I argue that Hegel’s Phenomenology is an attempt to prove that human experience displays a sui generis logical structure. This is because, as rational animals who instinctively create a universe of meaning to navigate our environment, the perceptual content of our conscious experience of objects, the desires that motivate our self-conscious experience of action, and the beliefs and values that make up our sociohistorical experience all testify to the presence of rationality as their condition of possibility. As such, Hegel’s Phenomenology (...) not only requires of us that we transform the mission of logic into a description of the immanent logic at the basis of human experience, thereby making the task of logic “anthropological.” It also presents us with a novel model of human experience—one that: demonstrates the rationality already instinctively at work in our bodily sensations, perceptions, and desires; gives an account of the origins of human society and history; and also makes human experience irreducible to cognitive processes in the brain, psychological mechanisms, and the biological imperatives of survival and reproduction. (shrink)

I argue that Hegel’s logic is an anthropology. Appealing to the fact that we, as the kind of beings we are, search for meaning in our sensory encounter with things and in our actions, it articulates the rationality that guides this search and explains the fundamental shape of human experience. This has three implications for his logic. First, since this rationality is first and foremost an instinctive activity, it is an elaboration of our unconscious knowledge of the rules of thinking. (...) Second, it is an account of the universe of meaning that we create in order to make sense of what is around us and our lives, a theory of the discourses through which we engage in the project of world-interpretation. Third, I contend that it is a work of human self-knowledge and cannot be understood in isolation from the rational form of life whose basic normative structure it distills. (shrink)

I argue that Žižek's Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism presents us with a radically original variety of metaphysics both in terms of Žižek's own intellectual development and the history of philosophy. Rather than being concerned with the study of being qua being, Less Than Nothing proclaims that we ought to investigate nothing qua nothing inasmuch as contemporary physics demonstrates that the more we analyze reality the more we find a void, this latter now in matter (...) of fact exhibiting the traits of ultimate reality rather than the order of the perceived universe. Before arriving at this, however, I demonstrate how Žižek is led to contemporary physics in order to overcome inherent limitations in his own previous metaphysics of Hegelian inspiration. If thinking substance as subject imposes upon us the recognition that substance as a self-articulating totality of necessity is an illusion, subject being nothing but a synonymous for its constitutive tension with itself, if we are to explain how this weakly structured nature does not collapse upon itself we must go further. In this manner, Less Than Nothing outlines one way in which we must step beyond Hegel to find new metaphysical solutions for impasses that have emerged out of thinking the obscure ground of the psychoanalytic subject. (shrink)

In Ontological Catastrophe, Joseph Carew takes up the central question guiding Slavoj Žižek’s philosophy: How could something like phenomenal reality emerge out of the meaninglessness of the Real? Carefully reconstructing and expanding upon his controversial reactualization of German Idealism, Carew argues that Žižek offers us an original, but perhaps terrifying, response: experience is possible only if we presuppose a prior moment of breakdown as the ontogenetic basis of subjectivity. Drawing upon resources found in Žižek, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and (...) post-Kantian philosophy, Carew thus develops a new critical metaphysics—a metaphysics which is a variation upon the late German Idealist theme of balancing system and freedom, realism and idealism, in a single, self-reflexive theoretical construct—that challenges our understanding of nature, culture, and the ultimate structure of reality. (shrink)

What are the origins of consciousness and language? Why are so many driven to see them as epiphenomenal to a metaphysically more primordial phenomenon when we have good reasons to think they are irreducible to such? Drawing on the work of the Slovenian psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek, and in particular his reading of the German philosopher F.W.J. Schelling, I suggest a provactive but nuanced thesis: that at the basis of human subjectivity there is no rhyme or reason for its emergence and (...) to protect ourselves from this insight we build various fantasy-constructions of its ground as defensive mechanisms. (shrink)

My aim is to show how Žižek's political philosophy is informed and made possible by his reading of German Idealism, thus establishing an intrinsic relationship between Žižek's politics and ontology, by focusing on the problematic of “political imagination.” First, we will see to what degree Žižek's interpretation of the Schellingian logic of the Grund lays the foundation for his own appropriation of Marx's analysis of capital and this theorization of the sociopolitical deadlock we find ourselves in. Next, I will show (...) how his reading of Hegel's concept of tarrying with the negative allows him to establish the possibility of a way out of this deadlock while simultaneously giving him resources to rethink orthodox Hegelian-Marxist interpretations of the philosophy of history and the very nature of the communist struggle. In the last section, I will demonstrate how it is the Schellingian-inspired concept of ontological catastrophe, which is implicitly at work in the former as that which guarantees the always formally possible capacity for political imagination and thus the condition of the possibility of an authentically political act. (shrink)

