En esta ponencia presentaremos la traducción al catalán del libro Análisis Reflexivo, de Lester Embree, quien es probablemente el representante vivo más influyente y líder de la corriente fenomenológica que empezó con la New School For Social Research y cuya primera generación fue la de Dorion Cairns, Aaron Gurwitsch y Alfred Schutz. Esta tradición empieza con la publicación de Ideas de Husserl en 1913, por lo que la traducción de este libro no deja de ser un pequeño homenaje al libro (...) en el año de su centenario. Contaremos cómo surgió y por qué decidimos emprender la traducción del libro, para pasar a exponer luego algunas dificultades terminológicas que aparecieron a lo largo de la traducción, así como justificar algunos de los términos que usamos para su traducción. Nos centraremos en los términos que pertenecen estrictamente a la tradición de la New School, como son ‘intentivity’ and ‘intentive process’, acuñados por Cairns, para pasar a explicar luego el término que Lester prefiere para referirse a aquello a lo que se refieren estos conceptos: ‘encounterings’. Finalmente, acabaremos por comentar la traducción de los términos ingleses ‘experience’ y ‘objects as intended to’. En resumen, nuestra intención es presentar la traducción del libro Análisis Reflexivo al catalán y que esta presentación sea un humilde homenaje al autor.In this paper we are going to present the Catalan translation of the book Reflexive Analysis, by Lester Embree, who is probably the most influential living representative and leader of what once was the New School tendency in phenomenology headed by Dorion Cairns, Aron Gurswitch and Alfred Schutz. This tendency began with the publication of Husserl’s Ideas in 1913. In this way, the translation of this book is a small tribute to Ideas in the year of the celebration of its centenary. We will explain how and why we decided to translate Embree’s book, followed by an exposition of some of the terminological difficulties that came up during its translation, as well as the justification for some of our terminological decisions. We will focus on the terms that strictly belong to the tradition of the New School tendency, such as ‘intentiveness’ and ‘intentive process’, coined by Cairns, so as to proceed then to explain the term that Lester prefers to use to refer to what those terms refer to: ‘encounterings’. Finally, we will close this talk by commenting on the translation of the English words ‘experience’ and ‘objects as intended to’. Summarizing, our intention is to present the translation of the book Reflexive Analysis into Catalan and we expect this presentation to be a humble tribute to the author. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In the educational sphere, the concept of democracy is used in many and varied ways, though the hegemonic school culture often starts from a concept of democracy that is taken for granted, and it is understood that the entire educational community shares a similar concept. As a result of the research project “Democracy, participation and inclusive education in schools” we realized that the above-mentioned concept is used without being accurately defined in the school setting. This observation is what has prompted (...) us to write this article, basically structured in two parts. In the first part, based on the theoretical debate occurring in the field of social sciences, we delimit the concept of democracy and structure it in four basic dimensions: governance, inhabitance, otherness and ethos. In the second part, we specify and examine in depth these four dimensions in the school setting in order to construct a broad and transversal, yet specific, definition, with which to be able to develop ambitious democratic projects and, in turn, contribute to scientific debate. (shrink)

The recent emergence, among philosophers, of the view that the activity of human reason in all its possible modes must also be historicized, including the activity of philosophizing itself, may be found in writers as diverse as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, and Alasdair MacIntyre. This contemporary view of human reason contrasts with the traditional commitments of "First Philosophy," Aristotle's name for the knowledge of things through their ultimate causes and principles. This book challenges the prevailing historicist orthodoxies about (...) the nature of reason and philosophy and offers the first comprehensive analysis and critique of historicism in its current philosophical form. Can philosophical historicism reasonably justify the interpretation of human reason on which its own objections to First Philosophy are based? While Carl Page ultimately concludes that it cannot, he also seeks to rehabilitate historicism's motivating insights by showing how they derive from questions Hegel and Heidegger raised about reason's relation to history. (shrink)

