This article argues that Kant’s argument from incongruent counterparts in his essay, Directions in Space yields not the conclusion that space is an objective reality, but rather that it is an absolute and dynamical framework that grounds spatial properties, a view which is neutral with respect to the objective/subjective nature of space. It is suggested that, so construed, Kant’s argument in this essay can be made consistent with his later employment in support of transcendental idealism with regard to space.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 2 Seiten: 175-194.

Fichte claims in Section 5 of the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (GWL) that the absolute I contains a difference between two directions. In this paper, I argue that this specific claim complements, rather than contradicts, his general position in Section 1, according to which the absolute I is a simple identity or a point. I first show that we can identify a version of what I call Fichte’s Two-Directions Theory in texts written both before and after the GWL. (...) I term this version his Two-Series Theory. Drawing on this reading, I demonstrate, in contrast to previous research, that Fichte consistently formulates the absolute I in a twofold manner: as a pure act that precedes any difference and as a proposition that contains a relation. I further argue that Fichte’s treatment of the absolute I as a simple unity and as a unity of two directions maps onto two stages within his philosophical investigation. On my account, Fichte seeks to comprehend the absolute I by considering the I’s activity both as it is in itself and as it presents itself to thought. (shrink)

Fichte claims in Section 5 of the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre that the absolute I contains a difference between two directions. In this paper, I argue that this specific claim complements, rather than contradicts, his general position in Section 1, according to which the absolute I is a simple identity or a point. I first show that we can identify a version of what I call Fichte’s Two-Directions Theory in texts written both before and after the GWL. I (...) term this version his Two-Series Theory. Drawing on this reading, I demonstrate, in contrast to previous research, that Fichte consistently formulates the absolute I in a twofold manner: as a pure act that precedes any difference and as a proposition that contains a relation. I further argue that Fichte’s treatment of the absolute I as a simple unity and as a unity of two directions maps onto two stages within his philosophical investigation. On my account, Fichte seeks to comprehend the absolute I by considering the I’s activity both as it is in itself and as it presents itself to thought. (shrink)

The absolute self-evidence of consciousness is due to the fact that the object of consciousness is present or immanent in it. We may therefore formulate the absolutely certain starting point of philosophy as follows: knowledge about an object immanent in consciousness is absolutely certain in so far as it is the actual testimony of the object about itself, and does not go beyond that which is present in consciousness. The criterion of the absolute certainty of such knowledge is (...) self evidence, i.e. the fact that it consists entirely of what is present in consciousness. To doubt such knowledge is absurd because it is not a copy of the object, it is not a symbol of it, but simply and directly contains the object itself as known. I designate the act of the immediate contemplation of objects by the term intuition. According to the epistemological theory which I began to work out in 1903 all our trustworthy knowledge is obtained by means of such immediate observation of objects as they are in themselves; I therefore call my theory of knowledge Intuitivism. (shrink)

This richly detailed biography captures both the personal life and the scientific career of Isaac Newton, presenting a fully rounded picture of Newton the man, the scientist, the philosopher, the theologian, and the public figure. Professor Westall treats all aspects of Newton's career, but his account centers on a full description of Newton's achievements in science. Thus the core of the work describes the development of the calculus, the experimentation that altered the direction of the science of optics, and (...) especially the investigations in celestial dynamics that led to the law of universal gravitation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Absolute and Ordained Power of God in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century TheologyFrancis Oakley[W]e must cautiously abandon [that more specious opinion of the Platonist and Stoick]... in this, that it... blasphemously invades the cardinal Prerogative of Divinity, Omnipotence, by denying him a reserved power, of infringing, or altering any one of those Laws which [He] Himself ordained, and enacted, and chaining up his armes in the adamantine fetters of (...) Destiny.Walter Charleton, The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature : A Physico-Theologicall Treatise (London, 1652)Of the various attributes characteristically ascribed to God in the Christian tradition—goodness, wisdom, omniscience, omnipotence, and the like—it is omnipotence which of recent years has most persistently been the object of focused attention among philosophers and historians alike. That that should be the case with philosophers working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition is not altogether surprising. While it is doubtless a development few would have predicted half a century ago, the years since then have seen something of a recrudescence of interest in a legislative or divine-command ethic. 1 Had that [End Page 437] not itself conspired to make omnipotence an obvious focus of philosophic attention, the deepening contemporaneous preoccupation with modal logic or the logic of possibility would surely have succeeded in so doing. Understood classically as affirming of God the ability to do all things and connoting a virtual capacity for action (as opposed to a power exercised in actuality), omnipotence has proven to be something of a troublesome notion, inviting unrestrained speculation about hypothetical divine action and generating a veritable cat’s cradle of philosophical conundrums concerning the relationship of God’s power to his will, wisdom, goodness, and justice.Medieval theologians and philosophers alike were forced to grapple with these taxing problems, 2 and philosophers of our own era have found them no less directly pertinent to their own logical and ethical concerns. 3 In 1955 Mackie inaugurated what was destined to become an ongoing discussion of omnipotence in the philosophical journals, 4 and such philosophers as Kenny and Keane, Cowan and Wolfe, Dummett, Plantinga, Swinburne, and Geach have been drawn into the fray. Since then, as a result, the pages of Mind, Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and even The Listener have been punctuated by their efforts to grapple with those venerable questions concerning the divine power that had exercised St. Peter Damiani in the mid-eleventh century, brought Abelard to grief a half-century later, and subsequently led Peter Lombard to devote to them a crucial and influential section of his Sentences—whether God of his omnipotence could undo the past, whether he could have made things other than he had, or created a world better than he did, and so on. 5 [End Page 438]While no medievalist can be expected to be anything but gratified by this unexpected testimony to the enduring significance and power of medieval scholastic concerns, those of us interested especially in the intellectual developments of the later-medieval centuries have particular reason to be energized by it. The years since Mackie launched this contemporary philosophical debate have also seen an intensification of interest on the part of historians in the ways in which, during these particular centuries, medieval thinkers themselves came to terms with the implications of the divine omnipotence and dealt with the theological and philosophical puzzles characteristically generated by that notion. Unlike the philosophers, whose concerns have been somewhat more broad-ranging, the historians have focused in particular on a quintessentially scholastic distinction that was developed, it has been said, “as a ‘yes and no’ answer to the question whether God is able to do or arrange things other than he did in creating the orders of nature and grace.” 6 The distinction in question is that between God’s power understood as absolute and as ordained (potentia dei absoluta et ordinata), which the theologians and philosophers of the period deployed as part of their great effort of accommodation between Greek philosophical and biblical notions of the divine, and the historical significance of which the scholarship of the past forty years has served increasingly to vindicate. 7 But while that distinction has been... (shrink)

