could be translated as bullying. While the word may be culturally marked, the phenomenon it describes is certainly universal. Bullying is a process through which a child becomes the victim of one or more of his (...) classmates. A bully is a little brute, a person who pushes with his elbows, steps in front ofothers and, generally, brutalizes his comrades for no reason, it seems, except because he can. A bully is a torturer, and bullying refers to the set of actions involving torment, molestation, persecution, teasing, harassment, in short the set of cruelties and vexations inflicted on the victim. This is something which exists at every latitude, but in Japan it sometimes takes on disturbing proportions, both in terms ofnumber and seriousness of incidents. Between the beginning of the year and April 1995, it was possible to identify four suicides which clearly resulted directly from bullying, in other words where notes (generally called "testaments") left by the suicide victims explicitly stated that the cruelty ofwhich they were the victim was the reason for their suicide. Four suicides between January and April, in other words an average ofone per month. This is enough to raise a few questions.1 Japanese educators, sociologists and journalists often wonder, especially during bad years like 1 995, what could be the cause, origin or reasons for the ijime phenomenon. In general, they blame the greater individualism characteristic ofthe period since the war, the excessive competition typical of both Japanese society and school, the father's reduced role in family discipline, or the fact that children in today's society of abundance are too 'The important information, which I do not have, would be to compare the number of ijime related suicides to the total number of suicides in Japanese high-schools. 78Paul Dumouchel weak or spoiled. In short, the phenomena invoked are all related to the modernization of Japan, even to its recent modernization, that which has taken place since the end ofthe war. I tend to believe that ijime is not linked so much to the modern world, to anomy, individualism, excessive competition, as it is to the immemorial origin ofsociety (and notjust that of Japanese society, of course). Likewise, I tend to believe that incidents of bullying are not accidents, that they are not malfunctions, ruptures within the Japanese education system, but to the contrary a virtual institution, events which until very recently were relatively normal. It is not that I believe such persecution is the result of an open policy, much to the contrary: the phenomenon is much more fundamental than that. The high number of incidents of bullying which are reported now, and which are found in all sociological studies and research, do not indicate so much that the phenomenon is more frequent than before as they do that it is working less well, that it is beginning to crumble and that it is becoming possible to talk about it and see it. Allow me to explain. Numerous studies on Japan (see for instance, Benedict 253-316) provide certain reasons for thinking that the phenomenon of ijime among secondary school students is not recent, that it can be traced to the pre-war period, and perhaps even further back. (I do not know whether this phenomenon was present in the period preceding the Meiji era. It would be interesting to see if phenomena ofthe same sort already existed in the temple schools which were responsible for most education during the Edo period.) The little information I have been able to find on this subject (during the Meiji period) seems to indicate that the victim perished more often in the hands of his torturers than he did by his own hand. However this is nothing but an assertion. (We will see below why it is unlikely we will find easy access to information on ijime in ancient Japan.2) It is true that Japanese elementary and secondary schools are very restrictive for students, but they are so in their own... (shrink)