The recent emergence, among philosophers, of the view that the activity of human reason in all its possible modes must also be historicized, including the activity of philosophizing itself, may be found in writers as diverse as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, and Alasdair MacIntyre. This contemporary view of human reason contrasts with the traditional commitments of "First Philosophy," Aristotle's name for the knowledge of things through their ultimate causes and principles. This book challenges the prevailing historicist orthodoxies about (...) the nature of reason and philosophy and offers the first comprehensive analysis and critique of historicism in its current philosophical form. Can philosophical historicism reasonably justify the interpretation of human reason on which its own objections to First Philosophy are based? While Carl Page ultimately concludes that it cannot, he also seeks to rehabilitate historicism's motivating insights by showing how they derive from questions Hegel and Heidegger raised about reason's relation to history. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy is marked by a turn to 'practical rationality' in the face of the issues associated with relativism and foundationalism. This turn is visible in the work of gadamer and rorty (among others) and has recently been surveyed by richard bernstein. The paper shows that 'practical rationality' fails as a model for rational justification in both 'post-Empiricist' philosophy of science and philosophical hermeneutics. The popular appeal to "phronesis" is shown to be an abuse of the ancient notion.

ON A GENERAL READING of the Metaphysics and the treatises of the so-called Organon, the types of assertion which Aristotle would allow as genuine predications seem relatively straightforward. According to the Categories, for instance, a species is characteristically predicated of the individuals falling under it, while genera and differentiae are predicated both of the relevant species and their associated individuals. The predicates are, in these instances, universals in a familiar Aristotelian sense. Furthermore, these intra-categorial predications, such as "Socrates is a (...) man" and "white is a color," are not the only instances of categorial acts. Aristotle also admits certain cross-categorial predications as logically well-formed; for example, "Socrates is white" and "Socrates is in the marketplace". These latter predications are at first glance also intelligible enough, though there are in both cases questions yet to be faced about the logical structure and ontological commitments of such ways of speaking. For Aristotle, one metaphysical theme presented even on the face of these linguistic appearances is the possibility that being a substrate for predication counts as a criterion for ontological primacy or, more generally, that being an ultimate substrate for meaningful discourse is grounds for being primarily real. An obvious corollary to this line of thought is the thesis that whatever might be said of or predicated of such primary substrata is ontologically dependent upon them. Just such a criterion seems to be at work in disqualifying universals from their claim to be substance in a significant sense. Therefore, it would be somewhat surprising to find primary substance appearing anywhere as a predicate. (shrink)