Following a series of textual gestures which suggest that Schelling is the culmination of the German Idealist tradition, this essay is an attempt to articulate the ambiguity of the Hegel-Schelling relationship in Slavoj Žižek's work and its productive potential. Characterizing his own dialectical materialism again and again as Hegelian, but never a Schellingian project, Žižek often belies the central role played by late Schelling of the Freiheitsschrift and the Weltalter in the self-unfolding logic of the tradition. But why is there (...) such an oscillation? Describing the Grundlogik of German Idealism as the radical ontological incompletion of reality announced by the abyss of freedom of the Kantian subject, Žižek's own philosophy suggests that neither Hegel nor Schelling were able of themselves to fully articulate the consequences of the deadlock of freedom. Yet, what I argue is that it is only by an implicit retroactive reconstruction of the inner logic of post-Kantian philosophy, an aprés-coup unearthing of philosophical possibilities hidden within these two thinkers made possible by psychoanalysis, that Žižek is able to present his reading of the radical nature of subjectivity in German Idealism. By unpacking this latent reconstruction I will not only demonstrate the consistency and comprehensiveness that a Žižekian reading of the history of German Idealism can display but also the complex intertwining of Schellingian ontology and Hegelian logic at the core of Žižek's own parallax ontology. (shrink)

My goal is to offer a strategy for understanding the intended effect of Žižek's sociopolitical writings. Although many critics are suspicious of Žižek's lack of a positive program for action or his rejection of liberal democracy, my conviction is that these concerns miss something essential in Žižek's endeavor as an intervention: Žižek's continual insistence on the need to “reformulate” the Left, “reinvent” the political, “think” an alternative future, if we are to overcome the impasses we face today and which in (...) turn calls for the necessity of social creativity. Using this intuition as a guide, I develop an interpretation of Žižek's account of the externality of truth, the function of imagination in politics as the art of the impossible, and how both are needed to carve up the space for an authentic act. We will see that Žižek's sociopolitical writings are less of a solution than an attempt, by identifying the role of the militant with the empty position of the analyst, to cultivate a potential for an event opening. (shrink)

Although Hegel's absolute idealism is often presented as a solipsistically self-grounding, the Realphilosophie offers us an another image of Hegel which not only challenges standard interpretations, but more importantly gives us valuable resources to rethink living being. The zero-level determinacy of nature as “the idea in its otherness” has two consequences. Firstly, the starting point of any philosophy of nature must be a realism, insofar as nature's material constitution shows itself as unthought-like. Secondly, if idealism is to be viable, it (...) must prove itself to be a result of nature's immanent auto-development. Taking as my guide the category of “trembling” (Erzittern) and exploring its intimate connection with the emergent ideality of bodies producing sound, the chemical process and the voice of animals, I aim to show how the Realphilosophie is a reconstruction of the painful odyssey of the material genesis of the autopoietic self-referentiality of the concept as it is paradoxically begotten, by immaculate conception, in the pure extimacy of nature. The dialectics of nature is not a naturephilosophical theory of material being as implicit, self-unfolding productivity which necessarily leads to life via an intrinsic teleology, but rather an account of the contingent material emergence of unpredictable kinds of ontological determinacies from within the immanent field of mechanical nature. Only a naturalized idealism/idealized naturalism is capable of arguing for the ontological irreducibility of living being while simulta eously articulating its dependence upon different scientific domains which form its ontogenetic ground. It avoids both eliminative materialism and naïve vitalism. (shrink)

Absent within Jean-Luc Marion’s theory of selfhood is an account of psychosis that displaces standard phenomenological and psychoanalytic models. Working primarily with Book V of Being Given, my paper sketches the formal possibilities exhibited in a self who cannot manage the superabundance of the given and, swept away by an uncontrollable flood of givenness, thereby falls into a hysteria of self-experience and loses its ipseity. Then, contrasting psychosis with positive figures of the self, I explore the dynamic relationship between givenness (...) and the gifted highlighted by the phenomenological diremption and effacement of selfhood displayed in both. (shrink)