In her seminal article ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958) Elizabeth Anscombe argued that we need a new ethics, one that uses virtue terms to generate absolute prohibitions against certain act-types. Leading contemporary virtue ethicists have not taken up Anscombe's challenge in justifying absolute prohibitions and have generally downplayed the role of rule-following in their normative theories. That they have not done so is primarily because contemporary virtue ethicists have focused on what is sufficient for characterizing the deliberation and action (...) of the fully virtuous person, and rule-following is inadequate for this task. In this article, I take up Anscombe's challenge by showing that rule-following is necessary for virtuous agency, and that virtue ethics can justify absolute prohibitions. First, I offer a possibility proof by showing how virtue ethics can generate absolute prohibitions in three ways: by considering actions that directly manifest vice or that cannot be performed virtuously; actions that are prohibited by one's institutional roles and practical identities; and actions that are prohibited by the prescriptions of the wise. I then seek to show why virtue ethicists should incorporate rule-following and absolute prohibitions into their theories. I emphasize the central role that rules have in the development of virtue, then motivate the stronger view that fully virtuous agents follow moral rules by considering the importance of hope, uncertainty about consequences, and taking responsibility for what eventuates. Finally, I provide an account of what Anscombe called a ‘corrupt mind’, explaining how our understanding of virtue is corrupted if we think that virtue may require us to do vicious actions. (shrink)

Mark Evan Bonds’ recent book, Absolute Music, deepens considerably the historical context within which Eduard Hanslick’s famous treatise on musical beauty can be read. This paper argues that, with the aid of this expanded context, we can understand Hanslick’s treatise to have provided contemporary and subsequent audiences with a kind of meta-programme for listening to symphonic and other non-texted music. That is to say, Hanslick’s text arguably informed and directed the way audiences came to listen to instrumental music by (...) furnishing them with imaginative constructs which could then be applied to the practice of musical listening. In much the same way as the texts which supply the poetic scenarios of so-called programme music, Hanslick’s ‘meta-programme’ became indispensable to an expanding culture of musical listening in the second half of the 19th century and beyond beyond. My claim thus contradicts the well-known formalist tenets of Hanslick’s musical aesthetics. (shrink)

In “Desire as Belief” and “Desire as Belief II,” David Lewis ( 1988 , 1996 ) considers the anti-Humean position that beliefs about the good require corresponding desires, which is his way of understanding the idea that beliefs about the good are capable of motivating behavior. He translates this anti-Humean claim into decision theoretic terms and demonstrates that it leads to absurdity and contradiction. As Ruth Weintraub ( 2007 ) has shown, Lewis’ argument goes awry at the outset. His decision (...) theoretic formulation of anti-Humeanism is one that no sensible anti-Humean would endorse. My aim is to demonstrate that Lewis’ infelicitous rendering of anti-Humeanism really does undermine the force of his arguments. To accomplish this, I begin by developing a more adequate decision theoretic rendering of the anti-Humean position. After showing that my formulation of anti-Humeanism constitutes a plausible interpretation of the anti-Humean thesis, I go on to demonstrate that if we adopt this more accurate rendition of anti-Humeanism, the view is no longer susceptible to arguments like the ones Lewis has devised. I thereby provide a more robust response to Lewis’ arguments than has yet been offered, and in the process I develop a formulation of anti-Humeanism that creates the possibility for future decision theoretic arguments that, unlike Lewis’, speak directly to the plausibility of anti-Humeanism. (shrink)

Moral absolutes were perceived, by Solov'ëv, in a dual manner: a) from the side of content, of psychology, as when we speak of feelings, emotions, etc.; and b) under a formal aspect, as “ideas,” i.e. logically. Neither of these can be treated without relating to moral absolutes astrue, and without a rationalbelief in their truth, a truth that cannot be logically proved. In my opinion, our time has become keenly aware of the universally human value of Vladimir Solov'ëv's ethics, of (...) its humanist nature, oriented towards the everyday and the ideal tasks of man, and of the concrete direction of his philosophy of “practical idealism”. (shrink)

Behavioural ethics in business is an emerging field that has challenged some of the established wisdom about ethics and added some truly new insights into our understanding about decision-making and behaviour. Why do seemingly responsible employees and managers sometimes act in bad ways? This book explains how people behave in real situations and what action can be taken to nudge behaviour in a more ethical direction. This concise textbook is ideal for use in the classroom as core or additional (...) reading on courses in business ethics and corporate social responsibility; organisational behaviour and psychology; and any module with ethics content (for example, accounting ethics and strategic management). Each chapter is presented as a story with details about the experimental designs and related research findings. The key features are included: learning outcomes; suggested class activities; mock assessment questions; and an annotated list of key readings provide a one-stop text for tutors and students interested in this increasingly important area of study. (shrink)

This paper examines the absolutist grounds for denying an agent's responsibility for what he allows to happen in 'keeping his hands clean' in acute circumstances. In defending an agent's non-prevention of what is, viewed impersonally, the greater harm in such cases, absolutists typically insist on a difference in responsibility between what an agent brings about as opposed to what he allows. This alleged difference is taken to be central to the absolutist justification of non-intervention in acute cases: the agent's obligation (...) not to do harm is held to be more stringent than his obligation to prevent (comparable) harm, since as agents we are principally responsible for what we ourselves do. The paper's central point is that this representation of the absolutist response to acute cases- as grounded in a difference in responsibility for what we do as opposed to what we allow- involves a misleading theoretical inversion. I argue that the absolutist justification of non-intervention in acute cases must depend on a direct defence of the nature and the stringency of the moral norm with which the agent's non-intervention complies. The nature and stringency of this norm are basic to attribution of agent responsibility in acute cases, and not the other way around. (shrink)