As the two comprehensive humanistic disciplines, philosophy and history have a complex interface. By ‘comprehensive’, I mean that only philosophy and history have the prerogative of being immediately and justifiably relevant to all domains of human endeavor. Thus, there is the history and philosophy of mathematics, the history and philosophy of art, the history and philosophy of religion, the history and philosophy of politics, not to mention the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, and, in qualified senses, the history (...) of history and the philosophy of philosophy. History is always immediately relevant to human endeavor because the latter aims at a coherence beyond simple behavior, yet necessarily leaves a spatio-temporal trace; philosophy is always immediately relevant because all forms of human endeavor have their primary principles—noetic, ethical, and metaphysical. Philosophy and history are necessarily interconnected not only because both are themselves human endeavors, but also because history’s orientation about coherence and philosophy’s about primacy both face, at a fundamental level, the dialectic of universal and particular induced by the hunt for intelligibility. The two are therefore led to quarrel about which really is the magistra vitæ, for both hope to be wise, i.e., intelligent and accomplished, about τἀνθρώπινα, the human things. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Symbolic Mathematics and the Intellect Militant: On Modern Philosophy’s Revolutionary SpiritCarl PageWhat makes modern philosophy different? My question presupposes the legitimacy of calling part of philosophy “modern.” That presupposition is in turn open to question as regards its meaning, its warrant, and the conditions of its applicability. 1 Importance notwithstanding, such further inquiries all start out from the phenomenon upon which everyone agrees: philosophy running through Plato and Aristotle (...) looks significantly different from philosophy running from Descartes to Kant.My concern in this essay is with the phenomenon of the difference itself, rather than with the second-order questions associated with how properly to assign it historical meaning. I take the difference between ancient and modern philosophy to be as significant as differences in philosophy’s history can be: modern philosophy rests on a new interpretation of the nature and fulfillment of human reason, and disputes about the nature of human reason are the ultimate battles of philosophy. But the general thesis is not my main point. 2 The focus of this essay falls on what may be called the integrity of the phenomenon, on the specific interpretation of human reason that lends modern philosophy its peculiar face. [End Page 233]Modern philosophy’s strikingly revolutionary spirit is my point of departure. When Descartes writes in the first of his Meditations that “it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last,” 3 he reveals the same enthusiasm for total reform later found in Kant: “This attempt to alter the procedure which has hitherto prevailed in metaphysics, by completely revolutionizing it in accordance with the example set by the geometers and physicists, forms indeed the main purpose of this critique of pure speculative reason.” 4 How exactly did philosophy become so convinced that its central tradition—a sprawling, disorganized, ugly city, as Descartes has it in the Discourse (I:116)—needed razing to the ground in the interest of some rational town-planning? Moreover, the calls for revolution have not abated, despite contemporary disillusionment with both Cartesian rationalism and Enlightenment philosophy in general; they have grown more shrill. The confidence with which rationalism, foundationalism, universalism, logocentrism, Platonism, and so on are currently set at naught for the sake of contingency, particularity, and difference reveals the same revolutionary and totalizing spirit that marks the earlier phase of philosophy’s modernity. Such enthusiasm is reason’s freedom taken to an extreme. 5 What inspires this march of the intellect militant? What, if anything, justifies its hubristic self-assertions in the domain of philosophy? These are the questions I address.Descartes is commonly identified as the father of modern philosophy. While the full story of modern philosophy’s parentage is more complicated than this, it is fair to say that in Descartes self-consciousness of a new mode of doing philosophy emerges with a focus and revolutionary sense of purpose that caught philosophical imagination in his own time and continues to do so in ours. 6 Motifs of modern philosophy may be found in many places—Machiavelli, Hobbes, Francis Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Jakob Boehme—nonetheless, Descartes’s intensely single-minded, even jealous advocacy commends itself to all but the most stubborn antiquarian mentality as modernity’s almost perfect philosophical representative. [End Page 234]That Descartes stands on a remarkable philosophical cusp is apparent in the contrast between the title and the subject matter of his most influential philosophical work: Meditationes de Prima Philosophiae (1641). To that point prima philosophia or First Philosophy had been construed as the metaphysics. It was not concerned with the critical question of how metaphysical sciences are possible and was not directly related to any doctrine of the human soul—except perhaps on the one point of the divinity of nous, the human soul’s highest part. In Descartes’s Meditations, on the other hand, the landscape has altered. Doubt, certainty, knowledge, the ego cogitans and its stream of representations are the new subject matter. What is first in philosophy is no longer what... (shrink)

Aimed at making Hegel accessible, first, to nonspecialists outside the discipline and, second, to beginning students in philosophy, Before and After Hegel is obliged to find its comfortably short and readable way between the virtue of a fitting simplicity and the vice of over-simplification. That difficult task is made more complex by the author's further conviction that this is "the first attempt in any language to provide a historical introduction to Hegel's theory", a hope whose significance the book's intended audience (...) is unlikely to appreciate. (shrink)