Absent within Jean-Luc Marion’s theory of selfhood is an account of psychosis that displaces standard phenomenological and psychoanalytic models. Working primarily with Book V of Being Given, my paper sketches the formal possibilities exhibited in a self who cannot manage the superabundance of the given and, swept away by an uncontrollable flood of givenness, thereby falls into a hysteria of self-experience and loses its ipseity. Then, contrasting psychosis with positive figures of the self, I explore the dynamic relationship between givenness (...) and the gifted highlighted by the phenomenological diremption and effacement of selfhood displayed in both. (shrink)

The ‘death’ of German Idealism has been decried innumerable times since its revolutionary inception, whether it be by the 19th-century critique of Western metaphysics, phenomenology, contemporary French philosophy, or analytic philosophy. Yet in the face of two hundred years of sustained, extremely rigorous attempts to leave behind its legacy, German Idealism has resisted its philosophical death sentence. For this exact reason it is timely ask: What remains of German Idealism? In what ways does its fundamental concepts and texts still speak (...) to us? Drawing together new and established voices from scholars in Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, this volume offers a fresh look on this time-honoured tradition. It uses myriad of recently developed conceptual tools to present new and challenging theories of its now canonical figures. (shrink)

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is typically read as a work that either rehabilitates the metaphysical tradition or argues for a new form of idealism centred on social normativity. In the following, I show that neither approach suffices. Not only does the metaphysical reading ignore how the Phenomenology demonstrates that human rationality can never adequately capture ultimate reality because ultimate reality itself has a moment of brute facticity that resists explanation, which prevents us from taking it as a logically self-contained, self-justifying (...) metaphysical zone traditionally known as ‘substance,’ but it also ignores how the Phenomenology equally demonstrates that human rationality creates a historically self-unfolding universe of meaning that is, because it displays a rational systematicity and consistency unlike anything else in the world, the closest thing we have to substance, but which, given its freedom, is more correctly called ‘subject.’ Consequently, while the non-metaphysical reading rightly recognizes that the Phenomenology develops a radically innovative account of intersubjectivity, it neglects how the social theory that it develops comes fully equipped with various metaphysical commitments concerning nature, spirit, and the relationship between them without which this theory would be unintelligible. (shrink)

The Human Psyche is an in-depth exploration of dualist-interactionism, a concept Sir John Eccles developed with Sir Karl Popper in the context of a wide...

Philosophers have already recognized the importance of causal preemption involving “positive” events. First, preemption with positive events raises problems for counterfactual theories of causation. Second, theories of moral and legal responsibility rely heavily on the concept of causation, so accurately assessing responsibility in preemption cases requires correctly assessing their causal structure. However, philosophers have not discussed preemption involving “negative” events or omissions. This paper argues that cases of preemptive omissions exist and have important implications for theories of causation and for (...) moral and legal responsibility. Of theoretical importance, the alterations made to counterfactual theories of causation to address preemption with positive events do not seem to work for accommodating preemptive omissions. Of practical importance, there have been actual legal cases involving preemptive omissions, and at least one such case was, this paper contends, decided incorrectly on erroneous causal grounds. This paper identifies what must happen for preemptive omissions to obtain. It then argues for the existence of preemptive omissions by constructing a series of cases and drawing structural parallels between preemption cases with positive events and cases with omissions. It ultimately presents a formula for generating preemptive omissions and examines both why “traditional” methods of generating preemption fail for omissions and why the proposed method avoids such concerns. (shrink)

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of...

Are there qualities of sound and the experience of listening that educators can extrapolate to inform the philosophy and practice of music education? In this essay, I imagine a music education where sound—how it behaves and how we experience it—serves not only as the subject of study, but generates the framework of the pedagogy. A sonic music education is not automatic because ocularcentrism privileges the vision and influences the listening and educational experiences, often in unrecognized ways. I explore two qualities (...) of sounds: they are, first, impermanent and continually changing and, second, diffuse—seemingly inside and outside our bodies. These qualities contrast with the visual experience, which makes objects appear permanent, fixed, and separate from our bodies. Pedagogies based on sound might present truth as impermanent and their aims as multidirectional and might employ social constructivist epistemologies and democratic education. A music education based on sounds may be a corrective to ocularcentric banking pedagogies where knowledge is fixed and progress is unidirectionally measured. (shrink)

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human persons possessed of reflective consciousness.