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

Cybersecurity aggregates are numerical data obtained by aggregation on features along a database of cybersecurity reports. These aggregates are obtained by integration of time-stamped tables using some recent results of non-standard calculus. Time-series of aggregates are shown to contain relevant information about the concrete system dealt with. Trend time series is also forecasted using known data-driven methods. Although absolute forecasting of trend time series is not obtained, a directional forecasting of trend time series is achieved thence validated by means (...) of a rolling cross validation scheme on a public database of Scareware reports. (shrink)

The philosophical career of Josiah Royce is defined in part by his relationship with G. H. Howison. Biographically speaking, this assertion recalls the mythic tale of how Royce received his appointment at Harvard after James “forgot” about Howison.2 Philosophically speaking, however, Howison’s interchange with Royce concerning his philosophical conception of God in the 1895 debate held at Berkeley was a crucial intersection of these two philosophers that set the directions for their future work. It was a chance for Howison to (...) “get it on,” in the words of John McDermott,3 with Royce, in a philosophical bout for the championship title of American Idealism. Royce welcomed the opportunity to return to his alma mater... (shrink)

After a brief discussion of Kreisel’s notion of informal rigour and Myhill’s notion of absolute proof, Gödel’s analysis of the subject is presented. It is shown how Gödel avoids the notion of informal proof because such a use would contradict one of the senses of “formal” that Gödel wants to preserve. This Gödelian notion of “formal” is directly tied to his notion of absolute proof and to the question of the general applicability of concepts, in a way that (...) overcomes both Kreisel and Myhill’s conceptions. This paper aims to contribute to the present-day debate on informal and epistemic mathematics, focusing on what appears necessary for a better understanding of the issues at stake. (shrink)

State sovereignty is often thought to be absolute, unlimited. This paper argues that there is no such a thing as absolute State sovereignty. Indeed, absolute sovereignty is impossible because all sovereignty is necessarily underpinned by its conditions of possibility—i.e. limited sovereignty is the norm, though the nature of the limitations varies. The article consists of two main sections: the concept of sovereignty: this section is focused on some of the limitations the concept of sovereignty itself presents; and (...) a historical account of the notion of sovereignty as it was used in the Ancient Times. The particular focus on early notions of a modern concept such as sovereignty has to do with the fact that this early notion has been anthropomorphised with societal evolution. Therein, the current concept of State sovereignty embraces the same limitations it had in its ancient form as a non-fully developed conceptual idea. The implications of understanding State sovereignty as limited rather than absolute are several, both directly and indirectly. A main immediate consequence is that sovereign States can cooperate together, limit their sovereignty and still be considered sovereign. (shrink)

Nondirectiveness is widely regarded as an important principle of genetic counseling. However, numerous studies have indicated that the use of this principle and its content itself are subject to controversies. The present study aimed to verify how the nondirectiveness principle is defined by Polish geneticists, the extent to which it is considered the main principle in clinical practice, and the situations in which geneticists see the positive value of the directive action. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, the study compared the (...) abstract declarations of the directiveness validity and the scope of this principle with the declaration of action in situations close to reality (case scenarios). The results showed that the high rank assigned to the nondirectiveness principle does not translate into the conviction about the absolute obligation to use it in clinical practice. Polish geneticists are inclined to restrict the scope of patients’ choices when these are outside of their definition of medical standard. Strong medical paternalism manifests itself particularly in invasive prenatal diagnostics, where geneticists play the role of gatekeepers. In this study, we offer hypotheses about the sources of these attitudes by analyzing the current cultural and legal context of Poland. (shrink)

Hegel once said that philosophy is the "world stood on its head" and Karl Marx credited his own philosophic genius with setting the Hegel ian world right side up again. But both of these intellectual Atlases hid before our mind's eye a symbol of the philosophical sphere that bears further reflection. Philosophy down the ages has always involved at least two elements, first, the universe of being as its objective pole and second, man gazing into this crystallic sphere as the (...) subjective pole. The "world" of Hegel and Marx and of most philosophers can be interpreted to mean the world we know and live in and about which all philosophers wonder. Thus for the philosopher - whoever he be - the concern of his interest is not limited to any particular segment of reality and no thing is off-limits to the beams of his mental radar. Yet this scope seems to many too vast and proud an enterprise. The philosopher seems to leap upon his horse and ride off in all directions at once. He is the day dreamer who indulges in fantasy and escapes from the world of practical concern and anxiety. On the other hand the reflective person must concede that it is the ideas ofthe philosophers more than the strategems of the generals that have shaped history and destinies. (shrink)

This book continues the Muirhead Library of Philosophy series. It is a sequel to Trethowan’s own Absolute Value, to which frequent reference is made by the author. Together with that work, it comprises the lectures the author delivered in the Department of Religion of Brown University in 1969. It is chiefly a work of theological reflection: Trethowan is seeking new conceptual models for the Christian experience of God. In this vein, he devotes the bulk of the book to explorations (...) of the nature of faith and of the At-onement effected in the experience of God by the Christian mystics. An interesting treatment of the mystical experience of the Absolute concludes the book. This is not to suggest that Trethowan’s work will not be of interest to a general philosophical audience as well. The author begins his investigations with a discussion of contemporary positions which are opposed to metaphysical and theistic claims; within this context, Trethowan’s suggests some useful criticisms of Flew’s position. Searching for an experience of the Absolute that can serve to ground theistic claims, Trethowan examines the formulations of Coreth and Marcel; in the author’s estimate each yields an important emphasis, although some criticism must be directed to their respective accounts. The author’s own solution surfaces in the course of his treatment of faith. Its inspiration is largely Blondel’s "logic of action" : man’s experience of his own range of action leads him to an "option" in favor of the Absolute, an option which includes assent to the Christian experience of the Absolute. Trethowan also indicates a theory of signs, in which signs mediate but also are dynamically directed toward an experienced Absolute. The author’s treatment of Blondel has the advantage of providing the reader with lengthy citations from Blondel in translation.—W. L. P. (shrink)