This book amounts to a set of prolegomena to any future metaphysics of the self that might qualify as a science. It seeks to locate the traditional concerns of what is now called "virtue ethics" within the naturalistic parameters of contemporary evolutionary biology, not so much by arguing that those parameters are the necessary ones or the only ones available but by considering what ethical intuitions can be maintained on their hypothesis. Within what the author calls "naturalistic brackets" he proceeds (...) to explore "what would become of ethics if we had no higher ideal to pursue than our own natural health". Those who have already found philosophical stimulation in such writers as Konrad Lorenz, E. O. Wilson, and Mary Midgley, for example, will welcome what amounts to a bridge between a contemporary scientific idiom and the traditional philosophical idioms of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, and Nietzsche. The chief question might be put: How can we make intelligible the nobility of virtue, once we have eschewed all transcendent consolation? The author's positive, optimistic answer requires a careful analysis of the notion of health, both bodily and mental, and a great deal of conceptual sophistication in order to avoid the various pitfalls of reductionist and scientistic thinking. One of the book's striking successes is just how sensibly its author negotiates those potential traps, deftly finding his own clear path through the sorts of debates that have for some time now typically been used to upset or derail metaphysical inquiry: nature vs. nurture, essence vs. freedom, univocity vs. language games, universality vs. contingency. There are no simplistic, irritating either/ors here. Furthermore, the book's "transformational, therapeutic vision of ethics is something very different from the justification of rules of correct behavior that we now think of as moral philosophy". Deontologists will find little comfort in this timely return to exploring the continuities between nature and the good. (shrink)

New Blackfriars, Volume 102, Issue 1101, Page 728-744, September 2021.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections (...) in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ Uber Den Psychologischen Ursprung Der Raumvorstellung Carl Stumpf S. Hirzel, 1873 Space perception. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 4, Page 685-698, December 2021.

Response to commentaries on “The Transmission Sense of Information” Content Type Journal Article Pages 195-200 DOI 10.1007/s10539-011-9257-3 Authors Carl T. Bergstrom, Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-1800, USA Martin Rosvall, Integrated Science Lab, Department of Physics, Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden Journal Biology and Philosophy Online ISSN 1572-8404 Print ISSN 0169-3867 Journal Volume Volume 26 Journal Issue Volume 26, Number 2.

Carl Plantinga; What a Documentary Is, After All, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 63, Issue 2, 15 April 2005, Pages 105–117, https://doi.org.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 63-64, July 2012.

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 67-69.

Book Reviews Conrad Heilmann, Economics and Philosophy, FirstView Article.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This book charts Carl Gustav Jung’s 32-year correspondence with James Kirsch, a German-Jewish psychiatrist who founded Jungian communities in Berlin, Tel Aviv, London, and Los Angeles, and adds depth and complexity to the previously published record of the early Jungian movement. Their letters tell of heroic survival, brilliant creativity, and the building of generative institutions; but these themes are also darkened by personal and collective shadows. The Nazi era looms over the first half of the book and shapes the story (...) in ways that are fateful not only for Kirsch and his career but also for Jung and his. In 1934, fearing that the undertow of anti-Semitism had taken hold of his beloved teacher, Kirsch challenged Jung to explain some of his publications for the German-dominated International Society for Psychotherapy. Jung’s answer convinced Kirsch of his sincerity, and from then on Kirsch defended him fiercely against any allegation of anti-Semitism. The letters are translated here for the first time and the illuminating editorial commentary provides unique and incisive insights into the writers’ world. Supported by appendices, including a series of revealing letters between Hilde Kirsch and Jung, _The Jung-Kirsch Letters_ is an invaluable resource for those in the fields of analytical psychology and Jungian studies, as well as all those with an interest in learning more about the historical and cultural origins of the Jungian movement. (shrink)