Both male ornamentation and male combat result in increased male mortality. Because population sizes are limited by a carrying capacity, increased age-specific adult male mortality will result in decreased age-specific adult female mortality, as well as decreased juvenile mortality. As intersexual competition is one form of intraspecific competition, through choosing to mate with ornamented and/or combative males, females in polygamous systems reduce intraspecific competition. Because average male fitness must exactly equal average female fitness, male fitness will paradoxically rise with increasing (...) male mortality. This theory also offers new perspectives on peripheral problems to sexual theory, such as mate location, resource guarding, leks, harems, and others. (shrink)

Participation in competition festivals—where students and ensembles compete against each other for high scores and accolades—is a widespread practice in North American formal music education. In this article, I use Marx's theories of labor, value, and phantasmagoria to suggest a capitalist logic that structures these competitions. Marx's theories might suggest that one of musical performance's educational use-values is its function as a representation of the labor of musical learning. Competitions reward the hiding of this use-value by privileging performances that conceal (...) the labor of musical learning. In hiding this use-value, the performance's exchange-value, or "price," is increased by gaining a higher score. In this way, competitions are phantasmagoric: they conceal learning within the performance in thrall of the exchange-value of a high score. Despite these flaws in competitions, educators and students might exploit competition festivals' value of coming together and comparing learning with others. Rather than retreating from competition festivals, educators might transform them by imagining renewed practices where students and educators come together to share their learning through performance, listening, and dialogue. (shrink)

Abstract:In this essay, I explore the recent cultural and epistemological turns in sociological music education research. Changes in the economy—and most specifically in the modes of production aided by changes in technology—provide a frame for understanding the cultural and epistemological turns within music education research in sociology. The economy has gone through a process of “dematerialization,” privileging non-material aspects—like mental conceptions of the world, symbols, culture, and social processes—over material considerations. Similarly, sociological research in music education, in its epistemological and (...) cultural turns, has gone through a process of dematerialization where symbols, culture, and mental conceptions have become the frames and emphases within music education. This is influenced by “the postmodern condition” where ideas and “culture” have become seats of power. After a brief introduction, I review dialectics, moving to the subcategory dialectical materialism which has come to signify Marx’s contribution to dialectics. Next, I apply dialectical materialism to the cultural and epistemological turns in sociological music education research, tracing changes in the economy and their influence over emphases in sociological research in music education. Finally, I pose some questions that may inform future philosophical and sociological research and practice in music education. (shrink)

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human persons possessed of reflective consciousness.

Privacy remains an intractable ethical issue for the information society, and one that is exacerbated by modern applications of artificial intelligence. Given its complicity, there is a moral obligation to redress privacy issues in systems engineering practice itself. This paper investigates the role the concept of privacy plays in contemporary systems engineering practice. Ontologically a nominalist human concept, privacy is considered from an appropriate engineering perspective: human-centred design. Two human-centred design standards are selected as exemplars of best practice, and are (...) analysed using an existing multi-dimensional privacy model. The findings indicate that the human-centred standards are currently inadequate in dealing with privacy issues. Some implications for future practice are subsequently highlighted. (shrink)

Functionalism has long been the dominant paradigm in systems development practice. However, functionalism promotes an innate and immutable instrumental rationality that is indifferent to human values, rights, society, culture and international stability. It, in essence, lacks empathy. Although alternative paradigms have been promoted for decades in the systems development literature to help address this deficit, functionalism remains dominant. This paper reiterates the call for a fundamental paradigm shift away from myopic functionalism and towards a more empathic and human-centred philosophy. It (...) argues that the human-centred tradition offers a philosophically compatible and mature approach that can be practically harnessed for promoting empathy in systems development. The paper investigates the potential of systems development to become truly human-centred using data originally collected as part of a multi-method critical-interpretive study of privacy in information systems development. Multiple methods are used for the data analysis presented, including principal components analysis, hierarchical clustering, Q methodology and descriptive statistics. The multi-method analysis demonstrates that a marked discreteness exists between human-centred sentiments and instrumentally rational ones in systems development praxis. The paper concludes by presenting recommendations on how human-centred values can be practically fostered and engaged to enable greater empathy in contemporary system development and strengthen international stability. (shrink)

This illustrated series exhibits biographical accounts of the great people of all time. 'People of Importance' includes a variety of figures, such as Vincent Van Gogh, Mother Teresa, Archimedes, Confucius, Dalai Lama, and Marco Polo.