This research provides an analysis of the role of ‘natural consciousness’ and ‘absolute knowledge’ in the process of establishing the notion of philosophy in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. The author seeks to show that ‘natural consciousness’ does not disappear in the first approaches to The Phenomenology, but rather, it continues to act as the subject of the ‘experience of consciousness’ until the end. The material analysis directly related to the evolution of ‘natural consciousness’ in the first stages of (...) ‘experience’ particularly supports the hypothesis about the philosopher’s work on the book. The results obtained can be seen as a validation of the idea that the usual notions of overcoming ‘natural consciousness’ already in the first ‘experiences of consciousness’ do not correspond to its fundamental role in establishing the notion of philosophy in The Phenomenology of Spirit. It represents not only the starting point of the phenomenological movement but it is also involved in the ‘reversals of consciousness’ at every stage of the ‘experience,’ which is important to take into account for the correct evaluation of the specificity of The Phenomenology of Spirit and the comprehension of the nature of philosophical knowledge as the main result of this Hegelian work. (shrink)

It has sometimes been held that instrumental music on its own, without text or program, is a kind of ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’ music, having no significant truck with extra-musical reality. While bird calls and canon shots might get countenanced, nothing in the vein of a philosophical worldview, a rich narrative, or a socio-political subtext is going to make the formalist’s strict cut. There has been considerable discussion in the analytic aesthetics of music about these issues and about closely-related ones (...) concerning musical expression and representation. But the discussion has focused almost exclusively on music’s *capacities* as a medium, or on our perceptual or imaginative capacities as listeners, in an effort to see how all of this might transpire. But as I will be arguing in this paper, this sort of approach, despite all its illuminating work, does not directly address one of the most important questions on the table between the partisans on different sides of the ‘pure’ music debate. And this question is the fundamentally normative one concerning *how this allegedly ‘pure’ instrumental music is to be appropriately appreciated.* When we appreciate this sort of instrumental music in content-involving ways, where our thoughts go beyond its basic and fairly uncontroversial expressive or representational features, is our mode of musical appreciation thereby deficient, or somehow ‘in the wrong,’ aesthetically-speaking? I argue that it needn’t be, and I further argue to the surprising conclusion that the answer to this normative question doesn’t crucially turn on whether music *possesses* the relevant content. Once we get this normative question in view, we should recognize a broader range of appropriate ways to engage with instrumental music, beyond the restrictive ideal of ‘pure’ listening that has thus far been championed by musical formalists. Then, in the final part of the paper, I shift gears to consider whether the sort of extra-musical content at issue is really as far-fetched as opponents can make it seem. I argue that it isn’t, and that this can be seen by looking to comparable sorts of content in the paradigmatically representational arts. (shrink)

We show that there are Π5 formulas in the language of the Turing degrees, [Formula: see text], with ≤, ∨ and ∧, that define the relations x″ ≤ y″, x″ = y″ and so {x ∈ L2 = x ≥ y|x″ = y″} in any jump ideal containing 0. There are also Σ6&Π6 and Π8 formulas that define the relations w = x″ and w = x', respectively, in any such ideal [Formula: see text]. In the language with just ≤ (...) the quantifier complexity of each of these definitions increases by one. For a lower bound on definability, we show that no Π2 or Σ2 formula in the language with just ≤ defines L2 or L2. Our arguments and constructions are purely degree theoretic without any appeals to absoluteness considerations, set theoretic methods or coding of models of arithmetic. As a corollary, we see that every automorphism of [Formula: see text] is fixed on every degree above 0″ and every relation on [Formula: see text] which is invariant under the double jump or under join with 0″ is definable over [Formula: see text] if and only if it is definable in second order arithmetic with set quantification ranging over sets whose degrees are in [Formula: see text]. (shrink)

Uterus transplantation (UTx) is highly anticipated for the benefits that it might bring to individuals wanting to carry a pregnancy in order to reproduce who do not have a functioning uterus. The surgery—now having been performed successfully in several countries around the world—remains experimental. However, UTx is at some point expected to become a routine treatment for people without a uterus and considering themselves in need of one: women with absolute uterine factor infertility; transgender women; and even cisgender men (...) who wish to gestate. Given the unique benefits UTx offers, uteri are likely to be ‘in demand’, and such demand, we suggest, will feasibly outstrip supply. Therefore, allocation of those uteri available for transplant may become a pressing issue. In this paper, we consider one aspect of organ allocation—the preferences of donors in making a directed or conditional donation of their uterus. To what extent, in the context of uterus donation, would such donations be ethically permissible? (shrink)

Even though the last decade has seen more original and significant work on Fichte, the flow of studies on his rival and "successor," Schelling, seems to continue uninterrupted. Beyond so many short and often quite modest writings, Kasper's huge book is towering, and not only because of its size. Kasper, like Horst Fuhrmans to whom he seems to be the most indebted and who is not in Schelling studies, is a Roman Catholic theologian who commands an immense and impressive knowledge (...) of the history of theological speculation from the Greek Fathers to the nineteenth century school of Tübingen. Like most major studies on Schelling, the present one must struggle its way through the evolution of the many phases of his thought before getting down to the more systematic investigation. Such an endeavor must express a "preference" for one of those phases, and, as is usually the case today, the greatest appreciation is directed towards the Spätphilosophie. The core and kernel of the book is the beautiful and highly concentrated exposition on "God as the ground and the Lord of history" where historicity itself receives its ontological deduction from the premisses of theism. The book concludes with the concrete modalities of the divine mediation of history through the great issues of the fall, mythology, and revelation. For more than a decade Walter Schulz's interpretation of Schelling's late philosophy has seemed to overshadow, and to dismiss, all more Weltanschauung-orientated research. It has long been time for a study focusing on Schelling, the philosopher of Christianity, which is what Schelling considered himself to be for the last forty-five years of his life.--M. J. V. (shrink)