This book charts Carl Gustav Jung’s 33-year correspondence with James Kirsch, adding depth and complexity to the previously published record of the early Jungian movement. Kirsch was a German-Jewish psychiatrist, a first-generation follower of Jung, who founded Jungian communities in Berlin, Tel Aviv, London, and Los Angeles. Their letters tell of heroic survival, brilliant creativity, and the building of generative institutions, but these themes are darkened by personal and collective shadows. The Nazi era looms over the first half of the (...) book, shaping the story in ways that were fateful not only for Kirsch and his career but also for Jung and his. Kirsch trained with Jung and acted as a tutor in Jewish psychology and culture to him. In 1934, fearing that anti-Semitism had seized his teacher, Kirsch challenged Jung to explain some of his publications for the Nazi-dominated Medical Society for Psychotherapy. Jung’s answer convinced Kirsch of his sincerity, and from then on Kirsch defended him fiercely against any allegation of anti-Semitism. We also witness Kirsch’s lifelong struggle with states of archetypal possession: his identification with the interior God-image on the one hand, and with unconscious feminine aspects of his psyche on the other. These complexes were expressed, for Kirsch, in physical symptoms and emotional dilemmas, and they led him into clinical boundary violations which were costly to his analysands, his family and himself. The text of these historical documents is translated with great attention to style and accuracy, and generous editorial scaffolding gives glimpses into the writers’ world. Four appendices are included: two essays by Kirsch, a series of letters between Hilde Kirsch and Jung, and a brief, incisive essay on the Medical Society for Psychotherapy. This revised edition includes primary material that was unavailable when the book was first published, as well as updated footnotes and minor corrections to the translated letters. (shrink)