The focus on the institutional implications of democratization in postcolonial plural societies invites the following conclusion. While procedural democracy, the general rules for aggregating preferences, is easily defeated, an alternative formulation, proportional representation or consociational democracy is defended. Consociational democracy has explicable reparable flaws and can be brought into coherence. The tools for repair require the embodiment of deliberative principles in the organs of consociational democracy. I argue in my conclusion that this theoretical argument can be utilized to explicate the (...) ethnic conflict in Burundi. (shrink)

The focus on the institutional implications of democratization in postcolonial plural societies invites the following conclusion. While procedural democracy, the general rules for aggregating preferences, is easily defeated, an alternative formulation, proportional representation or consociational democracy is defended. Consociational democracy has explicable reparable flaws and can be brought into coherence. The tools for repair require the embodiment of deliberative principles in the organs of consociational democracy. I argue in my conclusion that this theoretical argument can be utilized to explicate the (...) ethnic conflict in Burundi. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction An Analysis of the Problem What is Deliberative Democracy? Civil Society and Deliberative Politics The African State and Deliberative Democracy.

Contemporary data practices are inducing a convergent saturation point wherein every human action, reaction, interaction, transaction, thought or desire is quantified, reified, recorded and used. Physical or virtual, all is recorded, known or unknown, seen or unseen, until data permeates every facet of our shared human existence. The implications of this eventuality are potentially so far reaching that the very notion or concept of who we are might be fundamentally altered, resulting in new ontologies of the self in a world (...) of Total Data. This polemic paper reflects on the implications that Total Data has for the ontological self in a range of individual and shared contexts, and considers the potential it has to ultimately be symbiotic or assimilatory. It suggests that the current trajectory for Total Data is more assimilatory than symbiotic, demonstrating more potential to collectively monitor and control people than to emancipate and empower them. In response, it calls for an authentic debate and reassessment of current data practices, and for an urgent reprioritisation of core and enduring human-centred values and symbiosis in technological systems development to emancipate and empower people living in a Total Data world. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging study, Levine explores both sides of the mind-body dilemma, presenting the first book-length treatment of his highly influential ideas on the How does one explain the physical nature of an experience? This puzzle, the "explanatory gap" between mind and body, is the focus of this work by an influential scholar in the field.

What are our duties or rights? How should we act? What are we responsible for? Joseph Raz examines the philosophical issues underlying these everyday questions. He explores the nature of normativity--the reasoning behind certain beliefs and emotions about how we should behave--and offers a novel account of responsibility.

Joseph Raz presents a penetrating exploration of the interdependence of value, reason, and the will. These essays illuminate a wide range of questions concerning fundamental aspects of human thought and action. Engaging Reason is a summation of many years of original, compelling, and influential work by a major contemporary philosopher.

In the past twenty years Joseph Raz has consolidated his reputation as one of the most acute, inventive, and energetic scholars currently at work in analytic moral and political theory. This new collection of essays forms a representative selection of his most significant contributions to a number of important debates, including the extent of political duty and obligation, and the issue of self-determination. He also examines aspects of the common (and ancient) theme of the relations between law and morality. (...) This volume of essays, available in one volume for the first time, will be essential to legal philosophers and political theorists. (shrink)

Belief storage is often modeled as having the structure of a single, unified web. This model of belief storage is attractive and widely assumed because it appears to provide an explanation of the flexibility of cognition and the complicated dynamics of belief revision. However, when one scrutinizes human cognition, one finds strong evidence against a unified web of belief and for a fragmented model of belief storage. Using the best available evidence from cognitive science, we develop this fragmented model into (...) a nascent theory of the cognitive architecture of belief storage. (shrink)

Joseph Raz presents a penetrating exploration of the interdependence of value, reason, and the will. These essays illuminate a wide range of questions concerning fundamental aspects of human thought and action. Engaging Reason is a summation of many years of original, compelling, and influential work by a major contemporary philosopher.