This article engages two fundamentally different kinds of so-called natural law arguments in favor of specific moral absolutes: Elizabeth Anscombe's claim that certain actions are known to be intrinsically wrong through intuition, and John Finnis's claim that such actions are known to be wrong because they involve acting directly against a basic human good. Both authors maintain, for example, that murder and contraceptive sexual acts are known to be wrong, always and everywhere, through their respective epistemological lens. This article uses (...) the counter-example of anesthesia to challenge these two approaches to substantiating natural law claims. The paper concludes by rejecting the view shared by Professors Finnis and Anscombe that once one rejects these foundations for moral absolutes, one is left with moral subjectivism. In fact, one is left with moral absolutes of a more restricted nature, which are known philosophically, and with more robust moral absolutes held on religious grounds. Virtues are needed in the moral life, among other reasons, because such norms require discernment and integrity for their correct application. (shrink)

Moral relativism is deeply troubling for those who believe that, without a set of moral absolutes, democratic societies will devolve into tyranny or totalitarianism. Engaging directly with this claim, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti traces the roots of contemporary anti-relativist fears to the antimodern rhetoric of the Catholic Church, and then rescues a form of philosophical relativism for modern, pluralist societies, arguing that this standpoint provides the firmest foundation for an allegiance to democracy. In its dual analysis of the relationship between religion (...) and politics and the implications of philosophical relativism for democratic theory, this book makes a far-ranging contribution to contemporary debates over the revival of religion in politics and the conceptual grounds for a commitment to democracy. It conducts the first comprehensive genealogy of anti-relativist discourse and reclaims for English-speaking readers the overlooked work of political theorists such as Hans Kelsen and Norberto Bobbio, who had articulated the bond between philosophical relativism and democracy. By engaging with attempts to replace the religious foundation of democratic values with a neo-Kantian conception of reason, this book also offers a powerful case for relativism as the strongest basis for a civic ethos that integrates different perspectives into democratic politics. (shrink)

In this essay I will attempt to show that Derrida not only mistakenly reads the Hegelian text in terms of reflection, but that his own way of thinking could be characterized from a Hegelian perspective as itself reflective. For this I will not focus upon those writings of Derrida which are explicitly “about” Hegel, nor will I compare those places in both the Derridian and Hegelian corpora which seem to present a contiguity in an at least superficial resemblance between concepts, (...) such as Hegelian difference vis-à-vis Derridian différance. Rather, I will focus upon one of Derrida’s texts which indicates his own contributions to the field of thinking and writing and the directions for inquiry initiated in his work, as well as his engagement with Hegel. Such a text is his masterful essay, White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy, a writing overtly concerned with the difficulties posed by metaphoricity in the text of philosophy and the attempt in the latter to domesticate and “interiorize” its tropic reserve or condition of possibility within the concept of metaphor itself, which turns out to be a philosopheme. The problems of philosophy are posed in terms of such mastery and interiorization. Since my concern in this essay is to problematize this kind of reading by showing that it presupposes reflective distinctions, I will not here attempt a positive philosophical account of metaphoricity per se. Indeed, Derrida will indicate what he takes to be the conditions of the impossibility of such an account, but it is precisely his reasons for this impossibility that I find problematic in terms of reflection. (shrink)

This article proposes a new interpretation of the ontological significance of the Biblical statement ‘I am that I am’ that focuses on the relationship between the Heideggerian notion of the being that is beyond all entities and the German Idealist concern with the irreducibility of subjectivity. This focus is put forward as an effective way of philosophically elaborating what are argued to be the twin aspects of the statement—the being that transcends predication, and an irreducibly first person ontology. This elaboration (...) is performed by discussing the way in which these two themes have been approached at certain pertinent points in the history of metaphysics. With regard to the theme of transcendent being, an overview of the medieval Scholastic debates on the issue precedes a direct discussion of the Heideggerian position. As for the theme of the irreducibility of first person ontology, an overview of the relevant theories of the various German Idealist philosophers precedes a direct engagement with what Heidegger has to say on this issue. The overall argument here is that it is possible coherently to conceive of the pure being that transcends all entities in terms of the ‘I’ of an absolute subject without eliding the difference between being and entities, without succumbing to what Heidegger regards as an onto-theological oblivion of being. (shrink)

An argument that what is usually dismissed as the “mystical shell” of Hegel's thought—the concept of absolute knowledge—is actually its most “rational kernel.” This book sets out from a counterintuitive premise: the “mystical shell” of Hegel's system proves to be its most “rational kernel.” Hegel's radicalism is located precisely at the point where his thought seems to regress most. Most current readings try to update Hegel's thought by pruning back his grandiose claims to “absolute knowing.” Comay and Ruda (...) invert this deflationary gesture by inflating what seems to be most trivial: the absolute is grasped only in the minutiae of its most mundane appearances. Reading Hegel without presupposition, without eliminating anything in advance or making any decision about what is essential and what is inessential, what is living and what is dead, they explore his presentation of the absolute to the letter. The Dash is organized around a pair of seemingly innocuous details. Hegel punctuates strangely. He ends the Phenomenology of Spirit with a dash, and he begins the Science of Logic with a dash. This distinctive punctuation reveals an ambiguity at the heart of absolute knowing. The dash combines hesitation and acceleration. Its orientation is simultaneously retrospective and prospective. It both holds back and propels. It severs and connects. It demurs and insists. It interrupts and prolongs. It generates nonsequiturs and produces explanations. It leads in all directions: continuation, deviation, meaningless termination. This challenges every cliché about the Hegelian dialectic as a machine of uninterrupted teleological progress. The dialectical movement is, rather, structured by intermittency, interruption, hesitation, blockage, abruption, and random, unpredictable change—a rhythm that displays all the vicissitudes of the Freudian drive. (shrink)