In this article I want to clarify the text of one of the short maxims assigned to Pythagoras in the ancient tradition, which are known as symbola or acusmata. Before I turn to the acusma in question, it is important to understand the context in which it appears. It occurs in Chapter 17 of Book 4 of Aelian's Historical Miscellany. Aelian's work was written in the early third century a.d. in Rome, and is a ‘miscellaneous collection of anecdotes and historical (...) material’. It consists of short chapters, usually a page or less long, that are for the most part independent of one another. Chapter 17 of Book 4 is about a page long and is devoted to the sayings and doings of Pythagoras. There is no particular connection between it and the surrounding chapters, and it is clearly meant to stand on its own. The preceding chapter tells us that if we went to Callias for guidance he would turn us into drinkers, … if to Alcibiades, arrogant cheats, if to Demosthenes, orators, … if to Aristides, just men, … if to Socrates, wise men. The following chapter recounts an anecdote about Plato's arrival in Sicily and his reception by the tyrant Dionysius the Younger. The chapter that I am concerned with, Chapter 17, begins by asserting that Pythagoras taught that his ‘lineage was superior to that of ordinary mortals’. This is followed by a list of superhuman acts and traits of Pythagoras, for example his ability to be in Metapontum and Croton at the same time and his golden thigh. The second two-thirds of the chapter are then devoted to the miscellaneous teachings of Pythagoras. Most of these take the form of the brief taboos and maxims known elsewhere as symbola or acusmata, among which is the text on which I want to focus here. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This essay departs from conventional American Studies treatments to resituate Bellamy's utopia of 1888 within transnational debates over industrialism, socialism, and the state in European nations and their settler societies between 1890 and 1940. Building upon critical studies and information about the reception of Bellamy's utopia abroad, it offers three approaches: a genre-based analysis of the utopian hybrid that suggests textual bases for multiple readings; a transnational history of evolutionary socialism that helps explain Bellamy's global relevance in the 1890s and (...) again in the 1930s; and a comparative approach that contrasts the reception of Looking Backward in different national contexts. In the face of traditionally exceptionalist scholarship and the narrower, nationalistic frame of Bellamy's sequel, Equality, to understand Bellamy's global appeal we must recover the international context of Looking Backward and the internationalist views expressed in its pages. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 182-195, March 2022.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida, and a Phenomenology of No-SelfCarl OlsonBeyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida, and a Phenomenology of No-Self. By Gereon Kopf. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2001. 298 + xx pp.This work of comparative philosophy focuses on the problem of the self by comparing Western existential and phenomenological thought with Zen thinkers such as Dōgen and Nishida. In addition to such thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Edmund (...) Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, the author also includes a discussion of such Western philosophers as Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Lock, and Hume. The author demonstrates a knowledgeable command of his subjects and the central focus of the book.After discussing the problem of personal identity in the first part of the book, the author uses the second part of the book to place phenomenologists into dialogue with Zen Buddhist thinkers. The second part of the book includes the following topics: selfhood, otherness, continuity of experience, and temporality. In the final part of the book, the author considers the Zen conception of personal identity by discussing a Zen phenomenology of experience and personhood as presencing. Within the context of this final part of the book, Kopf wants to develop terminology that derives from both phenomenology and Zen Buddhism in order to consider the Zen notion of no-self as a process of presencing. This approach gives the author an opportunity to explore the philosophical implications of Zen Buddhist terminology and rhetoric and to suggest a way to theorize and discuss the self beyond personal [End Page 200] identity. Overall, each of the three parts of the book provides a different perspective: a discourse on personal identity, a comparative philosophical perspective, and a Zen viewpoint.This work of comparative philosophy embodies an internal tension between the position of the author and the impermanent nature of the non-self in Zen Buddhism. Kopf acknowledges his basic position in the following way: "It is my thesis that the framing of the question of personal identity already implies the notion of an enduring self" (p. xviii). In contrast, Dōgen rejects the notion of an enduring self or personal identity. The author's stated thesis and that of Zen Buddhism suggests that continuity is a crucial issue for this book.In chapter 4, Kopf elucidates his understanding of the continuity of experience: "The notion of continuity reflects the assumption that the 'I' of human experience is not without a history: It finds itself in the context of past experiences, which the experiental 'I' encounters in memories, as well as in a given situation" (p. 124). In short, a person finds oneself thrown into a situation. After discussing Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, the non-self doctrine in early Buddhism, how the Mahāyāna thinker Vasubandhu attributes continuity of experience to the habit energy produced by karmic activity, and how Nāgārjuna collapses the distinction between sam.sāra and nirvan.a, the author considers the positions of Dōgen and Nishida. The former defines the continuity of experience by two diachronically diverse dharma positions instead of three moments of time. This position suggests that Dōgen views continuity as the process from the present to the present and not as a process that operates from the past into the future. According to Nishida, the I-Thou forms a nonrelative contradictory self-identity, and it exists in the world of expression. This implies that the self is simultaneously continuous and discontinuous.In his chapter on temporality, Kopf distinguishes between abstract time, phenomenal time, lived time, and actual time, which is a fourth dimension suggested by Dōgen and Nishida. Abstract time is rejected because time is inseparable from existence. Grasping time as a dynamic event, the author discusses phenomenal time, in which the self realizes its own temporality and historicity. In contrast to the threefold structure of abstract time, phenomenal time possesses a twofold structure of past and future, whereas lived time embodies an internal unity in which the present unifies the past and future. A fourth dimension of time—actual time—is suggested by the work of Dōgen and Nishida. Actual time expresses a "modality of... (shrink)

Imagination has played a major role in theories of numerous aesthetic phenomena: it figures in accounts of the interpretation of art, of our emotional responses to art, and even of what art is, to name but a few topics. But imagination seemingly has a role to play also in aesthetic theorising itself, in particular in aesthetic thought experiments. Thought experiments in general pose an epistemic puzzle: how can a merely imagined scenario yield knowledge? In the paper, I have a look (...) at a special version of this puzzle that some thought experiments in aesthetics occasion. Many thought experiments in aesthetics—e.g. Kendall Walton’s guernica-experiment, or Arthur Danto’s imagined eight-hour long film of the title page of Tolstoy’s War and Peace—involve making judgements regarding the aesthetic properties of merely imagined works of art. But according to a widely accepted principle in aesthetics, one has to be acquainted with a work— seen it, heard it, and so on—in order to be able to judge its aesthetic qualities. But no one has ever seen Danto’s merely imagined film of Tolstoy’s book. So how are we in a position to judge its aesthetic properties? I propose a solution to the puzzle by elaborating on Tamar Gendler’s notion of “quasi-observation,” which she holds to be a common element of thought experimenting. As a coda, I also give a sketch of how aesthetic thought experiments are not only a tool for theorising about art, but often also figure in the production of art. (shrink)