Individuals are downloading copyrighted materials at escalating rates (Hill 2007; Siwek 2007). Since most materials shared within these networks are copyrighted works, providing, exchanging, or downloading files is considered to be piracy and a violation of intellectual property rights (Shang et al. 2008). Previous research indicates that personal moral philosophies rooted in moral absolutism together with social context may impact decision making in ethical dilemmas; however, it is yet unclear which motivations and norms contextually impact moral awareness in a peer-to-peer (...) (P2P) file sharing context (Shang et al. 2008). In sum, factors affecting the decision to share copyrighted material require further clarification and investigation (Shang et al. 2008). The purpose of this study was to use a consumer-based scenario and multiple ethics measures to explore how idealism, formalism, and perceived social consensus impact users’ propensity to recognize that the sharing of copyrighted media through P2P networks was an ethical issue and their subsequent ethical intentions. Results showed that high levels of idealism and formalism were associated with an increased recognition that file sharing was an ethical issue, but neither construct had a direct effect on ethical intention. Strong social consensus among respondents that other people consider file sharing to be unethical was also positively related to the recognition that file sharing was an ethical issue, and ethical recognition was a moderate predictor of intention not to engage in file sharing. Finally, a post hoc mediation analysis indicated that idealism, formalism, and social consensus operated through recognition of an ethical issue to impact ethical intention (indirect-only mediation). (shrink)

The issue addressed in this thesis is one in the absolute idealism of Spinoza. It is one of specifying an interpretation of substance-attribute identity as a solution to the problem of reconciling it with the diversity of the attributes and the oneness of substance. As a testing ground for any proposed solution, a list of questions is generated. Given the countable diversity of the attributes, can we conceive of the identity of each of them with the one substance? Why, (...) if I am identical to a mode of each of infinite attributes, do I perceive only a body? What is the rational explanation for the infinite countable diversity of the attributes and our being directly acquainted with only two? In what manner can we reconcile the divisibility of substance with the activity of thought? How does one reconcile the order of extension seeming to be one of external relations with the essentially internal order of any finite thinking thing? How does one reconcile the independent being of modes of extension with the truth-functionality of ideas? In what manner is it possible to understand the appearance of the uniqueness of the one thing conceived under the idea of the body and the one-among-severalness of the same thing conceived under the idea of the individual's mind? In what manner can it be said that substance, consisting of infinite attributes, is accurately and completely conceived through any one of them while each is conceptually independent of every other? How can the one thing which is mind and body be wholly and accurately conceived to be a mode of either of their respective attributes while modes of differing attributes are also conceptually independent? The interpretations of substance-attribute identity given by John Clark Murray, T. L. S. Sprigge, and Errol E. Harris, in their writings in which they advocate reading Spinoza as an absolute idealist, are argued to be disadvantageous in dealing with the evident parallelism of the attributes. Finally, a proposed solution, offered by an alternative absolute idealist interpretation of substance-attribute identity, is developed in response to each of the above questions. (shrink)

I propose that we interpret Kant’s argument from incongruent counterparts in the 1768 article ‘Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space’ in light of a theory of dynamic absolute space that he accepted throughout the 1750s and 1760s. This force-based or material conception of space was not an unusual interpretation of the Newtonian notion of absolute space. Nevertheless, commentators have continually argued that Kant’s argument is an utter failure that shifts from the metaphysics of (...) space to its epistemology, because he has no way to connect ‘directionality’ and ‘handedness’ to absolute space. This supposed failure is based on an understanding of absolute space in purely mathematical terms and as an absolute void that lacks any qualitative or dynamic features. If we recognize that Kant held that space had an intrinsic directional asymmetry then his argument successfully connects incongruent counterparts to absolute space. The presence of this notion in Kant’s pre-Critical thought is rarely noted, and its necessity in understanding his incongruence argument is novel. (shrink)

This paper examines problems and inconsistencies in the Plotinian conception of evil. A review of all the pertinent passages in the Enneads concludes that evil is non-existent in the metaphysical realm and that the absolute evil of the moral realm is subservient to a universal order and functions to produce a harmony in accord with the intellectual realm (Nous) of which it is but an image. [Most of the difficulties are seen as eliminated by adopting an interpretive view of (...) evil as the result of the soul’s misdirected orientation toward its own completeness in matter.]. (shrink)

This article intends to show how the philosophy of Kant supposes a rupture with the doctrines based on a system of absolute rationality, where the most important element is the unity of reason. In this way, it will try to underline the main critiques of the Prussian philosopher to theories based on the unity of reason and direct access to reality, as well as exposing the Kantian proposal of a unitary formal rational structure, but with several irreconcilable uses.

This article intends to show how the philosophy of Kant supposes a rupture with the doctrines based on a system of absolute rationality, where the most important element is the unity of reason. In this way, it will try to underline the main critiques of the Prussian philosopher to theories based on the unity of reason and direct access to reality, as well as exposing the Kantian proposal of a unitary formal rational structure, but with several irreconcilable uses.

Kierkegaard and Levinas are both philosophers of singularity. The latter, in Difficult Freedom and Proper Names, strongly criticizes the former, accusing him of subjectivism, violence and underestimation of ethics. However, the distance separating the two is very short, especially if one reads carefully Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In this article it is argued that both thinkers refuse impersonal totality, conceive Infinity as irreducible, ethics as directed towards the other person and suffering as necessary during lifetime. Above all, both Kierkegaard and (...) Levinas think of subjectivity as originally addressed beyond itself, towards Infinity. (shrink)

According to the traditional inferential theory of perception, percepts of object motion or stationarity stem from an evaluation of afferent retinal signals (which encode image motion) with the help of extraretinal signals (which encode eye movements). According to direct perception theory, on the other hand, the percepts derive from retinally conveyed information only. Neither view is compatible with a perceptual phenomenon that occurs during visually induced sensations of ego motion (vection). A modified version of inferential theory yields a model in (...) which the concept of extraretinal signals is replaced by that of reference signals, which do not encode how the eyes move in their orbits but how they move in space. Hence reference signals are produced not only during eye movements but also during ego motion (i.e., in response to vestibular stimulation and to retinal image flow, which may induce vection). The present theory describes the interface between self-motion and object-motion percepts. An experimental paradigm that allows quantitative measurement of the magnitude and gain of reference signals and the size of the just noticeable difference (JND) between retinal and reference signals reveals that the distinction between direct and inferential theories largely depends on: (1) a mistaken belief that perceptual veridicality is evidence that extraretinal information is not involved, and (2) a failure to distinguish between (the perception of) absolute object motion in space and relative motion of objects with respect to each other. The model corrects these errors, and provides a new, unified framework for interpreting many phenomena in the field of motion perception. (shrink)

Downside risk aversion (downside RA) and decreasing absolute risk aversion (DARA) are different concepts that describe preferences for which the harm from bearing risk is lessened by an increase in wealth. This note presents some intuitive explanations of the difference between the two concepts using simple lotteries and graphical analysis. All risk-averse utility functions exhibit downside risk aversion, except those that exhibit sufficiently strong increasing absolute risk aversion. In a sense, downside RA is to be expected: adding downside (...) risk to a baseline lottery is analogous to increasing risk while adding upside risk is analogous to decreasing risk. The difference between the two concepts can be attributed to the use of different measures of the harm from risk bearing: downside RA measures harm using the utility premium and DARA measures harm using the risk premium. The two premia can change at different rates and even in different directions as wealth increases. (shrink)

‘The doubtful story of successive events’. With these words Bernard Bosanquet is often taken to have damned historical knowledge to oblivion. Although it is undeniably true that Bosanquet uttered these words and saw them into print, it is much less clear what he intended their import to be and whether he intended to damn history as a form of knowledge as such. Although he wrote little directly which can be construed as ‘philosophy of history’, he developed views both implicitly and (...) explicitly which bear on this question. My concern in this paper is to show that Bosanquet’s animosity to history derived not from a desire to condemn, but from a desire to draw more from history than the historiography of his time would, in good philosophical conscience, allow him to. His words were words of disappointment and despair, of thwarted hope, rather than outright rejection. I shall argue that Bosanquet needed an account of historical experience to flesh out his account of the concrete universal. A re-telling of the story of Bosanquet and history shows how, if it had been possible for him to draw together unresolved strands in his thinking, he could have affirmed historical experience as ‘the heart beat of the absolute’. Following Foster I shall claim that he was ultimately committed to this, but was reluctant or unable to draw it out explicitly from his leading doctrines. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider the relationship between the rights to privacy and security and argue that, in a sense to be made somewhat more precise below, that threats to the right to security outweighs comparable threats to privacy. My argument begins with an assessment of ordinary case judgments and an explanation of the important moral distinction between intrinsic value (i.e., value as an end) and instrumental value (i.e., value as a means), arguing that each approach assigns more moral value, (...) other things being equal, to security interests than to privacy interests. I then consider the issue from with a number of mainstream approaches to normative theories of state legitimacy, including social contract theories (new and old), utilitarian theories, Scanlon's contractualism, and various communitarian theories assign security rights a higher place on the moral hierarchy than privacy rights. I then conclude that, under ordinary intuitions and each of these theories, security interests trump (or outweigh) privacy interests when the two come into “direct” conflict – although I make no attempt to give an algorithm or theory for answering the important question of when these interests come into direct conflict and how to weigh them when, say, minor interests in security conflict with major interests in privacy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:F. H. Bradley and the Working-out of Absolute Idealism* JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, JR. FRANCIS HERBERTBRADLEY (1846-1924) 1 agreed with the other English idealists that the real world is the experienced world. But he started with the fundamental conviction that "experience" is more than "thought," as Green had maintained. Bradley's basic drive is the refusal to abolish "feeling" in favor of knowledge and intelligibility. "Feeling" is a fundamental and (...) ineradicable aspect of "reality"m more fundamental, in fact, than thinking. In the immediately experienced world, all intelligible distinctions and relations are merged in a "whole of feeling" which is the ultimate subject-matter of philosophy. "Thought" arises out of feeling, out of "immediacy," as an interpretation of immediate experience by distinguishing relations and aspects in it. "Knowledge " is only one aspect of the experienced world; it needs blending with "feeling" and will to include all the experienced aspects. "Feeling" starts for Bradley, in his Principles of Logic (1883), in pretty much the empiricist sense, as isolated sensations, and as subjective (in flavor at least). It then becomes neutral: "feeling" is identified with "the felt"; and it grows richer, attempting to include the whole wealth of immediate experience. Thus Bradley gets very close to Dewey's conception of "direct experience," "non-reflective experience," without, however, Dewey's biological analysis. It is through this conception of experience that Bradley approaches the naturalism to which his thinking almost arrived at the end. Thought, that is, has a setting in experience " it is relational, and by its analysis it breaks up experienced and felt wholes. There is a double insistence in Bradley. On the one hand, reality is experienced, but is not adequately expressed in thought. On the other, reality/s accessible to knowledge. What has often been called Bradley's "skepticism" is really an objective relativism. Thought, logical structure, is not ultimate. In Appearance and *This study of F. It. Bradley is based on one of five chapters on post-ttegehan philosophical Ideahsm in Britain and America to be included in my forthcoming Career oJ Philosophy in Modem Times, Vol.III: The Hundred Years Since Darwin. ISee Bradley ed. of Mind, XXXIV (1925); A. E. Taylor, "F. H. Bradley"; J. H. Muirhead, "Bradley's Place in Philosophy." See also T. M. Forsyth, English Philosophy (London: 1910), chap. VII, 2rid part; Rudolf Kagey, F. H. Bradley's Logic (New York: 1931). The best philosophical analyses of Bradley are Robert D. Mack, The Appeal to Immediate Experience (New York: 1945),and Richard Wollheim,F. H. Bradley (Pelican Books, 1959). [245] 246 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Reality, he insists it is really self-contradictory; then later he emphasizes rather that it is always relative to its particular subiect-matter. The real, experienced world is never identical with the intelligible world, yet it is also never "extraneous " to it. The relation of the two can be said to be, in Aristotelian terms, that of substance to form, that of what is to its intelligible aspect. The intelligible world, the system of science and knowledge, thus fundamentally needs criticism in the light of its setting in the experienced world. This is not only the entire drive of Dewey's Experience and Nature; it is the expression of that whole current of thought on the Continent which began with the criticism of Hegel's "panlogism" in the 1840's and is today called "Existentialism." Bradley is the British counterpart of all those who have criticized philosophies of logical structure like T. H. Green's, or like the other contemporary forms of Neo-Kantianism in Germany and France. The "known world" is a world of relations distingflished in the richer "real world." These distinctions are ultimately relative to their particular setting, but in that setting they are valid enough. Bradley's celebrated doctrine of the "degrees of truth and reality" means that practically knowledge is "true"; any idea which fulfills its purpose of rendering some portion or aspect of experience intelligible and significant and meaningful, and which is not ousted by a better idea, Bradley is willing to say is "so far true." It is valid, in its own sphere and purpose, despite its ultimate inconsistency; the wave-theory... (shrink)