Almost nobody favors long consent forms for prospective research subjects. Almost everybody thinks they interfere with informed consent’s purpose—good decisions. Nevertheless, almost everybody believes consent forms have long been getting longer. Years ago, Paul Appelbaum lamented the “tendency to cram ever more information into consent forms.”1 Weeks ago, Ilene Albala and her colleagues (one of them Appelbaum) reported in IRB: Ethics & Human Research that the length of one institutional review board’s forms “increased roughly linearly by an average of 1.5 (...) pages per decade. In the 1970s, the average consent form was less than one page long and often only a paragraph or two, but by the mid-1990s the .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Don Quijote and the Law of LiteratureCarl Good (bio)The part is one of these beings, the whole minus this part the other. But the whole minus a part is not the whole and as long as this relationship persists, there is no whole, only two unequal parts.—Rousseau, Social Contract, cited by Paul de Man in Allegories of ReadingBut it is not just that, because it is also a performative.... (...) There is first a performative, the act of positing..., which then moves to a system of tropes; a kind of anamorphosis of tropes takes place, in which all the tropological systems are engendered, as a result of this original act of positing.... It is circulation which is out of hand,... the sheer circulation or play of the signifier, and which is, as you know, the root of error, madness, stupidity and all other evil.—Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony”Amid a confusion of narrative inversions, misleading appearances, and unresolvable disputes, at least two things are consistent in Don Quijote de la Mancha: first, the knight’s singular fidelity to what I will refer to as a law of literature, which persists like a phantasm of continuity throughout the larger narrative; and, second, the many interruptions of this narrative by the stories, or episodes, recounted by the characters who cross don Quijote’s path (including the knight himself), in the form of speeches, testimonies, plays, jokes, poems, and so on. In at least one strict sense, these other stories have nothing to do with that path other than their interruptions of it and by it. Such a claim has its own strategic value and does not entirely contradict the reasonings of a long history of critics of the Quijote who have tended to argue from a variety of different standpoints for some kind of ideological cohesion that would bind the smaller episodes to the larger story that they interpolate. But at a certain ground zero of interpretation—albeit a paradoxical ground that prohibits a scholarly shelter to be built on it—no argument would be sufficient to establish such a coherence among the work’s separate narrative parts, since such an argument would live in the brief, oneiric intensity of the critic’s testimony and that testimony’s potential effects rather than in the composition of the work itself somewhere beyond its apprehension by reading. Nonetheless, out of the dismembered ensemble of the Quijote what does perhaps effect its own strange kind of life is the very play of ironic interruptions and frictions between the dismembered parts, the profusion of which seems to impose itself as the work’s own aggressive insistence on itself as something which makes sense possible by constantly provoking and unsettling sense. That is where we could begin to speak of don Quijote himself, not only as the phantasmatic agent of this unsettling but also as the mad promise of justice that could be said to motivate it.The play of interruptions in don Quijote’s own story begins to outline the shifting contours and living contradictions of this novel as a “text” in the sense in which Derrida [End Page 44] and others have used the term: that which “names or relates in its way... [a] conflict without encounter between law and singularity” [“Before the Law” 187]. Although the story of this “encounter” has been often recounted, it bears another citation here, at least because it seems to be forgotten more often than it is told. Even when it is told, the story is often muted in homage to the name of Derrida by writers who tacitly assume that Derrida’s is the only possible version of this “conflict without encounter.” That version would be better described as merely one particular ethical shaping or forcing—a powerful one—of a story that has been told, and remains untold, in uncountable ways. Nonetheless, such a democratic assessment of Derrida does not quite justify a dismissal of his version as merely one among others, since, for one thing, it would be unable to account for the astonishing hold that different versions of Derridean “deconstruction” continue to have on the imagination of North American... (shrink)