This paper is an intervention in the debate inaugurated by Peter Harrison in 2002 when he called into question the validity of what has come to be called ‘the voluntarism and early-modern science thesis’. Though it subsequently drew support from such historians of science as J. E. McGuire, Margaret Osler, and Betty-Joe Teeter Dobbs, the origins of the thesis are usually traced back to articles published in 1934 and 1961 respectively by the philosopher Michael Foster and the historian of ideas (...) Francis Oakley. Central to Harrison’s critique of the thesis are claims he made about the meaning of the scholastic distinction between the potentia dei absoluta et ordinata and the role it played in the thinking of early-modern theologians and natural philosophers. This paper calls directly into question the accuracy of Harrison’s claims on that very matter. (shrink)

We are grateful to Jongsma et al 1 for their interest in our article analysing the case of ‘Mrs A’, a Dutch woman with Alzheimer’s disease who received euthanasia based on her advance euthanasia directive.2 Their commentary criticises two elements of our analysis. First, the authors believe our reasons for doubting that Mrs A had the capacity to write and revise an AED rely on ‘partial’ empirical data and rest on normative errors. Second, they use two of our statements to (...) suggest we must endorse some implausible claims, for example, that ‘… in all situations and for all people, current well-being should always take precedence over all other values’. Jongsma et al assert: ‘Miller et al argue that people with dementia are impaired to make decisions.’ This casts our probabilistic claim about Mrs A’s capacity as an absolute claim about persons with dementia in general. It also implies we are using an outdated diagnosis-based view of capacity. The accusation then becomes explicit : > … several empirical studies have shown that patients with dementia are able to actively participate in qualitative studies and can respond to open questions in a meaningful way,[2-8] as well that they are able to complete an advance directive in the early phases of dementia.[9, 10] One can therefore not simply conclude on the basis of the diagnosis of dementia …. (shrink)

Macroscopic irreversible processes emerge from fundamental physical laws of reversible character. The source of the local irreversibility seems to be not in the laws themselves but in the initial and boundary conditions of the equations that represent the laws. In this work we propose that the screening of currents by black hole event horizons determines, locally, a preferred direction for the flux of electromagnetic energy. We study the growth of black hole event horizons due to the cosmological expansion and (...) accretion of cosmic microwave background radiation, for different cosmological models. We propose generalized McVittie co-moving metrics and integrate the rate of accretion of cosmic microwave background radiation onto a supermassive black hole over cosmic time. We find that for flat, open, and closed Friedmann cosmological models, the ratio of the total area of the black hole event horizons with respect to the area of a radial co-moving space-like hypersurface always increases. Since accretion of cosmic radiation sets an absolute lower limit to the total matter accreted by black holes, this implies that the causal past and future are not mirror symmetric for any spacetime event. The asymmetry causes a net Poynting flux in the global future direction; the latter is in turn related to the ever increasing thermodynamic entropy. Thus, we expose a connection between four different “time arrows”: cosmological, electromagnetic, gravitational, and thermodynamic. (shrink)

Whether negative numbers have a fixed spatial–numerical association of response codes effect, and whether the spatial representation of negative numbers is associated with negative numbers’ absolute or signed values remains controversial. In this study, through three experiments, the coding level of the magnitude and the spatial-direction is manipulated. In the first experiment, participants are required to code the magnitude and spatial-direction explicitly by using a magnitude classification task. In the second experiment, participants are forced to code the (...) magnitude implicitly as well as to code the spatial-direction explicitly by utilizing a cuing task. In the third experiment, participants are obliged to code the magnitude explicitly as well as to code the spatial-direction implicitly by adopting a magnitude and arrow-direction classification tasks with Go/No-Go responses. The results show that the absolute value of negative numbers associates with space when the magnitude of negative numbers is explicitly coded, no matter employing the explicit or implicit spatial-direction; the signed value of negative numbers associates with space under the condition of implicit magnitude as well as explicit spatial-direction. In conclusion, the current study indicates that the SNARC effect of negative numbers is variable in different conditions, and the type of SNARC effect about negative numbers is modulated by the joint coding level of the magnitude and spatial-direction. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the concept of language developed in Gelug School and discusses its specific features. The majority of the Buddhist schools state that language can express only the relative truth. As for the absolute truth, it can be cognized directly in the meditative state when any duality is absent, including the symbolic linguistic structures. However, the Gelug School accentuates the point that it is impossible to explain the techniques of realization of the absolute without the use of (...) language. That is why the concept of language was developed in the Gelug School, according to which not all verbal structures are obstacles to enlightenment. The followers of the Gelug School subdivide concepts into two types. The first type includes the concepts that have arisen as a result of ascribin the false qualities to the objects. The second type is deprived of the false ascribing; it is formed in the process of using the special type of philosophical discourse – prasangika, which is the factor for emerging of the “middle view”, the proper view of things. This allows the follower of prasanga to efficiently use the verbal structures for adequate cognition on the conceptual level and transition towards the direct attainment of the absolute truth, which as a result leads to gaining freedom and achieving the state of Buddha. (shrink)